Ben and Sam end the holiday week with listener emails about Red Sox spending, the least similar teams, clubs doubling down on position players, and more.
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Earlier today, the author published a pair of leaderboards featuring the top regressed hitting and pitching performances of the four Caribbean winter leagues. Among the other revelations present in that post was one on the topic of right-handed Dodgers prospect Jose De Leon, a pitcher who (a) was drafted in just the 24th round a couple years ago but features (b) above-average velocity and (c) something better than above-average strikeout rates over two years of affiliated baseball.
Lately, Tony has written some pieces touching on the Fenway park factors. Though he’s provided detail, you already had some understanding of how the park plays. The Green Monster is unlike pretty much anything else in the game today, and it changes what happens to balls in play. To right field, and to center field, Fenway is more or less fair, if not a wee bit pitcher-friendly in places. To left field, though, and especially to left-center, balls that would be outs elsewhere clang off the Monster for singles or doubles. Every so often, the Monster will claim a would-be dinger, but that’s little consolation to pitchers; if they give up a ball headed to left, it’s probably putting a guy on base, and maybe in scoring position.
There’s nothing subtle about the Green Monster. You can’t miss it. It’s right there, casting a shadow over everything, and what it does makes absolute sense. Of course it leads to more singles. Of course it leads to more doubles. Of course it makes that part of Fenway hitter-friendly. Pitchers know all about it when they go to work, so I got to wondering, does that in any way change the way the pitchers pitch? I’m going to go ahead and spoil the rest of this article: yes. You already know how. The remainder is just going to confirm your suspicions.
Have you heard? The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2015 is now available for sale. You can check out the table of contents and read some excerpts from the book. When you finish that you can purchase it from our independent publishing platform, Createspace, in print form, or from Amazon in print or Kindle form.
But wait, there’s more! Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today and tomorrow (and yesterday), we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle version). It’s just that simple!
Today’s question comes to us from Chris St. John’s article entitled “Not All Fly Balls Are Created Equal.” In it, Chris developed a metric for the expected run value (xRV) of fly balls. A bit of explanation:
For example, say a ball is hit 400 feet to straight center and hangs in the air for 5.3 seconds. Of the balls hit with this trajectory and using the ranges given above, there were one error, 46 fly outs, 16 doubles, nine triples and 12 home runs. Using the run value for each, the expected run value (xRV) for this trajectory is 0.72.
Chris breaks down the trends, as well as the leaders and laggards for average xRV from 2012-2014. We’ll focus on the latter today. The question before you today then, dear reader, is this:
Can you name three of the bottom five players in average xRV from 2012 through 2014?
Keep in mind that you’re looking for players who have played with some regularity.
Good luck!
Reid Nichols is in charge of a Brewers system heavy on youth. The majority of Milwaukee’s top-rated prospects aren’t yet old enough to drink. Their ceilings are high, but they face long climbs to Miller Park.
Nichols has been the organization’s Director of Player Development – his official title includes Special Assistant to the GM – since 2002. His 13 years have featured numerous success stories, with the likes of Ryan Braun, Khris Davis, Yovani Gallardo and Jonathan Lucroy progressing through the minor-league ranks. As Brewers’ fans are well aware, other highly-regarded prospects have failed to meet expectations.
A big-league outfielder from 1980-1987, Nichols was the farm director – and for one year the first base coach – for the Texas Rangers before coming to Milwaukee.
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Nichols on interdepartmental cohesion: “From my end it’s kind of been the same with the player development side. Our basic philosophy is to help make that bridge from the minor leagues to the major leagues as smooth as possible. Baseball is baseball. Nobody’s trying to recreate the game.
“I’m in the draft room with the projections of both of our rookie teams. I discuss that with our scouting director and the cross checkers, so they know who’s playing where. The first five to eight rounds, they pick the best player available. I stay out of that – they spend months working on their draft board – but I do tell them what we have and who is going to play. Read the rest of this entry »
For much the same reason that he published a final statistical report last week for the Arizona Fall League, the author is publishing here a combined statistical report for the various Caribbean winter leagues — again, not necessarily because such reports are of great utility for evaluating players, but because they provide a means by which to participate in those leagues which doesn’t also require a substantial investment in transportation and lodging.
In this case, what the author has done is to identify the regressed hitting and pitching leaders in the Dominican Winter, Mexican Pacific, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan Leagues separately. What he’s then done is to combine the hitting and pitching leaders of those leagues into a pair of top-10 lists, which one can find below. Note: all ages are as of July 1, 2014.
The Red Sox came into the winter with a clear need for starting pitching, and a lot of money to spend. Yesterday, they spent a big chunk of that money, adding $41 million in AAV to their payrolls for the next four or five years. And yet, today, they still have the same glaring need for starting pitching. Evaluating the wisdom of the Red Sox spending spree is an interesting challenge, because unlike most free agent signings, these feel like half of the transaction.
We can still evaluate the signings of Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez based on the production the Red Sox should expect going forward and the money that was surrendered to acquire that future production, but we don’t really know the whole picture here. The signings of two of the winter’s premier free agent hitters very likely mean that Yoenis Cespedes is getting traded, and I think Mike Napoli might be on his way out of town too. What the team gets back in trade, and how they choose to reallocate money that could be saved through those trades, will affect what else the Red Sox can choose to do this winter. They know they need pitching, and it seems essentially impossible that they won’t make further moves to address that need; moves that were made possible by these signings.
So without those pieces of information in place, I’m hesitant to draw any strong conclusions about the new contracts given to Sandoval or Ramirez. If the team trades Cespedes and Napoli for young arms, then spends the $25 million in savings on Max Scherzer, then these moves start to more clearly address the team’s need for a frontline starter. But we don’t know if they’re going to do that. We don’t know what they’re going to do, so we can’t be too strongly convicted about whether these signings were a wise use of resources.
| 9:03 |
: Are we ready to baseball chat? |
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: I’ve given the queue a few minutes to get going and subsequently settle down |
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: So let’s talk about god knows what |
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i fear change |
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well this looks funny |
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what the heck is this interface????? |
The Boston Red Sox, as you might have heard, currently have an outfield glut. There is ten pounds of outfield meat in their five pound bag. Something has to give, and that something is likely Yoenis Cespedes.
When the Sox acquired Cespedes from Oakland in the Jon Lester trade, it felt more like a rental than a long-term investment in the player. Cespedes’ unique contract allows him to become a free agent at the end of the 2015 season, so Boston put themselves in an enviable position. They received an established big leaguer in exchange for their walk-year ace and got an up-close and personal look at a potential big free agent bat.
Whether or not a look under Cespedes’ hood informed their decision to sign both Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, that’s the route they went down. Now Cespedes is trade bait, the precious “right-handed power” commodity in a marketplace clambering for those skills. He’s headed into his age-29 season, he’s owed $10.5 million this year, and there’s going to be a line around the block to bid for his services. Where might he land?
Barry Bonds. You remember Barry Bonds. If he’s been on your mind recently, I’d bet it’s because Hall of Fame voting is again upon us. Bonds is arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport and this is his third year on the ballot. It’s arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport’s third year on the ballot, because arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport wasn’t elected to the Hall of Fame in either of his first two eligible years. But I digress. Despite your personal opinions on Bonds, including recent allegations of him glassing, his numbers are staggering. Search pretty much any offensive leaderboard where a high number is a good thing and Bonds will have some of the highest numbers.
I’m gonna switch gears here, and I’m gonna switch tremendously. We were just talking about Barry Bonds and now we’re going to talk about Jose Molina. Has that ever happened before? It will all make sense in a minute.
The Tampa Bay Rays released veteran catcher Jose Molina on Thursday, ending their three-year stint with the pitch-framing aficionado and perhaps putting a fork in his 15-year major league career. Molina has remained a major league player far longer than many imagined largely due in part to the skill named in the prior sentence; he’s never really been able to hit, but his ability behind the plate has always made up for his lack of ability at the plate. This year, however, his offense dropped to a new low and seemingly tipped the scales. Jeff already wrote about all this when it happened and there probably shouldn’t be two Jose Molina posts in a week, but Jose Molina’s offensive performance in 2014 — similar to Barry Bonds in the early 2000’s — was of historical significance. It was just the type of significance for which one would rather not be recognized. But we might not have another opportunity to talk about this, so it’s now or never. I hereby submit Jose Molina as: Bizarro Barry.
Read the rest of this entry »
