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

1. Spring Broadcast Schedule Begins Saturday
2. Saturday Games and Probable Starters
3. Sunday Games and Probable Starters

Spring Broadcast Schedule Begins Saturday
This weekend, six spring-training games are available via MLB.TV. “Which pitchers are starting those games?” a hypothetical reader might ask conveniently for the sake of this post. To which the author responds: “That’s a reasonable question.”

Indeed, given the nature of spring training, teams’ probable starters are not available days ahead of time (through the MLB website, for example) the way they are during the regular season. For example, as the author writes this, there are precisely zero probable starters listed for Saturday’s and Sunday’s games — and yet, this is what we might call “need to know” information.

With a view to satisfying the reader’s curiosity, then, what the author has done is to utilize his Google machine such that he might procure it (i.e. the information) from the internet. What follows is the fruit of that not-very-exhausting labor.

Beside each pitcher is his Steamer projection for 2013. Source material is available by clicking on each respective team acronym. All corrections are invited.

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First, Tigers’ general manager Dave Dombrowski said young fireballing right-hander Bruce Rondon would be given “every shot” at closing this coming year. Then there were rumors that the Tigers were “targeting relievers capable of closing.” Last week, the manager said he doubted that anyone would be “anointed the closer out of spring training.” Whether or not there’s a real difference in the team stance at any of these points, there do seem to be some different ideas being put forth about the team’s perception of the closer’s role.

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Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.

Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.

If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.

As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.

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Colorado doesn’t have a deep system but it has a few intriguing arms and some promising up-the-middle talents. There are a number of prospects that could be poised for big 2013 seasons.

#1 Nolan Arenado (3B)

Arenado’s season didn’t go quite as hoped and he had a very inconsistent year. Questions have been raised about his maturity level but most young men his age (21) have questionable behavior at times, so he probably deserves a mulligan and an opportunity to prove he can learn from his mistakes. The California native held his own in 2012 at double-A. He hits for average because he makes solid contact and uses the whole field. Arenado also has solid power thanks to plus bat speed, and his swing could generate 15-20 homers in his prime. He absolutely creamed left-handed pitching to the tune of a 1.043 OPS. When I saw him play in 2012 he was struggling against off-speed pitches.

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Ben and Sam preview the Marlins’ season with Daniel Rathman, and Pete talks to Sun-Sentinel Marlins beat writer Juan C. Rodriguez (at 16:59).

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Episode 309
Guest Patrick Dubuque is like Greek philosopher Heraclitus insofar as both possess (or possessed, as the case may be) a melancholy temperament. One way they differ is that Heraclitus contracted dropsy, covered himself in manure, and then died like that — pastimes with which Dubuque is barely even on nodding terms.

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 59 min play time.)

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On February 6, Todd Helton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. A week and a half later, he publicly apologized. His manager, Walt Weiss, who is also his former teammate, stood behind him all the way. “We have all needed a little grace from time to time. He stepped up and faced the music,” Weiss said at a news conference with Helton. “Now it’s time to play ball.” Helton received no further punishment from the league or from his team. Weiss picked a curious metaphor to announce that Helton will miss the first couple of games of spring training to conserve his strength, but would then play as normal. “For a guy like Todd,” Weiss said, “there’s no reason to put your foot on the pedal right out of the gate.”

Helton was not the only one to be quickly forgiven by his team. Mark Grace was arrested outside Phoenix last August, his second DUI arrest in 15 months. The Diamondbacks fired him as an announcer, but this spring, they rehired him as a special instructor. In the wake of Helton and Grace’s arrests, a number of people have been writing articles about the curious disconnect between the way we think about performance-enhancing drugs and the way we think about drunk driving. But is it a fair comparison? After all, PEDs affect baseball on the field. DUIs are off-field offenses, and they are handled by the courts. Should baseball subject its players to additional punishment?
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Here on FanGraphs, we host several different projection systems, most of which are algorithms that take a player’s performance history and then mix in things like regression and aging curves to develop a forecast for 2013 production. But, we have one set of projections that is very different from the rest – the Fans Projections.

Instead of being based on any kind of mathematical model, these are simply crowdsourced from our readers, with you guys creating the projections with your various opinions about player performances for next year. While there are certainly some imperfections with any kind of crowdsourcing project, the widsom of the crowds has also shown to do pretty well in situations like this, and over the years we’ve done the Fans Projections, we’ve seen that the system actually holds its own when stacked up against the algorithms, though it does require one manual adjustments in order to make the system work properly: deflation.

Put simply, you guys are just too darn optimistic — I guess that’s why you’re called fans — and annually overproject total WAR by something like 20%. So, if you look at the data from the Fans Projections next to something like ZIPS or Steamer, you’ll see some huge discrepancies, but a lot of those simply have to do with the scale, and once the Fans Projections are deflated to create a more accurate overall total, many of the variances go away.

Not all of them, though. There’s one clear type of player where the Fans and the algorithms disagree, and it’s probably a telling area, given what we know about the fine line between hope irrational exuberance. That type of player? Prospects.

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After the Braves acquired Justin Upton, uniting him and brother B.J. Upton on the same team, our very own Jeff Sullivan got curious about brothers playing together, and presented some salient information on the brother effect. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I became curious about it much after that (I’m slow), and while Jeff already did the pertinent research, nobody has ever accused me of doing pertinent research, so I thought today we could look at the best seasons put together by brothers on the same team.

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