Baseball fans, generally, are aware that strikeout rates have been increasing over the period of several years. I wouldn’t say they’re yet “out of control” — it’s not like we’ve got a league of Mark Reynolds against Billy Wagner — but some people have raised some concerns, and, additionally, they’re still trending up. There’s no telling how high the strikeout rate might go. Craig Kimbrel just became the first guy to strike out more than half of the batters he faced in a season. I suspect it won’t be too long before we see another, or at least before we see someone come close.

On Thursday, we discussed evidence that home-plate umpires might be getting better at calling the strike zone. It stands to reason that could be a factor in the rising strikeout rates, since more strikes means fewer balls and you don’t need me to explain this to you, but we covered only the last few years, and also there are presumably a bunch of reasons for the hike we’ve observed. It’s not like it’s all about the umpires, just. Everything in baseball is complicated, and so examining this ought to be complicated.

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The World Baseball Classic — which starts tonight! — tweeted out a fun fact about their extra innings procedure. Your mileage may vary:

DID YOU KNOW: In extra innings, from the 13th on, teams will begin with runners on 1st & 2nd base. More fun facts at atmlb.com/12gQBbf

— 2013 WBC (@WBCBaseball) March 1, 2013

This fact’s fun factor can be debated; in a game as based in tradition as baseball, I think many would prefer as little messing with the rules as possible. But with MLB (and foreign professional leagues, most likely) worried about the health of their players, it’s in the WBC’s best interest to avoid 20-inning marathon games, as much as we may want to see them. Does their policy at least succeed in that respect?

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Episode 312
Dayn Perry, contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and author of two books (one of them serviceable), has hands and they are covered in blood for some reason.

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 48 min play time.)

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Can you believe it!? Friday night, tonight!, the World Baseball Classic commences with an 11:30 p.m. ET game between Chinese Taipei and Australia!

For those of us who spent the snowy preceding months watching grainy online feeds of Australian and Latin American winter ball, this day — this meaningful day — is precious. But precious also describes the amount, the scarcity, of WBC enthusiasts in America. Tragic, but true: America and Canada do not share foreign fervor for the WBC.

Well, in an effort to correct that, I have offered studies of some Taiwanese sluggers, and today I will conclude that cultural and statistical foray. For the previous pieces, see:

INF Ngayaw Ake
1B/DH Yi-Chuan Lin

Today, let’s examine Taiwan’s likely starting left fielder, Szu-Chi Chou.
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Once upon a time, Justin Morneau was a very solid player. He was never the player his most-valuable-player status would have seemed to convey, though he was still solid. But that time was more than two seasons ago, and as he enters a contract year in what will be age-32 season, it’s fair to wonder if this is Morneau’s last stand.

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At FanGraphs we talk a lot about contracts, but we’ve never had contract data on our player pages or in an easily exportable form.

We’ve already got the ball rolling by entering about 300 contracts, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Our staff will of course continue to enter in contract data, but if you want to speed up the project you can help us by entering in missing contract data.

Any contract data you enter will be sent for approval to an editor.  Assuming the contract data is correct and mostly complete with proper attribution, it will shortly appear on the player pages along with attribution to your FanGraphs username.

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Everything, ultimately, has to come down to runs. Or wins, I suppose, but wins and runs are strongly correlated. By boiling measures and evaluations down to runs, we’re given an understanding of how much they matter at the end of the day. We know how to value a guy who hits a lot of home runs. We know how to value another guy who’s said to be great in the field. Runs and wins are at the core of performance analysis, because runs and wins are what teams are trying to add to get better.

When you talk about catcher pitch-framing, one generally ends up talking about the difference between a ball and a strike. It might seem like a missed call here and there shouldn’t matter — these are just individual pitches! — but each call does matter, and as they pile up, they matter more. Toward the end of last season, Joe Maddon said something to the effect of Jose Molina saving his team 50 runs or so because of his receiving. Catchers are ranked on their framing by runs saved or cost, and this is calculated by using the run-value difference between a ball and a strike. Each season, the best framers seem to be tens of runs better than the worst framers. When you’re talking about tens of runs, you’re talking about a significant effect.

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The Yankees have a long standing policy against negotiating contract extensions for players under contract, preferring instead to wait until the player reaches free agency to hash out a new deal. They even held that line with Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera, two of the iconic players in franchise history, so it hasn’t just been selectively applied here and there. So, it was pretty interesting to hear that the Yankees are ignoring that policy with Robinson Cano, and have confirmed that they recently made Scott Boras a “significant offer” to get him from becoming a free agent after the season.

Brian Cashman’s answer for why they’ve changed course with Cano:

“Since we’re the team, we have a right to change our minds and adjust the policy whenever, especially ownership,” Cashman said. “It’s not like it’s a country club, and here’s the code of conduct that you can’t deviate from. We’ve had a history of doing things a certain way, but it doesn’t mean that it has to be that way every day.”

For the Yankees to shift policy and extend Cano an offer now suggests that they’re both a little scared of what his price might be if he gets to free agency, and that they’re comfortable with how well he’ll age that they don’t need to see his age-30 season before deciding to sign up for the rest of his decline phase. The fear about his price if the Dodgers get involved is certainly valid, but should the fact that Cano is a second baseman scare the Yankees away from making a long term commitment to him before they have gathered all the information possible by letting him play out the 2013 season?

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Ben and Sam preview the Cubs’ season with Colin Wyers, and Pete talks to CSNChicago.com Cubs beat writer Patrick Mooney (at 19:43).

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Players choose the services of Scott Boras for a simple reason. The simplest reason, even: he gets money.

But not even Boras can truly command the invisible hand of the market. See Kyle Lohse. Despite many seeing him as one of the best pitchers available in this year’s free agent class, Lohse remains unsigned into march — a far cry from the four-year, $40 million deal or higher many saw him attaining.

Of course, for all of Boras’s success, Lohse isn’t his first high-profile client whose market has dropped out from under him. The safe play given the age of most of these players (over 30) and MLB’s guaranteed contract system would be to take a multi-year contract at a depressed average annual value. Quite often, however, Boras has eschewed the long term deal for the “pillow contract,” a one-year contract so-called because it lets the player land softly from their bottomed-out market and get up and try again next season.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

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