Minor-league contracts don’t really matter all that much in baseball, no matter how much some fans might think they do. Each year, teams sign dozens of guys to non-guaranteed deals that may or may not include an invite to major league camp, and much of the time you never hear those names ever mentioned again after March. It’s not an official FanGraphs rule that minor-league deals aren’t worth covering, but it might as well be; when Delmon Young got a guaranteed contract from Philadelphia last year, there was a post about it. When the Orioles made him an NRI last week, there wasn’t.

Yet here I am, talking about Milwaukee’s decision to add Mark Reynolds to the first base mix on a non-guaranteed contract, partially because it seems likely that he will have a real impact on the team this year, and partially because of what it says about the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitch-framing! Am I right? It’s still very much a fascinating subject, which is one of the reasons I write about it so often. But by this point we have a pretty good idea who’s good at it and who’s bad at it. That ground’s been covered. We know that Jose Molina is great. We know that Ryan Doumit was a problem. Yet we can break things down further still. Often, people don’t go beyond describing a guy as good, bad, or okay. But there are actually specific types of framers.

Which makes plenty of sense, doesn’t it? There are great hitters and there are bad hitters. Among them, there are guys with tremendous plate coverage, but there are also high-ball hitters and low-ball hitters. Every part of the zone area is different, and every player is different, so we should expect that different players respond differently to pitches in different parts of the zone. How this relates to framing is that some guys might be better with receiving high pitches, while other guys might be better with receiving low pitches. Intuitively, why not? And thanks to some awesome updates at Baseball Savant, this couldn’t be much easier to examine.

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The other day, in making room for John Buck, the Mariners designated for assignment a player named Carlos Peguero. This means absolutely nothing to most of you, but absolutely something to some of you. Peguero’s out of options now, so in order to return to the minors, he’ll have to make it through waivers. Peguero clearing waivers is a decent possibility. What’s clear, at this point, is that Peguero is unlikely to develop into a big-league star slugger. What’s simultaneously clear — what’s been clear all along — is that Peguero has big-time raw upside, not unlike such predecessors as Wily Mo Pena and Wladimir Balentien. Jesus Colome got jobs because of his fastball. Peguero will get jobs because of his power.

For those of you unfamiliar with Peguero, you’re most certainly familiar with his general player type. But still, I’ll summarize him in two images. The first is a video:

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Clayton Kershaw signed the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history on Wednesday. In doing so, he became the first player in MLB to agree to a long term deal for an annual average value of more than $30 million, so on a per season basis, he’s also the highest paid player in baseball history. And he got that deal a year before he was eligible to hit free agency, so this price reflects a discount over what the Dodgers believe he would have gotten with competitive bidding. Given these facts, it’s easy to look at this deal as a harbinger of escalating prices and further proof of significant inflation in Major League Baseball.

Interestingly, however, it’s really not that at all. I walked through Kershaw’s expected value about a half hour before the contract was announced on Wednesday, and my guess for the total price came out to $230 million over seven years, a little less than what he actually signed for, but also didn’t include the value to Kershaw of getting to opt-out after year five. Including that offsetting value, I think my guess was pretty decent.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
While not having realized the Sisyphean task of winning a World Series, GM Neal Huntington et al. have constructed a Pirates club that both (a) qualified for the playoffs in 2013 and also (b) would appear to have a reasonable chance of repeating that outcome in 2014.

If the Pirates don’t make their way to the postseason this year, it likely won’t be the fault of their field players. Per ZiPS, Andrew McCutchen is a candidate to win the 2014 MVP award after winning it in real life this last season. Beyond him is a collection of average-or-better players and also Gaby Sanchez. Combining the latter with Andrew Lambo (or maybe Jaff Decker or maybe Travis Snider) in a platoon might even render the club’s first-base position as average.

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Ben and Sam discuss Fat A-Rod and instant replay, then answer listener emails about Babe Ruth, Roger Clemens, and the darkness that lurks within all of us.

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I’m not gonna lie to you — I’d love to be writing about something more compelling. Perhaps some unexplored Clayton Kershaw angle, or perhaps something else entirely. At the end of the day, traffic does have to be there, and traffic follows entertaining, easily-understandable blog posts. It doesn’t so much follow posts about what it’s like, statistically, to pitch to a rookie in Major League Baseball. But we’re all just slaves to the ideas that we have at any given moment, and after I messed around earlier with league-wide leaderboards, I felt the urge to keep messing around in the same place. I promise this is just a phase.

Earlier I did what I could to investigate whether or not veteran pitchers and veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt from home-plate umpires when it comes to the called strike zone. Those are theories I’ve heard repeated time and time again, and they were easy enough to look into. That got me thinking about other well-worn baseball theories, and I wound up growing curious about how big leaguers have approached rookies, relative to how they’ve approached non-rookies. Do rookies get fed a steady stream of breaking balls? Alternatively, do they get fed a bunch of fastballs in the zone? Is there any meaningful difference in how rookies are pitched to? It didn’t take a lot to put some numbers together.

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Episode 415
Pete Beatty (@nocoastoffense) is a founding editor of The Classical and also a former not-founding editor of Bloomsbury Press, in which capacity he helped to publish Craig Robinson’s excellent Flip Flop Fly Ball. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 42 min play time.)

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Yesterday, the Dodgers signed Clayton Kershaw to a seven year, $215 million contract, or, if you prefer, a six year, $195 million extension, as they already owned his rights for 2014 at an arbitration price of around $20 million. That’s the amount that the Dodgers have guaranteed to pay Kershaw anyway, but I don’t know that it’s really all that accurate to describe it in that way, because there’s a pretty good chance the deal is actually going to end up as a five year, $150 million contract (or an extension of 4/$130M) when all is said and done. That’s because Clayton Kershaw is the latest to join the recent trend and get an opt-out clause negotiated into his deal; he can choose to void the final two years of the deal after the 2018 season if he so chooses and become a free agent again heading into his age-31 season.

Kershaw joins teammates Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu in having received opt-out clauses from the Dodgers, so this is clearly something LA is comfortable negotiating into their deals in an attempt to outbid other suitors. Texas also gave two opt-outs to Elvis Andrus in his long term extension signed last year, so Kershaw is the fourth player in the last year to receive a guaranteed paycheck but also the right to reset the terms if he stays healthy and performs at a high level over the next few years.

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A little earlier, I played around with some strike-zone data. There’s a theory out there that umpires are more willing to give veteran pitchers the benefit of the doubt when it comes to called strikes. I wanted to investigate that, and sure enough, I was able to turn up a modest effect related to age and experience. However, my suspicion is that this has less to do with doubt benefits, and more to do with pitcher command. It makes sense that more experienced pitchers would be better command pitchers, and it makes sense that better command pitchers would end up with a little called-strike benefit given what we understand about good and bad pitch-framing, and so on. It’s something that could be investigated further, and I’ll think of what I did as a simple starting point.

Now, if we’re going to look at pitchers, we should also look at hitters. Just as there’s a theory that veteran pitchers get the benefit of the doubt, there’s also a theory that veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt, in the opposite direction. In short, a lot of people believe that umpires are biased in favor of age and experience. I don’t know where this comes from, but enough people have repeated it that it’s worth a quick look with the numbers we have available. Once again, what follows isn’t exhaustive, but once again, it should get us started. If there’s any kind of major effect, this study should be able to find it.

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