Ben and Sam banter about Jose Molina, Pat Venditte, and non-revelatory rumors, then draft free agents whose contracts they expect to be above or below published estimates.
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A month and a half ago, Yasiel Puig was struggling. In the playoff series against the Cardinals, Puig struck out seven times in a row at one point, and there was a pretty clear book on him: try to beat him with heat, away. He was having trouble catching up, so the Cardinals were having less trouble putting him away, and that’s among the reasons the Dodgers were unable to advance. Anyway, nevermind the bigger context. Nevermind the Dodgers. It’s interesting how Puig was being pitched.
Because the book on Puig late in 2014 was sort of the opposite of the book on Puig late in 2013. A year ago, it seemed like pitchers solved Puig by busting him with fastballs inside. That was the scouting report at the time, and there’s no reason to think it wasn’t valid. It’s just, accurate scouting reports can be temporary scouting reports, sometimes. Over the course of 12 months, Yasiel Puig changed his own book.
Of course it would take a sample size of so many decades of FanGraphs Contract Crowdsourcing before The Crowd could be properly evaluated for their salary-creating acumen. I will not hesitate, however, to deliver swift and mighty judgement upon The Crowd based on just their (your) inaugural year of estimations.
A few weeks ago, one Carson Cistulli shared an exhaustive chart showing how The Crowd’s aggregate contracts compared against the actual salaries that 2013’s free agents actually received. This is only one dimension with which The Crowd’s collective wisdom can be judged. Now that the free agents of 2013 have played the 2014 season, we can also begin to make strong guesses (and/or swift and mighty judgements) as to whether The Crowd or The Real-Live GM proposed a contract that more accurately reflects a given player’s competitive value.
Tomorrow, a look at The Crowd’s successes: five contracts that are perhaps even more discerning than the contracts proffered by The Real-Live GMs. But today, a look at The Crowd’s collective failures — five contracts that, were they executed by The Real-Live GMs, would be cause for those Real-Live GMs to question (and/or have already lost) their job security.
These five contracts have been selected not out of a set of rigorous objective criteria. However, their short length (all five players were signed by Real-Live GMs to one-year contracts) invites the arrival at conclusions. None of these five players had what one would call a “good” or even a “mediocre” season in 2014. While The Real-Live GMs who designed these contracts no doubt regret their decisions, in each case The Crowd proposed a much larger commitment, in terms of both years and dollars, for these players. In the financial tables below, one can see The Crowd’s aggregate proposals for the number of years (cYRS), average annual value (cAAV), and cumulative contract totals (cTOT) offered to these players, compared to the contracts that they would agree to with The Real-Live GMs (aYRS/aAAV/aTOT).
Yesterday in these pages, the author — standing on the shoulders of the giant that is the Steamer projection system — attempted to identify the player most likely to serve as 2015’s edition of Yangervis Solarte. Surely, that post has already made household names of Buck Britton and Jose Martinez and Deibinson Romero.
For some people, identifying the next Yangervis Solarte is probably a less compelling endeavor than finding 2015’s edition of Mike Trout (which is to say, the best player in all of baseball), for example, or even 2015’s edition of Michael Brantley (which is to say, a player who unexpectedly produced among the league’s highest WAR figures).
The problem in each of those cases, however, is that 2015’s edition of Mike Trout is most likely just Mike Trout. And, while Michael Brantley was a more ordinary player before the 2014 season, he also wasn’t a freely available one.
No, the pleasure of contemplating Yangervis Solarte is that he began the 2014 season as little more than a $500 thousand investment by the Yankees and transformed into approximately a $10 million profit.
The Arizona Fall League championship game (domestic professional baseball’s de facto funeral for the year) featured superlative performances from a number of prospects that may have piqued your curiosity. Here’s a look at how, after nearly two months of evaluating these players, I feel things will play out moving forward.
| 11:43 |
: I’ll be here shortly. In the meantime, anyone get a Steely Dan vibe from this?
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| 11:43 |
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| 12:01 |
: Ooops. Forgot to publish this. I’ll give y’all a second. It’ll be like a real-time lightning round!
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| 12:03 |
pew pew |
| 12:03 |
::lightning:: |
| 12:03 |
Let’s dance! |
Remember when Billy Butler stole a base against the Angels in the playoffs? Of course you do. It was beautiful and it was absurd, and it psychologically cemented the notion that there was nothing the Angels could do to slow the Royals down. Even Billy Butler was having his way, however he wanted to. It was like the Royals flying their flag over the Angels’ conquered castle. And it had to be Butler. It felt meaningful because that’s something Butler just doesn’t do. There are reasons he doesn’t run, so when he ran, and when he got away with it, the Royals felt invincible.
Here’s an image sequence that should remind you of how the moment felt:
The title of this post presupposes a few things — that new Brave Shelby Miller is broken; that Shelby Miller can be fixed; that Shelby Miller has not yet been fixed; that some teams are more likely than others to fix certain problems. We’re not going to leave those presuppositions aside, though. Let’s instead tackle them, one by one.
Just like winter, hot stove season appears to be arriving early this year. Somewhat lost in all of the hubbub regarding Giancarlo Stanton‘s record-breaking deal is Russell Martin‘s five-year, $82 million contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. Though it is heavily backloaded, this still ranks as the third-largest catching contract currently on any club’s books — behind Buster Posey‘s nine-year, $164 million, and Brian McCann’s five-year, $85 million deals, which both run through the respective players’ age-34 seasons. Martin’s runs through his age-36 season. So how do the next five years look for Martin, and for the Blue Jays? Read the rest of this entry »
I’m sure I’ve said this before, but one of my favorite tools on our site would have to be the Depth Charts, which combine Steamer projections and human-curated depth charts to output expected WAR totals.
What I’ve done today — last night, really, which I’m clarifying only in the event of some huge late-night signing that would invalidate all of this — is to sort that by division and graph it out. When you do that, you get this:
A few things stand out there, things like “should we just give the NL East to Washington now or must we wait until next year” and “just think about what the Phillies are going to look like after they trade Cole Hamels, Marlon Byrd, and whomever else.” If the Mariners look too high, well, Jeff already delved into that. If the Yankees look too low, well, name their infield or a single reliably healthy starting pitcher.
Obviously, what we’re looking at is a snapshot of things they way they are right this second, and that’s not how they’ll look when the season kicks off. To use just one example: No, I don’t imagine we’ll be looking at the Dodgers and Rockies as being nearly equal teams in April, because at the moment, the Dodgers have almost literally no shortstop and just three-plus starting pitchers.
You get the idea, though. A lot’s going to change, but in order for teams to effectively make those decisions, they have to adequately understand where they are right now. That’s what might stand out the most about this chart, actually, at least to me — just look at the American League East. Read the rest of this entry »
