Heading into the winter, it wasn’t entirely clear what the market for Carlos Ruiz was going to look like. He’s headed into his age-35 season, coming off his worst offensive year since 2008, and served a 25 game suspension for failing a drug test (for using amphetamines, specifically Adderall) last year. However, Ruiz proved to be a popular early market target for many teams, and after a week or two of a mini-bidding war, the Phillies have re-signed Ruiz to a three year, $26 million contract, a bit more than the FanGraphs Crowd’s 2/$17M forecast.

Because the Phillies have a long history of overpaying for aging players, the easy narrative is that Ruben Amaro strikes again. He just guaranteed Ruiz $8.5 million for his age-37 season, and the list of catchers who have been productive at that point in their careers is very small indeed. This deal, like almost every other contract signed by the Phillies in recent years, is unlikely to end well.

However, I will continue to point out that we should not evaluate a free agent contract by how it looks in the last year of the contract. Free agents on multi-year deals often take less money in AAV than they are worth for the beginning of the contract in exchange for being overpaid at the back end. This is entirely normal, and nearly every free agent contract is going to work the same way: value up front, albatross at the end. We cannot simply state that the Ruiz signing is a poor one for the Phillies because Ruiz will be overpaid at the end of the deal.

And while Ruiz is an aging catcher coming off a poor season, I think it would be useful to keep the lessons of Russell Martin in mind when talking about this deal for Ruiz, and perhaps hold off on the easy shots at Amaro for re-signing yet another old guy, since this old guy might still be a good player.

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“Replay is coming! Replay is coming!” You can almost hear Ben Revere running through the streets of Philadelphia sounding the call, if I remember my American history correctly. I imagine that 98% of FanGraphs readers read the news last week and reacted with only glee, because decades after some of their major sports competitors started using instant replay, MLB is finally getting with the times. Anything that can stop preventable mistakes from happening is a good thing, as I think you’d agree.

I probably don’t need to regale you with dozens of examples of terribly blown calls, from Phil Cuzzi blowing up the 2009 ALCS to Jim Joyce ruining Armando Galarraga’s perfect game to Don Denkinger’s infamous error in the 1985 World Series, so I won’t. You know the game needs replay, and so do I. Still, for the one straggler among you who might just be on the fence about it, I absolutely can’t pass up the opportunity to reuse this still of arguably the worst call in the history of sports, Tim Welke calling Jerry Hairston out on this play in Colorado in 2012:

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Earlier this year, Jack Moore reviewed Josh Johnson’s inability to get hitters out while pitching from the stretch. Johnson and the Jays were very much aware of the situation, but even still, it did not improve as the season went on. In the end, Johnson limited batters to a .315 wOBA and a .307 BABIP when he worked out of a full wind-up, while opposing batters had a .440 wOBA and a .450 BABIP when Johnson worked out of the stretch. His BABIP while pitching from the stretch was 73 points higher than any other pitcher that made at least 15 starts in 2013.

The simple answer this dramatic split would be to simply point at Johnson’s BABIP and say he was unlucky. If one were to review the video from the first inning of his July 27th start against Houston, one could certainly believe that:
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Ben and Sam talk to Jason Parks about why he thinks the Minnesota Twins have the best minor-league talent in baseball.

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My cousin Cindy has a batting cage on her property. If you knew Cindy, this would absolutely not surprise you. She had been a farmer her whole life, and as she gets older and does less farming, she needs things to fill those now-free 18 hours or so. She needs things that involve activity as well, as she still has a lot of energy to burn. So when she had a family reunion of sorts last summer, there came a time when everybody had to take a turn in the batting cages. There were no helmets worn — these were strong Wisconsin folk, mind you — as the pitch speed was usually turned to the lowest setting. These were changeups, ostensibly. And when it was my turn to take some hacks, they still looked fast. I fouled a few off to begin, then was able to make some contact (note: making contact means weak grounders when it comes to my hitting.) Toward the end, the oddest thing happened. I started swinging early. I started getting comfortable enough that I started being proactive instead of reactive. In hitting terms, I adjusted.

Hitters in the middle of a cold streak use platitudes about their timing being off all the time. When a hitter is coming back from a prolonged injury, they often do rehab in the minors to get “their timing down.” Leg kicks can be added or removed from swings in order to assist with timing. It’s an integral part of hitting, is the point I’m making, and the point you already knew. It’s why so-called soft-tossing pitchers can still get away with cashing a check from a major league team. Their fastball might be weak, but they can counter that by taking enough from the off-speed stuff, that a hitter’s timing can still be thrown off significantly.

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The Hot Stove is still pre-heating, so while we wait on the oven timer, let’s reflect on a topic that we rarely question. Provocative title aside, why do we use miles per hour, more commonly referred to as mph, to talk about velocity in baseball? After all, it’s a game of feet, inches, and seconds.

It’s 60 feet, six inches from the rubber to the back corner of the plate. Home to first is 90 feet. Home to second is 127 feet, three and 3/8’s inches, which can also be expressed as 90 times the square root of two (h/t Pythagoras). The outfield fence is typically somewhere between 310 and 410 feet from home plate. A really long home run will travel 500 feet in about four to six seconds. Billy Hamilton can steal second base in 3.1 seconds. When Jose Fernandez hits a home run, it takes him about 28 seconds to wander around the bases.

In other words, no other single activity in baseball is meaningfully measured using miles or hours.
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Since 2008, PITCHf/x has collected six years of detailed pitch information. A raw search I just did shows 1,991 pitches over that span thrown at at least 100 miles per hour. Of those, 469, or just under 24%, were thrown in 2013. That one season represents just under 17% of the data. That’s…kind of interesting, and a little bit meaningful, but I probably shouldn’t have started with this. I probably should have started with this:

This year’s postseason was littered with hard-throwing starters and relievers. It seemed like bullpens were trotting out hard-throwing reliever after hard-throwing reliever, and if you’re at all active on Twitter, you might’ve noticed a few conversations taking place among certain big-leaguers. Prominent among them was Brandon McCarthy, who noted a few times that the landscape didn’t used to look like this, even just a few years ago. The feeling now is that every team has a handful of flamethrowers. The feeling used to be that a flamethrower was something special, something extraordinary to be cherished. The feeling, basically, is that yesterday’s 92 is today’s 96.

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Episode 400
Dave Studeman is manager of The Hardball Times and the actual, real inventor of xFIP. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which he promotes the newly released Hardball Times Annual entirely sans compunction.

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 26 min play time.)

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A couple of days ago, the Oakland A’s signed Nick Punto to a one year contract that will pay him $2.75 million in 2014 and then either pay him $250,000 to go away or an additional $2.75 million in 2015, so the deal is either $3 million for one year or $5.5 million for two. The A’s are not looking at Punto as a regular player, as they already have Jed Lowrie, Eric Sogard, and Alberto Callaspo as middle infield options, but Punto gives them additional depth and reinforces their bench. He’s a good reserve, capable of playing high level defense and getting on base enough to not be a complete zero as a hitter, but the A’s ideal plan for him likely involves him getting roughly 250 plate appearances next year. If he gets more than that, something probably went wrong.

So, $3 million for a quality bench guy seems reasonable. It’s about what you’d expect given how reserve position players have generally been priced in the free agent market. Last year, similar deals were given to Ty Wigginton, Eric Chavez, Raul Ibanez, Jack Hannahan, Placido Polanco, and Geovany Soto. This is, essentially, the market rate for an aging bench guy. Even if teams value their contributions, they don’t play enough to really command much more than a few million dollars on a one year deal.

A Major League can expect to send a hitter to the plate about 6,200 times in a season. A bench player who hits 250 times will comprise about 4% of the team’s total number of plate appearances. $3 million for that kind of marginal role seems perfectly fair.

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