FanGraphs Baseball

Nick Swisher is, in a word, divisive. His larger-than-Brohio personality tends to overshadow his abilities on the field. Put another way: almost everybody has an opinion on Swisher, few of which are based solely on his playing ability.

After you post a .208/.278/.331 line with 8 home runs in just over 400 plate appearances, perhaps you want more folks focused on your broisterous off-field brosona than an injury-plagued disappointment.

If the rumors drifting out of the GM meetings are to believed, Cleveland isn’t swayed by their popular player’s personality, instead focusing on what it might take to be rid of the remaining two years and $30 million (plus a $14 million vesting option for 2017) left on the contract he signed in ahead of the 2013 season. Ken Rosenthal intimates that Cleveland would like to free themselves of Swisher’s deal, perhaps taking a different bad contract coming back the other way.

Is there any daring or deep-pocketed team out there willing to roll the dice with Swisher’s age-34 and 35 seasons? Is $30 million of their precious payroll worth the gamble that Swisher returns to his previous levels of production?

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As he has previously in this life, the author has published below a statistical report for the Arizona Fall League — less because such reports are of great utility to prospect analysis, and more because, for those of us not residing in the Greater Phoenix area, one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league is by dwelling for too long on very small statistical samples.

What follows is an example of the final such statistical report for the AFL, the season having ended last Saturday.

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Justin Upton is probably going to get traded. If you believe Joel Sherman’s source, there’s no probably about it; Upton is the next Brave out of town. And it makes sense; the team is clearly retooling for the future, while Upton is entering the final year of his contract. If the Braves don’t think they’re going to sign him long-term, better to trade him now than settle a compensation pick next year.

The question will be the price. Sherman reports that the asking price for Upton is going to be higher than the return they got for Jason Heyward, and that was already a pretty solid package. As I noted this morning, teams are paying through the moon for right-handed power right now, and so Upton will be an attractive option for teams looking to balance out their line-ups.

But even with the advantage of his handedness, I’d like to suggest that the price for Upton should be less than what St. Louis gave up for Heyward. And I promise, this isn’t another discussion of Heyward’s defensive metrics. I can make the point without even needing to cite UZR or DRS, because the offensive gap just isn’t as large as people think. Here are their respective lines over the past three seasons.

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There aren’t any Mike Trouts on the free-agent market. And actually, at this rate, there might never be any Mike Trouts on the free-agent market.

There are plenty of talented position players available, but they all bring their own individual question marks. People wonder how Pablo Sandoval’s body is going to age. People wonder how Yasmany Tomas is going to translate his skills from Cuba. People wonder if Victor Martinez is going to sustain last year’s power spike, and no one’s really clear on whether Nelson Cruz can repeat his massive 2014.

Perhaps top among all of them, in desirability, is Hanley Ramirez, but he, too, has a question people ask. Actually, there are a few questions, but maybe most pressingly, there are questions about his defense.

He’s never been a great defender at shortstop, and now he’s almost 31 years old, having gotten through a countless number of aches and pains. I’ll quote writer and frequent Dodgers observer Mike Petriello, from the beginning of October:

[…] that defense took a bigger step back, to the point that it’s hard to see him sticking at shortstop rather than moving to third, and the injuries continued to pile up. In 2014 alone, he missed time with minor injuries to his left hand, left calf, right shoulder, right calf, and left oblique, and those are just the ones we know about.

It’s pretty well known that current defensive statistics aren’t as reliable as current offensive statistics, but it’s also pretty well known that current defensive statistics aren’t measuring nothing, and by the numbers, Ramirez looks bad. Over the last few years, he’s been one of the very worst defensive shortstops. When he spent a chunk of time playing third base, he was statistically bad there, too. You have to allow him an adjustment period there, but still, it’s evidence that points to Ramirez being a defensive liability. Not coincidentally, though he just played short for a contender, there’s talk that Ramirez is willing to move just about anywhere.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

Demographic data made available to the author reveals that no fewer than 90% or 95% of the present site’s readership is composed of busy executives. And while busy executives might definitely want to watch a collection of videos featuring that player revealed on Wednesday as the one projected, among all this offseason’s minor-league free agents, to record the highest WAR in 2015 — while those executives might want to do that, it’s also probably the case that the investment of time required to search all over the entire internet for those videos isn’t worth the return.

To that end, what I’ve done here is to aggregate the most illustrative of those videos featuring third baseman Deibinson Romero — i.e. the aforementioned player to have recieved the most promising Steamer projection among all minor-league free agents. What I’ve also done is supplied a brief passage with a view towards providing any relevant context to the video in question.

Begin.

1. Here’s the most recent available video of Romero care of Minor League Baseball — in this case, of Romero hitting a double for Triple-A Rochester in July.

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I tweeted a link earlier this week to an article in the Providence Journal with quotes for various big league executives about how the gap between Triple-A and the big leagues is widening.  The thrust of the article is that the step from dominating Triple-A as a top hitting prospect to performing well in a big league debut is even steeper now than in the past.  Gregory Polanco, Javier Baez, Jon Singleton, Michael Choice, Kolten Wong, Jackie Bradley, Jr, Will Middlebrooks, Xander Bogaerts and the late Oscar Taveras were all examples from just this past year that fit the description.  While these struggles can be blamed on plate discipline or mechanical breakdowns, they nearly all fall under the larger umbrella of mental toughness.

While I hadn’t heard about a MLB to Triple-A gap widening before, the underlying issue behind it keeps coming up in my Evaluating the Prospects series, with my recent Reds list a prime example.  In the report for #1 prospect RHP Robert Stephenson I said, “This year was a struggle for Stephenson as he hadn’t really failed before…” in the comment for #3 prospect LF Jesse Winker I mentioned, “Winker has never really failed before,” and for #7 prospect CF Phillip Ervin I summed up his disappointing 2014 campaign, “Ervin got into some bad habits at the plate early in 2014, getting too pull-conscious and was forced to deal with the first failure of his career.”

It’s a theme that came up earlier in the series and with some top pitchers.  In the Diamondbacks list, their #1 prospect RHP Archie Bradley had what some called a lost 2014 season because he “had never been hurt and basically hadn’t failed in his baseball career,” and while I didn’t use this phrasing in the Astros list, an executive with the team said former #1 overall pick RHP Mark Appel was embarrassed at some level about his struggles in 2014, the first failure of his career.  It also comes up in backwards-looking reviews of established big leaguers.  When talking to a Reds’ executive for their list, he mentioned that Jay Bruce experienced his first failure in the big leagues, which is quite rare, and that it defined his career in some ways.

I’m sure you can imagine the ways in which mental toughness is important to player development; specifically for hitters, failure is a huge part of the game and many top prospects haven’t experienced it in any form when they enter pro ball.  Beyond that, the humility, openness to coaching and improved work ethic that comes from working out of a funk are things that players refer back to for their entire career, on and off the field.  The timing and duration of these struggles often dictate whether the problem can become a teachable moment.

Every exec I’ve asked so far has agreed that if they could push a button to make a power pitching prospect throw in the upper-80’s just long enough that he wouldn’t fall apart mentally, learn to pitch without his best stuff, and then regain his velocity, that they all would do it.  The art of development is learning how much a player can handle, sometimes walking him into a tough spot but helping to guide him out of the abyss while being careful to let him do it on his own.

Roughly once a week, at least one person in a FanGraphs chat asks about the site’s name. Why do we have “Graphs” in the name if we hardly ever use the graphs section of the site? Well, some of the graphs don’t get much attention but one of the most popular features of the site is a graph. A win expectancy graph, to be more precise. It looks like this!

Source: FanGraphs

These graphs communicate the odds that a team will win from any given point in the contest based on the inning, score, base-out state, and run environment. They tell the story of the game and the changes from one location on the graph to the next is the Win Probability Added of that plate appearance.

This is a long-winded way of saying that the Win Expectancy and Win Probability Added sections of the FanGraphs Library received a makeover this week and now include more detailed information about these two statistics.

As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments section, on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or during our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats (Wednesdays at 3pm).

Ten years ago, everyone wanted young pitching. It was the considered the currency of baseball, the thing you could always trade if you needed to acquire something else. But these days, random kids on the street can throw 100 mph, the strike zone is gigantic, and preventing runs is now the easy part of the game. What everyone wants now is offense, and seemingly, offense in the form of good right-handed hitters.

This seems a reaction to the fact that the league’s platoon splits have gotten larger over the last few years; specifically, left-handed hitters have been exploited more often by left-handed pitching. Here is the league average wRC+ for LHP vs LHB match-ups in each year since 2002:

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Kevin Ziomek carved up Midwest League hitters in his first full professional season. In 123 innings at West Michigan, the 22-year-old left-hander logged a 2.27 ERA and an 11.1 K/9. His top-flight numbers notwithstanding, he created surprisingly little buzz.

The Detroit Tigers took Ziomek in the second round of the 2013 draft out of Vanderbilt University, which helps explain the paucity of plaudits. When a high-round pick from a high-profile college program excels in Low-A, the reaction is typically “That’s what he was expected to do. Let’s see what he does at the next level.”

Despite his dominance, Ziomek’s chance to pass that next test won’t come until next season. (Tigers farm director Reid Nichols gave a non-specific answer when I asked why Ziomek wasn’t promoted.) One possible reason was an opportunity to spent the entire summer working under the tutelage of Whitecaps pitching coach Mike Henneman.

Ziomek, whom Baseball America ranks as Detroit’s second-best pitching prospect, discussed his under-the-radar 2014 performance at the end of the season.

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Ziomek on his high strikeout rate: “Making pitches early in the count can put you in position to strike people out. What (the Tigers) want is for us to try to get people out early in the count. Then, if we get to that two-strike count, we can try to get that strikeout. Every pitcher – I don’t care who you are – likes to get strikeouts.

“Guys coming out of the college game have a tendency to throw a lot of pitches that are unnecessary. Keeping my pitch count down is something I improved on over the course of the year. I threw first-pitch strikes and got ahead, and as a result my strikeout numbers went up. In a way, I got more strikeouts because I wasn’t trying to strike people out.” Read the rest of this entry »