With the move of the Houston Astros to the American League, and the unfortunate fact that both leagues will have an uneven number of teams, interleague play is destined to change this year. As cross-platform play goes from something that happens in the middle of June, once a year, like some sort of strange exhibition mini-season, to something that happens every week, the National League will have to re-evaluate their past strategies for American League parks.

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

1. Even More Javier Vazquez Baseball Coverage, Crazy!
2. Action GIF: Javier Vazquez’s Curveball
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Puerto Rican League

Even More Javier Vazquez Baseball Coverage, Crazy!
Since last week’s update of the Puerto Rican League leaderboards, former major-league pitcher and potentially-again major-league pitcher Javier Vazquez has made another start (his fifth) for the Leones of Ponce — in which start Vazquez posted the following line (box): 6.0 IP, 25 TBF 7 K, 3 BB, 1 HR, 4:6 GO:AO. The performance further increased the right-hander’s lead over the league’s other starting pitchers, per the regressed pitching metric SCOUT- (below).

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, will be released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the very newest addition to the American League, the Houston Astros. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Athletics / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers.

Batters
It’s good news for Houston that young third baseman Matt Dominguez — acquired last July in a deal with Miami for Carlos Lee — that Dominguez is projected to post a roughly league-average WAR in 2013. What’s less good news for Houston is that Dominguez is projected to be the second-best player on the team — after Jose Altuve, that is.

Of note regarding Houston’s forecasts is this: there are a number of starters (or two, at least) whose plate-appearance projections are rather low. Shortstop Jed Lowrie (332 PA) and center fielder Justin Maxwell (358 PA), for example, could conceivably produce almost twice as many wins, were they to play something closer to full-time.

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People have expected big things from Freddie Freeman. I know this because Freeman is a professional baseball player, and all of those guys — each and every last one of them — was at one point considered a future star. The backup catcher, the disappointing first baseman, the 36-year-old in triple-A — former superstars, somewhere, thought to have the brightest of futures. Sometimes they fulfill their promise and most of the times they do not.

I know this also because, among professional baseball players, Freeman was and still is highly regarded. He was drafted 78th overall in 2007, two picks after Giancarlo Stanton, and before 2009 he cracked Baseball America’s top-100 list of prospects. Before 2010, he cracked the top-40; before 2011, he cracked the top-20. Freeman debuted in the majors before he turned 21, and he was established as a regular before he turned 22. Players who do that often become good players, relative to the other players, and unbelievably, inconceivably great players, relative to us.

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The 2013 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2013, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 15 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

We begin.

Brett Myers is on the Indians now

On a one-year contract, with a second-year club option. The whole deal is said to be worth $7 million, and Myers will go back to starting after spending all of 2012 in the bullpen. In two bullpens, as it were. Myers has done this before, as he was basically a full-time reliever in 2007, and then a starter between 2008-2011. If the Indians turn out to not like Myers as a starter, they can move him back to relief — he’s their player, after all, and he’s demonstrated his versatility — but he’s a starter first. And the Indians’ top starter is arguably Justin Masterson or Zach McAllister, so, yeah. There’s a need.

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Update: As pointed out to me on Twitter, the CBA explicitly prohibits (page 90, section c) teams and agents from agreeing to avoid the qualifying offer in the way I suggest below. So, this entire post is now academic. But still kind of interesting, perhaps. The points about the imbalanced incentives are still true, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the MLBPA negotiate significant changes into the next agreement.

This winter marked the first off-season under the new terms set out by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which included a complete overhaul of the free agent compensation system. Back in November, teams had to decide whether their free agents were worth a one year, $13.3 million contract offer in order to receive a draft pick if the player chose to sign elsewhere. Only nine players received the qualifying offer, and in David Ortiz’s case, it was mostly academic, as he was working on a two year deal with the Red Sox and never even made it to free agency.

Interestingly, of the eight players who did receive a qualifying offer and elected for free agency, half of them remain unsigned. Adam LaRoche has a standing two year offer to return to the Nationals, but has had problems drumming up enough interest elsewhere to force Washington to give him the third year that he’s looking for. And then there’s Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Rafael Soriano, who each remain without a team and seemingly without any serious suitors. While we don’t actually know what conversations have taken place between teams and agents, speculation exists that the loss of a draft pick has been a significant deterrent to clubs pursuing these players.

That speculation gains some steam when we look at the prices for players who did not receive a qualifying offer, but were eligible to receive such an offer. Among those who didn’t receive an offer for 1/13: Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
2. Graphs: Miguel Tejada’s Career in WAR
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League

Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
Kansas City Sign Chavez, Tejada
The Kansas City Royals have signed outfielder Endy Chavez and infielder Miguel Tejada to minor-league deals, reports MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The latter will become an MLB deal worth $1.1 million, according to Dionisio Soldevila of ESPN Deportes (with credit to MLB Trade Rumors’ Edward Creech for collecting same information). Tejada, who enters his age-39 season, has been worth 43.8 WAR over his career, although only about one of those wins has come over the previous three seasons.

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