November 7, 2011

Your International Free Agent Primer (updated)

Now that Yu Darvish is finally going to be posted from the NPB to MLB, let’s take a look at how international free agency works.

First, 95% or higher of all players entered MLB by signing a standard minor league contract (team-friendly, low annual pay) with a bonus at a young age, grew up in the organization and played for that team.

By the time they hit the majors, they’re under what’s called a rookie contract:

-3 years of league minimum pay.
-3 years of arbitration.

“Super 2″ players are the exception to this; they get arbitration with less than three years service, but it’s usually like 2.8 years service.

At the end of their final year of arbitration, they’re free to test the free agent market unrestricted, so long as they didn’t agree to any extensions.

Players in the minors can be traded, DFA’d, etc., but the contract remains the same. As soon as their service time clock starts, they’re all getting paid the same (unless they agreed to a major league contract).

If you’re wondering why this is so common when there are so many players in MLB with so many different backgrounds, it’s because MLB is meticulous about scouting. Very few players slip through the cracks. There are academies in virtually every country in the world now. The Dominican Republic has its own developmental league. Japan has its own fully functioning professional league and independent league. MLB has, in the past 20 years, made a very strong, concerted effort to revive baseball in inner cities in America.

On top of that, as opposed to the NFL or NBA, maybe one player a year, if that, is prepared to make the jump from college to the pros. It takes years to learn the sophisticated movements for pitching and batting and make them repeatable.

Because of this, MLB gets them young. Most international players, and especially ones in the latin countries, are signed at VERY young ages (16 or 17) in order to give them more sophisticated coaching and develop them in time to be ready for the majors.

That said, the two biggest international free agent spots are Japan and Cuba.

Japan benefits from having a competitive league of its own and the league is autonomous, though Nippon Professional Baseball and MLB do have a lot of crossover. Japanese players need to accrue nine years of service time before they can hit international free agency. At that point, they can sign with any MLB or NPB team they want.

If the player wants to go to America before the service time is over, he must ask his team to put his negotiating rights up for bidding to MLB teams. This is called posting, as in “The Nippon Ham Fighters posted Hideki Matsui and the Yankees won the rights to exclusively negotiate with Matsui on a contract.”

Most NPB teams refuse to do this until eight service years are accrued because, well, why would you ship out a talent that’s MLB worthy when it’s any earlier? This is what’s happening with Yu Darvish right now.

His NPB team may decline to post him, but if they approve, MLB teams bid for the exclusive negotiating rights.

After MLB Team X wins the posting rights, Team X then signs him to a contract. Yes, Team X has to pay twice over, though the posting fee is usually taken into consideration in the contract. Every once in a while, the MLB team will pay the posting fee and be unable to reach a deal on the contract. (EDIT: This is incorrect; the team doesn’t pay the posting fee if a deal isn’t reached.) In that case, Japanese player then returns home and plays for his team again. Iwakuma and the Oakland A’s is the most recent example of this. However, this is very rare. Almost every player who’s been posted from NPB has signed to an MLB team. Because the player was already active in Japan, he almost always makes the jump directly to the majors.

Ichiro and Daisuke Matsuzaka were both posted; Hideki Matsui and Hiroki Kuroda both signed with MLB teams after accrued service time.

Only three Japanese players in history have dodged the NPB and jumped straight to MLB’s minor league system via international free agency–Junichi Tazawa was the most recent and he signed a 3-year/3 mil deal with the Red Sox in 2009. Tazawa, who went undrafted out of high school, played a year in Japan’s corporate league (junior circuit) and asked NPB teams to not draft him the following year so he could play in MLB. They all complied. Kazuhito Tadano was another, but he was disgraced by being in a gay porno. The Cleveland Indians signed him.

Cubans are usually the only ones that hit the international free agent market without restrictions because they defect. Because Cuba has such an advanced national team and development system, Cubans are usually better prepared for, and old enough to play in, the majors when they defect, though some come raw-er than others.

A Cuban player will play with his national team for however long and then, on a road trip in another country, will abandon his team. This is how he defects. After the player gets some time to adjust to living away from home, the player usually does a public workout for teams. The player sets a deadline and teams have that many days to offer a contract. The team that offers the highest-paying contract is usually the winner.

Aroldis Chapman is the most famous international free agent in recent years. Adeinis Hechevarria (another Cuban) was another international free agent, though he flew under the radar because his skills weren’t as highly valued.

These are the very few exceptions. Almost everyone else goes the scout-bonus-develop-rookie contract route.

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October 28, 2011

Sometimes Baseball Finds A Way To Rope You Back In (some notes and links on Game 6)

First, new National song.

This has been a hell of a baseball season. This site’s been on hiatus for a while since we’re still doing the Scorekeeping Project and it’s taking most of my free time, but I have to post today. (A little update: most of the stuff is now down to Adam and I, since a number of the freelance viewers have dropped out; Adam is also a Cards fan and is going completely nuts right now).

Game 6 was an amazing game. I hope all of you got to watch it with someone you loved (or twitter). I got to do both.

Here’s the Win Expectancy chart from the game, via fangraphs:

Can’t Predict Baseball has a pretty nice wrap-up of the insanity.

From The Captain’s Blog, this is a neat little fact:

The returns are in…David Freese now owns the highest WPA in a WS game. His .953 beats Kirk Gibson’s.870.

Goddamn. What a game.

Jeff Passan tweeted this:

Just heard this listening back over tape. Scott Feldman broke Lance Berkman’s bat on the game-tying single. Gets more amazing by the second.

Passan also posted this:

Among all the cool things I’ve seen tonight, here’s another: Joe Buck emulating one of his dad’s signature calls. http://bit.ly/s8yP25

A few people didn’t like emulating the call, but I honestly loved it.

As I said on twitter last night, this has easily been the greatest season I’ve ever witnessed. If you’re not happy with this, get your pulse checked.

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September 28, 2011

Ted Lilly’s Homerless Allowed Streak–You’re Gonna Want to Read This

I don’t know what to call it. No Homer Streak? Whatever, let’s do this.

Ted Lilly has literally never gone a month in his career without giving up a home run. In 2002, he had only two starts in July and didn’t allow a home run, so there’s that. But September 2011 is the first time in his career he went a whole month without giving up a home run.

That was six consecutive starts without allowing a home run.

His longest homerless streaks before this:

1999: 4
2001: 5
2002: 4
2003: 3
2004: 4
2005: 3
2006: 3 (2)
2007: 3 (2)
2008: 2 (3)
2009: 3
2010: 3
2011: 6

Not only did he break his personal best for most non-homer-allowed games, he did it at the end of the season when he needed to allow only two home runs to join the 30/30 club.

Lilly has started 318 games in his career, appeared in 343 total. He’s given up 286 homers in that time; with multi-home run games, he’s had 193 games where he’s allowed a home run.

For averages, his HR/9 rate is 1.4 for his career, but since he averages 6 IP per start, it’s more like 0.933 per start. Yes, averaged out, he gives up a home run per appearances.

—Betting Odds—

Since he’s had 193 games with a homer allowed, 193 divided by 342 is 56; 56% of the time he made a MLB appearance he allowed a home run. That leaves you with 44% of the time he was in a game and didn’t allow one. That’s even on the lighter side, since we’re including non-start appearances (fewer innings, fewer chances to allow a HR).

You have better odds betting on the brightly colored spots on a Craps table and winning six times in a row than betting Lilly not giving up a homer.

So what are the official chances? The chances of Lilly not giving up a home run in six consecutive games are slightly less than 1% (about 0.73%; h/t @jeffersonlives). And he did it solely to prevent himself from entering the history books.

That’s pretty cool. We saw a >1% odd happen tonight.

The 30/30 pitcher season is rarer than Lilly’s homerless streak. There are about 17 seasons I think of a pitcher giving up 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in tens of thousands of eligible pitching seasons. But instead of Lilly breaking a negative record, he created a positive one–and a personal one at that. Good for him.

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September 23, 2011

A Brief Moneyball Review (about its content, not baseball stuff)

Let’s get this out of the way: there are plenty of reviews about Moneyball right now. I’m not writing this because I feel the need to express myself, but because there were a few things I think some reviews missed.

First off, it’s a very good movie. It’s not particularly accurate, but it’s a well-told story. All of Moneyball, from the Sandy Alderson A’s to the Billy Beane years, is condensed into one season. Alderson isn’t mentioned. The idea is that Moneyball didn’t exist as a concept until Beane hired Fake Paul Depodesta (Peter Brand, played by Jonah Hill) from Cleveland. If you have serious problems with this, don’t go see the movie.

What probably should’ve happened was renaming all of the characters except Beane. Scouts particularly don’t look good in this, but they serve a very important purpose: what Beane was doing was going completely against the grain. The book had it because Lewis couldn’t describe sufficiently the different levels of team building and so took it out on the scouts; the movie had it because there wasn’t enough time to expand on the universal nature conventional team building in the game. For that, I forgive it.

The movie does pound away at how different this concept is from anything anybody had done before. Whether or not that’s true is irrelevant because it’s the crux of the story. At some point, Beane and Peter Brand have to be completely alone to further the story and the director Bennett Something and Brad Pitt did a great job of isolating Beane from the rest of the universe, including Peter Brand who’s the person Beane brings into his universe. There are many beautiful shots of empty stadiums, Oakland more than others, and Beane sitting in the seats by himself. There’s one scene in particular in which Beane is standing at the Oakland Coliseum watching the game, frustrated again, and Brand sees him. Brand is seeing the game by himself as well. Brand doesn’t say hi because they’re both separated by distance in a swarm of people–who would warmly embrace them if they knew who they were. But they don’t because the GM and assistant GM are mostly anonymous pencil pushers.

The story tends to amble a bit, but for a purpose, not unlike Catcher in the Rye. This sets up the ending which I won’t spoil for you but does draw some interesting questions out of the story. What’s the point? Why are they doing this if their success is only the ALDS? The philosophy of the story winds up right there in the heart of the ending: this isn’t about money–and dang it if the guy who played John Henry didn’t absolutely nail the monologue at the end–it’s about finding success in places where success isn’t supposed to be. It’s about creating something that defies convention and, of course, finding the market inefficiences. As Beane says in the movie, it’s hard not to get romantic about baseball.

Naturally there’s going to be shortcuts taken when a book is adapted into a movie and Moneyball is no different–but Moneyball did a few things perfectly. Beane does drive around the parking lot in circles–and instead of laughing, you feel his frustration. He also works out (alone) while the game is on and occasionally unmutes it at the opportune times to hear “A-Rod has scored again for the Rangers, making it 6-0 in Oakland,” and so on. Pitt’s acting carries these moments.

Brand, though he’s definitely not Paul Depodesta, is the perfect combination of numbers guy and MLB-office rube. Though he’s got some bright ideas, it’s clear he doesn’t have an understanding on the social relationships required to handle the job. It’s a stereotype, sure, but like other things in this story, it serves a purpose: Brand is us. We’re getting a sexy look into the behind the scenes of running a major league baseball team and it’s kind of horrifying. There’s a lot of frustration. There’s a lot of anger. There’s very little support and a lot of criticism. There’s a lot of emotions for a position that’s supposed to be void of it. It freaks Peter out a bit and he apologizes a few times for things he shouldn’t apologize for
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On top of all of this is the cinematography and directing, where there’s these gorgeous shots with low stadium lighting in slow motion. They’re there to remind us that these guys are doing what Brand thought they’d be doing and this is why they’re undervalued. That although there’s some self-doubt and lots of questions from this new mode of team building, they’re ultimately right and it takes some time to prove it. It all culminates with Scotty H. doing his thing on Game 20 and it’s beautiful.

Keith Law had a lot of complaints about the movie. A good deal of them were correct, some were wrong, but the one I disagree with the most is that the story doesn’t work when the movie can’t decide to be a character construct of Beane and a story about the Oakland A’s. I can see where he gets that, but the story works because of its ending; the character of Beane works for the story; and the movie as a whole was very, very good.

Definitely go see it. You won’t regret it.

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September 23, 2011

A Follow-Up on Average/OBP/SLG Triple Crown and on Matt Kemp staying in LA

Here’s this post from last year, and I feel I should follow up on it a bit.

Josh Hamilton got seriously close last year, but Miguel Cabrera had him beat on OBP by .009. Kemp isn’t particularly close on the AOS triple crown, but who cares. He’s very close to the traditional triple crown and a 40/40 season with only a handful of games to go.

Kemp also had this to say on ESPN 710:

“[We] haven’t started talks,” the MVP candidate told 710 ESPN, “but I plan on being with Dodgers rest of my career.”

Pardon my language, but Goddamn it’s good to hear that.

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September 20, 2011

Afghanistan’s National Sport, Buzkashi, featured in ESPN and Wall Street Journal

I had no idea what Buzkashi was before yesterday, but after reading a few stories on it, I got hooked.

Here’s part of the ESPN story:

There aren’t a lot of bats, balls or rackets in northern Afghanistan. There are goats, horses, men and dusty plains, and they have been there ever since Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde swept into the neighborhood in the 13th century. Their game, then, is simple. Men on horseback grab a goat from a chalk circle, carry it around a pole and drop it into another circle. No downs, innings, line judges or refs. Sometimes there are teams, and sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the field is 200 meters by 200 meters, and sometimes it isn’t. And the goat? The goat might be a calf, but it’s always dead, just lying there with its head and hooves cut off.

Grab the goat, bring it around the pole and put it in the circle. That’s buzkashi.

Wall Street Journal had something good in April:

Over the past several years, the ancient sport of buzkashi—Dari for “goat grabbing”—has turned into a big business in northern Afghanistan. Instead of sporting-goods manufacturers, sponsors usually are rival warlords who bet on their favorite goat grabbers.

Afghanistan’s ‘Goat Grabbing’ Game

The buzkashi stars get a monthly wage, receive cars as gifts for a stellar performance and save enough money to afford a second or even third wife, the ultimate status symbol here.

“I used to practice buzkashi on donkeys, now I drive a Lexus!” said 33-year-old champion Jahaan Geer from his saddle covered in bright hand-woven carpets.

Mr. Geer used to play for Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan’s most brutal warlords in the 1990s civil war, but he recently switched to play for Kam Air, the Afghan airline, whose wealthy owner is one of the biggest buzkashi enthusiasts.

Absurdly amazing. Both articles are good reads. A lot of former warlords-turned-businessmen are involved and it’s become a big post-Taliban reminder of humanity (and sometimes lack thereof) in Afghanistan. Reminds me a lot of Pro Thunderball.

Circle of Justice has a better ring than gun circle.

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September 8, 2011

Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

The Scorekeeping Project donation drive ended on Tuesday at noon my time roughly and we finished just north of $3,000. I imagine everything should be paid for, barring some huge catestrophe, and we’re probably gonna be able to do some Spanish-speaking broadcasts as well.

The next few months will be collecting data. Adam and I have (well, OK, Adam has) done a good deal of it so far, but we have a long way to go.

If you’d like to become a coder–and receive a small stipend for your coverage–please contact me at sethamitin at gmail.

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