Last week, we took a look at the upcoming free agent hitters that may or may not be tendered a qualifying offer by their current teams. I’m going to borrow the intro that I used in that post, so if you read that piece, just go ahead and skip down to the discussion of the pitchers.

For some background, Jeff Sullivan wrote up an explanation of the Qualifying Offer process last year, but the nuts and bolts are pretty simple: for teams with free agents to be who have been on their roster all season, they can make them an offer for one year equal to the average salary of the Top 125 paid players in MLB, and then the player has one week to explore their market and decide whether to accept the offer from their current team or continue on in free agency with draft pick compensation attached.

Last year, the qualifying offer was equal to $13.3 million, and teams tendered it to nine players: David Ortiz, Josh Hamilton, B.J. Upton, Hiroki Kuroda, Rafael Soriano, Nick Swisher, Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Adam LaRoche. All nine players declined the offer, and in each case, they ended up with better deals than accepting $13.3 million for just one season.

This year, the average is expected to go up slightly, reaching the $14 million mark or something close to it. So, let’s take a look at this free agent class and see who is worth that kind of offer, and since we’ve already covered the hitters, let’s look at the arms this time.

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Remember when a seven-year, $126 million deal seemed pretty crazy? Sure, Jayson Werth’s similar contract (signed prior to the 2011 season) does not exactly seem great (although he is having a nice year) these days, either, but back during the 2006-2007 off-season, when Barry Zito signed with the Giants, it seemed utterly insane. It was not simply that it was, at the time, the biggest contract ever signed by a pitcher. Prices go up — hot dogs cost more now than ever before, and I do not see any moral panic about that phenomenon. It was that Zito seemed like a poor choice for such a deal. Sure, he was a three-time All-Star and the 2004 American League Cy Young winner. He was durable, as he had pitched more than 210 innings six seasons in a row for the As. However, Zito was going to be 29 in 2007, and his strikeout and walk rates, which had never been all that impressive, seemed to be getting worse. It looked like it was going to be an albatross.

It was. Although he has had his moments over the last seven seasons, as a final cherry on top (insert a joke about the 2014 option here), Zito’s 2013 season has been one more blow to the contract year theory of player performance. In the last season of his notorious contract, Zito has had the worst year of his career. He lost his rotation spot in August (although he received another shot in the rotation for a few starts later). Zito’s time with the Giants is drawing to a close, and he is not going to get a ceremonial final start at home, if that was something someone wanted. This is not meant as a career retrospective. Instead, I want to look at something that Zito seemed to have in Oakland, something that probably played a big part in the Giants’ willingness to give him the contract, something which seemed to depart after he made the move: his ability to outperform DIPS metrics.

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

1. A Leaderboard with Yusmeiro Petit’s Name in It
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

A Leaderboard with Yusmeiro Petit’s Name in It
Belabored Introduction
At a point in the not very distant past, right-hander Yusmeiro Petit was an actual, if slightly confounding, prospect, having compiled a 429:75 strikeout-to-walk ratio and 2.76 ERA in 346.0 minor-league innings through his age-20 season, during which season he recorded the large majority of his innings at Double-A. That he produced such high strikeout rates with a fastball that sat at 88-90 mph (or perhaps even lower) was regarded as a minor mystery. In any case, he appeared on Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list in both 2005 and 2006 — itself no small accomplishment.

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Ben and Sam discuss (again) whether Mike Trout or Bryce Harper will have the better career, then talk about where they would rank today’s top pitchers and position players for the future.

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Watch enough baseball and you’ll start to think of yourself as something of a scout. You’ll think that you’re an attentive observer — that you can pick up on things, individual strengths and weaknesses. In my younger days, I thought I was pretty good about identifying hitters who struggled with low, away sliders. You know the types, and you know the swings. In truth, everybody struggles with low, away sliders. Some struggle more than others, but righties have trouble with low, away sliders from righties, and lefties have trouble with low, away sliders from lefties. Executed properly, it’s almost the perfect pitch. It breaks away late, so it looks like a strike, often in a defensive count. Yet swinging is virtually futile — if you don’t swing through the pitch, you’ll put it in play pretty weakly. A well-thrown low, away slider is a ball, but usually, it’s a strike, or an out. There’s no hitter in baseball who can resist it on a consistent basis. It’s too potent a weapon.

What follows is the story of a Yasiel Puig home run.

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I recently posed a question to five hitters, four hitting coaches and a manager who once swung a potent bat. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Whether a right answer exists is a matter of interpretation.

Is creating backspin a skill?

The question was originally posed in a presentation at last month’s saberseminar in Boston. Alan Nathan, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois and the creator of The Physics of Baseball, said he doesn’t know the answer. He does know the science involved, which he explained as follows:

“The spin of a batted ball affects its trajectory. For example, when a ball is hit at a moderate launch angle typical of long fly balls, say 25 to 35 degrees, backspin keeps the ball in the air longer so it can carry farther and improve the chances for a home run. When a ball is hit at a low launch angle — typical of line drives — say 10 to 15 degrees, topspin makes the ball take a nosedive and reduces the chance that an outfielder can catch up with it before it hits the ground.”

The players’ and coaches’ responses are below. Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Top Games for All the People
2. Today’s Complete Schedule

Top Games for All the People
Introduction
Nothing debilitates the bespectacled reader like serious bodily injury. Beyond that, however, nothing debilitates like the prospect of having to choose which game to watch leisurely from one’s couch. The author has hopefully done something to combat these grievous conditions by providing below the curated list of today’s top games.

New York NL at Cleveland, 1:05pm ET
Last Saturday, Cleveland had something not unlike a 10-15% chance of making the playoffs in some capacity (i.e. by winning the division or qualifying for the wild-card game). Science informs us that those odds are much closer to 50% at the moment. “Life can change by upwards of 40 percentage points,” is the universal message one derives from these recent events. Impossible to ignore with regard to this game is how young and hard-throwing Danny Salazar is starting it for Cleveland.

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

1. Much-Awaited Return of the Corey Kluber Society
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Much-Awaited Return of the Corey Kluber Society
The Purpose of This Post
The purpose of this post is to announce a meeting — in this case, at 6:05pm ET today (Saturday) — of the Corey Kluber Society.

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to what you’re doing now. If you’re reading this, this is what you are doing. This is not what you were doing before — I don’t know what you were doing before. This is not what you will be doing soon — I don’t know what you will be doing soon. There is, literally, a world of options. But what you’re doing now? It’s this. Maybe you intended it this way. Maybe you just wound up here, somewhat unconsciously, because you’re distracting yourself from work or you’re distracting yourself from boredom. Do you know how many things you do a day you don’t think about? Of course you don’t. You don’t think about them. But there are a lot. Quite a lot, for some. Reading this today might be one of them. Or if you’re here on purpose, thanks! You are sweet.

It’s time to look at five wild swings, from between August 23 and September 5. As a reminder, I was away last Friday; as another reminder, I’ll be away next Friday, so the following edition of this will also cover two weeks. What did we get from the last two weeks? Some wild swings, and some regular swings that don’t get talked about here. And lots of pitches that weren’t swung at, even a little bit. Here, five awful swings at breaking balls out of the strike zone. A couple checked swings I excluded: Wilkin Ramirez vs. Danny Duffy, and Evan Longoria vs. Ivan Nova. I’m pleased with what we’re left with. I still wish I could write about someone swinging at a pitch at his eyes, but those don’t really come up under this methodology. And that seldom happens. I’ll probably have to dedicate a post specifically to that in November. For now, not that! For now, this! Also, here’s the series archive. Links are important on the Internet.

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