Your 2017 Giants: Odds and Ends at New Years

Happy New Year!  Wanted to cover some moves the Giants have made to add to their bench position player options for the 2017 season.

The biggest move was signing Jimmy Rollins to a minor league contract, with a $1M MLB base contract, if he makes the roster.  He grew up an A's fan, but started going to Giants games as a teenager, and became a fan during the Will Clark, Matt Williams, Royce Clayton era.  He seems excited and energized to be with the Giants.

He could have signed with the Giants last season, who pursued him with a similar contract, but he wanted to start so he ended up with the ChiSox.  However, getting dropped early in the season, and not getting any interest made him realize that it's time to be a reserve, and so he took up the Giants offer from last season for this season.  Oddly, they did not discuss his role for this season when he signed, he stated in an interview that he assumes that the Giants intentions must be the same as it was last season, when they tried to sign him, which was to provide a veteran presence off the bench in the infield.

Other significant major leaguer signings included:

• Mike Morse:  After missing most of the past two seasons - due to injury in 2015, due to being DFA and not picked up in 2016 - he reached out to the Giants and signed a minor league deal with them.  
• Justin Ruggiano:  Good hitter against LHP, he's strictly a platoon player.  Also hasn't played much in the past few seasons, hardly at all last season.  
• Tim Federowicz:  Will be battling for the backup catcher position with a minor league contract.  He spent most of his MLB career playing backup for the Dodgers, but last season played for the Cubs briefly.  He's been mostly a good defensive player, poor hitter, though per Baseball-Reference.com, last season he was not good defensively.  He's the youngest of this group at 29 YO next season, Ruggiano is 35 YO, Morse is also 35 YO, Rollins is 38 YO.  

Your 2017 Giants: Mac Attack!

Interesting The Hardball Times study on metrics related to MLB flyball length, and therefore, homerun power.  He looked for predictive signals within batted ball data and hope to uncover a couple of otherwise unknown potential power hitters. The data was sourced from the MiLB pitch-by-pitch gameday files and are subject to recording bias and human error. He did not attempt to clean the data (probably a huge job, and this was a first effort at looking at what the data said; if the data analysis ends up being predictive, future efforts undoubtedly will look to clean the data as well).

It ended with a projection table of AA and AAA hitters who has not had extensive experience in the majors yet, and Mac Williamson was 21st on the list.  His MLB projection was nearly 300 feet, based on his MiLB pitch-by-pitch stats.  He was nearly 18 feet behind the leader, but a much closer eleven and a half feet behind the second player, and only four feet away from a top ten placing.  There was no indication of what the standard deviation was, but four feet out of 300 seems like it would be within range of error.

However, he was one of the oldest players on the list, one of three (out of 26) born in 1990, and power comes with age, so if adjustments were made by age, he would fall further down the list relative to his younger colleagues on the list.  Still, he made a list of possible upper minor's power hitters.

Your 2017 Giants: Arbitration-Eligible Players Offered

Here is the news as reported by Pavlovic:

The Giants tendered contracts to all six arbitration-eligible players on Friday, agreeing to one-year contracts with two of them. 

Right-hander Cory Gearrin will get $1.05 million and infielder Ehire Adrianza will receive $600,000, per Jon Heyman of MLB Network. 

The Giants will exchange figures with George Kontos, Will Smith, Eduardo Nunez and Conor Gillaspie. They traditionally have avoided going to actual arbitration hearings. 

Gearrin, Kontos and Smith will make up a chunk of the bullpen next season, while Nunez is expected to start at third base. Gillaspie, the postseason hero, should see more playing time and Adrianza is currently slated to return in his familiar bench role.

MLBTR published again their annual estimates of arbitration salaries for all eligible players:

• Adrianza:  $508K (actual:  $600K)
• Gearrin:  $1.1M (actual:  $1.05M)
• Gillaspie:  $900K
• Kontos:  $1.7M
• Nunez:  $4.4M
• Smith:  $2.3M

As this illustrates, their estimates are pretty close and the estimated overall so far ($1.608M) is close to the actual overall ($1.65M).  Errors in estimation tend to be random, and cancel each other out in the final summation.

Your 2017 Giants: Melancon signed to 4 years, $62M contract to be Closer

It has been tweeted by a number of places, here is the link to MLBTR which captures all the twists and turns, and details of the deal:  4 years, $62M.  Detail of the contract, per Jeff Passan tweets:   $17M first two years, with player opt-out after two seasons, and it is front loaded with $20M signing bonus, $12M upfront ($8M second year), and guaranteed $34M ($4M and $10M salaries) over first two years.  And if he opts into last two years, they are at $14M each (low, so if he's still closing well, he most likely will opt out).   I'll place more in the comments if there are any more.  Of course, pending his passing a physical with the Giants, but this is generally a gimme, it is generally a done deal by this point.

This easily breaks the record 4 years, $50M that Papelbon got as a closer, but will be easily beat by both Chapman and Jensen when they sign their contracts.   Also, it will put the Giants over the new $195M spending threshold, meaning a third year of overage, which equals a 50% tax on the overage.  I'll calc what my spreadsheet says about this, but this seems about right, there was not a lot of space left in the budget, hence why the Giants are talking about going with Williamson and Parker in LF.  Plus, if a good enough LF in the $1-3M range falls to them in Jan/Feb, I assume that they will take a flier, like they did with Huff in 2010.