Dollar Store: The Birchwood Brothers’ 10 Bold Predictions

“Be bloody, bold, and resolute.” The approach didn’t work out for Macbeth, but these are nonetheless words to live by for the Birchwood Brothers. As we’ve often mentioned, we’re no better than Joe Fan at predicting the value of upper- and mid-tier players. We like Kole Calhoun, for example, but we have no idea whether he’s worth $15, $20, or somewhere in between. We leave the task of determining that to our Fangraphs colleagues.

We nonetheless find most of said colleagues’ Bold Predictions for the season a trifle, ah, timid. And, insofar as we are vessels of enlightenment, it is because we occasionally identify cheap players who might do something compelling. Remember, we’re the guys who last year urged upon you Jose Ramirez, T.J. House, Jordan Schafer, and Todd Cunningham. We operate at the intersection of the statistical and the anecdotal, and try to separate signal and noise. So, passing lightly over the recent news that–have we got this right?–Goose Gossage is retiring in order to home-school Adam LaRoche, we offer our Genuinely Bold Predictions for 2016. And, to quote a sign we once saw in the window of a discount shop, Everything One Dollars or Fewer. Although now that we think about it, some of the stuff in that shop, though undoubtedly cheap, cost more than a dollar. So let’s start with some guys who will probably cost you only that much, but whom we regard as worth $2 if someone says $1 before you get around to it.

Two Dollar Players

1. Keone Kela will lead the Rangers in saves. Contemplating Kela and Shawn Tolleson, the incumbent closer, we are reminded a bit of the situation before last season with Luke Gregerson and Chad Qualls. Qualls was ostensibly the incumbent, but a trifle long in the tooth and coming off an unusually successful season that was going to be hard to duplicate. Meanwhile, by any conceivable metric, Gregerson was a better pitcher. And so it is with Tolleson and Kela, with the additional fillip that Tolleson has a lot of trouble staying healthy.

2. Leonys Martin will return to his 2013-2014 level of play. What did you pay for Austin Jackson last year? At least $5, right? So meet Seattle’s new center fielder, who’s better than Jackson, both in the field and at bat. Martin was hurt last season continuously from early May onward. Now he’s healthy, and he’s only 28, so something akin to .265 with 30 or more SBs is imaginable if not completely foreseeable. (It looks as if he’ll be batting at the bottom of the order rather than leading off.) In retrospect, Martin was singularly unlucky last year, because the guy who was next in line, Delino DeShields, has a similar skill set, so once DeShields took over it was like Martin never left, even when he had. There’s no one like that in Seattle, and Martin should be on a very long leash, because (1) except for Kevin Kiermaier, he’s arguably the best center fielder in the American League (we said arguably), and (2) once Jackson left the building, the Mariners’ center fielders were Brad Miller, Dustin Ackley, Shawn O’Malley, and Justin Ruggiano, and James Jones, all but O’Malley now former Mariners, which means Martin will be deeply appreciated.

3. Phil Hughes will have an ERA of no more than 3.50 and a WHIP of roughly 1.20. Hughes had a remarkable 2014 in which he broke the Major League record for strikeout-to-walk ratio. He’d never had a season remotely comparable before. The Twins, in that obliging Lake Woebegon way of theirs, tore up his contract ($16 million over the next 2 years) and gave him a new one ($58 million over the next 5). We don’t know how the citizens of Hennapin County, whose sales tax got boosted to finance the Twins’ new stadium, celebrated this largesse. Hughes evidently celebrated by spending the winter gourmandizing, and hey—we would have too. He reported to work in February 2015 discernibly (indeed, conspicuously) overweight, stayed overweight all season, and—surprise surprise!—developed back problems. He was pretty awful. Now he’s svelter and reportedly healthy, so we figure a partial bounceback is in the offing.

 

4. Travis Shaw will get at least 400 at bats and hit at least 20 home runs. We concede that he’s probably a .250 hitter. We also concede that you expect more from your corner infielders. And, finally, we concede that the Red Sox are deeply invested in Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, the current occupants of the two positions Shaw plays. (Subject for further discussion: Will Sandoval’s contract prove to be the worst long-term deal in Major League history?) But Shaw loves Fenway, and is loved in turn by manager John Farrell, who is giving him reps in the outfield as well as first and third. The chances that Ramirez will stay healthy, Sandoval will stay sane, and both will produce seem to us nil. So 20-in-400 seems to us Shaw’s downside; his upside makes him worth an extra buck.

One Dollar Players

5. Chris Owings will hit 10 home runs and steal 20 bases. The long-running Arizona sitcom Infield Follies is still going strong. We get that Nick Ahmed is the filthiest glove man since O.J. Simpson, but we don’t get why you need to have both him and Jean Segura in your middle infield. Their aggregate slash line is .257/.285/.357, which means that you’re saying, essentially, that you like Josh Rutledge so much that you’re going to let him bat twice in a row. Meanwhile, Owings is a capable fielder with speed, power, and decent plate discipline. He was awful last year, when he was hurt, but fine in 2014, when he was healthy, as he is now. We think he’ll find his way into the lineup and perform.

6. The 2016 Chris Heston will be the first-half-of-2015 Chris Heston. Heston’s first half last season: 9W, 5L, 11 QS, 3.39 ERA,1.20 WHIP, 1 No-Hitter. Heston’s second half last season: 3W, 6L, 3 QS, 4.91 ERA, 1.50 WHIP, No No-Hitters. Maybe the batters just figured him out. But maybe not: Heston is slender to begin with, and by his own admission wore down badly over the long summer. He lost 20 pounds during the season, which he regained this winter thanks to a nutritionally-sophisticated diet that he’s planning to follow this season. Indeed, we’re planning to use it ourselves. As he puts it, “Just eat.” We think the chances that he’ll penetrate the Giants’ starting rotation and have the self-control to follow the Phil Hughes diet all season are worth $1.

7. Chris Bassitt will have about the same season, statistically, as we envision Phil Hughes having. We’ve already identified Bassitt as one of the starting pitchers most likely to benefit from the New Bullpen Philosophy, and specifically from the transformation of the A’s bullpen from one of the worst to (on paper) one of the best. But now we read in addition that Bassitt was tipping his pitches, and has figured out how not to tip his pitches. (Why does it always take them years to figure this kind of thing out?) His stats so far this spring suggest that he’s not kidding. Worth a dollar to find out, we think.

8. Josh Phegley will hit 15 home runs this season. Phegley is a right-handed-hitting catcher who thrives on left-handed pitching. We told you about him last week, when we noted that, if Mike Podhorzer is right, Phegley will hit 8 more home runs than Fangraphs thinks he’ll hit, which is approximately 5. Looking more closely at the numbers, we think that even that is low. The Fangraphs Depth Charts project Phegley to get about 200 plate appearances, less than the roughly 250 that he had last year. We think this is wrong—that Phegley is likely to get close to 300 plate appearances. We think this because (1) Phegley is a good catcher; (2) Phegley’s platoon mate, Stephen Vogt, gets even more banged up and in need of rest than other first-string catchers do; (3) Vogt, a left-handed batter, is a better hitter than either the A’s left-handed first baseman (Yonder Alonso) or their regular DH (Billy Butler), so if you want to get him in the lineup but out of the combat zone, you can; and (4) Phegley isn’t completely helpless against right-handed pitching (.259/.291/.417 with about 40 HRs in about 1200 PAs in the high minors). So we think that Phegley will play a bit more than last year, including some more starts against right-handers (against whom he’ll hit about .220, though with some power), but also some against left-handers (against whom Vogt started 16 games at catcher last season). 100 PAs beyond what we used last week to project Phegley’s home runs means about another 5 home runs beyond the 13 we foresaw, so 15 seems conservative.

9. Chris Young will hit between .260 and .270 with 12 to 15 home runs. Young in 2016 is a bit like Marlon Byrd in 2015: an elderly right-handed power-hitting outfielder newly arrived in a right-handed hitter’s paradise. The match isn’t perfect: Byrd started 2015 with a full-time job, and he hits right-handed pitching better than Young does. But the Red Sox went out of their way to get Young, presumably because they know his career stats in Fenway (.344 BA, .437 OBA, 3 HR in 71 PA). If he duplicates that in 100 PAs against lefties in Fenway, hits lefties on the road in another 100 PAs about as well as he hit them during his recent tenure with the Yankees, and is helpless against righties for another hundred PAs, you’re going to get the stats we envision. Well worth the buck.

Reserve Round

10. By the end of the season, Jaime Schultz will be Tampa Bay’s closer. Even before Brad Boxberger got hurt, we thought he was a vulnerable closer. Too many home runs, for one thing. So who’ll replace him now? Alex Colome? Bo-ring! We love Alex, but we flagged him for you last October, so let’s move on. Schultz is a 24-year-old right-handed pitcher, drafted in the 14th round in 2013. He’s a local lad, so we’ve been following his career since he was in high school. He had TJ surgery when he was in college. As Kiley McDaniel noted in Fangraphs, he’s got amazing stuff, including a 97 MPH fastball and a plus curve and changeup. He gets strikeouts (11.2 K/9 in AA last year) in abundance and is very stingy with home runs. His problem is control: 6 BB/9 last season. He’s been a starter throughout his career, but we look at him and see a reliever. And the reliever we see is Mitch Williams, who threw 97 MPH, gave up few home runs but a lot of walks, and got plentiful strikeouts and (this is the point) a good many saves. Manager Kevin Cash likes Schultz a lot. Why not spend a late-round reserve pick on him?





The Birchwood Brothers are two guys with the improbable surname of Smirlock. Michael, the younger brother, brings his skills as a former Professor of Economics to bear on baseball statistics. Dan, the older brother, brings his skills as a former college English professor and recently-retired lawyer to bear on his brother's delphic mutterings. They seek to delight and instruct. They tweet when the spirit moves them @birchwoodbroth2.

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HunterPants
8 years ago

Another great read. This line in particular gave me chuckles:

“We get that Nick Ahmed is the filthiest glove man since O.J. Simpson”