The Blue Jays may have won the winter by acquiring Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin, but no team has lost the spring more than Toronto, who saw young hurler Marcus Stroman tear his ACL in a workout on Tuesday morning. Surgery to repair the ligament will cost him the entire season, and opens up a gaping hole in in the Jays rotation; even though he was young, Stroman projected as the team’s best pitcher, and one of the best pitchers in the entire league.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, speculation immediately began to link the Blue Jays and the Phillies, who have been waiting for an opportunity just like this to convince a team to pay dearly for Cole Hamels. GM Alex Anthoplous was pretty quick to downplay that idea, however; after stating there are few aces available this time of year, he added “Actually there might be one, but I don’t know that we can afford that right now.” For now, at least, it seems the Blue Jays will look in-house to replace Stroman.

Young hurlers Daniel Norris and Aaron Sanchez are likely to get much longer looks now, and with Stroman out of the picture, at least one of the two likely break camp in the rotation, with the other fighting Marco Estrada for the last starting spot on the team. Unlike the young guns, Estrada doesn’t possess a particularly strong fastball, and certainly has the least upside of the three. But if the Jays really are going to stay with what they have, then I’d argue that Estrada might be their best option to replace Stroman, at least in the short-term.

There’s no question that Estrada was terrible in Milwaukee a year ago, particularly with his inability to keep the ball in the yard; he allowed 29 home runs in just 150 innings. When you don’t locate an 89 mph fastball particularly well, it often gets crushed, and Estrada looked like he was throwing batting practice for a large portion of the 2014 season. Estrada’s entire game is about commanding the top of the strike zone, and last year, he simply missed his spots too many times.

But there are reasons to think that, even with a mediocre fastball, Estrada’s up-in-the-zone preference can actually work to his advantage. While the result of this style of pitching is often a home run problem, that negative can be offset by inducing a large number of infield flies, which are basically equivalent to a strikeout. And few pitchers in baseball generate popups at the same rate as Estrada.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Power is still king when it comes to getting paid. On the pitching side, power pitchers anchoring staffs are paid well. On the hitting side, power hitters are among the highest paid players in Major League Baseball. The defensive positions like catcher, shortstop, and center field are highly spoken of, but nobody gets paid like first basemen and corner outfielders. The defensive spectrum as well as the WAR positional adjustment tends to go, from most difficult to least difficult, C-SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B. However, when it comes to getting paid, the opposite is true.

Using the FanGraphs Depth Charts, and the salary information from Cots at Baseball Prospectus, I took a look at every projected starter in the majors and their salaries. I added designated hitters in the American League as well as closers and the highest paid pitcher for all teams. While the highest paid pitcher is not necessarily a team’s best pitcher, it is an easy proxy in this case. Where a team received money from another to help pay for a player’s salary, only the salary paid by the team employing the player was counted. The money paid by the other team is not included in their own figures.

Top starting pitchers lead the way by a decent margin followed by first basemen.

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Last year, Cincinnati’s two middle of the order bats both had back leg injuries that robbed them of much of their power. Because of the complicated nature of swing mechanics, maybe it’s not surprising that both sluggers were affected differently by left leg injuries. But they did suffer.

“I saw a lot of ground balls to the right side of the infield results last year and I had a difficult time hitting within my typical profile — power to left field,” said Joey Votto this week in Arizona. “The pain was a limiting factor.”

When pushed to describe exactly how his left quad strain affected his swing, Votto spoke of a lean in his stance. “Being able to lean heavily on my back leg and be able to rotate the knee through and also lean at an angle” was important to the slugger — “I think that I buy myself a little extra space on the back side of the strike zone by being able to lean.”

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Read an article about Yasmany Tomas from before he signed with the Diamondbacks, and most of them will say something along the same lines about his profile. The power was thought to be real, maybe a 70 on the 20-80 scale; the contact skills might be uncertain; and while the arm could potentially be a plus, it was far from certain where he he’d fit on the defensive map.

That’s evident, really, in just how those reports described his position. In September, Kiley McDaniel listed him as a left fielder. In October, Baseball America’s Ben Badler said that he “had the defensive attributes to fit in either corner spot.” After Tomas signed with Arizona, Keith Law also talked about him as a corner outfielder. Dave Cameron even noted that “some teams felt that he profiled more as a DH.” Other than a few tossed-off occasional mentions that he’d played some small amount of first and third earlier in his youth — 30 games at third in 2008, primarily —  just about no one expected him to be an infielder.

Except for the Diamondbacks, that is. Due in part to their own evaluations of him, in part due to a crowded outfield, and in part due to a third base situation unstable enough that longtime second baseman Aaron Hill played his first games since 2005 at the position last year, Arizona almost immediately announced that they’d like Tomas to play third base.

It’s March 11, so we’re not going to pretend that we’ve seen enough of Tomas to make a determination as to whether he can handle the position or not. But we haven’t seen nothing, either, and considering where he came from, it’s the first time most of us are able to see real actual game video of him. Considering how the Diamondbacks are set up, where he ends up is going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Nationals’ rotation, team projections they disagree with, the most interesting eras to cover, and more.

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This is something I’ve already shown you before. I mean, this, specifically, is not, but this is a slightly sharper version of the same graph. Team wins vs. projected team wins from the past decade:

Right, so: the Angels exceeded their preseason projections by the most. The Cubs undershot their preseason projections by the most. By the projections, over the decade, the Angels should’ve won 48 more games than the Cubs. What actually happened was that the Angels won 150 more games than the Cubs. That’s pretty wild. We can also take this a little deeper.

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Earlier today, I published the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. The thought has been that, at best, the results might have some predictive value regarding future good major leaguers; at worst, that they’d at least document the origins of the league’s best players.

In the third part of the series — an examination of which college conferences had produced the most good players over the last five years — I noticed that the Pac-12 Conference was responsible for an inordinate number of talented second baseman. Jason Kipnis, Dustin Pedroia, and Chase Utley were all drafted and signed out of Pac-12 schools — and Ian Kinsler had been compelled to leave Arizona State for Missouri only because he was displaced at shortstop by Pedroia.

Collectively, those four players have produced 75 wins since 2010, averaging just over 4.0 WAR per every 600 plate appearances. Of the 50 player-seasons of three wins or better* produced by second baseman since 2010, they’re responsible for 16 (i.e. nearly a third) of them. And this is merely accounting for those second baseman who were members of Pac-12 schools. Ben Zobrist, another college product who’s played mostly second base, has recorded another five good seasons. Danny Espinosa, Dan Uggla, and Rickie Weeks have all also recorded multiple good seasons by this measure.

*Or what I’ll also refer to as a “good” season throughout the remainder of this post.

That seemed like a lot of college players developing into good major-league second basemen. On account of I’m paid to do such things, I endeavored to determine if it really was.

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This time, at least, it’s a little different. Yu Darvish sustained an injury while pitching. Cliff Lee sustained an injury while pitching. Gavin Floyd, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, so many of the others — they sustained their injuries while pitching. Marcus Stroman sustained an injury while fielding. His throwing arm is completely fine. His throwing arm, also, is completely useless to him at the moment, because you can’t pitch through a torn ACL. The freak injury will knock Stroman out for the duration of 2015, and though he should be good to go after that, the calendar says “2015” right now, and we’ll be without something we all thought we’d have. Stroman, like the others, has been taken from his team, and he’s been taken from the game.

There’s also that other twist. Darvish is a devastating loss, but then, the Rangers didn’t seem particularly poised to challenge for the playoffs. Lee would be another devastating loss, but even with him healthy, the Phillies looked like a mess. Floyd was just re-injured, and the Indians could win the AL Central, but the Indians also have a ton of pitching depth, and they knew Floyd was a risk. The Blue Jays had dreams of winning the World Series. Stroman figured to be the No. 1, and the team didn’t look deep with him. This is a massive blow, and it’s a massive blow to a team right on that win-curve position where a massive blow can be the most massive. People are mourning this. It’s not that much of an overreaction.

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