It’s not that I advise always taking teams at their word. Teams have an interest in pushing obvious agendas, and much of what they put out there is essentially some kind of propaganda. Teams always have to be selling themselves, which means emphasizing optimism while downplaying any negatives. But I trust the Rays on what they say they’re doing. Over the weekend, the Rays added C.J. Cron while losing Corey Dickerson and Jake Odorizzi. They said they slashed payroll without getting meaningfully worse, and I agreed. That post was promptly followed by news of the Rays trading Steven Souza Jr. for prospects, but the Rays said that was a baseball trade, not a money move, and that it would be the end of the selling. I believed the Rays; it just didn’t feel like an actual tank-job. There was also the room to make an addition.

An addition has already been made. The Rays have plugged the Souza void by signing Carlos Gomez for a year and $4 million. Gomez is signing from out of the bargain bin, so this isn’t a franchise-altering transaction. And there’s always the chance that, tomorrow or next week, Kevin Kiermaier or Chris Archer is swapped for younger players. The Rays still could tank, if they wanted to. But Gomez will actually earn more in 2018 than Souza will. And I think this is just more evidence of how the Rays are forever attempting to thread the needle. What is Carlos Gomez, as a ballplayer? He’s just an older and more fragile Steven Souza. It’s not the worst exchange, given the four new prospects from the trade.

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Earlier this month, it was announced that every major-league franchise would be extending protective netting to the ends of the dugouts on each side of the field. For some, the move is probably long overdue. Late last year, for example, a ball off the bat of Todd Frazier hit and severely injured a little girl at Yankee Stadium.  The Cubs and Major League Baseball, meanwhile, were sued last year after a fan was blinded in one eye by an errant foul ball in August at Wrigley Field. By one 2014 estimate, as many as 1,750 people per year are injured by foul balls and broken bats at baseball stadiums every year.

But the law is a tricky thing, and the extension of netting might have an unexpected result — at least insofar as the teams are concerned.

There are many sources of laws. Some are statutes. Some are federal regulations. Some are court decisions. And some law comes from what is called a “Restatement.” A Restatement is basically a book which tells us what the majority rules are in certain areas of law. For our purposes, we’re going to be referring to Chapter 17A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. (As to why it’s not the “Second Restatement of Torts,” that is a concern beyond the scope of this piece, but it’s mostly because lawyers have an irrepressible urge to make everything unnecessarily convoluted.)

As explained in the Restatement, there exists in the law a doctrine called “assumption of the risk.” In the context of baseball, that basically means that if you sit in an area without protective netting and you know it’s a possibility that a foul ball might come your way, you can’t sue the team for getting injured by that foul ball. As one court put it in a case called Edward C. v. City of Albuquerque, a fan “must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile” — even if that projectile is traveling upwards of 100 mph.

There’s a really excellent write-up on this that you can read here. In short, however, this “baseball rule” represents the majority rule in the United States. If a foul ball comes your way at a ballpark, the law basically says you should have seen it coming. You’ll probably find language on your ticket saying you assume the risk of injury by foul ball, like the Yankees have on theirs.

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If you ask a player what his goal is going into a season, there’s a decent chance he’ll tell you that he wants to be more consistent. It’s a reasonable enough answer, but what does it really mean? Everyone wants to perform well, so would it be just as accurate to say, “I want to be good more often and bad less often?”

Regardless of how you word it, avoiding slumps — particularly prolonged ones — is what players are ultimately looking to do. With that in mind, I asked Andrew Benintendi and Alex Cora how to go about doing so as expediently as possible.

Benintendi began by bringing up the dreaded 0-fers.

“It’s catching those little slumps earlier, before they become a thing,” expressed the Red Sox outfielder, who slashed .271/.352/.424 last year in his first full big-league season. “I went through a few 0-for-20s (he had one such stretch in mid May, and another in early September), so I probably need to be attacking those a little earlier.”

What was at the root of the problem? Cora wasn’t around Benintendi last season — he was A.J. Hinch’s right-hand man in Houston — but he does recognize the inevitability of ebbs and flows within a long season. He also knows they happen for different reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

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This is Sung Min Kim’s second piece as part of his February residency at FanGraphs. Sung Min is a staff writer for River Avenue Blues, the biggest independent New York Yankees blog on the web, and has freelanced for various publications including Deadspin, Sporting News, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and more. He can also be found on Twitter. He’ll be contributing regularly here this month. Read the work of all our residents here.

For the first post of my residency, I examined the biggest names in Asia who could soon come over to U.S. Because of the massive amount of attention MLB gets from local media and fans, people keep their eyes peeled on potential Asia-to-MLB transactions.

What does not get as much attention, however, is the reverse. Teams in Asia (for the purposes of this article, I’m specifically referring to teams in Japan and South Korea) diligently scout players Stateside, mainly scouring the Pacific Coast League, the International League, and sometimes even Mexico or independent ball to fill out their foreign-player roster. The Korea Baseball Organization (KBO), a 10-team league, has a cap of three foreign players per team, while the Nippon Professional League (NPB), a 12-team league, has a cap of four foreign players on its major-league rosters, and no cap on its minor-league rosters.

Sure, it may not be as newsworthy as an MLB team signing an exciting talent from Asia (remember the buzz Japanese phenom Shohei Ohtani generated this offseason?), but there are reasons to keep track of players crossing the Pacific to the Far East. In recent years, the players traveling to Asia are likely quite familiar to everyday baseball fans in the U.S. That hasn’t always been the case. For some time, playing baseball in Asia was seen more as a destination of last resort for players who could not find their way in the majors or were past their prime. Rather than signing ex-big leaguers looking to “collect their last paychecks,” however, Asian clubs are now signing younger players on the fringes of the big leagues — the so-called “Quad-A” player — and even, in some instances, players who are on a major-league 40-man roster.

Players are also now realizing that their careers don’t “go to die” in Asia. Rather, it is sometimes an opportunity for them to play well, get better, and return to Major League Baseball. With MLB teams having increased their scouting presence in the NPB and KBO, we have seen notable recent cases of American players thriving there and securing a guaranteed MLB contract.

One such player is, of course, Milwaukee 1B/OF Eric Thames. After recording a .799 OPS in the Orioles’ and Mariners’ minor-league systems in 2013, Thames signed with the NC Dinos of the KBO, where he proceeded to record video-game numbers, slashing .349/.451/.721 with 124 home runs and a 188 wRC+ from 2014 to 2016. Following the third of those season, the Brewers signed Thames to a $16-million contract with a $7.5 million club option for 2020. In his first season back in the MLB, Thames produced a 124 wRC+ with a 2.1 WAR while hitting 31 home runs for the Brewers. Not bad.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about another volcanic comment by Scott Boras, the Eric Hosmer and J.D. Martinez signings and the Rays’ sudden sell-off, MLB’s latest pace-of-play initiatives, why spring training intentions often go awry, and sabermetric trailblazer Sherri Nichols, then preview the 2018 Nationals (23:46) with the Washington Post’s Chelsea Janes, and the 2018 Tigers (50:44) with MLB.com’s Jason Beck.

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The Yankees entered the offseason determined to stay under the luxury-tax threshold. The Rays, meanwhile, have appeared intent recently on cutting payroll. As for the Diamondbacks, their moves this winter seem to indicate a club looking to quietly build on its first postseason appearance in six years.

On Tuesday night, the aforementioned organizations came together to accomplish their individual objectives in a three-team trade. Nick Piecoro reported on the most notable players involved in the deal.

Steven Souza Jr. should immediately assume Arizona’s starting right-field job, while Brandon Drury represents an option at second and third base for a club that lacks experience at both positions. With regard to Tampa Bay, they both shed Souza’s $3.6 million salary and land a small collection of prospects, including Nick Solak from the Yankees and Anthony Banda and two PTBNL from Arizona. Another prospect, Taylor Widener, goes from New York to Arizona. Our own Eric Longenhagen evaluates the merits of the prospects involved here. It’s not a franchise-altering return for Tampa.

So what to make of all this?

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Episode 802
Somewhat recently on FanGraphs Audio, Kiley McDaniel previewed Prospect Week 2018. More recently, Prospect Week 2018 itself actually occurred at FanGraphs. Now, Eric Longenhagen dedicates some portion of this episode to reliving Prospect Week 2018.

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 1 hr 3 min play time.)

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It got kind of lost on Saturday, because Eric Hosmer signed with the Padres on Saturday, and that became baseball’s big news. But the Padres weren’t the only team active over the weekend, as the Rays pulled off a trio of transactions. Jake Odorizzi was traded to the Twins for a low-level infielder. Additionally, C.J. Cron was acquired for a player to be named later, and, to make roster room, Corey Dickerson was designated for assignment. The moves all happened so fast it got confusing, but the sequence made an unpleasant impression. Dickerson was a 2017 AL All-Star, and Odorizzi had been a regular starter for four years. It looked as if the Rays were partially tearing down.

Indeed, in a sense, that’s true — ownership was looking for the front office to cut payroll. Even though the Rays’ payrolls have always been modest, money is a factor in everything, and the 2017 club apparently got a little pricey. The owners asked for a payroll reduction, and an ownership ask is an ownership demand. This is how the Rays have long operated. Ideally, it wouldn’t be the case, but it is what it is. I can’t compel the owners to spend more than they do.

But while many have been upset by the departures of Odorizzi and Dickerson — including Kevin Kiermaier — it should also be understood just where the Rays are. The Rays now aren’t really worse off compared to where they were. The team isn’t tanking, as far as I can tell, and they’re not planning to lose 95 games. Two big contributors from the past are now gone, yet the roster is still okay. That’s not a bad outcome after shedding $10 million.

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What’s interesting and disappointing about the pace-of-play changes revealed on Monday by Major League Baseball is that they do not actually address pace of play itself — that is, the actual frequency of action, the elapsed time between pitches. The reduction both of commercial break time and mound visits will have some effect, certainly, but those issues are more closely tied to overall time of game. They address stoppages of play not the pace of play itself. The more pressing issue is the frequency of pitches.

The one truly pace-related mechanism that many suspected would be employed, the 20-second pitch clock, had met resistance from players and was not unilaterally implemented by the commissioner’s office, perhaps an act of goodwill in this winter of discontent.

The clock would have been a game-changer, as only four — four! — of the 462 major-league pitchers to throw at least 30 innings last season recorded pitch paces of 20 seconds or less.

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