Episode 1013

It’s Prospect Week at FanGraphs, so our scouting department shares how the prospect list sausage is made before we hear from a fellow ranker who is now on the team side.

• To start things off, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is joined by contributor Tess Taruskin to celebrate making it through Prospect Week and to shine a light on how the Top 100 was made. The duo walk through a ranking exercise, using a group of relief-risk pitchers to show how they would evaluate comparable players. Eric and Tess also discuss some of their favorite players on the list, including Addison Barger and Miguel Bleis, and how nowadays they sometimes have to watch players’ TikTok accounts for the best scouting footage available. [3:44]
• After that, David Laurila welcomes John Manuel, former editor-in-chief at Baseball America and current scout for the Minnesota Twins. John tells David how different prospect lists look now that he is on the inside of a front office, as well as how much clubs actually pay attention to them. The pair also discuss the origins of prospect lists and how BA founder Allan Simpson deserves credit for originating the exercise many years ago. Finally, John reflects on some of his own evaluations on players such as Félix Hernández, Joe Mauer, Mookie Betts, Justin Verlander, and Freddie Freeman. [43:22]

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hour 36 minute play time.)

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Since joining MLB as an expansion team in 1993, the Rockies have won 46.9% of their games. Among active franchises, that mark stands as the third worst. Granted, most other teams have had a lot more time to establish themselves, and the Rockies have bested their 1993 expansion counterparts in the Marlins (though given the option, they’d probably take the Marlins’ two World Series championships). But they have also been handily outpaced by the 1998 expansion teams, the Diamondbacks and the Rays, who have each posted winning percentages of 48.5%. Further, the Rockies still have the fifth-worst winning percentage even if we limit our scope to 2000 onwards. These results don’t line up with the Rockies’ spending, especially as of late, which has placed them in the middle of the pack in terms of payroll — that is, until we consider the Coors effect.

The Rockies’ pitching has long dragged down the fortunes of the team as a whole. Since 2000, they’ve easily been the worst staff in the majors with a 4.93 ERA. But it isn’t entirely their fault: pitches move sub-optimally and balls fly further in Colorado. The front office has tried various remedies, in particular opting for more groundball-heavy or low-BABIP pitchers. Neither of those strategies has worked all that well, but some proposals carry promise, like the idea of relying more on gyro spin and/or using the lesser impacts of Magnus force in Colorado in an advantageous way.

But the innovation in Denver appears to be at a bit of a standstill, possibly due to unrealistic expectations about the Rockies’ current level of competitiveness. Self-evaluation issues aside, on a recent episode of Effectively Wild, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley described the Rockies as a team that could theoretically be more consistent if they truly figured out how to navigate playing half of their games at Coors. That got me thinking, and while I certainly don’t purport to provide the final answer, I do hope to supply a different perspective on the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

With players and team personnel reporting to their spring camps, the 2023 season is almost upon us, with 30 teams set to play over 2,000 games in an effort to qualify just for a chance to reach the ultimate goal of a World Series. It’s a marathon of unparalleled scale in American professional sports, and when all is said and done, some of those teams may be separated by as little as one or two wins — or, though it hasn’t happened since the tragic assassination of Game 163 last winter, any of a series of tiebreakers buried somewhere in the season standings.

That such a long race can come down to the final days is part of what makes our sport brilliant, like some amplified version of Monday’s UAE Tour cycling photo finish my colleague Michael Baumann shared on Twitter. It is part of what makes us all tune in so faithfully for this marathon; over a long summer, the margins between the playoff-bound and the homebound can be paper thin. Just ask last year’s 87-win Phillies and 86-win Brewers, who finished their seasons with extremely different tastes in their mouths.

All this to say: competitive balance is, well, a delicate balance, and with the debut of our 2023 playoff odds last week, there’s no time like the present to evaluate the state of the league from a parity perspective. Competitive parity in MLB has been a hot topic for the better part of a decade as we’ve started to see megateams like the Dodgers and Astros routinely eclipsing 100 wins, and others getting more comfortable with finishing somewhere around 60. In the five full seasons since 2017, 17 teams have reached 100 victories; just five did so in the previous 11 years. On the other side of the standings, prior to 2019, there had been just one season in which as many as four teams lost 100 games; then four clubs did so in each of the 2019, ’21, and ’22 seasons. With that in mind, here’s a look at the disparity in team winning percentage at the end of each season since 1960:

A few things are clear: measures of parity are pretty susceptible to swings in either direction, and as for right now, we are playing through a particularly disparate era. After a seven-year low in 2014, disparity spiked over the next five years to a peak standard deviation of .098 in 2019 before effectively leveling out around .090 in the last three. Left unchecked, this could pose a risk to the delicate balance of maintaining an exciting and marketable 162-game regular season. A wider spread means fewer tight playoff races and more teams with known playoff fates in the latter months of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $108 million extension with the Padres looks innocuous enough. Darvish is absolutely essential to the Padres’ success, and he’s now one of those rare MLB players who’s signed multiple $100 million deals, despite not having reached free agency the first time until his age-31 season.

If anyone can pitch until he’s 42, it’s Darvish, the man who’s got more pitches than can fit in Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. This extension actually has me looking forward to watching Darvish once he gets into his latter-day Zack Greinke era. No, the interesting thing about this contract is not who’s getting paid, who’s doing the paying, or how much money is set to change hands. It’s when. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball season is almost upon us. Spring training competition has begun and the hot stove of free agency has cooled off a bit, though not entirely. Many players, especially on the relief market, have yet to be signed. But over the past week, two former starters with a recent track record of excellent relief performance have taken their talents to Southern California – one finding a new home in Anaheim while the other returns to the big city.

Angels sign Matt Moore to a one-year, $7.55 million deal

Moore’s path through professional baseball has been as interesting as any. A highly touted high school draftee, Moore was once ranked as the top prospect in the game by MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus, ahead of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout. He established himself in the majors at the age of 23, making the AL All-Star team in his second full season. He then missed almost all of 2014 and ’15 with a torn UCL. After returning, his performance quickly dipped from solid to disastrous. He bounced from team to team and posted a 5.99 ERA in 2017-18 while splitting time between the rotation and bullpen. He appeared in just two games in 2019 before a knee injury prematurely ended his season. With his track record of injuries and poor performance now six years long, Moore took a new path to rejuvenate his career, signing with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of NPB for the 2020 season. There he ultimately excelled, with a 2.65 ERA and 3.21 FIP in 13 starts. Moore’s performance impressed the Phillies, who brought him on in a hybrid starter/reliever role where his struggles continued, allowing almost two homers per nine innings and a walk every other frame. However, one team still saw something in him – the Texas Rangers. They signed him to pitch out of the bullpen, and he was excellent: His 1.95 ERA and 2.98 FIP in 74 innings were career bests, as was his 10.1 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we published our playoff odds for the 2023 season. Those odds contain a ton of interesting bells and whistles, from win distributions to chances of receiving a playoff bye. At their core, however, they’re based on one number: win totals. Win totals determine who makes the playoffs, so our projections, at their core, are a machine for spitting out win totals and then assigning playoff spots from there.

We’ve been making these projections since 2014, so I thought it would be interesting to see how our win total projections have matched up with reality. After all, win total projections are only useful if they do an acceptable job of anticipating what happens during the season. If we simply projected 113 wins for the Royals every year, to pick a random example, the model wouldn’t be very useful. The Royals have won anywhere from 58 to 95 games in that span.

I’m not exactly sure what data is most useful about our projections, so I decided to run a bunch of different tests. That way, whatever description of them best helps you understand their volatility, you can simply listen to that one and ignore everything else I presented. Or, you know, consider a bunch of them. It’s your brain, after all.

Before I get started on these, I’d like to point out that I’ve already given our playoff odds estimates a similar test in these two articles. If you’re looking for a tl;dr summary of it, I’d go with this: our odds are pretty good, largely because they converge on which teams are either very likely or very unlikely to make the playoffs quickly. The odds are probably a touch too pessimistic on teams at the 5–10% playoff odds part of the distribution, though that’s more observational than provable through data. For the most part, what you see is what you get: projections do a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

With that out of the way, let’s get back to projected win totals. Here’s the base level: the average error of our win total projections is 7.5 wins, and the median error is 6.5 wins. In other words, if we say that we think your team is going to win 85.5 games, that means that half the time, they’ll win between 79 and 92 games. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results, but for what it’s worth, that error has been consistent over time. In standard deviation terms, that’s around 9.5 wins. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Prospect Week at FanGraphs, a misleading email, and Ben’s daughter’s cold, then discuss Alex Rodriguez as a budding book author, social-media maven, and flawed (anti)hero (9:19), non-revelatory news about Shohei Ohtani’s future (24:07), a secret Mets spring training drill (32:07), and Ben’s reviews of two baseball books that were recently under consideration to be banned in Duval County, Florida (46:07). After that (1:10:59), they bring on FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen to discuss the site’s ranking of the Top 100 (well, 112) prospects in baseball, touching on the relative thinness of the top of the class, evaluating injured pitchers (including Daniel Espino), prospects who could make impacts in 2023 (such as Eury Pérez and Andrew Painter), Gunnar Henderson vs. Corbin Carroll, fast-rising prospects, players Eric is higher on than the consensus, how rule changes affect prospect rankings, notable farm systems, the most interesting prospects to evaluate, and Noah Song joining the Phillies, followed by a Past Blast from 1972 (2:04:31).

Audio intro: The Plimsouls, “Dangerous Book”
Audio interstitial: The Notorious B.I.G. (Feat. 112), “Sky’s the Limit”
Audio outro: Billy Joel, “Zanzibar”

Link to Phoenix population story
Link to U.S. media market ranking
Link to A-Rod’s “book” image
Link to A-Rod’s bubble-bath image
Link to A-Rod’s mirror kiss
Link to ESPN’s Ohtani story
Link to Evan’s Mets tweet
Link to Eagles push play
Link to article on banning the play
Link to Woodward on the Mets drill
Link to Mets spring WS celebration
Link to info on Henry Aaron’s Dream
Link to buy Henry Aaron’s Dream
Link to story of Aaron’s spring debut
Link to Tavares on the book’s language
Link to Roberto Clemente on Goodreads
Link to Thank You, Jackie Robinson
Link to Clemente’s debut game
Link to Clemente’s 3000th hit
Link to 2022 story about possible bans
Link to story about book removal
Link to Duval County on law compliance
Link to Jacksonville Today on Duval
Link to Steven Goldman on hiding history
Link to story about books under review
Link to thread about books under review
Link to Tavares’s Twitter reply
Link to PredictIt Presidential odds
Link to Stop WOKE Act Wiki
Link to The Guardian on the act
Link to The Guardian on act injunctions
Link to The Guardian on book bans
Link to WaPo on book bans
Link to NYT on book bans
Link to CBS poll on book bans
Link to Jemele Hill tweet @MLB
Link to story about book approval
Link to Duval County response
Link to FG’s Top 100 list
Link to Top 100 chat
Link to Ben on 2023 prospect debuts
Link to Ben on pitching prospects
Link to MLBTR on Espino’s injury
Link to Baumann on the “Rolen Zone”
Link to ESPN on Song
Link to 1972 story source
Link to The Boys of Summer
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Topkin on Manfred’s comment
Link to Rob Mains on PPP

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On the heels of what was arguably the best season of his career — one in which he set career highs in wRC+ (152) and WAR (7.4), helped the Padres to the NLCS for the first time in 24 years, and finished second in the NL MVP voting — Manny Machado has informed the Padres that he intends to exercise the opt-out in his $300 million contract after this season and test free agency again.

Last Friday, at the Padres’ spring training site in Peoria, Arizona, the All-Star third baseman confirmed that in December prior to the Winter Meetings, agent Dan Lozano gave the Padres a February 16 deadline to reach agreement on extending the 10-year, $300 million contract Machado signed in February 2019. According to a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kevin Acee, the Padres made just one offer after hearing from Lozano; two days before the deadline, they offered to add five years and $21 million per year ($105 million total) to the five years and $150 million that will remain on his deal after this year. The proposed package of 10 years and $255 million wasn’t enough to satisfy Machado, and so with the deadline having passed, he told reporters that now that he’s in camp he wants to focus on the upcoming season rather than on contract negotiations. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Sal Frelick is a pure hitter from a cold weather climate. He is also one of the top prospects in the Brewers’ system and ranks 68th overall on our recently released Top 100. A Massachusetts native who was drafted 15th overall in 2021 out of Boston College, the 22-year-old outfielder is coming off of a first full professional season in which he slashed .331/.403/.480 with 11 home runs between three levels. Moreover, he fanned just 63 times in 562 plate appearances and spent the final two months with Triple-A Nashville. Assigned a 50 FV by our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, the 5-foot-9-and-a-half, 184-pound left-handed hitter doesn’t project to hit for much power, but his elite contact skills make him one of the more intriguing position player prospects in the National League.

Frelick discussed his line-drive approach and his ascent to pro ball prior to the start of spring training.

———

David Laurila: You’re obviously a very good hitter. Where did you learn to hit?

Sal Frelick: “I don’t know if I ever learned from anybody, For as long as I can remember, the only thing I’ve tried to do is not strike out. I’ve wanted to put the ball in play, and over time, with that being the number one priority for me, it’s kind of how the swing I have now developed.”

Laurila: Is it basically the same swing you had as a kid?

Frelick: “Just about. It’s obviously gotten a little cleaner mechanically, but for the most part it’s been just short and compact. It’s not the prettiest thing you’ll ever see, but it gets the job done.”

Laurila: What’s not pretty about it?

Frelick: “If you look at your average lefty, sweet-swinging [Robinson] Canó-type of player, they have these nice long swings. Because I’ve always been trying to stay as short as possible, trying not to swing and miss, it’s just kind of compact.” Read the rest of this entry »