A look at the draft, a KBO study and those dreadful, dreadful owners
Here's to hoping we negotiated these words in good faith.
Happy Monday, rich people.
We’re back on the regular publishing schedule, sending this puppy right out into your hot little e-mail hands on a Monday. We’ve got a loaded slate this week, starting things off with some minor MLB Draft breakdowns and finishing with Jake’s words about “negotiations” between owners and the players’ association (but mostly about the owners, those dreadful owners). Sandwiched in between are about 2,000 words on the KBO and MLB and math and how stats between the two leagues relate.
Let’s converse.
So, about that draft
There was a draft last week and, somehow, it was only like the third-biggest storyline of the week in Major League Baseball despite there being no actual baseball being played. 2020 is dumb and I do not like it, Sam I Am.
The draft isn’t getting overlooked here, though. It’s been months since we had any actual baseball news to talk about; as fun as it’s been to do fantasy Backyard Baseball and baseball movie character drafts, it’d be a crying shame to miss this opportunity.
We won’t be dropping full-on scouting reports on the picks here. Those are already available all over the interwebs by people that have spent a lot more time watching these guys—often in person, as well. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still pick out one (hopefully) keen observation on each player.
Brewers picks
~Curt
1st round, 20th overall: Garrett Mitchell, OF, UCLA
Mitchell obviously comes with plus-plus speed and some serious ability in center field, but I’ve found myself wondering about the power potential that hasn’t been tapped into yet. He’s got the right frame for some raw power at 6-3, 215 and reports say he flashes that pop in batting practice, but even in those sessions, it looks like he’s not getting much lower-body into the swing.
He has significantly cut down on strikeouts—and I mean significantly—and led all of the NCAA in triples last year, so the strides in contact and gap power have already been made. The next thing is turning those two into game power.
Some of the tools are already there and it’s not hard to dream on the pop. And with the Brewers being known for targeting high exit velo, analytic darlings in the draft, I’d bet they’re dreaming on it, too.
2nd round, 53rd overall: Freddy Zamora, SS, Miami (FL)
Sometimes, it’s like they read the tweets.
The two guys who I deemed as My Guys in this draft were Justin Foscue, who went to the Rangers in the first round, and Zamora. Both were gap-hitting, strike zone-controlling middle infielders.
There were reports of Zamora, who was 35th on FanGraphs’ rankings, having makeup issues, but one man’s perceived character problem is another man’s bargain. The kid walked more times (49) than he struck out (43) in his two years at Miami (he didn’t play at all this year while recovering from a torn ACL). Solid contact with a good eye and a 60-grade glove/arm that will keep him at shortstop is one way to my heart.
3rd round, 92nd overall: Zavier Warren, C/UT, Central Michigan
Zavier Warren is apparently Very Online, considering he left this comment on a YouTube video breaking down what one analyst thought were the best Day 2-5 picks.
Why break down the pick myself when the pick himself can do it for me?
4th round, 121nd overall: Joey Wiemer, OF, Cincinnati
I’m going to be rather frank with you here. I paid zero attention to this pick because, two spots prior, the Diamondbacks selected a kid I cover, AJ Vukovich, and so I had to rush to get a story up.
I am now paying attention to it. More specifically, I’m paying attention to this leg kick that demands your respect.
Folks, that is VIOLENT. With a leg kick like that, we need to get this young man in the KBO.
5th round, 151st overall: Hayden Cantrelle, IF, Louisiana-Lafayette
As a sophomore, my mans had 15 doubles, nine homers, 28 steals and 31 walks in 59 games. There’s some swing-and-miss in there, but he strikes me as another hyper-athletic guy that should be able to play anywhere up the middle. After a .417 OBP last summer at the Cape, he’s a guy whose floor seems to be higher than a lot of guys picked ahead of him, including some of the Brewers picks.
Twins picks
~Tom
1st round, 27th overall: Aaron Sabato, 1B, North Carolina
Every choice in the MLB draft after the first overall pick is usually advertised by the team as the “steal of the draft.” Sabato is no exception. According to MLB reporter Do-Hyoung Park, Twins minor-league hitting coordinator Donegal Fergus considered Sabato the No. 2 prospect on the draft board. Cool, but not important.
What is important is that Sabato can mash. In 2019, he set a UNC freshman record for homers in a season (18) and led the Tar Heels in batting average (.343), doubles (25), RBI (63) and slugging percentage (.696). He also managed to hit a cycle and ended it with a triple, which is without a doubt the best way to complete a cycle.
2nd round, 59th overall: Alerick Soularie, OF, Tennessee
I’m in love with Soularie based on his name alone. It’s wonderful. In 2019, he was a big factor in Tennessee making its long overdue return to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2005. Soularie led the Volunteers with a .357/.602/.466 slash line and 52 runs scored.
Those Tennessee Orange baseball threads make me miss the game more than anything.
4th round, 128th overall: Marco Raya, P, United South High School
We know the only reason Derek Falvey and Thad Levine chose Raya is to protect themselves from the blood-thirsty Facebook commenters that write “what about pitching?” on literally every post.
5th round, 158th overall: Kala’i Rosario, OF, Waiakea High School
Widely considered the top MLB prospect in Hawaii, Rosario thrives on both the diamond and the waves. That’s right, kids. He surfs.
Projecting across KBO and MLB
~Curt
Mel Rojas Jr. Drew Rucinski. Eric Jokisch. Jose Miguel Fernandez. Preston Tucker. These are all names of players who, at best, were replacement-level in the major leagues but have gone onto be among the best players in the KBO this season.
The reasoning behind it is pretty simple. Major League Baseball is the toughest collection of competition in the world. Players who make it to that level in any capacity are very good. The KBO is also chock-full of good players, but it’s obviously just not to the level of MLB. Players, then, who are good enough to have played very recently in the bigs are likely to perform very well against KBO competition.
But how well are they likely to perform?
This is one of the questions that I considered for last week’s “KBO questions” newsletter. How well do various statistics translate over from league-to-league? It’s a conversion chart of sorts involving international baseball metrics. The answer(s) to this question is useful to both KBO and Major League teams alike who are projecting how well a player would perform in their league without any prior history in said league. It’s probably also data that almost, if not every, team already possesses (if you’re a MLB front office and haven’t already had some person run a much more detailed version of this study than I have, then I just don’t know what to tell you).
I’ll be splitting this into a two-part series, with pitchers this week and hitters the next.
Let’s get to the findings. There will be math.
The process
First, I had to choose which stat categories to analyze. Because of the nature of the sample sizes of the players that were part of the study (more on this in a bit), I wanted to avoid numbers that are more prone to be luck-influenced before they can stabilize over a longer period of games. Two of the fastest-stabilizing metrics for pitchers are K% and BB%, so I used those as the primary data sets. I also looked into ERA, although it’s more prone to be more “random” and less indicative of true talent level in many of the individual player samples I took; that said, over the 10,000+ innings that were included in the study, it should stabilize significantly.
Since the goal was to determine how MLB and KBO stats translate to one another, our sample involved exclusively players that, shocking revelation forthcoming, played in both leagues. This group included every Korean-born player who pitched at least 10 big-league innings. I also took the KBO’s foreign players since 2015 that had at least 70 big league innings or both 30 big-league innings and 100 KBO innings.
It wound up being 31 players who totaled more than 22,000 career innings between the majors and KBO. There’s room to include more players in the sample, but with that sum of innings I felt the sample was significant enough considering I really was not looking to double or triple the time spent force-feeding numbers into Excel. The cutoffs for qualifying were also admittedly arbitrary, but I felt that, based on the already-sparse pool of players to work with, they would help accomplish what we wanted.
When a player signs in MLB from the KBO and vice-versa, his very recent performance is often a large reason why. Perhaps he’s a former successful starter in the majors that could no longer cut it, or perhaps he’s a star pitcher in Korea like Hyun-jin Ryu that is signing with a big league team. Because of this, I logged each player’s numbers—again, K%, BB% and ERA—in the two years prior to switching leagues and two years after. If a player is going to the KBO at age 32, we should account for the fact that he’s aged and probably declined in performance since he was 25, and that’s the goal of including the two-year net on both sides. (Chan Ho Park’s career numbers were not included; his 17-year major league career was an outlier, he collected 17.3 of his career 19.9 WAR in a six-year span at the beginning of his career and he didn’t pitch in the KBO until the final year as a pro.)
That said, those two-year windows can often be windows of smaller samples whereas including the player’s entire career gives us the bigger picture. To account for that, players’ career numbers in both leagues were accounted for separate from the two-year stats.
The results
Congratulations, you’ve made it past the part where I explained all the boring methodology of a study nobody asked me to do. Now for the good stuff.
First, here’s the innings totals for each category that the stats are split into. It’s important to keep in mind the samples we’re playing with here.
Again, the more players you include, the more innings you get. The more innings, the more “true” the study is. I may go through and try to double the total of players included at some point when time is more free or during a week’s worth of 4:30 a.m. KBO games.
At first, I was surprised to see the relatively minimal climb in strikeouts for pitchers who made the switch. After all, In the two years immediately before and after switching leagues—when, one would think, skill would not fluctuate greatly—the jump was less than two strikeouts per 100 hitters! But the KBO is a more contact-oriented league than MLB, particularly over the past five years or so as strikeout numbers in the States have escalated.
Many of the players in our sample were former big leaguers who then signed in Korea when not presented with enticing MLB offers, so it makes sense that the average player’s strikeout total is larger over his career than in the two years before heading to the KBO. Very rarely does a player go to the KBO after a really good year in the bigs. Just ask Tyler Saladino.
What’s more notable is a player’s K% being 1.2 percent higher in the KBO for his career than in the two-year stretch. Of the six foreign pitchers that threw more than two years in the KBO in the sample, five had higher career strikeout rates than two-year marks; this sample isn’t significant enough, but it might spell a trend.
These aren’t incredibly huge gaps from league-to-league, but a 16 percent jump also ain’t nothing.
I have this idea in my head that hitters in the KBO don’t walk as much, but, for reference, the median BB% for qualified hitters in the league last year was 9.2%. In MLB, it was 8.4%. The league averages don’t really impact this study as we’re comparing players’ stats to their numbers in a different league and not to the league itself, but it’s worth noting.
I also looked at how ERA translated. As mentioned above, this stat stabilizes far less quickly than K% and BB%, so these numbers, especially the two-year ERAs, come with a larger grain of salt. A 40-inning season for a player in his final year before signing in the KBO is far more likely to be swayed by a fluky-high BABIP or a few fly balls that barely left the yard.
So what can we do with this info? The answer is, well, uh, I guess, lots of things. Fun, right?
What I wanted to find out from the outset was what we could expect from a player who is headed from one league to another. Determining that requires the percent increase/decrease in the three categories from one league to the other. Here’s what we’ve got.
MLB to KBO
Career K%: 14.5% increase
Career BB%: 11.3% decrease
Career ERA: 24.9% decrease
2-year K%: 9.4% increase
2-year BB%: 13.9% decrease
2-year ERA: 24.4% decrease
KBO to MLB (fewer samples available)
Career K%: 12.6% decrease
Career BB%: 12.7% increase
Career ERA: 33.1% increase
2-year K%: 8.6% decrease
2-year BB%: 16.2% increase
2-year ERA: 32.4% increase
These calculations wouldn’t be the only factors that go into projecting a player’s cross-league performance, of course. There’s age, batted ball profile/luck, team defense, how certain pitches would play up or down and more, such as other intangibles including but not limited to coaching and player development. But it’s a start.
There’s also the question of how to properly weigh both the career and two-year numbers when applying the percentages to projections. That’s another separate project, likely. But, for the sake of finishing this story with something we can sink our teeth into, let’s halve them and apply the numbers to a pitcher known as Jacob deGrom.
K%: 35.8%
BB%: 4.8%
ERA: 1.54
KBO Jacob deGrom would, in fact, be stupid good.
More practically (I’m pretty sure Jake deGrom will never pitch in the KBO!), we can apply these to Josh Lindblom in his first year back in MLB since 2017. He spent each of the last two years with the Doosan Bears and, prior to that, also pitched for the Lotte Giants from 2015-2017. Halving the weight applied to Lindblom’s career and two-year KBO numbers, here are the numbers spit out for his 2020 MLB projections.
K%: 20.7%
BB%: 6.4%
ERA: 4.28
We would, from there, still want to factor in more of his previous numbers in the majors. He outperformed his FIP in all five of his KBO seasons, which could be a sign of his ability to limit hard contact, but it would be smart to factor in some regression in that area. His walk rate in his big league career is also 9.7%, although nearly all the heavy damage on that mark was done a long time ago in 2011 and 2012. A projection system would factor in that career number, even if just slightly.
Compare those numbers to ZiPS, which thinks very highly of his ability to translate that strikeout ability with the Brewers.
K%: 22.2%
BB%: 6.9%
ERA/FIP: 4.48 /4.27
If you hung with me all the way until now through nearly 1,900 words, pat yourself on the back and go purchase an ice cream cake for yourself. You deserve it. And you may also need it as we get into the hitters next week.
Major Leagues, major issues
~Jake
On the heels of the first truly enjoyable American baseball moment of 2020, Major League Baseball owners threw their collective middle finger in the air again. The Major League Baseball Players Association, in turn, dashed any hopes of an amicable end to this tortured negotiations.
This won’t be the place to break down all of the proposals going back forth. Read Craig Edwards at FanGraphs or Jeff Passan at ESPN or Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich at The Athletic for that, or just envision two siblings arguing about who hit who first. This, rather, is a “WTF” piece.
The short version is this: Saturday, the players formally rejected the fourth or eighth or 1,000th proposal from the owners and demanded the league set a start date for the season. There’s a lot to break down in that sentence, but perhaps the most important portion is about the start date of a season. Yes, there’s going to be a season! MLB Overlord Rob Manfred said so as much last week when he said there’s 100% chance there will be big league games this year. Now, from a pure baseball standpoint, that’s great. We can only stay awake for a 3 a.m. kt Wiz game so many times.
This shouldn’t be a huge surprise, though. This has been sitting in the back pocket for both players and owners this entire time; when both sides came to terms with a deal for the 2020 season back in March, it was decided there would be a small season—likely to be around 54 games, according to Drellich and Rosenthal—where players make 100 percent of their 54-game salary. So, if all else failed—and believe me, all else is very much failing—both sides could bank on that as a backup. But, that’s like saying your backup career is dogsitting. Sure, it’s fun and the dog is happy to see you, but both parties end up wondering what the point of it even is.
Both sides have ostensibly negotiated to increase the potential number of games while keeping their own financial interests in mind. Both sides have had major sticking points. Owners are now claiming they made the initial deal in March without realizing that games would likely be played without fans. Which, I mean, come on now. So, because asses won’t be in seats, owners think players shouldn’t make 100% of their salary. The owners will make less money so players should, too. At least, so say the owners.
This line of thinking is too dichotomous, though. True, owners will make less money by not being able to charge my frivolous self $12 for a bad beer and $30 for vertiginous seats. Owners still, however, will rake in cash from their media partners—some of which are owned by the teams, mind you—and various advertising revenue, merchandise and, you know, the general goodwill of the people.
The owners’ desires to pay the players less than 100% of their prorated salary misses on two other significant points: 1. The players are taking all the physical risk. 2. Players haven’t been able to take advantage of the numerous financial gains from owners, so why should they have to take part of their losses, too?
First point first. For the coming years, there is going to be an inherent risk to any organized activity. It’s a fact we all have to come to grips with in our own way, but we need to recognize that. Baseball players jumping back on the baseball diamond before the global community has a vaccine or solid treatment plan for COVID-19 is especially risky. There’s an honest case to be made for hazard pay, but that isn’t even a major talking point. Instead, the owners are going to make less than they normally do, so they think players should share in their losses.
Which brings us to the second point. According to Edwards at FanGraphs, player salaries have plateaued over the past four years, despite baseball-only revenues increasing more than $1 billion and a number of other significant baseball-related deals putting money in owners’ pocketbooks. Just days ago, MLB inked a deal with Turner Sports to air playoff games worth more than $1 billion. So, as long as playoff games happen—which would be why the owners are vying for extended playoffs, by the way—owners are going to make bank. Your random July 7 game? They don’t care about that. It’s all about October baseball.
A common refrain from those fans who side with the owners is something about how baseball players earn too much money anyways. “They should just want to play for the good of the game,” some say. It’s a matter of principle, though. Clayton Kershaw isn’t taking money from a nurse or a teacher; ballplayers get paid by owners who bring in hundreds of millions of dollars based on the talent of ballplayers. To say those players don’t deserve that money is counterintuitive to commerce as a concept. If players made a concession on their pay, there’s nothing stopping owners from trying to pull a similar trick down the line.
Therein lies the bad news. While we will have baseball in 2020, we almost surely won’t get baseball in 2022. Why? The current collective bargaining agreement expires in 2021. A work stoppage was a very real possibility even before the pandemic because of a number of concerns, including many of the financial concerns just mentioned, free agent freezes (hello potential collusion), rule changes, service time manipulation and others. Given how these negotiations are going, it’s hard to imagine CBA talks going well.
Ultimately, the most recent response from the players feels like an end to negotiations, which is sad but feels appropriate. The owners have routinely submitted different proposals with the same outcome: less money for the players and just as much risk. It’ll be great to have baseball back; we’ll just need to enjoy it while we still can.
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