Look, there’s no way to begin this except with a little story. I don’t know how else I could get to the meat and keep you guys with me. From time to time, I like to play around with pitcher numbers when they’re facing other pitchers. It’s not super meaningful — little of my research is ever super meaningful — but it’s interesting to me, and it’s interesting that pitchers, at least some of the time, get to face hitters who are so tremendously worse than the rest of the guys in the lineup. It only makes sense to me to occasionally split those numbers apart.

Usually, I look at strikeouts. Strikeouts are the best indicator of dominance, at least over the smaller samples I generally encounter. I’ve written here before about how Gio Gonzalez one year put up some crazy strikeout numbers against pitchers in the National League. But something else that’s caught my eye a bunch of times is that I keep seeing the name ‘Wandy Rodriguez‘. As in, it seems like Rodriguez has been a strikeout machine against pitchers. Rodriguez has been a perfectly adequate starter, but I’ve never really thought of him as being unhittable, so his name stood out to me as slightly out of place. Eventually, this was something I knew I’d have to pursue.

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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 San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A haphazard inspection of the 29 ZiPS posts to have preceded this one reveals that only one field player (Mike Trout, at 9.5) is projected to produce as many wins in 2014 as Buster Posey. Andrew McCutchen also crosses the six-win threshold. Everyone else: less than that. Offensively, Posey has demonstrated excellent control of the strike zone and also power on contact. Defensively, he plays a difficult position and plays it well. That’s an ideal player, more or less.

Not entirely like Buster Posey is free-agent acquisition and probable left fielder Michael Morse. Other people smarter than the present author have questioned the wisdom of the Morse signing for the Giants. Germane to this post is that ZiPS renders objectively the reasons for those questions. Morse has one skill, his raw power, nor is ZiPS even particularly confident about that: the .162 mark projected here would only be fourth on the club, not much greater than the figures assigned to Roger Kieschnick and Brett Pill.

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The Cy Young Award.

The Jackie Robinson Award.

The Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award.

Players dream of earning these awards during their career. To be a part of the prestige and history of the game in that manner is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Then, we have the award named after baseball contemporaries.

Matt Klaassen started the Carter-Batista Awards (CBA) in 2009 to recognize those players whose offensive value is exaggerated by their RBI totals.  Joe Carter’s name is listed first because not only does he own the highest CBA score since 1990, he owns three of the top seven.
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Ben and Sam answer emails about an auction for playing time, Mike Trout’s plate approach, a contract that could kill baseball, and more.

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The Mariners lost Tom Wilhelmsen last year, not to injury, but to whatever it is that capriciously claims the effectiveness of relievers with otherwise quality stuff. In stepped Danny Farquhar, one of two guys the Mariners got for Ichiro in a deal interpreted as nothing other than a dump and a favor. At the time, the Mariners said they liked Farquhar’s new cutter he’d shown in the minors. He proved to be, you could say, up to the task. There were 125 relievers last year who threw at least 50 innings. Farquhar ranked sixth in strikeout rate, between Kenley Jansen and Trevor Rosenthal. He ranked fourth in FIP-, between Mark Melancon and Craig Kimbrel. He ranked sixth in xFIP-, between Aroldis Chapman and Rosenthal. As closer he had a 2.38 ERA. In no time, Farquhar established himself as perhaps one of the better relievers in the major leagues.

On Thursday the Mariners replaced Farquhar with free-agent Fernando Rodney. It had been rumored for months that the Mariners were interested in a veteran closer, and they got the last good one for two years and $14 million, with another possible million in incentives. The Orioles were a possibility, but it seems they’ll stay internal. For the Mariners, on the surface, it’s a strange move. Below the surface, it’s a perfectly reasonable move, that fits within the current market.

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Even a couple of days after the news broke about the Braves locking up Freddie Freeman to a $135 million contract, there remains a lot of residual skepticism about this price for a non-star player who was still three years from free agency. Yesterday I compared the deal to similar contracts signed by Ryan Braun and Elvis Andrus, but Freeman doesn’t have Ryan Braun’s track record and Andrus was a year ahead of him in service time, so both comparisons required a little imagination. The reality is that we haven’t seen a contract like this for a player like Freeman before. The guys who have landed $100+ million extensions while still early in their careers have almost exclusively been superstars (Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, and Buster Posey), and Freeman is not at that level. This is the first nine figure commitment we’ve seen to a player this far from free agency who isn’t already one of the true elite players in the sport.

The size of the Freeman commitment stands out because, over the last four or five years, we’ve seen a rash of young player contract extensions that have generally been for far less than what the Braves just gave their first baseman; in most cases, the total guarantees were half as large as what Freeman just got from Atlanta. It’s easy to react negatively to 8/$135M for Freeman when you see contracts like 7/$80M for Carlos Gonzalez, 6/$66M for Nick Markakis, 6/$51M for Andrew McCutchen, Justin Upton, and Jay Bruce, and a bunch of contracts hanging in the 5/30M range for good young pitchers like Madison Bumgarner, Chris Sale, Jon Lester, Derek Holland. These prices are what we’re used to seeing in terms of long term deals for good young players with potential but also real risk. Freeman’s deal blew all those contracts out of the water, even though as a player at this point in his career, he’s pretty similar to many of them.

So that leaves us with two options. Either the Braves massively overpaid Freeman — a pretty popular sentiment, it appears — or that players and agents have concluded that the previously agreed to price levels were simply too team friendly. I’m going with the latter.

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Two years ago, things looked to be headed in the right direction for San Diego. True, they were coming off a 91-loss 2011 season as they transitioned out of the Adrian Gonzalez / Heath Bell era, but the signs were at least pointing the right way. Keith Law ranked them as the #1 farm system in baseball, saying “in terms of total future value of players likely to play significant roles in the big leagues, they’re ahead of everyone else,” and “they are well-positioned to compete even with modest major league payrolls during the next five to six years,” thanks in no small part to the rewards reaped from the trades of Gonzalez and Mat Latos. Cameron Maybin had finally shown some of the promise that had made him a centerpiece of the Miguel Cabrera trade by putting up over 4 WAR, and so the Padres gave him a five-year extension. Nick Hundley took a big step forward with a .356 wOBA and 3.3 WAR, so San Diego bought out most of his remaining team control years too.

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Laser eye surgery has become a pretty routine procedure. Nothing’s yet been perfected, and fear comes from a machine slicing your eyes open, but patients are in and out in practically no time at all, and the risk of complications is incredibly low. And many of those complications are minor and/or temporary. It’s a safe and accepted part of contemporary living. Given that it involves removing tissue from one body part and weaving it into another, it’s something of a miracle that Tommy John surgery these days has a success rate even within sniffing distance of laser eye surgery. Of course, it’s not that automatic, and of course, there’s still the year-long rehab, but Tommy John surgery isn’t feared the way it used to be, and the results tend to speak for themselves. Certainly, among fans, it seems like the operation is simply seen as a year-long delay. Less devastating, more annoying.

To an extent, that’s justified. Surgeons know what they’re doing, the rehab track has been tested a million times over, and most pitchers are able to make it back and make it back effectively within the usual timetable. Sometimes they even feel stronger, perhaps because other parts of their bodies are able to heal while the pitcher isn’t throwing. But it’s important to understand that there can be speed bumps. Sometimes there can be even bigger obstacles. Recovery from Tommy John shouldn’t be taken for granted, and you could just ask Cory Luebke.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Reds or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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