News broke Sunday night that the Maloofs — the majority owners of the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings — agreed to sell their share of the team to Seattle investors, including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and investor Chris Hansen. The Seattle group valued the franchise at $525 million, and agreed to pay $340 million for the Maloof family’s 65% stake. Sacramento mayor and former NBA star Kevin Johnson is working to assemble a counter-bid to keep the team in California while minority investors may sue and claim a breach of the limited-partnership agreement. In other words, the $525 million value is likely to go up before this is done.

Just days later, Forbes published its annual story on NBA franchise values, and ranked the Kings as the 11th-most-valuable franchise, using the $525 million figure from the proposed sale. But the Kings weren’t the only NBA team to see its value rise significantly in the past year. For the first time, Forbes valued two teams at $1 billion or more — the New York Knicks (at $1.1 billion) and the Los Angeles Lakers (at $1 billion) — and pegged the average franchise value at $509 million, a 30% increase over 2012. Forbes also reported the average operating income (earnings before taxes, depreciation, etc) for the NBA’s 30 teams was $11.9 million, the highest since Forbes started tracking the numbers in 1998.

So what’s driving the NBA’s financial success, and what does it foretell for Major League Baseball teams’ values when Forbes releases that list in March?

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FanGraphs+ never went away — we update it throughout the year with content posted on ESPN Insider — but it’s time for the annual. We’ll be publishing the full FG+ arsenal in just over a week.

Once again, we’ll have over 1000 player capsules, sussing the fantasy value of everything from the studdiest stud to the LOOGYiest LOOGY. This year, we’ll add auction values to those capsules, and FG+ subscribers will see those values on the projections leaderboards. And below you’ll see our table of contents — all long, research-driven and analysis-heavy pieces that walk the line between fantasy and real baseball work.

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

1. Nerds Stats for Venezuela’s Provisional WBC Team
2. Comparative Images: Cesar Jimenez vs. Caesar Augustus

Nerds Stats for Venezuela’s Provisional WBC Team
Last Thursday, all 16 participants in this year’s World Baseball Classic announced their provisional rosters for that same tournament (which itself begins in early March). Recently, in the Notes, we’ve considered the nerds stats for some of the notable WBC rosters, where notable is defined as “those which most interest the author on that particular morning.”

Here are the countries considered so far: Canada* / Dominican Republic / United States.

*Not by this precise methodology.

Below are the members of the Venezuelan national team, accompanied by various nerd stats from the last three seasons of major-league play.

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“Personally, I like contact hitters. I like guys that have good pitch recognition. Strikeouts are part of the game, but if you have four or five or six guys in your lineup, it’s hard to sustain any sort of rally.”

Those were among Kevin Towers’s first official words as Arizona’s general manager. His actions have, more or less, backed up the philosophy espoused therein. He inherited a team that finished with an atrocious 24.7 percent strikeout rate in 2010. His first moves saw Mark Reynolds traded and Adam LaRoche dismissed to free agency. As 2011 progressed, Kelly Johnson and his 27 percent strikeout rate was dealt to the Blue Jays for Aaron Hill and his 13 percent strikeout rate.

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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, are being released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cubs / Diamondbacks / Giants / Mets / Nationals / Phillies / Pirates / Rangers / Reds / Rockies / Royals / Tigers / White Sox.

Batters
The Cardinals have a number of hitters who’ve posted above-average offensive numbers over the last three years on the strength of high batting averages on balls in play. David Freese (.359 BABIP, 1200 PA), Jon Jay (.348, 1328), Matt Holliday (.333, 1879), and Allen Craig (.329, 857): each has posted a ball-in-play figure considerably above league average (which typically falls in the .290-.300 range).

The production of high BABIPs certainly can be a skill; however, as Dan Szymborski suggested recently with regard to Detroit’s Austin Jackson (who’s also posted high ball-play-numbers), it takes rather a large sample for that skill to reveal itself in the numbers. Accordingly, the ZiPS projections are going to appear conservative for players whose offensive value has been informed more considerably by his batted-ball profile.

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Ben and Sam analyze the Justin Upton trade and Arizona’s offseason.

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Episode 298
David Temple is a contributor both to NotGraphs and the Platoon Advantage — and is now the proprietor of a podcast, Stealing Home, which makes up for its lack of quality content with excellent production value.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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According to Kevin Towers, a few days ago he was prepared to move on without having traded Justin Upton, as he wasn’t finding enough value on the market. In lieu of an Upton trade, the Diamondbacks presumably would’ve made a Jason Kubel trade, presumably with the Orioles. But things changed, and they must have changed swiftly — on Thursday, the Diamondbacks officially announced an Upton trade with the Braves, as Justin will join his brother B.J. in the Atlanta outfield. Or, this, in other words.

Dave already wrote about the trade overall, from both sides. Mike Newman already took a look at the prospects involved. I, personally, got curious about the brother angle. This was something Justin was hoping for; he turned down a trade to Seattle, hoping for a trade somewhere else, somewhere more familiar, somewhere closer to home. Speculation was that he wanted Atlanta more than anything else. It’s an odd quirk that Upton will play beside his own brother. But I found myself wondering if the psychology involved has any effect on performance. In short: historically, have players gotten better when they’ve been teammates with a sibling? On one hand, it would be surprising if they did; on the other hand, it would be surprising if they didn’t. Players are always talking about the importance of comfort. What could be more comfortable than playing with family?

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Web Developer – New York Yankees (Bronx, NY)

Description:
The New York Yankees organization is accepting applications for an entry to mid-level web developer in their Baseball Operations department. Candidate should have development experience with the .NET framework, C#, JavaScript, and Microsoft SQL Server.

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