Last week, ESPN’s Adam Rubin reported that Major League Baseball owners were considering a proposal to “eliminate pensions” of non-union personnel — everyone from scouts to  secretaries who work in the general manager’s office. The story included a quote from MLB executive vice president Rob Manfred who said, essentially, that MLB wasn’t eliminating pensions entirely, but amending MLB’s program to allow teams “more flexibility.”

The story led to a great deal of hue and cry, and perhaps rightfully so: Baseball isn’t a distressed industry. Quite the contrary. As Forbes reported Wednesday, the average MLB team gained 23% in value over the last year, the result of a new $12.4 billion dollar national TV contract, skyrocketing local TV contracts and the revenues generated hand-over-fist by MLB Advanced Media. Manfred wasn’t willing to admit that certain owners are simply looking to spend less money on retirement benefits going forward — even in this era of immense prosperity in baseball — but it’s hard to draw a different conclusion.

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Table of Contents
Today’s edition of the Daily Notes has no table of contents, it appears.

Live from Cardinals Camp in Jupiter
The author spent part of Thursday afternoon on the backfields at Jupiter, Florida’s Roger Dean Stadium, spring home both to the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals. It was a camp day for the Cardinals, and the observations which follow are from a game between that club’s Double- and Triple-A rosters.

While reading them (i.e. the following observations), the reader would do well to remember that the author is an amateur in every respect.

On Jorge Rondon and His Fastball
Right-hander Jorge Rondon pitched only an inning today, but definitely threw harder than any of the five or seven or whatever other pitchers who appeared in the game. All told, he threw maybe six total pitches in that one inning — all of them, so far as I could tell, fastballs at ca. 96 mph — and induced three ground-ball outs. There’s not a lot to be deduced from his appearance — except this, of course: Jorge Rondon throws at 96 mph. Matt Eddy reported a similar velocity in a minor-league transactions piece back in October (when St. Louis added Rondon to the 40-man roster), adding that the 24-year-old reliever also has “a nice mid-80s slider.”

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It’s been five years since Domonic Brown cracked the public consciousness as a five-tooler in the Phillies system. Five up and down years. Three of those years, he failed to impress in short samples with the big league team, and yet the team’s outfield crumbled around him gradually. So this year, playing time in the outfield is embarrassingly available. Domonic Brown made some changes, and looks to be ready to capitalize, finally.

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Ben and Sam talk to Jason Parks about the forthcoming Fringe Average Podcast and BP prospect book, the ranking process, and how player development differs between teams.

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Wouldn’t you know it, but Scott Kazmir is relevant again. Jeremy Bonderman is relevant again, too, and that’s also amazing, but Kazmir’s actually got himself a big-league rotation job and that gives me an opportunity to talk about an incredible Kazmir fun fact. I could’ve talked about it anyway, even if Kazmir were completely off the radar, but now it’ll be less insignificant. You’re thinking about Scott Kazmir, and here’s another thing to think about him.

Pitching with the bases empty is different from pitching with at least one runner on. For many pitchers, the delivery changes, and of course the situation and the intensity changes. The defense changes. Things change when there are people on base, so it can be informative to look at the base-state splits. In such situations it’s always important to remain aware of small sample sizes, but when you get to talking about whole careers, those concerns by and large go away.

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Mike Newman and I traversed the back fields of Cactus League last week. When we weren’t berating one another with insults, we analyzed the prospects we watched.  After hours of back and forth we decided to memorialize our differences in “Dueling Prospects Lists.” So that we don’t taint our lists, we haven’t discussed these rankings or the analysis with each other. 

You can see Mike’s list here, if you’re so inclined.

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In Arizona, J.D. Sussman and I hit the back fields together to scout talent from the Mariners, Indians, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Cubs. Each of us took notes, collected radar gun readings, worked angles and collected the best information we could.

Back from the warm weather, we decided to rank the 10 best prospects we scouted together to highlight differences in opinion and player preference. Scouting is an inexact science. Prospect followers tend to pit opinions of writers against each other, but of course there’s room for dissent and discussion even among friends and colleagues.

Here’s my top-10 of players I liked the most. J.D.’s list will follow in an hour.

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Mariano Rivera turned 43 last November. There was wide speculation that he would retire at the end of the 2012 season, until his 2012 season ended with an untimely season-ending injury, and Rivera decided to try to make a comeback so that his last season could occur on his terms.

But even though Mariano Rivera’s career is full of unprecedented moments, that does not mean that it will be trivial for him to come up with another. Baseball has been played in America for the better part of two centuries, and unprecedented things are generally unprecedented for a reason: they are extraordinarily unlikely. So how many players have been able to play effectively after losing a full season in their 40s?
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This morning, we announced that we’d come to an agreement with Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference on a unified replacement level, allowing both WAR calculations to measure players on the same scale. In that post, though, I didn’t spend much time talking about why replacement level is the baseline to begin with, so I thought it was worth taking a little bit more time to talk about why replacement level is a necessary concept.

After all, we’re all used to metrics that use average as a baseline, and average is easily defined and measured. Why not just measure everyone against league average, and use WAA instead of WAR?

There are two answers to that question, really. Let’s tackle them in order of importance, beginning with the playing time issue.

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