Players have begun to report to their various camps, and while whole entire teams aren’t yet together, spring training is officially on the doorstep, preparing to knock. For some, this is the most wonderful time; for others, this is a time most miserable. Soon, there will be practices, and then there will be games. When there are games, there will be statistics, and when there are statistics, there will be attempted interpretations of the statistics. There’s no such thing as a baseball number that goes by un-analyzed.

On countless occasions before you’ve probably seen attempted correlations between spring-training statistics and regular-season statistics. What we care about, after all, are those statistics that might be meaningful, so it’s important to check the spring numbers for meaning. Is there anything in there? Is it possible to identify imminent breakouts or collapses? Plenty of people have examined plenty of correlations. I know I’ve done it myself, and I didn’t come up with the idea. It comes around every year.

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Bill Baer coined the term “Goldilocks Syndrome” to describe when we, as fans, get discouraged with a player or prospect because he isn’t perfect or what we hoped he would be, and Christian Bethancourt isn’t “just right”. Signed out of Panama in 2008, Bethancourt had elite potential behind the plate with good athleticism and an incredibly strong arm. The concern, however, was whether or not he could hit enough to even get the stellar defense to the majors, and four years after his signing, there are still serious concerns about Bethancourt’s bat, especially after hitting .243/.275/.291 in AA Mississippi. Bethancourt’s stock has predictably, and deservedly, fallen from the top prospect ranks, but while he’s no longer a “top prospect”, what can we still expect from him?

The chances of Bethancourt becoming a star have, indeed, fallen. One of Bethancourt’s most common comparisons is Yadier Molina because of their strong arms and inability to hit early in their careers, and the hope was (and still is to some degree) that Bethancourt can make the offensive improvements that Molina has.

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Craig Calcaterra made me do something I have not done for a long time yesterday: think about Deion Sanders. Calcaterra’s post is worth reading in itself (at least click the link to see an incredibly time-bound photograph), as it is reflection on Buster Olney’s (annual) reflection (how meta!) on some interaction Olney had with Deion Sanders years ago as a rookie reporter. Okay, that sounds equal parts boring and confusing, but Craig makes it funny, at least to me. Leaving aside the mystery of why Olney makes this his annual Spring Training Kickoff Tradition and what it is supposed to mean (nothing against Olney; like Craig, I am simply baffled by the whole thing): man, it has been a long time since I’ve thought about Deion Sanders, especially Deion Sanders the baseball player.

My memories of that are pretty hazy, so others can recall various cool, fun, or just ridiculous Deion Sanders stories. I do not want to take that approach and end up with a car wreck of a post. Sanders had his moments on the diamond, and the whole part-time football/baseball thing is itself a curious artifact of the past. (The latter is worth a long post in its own right. “Well, sure, I could make millions guaranteed, but I think I’d rather spend part of the year doing something far more dangerous for non-guaranteed money.”) Leaving all of that aside, I was struck by just how unusual, especially these days, Sanders combination of skills was. What players recently have had seasons like Neon Deion at his best?

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Last week, I presented my list of the 10 best transactions of the off-season. Of course, if there’s a best, there also has to be a worst, so today, we look at the flip side of the winter maneuvers. I will note, however, that this list was harder to put together than last week’s version, as MLB teams are getting smarter and there simply aren’t as many total head-scratching moves made anymore. No one’s giving out Gary Matthews Jr or Barry Zito contracts these days. The biggest potential landmine of the winter was paying Kyle Lohse as if his ERA represented his actual talent level, and every team in baseball decided to pass on that kind of signing. So, while I don’t love most of the moves below, several of them are more defensible than moves in previous off-seasons. The worst moves aren’t as bad as bad as they used to be.

Without further ado, on to the list.

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Colorado might be the place that most made people aware that baseball works differently in different ballparks. It was pretty hard to deny the fact that, in Colorado, hit baseballs just took off. Since people became aware of Colorado playing in a hitter-friendly stadium, many people have also become aware of San Diego and Seattle playing in pitcher-friendly stadiums. Petco Park and Safeco Field are two of baseball’s newer parks, and to date they’ve played reasonably extreme. Because of their established pitcher-friendliness, both Petco and Safeco are having their dimensions adjusted this offseason. The idea isn’t to make the ballparks hitter-friendly — it’s to make them more hitter-friendly, or basically more neutral. You bring the fences in, and it follows that offense ought to go up.

Yet it’s interesting what we can observe in recent history. I can identify four instances in which fences were moved in somewhere with the idea of helping the hitters. Between 1994-1995, the Royals made adjustments at Kauffman Stadium. Between 2002-2003, the Tigers made adjustments at Comerica Park. Between 2005-2006, the Padres made an adjustment at Petco, which obviously wasn’t enough. And, between 2011-2012, the Mets made adjustments at Citi Field. Though simple park factors are imperfect and while in certain cases we’re working with limited data, the relevant numbers are of interest. We’ll go in order.

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

1. Top Performers of the Australian Baseball League
2. Largely Unhelpful Video: Adam Buschini Homering
3. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Australian Baseball League

Top Performers of the Australian Baseball League
The championship series for the Australian Baseball League (ABL) took place this weekend, with Canberra defeating Perth, 2-0, in the best-of-three competition.

Here are the top performers of the ABL, per SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).

Best Hitter: Adam Buschini
A native of Oakland, Canberra second baseman Adam Buschini was originally a fourth-round pick out of Cal Poly by the Philadelphia in the 2009 draft. After spending 2008-09 in the Phillies system, he was released by the club and found his way to independent ball, first with Chico (of the North American League) in 2011 and then with Amarillo (of the American Association) in 2012. This season in the ABL, Buschini almost doubled the home-run total of the next-best by that measure, hitting 15 of them to lead the league. San Diego appears to have recently signed Buschini to a minor-league deal.

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Asking a player how he’s over-performed his peripherals is a tricky thing. I settled on a toe in the water: “Have you ever heard of FanGraphs? WAR? FIP?” From Ryan Vogelsong’s responses to those inquiries at Giants’ Media day (“No, but Wins Above Replacement I have, all those stats, yeah” he replied), it seemed clear that the right-hander might need a little introduction to any sabermetric statistic I was going to ask him about.

“Given your strikeouts, walks, and ground balls, your FIP, which is usually more steady than ERA, has been higher than your ERA — you’ve been sort of over-performing these stats that people have come up with. I think this is really interesting because given your history, and given all that you’ve had to overcome, you’ve been under-rated in the past, too. Is there anything you can say about the way you pitch that might look like more than the sum of the parts? Is there something you play ‘up?’ How would you define yourself as a pitcher?”

It’s a wonder that Vogelsong had a reasoned, affable response to that mess. In fact, it’s a credit to the pitcher that he didn’t give this reporter the thousand-mile stare. I just asked him why his FIP has been almost three-quarters of a run higher than his ERA over the last two years.

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It was about time for Todd Frazier. The Cincinnati Reds slugger was one of the top rookies in the National League last season, and arguably the most valuable player on a team that won 97 games. Drafted 34th overall in 2007, he could have been in Dusty Baker’s lineup earlier than he was.

Two lines in his 2010 Baseball America Prospect Handbook bio help explain his delayed arrival. In rating him Cincinnati’s top prospect, the publication described Frazier as “a jack of all trades but a master of none” and listed his position was as “OF/2B/3B.” Originally a shortstop, he had become a man without a defensive home.

Last year, his versatility proved more of a blessing than a curse. When Joey Votto went on the shelf, Frazier stepped in and provided solid production at first base. When Scott Rolen went down, he did the same at third base. Overall, he hit .273/.331/.498, with 19 home runs, in 128 games.

Frazier, who celebrates his 27th birthday on Tuesday, heads into the 2013 season as Cincinnati’s starting third baseman.

——

David Laurila: Are you finally an established big-leaguer?

Todd Frazier: I have that first year under my belt, but I don’t think I’m an established big-leaguer. You need at least a couple of years in to be that, but I do feel I’m a big-league ballplayer. I think I’ve opened some eyes, although there’s always room for improvement.

It’s crazy, because you play in the minor leagues — you wait your time — and when you finally get your chance, it’s: `What are you going to do with it now?’ Often, when guys get called up, they play a lot. When I got called up, I was in a pinch-hitting role. I told myself that when I get that opportunity, I need to step up. I think I was 5-for-6, or 6-for-7, as a pinch-hitter and was able to help the team enough that they kept me on. The next step was to show I belonged, and I did that. I think I proved I belong.

DL: Did not establishing yourself in any one position hold you back? Read the rest of this entry »

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 Boston Red Sox. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cardinals / Cubs / Diamondbacks / Dodgers / Giants / Mariners / Marlins / Mets / Nationals / Orioles / Padres / Phillies / Pirates / Rangers / Rays / Reds / Rockies / Royals / Tigers / Twins / White Sox / Yankees.

Batters
It’s important, of course, to acknowledge always that front offices — especially the sort which have a reputation for embracing all manner of analysis — that they might possess certain information to which we, baseball’s laypeople, are not privy. To whatever degree that might be the case, however, it’s difficult to imagine what information precisely the Red Sox might have with regard to Jonny Gomes, whom the club signed to a two-year, $10 million contract this offseason and intends, it seems, to deploy as their starting left fielder. While the bar is rather low for Gomes to earn his money, Dan Szymborski’s math computer suggests that Gomes’ odds of producing like an average major-leaguer aren’t excellent.

I asked Szymborski about the Gomes projection — and, in particular, to what degree it might account for platoon splits (Gomes having a reputation for possessing a large-ish one). To which question Szymborski replied: “ZiPS only knows past usage.” To that point, we ought to consider this when considering Gomes’s rather successful 2012 season: about 59% of Gomes’s plate appearances in 2012 were against left-handed pitchers. Meanwhile, only one-third of his plate appearances between 2009 and -11 were against lefties.

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