Week: 1 / 2.

Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents such a report for the 2017 college campaign, following roughly three weeks of play.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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One of the main complaints about the World Baseball Classic is that it’s played in March. That creates at least two hurdles for the event in terms of mass appeal. One, fans aren’t conditioned to watch competitive baseball in March. Second, a lot of the players back out due to the upcoming grind of their regular seasons. While it’s possible that younger generations could eventually learn to expect competitive March baseball and that future players might regard the tournament with more gravity, neither outcome is certain.

The alternative that is often discussed is holding the tournament in July. Dave has written about this twice, both in 2009 and in 2013. His “March Madness” style idea is very appealing, because it wouldn’t be necessary to alter the schedule other than to cancel the All-Star Game. It also creates less of a time commitment and ratchets up the excitement. It’s a great solution in my opinion, and I heartily endorse it. But what if we wanted to play the entire tournament in July, with more or less its current structure? Impossible, you say? I don’t think so.

Let’s start with this year’s schedule.

• First Round/Pool A: March 6-9
• First Round/Pool B: March 7-11
• First Round/Pool C: March 9-13
• First Round/Pool D: March 9-13
• Second Round/Pool E: March 11-16
• Second Round/Pool F: March 14-19
• Semi-Finals/Finals: March 20-22

As you can see if you count it out, this makes for a 17-day tournament. The start times for Pools A, B and E are staggered to start earlier, primarily to give the Pool E winner time to fly from Tokyo to Los Angeles for the finals. Keep that in your back pocket for a minute.

What we need to do now is figure out how to squeeze 17 days of non-MLB games into July. Let’s walk through it, shall we?

Co-Opt the All-Star Break

The All-Star break is four days long. You would still have to cancel the All-Star Game in order to play the WBC in the middle of the season, so right there, we’re down to 13 days. I should note, however, that I’m advocating only for the cancellation of the All-Star Game itself. The league could still hold the vote, and still have the same process of naming starters and reserves. Why? Because there’s still money to be made here.

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As the person in charge of the FanGraphs Community blog, I read over every submission that isn’t curiously-worded spam about industrial milling machinery or picking up girls. This week, a post about Matt Carpenter was submitted and published, and here is a link. I’ve been meaning to review Carpenter’s 2016 for a while, and the Community post beat me to the punch. Go ahead and read that, and if you want, stop there. I’m just going to talk more about Carpenter in the following paragraphs. His most recent year, you see, was something extraordinary.

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BRADENTON, Fla. – Jose Bautista has always played with an edge.

He has often defied expectations since his age-29 breakout with the Toronto Blue Jays.

So on Wednesday, after a World Baseball Classic tune-up game for the Dominican Republic against the Pirates — the organization with whom he began his career and a club towards which he still bears some resentment — I asked Bautista outside of the visiting clubhouse at LECOM Park if his edge has heightened this spring. His doubters have grown in number as he nears the twilight of his career, and I was curious to learn how the 36-year-old plans to continue to defy odds.

A spring earlier, Bautista was reportedly seeking a six-year, $150 million contract extension. This offseason, coming off a down year, an injury-plagued year, he settled for a one-year deal with an option in his first test of free agency. That he did not have more of a market had to bruise Bautista’s ego. The market spoke to the doubts of the industry about an aging star in an era when every team uses some sort of aging model to guide decision making.

While I visited the topic of Bautista and the defiance aging curves back in January, I wanted to speak to the man himself and and better understand why he believes he a good bet to age more gracefully.

ZiPS is forecasting a modest bounceback, a 132 wRC+ and 2.7 WAR season in 117 games. PECOTA predicts a three-win campaign and .255/.374/.498 slash line in 2017, but suspects he’ll fall off to become a 1.4-win player in 2018.

Should we expect Bautista to beat those forecasts, though? Should we toss away our aging models in deference to the 21st-century athlete, as innovative Pirates trainer Todd Tomcyzk has suggested?

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The quick background: Travis Sawchik talked with J.D. Martinez about his fly-ball-oriented approach, and at one point Martinez said opponents were making adjustments to him. The player himself didn’t want to go into specifics, but it didn’t take much digging to see that Martinez is vulnerable against pitches up. It’s not something unique to him — I followed that post with this post, talking about the recent home-run spike. League-wide home-run rates skyrocketed against pitches in the lower third of the zone. They also went up against pitches in the middle third of the zone. They didn’t budge at all against pitches in the upper third of the zone.

Which is interesting! It supports the idea that more players have changed their approaches and swings to attack pitches down. Now, unless you’re super-human, you can’t, as a hitter, protect against everything. Fly-ball hitters tend to be vulnerable closer to the belt. There seems to be an ongoing shift toward more fly-ball hitters. This all got me thinking about pitchers who like to elevate. And when we’re talking about elevating, we’re pretty much exclusively talking about fastballs, since you rarely want to elevate the other stuff. You know whose pitchers like to keep their fastballs up? Tampa Bay’s, more than any other team.

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With free agency more or less in the books and all arbitration cases having been decided, the projected payrolls for Major League Baseball teams are becoming more clear. A few moves could occur before the start of the season — maybe some contract extensions, maybe some trades — but given the information we have, we can come pretty close to projecting Opening Day payrolls for all 30 teams.

Overall, spending has increased moderately since last season. A year ago, the average Opening Day payroll was right around $128 million, which itself represented a very small increase over 2015 despite big spending in free agency. This year, the average payroll is up to $133 million, a 4% increase despite uncertainty with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement and a weak free-agent class.

In what follows, I’ll consider the league’s payrolls in a few different ways. Salary information has been collected from Cot’s Contracts, while the equivalent of the MLB-minimum salary has been attached to open roster spots, bringing each team to 25 players. Money for players not on a club’s roster roster — as in the case of the Reds, for example, who are paying $13 million for Brandon Phillips to play in the Atlanta suburbs — is included in the payroll for the team actually paying the money.

To nobody’s surprise, the Los Angeles Dodgers have the highest payroll in baseball.

The Dodgers come in at around $235 million, which is roughly $40 million clear of the second-place Detroit Tigers. Even after accounting for the competitive-balance tax, it appears as though the Dodgers are still looking at a reduction of more than $30 million from last season. Even if they need to cut payroll more, the result should hardly be debilitating for the health of the team.

The tax amount for this season is $195 million. When you account for the $15 million or so that gets added for benefits and the rest of the 40-man roster, it would appear that the Tigers and Yankees will pay between $5 million and $10 million, the Giants will be right on the borderline, and the Red Sox might actually be under, as Allen Craig and Rusney Castillo don’t count for tax purposes.

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Last year, only one team improved their exit velocity in the second half as much as the Brewers did, when they went from 17th in the league to fifth. That might not surprise you, because you’ve read often about the young power duo on that team — Keon Broxton and Domingo Santana — and those two were at their healthiest and most dynamic in the second half. And yet the team was 20th in park- and league-adjusted weighted run creation during that same period. There’s always something else that requires attention, both players agreed in camp this week.

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Zack Greinke made his second start in spring training yesterday, and it did not go well. Facing off against Team Mexico, he allowed six hits in 2 2/3 innings, including a number of balls that were crushed by a line-up of guys who won’t play in the big leagues this year. Of the 12 batted balls that Greinke allowed that were tracked by StatCast, four of them were hit at least 100 mph. This is not really what you want from a guy who got paid like an ace in large part because of his perceived contact management skills.

But while the exit velocity numbers showed that Greinke was getting squared up regularly, the pitch velocity numbers were the most concerning elements of the day. Statcast didn’t record a single pitch even at the 90 mph threshold, with Greinke essentially sitting at 89 with his fastball all day. Given that he averaged 92 on his fastball last year, that’s a fairly steep decline, and Greinke even admitted after the game that his stuff isn’t where he wants it.

“It’s still early,” Greinke said. “It is what it is. It’s still early and it’s not like some crazy, crazy thing. But it’s not ideal, either.”

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For Lucas Giolito, KISS doesn’t mean Keep It Simple Stupid. Given his intellectual curiosity — picking Max Scherzer’s brain didn’t hurt — the acronym more aptly equates to Keep It Simple Smart.

Giolito is now in the White Sox organization, having been acquired by Chicago from Washington in December’s Adam Eaton mini-blockbuster. Blessed with a big arm and a made-for-movies persona, the 6-foot-6 righty projects as a front-line starter, but only if he can keep his delivery in sync. That was an issue in last year’s six-game cameo with the Nationals, when he allowed 39 baserunners in 21.1 innings.

The 22-year-old former first-round pick believes that striking the right balance is the secret to future success. Being studious and cerebral comes naturally to Giolito, but at the same time, he understands that simplicity is a pitcher’s friend.

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Giolito on how analytics impact his thought process: “It’s tough, because they make it a little more complicated, and when I’m pitching I like to make it super simple. But things like spin rate and extension play a role in, ‘How good is your stuff?’ What I especially looked at last year was… usually, I’m a big extension guy. On my fastball, I’ll get seven-foot-whatever.

“I was looking at some numbers, and saw that I was down to six-foot-eight, six-nine, six-whatever. That’s not what I should be doing. Sure enough, video showed that I was flying open and yanking everything. So that stuff can be very helpful. Same thing with spin rate. Is the ball coming out of your hand at its best right now? It used to just be a feel thing, and now you can actually look at the numbers to back it up.

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