Episode 876

On this edition of FanGraphs Audio, Ben Clemens shares his impressions of the Winter Meetings, before we discuss a recent piece of his exploring free agency, and which types of teams are actually keeping the hot stove burning. Ben also shares which rosters have him the most excited for the 2020 season, and the answers may surprise you. Lastly, we discuss the latest updates from the realm of sign-stealing, and Ben discourages you from committing financial crime. 

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 44 min play time.)

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“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” – Joseph Campbell

If someone tells you the Washington Nationals had a storybook season, they’re wrong. The tale of the 2019 Nats is one of science, not magic, one in which they had a team led by superstars and were designed to roll over the opposition in the playoffs. Robbed by fate of the Bryce Harper Hollywood ending in 2018, the Nats moved on from their franchise player, and even at the lowest point of the season, they always projected to have an excellent chance of making the playoffs. Facing teams with better regular season records, Washington leveraged the club’s strengths to even the odds and grabbed the franchise’s first championship. Read the rest of this entry »

A new avenue to pursue a competitive advantage, a gray area as to whether it’s considered cheating, a paper ban that goes unenforced, bad behavior spreading around the league through player movement, executives shocked — shocked! — that such behavior is happening on their teams, a commissioner sounding out of touch as he publicly downplays the severity of the problem, once-celebrated achievements now tainted… if the outlines of baseball’s current sign-stealing scandal sound familiar, it’s because they’ve followed a pattern similar to that of the performance-enhancing drug problem that enveloped the game in the 1990s and early 2000s. Of course, there are key differences between the two, but both found Major League Baseball well behind the curve and struggling both to catch up and regain credibility on the issue.

That thought came to mind on Tuesday, as the sign-stealing saga took a new turn when The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported that in 2018, the Red Sox used their video replay room in an attempt to decipher opponents’ sign sequences, a practice that proliferated after instant replay reviews were introduced in 2014, one that was broadly prohibited but generally unenforced until 2018. Three members of the 2018 Red Sox told The Athletic that multiple teammates used the team’s video room, which was just a few steps from the home dugout, to break down opponents’ signs. Unlike the bang-on-a-trash-can system Rosenthal and Drellich reported the Astros having used in 2017, the Red Sox did not directly communicate to batters what pitch was coming, instead relaying that information through the dugout to the baserunner and then to the hitter.

While the efficacy of either system is still murky, both the Astros and Red Sox flouted the rules, and both went on to win the World Series in the year they did so, coincidentally beating the Dodgers. While rumors have circulated regarding other teams’ usage of replay rooms and other means to steal signs electronically, thus far the substantiated allegations have been limited to those two clubs, who share a common denominator: Alex Cora, who as bench coach of the Astros in 2017 is said to have played a key role in their sign-stealing system, and who left following that season to manage the Red Sox, a job he still holds. Read the rest of this entry »

After a few cold, dreary, quiet hot stove seasons, free agency picked up its pace this winter. While Manny Machado and Bryce Harper got $300 million deals last offseason, it took until nearly spring to get those contracts finalized. This offseason, we’ve seen Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon, and Zack Wheeler sign for more than $100 million, and with the new year just eight days old, only a handful of decent free agents remain. While large deals and total spending near $2 billion have captivated us this offseason, it’s worth exploring what has made this winter different from years past. Is it just timing? Is it this class of free agents? Have teams changed their spending habits? Is the cost of a win still linear? A useful tool when examining those issues it to try to determine how much teams are paying for a win above replacement in the free agent market.

While putting dollar figures on players isn’t the most feel-good task, it’s helpful for framing conversations about costs in free agency. From the front office perspective, it helps to determine which free agents are good values and a worthy investment of resources compared to other free agents and veteran players. It also helps frame the value of younger players who have yet to reach the full six years of service time necessary to hit the market by showing the alternative cost to obtaining similar production. On the player side, these types of valuations tend to show how underpaid players are prior to reaching free agency, given the low cost of their tremendous on-field value compared to similarly productive free agents.

There are a variety of ways to go about determining how much teams are paying per win on the free agent market. Matt Swartz, having found that projections tended to overweight free agent player production and playing time when considered in the aggregate, instead considered actual production of past results to determine how much teams were paying for a win. He also used all players with at least six years of service time to account for players aging over the course of a contract. He acknowledged that there might be issues with including players on extensions. To be clear, Swartz wasn’t wrong about the way he formulated his dollars per win, but another approach can be helpful, and, if we are to look at the current offseason, necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

12:30

Kiley McDaniel: which includes new 2020 RHP Nick Bitsko:   Kiley McDaniel @kileymcd   Had a loud East Coast Pro outing where he started 94-96 and flashed a plus hook, usable changeup at 6’4/220 having turned 17 a month before. Hit 95 for the first time right after turning 16. Moved to our 2020 rankings: #17 overall, 3rd best HS arm for now fangraphs.com/prospects/the-… Jonathan Mayo@JonathanMayo Some @MLBDraft news: HS RHP Nick Bitsko from Eastern PA will graduate early, which will make the @UVABaseball commit eligible for the 2020 #MLBDraft. Potential top 10 pick this June. 7 Jan 2020

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, the Texas Rangers made another nifty signing in their humble but effective winter. Robinson Chirinos, coming off a career season in his Houston sojourn, will return to his roots this spring. He inked a one-year deal worth $5.75 million, with a $6.5 million team option for 2021; the contract also includes a $1 million buyout if the Rangers choose not to exercise the option.

Chirinos is one of those players who’s both older and better than you think. A career part-timer until 2018, the 35-year-old has quietly emerged as one of baseball’s best hitting catchers at an age most players fade into retirement. He has a very modern offensive game: He’s content to work the count, draw a few walks, take a few more strikeouts, post the occasional Insta, and smack a dinger every 10 days or so. He’s finished with a wRC+ above 100 in each of the last five campaigns, and among catchers with at least 1,000 plate appearances over the last three years, only seven have been better with the stick:

If all of that sounds like a way to avoid talking about his glove, guilty as charged. Per our framing metrics, Chirinos is one of the worst receivers in the league. This is not a minority view either, as Baseball Prospectus’s framing numbers track very similarly. He’s given away nearly 50 runs over his career from his framing alone, and while he improved a bit last season, he’s very much a bat-first option behind the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a big, boring truism you surely don’t want to read an article about: as a pitcher, it’s better to be ahead in the count than behind. Good, great, fine. Thanks for the information, Ben, but let’s move along. We all know that, there’s no need to further prove it.

But wait! Here’s another truism that complicates the first one. Better hitters get ahead in the count more often. Mike Trout gets to 1-0 a lot more frequently than Billy Hamilton does — in roughly 48% of his plate appearances, as compared to a mere 36.8% for Hamilton.

So here’s a fact presented without context: major league hitters, as a whole, had a .363 wOBA after 1-0 counts and a .270 wOBA after 0-1 counts. Get ahead, hit better. But here’s some context, which at least slightly confuses the issue. The average wOBA of a batter reaching a 1-0 count was .322. In contrast, the average wOBA of 0-1 batters was .317. Better batters, in other words, really do reach advantageous counts more often. If you don’t account for that, you’ll probably end up over-valuing getting ahead in the count. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a new insight to point out that the Dodgers decided a few years ago that one helpful thing they can do with all their money is take fliers on a ton of injured or otherwise unreliable starting pitchers, only some of whom will work out. Other teams do this too, of course, but only the Dodgers do it at a scale that leaves their starting pitchers’ depth chart looking quite this crowded year after year:

Jimmy Nelson, row seven, is the newest addition to the Dodgers’ crop of injured arms, as he reportedly signed with Los Angeles for $1.25 million in guaranteed dollars with a litany of incentives and option years (up to $13 million over two years, according to reports). That structure has the effect of capping Nelson’s earnings through the end of 2021 if he comes back healthy — starting pitchers have signed for a median of $8.25 million a year so far this offseason, which puts Nelson’s cap of $6.5 million well below average — while committing the Dodgers to very little guaranteed money in the event Nelson fails to bounce back. Read the rest of this entry »

In many cases, no news is good news. But for the Cubs, their broadcasting partner Sinclair, and the new Marquee Network, no news is bad news. While there’s still more than a month to go before the network is on the air, it has yet to reach agreements with Comcast/Xfinity, the largest cable provider in Chicago, as well as RCN and streaming only services like Hulu Live, Sling, and Youtube TV. In his piece for the Chicago Tribune, Phil Rosenthal provides a reminder of where things stand for viewers in Chicago when it comes to seeing Cubs’ games this season:

While Marquee currently has deals in place to run on a handful of carriers, including DirecTV, U-verse, AT&T TV, Charter Communications and Mediacom Communications, it is lost on no one that it’s still negotiating with many others, including Comcast’s Xfinity, the Chicago-area’s largest carrier with an estimated 1.5 million households.

As Rosenthal notes, Sinclair was able to leverage its massive reach across the country, which includes local stations and more than half the Regional Sports Networks that air baseball games, to secure deals with AT&T/DirecTV/Uverse/DirecTVNow, allowing the Cubs and Sinclair to say they reach nearly all Chicagoland homes. But reaching nearly every home and actually airing in those homes are two entirely different things. The deals with Charter and Mediacom aren’t insignificant, as fans in downstate Illinois, southern Wisconsin, Iowa, and Indiana will likely have access to Cubs games in the spring with a cable package. The Cubs didn’t start their own network to reap the benefits of subscriber fees in those areas, however, as getting on cable in homes in Chicago is the big prize and moneymaker.

In Rosenthal’s piece, he notes that the Yankees’ YES network had difficulties getting onto Comcast a few years back. The Yankees’ situation provides an interesting analogue both for its similarities and its differences. While Comcast was in nearly a million homes at the time, none of them were in New York City, where YES Network was available to millions more subscribers. Comcast was a smaller fish for YES, unlike the situation in Chicago. In addition, the dispute ended when Comcast wanted to add Fox News Channel to its lineup and FOX, which owned YES at the time, was able to leverage those negotiations into carriage for YES on Comcast. It’s not clear that the Cubs and Sinclair have the same type of leverage in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »