No team has more conspicuously made us look silly than the Royals. Not in the last few years, for all the reasons you already know. Not many things more visible than consecutive trips to the World Series, and when you look at what the Royals did against what the Royals were expected to do, statistically, it’s natural to wonder what’s up. It’s normal to find comments like this one, left earlier today:

Dave, if the Royals once again reach the post season, or even the world series, is it time to re-calibrate the predictive model? In other words weight some of the production measures differently? 4 years in a row isn’t luck.

For some, “projection” is a dirty word, and for others there’s just a certain skepticism. The Royals are the “face” of this feeling, if that makes any sense, because after all, they’re the defending champs, and they were projected to not be very good. There’s absolutely no question the Royals have exceeded statistical expectations the last few years. What might surprise you is another team has done that even more.

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Ben and Sam banter about the resolution to a legal case they discussed last week, then discuss the Ian Kennedy, Chris Davis, and Justin Upton signings.

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Today we’re starting with a bunch of numbers. Ready? Duck! Last season, third basemen hit .260/.318/.420. They were good for a wOBA of .319 and a wRC+ of 101. Outfielders were slightly better. They hit .260/.325/.418, for a wOBA of .322 and a wRC+ of 103. First basemen were even better! They collectively hit .259/.336/.444, a .014 improvement in wOBA and 10-point jump in wRC+ over outfielders. Know who was even better? Pitchers! Just kidding, they were horrible!

Last season, pitchers hit .131/.158/.168. That’s a wOBA of Are You Kidding Me? and a wRC+ of Nope. It’s quite striking to look at the effectiveness of pitchers hitting compared to other positions. It’s a bit like taping your first grader’s artwork up next to a painting in the Louvre. One is the work of a world-renowned artist and the other is a nice try by someone who has no real business facing that kind of competition and quite possibly made an accident in their pants during production.

Pitchers have never been good hitters. This makes the tweet sent out by Derrick Goold of the St.Louis Post-Dispatch a few days ago good news. Goold quoted Cardinals GM John Mozeliak as saying there is “more momentum” to add the DH to the National League.

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This post was written by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren, the co-founders of NEIFI Analytics, an outfit which consults for Major League teams. Guttridge began his MLB career in 2005 as an intern with the Colorado Rockies, and most recently worked as Manager of Baseball of Research and Development for the Milwaukee Brewers until the summer of 2015, when he helped launch NEIFI. As part of their current project, they tweet from @NEIFIco, and maintain a blog at their site as well.

The novel data coming into Major League Baseball from entirely new spaces, such as the wearable tech companies we mentioned yesterday, was something we should have anticipated. Within the past few years, restrictions have been imposed which attempted to dramatically flatten out the possible differences between teams in their volume of amateur spending. While the rules have proven to be easily manipulated on the international front, the intent and goal is clear, and the long-term plan for the league is to equalize the spending on talent acquisition. Therefore, greater investment in amateur talent can no longer be a long-term strategy to the extent that it drove success under previous models. At the same time, a million dollars spent on MLB talent can be expected to provide a smaller return than ever, so the influx of cash in MLB had to go somewhere.

Thus, two major areas remain where an organization’s spending is not only unrestricted, but has the potential to provide much greater dollar-for-dollar return than elsewhere: player development and evaluative advancement.

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Maybe the headline is a tad misleading; Joe Blanton-to-the-bullpen looked like something of a success story before he went to Pittsburgh and worked under the tutelage of pitching coach guru Ray Searage. But it was in Pittsburgh and under Searage that Blanton really took off, and without that time in Pittsburgh, Blanton may very well have been Just Another Reliever on the scrap heap, rather than a reliever who receives $4 million on a one-year deal to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s the year 2016, and we live in a world where Joe Blanton is getting guaranteed money to serve as a relief weapon for a contender. What a time to be alive.

Like many of you, I’ve long played fantasy baseball, and I’ve got a history with Mr. Blanton. Beware: I’m currently breaking rule No. 1 of playing fantasy baseball by talking about my fantasy baseball team. Nobody cares, I know, but I promise it won’t take long, and it’s related to the events at hand. My history with Joe Blanton goes like this: when I first started learning about sabermetrics, I learned about xFIP, and thought to myself, “Hey, this could be a useful tool for fantasy baseball.” One single stat, a predictive stat, that shows you potential under- and over-performers who have the peripherals to succeed; it was perfect!

Through the power of the almighty xFIP, I hastily, yet assertively, concluded that Joe Blanton was just unlucky. I concluded that Joe Blanton’s peripherals hinted at better results than he’d shown, and that Joe Blanton would provide Good Value. I drafted Joe Blanton, and then he was bad. Drats. Unlucky. Drafted him again, bad again. It goes on like this for several seasons until I couldn’t draft Joe Blanton anymore because he was no longer in the major leagues. At a certain point, I think I just became pot-committed and was determined to squeeze a good season out of Joe Blanton. It never came.

The point is this: Joe Blanton was always close. It always seemed like he might just be an adjustment away. An adjustment, or a lucky home run season. One of the two. He didn’t get a ton of strikeouts, but he got enough, he didn’t walk anybody, and he got a bunch of ground balls. That’s typically the beginning of a strong recipe for a successful pitcher, except Joe Blanton just gave up so many freaking dingers. Joe Blanton dingered himself right out of baseball, culminating in a 2013 in which he allowed 29 homers in 28 appearances. That was it for Blanton.

Or so we thought — until right around this time last year, when Blanton announced he was coming out of retirement, and we scoffed. Until Blanton received a minor league deal with the Royals, and we scoffed. Until Blanton found his way onto the major league roster and pitched effectively out of the bullpen, and we continued to scoff, but our hearts weren’t really in it, and as we scoffed we kind of looked around the proverbial room at one another, quizzically, as if to say, “Should we still be scoffing?” Until Blanton made his way to Pittsburgh and flat-out dominated, and we all just sat there, dumbfounded.

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Considering the potential ramifications of a victory by the plaintiffs in the Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball lawsuit, the odds always favored Major League Baseball eventually reaching a settlement in the case. Indeed, considering that the sport’s entire existing broadcast model was under attack – with the lawsuit alleging that MLB violates federal antitrust law by preventing its teams from competing in the local and national broadcast marketplaces – allowing the Garber case to proceed to trial would have been extremely risky for the league.

As a result, it was no great surprise to learn that MLB did in fact reach a tentative settlement agreement with the Garber plaintiffs on Tuesday morning, just minutes before a two-week trial was slated to begin in the lawsuit.

The terms of the deal will not be officially announced until after the attorneys have committed the tentative agreement to writing. Nevertheless, various media reports have revealed a number of details regarding the proposed settlement. In particular, it appears that by agreeing to create new viewing options for fans, and lowering the price for its MLB.TV package, the league has succeeded – at least for the time being – in preserving its oft-criticized blackout policy.

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Here’s a graph posted at Baseball Prospectus a week ago:

You see, for each of the last six years, an estimate of Jonathan Lucroy’s pitch-framing value. Now, there are freely available pitch-framing numbers you can browse through at StatCorner. Those will give you a good sense, but the numbers at Baseball Prospectus are the gold standard, with countless variables and adjustments, and what we observe when we look at Lucroy on Baseball Prospectus is that, statistically, it seems like his pitch-receiving has dropped almost all the way to league average. It was only a few years ago he ranked as one of the best, if not the best, so this is fairly astonishing. And Lucroy is said to be on the market, so this is also relevant. What are we supposed to believe as far as Lucroy and pitch-receiving go?

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Episode 625
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he examines the return of Chris Davis to Baltimore, agent Scott Boras’s role in that return, and also some possibly notable arbitration cases.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 48 min play time.)

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