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Earlier today, ESPN published the latest Sam Miller article. The article was in part about the nature of modern-day statistical records, but it was also in large part about Victor Martinez. Specifically, it was in large part about how Victor Martinez has been a dreadful baserunner. Excellent hitter! Dreadful baserunner. Pick your metric, and it’ll agree. Martinez has supplied his teams runs by getting on base, but once he’s gotten that far, he’s been an easy net negative.

Miller is right about all the variables that go into baserunning stats. Stats can’t know all the conditions under which a baserunning event takes place, so sometimes the numbers are misleading. If you’re a runner who stops at third on a double, maybe the outfielder just has a cannon for an arm. If, instead, you score, maybe the outfielder is Khris Davis. No two plays are exactly alike, so, as with any stat, you prefer a sample as big as you can get.

Let’s talk about a big sample, then. A six-year sample, covering not an individual player, but an entire team. This is certainly related to Victor Martinez. When it’s come to baserunning, the Tigers have been a disaster.

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Baseball has an obsession with velocity.

Most scouts employ radar guns which are particularly useful on the amateur trail, at minor league ballparks, and in spring training.

Since PITCHf/x went online in every MLB stadium in 2008, baseball, for the first time, enjoyed a uniform standard in velocity measurement. At places like FanGraphs, we often search for increases and decreases in velocity to explain something about a player’s performance.

Some teams like the Yankees and Pirates have placed a premium on velocity relative to other clubs, as I wrote earlier this month.

Velocity has increased at the MLB level every year since PITCHf/x has tracked pitches with average fastball velocity reaching 92.6 mph last season. At the amateur level there is a focus on velocity at showcase events and in travel ball, velocity is what in part allows pitchers to be drafted in the early rounds of the June draft. When visiting a pitcher’s profile page at Perfect Game, velocity readings are displayed and placed in the context of a player’s peer group. For an example, here is Dylan Bundy’s PG profile.

So perhaps it is no surprise that on the eve of February, the month in which equipment trucks depart for southern spring training destinations and pitchers and catchers report, that of the free agent pitchers that remain unsigned – and there are a number of them – the majority are soft-tossing pitchers.

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It’s no secret that this winter has not been kind to veteran hitters, particularly those with limited defensive ability. Mike Napoli is still a free agent, as are Chris Carter and Pedro Alvarez. Brandon Moss just signed with the Royals yesterday, getting a backloaded $12 million on a two year deal. Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Bautista, and Mark Trumbo all took significant discounts relative to their initial asking prices. As we discussed a few weeks ago, the market for offense-first players was remarkably poor this year, to the point where it could be seen as an overcorrection; perfectly useful players are signing for less than what similarly valuable players with different skills are getting paid.

What is perhaps most interesting about this development, however, is that the teams who could are most in need of a first base upgrade are also teams that should be trying to squeak out every marginal win they can find.

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To whatever extent the Astros are going to have issues, they probably won’t have to worry too much about the lineup. As Mike Petriello recently wrote, said lineup looks to be incredibly deep. Based just on Steamer and our present depth charts, the Astros project to have easily the best-hitting lineup in the American League. The Red Sox come in second, but they trail by more than 30 runs. Steamer is just one system, and ZiPS will join it soon, but the point is made clear: The Astros offense looks good. They’ll score a bunch.

Yet something else has taken place, quietly. As the Astros have built a better order, there’s also been a rather significant side effect. I can’t tell you whether it’s been intentional, or whether it’s been a coincidence. But if you can believe it, the Astros are going to make contact. In fact, they project to be very nearly the best contact-hitting lineup in the game.

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“I’m a completely different hitter from each side of the plate,” Hank Conger told me one time. He went on to describe how he had more loft in his swing from one side. Switch-hitter Billy Burns said about the same thing, speculating that his relative lack of experience hitting from the left side was the cause for his lack of power on contact from that side. “My muscles aren’t as strong there,” he told me in July of 2015. Even if a player is capable of hitting — even hitting well — from both sides of the plate, that doesn’t mean he’s the same type of hitter from both sides. Subtle differences are bound to be present.

All of this may explain a strange thing that happened to Jonathan Villar last year.

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Brandon Gomes is on to phase two of his baseball career. Ten years after being drafted out of Tulane University, the 32-year-old right-hander has moved from the mound to a player-development position. This past fall, he was hired as a pitching coordinator by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

His role is somewhat atypical, which is hardly a surprise given the team employing him. Led by Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi, and Josh Byrnes, the Dodgers front office is as progressive as any in the game. They like bringing on board smart, creative people, and Gomes has a degree in Legal Studies and Finance to augment his five seasons as a Tampa Bay Rays reliever.

Gomes talked about his new job, and some of what’s being done in LA’s newly-created pitching department, late last week.

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Gomes on getting hired by the Dodgers: “After I got released [by the Cubs] in June, I spent about three or four weeks trying to find another Triple-A job. No teams showed interest, so at that point I decided I wanted to pursue this end of things. I contacted [president of baseball operations] Andrew Friedman, who I had relationship with from our time in Tampa, and that kind of got the ball rolling. He put me in contact with [director of player development] Gabe Kapler.

“I spoke with Gabe quite a bit, trying to figure out what shape my role would be if I came on board. That happened in September, when I went out to instructional league in Arizona. I spent a month there, getting to know some of the staff, and build a relationship with some of the younger players.

“My title is ‘Pitching Coordinator, Performance.’ We actually created a department, so we have a couple of pitching coordinators, of different iterations. That’s wise, because it’s a huge undertaking for one person to really tackle the entire situation. Having multiple people who are able to hit it from different angles, the goal is to not miss anything with any of our guys.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Average fastball velo was 97 mph in big-league appearances.

Scouting Report
The rate at which Reyes missed bats during his 46-inning big-league stint last year is encouraging considering he only turned 22 in August and his repertoire is still relatively amorphous. By now you should know about his fastball, a plus-plus seed that sits in the mid-90s and will crest 100 during relief outings. That velocity arguably allows an already average-to-above changeup play as plus as hitters are geared up for elite velocity only to wave helplessly at a fading 86-91.

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The Dodgers and Rich Hill announced their agreement at a ballroom podium in a sprawling Marriott hotel property in National Harbor, Maryland, in December. Hill fought back emotion through the press conference after signing a three-year, $48 million agreement at the winter meetings.

“I told myself I wasn’t going to do this… There’s a lot of emotion up here,” said Hill to reporters, explaining the reason for his pauses. “It’s been an incredible journey to get to this point.”

This was a player who had been through much professionally (nearly losing a career) and personally (losing an infant son in 2014), the latter event placing life and the game in perspective.

Hill’s unlikely and unusual success story has multiple layers. There’s the work he did to strengthen his body and arm. There was the counsel of Red Sox pitching guru Brian Bannister, who helped him with his pitch mix and philosophy. There’s the bet he made on himself, believing he could return to a rotation despite having not started a major-league game since 2009, showcasing himself starter with the independent Long Island Ducks in the summer of ’15 to prove it.

But another compelling aspect of Hill’s reclamation story is the process of sorting through what’s effective and what isn’t in the midst of failure. What’s so interesting is the process Hill took in climbing from the nadir of a career to become one of the most effective pitchers per inning last season. In a sport that deals so much with failure, Hill’s story is perhaps an instructional one.

Hill described himself as “a role model for failure” in an excellent L.A. Times feature by Andy McCullough.

Hill is indeed a model to follow — for how he employed all the tools available to him and for the curiosity and purpose he exhibited along the way.

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