For the first month of the season, the Red Sox didn’t just have a bad bullpen, they had one of the worst bullpens in recent memory. Manager Bobby Valentine’s relief corps pitched to a 6.10 ERA with a 5.13 FIP in April, both easily the worst marks in the game. Boston’s pen has gone on to post a 2.31 ERA with a 2.97 FIP since the calendar flipped to May, bringing their overall season performance down to a much more respectable 3.55 ERA and 3.75 FIP.

A turn around like that can be attributed to many things, first and foremost just simple regression to the mean. A .337 BABIP and 16.4% HR/FB ratio certainly aren’t performances you’d expect an entire pitching staff sustain over a full season. It’s possible, just unlikely. Secondly, the Red Sox did what you would expect them to do and made some personnel changes. Mark Melancon (49.50 ERA/37.55 FIP (!!!)) was shipped to the minors while Justin Thomas (7.71/3.27) and Michael Bowden (3.00/6.38) were cut loose. Changing the names is the easiest way to change performance.

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The new collective bargaining agreement essentially puts an end to the kinds of bidding wars for young Cuban prospects that we’ve seen over the last few years, but those rules don’t go into effect for another month, so 20-year-old outfielder Jorge Soler was not bound by the new rules and was free to negotiate as large of a contract as he could get from big league clubs.

Today, the Chicago Cubs were announced as the winning bidders, and while the $30 million total price tag is not all that surprising considering what Yoenis Cespedes, Aroldis Chapman, and Leonys Martin received, the shocking part of the reported deal is the term – according to Jon Heyman, the Cubs locked up Soler for nine years.

Now, Soler is not a Major League ready player, and should probably be expected to spend most of the next couple of seasons in the minors. If he spends the first three years of the deal in the minors, this will end up just covering his six years of club control, and won’t end up buying out any free agent seasons, so perhaps the nine year term isn’t as surprising as it might sound. However, this contract structure sounds like it may motivate the Cubs to push Soler aggressively (as long as it isn’t harming his development, anyway), since they won’t have any kinds of concerns about service time leading to earlier free agency. In fact, if they can get Soler to the big leagues at some point in 2014, they may be able to squeeze out seven full years and some change from Soler before he becomes a free agent. He wouldn’t have to play all that well to justify a $30 million investment that carried him through all of his arbitration years and potentially even a year of free agency.

I’d imagine the contract probably covers this scenario to some degree, and we’ll probably see incentives that increase Soler’s pay based on when he gets to the big leagues, but this contract may make it unlikely that the Cubs ever have to go to arbitration with Soler, and that could end up being a significant cost savings down the line.

Because of the new rules that go into effect next month, this will be the last deal of its kind, but the Cubs decided to make the last one pretty interesting.

Update: It appears that the contract contains not incentives for arrival, but a total opt-out of the contract when Soler becomes arbitration eligible. So, essentially, the $30 million the Cubs paid Soler is more of a signing bonus than anything else, and makes this deal much more friendly for Soler.

With a sweep of the Royals this weekend, the Pittsburgh Pirates moved into a tie with Cincinnati for first place in the National League Central. If you read baseball blogs, you probably realize how surprising this is. Sure, last year the Pirates had a winning record as late as August 1 before finishing the season 72-90. But rather than getting into an overall “are they going to regress?” post, I’d like to be more light-hearted (or shallow, depending on your perspective), and look at three curious facets of this particular Pirates team so far.

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Now that the draft is over, Major League teams can start reallocating their time to upgrading their Major League roster again, which is why mid-June is generally the beginning of the summer trading season. With two months of the season behind us, teams are beginning to get a better feel for the strengths and weaknesses of their clubs, and are formulating a plan for whether they’ll be upgrading for a playoff race or shedding veterans to shift value from the present to the future.

However, this year, the expanded playoff system adds a bit of a wrinkle to the buy/sell/hold decision making process. With a second wild card available, the barrier to entry for the “playoffs” (if we consider the one-game play-in a playoff game) has been significantly lowered, and now teams that think they’ll finish with ~88 or so wins (or a .543 winning percentage) can consider themselves to have a legitimate chance at playing postseason baseball. Right now, there are 12 teams playing at a clip that would see them win at least 88 games – Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Cincinnati are all on pace to win exactly 88 games, actually – and another four teams that are within two games back of that point, so they’re just barely off the necessary pace.

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The Philadelphia Phillies aren’t accustomed to hovering around the .500 mark, let alone falling on the wrong side of it. Winners of five straight division titles, the team and its core members are used to playing solid baseball and firming up grasps on playoff berths. Throughout this recent run of success, the front office has used the trade deadline to bolster the roster, fix a glaring weakness, or just strengthen an area not previously considered an outright strength. All the while there was never substantial doubt that they would contend.

The situation may play out differently this season, as the Phillies are now 29-33, four games under .500, and eight games behind the first-place Washington Nationals.

While their struggles were somewhat predictable given the extended absences of Chase Utley and Ryan Howard — which were known before the season — and the in-season injuries to Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Vance Worley, Carlos Ruiz, Jim Thome and Laynce Nix, the fact remains that the team isn’t playing good baseball and doesn’t really seem primed to right the ship.

With a number of roster decisions on the horizon, their play of late has raised questions about when the team should legitimately consider selling off assets in an attempt to replenish a depleted farm system and regroup for next year. Seeing that they are eight games behind the Nationals and 6.5 games behind the second wild card team, that time may be fast approaching.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Yesterday’s Debuts
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Lightly Annotated Video: Garrett Richards’ Last Start
4. Today’s Complete Schedule

Yesterday’s Debuts
The Whim of the author has dictated that a portion of today’s Notes — indeed, this portion of the Notes — will be dedicated to equal parts meeting and greeting of baseball’s newest major leaguers.

Player: Bradley Boxberger, RHP, SD
Line: 23.0 IP, 13.70 K/9, 5.87 BB/9, 0.00 HR/9, 2.24 FIP at Triple-A Tucson
Notes: Boxberger, 24, made his debut on Sunday, posting this line: 1.0 IP, 3 TBF, 1 K, 1 BB, 1 GB on 1 batted-ball, 4.05 xFIP. Notably, the minor-league strikeout rate above doesn’t represent much of a departure from his work in previous seasons: over 176.2 minor-league innings, Boxberger has recorded a 12.1 K/9. According to our Marc Hulet, who ranked Boxberger 13th among San Diego prospects, the right-hander’s best pitch is a “fastball that sits around 93-95 mph with good movement.” Indeed, 10 of the 12 pitches Boxberger threw on Sunday were fastballs, two of which got whiffs. Boxberger was promoted when Andrew Cashner, who’s transitioning to the starting rotation, was optioned to Double-A San Antonio over the weekend.

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The Washington Nationals are first in scouting, first in player development and first in the National League East. Mike Rizzo deserves much of the credit. The former scouting director became the Nats’ assistant GM in 2006 and he has been the general manager since 2010. Highly respected as a talent evaluator, Rizzo has helped build one of the most exciting young teams in baseball.

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Rizzo on the impact of the new CBA on the draft: “The strategy and the philosophy are very important. You have to have a clear thought process as to what your end goal is before the draft has started. It takes some creativity and some foresight to really put your master plan in place. The [changes] impacted us. They impacted the strategy we employed in putting together our draft board, and in putting together our top-10-round picks.”

On scouting and player development: “To me, it’s a two-headed monster. It’s never just player development, and it’s never just scouting. The two go hand in hand. It’s a hand-in-glove type of thing, and I think the state of our scouting and player development systems has never been stronger here in Washington.

“Our philosophy is that we take the best player available, at all times. We also take [the type of] players that we’ve had success developing in the past. Read the rest of this entry »

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. First-Round Draft Signees So Far
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

First-Round Draft Signees So Far
So far as I can tell — and I’ll admit to not having searched with what one might call “utmost vigor” — there’s no readily available and free resource with information both on which first-round draftees have signed so far and for how much. The following table does include that information — along with the corresponding suggested slot value of each pick.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Actual News: Daniel Bard and Trevor Bauer at Triple-A
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Actual News: Daniel Bard and Trevor Bauer at Triple-A
Regarding Trevor Bauer
Right-handed Arizona pitching prospect Trevor Bauer made his fifth start for Triple-A Reno on Friday following his mid-May promotion to same. Here’s his line from that start: 7.0 IP, 27 TBF, 11 K, 2 BB, 0 HR. And now here’s his line at Triple-A: 32.0 IP, 11.8 K/9, 3.9 BB/9, 0.3 HR/9.

What That Is in Terms of FIP
That brings Bauer’s Triple-A FIP to about 2.30. The PCL league average, according to Minor League Central, is 4.13.

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