Aroldis Chapman doesn’t throw all the hardest pitches in baseball, but he does throw most of them. Last year, PITCHf/x captured 41 pitches of at least 102 miles per hour. Of those, Chapman was responsible for 27. He throws the kinds of rockets that make even rival spectators gasp, and indeed, the heat has long been his calling card. It’s one of the most exceptional abilities in the game.  Chapman throws a lot harder than just about anyone. But what if he didn’t?

In a sense, this is a hypothetical. In a sense, this can be investigated. What if we chopped a few miles per hour off Chapman’s average fastball? We can’t know for sure what that pitcher would actually be like, but we can make something of an educated guess, based on Chapman’s history. So let’s try it, just to see. Big thanks to Brooks Baseball for making this fairly easy.

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On Wednsesday, I gave my thoughts on the 10 moves from this past off-season that I liked the most. Today, we’ll look at the other side, and cover the 10 moves that most made me scratch my head.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about MLB’s blackout policy, the Phillies and the NCAA, missing triples, the save rule, and more.

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When Ryan Dempster walked away, it was pretty clear what the Red Sox needed to do. Though Dempster’s salary was too high, the pitcher served an important function as swingman and rotation depth. So it was up to the Red Sox to find a replacement, and the most obvious replacement on the market was Chris Capuano. Capuano was both a starter and a reliever just last year, and with Boston, he could compete with Felix Doubront for the fifth rotation slot in camp. In short, it’s not a surprise at all that, Thursday, Capuano and the Red Sox agreed to terms, pending a physical.

What’s more of a surprise are the terms themselves. Capuano signed for one year, despite having looked for two earlier in the offseason. And his guaranteed base salary is just $2.25 million, with incentives that could push the deal up to a maximum of $5 million. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because the Red Sox just won the World Series. Granted, there might’ve been a discount because Capuano grew up in Massachusetts. But if there were substantially bigger offers out there, it stands to reason Capuano would’ve taken one of those, so it’s curious that he was available so cheap.

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At this rate, every person in the metro Atlanta area will receive a long term deal from the Braves before the end of spring training. Their extension spree continued today with a seven year, $58 million deal for shortstop Andrelton Simmons that will keep him locked up through his age-30 season while also providing some new benchmarks for both inexperienced players and defensive specialists.

For the Braves, this deal is very similar to the contracts they’ve already agreed to with Freddie Freeman, Julio Teheran, and Craig Kimbrel. In each case, they prioritized locking up the player’s prime years for the right to not be on the hook for the age at which we expect their skills to begin to deteriorate. For reference:

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As much fun as it can be to criticize, the reality is that nearly every decision made by an MLB organization is justifiable. It’s a competitive business, after all, with great potential rewards, so organizations have to look out for themselves, and they have to make sure they’re going down the right path. Decisions have to be made rationally, intelligently, and that’s what makes the occasional transaction so extraordinary. There was simply no reasonable explanation for, say, the Angels trading for Vernon Wells. Likewise, there was no reasonable explanation for the Tigers getting so little for Doug Fister. These decisions have stood out specifically because of how unambiguously bad they were. Decisions of that ilk are few and far between.

The Phillies, as an organization, are no stranger to criticism. This is a team that has yet to rebuild, the same team that gave Ryan Howard way too big of a contract. It’s an aging team, a team that’s easy to mock, a team that might believe it’s more than it is, but the latest issue with the Phillies has nothing at all to do with the payroll or major-league roster. It has to do with the draft, and with the Phillies turning in unsigned collegiate players to the NCAA for dealing with professional agents.

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As I approach the wrong side of thirty, I find myself shifting preferences when it comes to video games. While my earlier days were filled with shooters or the latest Madden game, I now play more low-key offerings. I’ll still throw in a Bioshock ever now and again, but my game playing time is for more serene these days. Less quick-twitch shooting, more strategy. I play a lot of Civilization V. I play a lot of Out of the Park Baseball. And lately, I’ve been playing a LOT of Kerbal Space Program.

Kerbal Space Program is a sort-of simulator in which you control an alien race that is trying to explore space. You build rockets, achieve goals, and push to discover as much as possible. It’s insanely fun. In fact, as I typed those last few sentences I had to fight a strong urge to save what I was writing and fire the game up again. You start off with small goals — break the planet’s atmosphere, achieve gravitational orbit, land on one of the planet’s moons, etc. But after all that is done, it’s time for interplanetary travel. This is where things get tricky. Not only do you need to design rockets that toe the fine line between needed fuel and mass, you need to check and double check every stage of your rocket to make sure things execute as desired. You don’t want to leave one of your adorable cosmonauts floating around in space with no fuel to get home. There’s a ton of planning and designing to do and when you’re confident you have what you need … you wait.

See, when you’re ready to go to another planet, you can’t shoot out of the atmosphere willy nilly and go. You have to be in proper alignment. If your destination is behind the sun relative to your location, you can’t point and shoot. The stupid sun is in the way. Also, there are gravitational forces at work. In order to conserve fuel, you need to have gravity work for you. Therefor, your destination must align perfectly with your point of origin in order to assure proper trajectory. In Kerbal Space Program, this means waiting. This also means the takeoff windows are fairly small. When the planets align, you have to be ready. This, of course, is a terrible and terribly long analogy for baseball and player development. I could go longer, but I won’t. Instead, I want to talk about Xander Bogaerts. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time, Max Scherzer had been heralded as a future superstar. It was his bonus demands more than anything else that drove him down to the Diamondbacks’ 11th overall pick in the 2006 draft. Though he made quick work of the minor leagues, there were some speed bumps along the way, and he was part of a three-team deal that landed him in Detroit prior to the 2010 season. His peripherals screamed “superstar” early in his major league career – high K rate, couple with a high popup rate. In 2012, the K rate jumped to another level, and in 2013, everything fell into place, resulting in his long-awaited breakout and a Cy Young Award. He did everything but pitch his first career complete game. (Seriously.) Let’s take a look at a couple of pitchers with some very interesting peripherals who have a chance to “pull a Scherzer” in 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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 Rangers 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 / Atlanta / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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