Baseball has always had its share of eccentrics. Mark Fidrych talked to the ball. Moises Alou urinated on his hands to get a better grip on his bat. Then there was Turk Wendell, about whom the Chicago Tribune wrote:

Consider this a partial list:

He doesn’t wear socks on the field. He waves at the center-fielder before each inning. He brushes his teeth between innings. He makes three crosses with a finger in the mound dirt before he pitches. When the inning is done, he sprints from the mound, leaps sideways over the foul line and spits out what appears to be four pounds of black licorice.

And he eats the same dinner at the same restaurant chain the night before every start: French onion soup. Peel-and-eat shrimp. Broccoli bites. Salad. Garlic sticks. Four-cheese lasagna. And something called `Death by Chocolate’ for dessert.

“I eat it all in about 15 minutes,” he said. “I say, `Bring it out all at once.’ “

The Only Nolan may have topped them all.
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Coming into the 2013 season, Neil Wagner was a 29-year-old right-handed reliever with all of five big-league innings under his belt. Prior to signing with Toronto last November, he had bounced from the Indians to the A’s to the Padres. A former 21st-round pick out of North Dakota State, he was a minor-league journeyman.

With the help of his trusty notebook, Wagner became a bona fide Blue Jay. After beginning the campaign in Triple-A Buffalo, where he logged a 0.76 ERA and 16 saves, he ended up being one of the most-reliable arms in the Toronto bullpen. Called up in late May, he went 2-4, 3.79 as one of the few pleasant surprises on a underachieving team.

Wagner talked about his stat-influenced road to success when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park in September. Read the rest of this entry »

As Miami infielder Ed Lucas himself has reminded the author, Miami infielder Ed Lucas ought to be included among the minor-league free agents who recorded a 0.5 WAR or better in 2013. Lucas had previously been employed by the Angels.

Such authorities on the matter as Paul the Apostle and late American singer Whitney Houston have suggested — sometimes in more, sometimes in fewer words — that love is the greatest gift of all. It’s quite possibly the case, that. Actually testing the hypothesis presents difficulties, of course. That said, one hears few arguments to the contrary.

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Robinson Cano just turned 31, and the FanGraphs crowd expects him to sign an eight year contract this winter that will take him through 2021, his age-38 season. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he lands a nine or ten year deal, as Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols did a couple of years ago, and ends up getting signed through age-40. And it’s not a controversial statement to say that Robinson Cano is unlikely to still be a highly productive player at that point in his career.

Any team that signs Cano this winter is going to be be guaranteeing him in the range of $25 million per year for years in which Cano should reasonably be projected as a below average player, and maybe even a guy who shouldn’t be starting for a big league team. The negotiations for his services are essentially going to center around how many years a team is willing to guarantee Cano a significant paycheck while expecting almost nothing in return. The team that eventually gets to sign him will be the team that gives him the most “dead money” years.

This is what free agency for elite players has evolved into. Instead of negotiating on annual salary, the market has evolved to negotiate on years. Let’s look at some data, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

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Here’s the simplest smart offseason rule of thumb: it should never be about specific improvements. It should be about improvements, however. No team needs to go out and try to land some right-handed power hitting. Those teams just need to get better. No team needs to go out and try to land a left-handed starting pitcher. Those teams just need to get better. The St. Louis Cardinals don’t necessarily need to replace Pete Kozma with a superior shortstop. They just need to get better, and if they get better somewhere else, great. They should get a shortstop. But they don’t need to get a shortstop to have a good offseason, is the point. When it comes to improving, it pays to be as open-minded as possible.

But even if we all know that to be true, we still feel in our hearts like we wish our teams had more of one or two things. We tend to want more dingers, or more defense, or more quality baserunning, or less attempted baserunning, or more flamethrowers in the bullpen. We think a lot in terms of acquiring specific skills, even if that isn’t or shouldn’t be the point, and these days one more specific skill we can quantify is pitch-receiving. There are fans out there who are rooting for their team to sign a good framer of pitches. Or, rooting for their team to not sign a bad framer of pitches. Pitch-framing is a thing we think we understand, now, and below, I’m going to share with you the framing numbers for this year’s crop of free-agent catchers. You can thank Matthew Carruth and StatCorner.com. I was left to do just the easy work.

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Ben and Sam talk to author Kevin Kerrane about the Dollar Sign on the Muscle reprint and the world of scouting.

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Some people, surely, are being racist when they draw comparisons between Masahiro Tanaka and Hiroki Kuroda. Some other people, surely, are being not racist, but lazy, failing to look much beyond country of origin. But it is neither automatically racist nor automatically lazy to compare the two starters, because it turns out the comparison is a pretty good one. Masahiro Tanaka has a lot in common with Hiroki Kuroda, and Kuroda has been quite good from the get-go, and Tanaka is entering an offseason in which he might stand to have a higher price tag than Yu Darvish.

What Tanaka doesn’t have is Darvish’s raw stuff. On top of that, he hasn’t put up quite the same numbers in Japan, so there’s a reason people aren’t talking about him as potentially the next best starting pitcher on the planet. But there’s more money in baseball now than there was then, even though “then” wasn’t long ago, and among the teams looking to land an impact starter are some of the richest teams in the league. This isn’t going to be the offseason of Masahiro Tanaka, but it’s going to be the offseason with Masahiro Tanaka, and he ought to be the kind of pitcher who can alter a playoff race.

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Although the end of regular baseball is sad for both fans who blog and those who do not, for the former it at least provides a time to look back on the season and write about certain achievements. For me, it is a nice time to whip out some silly awards based on toy stats. On Monday, we looked at 2013’s Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award winner, which compared RBI totals with linear weights runs created. Today, we look at a more specific situational stat that someone (not me) suggested a few years back and that I have looked at annually. It is not the same thing as clutch, but does use situational metrics to see how much a player contributed on offense beyond what is measured by traditional linear weights, in this case by looking at the specific game states the player faced. For better or worse, we call the winner of this award the King of the Little Things.

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You don’t need me to tell you that the Houston Astros are a terrible baseball team (162-324 over the last three seasons), and you probably already know why. GM Jeff Luhnow and his growing collection of former internet baseball writers have committed to a full-scale, ground-up rebuilding of the talent-sparse organization he found himself with when he was hired in December 2011. That meant trading everything he possibly could for young talent, and it meant going with a young, inexperienced, and inexpensive — down to around $13 million total late in the year — roster as they sacrifice a watchable major league product in service of an increasingly bright future.

That strategy, one that I imagine a majority of FanGraphs readers understand and embrace, has been a source of some controversy in the larger sports world, with semi-regular stories popping up here and there accusing the team of not respecting their fans while they skimp on players and pocket the savings.

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