Josh Hamilton got $125 million. B.J. Upton got $75 million. Angel Pagan got $40 million. Shane Victorino got $39 million. Melky Cabrera got $16 million. And Michael Bourn, the best center fielder still on the board — at this point, he’s probably the best free agent position player left, period — is still waiting for the right offer.

In the meantime, many other teams that looked like a good fit for him have filled center field with another player: the Nationals traded for Denard Span, the Phillies traded for Ben Revere, the Athletics traded for Chris Young. In the meantime, bloggers like Martin Gandy of Talking Chop, the SBNation Braves blog, are starting to wonder whether Bourn will need to take a one-year offer and wait ’til next year for his payday. So did Bourn wait too long? Did Scott Boras, gasp!, make a mistake?
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Last winter, I was flummoxed at the league’s apparent lack of interest in Edwin Jackson. He’d just put up his third straight solid season at age 27, and had established himself as a durable, effective +3 to +4 win starter. Unfortunately, in that post, I made a pretty bad assumption:

Someone’s going to get a steal with Edwin Jackson, and given what he’s likely to do for the price he’s going to cost, the signing team should probably want to lock him in at these rates for the next few years. From Jackson’s perspective, he’s just been given a thorough rejection in his efforts to land a long term contract in a market where he should have been a pretty well sought after commodity, so he shouldn’t expect that posting another 200 inning season with a decent ERA will land him a raise next winter.

Guess what? Jackson posted another 200 inning season with a decent ERA and now he’s landing a huge raise, as the Cubs are reportedly set to sign him to a four year, $52 million contract.

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The easy thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton has done. For his career, he’s hit .304, with 161 dingers. Last year, his WAR was 4.4, and before that it was 4.1, and before that he won the American League MVP. Hamilton just signed a substantial contract with the Angels, and the season most relevant to the Angels during negotiations would’ve been Hamilton’s 2012. Hamilton started impossibly strong and cooled off, finishing with excellent numbers overall. If the Angels didn’t think Josh Hamilton is excellent, they wouldn’t have guaranteed him an eighth of a billion dollars.

The harder thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton will do, precisely because we don’t and can’t know. We can only try to guess, based on what we assume to be relevant information, and when talking about Hamilton’s future — which everybody’s tried to do — it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at those 2012 trends. For some time, Hamilton was practically impossible to pitch to. Then he became easy to pitch to, at least relative to the earlier version of himself. Random statistical fluctuation, or something the Angels ought to be thinking about?

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The Orioles — and to some extent, the Royals — have sworn off the cutter. Now it looks like the Red Sox are eschewing the slider. The curveball is probably bad for you. If you throw the changeup one way, you might be at risk for injury. We’re years ahead of a stream of knuckleball copycats, and there’s only one screwball pitcher in the big leagues. Maybe one day we’ll find those pitches lead to injury, too.

Maybe using any pitch too much is a problem?

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I had abbreviated looks at two more Blue Jays hitters with big, recent international bonuses and am tossing in the one pitcher with some prospect standing from the game I saw of the Red Sox. All three of these players have big bonuses, tools and expectations, but little experience in organized minor league games.

Two of the highest recent bonuses from the July 2 market have been handed out to hitters but the Blue Jays in 2B/CF Franklin Barreto (2012) and SS Dawel Lugo (2011). Barreto signed for $1.45 million, one of the top bonuses in the first year of fixed international bonus pools while Lugo signed for $1.3 million last season under the old rules.

Barreto won’t be 17 until spring training, is the equivalent of a high school junior and is actually younger than most of the top prep prospects for the 2014 draft. I point that out so you realize how much more projection is necessary to see what he’ll become and I’m guessing his age is a reason that Barreto barely even played in instructs. He obviously has plenty of instruction to absorb and I only saw him in part of one game.

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Remember when the Playstation 2 came out, and then Sony released a newer, smaller version of the original Playstation, called the PSone? After that, people started calling the original Playstation console the PSX, or Playstation X. Today, we are going back to the original console version of the De-Lucker, so grab your nearest mint copy of Final Fantasy VII and buckle in!

Why DLX?

FanGraphs recently re-did how we calculate wOBA for all the players. In an effort to give base-running its own stand-alone category and run/win value, we reduced wOBA to a hitting-only metric and took out SB and CS. That’s where the problem with the De-Lucker 2.0.

DL 2.0 used the Fielding Independent wOBA formula, which includes stolen bases. In order to keep things parallel, we now must revert back to the Should Hit formula — essentially:

The De-Lucker part comes in when we plop an xBABIP in the place of yonder true BABIP. Jeff Zimmerman and Robert Boden (slash12) have been working on and promoting what I believe is the best xBABIP formula out there, so let us once again use that.

Beneath the jump: More caveats! All sorts of data! Downloadable Excel spreadsheets! Fewer video game references!
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Table: League’s Top Changeups by Pitch-Type Runs, 2012
2. Action Footage: Three of Jason Vargas’s Changeups
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Mexican Pacific League

Table: League’s Top Changeups by Pitch-Type Runs, 2012
As Alden Gonzalez of MLB.com was first to report on Wednesday, the Seattle Mariners have traded left-hander Jason Vargas (829.2 career IP, 5.9 WAR, 8.4 RA9-Wins) to the Angels for first baseman/designated hitter Kendrys Morales (1762 career PA, 6.0 WAR). As Jeff Sullivan noted not long after that, the trade mostly benefits both teams. “The Angels,” writes Sullivan, “had too many bats and too few starting pitchers, so they traded a bat for a starting pitcher. The Mariners wanted a bat more than they wanted to keep one of their starting pitchers.”

Morales’s best tool is his power, represented most succinctly by his .210 career ISO. Vargas’s best tool is his changeup. Nor is Vargas’s changeup his best pitch, it’s also one of the best pitches in the league.

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Ryan Hanigan might be the most underrated catcher in baseball. He is definitely one of the most studious and verbose. The 32-year-old Cincinnati Red knows the game, and he can break down the nuances of his craft — and his pitching staff — with the best of them.

Signed by the Reds as a non-drafted free agent in 2002, Hanigan made his big-league debut five years later and has since become a stalwart on both sides of the ball. A well-above-average defensive catcher who threw out 48 percent of runners trying to steal this year, he boasts a .370 lifetime OBP.

Hanigan recently addressed a number of subjects, including where he hits in the batting order, who has the nastiest stuff on the staff, and the challenges Aroldis Chapman will face as a starting pitcher.

——

David Laurila: Do you pay attention to advanced stats?

Ryan Hanigan: I have an understanding of sabermetrics and a lot of the terms people are using to categorize what matters, and is what is actually going on. There’s definitely something to it, so I’ve thought about it in terms of the type of player I’ve been, and what I’m trying to become. It factors in to the organization’s perception of you, as well as Major League Baseball’s.

Some of the new stats are more tangible, at least to the stat-specific people of this world. Baseball is moving more towards that, although there are obviously still a lot of people who don’t believe in that stuff. They look at things more old-school.

DL: As a guest on Ken Broo‘s Sunday morning sports show [AM-700 WLW] I’ve suggested you hit second in Dusty Baker’s batting order. What are your thoughts on that?

RH: There’s logic to it. That said, I’m paid to play and the decision, ultimately, isn’t for me to make. That’s up to the manager. Dusty is going to hit me where he wants to hit me, and the last thing I want to do is step on anybody’s toes. It’s not my job to try to change the status quo.

At the same time, the type of hitter I am… I’ve always considered myself a good hitter. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Angels’ offense, the dreaded mental block known as the yips, and the impact of the time pitchers take between pitches.

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