As vice president of on-field operations, Joe Torre is Major League Baseball’s point man on rule changes. If Torre doesn’t think a rule change is warranted, a proposed change isn’t going to get very far. He’s not the final arbiter — rule changes are made only by a vote of the owners and the players’ union — but he is the gatekeeper of rule-change ideas.

In the past several years, Torre’s been fending off requests to consider rule changes on home-plate collisions. Those requests reached a fever pitch in May 2011 after Scott Cousins voilently collided with Buster Posey, knocking the Giants’ catcher out for the season. Just days later, Astros’ catcher Humberto Quintero and Pirates’ catcher Ryan Doumit suffered serious injuries after home-plate collisions. Torre is a former catcher, and many hoped his experiences behind the plate would make him receptive to protecting catchers from head-on collisions. But, in fact, the opposite has been true.

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Ben and Sam preview the Phillies’ season with Paul Sporer, and Pete talks to CSNPhilly.com Phillies Insider Jim Salisbury (at 19:27).

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When scouts evaluate the players on the field, they use a 20-80 scale as shorthand to describe a player’s tools and/or his overall ability. Receiving a 50 on the scale means that one is major-league average, and for every 10 points up or down the scale, the scout believes the player is one more standard deviation above or below major-league average. An 80 is incredibly rare because one would have to be 3 standard deviations above the mean (or in the top 0.1-0.2 percent of players), and it’s a representation of the truly, truly elite. But the question becomes what those grades represent. When someone says that a player is an [insert grade], what should we actually expect them to do statistically at the major-league level? Armed with some advanced statistics and z-scores, I went to find out.

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Tommy John surgery might have been the best thing that could have happened to George Kontos. In 2009, the Giants’ right-hander was in Triple-A for the first time, and he had the kind of stuff that would make him a big leaguer in somebody’s bullpen: A 92-mph fastball and a wipeout slider that usually produced more than a strikeout per inning. That isn’t to say that he didn’t have some of the flaws inherent with a fastball/slider guy with only passable control, but he was well on his way. Then he felt that signature elbow pain, went under the knife, and a year and a half later, the reliever came out from the experience having changed two important facets of his game for the better.

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Let’s talk World Baseball Classic.

I believe one of the key impediments preventing American and Canadian baseball fans from true excitement about the WBC has to do with limited knowledge of foreign players. We are, as some economists might say, rationally uninformed. To learn the necessary statistics and fun bits about the teams and players would take too much time and effort, considering the difficulty language barriers present.

Lo and behold! I happen to speak and, to a lesser extent, read Chinese! Allow me to act as your conduit; your semi-skilled cultural guide for, if nothing else, the Chinese-speaking teams. Allow me to not only translate some of their more useful statistics, but also present some slices of their personalities.

Let’s examine three of Taiwan’s best hitters: (1) Ngayaw Ake, (2) Yi-Chuan Lin, and (3) Szu-Chi Chou:

Top wOBA+ Numbers*, 2009-2012

*Not park adjusted.
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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Spring Broadcast Schedule Begins Saturday
2. Mostly Unhelpful Video: Anthony Rendon, Homering

Spring Broadcast Schedule Begins Saturday
MLB.com has released the (tentative) schedule for all the spring-training broadcasts available through MLB.TV — which broadcasts are accessible via a number of connected devices, including PlayStation 3, XBOX 360, Roku, and Apple TV.

The schedule in question is available by clicking this hyperlinked text. Furthermore, by way of cultivating our collective enthusiasm, the author has reprinted below the first four games of the spring broadcast schedule (which starts on Saturday, February 23rd) and made note both of notable offseason arrivals and prospects in camp.

Washington at New York NL | 12:10 ET
• Notable offseason arrivals: Dan Haren, Rafael Soriano, Denard Span (Washington); John Buck, Collin Cowgill, Travis D’Arnaud, Shaun Marcum (New York).
• Notable prospects in camp: Anthony Rendon, Matt Skole (Washington); D’Arnaud, Wilmer Flores, Rafael Montero, Zack Wheeler (New York).
• Other notes: former pitcher and current first baseman Micah Owings has been invited to big league camp for the Nationals. Third base prospect Carlos Rivero was among the top hitters in the Venezuelan Winter League.

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Last week, the Seattle Mariners inked their ace, Felix Hernandez, to a $175 million extension for the next seven years. The dominating righty will be entering his age-27 season this year, meaning the contract will through his age-33 season. That is, unless, he injures his right elbow.

Embedded within Hernandez’s contract is a clause that gives the Mariners a club option for an eighth season — at a paltry $1 million — should Hernandez miss at least 130 consecutive days due to any kind of procedure to his right elbow. The Mariners negotiated this clause after some concern over what their doctors saw in the pitcher’s MRI.

Apparently, the club was reassured enough by their medical staff to sign the mammoth deal, even though the track record for long-term pitcher extensions isn’t the greatest. But how confident should the team be?
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Note: if Google spreadsheet below isn’t working, click here for one the author has uploaded himself after having modified only slightly from Szymborski’s original.

With the release last Thursday of the ZiPS projections for the Cleveland Indians, now all 30 major-league teams have been caressed tenderly by proprietor Dan Szymborski’s math computer.

While we wait — as if sitting atop some combination of pins and needles — for ZiPS to be added to the projection leaderboard area here at the site, Szymborski has released a spreadsheet including all the ZiPS projections for 2013.

Click this hyperlinked text to visit the full spreadsheet for the 2013 ZiPS projections.

In the meantime, some observations:

• Highest Projected WAR (Field Players): Mike Trout, 8.0

• Most Defensive Runs Saved: Craig Gentry, +15

• Highest Projected WAR (Pitchers): Justin Verlander, 6.4

• Lowest ERA: Craig Kimbrel, 1.57

• Yankees Prospect Corban Joseph: 579 PA, .242/.313/.389, 87 OPS+, 1.0 WAR