Major league baseball remains in a holding pattern. There’s a lockout, the two sides are intermittently negotiating, and nothing can happen until they reach an agreement. That’s major league baseball, though, not all of baseball, and some interesting economic shenanigans are afoot across the minors.

As Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper reported last week, Endeavor Group Holdings is purchasing nine minor league baseball teams: the Gwinnett Stripers, Mississippi Braves, Rome Braves, Augusta GreenJackets, Iowa Cubs, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, Memphis Redbirds, Hudson Valley Renegades, and San Jose Giants; The Athletic’s Daniel Kaplan and Evan Drellich first reported the possibility in October. These transactions aren’t yet final, but they’re very likely to be approved, which will make Endeavor (via new subsidiary Diamond Baseball Holdings) the largest MiLB owner.

Endeavor, a publicly traded company partially owned by private equity group Silver Lake Partners, is already in the business of sports, though not specifically minor league baseball. They own a little bit of everything, from agencies to sports organizations. Their marquee holding is the UFC, but seriously, the list is endless: Professional Bull Riding, Euroleague Basketball, the IMG Academy that turns out baseball prospects, the Madrid Open, the William Morris Endeavor agency. It’s a broad portfolio, much of which is made up of directly-sports-related operations; an arm of the company also sells media rights for the Olympics.
Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 952

On this edition of the podcast, we engage in an important Hall of Fame discussion before chatting with a pitcher on the rise.

• At the top of the show, Jay Jaffe welcomes Sean Gibson, executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation; Gary Gillette, baseball author, as well as the founder and chair of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium; and Ted Knorr, baseball historian and researcher. Together, they are the co-founders of the 42 for 21 Committee, which works to publicize deserving Negro Leagues and Black baseball players for induction into the Hall of Fame. The group discusses the recent election of Buck O’Neil, Bud Fowler, and Minnie Miñoso to the Hall, as well as the candidates on this year’s Era Committee ballots who deserved to get in but didn’t. We also hear about how the election process could be improved, how important it is to honor living players, and the movement to rename the MVP award after Josh Gibson. [2:52]
• After that, David Laurila is joined by Spencer Strider, a right-handed pitching prospect in Atlanta’s organization. A 2020 draftee, Strider jumped from Low-A to the majors this year thanks to some changes in his game, and he shares with David what’s gone into his recent success. We also hear about his memorable debut against the Mets, developing a major-league changeup, and the best advice he got for pitching high in the zone. [29:19]

To purchase a FanGraphs membership for yourself or as a gift, click here.

To donate to FanGraphs and help us keep things running, click here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @dhhiggins on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 59 minute play time.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Luis Robert debuted in 2020 as our No. 7 prospect in baseball and put up up a strong rookie season with league average offensive numbers (100 wRC+), and stellar center field defense (8 Defensive Runs Saved), helping the White Sox return to the playoffs. Under the hood, though, there were some red flags. He had the worst SwStr% in baseball at 22.1%, as well as a 32.2% strikeout rate. His O-Swing rate of 43.1% was fourth worst in baseball, and even when he did make contact, he had a below-average exit velocity of only 87.9 mph. The 2021 season started off with a similar level of production until Robert suffered a torn hip flexor in early May that would end up costing him the middle three months of the season.

When he returned to action in early August, he immediately looked like a different hitter, putting up a 173 wRC+ over the rest of the season and, perhaps most impressive of all, dropping his SwStr% all the way down to 14.5% — not quite league average, but nowhere near the outlier he had been prior to his injury. Check out the contrast in his career numbers before and after his injury:

As you can see, his gaudy offensive performance is now being backed up by a huge improvement in his strikeout rate, as well as much better quality of contact. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And it’s chat time!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Well, yeah, but in the sense that everybody should want to.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Good luck, though!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: He’s too young and talented to give up on, but the last 1.37 seasons should make you extremely worried

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books and has been updated for FanGraphs. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“Papi is even more famous than he is great, occupying his own space in baseball’s cultural catalog with the likes of Mickey Mantle, Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige, and others who layered personality upon skill in outsized measures. October has much to do with that space.” — Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated David Ortiz Special Retirement Tribute, October 2016
 
In December 2002, the Twins released David Ortiz, which is to say that they looked at the bulky, oft-injured 27-year-old slugger coming off his first 20-homer season, considered the possibility of doubling or tripling his $950,000 salary in his first year of arbitration eligibility and thought, “Nope.” Five weeks later, and two months into his new job, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein signed Ortiz on the cheap as one of several potential first base and designated hitter options. Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of October, I wrote about the alterations José Urquidy made to his arsenal during the postseason, trying to estimate how much better or worse his pitches might have been given their velocity and movement changes. In that piece, I briefly touched on raw movement changes but mostly relied upon the vertical and horizontal approach angles (along with location and release point changes) of Urquidy’s pitches to try to fully encapsulate their movement. While the concept and value of vertical approach angle is rather intuitive, I figured it would be useful to go into horizontal approach angle here today and have fun with a little exercise.

This post is inspired in part by all that we have been able to grasp in the public sphere when it comes to vertical approach angle. Measuring the up-down angle of a pitch as it enters the zone is largely derived from the vertical movement measures we’re so accustomed to. Steep vertical movement on breaking pitches and “rising” four-seam fastballs in the upper parts of the zone have been coveted for a while now because we know those pitches are associated with whiffs and therefore success. Much less can be intuited by simply looking at the pitches with above average horizontal movement. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

ZiPS doesn’t usually catch me completely by surprise, but the Tigers’ 2022 offensive projections are, as a group, a solid step or two ahead of what I expected. In fact, the difference is enough to make me think a bit more positively about exactly where the Tigers are in the American League Central. Detroit didn’t hit all that well in 2021, but they were a galaxy ahead of a ’19 season when they literally scored about 200 fewer runs than the average offense. Last season, they almost clawed their way to the middle of the pack, and that was without really getting all that much good fortune. Sure, they got a very good year out of Jeimer Candelario and Akil Baddoo seemingly came out of nowhere, but nobody really hit a level of performance that looks like it will be a challenge to repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

John Means is the best pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles. In a different world, that might be exciting to Baltimore fans as the team builds a contender. An 11th round draft pick in 2014, Means climbed the minor league ladder, burst into the majors with a 3.60 ERA in 2019, and started throwing harder over the subsequent years. Can he be the best pitcher on a playoff team? I’m skeptical. But can he be the third-best? Definitely, and that’s a really cool outcome for someone who was never supposed to make it this far.

Of course, modern baseball being what it is, Means likely won’t be on the next playoff team in Baltimore. Instead, he’ll probably get traded for whatever the O’s can get, because he’s arbitration-eligible and only three years from free agency. You don’t build generational team wealth by passing up the opportunity to trade your good players for future considerations, at least not the way Baltimore is attempting to build for the future. The team is reportedly looking to trade Means, and I think they’ll find a match. So let’s talk about what the team that wins the Means bidding will be getting for their prospects and salary relief.

If you trade for Means, you’re not doing it for the strikeouts. You could look at his career numbers to tell you that, or you could look at his performance in his last 14 starts after returning from an IL stint. He struck out only 20% of the batters he faced, which isn’t cover-your-eyes bad but definitely shouldn’t top your rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

I feel a bit of disquietude when projecting the 2022 Giants. Following up on your biggest team projection miss in nearly 20 years of making said projections doesn’t feel great. Even worse is when your current projection is far closer to the previous year’s very wrong forecast than it is to the previous season’s actual win total. It’s a challenge to convince people that I didn’t write a model for sour grapes and reassure them that I’m an egalitarian who hates every team equally, no matter which one you root for!

In this case, I generally agree with ZiPS that the most significant regressions toward the mean will come on the offense. Let’s start with catcher. At least with the bat, Buster Posey matched some of his best seasons with his stunning 2021 campaign, this despite sitting out the entire 2020 season. With a 35-year-old catcher, it was already likely that some of those wins were going to melt off San Francisco’s total, but Posey’s retirement makes the position even more uncertain. Joey Bart is an outstanding prospect, but even just replacing Posey’s 2022 projection is going to be a tall order. ZiPS does like Bart’s bat a little better than Steamer does, but I don’t think he’s going to make fans forget their retired franchise player particularly quickly. Read the rest of this entry »