Surprisingly, over the last few weeks, Dayton Moore was on quite the hot streak. Within the span of four days, the Kansas City Royals made the Best Free Agent Signing Of The Winter, and gained $12 million after Gil Meche abruptly retired. The run of good fortune ended Thursday, as the Royals signed Pedro Feliz to a minor league contract. While it’s no guarantee that Feliz will make the team, this signing continues some of the head-scratching decisions made by the Royals this off-season.
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With several recent discussions (here and here and here and here) on home team advantage (HTA) – which began with Tobias Moskowitz’s and L. Jon Wertheim’s new book Scorecasting – I decided to see if I could find any reasonable causes for the advantage. I decided to look into areas that I thought home teams may have an advantage, namely errors (not much – about 2 wins league wide) and base running (some), but the number that caught my eye was the differences in batting average on balls in play from the home and away team. Here are the differences in BABIP for the home and away teams over the last few years:

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Tangotiger just released the 2011 Marcel Projections. They’re also up and running on the FanGraphs player pages and in our sortable projection section too!

Few contracts in recent baseball history have attracted more ridicule than the seven-year, $126 million deal the Giants gifted to Barry Zito. Apparently still dazzled by Zito’s 23-5 record, 2.75 ERA and Cy Young award four seasons earlier, Brian Sabean ignored Zito’s more pedestrian peripheral stats, threw a mint at him, and instantly became the proud owner of one of the worst contracts in professional sports.

Which is exactly why the Yankees should trade for him.

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Spring training starts soon, and the Florida Grapefruit League is in trouble. Half the major league teams play in the Arizona Cactus League, many of whose cities are far from Arizona — though it has long been a West Coast-centric spring training league, the Cincinnati Reds moved their facilities out of Florida in 2010, and now all of the Illinois and Ohio teams are based in Arizona rather than Florida. The head of the Florida Sports Foundation, Larry Pendleton, is lobbying Florida’s new governor, Rick Scott, to do whatever he can to convince teams to stay in Florida, but Pendleton must realize that the odds are against him. It’s easy to see why.

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It all ended when Bengie Molina grounded out to Alex Rodriguez, though no one knew it at the time. It was actually a well-struck ball heading down the third base line, but Rodriguez laid out, sprang to his feet, and fired a one-hopper that Mark Teixeira scooped out of the dirt. In celebration, Andy Pettitte let loose with a mighty pump of the fist. With today’s news that Pettitte will announce his retirement tomorrow, that fist pump marks his final act on a pitching mound.

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Suffice it to say that Adam Dunn’s power has been eerily consistent throughout his career, hitting 40 +/- 2 home runs the past six years with over 100 RBI in five of them. His OBP, walk rate, and strikeout rate were very similar from 2004 to 2009. However, Dunn showed a change in approach last season, reaching career worsts in walk rate (11.9%) and strikeout rate (35.7%) while his OBP was his lowest since 2003 (.356). Granted, that’s still a very good OBP, but his change in approach came with an OBP drop of 40 points since he first joined the Washington Nationals.

Dunn’s swing rate has increased from 40.4% to 45.0%, a career high, showing a more aggressive approach at the plate. Here’s how his other plate-discipline stats changed:

2009: 19.4% O-Swing%, 65.5% Z-Swing%, 73.0% Contact%, 10.7% SwStr%
2010: 28.5% O-Swing%, 68.3% Z-Swing%, 68.2% Contact%, 13.8% SwStr%

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I recently had a conversation with Boston Red Sox hitting instructor Dave Magadan, who also played in the Major Leagues from 1986 to 2001, and had one of the most interesting careers of any corner infielder in history. His ratio of career WAR (27.1) to home runs (42) is pretty stunning, and Magadan showed that you didn’t have to hit the ball over the fence to be a productive player. What are his philosophies as a hitting coach? Read on for the answers.

1) Referring to younger players, many of us who follow baseball have heard the term from scouts and coaches that the power in a player will eventually come? What do scouts and coaches see that the casual fan might be overlooking or failing to recognize?

DM: They might be seeing a frame on a young player that is showing that he will fill out and get a lot stronger. That he’s showing bat speed, but is lacking in overall strength to drive the ball out of the park.

2) Can a hitter, from all the batting practice, on-deck swings, and hitting off a tee, among other similar range of motions, tire themselves out and find themselves fatigued and a split-second late trying to hit in the later innings? Is the volume of repetitions something that you or the team monitor?

DM: No question that a hitter can swing too much. There are times when we will throttle back a player and tell him to take a day off of batting practice and just chill out. There are guys that will go in and out of slumps in one batting practice session because they hit beyond the point of feeling good and work their way back into not feeling good.

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Since he’s become a regular starter, it’s tempting to look at Zack Greinke’s career and say that he’s been about the same pitcher with an outstanding peak in 2009. Other than that wonderful year, he’s managed an FIP in the mid-threes by striking batters out at a slightly-above-average rate for a starter and showing excellent control of his four-pitch mix. He’s no metronome – his ground ball to fly ball mix has oscillated – but he seems pretty stable.

But zoom in on just the last two years, and the change seems startling. He went from striking out 9.5 batters per nine to a mere 7.4. He added a run of FIP. His swinging strike percentage dove two percent (from above to below average). And his ground-ball rate changed, as is his wont (from dead-on average (40%) to above-average (46%)). His pitching mix changed fairly significantly, too, dropping almost four percent of his curves and five percent of his sliders, while almost doubling his changeup usage.

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With the Rays’ signing of Felipe Lopez to a minor league deal, all the supplemental draft picks have been decided and the final draft order for the 2011 Rule 4 draft has been set. Especially given how tremendously strong the 2011 draft is supposed to be – Keith Law says that there could be as many as 20 top-100 caliber prospects in this class and that it looks, at least right now, like the best class since he joined the baseball industry. Using the draft order from our own Mike Axisa at River Avenue Blues, here are the teams that can really invigorate their systems with either high quality picks, a large quantity of picks, or both.

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