Luke Weaver dominated high-A in his first full professional season. In 19 Florida State League starts, the St. Louis Cardinals’ 2014 first-round pick had a 1.11 WHIP and a 1.62 ERA.

There was no opportunity for the lanky righty to prove himself in Double-A. He didn’t make his first 2015 appearance until mid-May — according to St. Louis assistant GM Michael Girsch, there was “no specific injury” — and the club proceeded to keep him in the FSL for the entire campaign. Wanting to augment his innings — Weaver spun 105 at Palm Beach — they subsequently sent the 22-year-old former Florida State Seminole to the Arizona Fall League for further seasoning.

Weaver, who gets high marks for his changeup and his ability to command the strike zone, discussed his development late in the AFL season.

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Weaver on his build and his delivery: “Right now, I’m 6’ 2” and about 175 pounds. I work on getting bigger and stronger, but that’s not something I see as an absolute must. I accept how I’m built. Being loose and agile are tools that I can use to my advantage.

“My delivery is long and loose. I have a coil with my leg and throw across my body — I just kind of sling it in there. I don’t know exactly who I’d compare my windup to. The coil isn’t extreme — it’s not a Cueto or a Lincecum — but rather more like an Arrieta, where he kind of has that sideways coil.”

On his curveball and his slider: “My innings were down a little bit, so they wanted me to tack on a few more (in the AFL). They also wanted me to come here to get more reps on my slider. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I wrote about a trade rumor that, on paper, didn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Ken Rosenthal and Marc Topkin both reported that the Rays and Rockies were discussing a deal centered around Corey Dickerson and Jake McGee, and they’re the kind of reporters who don’t just say things for the fun of it; when they throw names out there, it’s because there is some substance behind the report. And so not surprisingly, two days later, the weird trade rumor is now a weird trade.

McGee heading to #Rockies as part of package for Dickerson, according to @Joelsherman1. Minor leaguers also involved.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 28, 2016

Source: Deal is McGee and a minor-league pitcher to the #Rockies, Dickerson and a minor-league pitcher to the #Rays.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 28, 2016

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Just gonna go ahead and borrow from a colleague:

I wonder what kind of odds you could have gotten on “Doug Fister and Rich Hill will sign almost the same FA contract” 12 months ago.

— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) January 28, 2016

Rich Hill signed for a year and a guaranteed $6 million. He’s nearly 36 years old, and he just started all of four games for the Red Sox, and before those, he hadn’t made a start in the majors since 2009. Doug Fister, meanwhile, has now signed for a year and a guaranteed $7 million, with the Astros folding in some additional incentives. He’s nearly 32 years old, and between 2011 – 2014, he had roughly the same RA9-WAR as Max Scherzer, Jon Lester, and Zack Greinke. In this past season, Fister wasn’t terrible, and he didn’t undergo any surgeries.

Compared to Hill, Fister obviously has the track record. He also has age on his side, and more 2015 big-league innings, and yet the market wasn’t excited. We’re left with Fister signing for only an incrementally larger guarantee, and it’s because the market is forward-looking, and Fister is a mighty big question mark.

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If you go to our leaderboards and click on “career,” you’ll get a sample of 3,879 qualified position players, and 2,988 pitchers. If you lower the playing time threshold down to zero on each, you end up with 16,824 and 9,127. Now, obviously there’s some overlap in those numbers, but the point is that at least 16,000 players have suited up for a major league game. In that context, when I note that only 472 players total (314 position, 158 pitcher) have crossed the 40 WAR threshold, you can see it’s a big deal. It’s more or less the top-500 players in the game’s history (you can fill in the gaps — and probably then some — with Negro League players for whom we don’t have WAR or any advanced metrics).

That’s not to say there’s a lot of fanfare with getting to 40 wins. No one throws you a party, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything to the person. But since we know that 50 WAR is sort of the dividing line for whether a player can be a Hall of Famer (as I noted recently, there are plenty of players in the Hall of Fame who barely cracked the 50 WAR plateau, and I believe there are even some in who are below it), then 40 WAR is sort of the dividing line for whether we’ll argue about a player being deserving of the Hall of Fame. Well, for everyone except relief pitchers, anyway.

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Ben and Sam banter about a Salvador Perez extension and a strike-zone change, then discuss the rapid reversal of the Athletics’ clubhouse and what it might mean for the Nationals.

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In 2015, there were fewer pitchers (74) qualifying for the AL and NL ERA titles than in any season going back to 1995 (70). In any given season, the number of first-time ERA qualifiers is about a quarter of that population. This last year was no exception, as 18 pitchers qualified for the ERA title for the first time.

What was unique about 2015 was the high quality of those first-time ERA qualifiers. AL first-timers included Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar, Taijuan Walker, Collin McHugh, Trevor Bauer and Marco Estrada. Their NL counterparts included Jake Arrieta, Jacob deGrom, Gerrit Cole, Kyle Hendricks, Carlos Martinez and Michael Wacha. There are some heavy hitters on those two lists; you might have to go back to the Class of 1984, which boasted Dwight Gooden, Orel Hershiser, Mark Langston, Mike Moore and Oil Can Boyd among its members, to find a comparable group at the top.

Beginning last week, I have reached reach into the large population of zero-time ERA qualifiers to identify the top breakthrough candidates for 2016 in both leagues. Last week, we took a look at the Orioles’ Kevin Gausman. This time around, we’ll switch over to the senior circuit and hone in on the Reds’ Raisel Iglesias.

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College baseball season begins in roughly a month. For some readers, this is of little consequence. For others — even for those with no particular stake in the competition itself — it’s quite meaningful. In either case, what the college game facilitates is the opportunity to watch actual live baseball over a month before the regular major-league season begins. It also features a number of participants who are likely to appear, one day, in those same major-league games. Because, consider: 19 of the 42 players selected within the first round of the 2015 amateur draft were selected out of a four-year university. The figure is roughly half in most other years, as well.

The present author made a habit last year of publishing periodic statistical reports of dubious import for the top college conferences. I’ll continue that same practice this year when the season commences in late February. For the moment, however, I’d like to publish a different kind of report — still totally dubious — regarding the possible future value of certain college players. Or player, singular, in this case.

When watching a college game, one is naturally led to ask, “Which of these players is most likely to end up as a major leaguer — and not just to appear in the majors, but to thrive there?” There are certain clues, of course: some of them based on observations of a player’s tools, some on the sort of success which one can identify in the numbers.

Last year around this same time, Jeff Sullivan performed a simple, useful experiment with simple, important consequences. His object: to better understand the relationship between young players and their future success as professionals. Instead of examining the major-league production of former top prospects, however, Sullivan inverted the line of inquiry. Instead, he opted to focus on players who have already experienced success in the majors, and then to review how those same players were regarded as minor leaguers.

What if, instead of players, one were to begin with merely one player? One would write a post very much like the current one, is what.

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12:02

the eno, the one, the matrix: eno time –

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We’re born into this world kicking and screaming. Being just seconds old, we’re confused and afraid, and being just seconds old, crying is the only way we know to cope with these anxieties. Even now, we’re all still babies — just really big ones who have better learned how to productively deal with our stressors.

Adult life is a constant stream of setting goals and either reaching them, or not. Throughout the course of a day, we’ll set dozens, if not hundreds, of goals, most of which are instantly resolved. Folks tend to think of “goals” as these overarching narratives — “lose 10 pounds this month” or “read a couple dozen books this year” or “save up enough money to buy a new car” — but even thoughtless, menial tasks like make the bed or pay a bill are really just miniature, easily attainable goals, set throughout the day, that provide us small bursts of satisfaction when they’re achieved.

Things don’t always go our way, though. And when things don’t go our way, it’s human nature to produce a response. Noted psychologist Richard S. Lazarus defined stress as “nothing more (and nothing less) than the experience of encountering or anticipating adversity in one’s goal-related efforts.” While the newborn deals with its stress the only way it knows how — crying — we as adults have developed myriad ways to cope with our adversities.

* * *

To spin this into a baseball metaphor, a batter has a goal when he steps to the plate to begin an at-bat: to reach base safely. Then, even smaller goals are created, as snap decisions are made during the act of each pitch: the moment a batter decides to swing, his newest goal becomes to make solid contact. On the contrary, the moment a batter decides not to swing, his goal becomes to earn a called ball.

For instance, a batter sees a 3-2 pitch, and he has a decision: swing, or take. Either one will produce a different goal, a goal that will be resolved instantaneously. When the batter faces adversity in that goal he’s set — say, he takes the pitch, thinking it’s ball four, but the umpire actually calls strike three — a stress is born, and our ego produces a defense mechanism in an effort to cope with this stress.

This particular scenario is among the most surefire ways for a baseball player to produce a visceral reaction on the field. So, allow me to continue playing armchair psychologist as we (a) observe pleasing .gifs of professional athletes feeling wronged by bad calls and (b) lean on George E. Vaillant’s Ego Mechanisms of Defense: A Guide for Clinicians and Researchers to categorize the observed defense mechanisms in an attempt to better understand human behavior.

The Freeze

We begin with perhaps the most common — and varied — reaction: The Freeze. The Freeze comes in many forms. In the top example, for instance, our subject appears to exhibit patience (enduring difficult circumstances for some time before responding negatively), suppression (the conscious decision to delay paying attention to an emotion or need in order to cope with the present reality), and tolerance (the practice of deliberately allowing or permitting a thing of which one disapproves).

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I don’t know how many of you participate in the Fan projection process. I’m sure it’s only a small minority, because for one thing, it’s extra work, and for another, it’s not like we do a lot to incentivize mass participation. For whatever it’s worth, though, I do think they make for a valuable tool, because when you get enough people chiming in, you get to do things like compare Fan projections to other projections. That doesn’t have to be just for fun — there’s the potential for great insight there. Fans pick up on stuff. Even when they don’t, it’s interesting to see when fans think they’re picking up on stuff. In an ideal world, we’d have hundreds or thousands of people entering projections for all kinds of players, and then we could try to make something of the results.

We don’t live in an ideal world — at least not in that kind of ideal world — but I’m still going to use what we have, for what you find below. Just for the hell of it, I’ve elected to compare Fan projections for position players to Steamer projections for position players. Seems to me, it could be interesting to see where the projections don’t line up. Now, as caution, I want to tell you some of these fan projections are based on pretty small samples, so this is largely just for curiosity’s sake. But, you know, away we go. I’ve chosen to compare by WAR per 600 plate appearances. An awful lot of players aren’t going to get anywhere close to 600 plate appearances, but I’m just shooting for consistency.

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