Prior to his start on Tuesday night when he allowed seven earned runs, Blue Jays No. 26 prospect Patrick Murphy was mowing down opponents in the Double-A Eastern League.

After allowing 12 earned runs through his first four starts of the season, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-hander really turned things around, dropping his ERA from 6.11 to 3.14 before Tuesday’s game. In three of his six starts since, he had gone seven innings while allowing one or zero runs.

Here is a comparison of his first four starts compared to the five that followed:

First four starts: 17.2 IP, 19 H, 12 ER, 8 BB, 18 K

Following five starts: 34 IP, 17 H, 6 ER, 4 BB, 39 K

The bottom numbers are the Patrick Murphy Dunedin fans became accustomed to watching last season when he posted some of the best stats in the organization among pitchers.

He started 26 games in Dunedin last year, throwing 146.2 innings with an ERA of 2.64, and he even got a start in Double-A New Hampshire, where he allowed two runs and struck out six over six innings. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has been written over the past year about pay at the minor league level and attempts to fix things, and with good reason — it’s a pretty bad situation, and with fundamental decency in mind, it is certainly a good thing that it may be changing.

But alongside that discussion, I’ve been kind of curious of how changing minor league pay would actually change performance. In theory, paying players more could let them focus on baseball, translating to better performance. If that’s the case, it’s even possible that paying players more could actually “pay for itself” if the value of the extra wins players generate outweighs the costs of paying them more. In a perfect world, to test that, you could randomly pay some players more than others and see which group does better.

We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in one where signing bonuses are still pretty random. Yes, obviously players drafted higher receive higher bonuses on average, but there’s still pretty significant variation across the board, especially when you get into later rounds. In 2015, for example, there were 105 players drafted who had assigned “slot values” of between $130,000 and $200,000, and their bonuses were anywhere from $2,000 to $1,000,000. While in general higher bonuses should go to more talented prospects, it also stands to reason that two players drafted around the same time with around the same slot values should have around the same talent level and chances to make the majors.

With that in mind, I took a look at a couple different ways of seeing how well players with much lower bonuses progressed. Using 2014-16 draft data from SBN, I had a set of all players drafted in the first 10 rounds along with their signing bonuses and slot values, which I then matched with FanGraphs’ data on player appearances at either the Triple-A or major league level from 2014 to 2019. In total, this left me with 922 players, of whom 319 (~35%) made a Triple-A or MLB appearance and 144 (~16%) that made an MLB appearance. 153 (~17%) had a signing bonus of $50,000 or lower. I looked at two different ways to see how signing bonuses varied with advancement. Read the rest of this entry »

In a 2019 season that has started with so many bullpens struggling (and yes, Craig Kimbrel still unemployed to this date), we still have relievers that have been brilliant thus far, some of them more surprising than others. That category of the surprising includes our guy, Luke Jackson.

Jackson, a 27-year-old righty from Fort Lauderdale, is in his third season with the Braves. He might go unnoticed if: a) one does not watch Atlanta much or b) one only looks at the current leaderboards in most metrics. By traditional stats, for example, he barely cracks the top 100 relievers in ERA (a three-run ninth on Tuesday in San Francisco took him away from the top 50) and is well below Kirby Yates’ 20 saves. As we move to advanced metrics, we see him climb higher, though still far from the leaders. His 2.24 xFIP ranks him eighth in the big leagues but well below Josh Hader’s 1.59 that currently leads the NL. While we are still early in the season and a few bad outings could hamper his (or any reliever’s) numbers, Jackson deserves to be looked at, mostly because he is changing Braves fans’ opinion from “this guy again?” to a growing sensation of security when he comes up to pitch. And that has not gone unnoticed for Brian Snitker, to whom he has now become the closer and the guy who handles most of high-leverage situations.

After a spring training that included two awful outings against the Astros and Red Sox, Jackson cracked the Opening Day roster and saw action on March 28th, on the first game of an opening series that was a catastrophe for the Braves, and especially for the bullpen. He entered to pitch the 6th inning with Atlanta trailing Philadelphia 6-3, and less than twenty pitches later, the game was as good as lost. A walk and a throwing error of his own set up the frame. The Braves intentionally walked Bryce Harper, and behind him, Rhys Hoskins hit a grand slam that put the final nail in the coffin. Twenty-two appearances later, the only extra bases he has allowed are a homer by David Peralta (who has been mashing against the Braves) and three doubles, and most importantly, he has allowed only five runs, three of them in that blown save earlier this week. Despite that, he holds a 1.80 ERA if we take out his horrid season debut.

Why so much attention on a pitcher that so far has shown nothing else than a great start to the season after more than 100 career innings of subpar pitching? Because this season is the best he has had since his debut in the big leagues with the Texas Rangers back in 2015, and this stretch (which included 14 appearances without allowing a run) already accounts for hist best one in The Show. Thus, it sure would be nice to (at least try to) analyze why. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: The FanGraphs Community Blog has received multiple submissions about Franmil Reyes lately, so we are running a pair together today. Here is the other. Happy Franmil day.

Franmil Reyes. Franimal. La Mole.

There are a few names for one of the most interesting players in the big leagues this year. He certainly has one of the most interesting triple-slash lines — Reyes was the only MLB player with a slugging percentage above .600 and an on-base percentage below .300 going into last weekend.

Reyes, who doesn’t turn 24 until July, is now firmly ensconced as the No. 2 hitter in the lineup on a San Diego Padres team that is somewhat unexpectedly above .500 more than a quarter of the way into the 2019 season.

The OBP around .300 isn’t ideal — it’s the second-lowest among the 52 players with slugging percentages above .500. Reyes ended 2018 with a .340 OBP, so he has demonstrated the ability to get on base at an above-average rate, but this season he has traded some walks for a spike in power by being aggressive, particularly early in at-bats. He was slugging .963 on first pitches after Wednesday’s game, including this blast Friday night for his 14th homer in less than 160 at-bats. There was also this shot to right-center for his 15th homer on a first pitch on Monday. If pitchers come to the inside part of the plate on a 0-0 count against Reyes, he has made them regret it.

Impressively, his aggression is not leading to an increase in strikeouts — rather, his K rate has gone down from 28% in 2018 to 25% in 2019. Reyes has made a lot of noise with his bat, including many loud outs. Bad batted ball luck has led to a .255 BABIP this year despite being in the 93rd percentile in average exit velocity, so there is still possibly some upside he has yet to reach. He isn’t in danger of platooning, with a higher OPS against RHP than LHP, and his spray chart shows he can do as much damage to the opposite field as he can the pull side. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: The FanGraphs Community Blog has received multiple submissions about Franmil Reyes lately, so we are running a pair together today. Here is the other. Happy Franmil day.

When you consider a power hitter like Giancarlo Stanton, it’s hard to think of any other player that can crush the ball the way he can outside of his teammate Aaron Judge. However, there appears to be a young slugger who resembles Stanton in many ways that everyone should be paying more attention to. This is a player who debuted in 2018, and is playing in his first full season in 2019. Meet Franmil Reyes, the 23-year-old Padres outfielder who has 15 home runs through his first 50 games this season. Obviously it’s pretty significant to compare any baseball player to Giancarlo Stanton, right? What’s awesome about this comparison specifically is that Reyes stacks up with Stanton in almost every statistical category from the 2018 season. Take a look at how their offensive numbers compare:

As you can see above, Reyes and Stanton produced almost identically at the plate last season. Of course Stanton produced over the course of a full season, while Reyes played slightly more than half of a season’s worth of games (87). Nonetheless, the similarities between their statistical outputs are remarkable. When we get into the Statcast numbers from the 2018 campaign, the two sluggers once again compare pretty well:

With this data, it’s clear that Reyes didn’t quite hit the ball as hard as Stanton. Despite their similarities statistically, Stanton definitely showed a better ability to crush the ball than Reyes did. We’re looking at the 2018 data because Stanton is currently hurt, but Reyes’ 2019 Statcast data has actually improved this season. Here’s how he’s performed in the same categories thus far: Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Nimmo broke out for the New York Mets in 2018, emerging as one of their core hitters. He featured an excellent combination of power and plate discipline that led him to a .263/.404/.483 slash line and a 149 wRC+, a mark that ranked among the best in all of baseball. In getting to that point, Nimmo developed a more pull-heavy approach at the plate, which led to more hard contact and ultimately more power. Nimmo also featured a high .351 BABIP in 2018, which most would expect to come back down to a more reasonable number because of his tendency to pull ground balls into a shifted infield.

Very few, however, would have expected Nimmo to struggle like he has to start the 2019 season. To this point, Nimmo has put up a .200/.344/.323 slash line, good for a 93 wRC+ in 161 plate appearances, and injury concerns continue to linger. Nimmo’s struggles are playing a big part in the overall difficulties of the Mets lineup, and coaches have offered suggestions to Nimmo that might snap him out of it:

Nimmo disagrees with Callaway, and so do I. Nimmo is one of the more patient hitters in the game, and he likes to wait for a pitch he can do damage with. The problem has been that he isn’t doing damage on those pitches like last year, so I wanted to find out what it is about Nimmo’s profile that could potentially be causing such a slow start. Read the rest of this entry »

Orioles fans like myself don’t have a lot of hope. It’s hard to get excited about a starting lineup featuring Austin Wynns, Joey Rickard, and Rio Ruiz. The Orioles’ hope is for the future, and one thing that got some Orioles fans excited this winter was the selection of Richie Martin with the first pick of the Rule 5 draft. Fans can dream about their team unearthing a diamond in the Rule 5 draft, reminding each other that Jose Bautista was a Rule 5 draft pick once. But the likelihood of success remains extremely low. Still, the first shot at a Rule 5 draft pick seems to suggest a better chance at success. The question is, how much does Rule 5 draft position predict the player’s future career value or team contribution?

To answer this, I identified data from the 2003 to 2014 Rule 5 drafts. I included only players selected in the major league portion of the draft, a sample size of 175. I also only included data up until 2014 to give players time to contribute towards their career bWAR and team bWAR values.

First off, the bar for success in the Rule 5 major league draft is fairly low. Take a look at the distribution of total bWAR provided to the team during the selected players’ tenure.

That’s a lot of clustering around 0 with the exception of some highlights like Shane Victorino, Dan Uggla, Joakim Soria, Marwin Gonzalez, and Odubel Herrera, who all come in at top-10 in team bWAR. The mean team bWAR provided is .61 for this sample. Only six players, or 3.4%, provide more than 5 bWAR to their selecting team. In comparison, 25% of them posted a negative team bWAR, including poor Levale Speigner, who posted a -1.7 bWAR in 26 games across two seasons with the Washington Nationals. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baseball Project is a baseball-themed rock supergroup. The active roster includes:

Scott McCaughey [Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5, R.E.M.] (Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards, Bass, Percussion, SF Giants)

Steve Wynn [The Dream Syndicate, The Miracle 3, Gutterball] (Vocals, Guitars, New York Yankees)

Linda Pitmon [The Miracle 3, Zuzu’s Petals] (Drums, Vocals, Minnesota Twins)

Peter Buck [R.E.M.] (Guitars, Bass, Banjo, Washington Senators)

Mike Mills [R.E.M.] (Bass, Vocals, Atlanta Braves)

The Baseball Project started when McCaughey and Wynn met and discovered a mutual love of The National Pastime sometime around 1992. It wasn’t until 2007 that the pair sat down to write and records songs. “We don’t have any rules about what constitutes a baseball song,” McCaughey explains on the band’s website. “It can be anything from a character study of an obscure guy from the 1920s, to something that just happened, to something completely ridiculous like Extra Inning of Love, which takes the baseball-as-love metaphor and tries to stretch it as far as it will go. They can be fictional songs or non-fictional songs. The great thing with baseball is, we’ll never run out of things to write about!”

The Baseball Project has released three albums, performed The Star-Spangled Banner and Take Me Out to the Ballgame at numerous ballparks, and recorded the theme song for Adult Swim’s animated series Squidbillies in 2013.

Their songs are endlessly catchy and often dense with baseball references. Here’s one of their best, with 30 footnotes to fill in any backstory you may not already know. Read the rest of this entry »

Opt-outs are complicated to understand. On a basic level, an opt-out allows a player the choice, during a specified offseason, to nullify his current contract and become a free agent again. How an opt-out affects the value of a contract has been written about plenty — despite the differences in methods or dollar-per-WAR values, it is generally accepted that the inclusion of an opt-out lowers the total salary of the contract.

Given the issues with trying to calculate an exact value of an opt-out — the two biggest challenges being having sparse contract data and the necessity of a reliable future projection system — I tried to explore opt-outs from a theoretical perspective: why would a player ask for an opt-out, and why would a team write one into a contract. Note: the equations were originally in latex, but they lost formatting through submission. They have been replaced with plain text.

From the Player’s Perspective:

A player would sign a contract with an opt-out if he believed the expected present value of the contract was greater than a contract offer without an opt-out.

EPV_opt < EPV_no-opt

The expected present value of the contract without an opt-out (EPV_no-opt) is just the expected present value of the contract itself. The expected present value of the contract with an opt-out (EPV_opt) is more complex.

The expected present value of a contract with an opt-out can be broken down into two components: the expected present value of the pre-opt-out portion of the contract ($latex EPV_{pre\:opt}$) and the expected present value of the post-opt-out portion. Regardless of whether the player opts out or not, the pre-opt-out value of the contract is the same. The post-opt-out value differs, depending on three values: the value of the new contract should the player opt-out ($latex EPV_{opt}$), the value of staying in the current contract and not opting out ($latex EPV_{no\:opt}$), and the probability the player opts out (P opt-out). Read the rest of this entry »

Are we finally seeing the Lucas Giolito performance that we waited so long for? Once pegged as a “top-of-the-rotation demigod,” Giolito has struggled to find any consistency in the majors. Through the month of May, he’s got the highest K% of his career at 29.2% and the largest K% increase in MLB from 2018 to 2019 with a 13.1% jump. He’s got an average fastball velocity of 93.4 mph, up exactly one tick from last season, and has also added 148 rpm to his heater. Giolito has been more aggressive in terms of overall zone percentage, with the third-largest MLB increase from 2018 to 2019 at 6.8%. Even while down in a hitter’s count, he’s found ways to battle back in the zone, something he was below league average in last season:

Batters are having a tougher time squaring him up and he’s even added some vertical break on his fastball and curveball: Read the rest of this entry »