When Felix Hernandez broke into the Majors as a 19-year-old, he threw the ball really hard. Here’s the Pitch F/x plot of his start against the Oakland A’s on April 2nd, 2007, the first for which we have Pitch F/x data available.

The fastball was 95-100, the slider was 89-92, the change-up was 86-89 (ignore the “FS” labels, as the algorithm wasn’t so good back then), and even his “slow curve” was 82-87. Felix was the embodiment of a power pitcher, and while his three off-speed pitchers were all notable in their own right, Felix’s mid-90s two-seamer was his defining pitch. There just weren’t many guys in the game that could run a sinking fastball up there at 95 MPH, and that pitch helped him run a 60.8% GB% that year.

Now, here’s Felix’s Pitch F/x plot from his start against Oakland on Saturday night.

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Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80, with 50 representing league average.

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago White Sox
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York Mets
#19 – Los Angeles Dodgers
#18 – Colorado
#17 — Miami
#16 — Arizona
#15 — Cincinnati
#14 — Chicago Cubs
#13 — Milwaukee
#12 — San Francisco
#11 — Washington
#10 — Tampa Bay
#9 – Toronto
#8 – Atlanta
#7 – Detroit
#6 – St. Louis
#5 – Philadelphia
#4 – Anaheim

Texas 2011 Rating: #7

2012 Outlook: 68 (2nd)

The Rangers return most of a team that reached the World Series for a second straight year in 2011, and they replaced their only significant departure by bringing in Yu Darvish, billed as perhaps the best international free agent in history. There just isn’t an area of the game where the Rangers are deficient, as they have one of the league’s deepest pitching staffs, best defenses, and an offense that can score runs in bunches. They have a terrific, balanced roster, and they are very likely to contend for their third consecutive World Series appearance.

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It’s Opening Night (last week was Opening Oh God It’s Early, I think), so with the season the brink of starting, we polled our staff and asked them to put down their selections for the playoff teams and the postseason award winners. Unlike last year, there was very little agreement among the group, and the consensus picks are often a plurality but not a majority. While there’s a pretty clear divide between the top six or seven teams and the rest of baseball, there doesn’t appear to be one dominant team that stands out from the group of contenders.

So, without futher ado, let’s get to the predictions:

AL West: Anaheim
AL Central: Detroit
AL East: New York
AL Wild Cards: Tampa Bay, Texas
AL Champ: Anaheim

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Now that Joey Votto is signed with Cincinnati through his age 39 season, there’s a lot of talk about how long he can be expected to remain productive. The Reds are basically accepting that this deal will be an albatross at the end of the contract in order to secure premium years at reasonable prices in the first half of the deal. The discussion of the contract should not be whether Votto will be worth the money in 2021, 2022, or 2023 – he won’t be, in almost any scenario you can come up with – but by how much surplus value he’ll be able to create through 2020.

I have more thoughts on long term pricing valuations that I’ll share in the next day or two, but for now, I wanted to look at how productive other similar first baseman to Votto were in their age 28-39 seasons. To do this, I pulled every first baseman in history who had at least 2,000 plate appearances and a wRC+ between 142 to 161 from ages 24-27. Those are the ages that Votto has been a big leaguer for, and gives us a nice four year window leading up a player’s prime. Since Votto has a wRC+ of 152 and a WAR of 22.9 and all the players in the sample have a weighted average wRC+ of 150 and a WAR of 22.0, this group is almost identical in terms of recent performance to Votto at this point in his career.

Here’s the list of comparables, and their 24-27 performance:

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Well, I think we’ve just seen the first piece of fallout from the stunning $2.15 billion purchase of the Dodgers on Wednesday. With money flowing into MLB at a breakneck pace, the Cincinnati Reds decided to make star first baseman Joey Votto an offer he couldn’t refuse. Actually, they made him an offer that no player in baseball could refuse, signing him (per Bob Nightengale of USA Today) to the longest contract in the history of the game — a staggering 12-year, $251.5 million commitment (or, phrased differently, a 10-year extension on top of the 2/26 he had already agreed to) that will keep Votto in Cincinnati through the 2023 season.

For as much as the Albert Pujols and Prince Fielder contracts helped shape the off-season, this is the deal that could have long lasting effects going forward. First baseman have been getting monster contracts in free agency for years, and in both cases, there were some special circumstances that set their particular case apart; Pujols is one of the great players in the history of the game, while Fielder certainly benefited from Victor Martinez’s torn ACL, which didn’t occur until after most other options were already off the table. Free agents trying to use these deals as yardsticks for future negotiations would not stack up to Pujols resume, nor would they likely reap the rewards of a high-payroll team suddenly needing their services just weeks before spring training begins.

This contract for Votto, though, doesn’t come with any of those caveats, and it didn’t come through an intense bidding war in free agency. This is the third-largest contract in baseball history being given to a player who was two years away from free agency. This deal just blows up the expected compensation level for premium players negotiating with only their own franchise.

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A couple of hours ago, the Giants announced that they reached an agreement with Matt Cain on a five year deal worth just over $110 million. Wendy Thurm has already recapped the contract and why this is probably fair market value for a quality pitcher with no health problems headed into his age 27 season. And, she’s probably right – if the Giants wanted to keep Cain, they weren’t going to be able to do it for less than this. This isn’t a situation where they just overpaid irrationally. Their options were either to sign him for this price or watch him get more money from another team next winter. They chose the former.

I would have chosen the latter.

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According to MLBTradeRumors, Joey Votto is nearing an agreement with the Reds on a long term contract. Votto is currently under team control through 2013, and he’s due $26 million over the next two years as part of the deal he signed last winter.

It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Votto ended up getting. Ryan Zimmerman, another quality player with the same level of service time, signed a six year, $100 million extension a little over a month ago, but Zimmerman is coming off a down year and has a lot of value tied up in his defense, which doesn’t generally pay as well as just hitting the ball really hard. Matt Kemp got $160 million over eight years, but he was also only under team control for one more season, so he had more leverage in negotiations than Votto did. Kemp is also coming off a monster season and plays an up-the-middle position, so you’d think his deal would be some kind of ceiling for Votto.

However, with the timing of the report coming so close to the massive sale price of the Dodgers, you have to wonder if the Reds got inspired to kick things into high gear after they saw what the new owners were willing to invest in Los Angeles. Votto almost certainly would have been a target acquisition for LA’s group, and Reds may have decided to get something done now before they have to deal with competition from rich new owners out west.

Read the methodology behind the ratings here. Remember that the grading scale is 20-80 (50 representing league average) with extra weight given to 2012 and Revenue rankings.

2012 Organizational Rankings

#30 – Baltimore
#29 – Houston
#28 – Oakland
#27 – Pittsburgh
#26 – San Diego
#25 – Minnesota
#24 – Chicago AL
#23 – Seattle
#22 – Kansas City
#21 – Cleveland
#20 – New York NL
#19 – Los Angeles
#18 – Colorado
#17 – Miami
#16 — Arizona

Cincinnati’s 2011 Ranking: #9

2012 Outlook: 57 (t-9th)

Coming off a disappointing 79-83 finish, Walt Jocketty decided to bring in some reinforcements in order to make sure his team could regain their status as legitimate contenders in the National League. It cost him a good chunk of his farm system, but he was able to bring in two dynamic arms in Mat Latos and Sean Marshall, both of whom will be critical to the Reds success this year. The team ended up skimping on upgrades for position players, though, and settled on an unorthodox right-right platoon of Ryan Ludwick and Chris Heisey in left field, and are vulnerable to injuries – they don’t have any real in-house alternatives if a guy like Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips, or Jay Bruce get hurt. They exchanged depth for pitching improvements, which was a wise choice, but has also left them thin behind their core starters.

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