We’re in that awkward time between the true offseason, when most deals are made, and the spring, when all the Best Shape of His Life news stars flowing in. Let’s call it Projection Season, because we’re all stuck ogling prospect lists while perusing the projected numbers for the major league squads.

One of the most frustrating things about projection season can be the fact that most projection systems remain agnostic about change. Many of the adjustments the players talk about in season don’t take, or take for a while and then require further adjustment to remain relevant. So projections ignore most of it and assume the player will continue to be about the same as he’s always been until certain statistical thresholds are met and the change is believable from a numbers standpoint.

But projections do worse when it comes to projecting pitching than hitting, so there’s something that pitchers do that’s different than the many adjustments a hitter will make to his mechanics or approach over the course of a season. The submission here is that pitchers change their arsenals sometimes, and that a big change in arsenal radically changes who that player is.

Look at Greg Maddux pitching for Peoria in 1985. He’s not the Greg Maddux we know and love. Watch him throw fourseamers and curveballs. It was enough to get through the minor leagues, but, at that point, he’s barely throwing the two pitches that made him a Hall of Famer eventually.

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Pitchers are expected to lose command after Tommy John surgeries. Prolific base stealers coming back from hamstring injuries are expected to take it slow for a week or two before regularly getting the green light on the basepaths. A broken finger for a slugger is blamed for the loss of power; a blister for a pitcher might mean a loss of feel on their breaking ball. What is not well publicized, however, is how a player recovers from and reacts to returning from a concussion. For an injury that has been talked about in the media so often in the last few years, we know very little about the actual long-term, statistical impacts that concussions have on players that experience them.

Players often talk about being “in a fog” for some time after suffering a concussion – often even after they return to play. The act of hitting is a mechanism that involves identifying, reacting, and deciding on a course of action within half a second. With that in mind, I wondered: do concussions change the quality of a batter’s eye and discipline at the plate? Do brain injuries add milliseconds to those individual steps? Even though each injury is different, do varying lengths of disabled list stints due to concussions change a player’s performance on the field after they return? The most direct route to answering those questions might be studying the impact of concussions on strikeout and walk rates.

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You may have heard that football is in the midst of a bit of a concussion crisis. Not only is the National Football League facing a number of concussion-related lawsuits, but suits have been filed at the collegiate, high school, and Pop Warner levels as well. Meanwhile, both professional hockey and soccer are also facing their own concussion litigation.

Like football, hockey, and soccer, baseball is also – at times – a contact sport, and baseball players occasionally suffer concussions. In 2013, for instance, former outfielder Ryan Freel became the first professional baseball player to be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – the brain disease often associated with professional football players – following a career during which he reportedly suffered nine or ten concussions.

So it is reasonable to ask whether Major League Baseball could be the next league to face a concussion-related lawsuit, and if so, how such a case would compare to those in the other sports?

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Winter ball in Puerto Rico wrapped up at the end of January, with Javier Baez attempting to improve his plate discipline problems after a short stint in the majors at the end of 2014. That stint, as most of us are aware, featured him striking out 41% of the time he came to the plate. Unfortunately, Baez didn’t seem to improve that aspect of his game very much while playing for the Cangrejeros de Santurce, as he went 11-43 with five walks and 21 strikeouts during the regular winter season. For those without a calculator handy, that’s a 44% strikeout rate. His walk rate improved to 10% (6.6% in 2014 MLB), so we can say there was some positive news to be claimed from his time there.

We have barely enough plate appearances for Baez from the winter league to know whether these rate statistics actually hold water, and it certainly doesn’t bode well that Baez struck out so often in Puerto Rico against the quasi-equivalent of AAA pitching talent. He managed to strike out less often in the winter league playoff games, going 13-64 with four walks and 18 strikeouts – a 26% strikeout rate that again is from a small sample size, and still not great, but an improvement. The Cubs decided to pull the plug on him in winter ball after the playoffs, preventing him from playing in the Caribbean Series after Santurce won the Puerto Rican Championship. If we combine the regular winter season and playoffs, we get this line for Baez:

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It’s prospect season. Over at FanGraphs, we released our Top 200 Prospects list yesterday; last week, Rob wrote about flipping through the recently released Prospect Handbook from Baseball America. It seems like everyone is currently in the process of ranking and grading minor leaguers, speculating about which ones are going to become the stars of tomorrow.

But as Rob pointed out last week, most of the guys we’re so excited about now are never going to pan out. Quoting his piece, which in turn quotes BA’s Handbook.

“In the 2011 Prospect Handbook, we detailed the depth of the Royals’ top-ranked farm system, which we also featured on the cover of the March 2011 issue of Baseball America magazine. No team had ever placed nine players in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects before, and group – both as big leaguers and through trades – helped form the core of the Royals’ 2014 American League pennant winners.

Turning a losing franchise into a winner – that’s why prospects matter.”

Here are those nine guys who made the Top 100 list: Eric Hosmer, Wil Myers, Mike Moustakas, John Lamb, Mike Montgomery, Christian Colon, Danny Duffy, Chris Dwyer, Aaron Crow.

I will pardon you for being underwhelmed.

Rob is right; the Royals had one of the most celebrated farm systems of all time, and a majority of their prospects haven’t done jack squat in the big leagues. Some of the guys who weren’t as highly heralded have become stars, and the Royals are absolutely an example of why prospect development can help turn a franchise around, but even in boasting of a clear success story, there are examples of failure everywhere.

In fact, according to most of the research done on prospect rankings, the failure rate for players ranked within Baseball America’s Top 100 approaches 70%. Even selecting the cream of the crop, theoretically the guys we should have the best information on, seven in ten fail to become significant big league contributors.

This seems like a lousy success rate, and it’s one of the reasons why there is significant pushback against the rising valuations teams are putting on minor league players with no big league track record. For example, the Phillies have been frustrated by the market’s unwillingness to surrender the kinds of talent they believe Cole Hamels is worth, and likely the kind of return he would have brought even a few years ago. The relative values teams are placing on on big league stars and minor league prospects has shifted towards the young kids, even as most of them continue to fail.

Even JABO’s own Ken Rosenthal has argued strongly that prospects are currently being overvalued in trade negotiations, and that teams should not be so afraid to part with their best young talents. That 70% failure rate supports these suggestions; why be so attached to an asset that is more likely than not going to lose all of its value?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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You know the difference between control and command? Mariano Rivera is why the difference exists. Some pitchers are good at throwing strikes; Mariano Rivera was good at throwing Rivera strikes, which were simply strikes where Rivera wanted them to be. They looked a lot like any other strike, and pitch to pitch you wouldn’t really notice a difference, but over time, pitches pile up, and locations really matter. No one has located quite like Rivera, and you can guess the effects. Or you don’t have to, since Rivera’s career is complete and we have a full statistical record, but anyway. Because Rivera could locate, he could make certain numbers work in his favor.

Yeah, he struck guys out. Yeah, he didn’t walk guys much. Those are the basics. But Rivera was also skilled at allowing weaker contact than your average other guy. One of the reasons we’re usually skeptical of BABIP-suppressing skill is that most pitchers just aren’t good at hitting the same spots over and over. Rivera was one of the exceptions. He limited the singles, and he limited the non-singles.

Let’s take a look at something. PITCHf/x captured only the last few years of Rivera’s career, but Rivera was still outstanding when the cameras were installed, so we have a good amount of data. Let’s consider balls in play that Rivera allowed on pitches that were out of the strike zone. (Thank you, Baseball Savant.) You know what those balls in play are? They’re worse balls in play. Worse, relative to pitches over the plate.

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Two bits of news spread almost simultaneously Monday night: Bruce Chen signed somewhere for a minor-league contract, and Barry Zito had signed somewhere else for, also, a minor-league contract. This is the season of minor-league contracts, as the pool of available free agents has been reduced to a puddle on an otherwise dry concrete foundation. But of those names still out there, Chris Young has a certain intrigue. If Chen and Zito can find opportunities, it stands to reason Young should find one as well. Right?

Certainly, his agent has been called. Certainly, there have been feelers. And it’s not a complete mystery why Young remains unsigned. This is Chris Young, to the naked eye:

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We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

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