It’s become well-known that minor league players earn meager salaries. Little attention has been paid to the earnings of the instructors responsible for their development. They’re not getting rich either.

Salaries at the big league level are fairly generous. Some managers make seven figures. Hitting and pitching coaches are paid anywhere from $150,000 to $350,000, with a select few earning far more. Bench coaches earn between $150,000-$250,000. Third base coaches are around $130,000-$140,000. First base coaches are in the $100,000-$110,000 range. Bullpen coaches bring home roughly $90,000.

It’s a different story down on the farm.

Minor league coaches get paychecks year round – unlike minor league players — but that doesn’t mean the majority can afford to spend their winters on the golf course. One baseball lifer I talked to said he managed in the minors for over a decade and never made more than $42,000 a year. He worked camps and substitute taught in the off-season to help make ends meet. Others manage winter ball in Mexico or Venezuela to earn extra money.

Not everybody I spoke to would get specific with salaries, but a front office type told me his club pays minor league coaches and managers a minimum of $35,000. Another put that number at $30,000. Multiple sources estimated the high end to be in the $150,000-$175,00 range, with long-time managers and coordinators typically at the top of the pay scale.

Player development staff salaries vary by organization. One contact cited the Marlins as a team that pays poorly, and the Braves as one of the more generous. Qualifying that he doesn’t know the exact difference in dollars – he’s with another club – he said, “That’s why Miami has a lot of turnover and Atlanta doesn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Episode 531
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses his recent trip to the Dominican Republic and also his forthcoming top-100 prospect list.

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 56 min play time.)

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Some weeks ago, I was tooling around on the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, and one thing led to another, and I noticed that Marcus Stroman had developed a sinker that looked and worked an awful lot like Roy Halladay’s sinker. It was a pitch that just came to Stroman during the course of the 2014 season, and he debuted it early in the second half, and this is the FanGraphs post that resulted. Blue Jays fans derived a modest thrill from seeing Stroman compared to one of the best franchise pitchers ever.

This week, I’ve run some posts calculating certain pitch comps. I’ve developed a method that’s different from the method I used when I compared Stroman and Halladay, and here, you can see, for example, the best comps for Sonny Gray’s curveball. I thought today I’d put Marcus Stroman under the microscope. Stroman is a genuine six-pitch pitcher, and here’s his second-half breakdown, by usage, according to Brooks Baseball:

• Sinker: 32%
• Four-seam: 23%
• Curve: 16%
• Cutter: 15%
• Slider: 8%
• Changeup: 6%

For each of the six pitches, I calculated the best comps, out of right-handed starting pitchers during the PITCHf/x era, spanning 2008 – 2014. The results are absurd. Marcus Stroman has got some weapons. Consider him excessively armed and absolutely terrifying.

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At times, last season felt particularly rough for young hitters just getting their feet wet. There were problems in Boston, where, for example, neither Jackie Bradley nor Xander Bogaerts performed anywhere near the level of expectation. In St. Louis, the late Oscar Taveras had trouble getting into a groove and earning a regular job. Javier Baez mostly looked like a mess for Chicago, and for all the hype, Gregory Polanco eventually came up to join Pittsburgh and underwhelmed. Nick Castellanos was fine, but nothing revelatory. Billy Hamilton had a terrible second half. Jake Marisnick didn’t hit, and Jon Singleton didn’t hit, and so on and so forth. There’s nothing quite like top prospect hype, and there’s nothing quite like watching a top prospect struggle to hit at the highest level, after all the anticipation.

In each case, there was just anecdotal evidence, but put enough anecdotal evidence together, and you have a story. For at least several months, people have been discussing the theory that there’s a widening gap between the major leagues and everywhere else. Alex Speier is currently writing about this at the Boston Globe. There are reasons to believe this to be true; there are elements to playing in the majors that haven’t always been present. Most importantly, there’s more information than ever, so young players don’t show up as unknowns. Reports get generated, and reports get spread, and, faster than ever before, opponents are able to zone in on a given hitter’s weaknesses.

The feeling is that the majors have never been this hard for rookies. The feeling is that rookie hitters are facing an uphill battle, and hitting a baseball is no walk in the park even at the best of times, where you’re facing Kyle Davies in Colorado. There are feelings, and then there’s information. Let’s see what we can do with this. How have the majors lately been treating rookie bats?

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

I returned a few days ago from a three-day trip to the Dominican to see top July 2nd prospects (more on that in the coming weeks) and also a workout that had 18 Cuban players in it. Two of those 18 were big-time prospects, the well-known and hyped 29-year-old 2B Hector Olivera and the brand new name, 18-year-old righty Yadier Alvarez.  Here’s my notes and video on those two, along with some quick updates on the other two notable Cubans on the market, 2B/3B/CF Yoan Moncada and 2B Andy Ibanez.

For reference, in my top 200 prospects list that is coming next week, these Cuban players aren’t included on the list, but Moncada would be 8th, Alvarez would be 57th and Ibanez would be in the 150-200 range, while Olivera is ineligible due to his age and experience.

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Yesterday, I covered the moves of the winter that I liked the most. Today, we look at the moves that I like less, though I’ll note that this year simply doesn’t have the collection of clear mistakes that last year’s list had. While there were some transactions this winter that probably won’t work out that well, the risk associated with a lot of these moves is significantly lower than the ones we saw a year ago. No team really screwed themselves this off-season the same way the Rangers did last year with their Prince Fielder/Shin-Soo Choo acquisitions, and the free agent overpays seem to be getting smaller each year.

So, in reality, most of these moves are more suboptimal than outright disasters. Perhaps there were better alternatives each case, but the downside potential is often limited here, and a good amount of these will probably end up not having a major negative impact on their clubs.

In that spirit, no (dis)honorable mentions this time around; let’s just get straight to the moves that I didn’t particularly care for this off-season.

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed, once again, by FG+ editor Eno Sarris.

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“Tom Seaver, he had the whole package. Power, deception, command, everything,” said Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti last week before FanFest. We’d been talking about tipping pitches, and deception, but any time you hear about an icon in the same sentence as Yusmeiro Petit, you put down your recording device and start looking at some moving images.

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