Ben and Sam preview the Rangers’ season with Jason Cole, and Pete talks to ESPN Dallas staff writer and blogger Richard Durrett (at 20:48).
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Michael Bourn was supposed to become a very highly-paid player. Then all the teams with center-field vacancies started filling them with other guys, leaving Bourn on the market. It was an impossible market to read, and, per usual, people started wondering if Scott Boras had overplayed his hand. Eventually there was talk that the Mets would be interested, if they could negotiate to have their first draft pick protected. So, for a short while, it looked like Bourn could sign with the Mets. But, instead, Bourn has now signed with the Indians, joining fellow free-agent acquisition Nick Swisher. And Bourn is going to be a very highly-paid player, if to a lesser extent than expected.
The terms are as such: four years and $48 million, guaranteed, with a vesting fifth-year option worth $12 million. Ages ago, the FanGraphs audience — that’s you! — projected that Bourn would sign for five years and $70 million. So, relative to expectations, Cleveland has done pretty well.
Episode 305
Though many have said it couldn’t be done, managing editor Dave Cameron — in this edition of FanGraphs Audio — analyzes baseball, entirely. Of note: reviewing some first principles from Cameron’s 10-best and -worst offseason transaction posts; everything regarding the Felix Hernandez extension; and the Francisco Liriano deal with Pittsburgh, if it’s a bargain in the way the Cubs’ Scott Feldman signing is.
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 35 min play time.)
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Last summer, Major League teams had to operate under the new rules imposed on amateur signings put in place by the CBA last winter. While international free agents had previously signed for whatever the market would grant, MLB imposed a $2.9 million spending cap on each Major League team. As Ben Badler noted over at Baseball America today, however, the Rays exceeded the limit and are going to face some significant penalties for doing so:
The CBA limited every team to a $2.9 million bonus pool for the 2012-13 international signing period that began on July 2. The strongest penalty in the CBA is that any team that exceeds its international bonus pool by 15 percent or more will pay a 100 percent tax on the overage and won’t be able to sign a player for more than $250,000 during the 2013-14 signing period. Since July 2, the Rays already have spent more than $3.7 million (not counting players signed for $50,000 or less, since there are exemptions for those players), which is 28 percent beyond their international pool.
As a result, the Rays won’t be able to sign anyone next year for more than $250,000 and probably won’t make any major international splashes until July 2 either because of the tax. Going well beyond the bonus pool is a curious move, but the Rays did pull in a considerable amount of talent, including arguably the two best 16-year-old pitchers on the market. Given that their 90-win season last year will give them one of the lower bonus pools for the 2013-14 signing period, which many scouts believe is shaping up to be a down year for international talent, perhaps it will be a worthwhile gambit.
The 100% tax means that the Rays will owe the league an extra $800,000, which isn’t a huge penalty, but the inability to sign any player for more than $250,000 next summer is a significant issue, and continues to show why the current international limits simply don’t work to promote competitive balance.
Players have begun to report to their various camps, and while whole entire teams aren’t yet together, spring training is officially on the doorstep, preparing to knock. For some, this is the most wonderful time; for others, this is a time most miserable. Soon, there will be practices, and then there will be games. When there are games, there will be statistics, and when there are statistics, there will be attempted interpretations of the statistics. There’s no such thing as a baseball number that goes by un-analyzed.
On countless occasions before you’ve probably seen attempted correlations between spring-training statistics and regular-season statistics. What we care about, after all, are those statistics that might be meaningful, so it’s important to check the spring numbers for meaning. Is there anything in there? Is it possible to identify imminent breakouts or collapses? Plenty of people have examined plenty of correlations. I know I’ve done it myself, and I didn’t come up with the idea. It comes around every year.
Bill Baer coined the term “Goldilocks Syndrome” to describe when we, as fans, get discouraged with a player or prospect because he isn’t perfect or what we hoped he would be, and Christian Bethancourt isn’t “just right”. Signed out of Panama in 2008, Bethancourt had elite potential behind the plate with good athleticism and an incredibly strong arm. The concern, however, was whether or not he could hit enough to even get the stellar defense to the majors, and four years after his signing, there are still serious concerns about Bethancourt’s bat, especially after hitting .243/.275/.291 in AA Mississippi. Bethancourt’s stock has predictably, and deservedly, fallen from the top prospect ranks, but while he’s no longer a “top prospect”, what can we still expect from him?
The chances of Bethancourt becoming a star have, indeed, fallen. One of Bethancourt’s most common comparisons is Yadier Molina because of their strong arms and inability to hit early in their careers, and the hope was (and still is to some degree) that Bethancourt can make the offensive improvements that Molina has.
Craig Calcaterra made me do something I have not done for a long time yesterday: think about Deion Sanders. Calcaterra’s post is worth reading in itself (at least click the link to see an incredibly time-bound photograph), as it is reflection on Buster Olney’s (annual) reflection (how meta!) on some interaction Olney had with Deion Sanders years ago as a rookie reporter. Okay, that sounds equal parts boring and confusing, but Craig makes it funny, at least to me. Leaving aside the mystery of why Olney makes this his annual Spring Training Kickoff Tradition and what it is supposed to mean (nothing against Olney; like Craig, I am simply baffled by the whole thing): man, it has been a long time since I’ve thought about Deion Sanders, especially Deion Sanders the baseball player.
My memories of that are pretty hazy, so others can recall various cool, fun, or just ridiculous Deion Sanders stories. I do not want to take that approach and end up with a car wreck of a post. Sanders had his moments on the diamond, and the whole part-time football/baseball thing is itself a curious artifact of the past. (The latter is worth a long post in its own right. “Well, sure, I could make millions guaranteed, but I think I’d rather spend part of the year doing something far more dangerous for non-guaranteed money.”) Leaving all of that aside, I was struck by just how unusual, especially these days, Sanders combination of skills was. What players recently have had seasons like Neon Deion at his best?
Last week, I presented my list of the 10 best transactions of the off-season. Of course, if there’s a best, there also has to be a worst, so today, we look at the flip side of the winter maneuvers. I will note, however, that this list was harder to put together than last week’s version, as MLB teams are getting smarter and there simply aren’t as many total head-scratching moves made anymore. No one’s giving out Gary Matthews Jr or Barry Zito contracts these days. The biggest potential landmine of the winter was paying Kyle Lohse as if his ERA represented his actual talent level, and every team in baseball decided to pass on that kind of signing. So, while I don’t love most of the moves below, several of them are more defensible than moves in previous off-seasons. The worst moves aren’t as bad as bad as they used to be.
Without further ado, on to the list.
Colorado might be the place that most made people aware that baseball works differently in different ballparks. It was pretty hard to deny the fact that, in Colorado, hit baseballs just took off. Since people became aware of Colorado playing in a hitter-friendly stadium, many people have also become aware of San Diego and Seattle playing in pitcher-friendly stadiums. Petco Park and Safeco Field are two of baseball’s newer parks, and to date they’ve played reasonably extreme. Because of their established pitcher-friendliness, both Petco and Safeco are having their dimensions adjusted this offseason. The idea isn’t to make the ballparks hitter-friendly — it’s to make them more hitter-friendly, or basically more neutral. You bring the fences in, and it follows that offense ought to go up.
Yet it’s interesting what we can observe in recent history. I can identify four instances in which fences were moved in somewhere with the idea of helping the hitters. Between 1994-1995, the Royals made adjustments at Kauffman Stadium. Between 2002-2003, the Tigers made adjustments at Comerica Park. Between 2005-2006, the Padres made an adjustment at Petco, which obviously wasn’t enough. And, between 2011-2012, the Mets made adjustments at Citi Field. Though simple park factors are imperfect and while in certain cases we’re working with limited data, the relevant numbers are of interest. We’ll go in order.
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.
1. Top Performers of the Australian Baseball League
2. Largely Unhelpful Video: Adam Buschini Homering
3. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Australian Baseball League
Top Performers of the Australian Baseball League
The championship series for the Australian Baseball League (ABL) took place this weekend, with Canberra defeating Perth, 2-0, in the best-of-three competition.
Here are the top performers of the ABL, per SCOUT (a metric explained below, but which, briefly stated, uses regressed inputs to help make sense of small samples).
Best Hitter: Adam Buschini
A native of Oakland, Canberra second baseman Adam Buschini was originally a fourth-round pick out of Cal Poly by the Philadelphia in the 2009 draft. After spending 2008-09 in the Phillies system, he was released by the club and found his way to independent ball, first with Chico (of the North American League) in 2011 and then with Amarillo (of the American Association) in 2012. This season in the ABL, Buschini almost doubled the home-run total of the next-best by that measure, hitting 15 of them to lead the league. San Diego appears to have recently signed Buschini to a minor-league deal.
