Former Texas Ranger David Murphy has reportedly agreed to a contract with the Cleveland Indians. As of this writing, the details are still coming out, but the deal is said to be for two years and about $12 million. It sounds like the new standard contract for platoon players in their thirties — see Jonny Gomes and David DeJesus for recent examples. Cleveland might very well be planning to platoon the left-handed-hitting Murphy with Ryan Raburn in right field. The combination could provide enough production at the right price to overcome concerns about flexibility while also filling out Cleveland’s lineup and allowing them a chance to take another shot at the playoffs in 2014 if they make some additional moves.

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The author has published a weekly statistical report for the Arizona Fall League each week since its brief season commenced back in October — not necessarily because such a thing is of great utility to prospect analysis, but more because, for those of us not currently present in the Greater Phoenix area, it’s one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league.

What follows is the entirely last statistical report for the AFL, following that league’ championship game this past Saturday.

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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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No team has been on a faster pace early in free agency so far than the Phillies, who have added Marlon Byrd to their outfield and agreed to retain catcher Carlos Ruiz. As you certainly know, both moves have been met with derision in certain corners of the baseball world, partially because both Byrd & Ruiz are older players with recent PED suspensions and at least one lousy year in the last two, and partially because Ruben Amaro’s reputation is such these days that he could find a way to trade John Mayberry for Mike Trout and people would still laugh at him about it.

Amaro’s earned a lot of that scorn, obviously, thanks to the atrocious Ryan Howard extension, his bets on Michael Young & Delmon Young last winter, and his insistence on retaining an aging core as the team has fallen from 102 wins to 81 to 73 in the last three years. But while these new moves aren’t exactly slam dunks, you can defend each of them on their own. Byrd’s contract is exactly in line with what basically everyone on the internet — FanGraphs readers included — expected he would get, and while guaranteeing Ruiz three years at his age is a lot harder to stomach, Dave Cameron did lay out a convincing case for why it can be considered a reasonable move. Read the rest of this entry »

Young, first-year managers are a growing trend in Major League Baseball. That’s good news for David Wallace. The 34-year-old wasn’t a candidate for any of this off-season’s openings, but he almost certainly will be in future years.

A catcher in the Cleveland system for six seasons, Wallace moved from the playing field to the coaching ranks in 2009. An assistant on the Indians’ big-league coaching staff in 2009 and in 2010, he has spent the past three seasons as a minor-league manager. This past summer he skippered Cleveland’s high-A affiliate, the Carolina Mudcats.

Wallace — a product of Vanderbilt University — recently discussed the approach he’d bring to a big-league managerial position. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss the new kind of coach being hired by big-league teams this offseason.

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The news is breaking now. It seems that Josh Johnson has gotten $8 million dollars from the Padres to pitch in 2014, according to Jerry Crasnick. By itself, that is an interesting match — Johnson gets to go to the National League and reboot his value in a pitcher’s park, and the Padres get a high-variance player for a little bit more than the price of a win.

But then I heard a little nugget about the contract, seconds before my internet went out and Jeff Passan broke the news while I was mashing my keyboard frantically: The Padres get a $4 million option on Johnson in 2015 if he pitches fewer than seven starts in 2014. That little nugget contains multitudes.

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Over the weekend, I wrote a piece for ESPN Insider and FanGraphs+ based around the question of how players like Jacoby Ellsbury have aged previously. There’s a belief among some that speed-and-defense players like Ellsbury are bad bets after they turn 30, since a large chunk of their value is tied to what they can do with their legs, and speed peaks earlier than other skills. However, there’s also data that shows that faster players actually age better than most other player types. Instead of just trying to show you what the aging curves say, though, I figured showing how similar players to Ellsbury actually did might be more appealing.

So, here’s the basic gist of how I went about finding Ellsbury-like players, though I’ll note that the process here is slightly different from the table I used in the ESPN piece, since I have a little more room to explain my thought process and findings here. I went to the leaderboards and set the date range to cover the last 30 years. I set the age filter to cover ages 27 to 29, the same ages as the last three seasons of Ellsbury’s career. To narrow it down to Ellsbury-type players, I used the positional tabs to select only outfielders, and then put a filter in place to cap Isolated Slugging at .180, which gets rid of the power hitters who are not really anything like Ellsbury to begin with. I also put in a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances, so that we only got players who were roughly full time players over those three seasons.

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It’s too bad it won’t be Roy Steele’s voice ringing this post’s title from on high — wherever the Athletics are playing — but the declaration itself does seem like more of a lock to happen eventually. Nineteen-year-old Addison Russell has had some doubters in the past. After playing his way to an all-star berth in the Arizona Fall League, the bat has successfully made fans at every stop.

The most interesting aspect of his play might be on the other side of the ball, though, where some feel his body type may move him off the position. After talking to the young man about his craft, though, and assessing his skillset and the values of his major league team, it seemed obvious to me that he’ll be a shortstop when he’s announced into the lineup for the first time in the big leagues.

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