Mariners 8, Blue Jays 7

Moving the Needle: Luis Rodriguez walks off with a single, +.782 WPA. For the first seven and a half innings this looked like another game where the Mariners’ offense would fall flat. It’s all too common a story these days, and apparently the Mariners were sick of hearing it. Rodriguez started things in the eighth by drawing a bases-loaded walk. Two of his teammates apparently thought that was a great idea and did the same. Heading into the ninth they still trailed 7-6, but a Michael Saunders leadoff double got things started. Shawn Camp didn’t deliver a bad pitch, but Rodriguez went down and crushed it into the gap in right-center. It would have been an easy double, maybe a triple, if Ichiro didn’t score so easily on it.

Notables

Justin Smoak: 2 for 3, 1 2B, 2 BB. He’s off to a nice, albeit homer-less, start, with more doubles than singles to this point. He also has more walks than singles.

Corey Patterson: 2 for 5, 1 HR. Notable because not only does it mean Corey Patterson is still playing baseball, but that he’s hitting second.

Also in this issue: Indians 4, Angels 0 | Cardinals 8, Diamondbacks 2 | Rays 16, Red Sox 5 | Cubs 5, Astros 4 | A’s 2, White Sox 1 | Rockies 7, Mets 6 | Rangers 2, Tigers 0 | Reds 3, Padres 2 | Dodgers 6, Giants 1 |

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Locking up young players shortly after they reach the majors is all the rage these days in Major League Baseball. It should come as no surprise then that the Oakland Athletics locked up Trevor Cahill on Monday. Looking to build on his breakout season, Cahill signed a 5 year deal worth approximately $30.5 million. Oakland also holds two team options on Cahill valued at $13 million and $13.5 million. Despite Cahill’s 2010 breakout, he’s been a popular regression candidate this season. With that in mind, was Cahill a good candidate for an extension?

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On the Monday evening ESPN SportsCenter, Dave Winfield was highlighting the big plays of the afternoon tilt between the Rangers and the Tigers. Since Michael Young went two-for-four with a big RBI double that broke open a tied, scoreless game in the seventh inning, Winfield was right to attribute much of the offensive glory to the longtime Ranger. He was the offensive WPA champ of the game (+.184) on the revamped box scores.

But maybe Winfield went a little too far when he said “Michael Young is the Derek Jeter of the Texas Rangers.” Derek Jeter still plays shortstop and owns all those rings! Then again, we might find with a little uncovering that the description was apt.

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Though we’re just a bit over a week into the season, every team in the majors has recorded over 300 plate appearances and has, at least to some degree, begun to fashion something like a “team identity.” Whether said identity is the one that defines the team even two weeks from now — that remains to be seen. But, like I always say, it’s never too early to begin making sweeping generalizations!

In any case, owing to the samples available, it’s not entirely inappropriate to look at our very proprietary watchability index, NERD, at the team level. NERD, which was introduced in these pages at the end of last August, represents an attempt to anticipate how interesting a team might be to the smarter baseball fan — taking into account both sabermetric variables (batting runs, bullpen xFIP) and more aesthetic or generally appealing ones (team speed, age, payroll).

Here are the results, first. Discussion regarding particular scores and a reminder on calculating NERD appear after the jump. (UPDATE: for some reason the Padres’ Pay variable was off. Now fixed. Thanks, reader Tony.)

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Although Pedro Martinez may not have had the longevity or durability of some of baseball’s other pitching greats, there is little doubt that his peak years were some of the best, if not the best, that any pitcher has ever produced. With the introduction of the “minus stats,” ERA-, FIP-, and xFIP-, we have yet another tool with which to put these fantastic years in context. Here’s a look at Pedro’s 1999-2003, with the reminder that 100 is average and unlike the “plus stats,” (OPS+, wRC+, etc.), lower is better.

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Click here for part one and here for part two.

In the previous analyses we saw that while a player increases his expected bonus by going to college, players who sign straight out of high school get to their free-agent seasons more quickly.

So are players better off by signing straight out of high school or going to college?

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In the American League East, Tampa Bay and Toronto get the bulk of attention as clubs with a lot of up-and-coming talent. Baltimore, though, has a lot of potential as well and could soon surprise a lot of people – if they’re not already – on the strength of the organization’s young pitching.

With Chris Tillman, Jake Arrieta, and Brian Matusz already making names for themselves in the young rotation, an early-season injury to the latter pitcher has given Baltimore fans an earlier-than-expected glimpse at ground-ball machine Zach Britton. Perhaps one of the most underrated pitching prospects in the game (who is slowly gaining supporters) Britton burst onto the scene on April 3 with an impressive performance against the Tampa Bay Rays during his MLB debut.

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After a middling first start, the media was ready to jump on Josh Beckett. The results weren’t bad, exactly, but he didn’t quite look like the pre-2010 Beckett. In their podcast the following day, ESPN’s David Schoenfield, Keith Law, and Eric Karabell talked about Beckett’s lack of conditioning. Red Sox blog Fire Brand of the AL mentioned it, too. Yet there were many pitchers who performed poorly in their first outings who didn’t get called out for conditioning issues. Perhaps this was an ex-post explanation for the bad outing following a poor 2010 season. But, poor conditioning or not, he came back to completely shut down the Yankees last night. I doing so, he looked a lot like the Beckett of old.

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In the last week, we’ve seen three young American League starters sign long term contracts with their teams despite minimal Major League experience. Clay Buchholz has thrown 374 innings, Trevor Cahill has thrown 388 innings, and Wade Davis has thrown just 217 innings in the big leagues, and yet all three now have long term financial security. In order to get the cash so early in their careers, however, they each had to give their organizations multiple club options on their free agent years. These three are continuing a trend that is gaining momentum, and could have some interesting ramifications for the future of salary inflation on the free agent market.

Contract extensions used to be mainly aimed toward retaining players who weren’t too far off from free agency, and it was extremely rare to see a player rewarded with a long term deal until he had established himself as a premier player. That has shifted significantly over the last few years, as teams have used the carrot of quicker paths to significant money in order to get their best young talents to sign away free agent years at an early age.

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