Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Hall of Fame, preparing for interleague play, the 162-game schedule, and methods of preserving parity.
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Adam LaRoche lost a lot of 2011 to injury, okay, and in 2012 he had himself a bounceback season, okay. Sometime during the season, the Nationals approached LaRoche — a free-agent-to-be — about a contract extension. Nothing was agreed to; the Nationals were willing to give LaRoche two years, and LaRoche was seeking three years, citing a desire to stop bouncing around. Come the offseason, the Nationals extended to LaRoche a qualifying offer, and LaRoche turned it down; LaRoche was seeking three years. LaRoche kept on seeking three years. On Tuesday, LaRoche re-signed with the Nationals. He re-signed for two years, with a mutual third-year option. I’ll quote Amanda Comak:
“[The negotiations] were pretty much not moving for a couple months,” LaRoche said. “It got to a point at one time where I really thought ‘OK, I probably am not going back to Washington.’ We were in talks with some other teams and things were looking promising and Washington wasn’t budging.”
[…]
The deal, which a source said is the same one that had been on the table for the first baseman for much of the offseason[…]
Adam LaRoche finally gave in and took the Nationals two year contract today, after having sat it on it for most of the off-season. He’ll return to Washington and play first base, which means Mike Morse will not be playing much first base, and that means Mike Morse is going to get traded. Two years ago, Morse was really good. Last year, not so much. Teams thinking about acquiring Morse are going to have to figure out whether they think 2011 was a fluke, or whether he’s an impact bat who just had a down year while struggling with some health issues.
Because, let’s be honest, you’re only acquiring Morse for his offensive capability. The Nationals didn’t consider him an outfielder any more, which is why he’s available in the first place. His career UZR/150 in the OF is -15, which is pretty close to the line at which you see teams decide that the lack of range is too much of a problem to continue the experiment. He’s also been a negative baserunner for most of his career, and last year, only David Ortiz, Jesus Montero, Prince Fielder, and Billy Butler were worse at advancing around the bases. Morse is a guy who fits best as a 1B/DH, and if he doesn’t hit, he’s not particularly useful.
So, will he hit well enough at age 31 to justify not only his $7 million salary, but also the talent required to outbid other suitors and strike a deal with the Nationals? To find out, I decided to look at how other hitters have done, focusing on guys who have succeeded in a not too dissimilar way from what Morse has done the last three years.
Similar to my post earlier in the summer on what a beautifully morbid season Cliff Lee was having, I tend to have a fascination with the way baseball sometimes refuses to be fair. I blame Tom Paciorek.
When I was 5 years old, I wrote Paciorek and asked him if he had any advice about how to get to the big leagues. After checking my mail obsessively over the next four months, I got an envelope with a Seattle Mariner trident on it. I tore it open. “Tom Paciorek! Tom Paciorek! Tom Paciorek!” I hollered, sprinting through through the house, waving the letter in the air.
And what sage advice did I receive? “Kid,” Paciorek wrote, “in baseball, you’re either the hero or the goat. – Tom.”
From those few words, my passion was born.
Because of all the angst about this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, there have been a lot of words spilled trying to fix the process. I’m one of many who have suggested that, at the bare minimum, they need to expand the ballot to cover more than 10 slots. Others have offered their own suggestions, from changing the electorate to more clearly defining a player’s eligibility.
There are a lot of interesting opinions out there for ways to improve the Hall of Fame, but they generally start with the premise of tweaking the established methodology. Sometimes, though, I think it’s useful to think about changes without considering what is already in place, to ask yourself what you would do if you could just start from scratch. So, let’s do that with the Hall of Fame.
What would the Hall of Fame look like if we were building it anew in 2013? I’m sure it would be different for each of us. Maybe you’d move it to another location, where it could be more easily accessible to the public at large? Or maybe you’d pick a set proportion of each generation to be represented, so that each age of baseball was equally represented? There are a lot of practical changes you could make that would make the Hall of Fame very different than what it is now.
For, me, though, there’s one thing that stands above the rest as a way to make the Hall more interesting, and to settle most of the problems we have with the enshrinement process as it currently stands; a tiered Hall of Fame.
The best result from a first pitch? Has to be a dribbler to the mound, right? We spend all this time chasing the swinging strike and drooling on triple-digit velocity, and there’s a future Hall of Fame pitcher who made his living getting first-pitch sawed-off million-hoppers to the second base side — Greg Maddux.
But if you’re not Greg Maddux, the first strike is the nexus for a game of cat and mouse. We’ve found that throwing a first-pitch strike is one of the best ways to get your walk rate down. But if the league throws too many meatballs on 0-0 counts, batters should swing more. It might be the best pitch they see. If the league then throws fewer strikes for the first pitch, batters would find themselves looking more. I don’t know if it’s game theory, but it’s certainly a theory about this game.
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.
1. Top Performers of the Dominican Winter League
2. Totally Irrelevant Video: Rey Ordonez, Superstar Defender
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
Top Performers of the Dominican Winter League
The playoffs for the Dominican Winter League (DWL) have begun — and, as such, the regular-season stats for the players in said League are final.
Here are the top performers of the DWL, per SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).
Best Hitter (Overall): Hector Luna
Hector Luna, who turns 33 in February, isn’t a player about whom one is compelled to think very often — although, to his credit, he’s been slightly better than replacement level in 800-plus major-league plate appearances with five teams since 2004. Also to his credit, he was excellent in the DWL, posting a 29:30 walk-to-strikeout ratio while hitting seven home runs in ca. 200 plate appearances.
The Orioles list is strong at the top but begins to taper off quickly after the Top 4 players. The system boasts a fair bit of up-the-middle position talent (especially in the outfield) and strong pitching. There were another three or four prospects that could have easily slide into the 11-15 range and just narrowly missed the list.
#1 Dylan Bundy (P)
| Age | G | GS | IP | K/9 | BB/9 | GB% | ERA | FIP | WAR |
| 19 | 2 | 0 | 1.2 | 0.00 | 5.40 | 20.0 % | 0.00 | 4.89 | 0.0 |
There’s not much to be said about Bundy that hasn’t already been written about a hundred times. Just 19 in 2012, he carved through the minors and reached the majors in his first full pro season. Bundy possesses mid-to-high-90s velocity on his fastball and he also features a plus changeup and a curveball that shows plus potential. He also has a cutter that he hasn’t thrown much as a pro.
I asked a scout familiar with Bundy about the other aspects of the young phenom’s game. “His mechanics are clean and he’s a good athlete with very good body control which allows him to repeat his delivery for solid-average to plus command and he’s got a good feel for what he’s doing,” the talent evaluator said. “His make-up is off the chart. He’s the most driven and focused young man that I’ve every seen and he’s a good character guy. As far as what Dylan needs to work on. I would say he needs to refine his repertoire and learn the finer points to using his pitches.”
The fourth overall selection in the 2011 draft, Bundy made just three starts above A-ball in 2012 so he could return to double-A or triple-A in 2013. With three potentially-plus pitches and plus make-up, Bundy has true No. 1 starter potential. Only an injury appears capable of derailing this once-in-a-generation talent. Read the rest of this entry »