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

1. Some Almost Not Meaningless Spring Numbers
2. Mostly Unhelpful Video: Tom Layne, Striking Out Sides

Some Almost Not Meaningless Spring Numbers
The bespectacled reader is likely aware that spring training baseball has begun. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out earlier this month, there are a number of variables present in spring games which necessarily distort the stats that are produced there. As Mike Podhorzer demonstrated last March, however, there’s some significance to certain spring stats — especially among those which become reliable in smaller samples.

Even less than a week into spring, there are some numbers that are worthy of consideration — more for purposes of monitoring, perhaps, if not to regard as gospel.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers have many stars. The Los Angeles Dodgers don’t have a star third baseman, at least not one that is slated to start third base this year. The Dodgers *do* have many good defensive shortstops, and none of them is starting at shortstop. The weirdest thing is that it might all make sense, at least for now.

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Zack Wheeler hadn’t been pitching particularly well when he agreed to do this interview late last season. During his previous seven outings — three with Double-A Binghamton and four with Triple-A Buffalo — he’d allowed 28 runs in 35 innings. Deep into his second full professional season, the New York Mets’ best prospect seemed to have hit a wall.

This season, the 23-year-old right-hander promises to knock down a different wall — the one standing between him and big-league stardom. Few pitching prospects have a higher ceiling. Wheeler throws four plus-pitches, including a mid-90s fastball and a rapidly improving changeup.

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The New York Mets’ top prospect list is a lot stronger now than it was when the off-season began, thanks to the R.A. Dickey trade with Toronto that brought two of the club’s Top 3 prospects into the system. The club lacks impact bats but it has a plethora of high-ceiling arms.

#1 Zack Wheeler (P)

Organizations have to make bold moves at times when trying to win championships and the Mets’ top prospect list has benefited from that, both with the R.A. Dickey trade with Toronto, as well as the deal that saw veteran outfielder Carlos Beltran head to the San Francisco Giants, an organization that has won the World Series in two of the past three seasons. That latter trade netted Wheeler, a pitcher with the upside of a No. 1 or 2 starter.

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Ben and Sam preview the Brewers’ season with Ken Funck, and Pete talks to MLB.com columnist Mike Bauman (at 19:37).

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Everybody’s aware that, by and large, spring-training results are meaningless. Not everybody always acts like it, but everybody gets it, on some level. The stats don’t really matter, and the wins and losses don’t really matter. But spring training can still serve some purposes, for us as fans. As we discussed yesterday, spring training can generate highlights as good or almost as good as the highlights generated during the regular season. That is, of plays in isolation, separated from context. And there’s also some analysis that can be done, if done carefully. Previously, Michael Saunders never demonstrated any ability to hit to the opposite field or cover the outer half of the plate. Between 2011 and 2012, he re-worked his swing, and in spring 2012, he covered the other half of the plate. It was promising, and, sure enough, Saunders had a breakthrough season. Spring training isn’t entirely devoid of substance.

Which brings us to the matter of Domonic Brown, on Tuesday, February 26. On this Tuesday, Brown generated a highlight, and he also did something maybe worth talking about for analytical purposes. Behold, what Domonic Brown did to a thrown pitch by a member of the Yankees organization:

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With the ZIPS projections now loaded onto the site and the player pages, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at a few examples where ZIPS and Steamer — probably my two preferred projection systems at the moment — differ this year, and whether there’s anything in particular we can learn from those differences.

First, I wanted to whittle down the population of players that I was dealing with. While I appreciate Steamer’s pluckiness, 4,136 projections for position players might be a little bit of overkill. I, for one, am not overly concerned with how Jeyckol De Leon is going to perform this year. Maybe it’s just me.

ZIPS projects a slightly more sane number of position players — 1,046, to be exact — but even that is still a little unwieldy, as a good chunk of those guys are sub-replacement level minor leaguers who aren’t going to see the Majors this year. By and large, we care mostly about the projections for players who are going to see substantial regular playing time in the big leagues this year, or at least, I do. Carson can care about all the fringe prospects he wants; I’ll leave that to him.

So, in order to get a list of projections for guys we care about, I excluded players who had never been in the majors or were projected to be below replacement level, leaving us with 601 Major League position players. That was still a little unwieldy, though, so I took the top 180 players by the average WAR of the two systems, which gave us a good selection of players that are projected to be league average or better by one of the two systems.

From there, it was a pretty simple sorting task to find some big differences, but many of them are driven by assumptions about playing time rather than big gaps in the actual projections. For instance, ZIPS lists Brett Jackson as a +2.5 WAR player, while Steamer comes in at just +0.9, which seems like a huge difference of opinion until you realize that the ZIPS number is based on 626 PA and the Steamer number is based on 274 PA. Rescale them both to 600 PA, and the gap is just 2.4/2.0, showing that the two systems are essentially in agreement on Jackson’s overall profile for 2013.

Since I care more about the differences in the projected performances than in the playing time gaps, we’ll focus on the big discrepancies in projections per 600 plate appearances (or 450 PA for catchers). Putting things on the same playing time scale will inflate the numbers of part-time players and injured guys while depressing the numbers of durable iron men, but we’ve already gotten rid of most of the part-time guys with our filtering, so that’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. Oh, and thankfully, the two systems were already on almost identical scales for these players, so there was no need to make any adjustments to the numbers as we did with the Fans projections last week.

Long introduction finished… on to the differences. We’ll start with the 14 players where Steamer projects at least +1 additional WAR per full season (600 PA non-catchers, 450 PA catchers):

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Spring training games are underway. The hot stove stories that kept us going all winter have been replaced by stories about non-roster invitees trying to make a major-league roster, behind-the-scenes looks at what your favorite player did over the winter, and columns drawing conclusions about spring statistics. And Alex Rodriguez stories. There are always A-Rod stories.

So it was on Sunday when several outlets reported that A-Rod’s cousin was selling Rodriguez’s 2009 World Series ring. And not just any cousin, but Yuri Sucart, the person A-Rod fingered as the person who convinced him to take steroids while he played for the Texas Rangers. Sucart was later banned from MLB clubhouses but his name recently resurfaced in news reports about Biogenesis, the Miami anti-aging clinic that purportedly supplied PEDs to A-Rod and others.

A-Rod. Traitor. Biogenesis. PEDs. Greedy cousin. Perfect storm.

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