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This is the second in a series of posts looking back at the most significant events in what has been an unusually eventful year for Major League Baseball on the legal front. Part One reviewed the legal maneuvering surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s suspension and the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose. This part now looks at baseball’s minimum wage issues and two potentially embarrassing gender discrimination suits filed against MLB and its teams in 2014.

MLB Pay Practices

MLB’s allegedly unlawful pay practices were the subject of considerable legal scrutiny in 2014. Most significantly, in February the league was hit with the first of two class action lawsuits filed on behalf of former minor league baseball players, cases asserting that MLB’s minor league salary scale violates federal and state minimum wage and overtime laws.

In Senne v. Office of the Commissioner, the plaintiffs contend that MLB has violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by paying minor league players as little as $3,300 per year, without overtime, despite often requiring players to work 50 or more hours per week. Moreover, as the suit notes, minor leaguers typically are not paid at all for their participation in spring training, fall instructional leagues, or mandatory offseason workout programs. All told, then, the suit claims that most minor league players receive well below the federally guaranteed minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

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Episode 517
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the official 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 44 min play time.)

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Hello and welcome to the second half of this exercise, in which I do some of the work and you also do some of the work. Here’s a link to the first part, going over the American League. I think this is all pretty simple to understand. I’ll probably also do something like this again just before the season, when rosters are complete and we have more information in general, but we can still learn something from this, which asks you about the present situations, presently. And maybe any kinks experienced through these posts will be smoothed out by the time we re-visit in March. Are you ready to vote in 15 polls? Or, are you ready to vote in up to 15 polls?

Information’s based on the Steamer projections and the team depth charts. While free agents are still available, and while players will still get traded, this is asking about the roster situations right now, and not what you anticipate the roster situations to be by the end of spring training. Thank you all for your participation!

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Hello! Welcome to a post with 15 polls in it. Ordinarily, when you click on a FanGraphs post, it’s the author who’s done all the work. In this case, the author has done some of the work, but the work is to be completed by you, as this is an audience exercise. I’ll explain.

You know about the Steamer team projections. We use them a lot. They’re a super tool, for purposes of discussing, say, the highly active White Sox, or the highly active Padres, or the highly active Dodgers, or the so far highly inactive Orioles. When analyzing any transaction, we want to have an idea of how a given team looks, and the linked page makes it really easy. We’re always trying to project; Steamer has already projected. The depth charts have already depth charted.

But! Sometimes people disagree with the projections. Sometimes certain teams might seem way off. That’s what I want to gauge, here, with what I think are pretty easily understandable polls. There’s a poll here for each American League team, and I want to know what you think of their projections. I understand this is just based on Steamer, since we don’t yet have full ZiPS, and I also understand there are moves yet to be made. Max Scherzer won’t be a free agent forever. But I want to know what you think right now, based on conditions right now. I think there might be a lot to be learned from this. Alternatively, maybe there’s nothing to be learned from this. But the most important thing is, here’s content, and nothing has happened in baseball for like a week and a half, so, participate, please. I want to know where you think we’re wrong. People are always saying we’re wrong! This should be fun.

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Hiroki Kuroda didn’t actually retire, but he did for all intents and purposes. The 39-year-old free agent pitcher, most recently of the New York Yankees but also formerly of the Los Angeles Dodgers, decided to return to his former team, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, in his homeland of Japan. Kuroda had worked on one-year contracts each of the last four years — weighing the decision of whether or not to return to Japan heavily each season. This year, something tipped the scales.

It certainly wasn’t a matter of the demand for his services. Kuroda is coming off a three-win season and took just $3.3 million to play in Japan. It almost certainly is a matter of a nearly 40-year-old man simply desiring to go home, back to the place in which he grew up and lived for the first 32 years of his life. And back to the team he called his own for the first 11 years of his professional baseball career.

Kuroda was never the best pitcher in the league; he was never the best pitcher on his team. But he wasn’t supposed to be. What he was, was consistent. In an era where pitchers are more volatile than ever, Kuroda was anything but. Since coming to the USA in 2008, he made at least 31 starts in six of his seven MLB seasons. In the other, he made 20.
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At the end of last week, the present author examined the unusual career arc of former excellent right-handed pitcher Brandon Webb. Never regarded as a top prospect, Webb debuted at the beginning of 2003, led all rookies (including both pitchers and hitters) in WAR that season, and then proceeded to become one of the sport’s best pitchers over the next five years — despite a fastball that, whatever its other virtues, featured average velocity at best.

Certain readers expressed some interest in identifying who, among the league’s current pitchers, most resembles Webb — and, indeed, Dallas Keuchel (a name invoked by more than one commenter) appears to be the most obvious choice, insofar as he led all qualifiers in ground-ball rate by a wide margin while also producing an average fastball velocity of 89.7 mph (even as the league average among starters in 2014 was 91.4 mph). The strikeout and walk rates are both similar and, as for pedigree, Keuchel was a seventh-round selection out of college. Webb, meanwhile, was an eighth-round pick, also out of college. Keuchel, like Webb, never appeared among Baseball America’s top-100 prospects. So, really, except for handedness, the two feature decidedly similar profiles (except, one hopes, the injury profile).

For many similar reasons, Cleveland left-hander T.J. House, who posted a 60.5% ground-ball rate — distinguishing him as the only other pitcher with 50-plus innings as a starter to break the 60%-ground-ball threshold in 2014 — qualifies as a possible heir to Webb’s legacy. House, for his part, recorded almost identical strikeout and walk rates to Keuchel over his 10 starts this year and wasn’t selected until the 16th round of the 2008 draft.

So those are two active pitchers who possess more than a passing resemblance to Webb — and who, should they retain their health, ought to exceed by a considerable margin the production expected of players drafted in their respective rounds and throwing fastballs at their respective velocities and having been absent from top-propsect lists.

Of perhaps more interest for me, personally, is the idea of possibly identifying those Webb comparables who lack a body of work at the major-league level yet — or at least one as relatively substantial as either House or Keuchel.

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One of the things you’re supposed to learn about in a literature class is subtext. Subtext isn’t exactly a “hidden meaning,” but it’s the unspoken thematic uncurrent of a particular narrative or conversation. While the following will appear to be another post in a long line of posts about Jonathan Lucroy’s pitch framing (It is!), there’s a broader subtext driving the conversation as well that we’ll discuss at the conclusion.

The essence of pitch framing is well-established and relatively simple. Due to the imperfect nature of human eyes and the lack of a uniformly enforced strike zone, the way a catcher receives a pitch can influence whether that pitch is called a strike. Certain catchers have the ability to make balls look like strikes and to make sure that very few strikes look like balls. And certain catchers obviously lack this ability.

The way a catcher receives the ball influences the call, meaning good framers reduce the number of runs scored against their team and make their pitchers look great in the process. Jonathan Lucroy, catcher extraordinaire, is someone who seems to do this very well.

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Comment From Matt

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Like any multi-billion dollar organization, Major League Baseball faces its share of lawsuits in any given year. Even by its standards, though, 2014 was a particularly busy and eventful year for MLB on the legal front.

This week I’ll be reviewing and providing updates for the most significant events of the last year. In this installment, we’ll look back at the legal wrangling surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s season-long PED suspension and the on-going saga regarding the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose. Read the rest of this entry »