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Yesterday, I looked at five players who I thought would be significant bargains if they signed for the expected contract produced by the FanGraphs Crowdsourcing series. Today, let’s go the other direction, and look at five players who I think might be significant overpays at their projected salaries.

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The author has published each of the last four weeks (One, Two, Three, Four), in these pages, a statistical report on the Arizona Fall League not necessarily because such a thing is of great utility to prospect analysis, but more because, for those of us not currently present in the Greater Phoenix area, it’s one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league.

What follows, for the pleasure of the readership, is the fifth edition of this site’s weekly AFL statistical report.

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The newest manager in Major League Baseball is also not baseball’s newest manager, in that the Mariners have officially hired Lloyd McClendon to replace Eric Wedge, and McClendon has managed before, for about five years with the Pirates at the start of the millennium. The Mariners are still a young team, and on the face of it, it’s hardly surprising that they went with an experienced leader, since theirs is a team in need of leadership and since we’re all used to coaches getting recycled. But then, McClendon was the only one of the Mariners’ known candidates with prior experience managing in the bigs. Clearly, they didn’t make a track record mandatory. And by hiring the experienced guy, the Mariners actually bucked what seems to be a growing league-wide trend.

The Tigers just hired Brad Ausmus as manager, and he’s hardly ever been a manager, never having managed in the majors. In hiring Ausmus, the Tigers didn’t hire McClendon, who was an in-house candidate. The Nationals just hired Matt Williams to manage, and he’s only been a coach. The Reds promoted Bryan Price to replace Dusty Baker. Going into the recent past, the Rockies settled on the inexperienced but familiar Walt Weiss, the White Sox settled on the inexperienced but familiar Robin Ventura, and the Cardinals settled on the inexperienced but familiar Mike Matheny. In all of our heads, major-league teams value a managerial track record. The times, however, appear to be changing. Perhaps they’ve changed already.

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The “pure hitter” label befits Stephen Piscotty. The St. Louis Cardinals’ outfield prospect hit .341 in his three seasons at Stanford, and won a Cape Cod League batting title in 2011. He’s continued to produce line drives since being taken 36th overall in the 2012 draft.

Piscotty is coming off a productive first full professional season. Swinging from the right side, the 22-year-old hit .295/.355/.464 between High-A Palm Beach and Double-A Springfield. Helping dispel questions about his power, the former engineering major hit 15 home runs in 427 at bats. On the defensive side, he split time between center field and right field.

Piscotty talked about his hitting approach — including his improved power numbers — late in this past minor-league season. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk to former big leaguer Adrian Cardenas about why he decided to walk away from baseball shortly after making his MLB debut.

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Free Agency starts today. Well, sort of. Teams and agents are now allowed to start fully negotiating with each other, though they’ve been flirting with each other ever since the World Series ended, and no one really comes close to signing with a new team at this point in the off-season anyway. It’s kind of a symbolic opening, but it does bring with it one reliable event: the release of Top X Free Agent lists and predictions. Everyone does them, even though we’re all basically the saying the same thing — Jacoby Ellsbury and Robinson Cano are good players — and our predictions are all mostly useless.

We presented our version a couple of weeks ago, ordered by the total guaranteed dollars expected by our readers in our crowdsourcing project. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the prices or the ordering of the players relative to each other, but rather than present another Top 50 Free Agent list, let’s try something a little different. Today and tomorrow, I’ll go through the crowdsourced expected prices and present the players that I think are worth significantly more and significantly less than the crowd expects them to sign for. Today, let’s start with the guys who I’d target as values, if their market price was their crowdsourced expected signing price.

We’ll go in reverse order, because why not.

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What is the relationship between spin axis and the backup slider? Alan Nathan knows the answer. He also knows why fastballs move more than curveballs and why split-finger fastballs drop. A physics professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Nathan is an expert not only on nuclear physics, he is the man behind The Physics of Baseball

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You guys keep asking questions about FIELDf/x. You guys really want to get some information out of FIELDf/x. The unfortunate reality is that, right now, FIELDf/x is more of a concept than a tool, and on top of that, even if it were turned into something flawless, the data probably wouldn’t be made public. But you want some novel ideas or new presentations, like we all got out of our glimpse of HITf/x. And as much as it’s just commonplace now, don’t forget that PITCHf/x is amazing. So many fascinating projects, the instant PITCHf/x went public. It changed the way we all analyze. It changed the way we look at the game.

One of the first things that really blew my mind, personally, was being able to visualize the actual strike zone, as it’s called, and not as it’s supposed to be. We all had our ideas, but PITCHf/x allowed us to know, for fact. We could see which parts of the rulebook zone don’t get calls. We could see which parts outside of the rulebook zone do get calls. We could see that righties and lefties get different strike zones, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw the typical called strike zone for left-handed batters. There were a ton of called strikes leaking off the outer edge, some several inches from the plate. This has been established over and over again as a thing that happens, and those pitches are commonly referred to as lefty strikes. At this point many of us just take them for granted.

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