Yesterday, the Tigers agreed to make Miguel Cabrera the highest paid player in baseball history. If you look at the entirety of their future financial commitments to him as one single entity rather than two separate agreements, then this is the biggest contract in U.S. sports history. Over the next decade, the Tigers have agreed to pay Cabrera $292 million, a staggering figure for any player, and even more stunning given the context in which it was handed out. Cabrera turns 31 in less than a month. He wasn’t eligible to hit the free agent market for another two years. The contract begins with his age-33 season, and yet, without the benefit of free agency as leverage, he got more for eight years than Robinson Cano got for 10.

As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts about this contract. They don’t all agree with each other. So, let’s just go through the things I believe about this deal.

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For the last few weeks, word has been circulating that the Pirates wanted to sign Starling Marte to a long term contract, but that he had rebuffed their first few offers over the off-season. Yesterday, however, the Pirates finally changed his mind, agreeing to a six year contract that raises the question: if this is all that it took to get him signed, were their initial offers that he would pay them for the right to wear the uniform?

Yes, that comment is said in jest, and yes, the $31 million guaranteed money that Marte received in this deal is hardly chump change. But let’s call a spade a spade here: Marte left a ton of money on the table, and this contract is remarkably favorable to the Pirates.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position. The author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

Jeff already rolled out the Top 15 this morning, so here’s the second half of the starting pitching list. As with this morning, here’s the chart, though we will talk about the right side of things in this post.

Again, keep the separation in mind more than the ranking itself, as you can see from the graph that there’s a big chunk of teams from #11-#23 that aren’t all that different. And, as Jeff noted, some teams that are transitioning relievers into the rotation will be overrated by the forecasts, which are still going to have relief pitcher projections stretched out to starting pitcher innings totals. These aren’t perfect, and we don’t pretend that they are. Take them as an overview, not gospel, and realize that with this many moving parts, there’s a huge amount of variance around all these forecasts. Projecting pitching is hard.

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Well, this is a pretty neat example of what journalism can look like with multiple mediums incorporated: video, interviews, heat maps, and pitch data. ESPN talked to the D’Backs pitchers about their various pitch types, and while some of them are basically the same thing — you even hear Brandon McCarthy refer to his two-seam fastball as a sinker in his video, even though Brad Ziegler is the official sinker guy — it’s still a pretty neat interactive way of looking at pitch types and mechanics.

Kudos to ESPN for featuring this kind of baseball analysis. More and more, I think the average fan is interested in the why and the how, and media pieces like this will help promote some understanding of things that are basic to the players but haven’t always been easily accessible to the public.

Check it out, and let’s hope the baseball media in general sees the market for stuff like this going forward.

Last week, Ken Rosenthal reported — and others have since confirmed — that the Astros offered top prospect George Springer a seven year, $23 million contract. He turned them down, and has since been optioned to Triple-A, where he will begin the season. Presumably, had he accepted the contract offer, he may very well have been named the Astros Opening Day right fielder, as the contract would have nullified the benefits of keeping him from accruing a full year of service time in 2014, and it’s not like the Astros have a better right fielder blocking his path at the moment. However, since Springer did not accept the contract, he’ll have to wait at least a few weeks to join the Astros, and potentially a few months if they decide to try and get him past the Super Two cutoff as well.

On the one hand, it’s easy to paint this as a picture of an organization acting in bad faith, using the carrot of a big league roster spot to try and coerce a young player into signing away his future earnings potential. The MLBPA is even considering filing a grievance on Springer’s behalf — even though he isn’t a member yet, since he is not on the Astros 40 man roster — over the issue, though it would be nearly impossible for them to prove intent given that Springer only has 266 plate appearances in Triple-A; optioning out a young player with Springer’s contact rate would be pretty easily defensible on merit alone. But the perception of impropriety still exists, due to the appearance that his demotion was directly tied to his decision to reject the Astros contract offer, whether that is actually true or not.

The Springer news has brought about another round of calls for reformation of the rules in order to remove the incentives for teams to keep their best young players in the minor leagues to begin the season, and I’m with the crowd who thinks that MLB is best served by allowing teams to make roster decisions based on talent and performance rather than worrying about accrued service time. I’d rather see George Springer play in April than whoever the Astros end up rolling out there on Opening Day. But for MLB and the MLBPA to come to any sort of consensus on this in the next CBA negotiations, everyone will first have to admit that the concept of six years of team control is basically a myth.

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For the last decade or so, various versions of payroll efficiency estimators have popped up to measure which teams are getting the most bang for their buck in terms of spending. The late Doug Pappas pioneered this research in MLB, using a formula he called Marginal Dollars, Marginal Wins. That is basically the ancestor of the present $/WAR calculation we often cite, looking at the cost a team paid to add wins to their side of the ledger. These kinds of calculations have helped identify which teams have invested their resources wisely, and which teams are simply squandering their wealth while getting little in return.

However, there’s always been a bit of a problem with $/WAR calculations, because we know that the value of each win added is not linear. The value of a win is better described as a curve, with a sharp inflection in the mid-80s when each additional win significantly increases a team’s chance of making the postseason and going on to compete for a World Series title. A team should not be incentivized to pay as much as for their 78th win as they are for their 88th win, and a rational GM would indeed pay more to make a marginal upgrade on a contender than he would if his team was expected to finish out of the running.

$/WAR calculations ignore the marginal differences in the value of a win, and end up putting too much emphasis on teams that manage to be good and cheap while penalizing teams that are great and expensive, even though the wins added that pushed the great team into that next tier are the ones that make the most sense to overpay for. So, today, I thought I’d try a new spin on the team efficiency calculations, using our expected playoff odds instead of a team’s projected WAR to measure the value of team spending.

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Recently, our good friend Rob Neyer joined Fox Sports, and today, we’re going to join him, Jon Paul Morosi, and Ben Lindbergh for a Google Hangout discussion of sabermetrics and the role of statistical analysis. To watch live (or to view the archive when the hangout is over), you can simply click the embedded video below.

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