Over the last three years, we’ve previewed the upcoming season by going position by position around Major League Baseball, looking at the how teams stack up to their various competitors at each spot on the diamond. This format provides a bit of a different look than a traditional team or division based preview, and gives us the ability to do some things that you might find in other outlets. For instance, by starting at the position level, we can see exactly where a team’s strengths and weaknesses lie, and identify some areas of for potential upgrade as well.

Additionally, by not just focusing on the starter at each position, we’re able to compare and contrast different strategies for manning a particular position on the field. How will one team’s everyday player compare to a left/right platoon? Or is a team with a hot young prospect on the way up in line for a second half upgrade once the service time issues are out of the way? What teams have enough depth to sustain quality performance in case of an injury? These are the kinds of things we can readily identify through this series.

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Ben and Sam preview Boston’s season with Providence Journal Red Sox beat writer Tim Britton, and Sahadev talks to Boston Globe writer Alex Speier (at 27:48).

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Travis Snider is a breakout candidate. Sound familiar? He’s owned the label for years, and maybe – just maybe – this will be the season he finally explodes. It’s not implausible. Somehow, Snider is still just 27 years old.

Skeptics will surely scoff at the idea, but the 2006 first-round pick feels ready to come into his own. Acquired by the Orioles in the off-season, the former Toronto and Pittsburgh outfielder is settling into his swing after nearly a decade of trying to reinvent the wheel.

‘I think I’ve had about eight different swings in eight years,” Snider told me on Friday. “In the last two years, I’ve been working toward recreating the same swing as much as possible.

“It’s about trying to create a consistent swing through the zone that can cover pitches in different quadrants, and not just be a low-ball hitter, or an inside hitter, or an outside hitter. Understanding, and being able to adjust to, the way pitchers are attacking you is often more important than mechanics.”

Mechanically, Snider said he’s concentrating on allowing his hips to clear and his hands to flow through the zone. He cited Miguel Cabrera as a hitter who can generate torque with his lower half, thus allowing his top half to uncoil. Snider admits to sometimes falling into the habit of trying to use every muscle in his body instead of taking a smooth, effortless swing. 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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The Orioles are projected to have the seventh-best offense this season, and they had the seventh-best offense last season. Yet looking at the offenses projected to be better and slightly worse than the Orioles reveals something interesting about Baltimore, and how you can take it one of two ways. We’ll get to that part later.

First, let’s go through and examine just how many players on each team are projected to have a positive and negative batting runs above average.
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Episode 540
The host’s 94-year-old grandfather, a guest on FanGraphs Audio when he was merely a 91-year-old and 92-year-old and also 93-year-old grandfather, is the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, as well — recorded live on tape from his (i.e. that same grandfather’s) condominium in Jupiter, Florida.

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 41 min play time.)

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I want to put to rest the discussion about the lack of right-handed power in Major League Baseball today. There has been a lot of anecdotal commentary about how scarce right-handed power has become, but there haven’t been too many analytical articles supporting this idea. If anything, the handful of articles that have been written question if the problem even exists in the first place. There are two different arguments about this topic: the first is that right-handed power is scarce — that is to say left-hand power is bountiful — but right-hand power is not, while the second argument, which I won’t address today, is that relative to left-handed power hitters, right-handed power hitters have declined in number.

In a hypothetical choice between players of equal talent, you would almost always prefer a left-handed power hitter to a right-handed power hitter, since the lefty will have the platoon advantage more often and should be more productive as a result. There are valid arguments concerning rounding out line-ups, but right-handed batters are not scarce; good left-handed hitters are actually the scarce commodity.

For reference, the general population is estimated at having a left-handed rate of 10%, while baseball has a left-handed rate among batters is about 33%; lefties are overrepresented in baseball.

This is a box plot of the various player-seasons from 2010 until 2014. I’ve chosen this time span since it’s recent and it falls after the implementation of PITCHf/x, which improved the measurement of the strike zone. I’ve excluded switch hitters for simplicity, and set a floor at 200 plate appearances.

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I don’t have to be talked into writing posts about Dellin Betances. If I just supplied 10 consecutive GIFs of his fastball followed by his breaking ball, we’d probably all walk away happy (don’t worry, there will be plenty of GIFs). It’s special when a pitcher comes along and dominates major league hitters with just two pitches. It’s something to be celebrated. Yes, Betances has had a tough spring so far compared to his 2014 performance (a four inning sample size will do that), but there’s no denying the leap he took last year in regard to control that elevated his game to an elite level.

Our 2015 projections have him regressing a bit in terms of that control, but that’s bound to happen when a player shows such vast improvement in one year over past chronic issues. However, this isn’t an article discussing his projections for this coming year, though they are stellar. Today, we’re going to go over Betances’ repertoire, then try to find contemporary comparisons for one of his pitches. That’s hard to do given the quality of the offerings he has and the numbers he puts up, but we’re going to try anyway. Why are Betances’ two pitches so successful, and who has a curveball that moves like his? Let’s find out.

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Over the last 40 seasons, there have been 752 player seasons where a reliever pitched at least eighty innings out of the bullpen and averaged at least 1 1/3 innings pitched per appearances. Last year was the first and only season of the last 40 where not a single player met that criteria. Increased reliever specialization and larger bullpens have minimized the long reliever, and those who have been given the long reliever role tend to be the low man in the bullpen hierarchy. That was not always the case, and the decreased offensive environment could be a good opportunity to reintroduce the good long reliever to baseball.

In the not too distant past, long relievers were a regular fixture on teams. Relievers making regular appearances longer than two innings has always been a rarity, but some teams had relievers truly earning the the title of long relievers. From 1975-2014, just 110 relievers pitched at least 80 innings and averaged more than two innings per appearance, but those seasons have all but disappeared in the last two decades.

Strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 are omitted
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