Over the last few years, a common thought experiment among nerdy baseball fans has been to imagine what Mike Trout would sign for if he was a free agent. He was the best player in baseball before he could legally drink, and if the market had to price a player of his ability and youth, $400 million wouldn’t be out of the question. You could even make a case for $500 million if the contract was long enough. But it was all just fun mental gymnastics, a hypothetical that didn’t exist in reality.

However, Mike Trout isn’t the only historically special player currently dominating the big leagues. Clayton Kershaw has also put up numbers that few his age have ever matched, and since he’s only a year from reaching free agent status, we’re about to find out just what the market will pay for a young superstar on a Hall of Fame track.

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A few weeks ago I noticed hitters no longer improved, but instead their production only declined as they aged. Additionally, I answered at few questions on the first article in a second article. Today, I am going to look at the individual hitter traits to see which ones may be leading to the early decline.

First off, I will start off with some disclaimers.

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At the end of the 1972 season, Steve Carlton was awarded the NL Cy Young award for his efforts with the Philadelphia Phillies. He certainly earned it. He posted a 12.1 WAR, a 22% strikeout rate, and an ERA- of 56. What many voters and fans were looking at, however, was his wins — 27, the most in the National League.

That number is impressive for a different reason to my father. Steve Carlton’s 27 wins in 1972 are important to my dad because it is included in one of his favorite baseball tales, a not-so-secret weapon for dads — Steve Carlton won 27 games in 1972, the same year the Phillies won all of 59. For those keeping score at home, that means that Steve Carlton was awarded a pitcher win in 46% of the games that the Phillies won all together.

This is more in the “fun fact” category than the “useful information” one, but it’s an eyebrow raiser nonetheless. Still, I needed to set the record straight and, during the 14th or 15th time my dad relayed his trivia nugget I, politely, mentioned that pitcher wins perhaps aren’t as important of a stat as we once thought. This led to a discussion involving all the usual stuff statistically-minded people mention when discussing wins. We sort of agreed to disagree, I guess, but something still stuck with me.

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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 Chicago White Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

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

Batters
Despite having performed no rigorous analysis on the matter, the author nevertheless feels comfortable asserting that it’s difficult for a club that features just one above-average hitter — it’s difficult for that sort of club to win very much. Unfortunately, barring any sort of further offseason acquisitions, this appears to be the sort of club with which the Chicago White Sox enter the 2014 season. According to ZiPS, the next-best projected batting line after Cuban emigre Jose Abreu’s 129 OPS+ is the 97 OPS+ shared both by Adam Dunn and Avisail Garcia.

That Cuban emigre Jose Abreu’s No. 1 comp is Paul Konerko might amuse the reader — on account of Konerko is more or less the player whom Abreu is replacing, that is. This particular comparison also serves as a pretense upon which to remind the reader that all comparable players pertain only to the age-season into which the projected player is entering. So, for example, the season of interest regarding Konerko as it pertains to Abreu is the former’s age-27 one — which, besides a deflated BABIP, wasn’t a bad one.

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Ben and Sam discuss Delmon Young, then pick candidates to become the 2014 versions of 2013 players.

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People don’t really argue about Tom Glavine anymore. It’s been some years since he pitched, and we have younger, Troutier, Cabreraier things to argue about. But when people did argue about Tom Glavine — and they used to do it a lot — his critics routinely pointed to the same thing. And when Glavine was voted into the Hall of Fame just the other day on the first ballot, the old familiar argument popped up again in certain places. Glavine, many people believe, was a product of a strike zone that extended several inches off the outside of the plate.

An alleged strike zone, it should be said, that Glavine kind of allegedly earned. The theory is that Glavine established that area and was given the benefit of the doubt by the umpires because he could so consistently put the ball there. So, with his command, Glavine was said to get strikes on balls. That would be a credit to his ability, but that also puts hitters at a disadvantage, and a lot of people want to know how Glavine would’ve held up under a more uniform zone. There’s a belief that, had Glavine been more squeezed, he would’ve been punished more often. The only problem is that Glavine doesn’t seem to have been a product of his strike zone at all.

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We officially learned yesterday that John Axford had a tipping problem. Specifically, the Cardinals scouting staff noticed he had been tipping his pitches nearly the entire time they had scouted him. This is actually something that Axford himself hinted at during an interview in early September, as he explained to FoxSports Ohio.

Axford, who had lost his job as the Brewers’ closer early in the season, found another reason to be glad to land with the Cardinals in his first meeting with his new coaching staff. The Cardinals gave him some pitching advice — the specifics of which he declined to discuss — that he says immediately helped his performance. “When a team has been looking at you for five years, trying to kill you every single time you’re out there on the mound, they pick up on every little detail they can — what you may be showing, or tipping, or what you’re doing different,”

Maybe this quasi-intervention was what Axford needed to get the message, because this was not the first time this issue has come up in his career.

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For the second year, our friends at SABR are going to be giving away three Research Awards at their annual Analytics Conference in March, intended to honor the best baseball writing from the previous year. However, there is so much good baseball writing happening in all corners of the world now that it is impossible for anyone to read all of it. So, to make sure the nomination process is as thorough as possible, we would like to ask you for your help in rewarding those who published something particularly notable about the sport last year.

From SABR’s own website, here are the guidelines for nominations:

What are the best baseball analytics articles you’ve read in 2013?

We’re seeking nominations for the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards, which recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year in the following categories:

Contemporary Baseball Analysis: Honoring the best analysis focusing on a subject related to the modern game(s), team(s) or player(s).
Contemporary Baseball Commentary: Honoring the best commentary focusing on a subject related to the modern game(s), team(s) or player(s).
Historical Baseball Analysis/Commentary: Honoring the best original analysis or commentary focusing on a subject related to a game(s), team(s) or player(s) throughout baseball history.

Works of “Analysis” will be judged on the following criteria: thorough examination of the subject matter; originality of research; factual accuracy; significance in advancing our understanding of baseball.

Works of “Commentary” will be judged on the following criteria: distinguished writing; profound insight; factual accuracy; significance in advancing our understanding of baseball.

A work can be in any format except books, including but not limited to articles, columns, blog posts, television, film, websites, spreadsheets or databases, but it must have been first published in the preceding calendar year. No unpublished work will be considered. No work published, in part or in whole, prior to the preceding calendar year will be considered.

No work will be considered in more than one category. Multiple nominations can be submitted, but only one work per author will be considered as a finalist.

I’ve got a few pieces in mind that stand out to me, but we’d love to hear your suggestions as well. If you’d like to submit a piece to be considered for nomination, please include the category you believe the piece fits into, the author, the title of the article, the date it was published, and a link to the article. If it is not online, please provide a brief summary of the work and the best way to get access to the work.

Suggestions from any publication are welcome. We’re happy if you really liked something we published (and our own Bill Petti and Jeff Zimmerman won the Contemporary Analysis award last year), but if you think the best thing you read last year was published elsewhere, that’s totally okay too. The nomination deadline is tomorrow, so make sure you get your suggestions in today.