There is an inherent risk/reward dynamic for both team and player when it comes to locking up young players to guaranteed contracts past their arbitration years. Without a guaranteed contract, teams can go year to year with players through the arbitration process and, in the event of player injury or decline in performance, the team can drop the player without consequence. However, once that same player reaches six years of service time, he is free to choose any team he prefers, often at an expensive price.

For the player, going year to year naturally exposes him to a possible loss in future compensation due to the risk of injury or a decline in performance. That said, by going year to year, the player essentially bets on himself during the arbitration process and reaches free agency at the earliest possible time — and with the benefit of a potentially large payday.

Where these two interests meet, teams and players reach agreements early in careers to buy out the player’s remaining arbitration years and some years of free agency. A team’s ability to absorb risk in handing out contracts is much greater than the player’s risk in turning the contract down, and the savings are generally much greater for the team.

From the winter of 2008 through the summer of 2011, teams and players agreed to 53 contracts both (a) at a point before the player in question had recorded four years of service time and (b) in which the contract featured no guaranteed money beyond 2016. Among those players, there are some bargains and some duds. By examining only the free-agent years for which clubs paid ahead of time, we can calculate rough approximation of how much money teams saved or lost by locking up players early in their careers.

While there are some players who might have been non-tendered during the arbitration process — therefore costing teams a bit more money than they would have going year to year — there are also players who would have earned considerably more during the arbitration process than their contracts provided. When teams sign players to these type of contracts, the major win for the team comes in free agent seasons, and the major concession by the players are those same years. As a result, the analysis below will focus on those years.

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With pitchers and catchers reporting soon, we just about have all the major free-agent signings wrapped up. It looks like Yovani Gallardo is about to sign with the Orioles, and there are rumors that Dexter Fowler could soon join him now that Baltimore has apparently decided to give up their first-round draft pick. With so many good outfielders available this winter, as the music stops, the available chairs for Fowler seem less desirable than we might have thought at the end of last season. Fowler’s defensive numbers have been pretty bad over the last few seasons, but his UZR figure was close to average in his only year with the Chicago Cubs. Determining change in skill from small sample size can be difficult, but it does not seem likely Fowler greatly improved his defense last season.

Defensive statistics are much-maligned outside of the analytic community, and even among those who use advanced statistics, there’s a degree of doubt regarding their utility. Much of the criticism stems from a misunderstanding about how to use defensive statistics given the larger sample size necessary to draw meaningful conclusions. Looking at three seasons worth of UZR can seem like going too far into the past, leading to rationalizations about short-term spikes in defensive numbers.

Over the last four seasons, Fowler has put up a UZR numbers in center field of -13.6, -1.7, -21.8, and last year’s -1.9 mark. Taken on the whole, it would be reasonable to conclude that Fowler is a below-average center fielder. It might be easy to look at the last three years, point to two that are pretty close to average, and call the -21.8 an outlier. This isn’t advisable, however, as doing so completely ignores a full year of data and merely cherrypicks the good seasons. The graph below shows two lines: yearly UZR for Fowler over the past five seasons, and a three-year average of UZR over the past five seasons, which is more representative of Fowler’s defense.

Using three years of data smooths Fowler’s numbers considerably. The inconsistency of the yearly numbers largely evaporates and places Fowler’s defense somewhere between six and 12 runs below average at center field over the past few years. That inconsistency carried over to his WAR numbers as well, as the graph below shows.

Instead of a 1.4 WAR season followed a 3.2 WAR season, we see a pair of 2.5 WAR seasons the last two years. Not surprising for the soon-to-be 30-year-old, ZiPS sees Fowler as a 2.4 WAR player heading into next season.

But what about the possibility that Fowler’s defensive improvements are real? It does happen. Jhonny Peralta made himself a much better shortstop later into his career — and improved positioning could have helped Fowler last season, as could getting out of the ballparks in Colorado and Houston. That narrative was getting pushed early last season and it does have some validity.

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Major League Baseball is a profitable enterprise, and (not surprisingly) MLB owners tend to benefit from that profitability, generally through revenues directly related to operating those franchises. However, MLB owners have also profited from ventures only partially related to MLB ownership, as well. They’ve made money owning television stations that also happen to air the games of teams they own. Owners are also in the process of spinning off the non-baseball related arm of MLBAM for billions. Notably, MLB owners have begun capitalizing on another revenue stream: developing the land near their teams’ ballparks.

When the Atlanta Braves announced they were leaving a 20-year-old Atlanta-based stadium for a new one out in the suburbs of Cobb County, it took many by surprise. Cobb County made an appealling offer to the Braves, and one of the Braves’ promises was a $400 million mixed-used land development surrounding the stadium. While this has some likely benefits for Cobb County, it has the potential to be very beneficial for the Braves, as well — and it was one of their reasons for leaving Atlanta.

Bucking the trend of pro teams seeking stadiums and arenas closer to the city center, the Braves’ new facility will be part of a 60-acre development near Cobb Galleria mall. Plant compared it to new ballparks in Cincinnati, San Diego and Houston, as well as L.A. Live, which hosts the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers and the NHL’s Kings at Staples Center.

“With our current location, we couldn’t control that process,” Plant said. “This site allows us to do that.”

In Cincinnati, the Reds have their Hall of Fame across the street. In Houston, the Astros took over Union Station. However, the first major attempt to control an entire area of land around the stadium had mixed results. In San Diego, real estate developer JMI, owned by John Moores, the previous owner of the Padres before a messy divorce forced the sale of the team, built up the area around the park, mainly with housing after original plans for more office buildings had to be scrapped due to economic conditions. The area is still in flux, as it was also a potential site for a new stadium for the San Diego Chargers.

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In yet another sign that baseball season is coming ever closer, the arbitration process this year is coming to a close. Many players signed one-year deals before the teams and players exchanged numbers last month, while others exchanged numbers and struck one-year deals. A few players have actually gone to arbitration. Four players — Lorenzo Cain, Josh Donaldson, J.D. Martinez, and A.J. Pollock — agreed to two-year deals with their teams, buying out no free-agent seasons, but ensuring both parties that arbitration would not be necessary next year. These two-year deals are common and typically come with a discount for the team. For the four players who signed this season, however, there was no discount.

The arbitration process is set up to provide a discount to teams in the years just before free agency. The players get their first taste of actual millions while the team retains control of the player at a price much less than what the market would yield — all without having to mark a multi-year commitment. Some players sign extensions which takie them through free agency while others are non-tendered and set free by clubs who think that even the small, arbitration-produced salaries are too much compared to the expected production.

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Major League Baseball has taken a number of small steps designed to make it easier for consumers to watch baseball, even for consumers in local markets. MLB.TV has been around for years, but for fans wanting to watch local games on mobile devices or through non-cable set-top boxes and devices like Apple TV, Roku, or Chromecast, there had been few advancements. This offseason, however, MLB announced that the Fox-owned Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) would finally provide local games on something other than cable to cable subscribers.

This small step was accompanied by a somewhat forced step in the Garber settlement to offer out-of-town fans the opportunity to purchase single-team packages at a reduced rate. A lesser publicized part of the settlement prevents MLB.TV from raising prices (capped at 3% per year) unless the non-Fox RSNs also offer streaming for local games by the 2017 season, which Commissioner Rob Manfred expects to happen.

These steps, along with burgeoning MLBAM technology and reports that ESPN is losing billions to cord-cutting viewers, have begun to raise more questions about when the sports right bubble might finally burst — when the current cable model might finally be unsustainable — and MLB fans will finally be able to purchase directly the rights to see the games of their local team (or in Iowa and Las Vegas, their six local teams) free from cable and the onerous blackout rules that accompany it. Unfortunately, nobody has an answer.

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After first demonstrating that batted ball exit velocity matters, and then establishing that it might stabilize rather quickly and represent an actual repeatable skill, the next step in our exploration of the data is its application. We want to find something that’s predictive and could possibly provide clues for future performance. In the second part of this series, we looked at a lot of relationships between first- and second-half data to determine if exit velocity is a repeatable skill. To attempt to find meaning in the data, we will again use the numbers we have for the first and second halves with a view towards identifying some meaningful information.

Looking for potentially predictive information, the simplest thing to do is look at the overall outcome — in this case, second-half production — and see if there is anything in the first half which might have portended the numbers from the second. In Part II, a scatter plot of first- versus second-half wOBA was used to show the relationship between halves. Here is that graph again.

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In part one of this three-part series, we examined the (relatively strong) correlation between exit velocity and slugging percentage — and the (also relatively strong) correlation with individual wOBA, a solid proxy for offensive production at the plate. While there might be some debate over how important exit velocity is on offensive production — particularly when we dial down to an individual level — we know there is some relationship, and that relationship is enough to answer the next question, which is whether exit velocity represents a repeatable skill.

We first attempted to answer the question of whether exit velocity matters. Once we know that it matters, it is still incredibly important to try and determine if it is a skill. An appropriate analogy might be as follows: we know that pitcher BABIP against is important because when the BABIP is higher, the pitcher gives up more hits and runs. Unfortunately, we know a lot less about determining pitchers who can suppress BABIP or pitchers who seem to be prone to a high BABIP. We might believe that it is a repeatable skill; however, if it takes an incredibly long time to figure out who has the skill and who does not, then using a pitcher’s BABIP against to try and predict future performance is of limited use.

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The production of new data by means of new recording technology is exciting — and the more data we get, the better we can become at analyzing said data. We have come a long way since PITCHf/x was made available, but we still have much more to learn. We also now have Statcast data with defensive numbers and figures — as well as exit velocity for hitters and against pitchers — and right now that data is very interesting. But a lot of people are all working very hard to transform the data from merely interesting to actually useful. If it remains interesting without becoming useful, it is still fascinating information to have, but also trivial from an analytical perspective. Organizations want the information to be useful. Exit velocity, one of the streams of data rendered available by Statcast, appears to have the potential to be very useful. Right now, however, I am still unsure what we have, and I am not alone.

As Ben Badler of Baseball America recently noted on Twitter:

Common thing I’m hearing from execs: They have an enormous amount of new data, but they’re still learning to turn it into usable information. Even the more data-driven organizations are still just scratching the surface of separating signal from noise and understanding what has predictive value.

Back in September, I gathered a bunch of exit velocity data on major league pitchers, and attempted to make some sense of it. There seemed to be some evidence to suggest that if a low exit velocity was a repeatable skill, then it might be helpful in limiting home runs. Not exactly groundbreaking, but at least from my perspective, interesting. Others have studied the data and found that exit velocity was five parts the responsibility of the hitter and just one part the responsibility of the pitcher, so perhaps in retrospect, I should have focused on hitters. Below represents my current attempt.

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New York Mets ownership has come under increased scrutiny over the past few years. Lowering payroll in a gigantic media market and getting entwined in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme will bring that kind of attention. Back at the trading deadline, there were many, including myself, wondering why the Mets were acting like a small-market team in New York. The team quieted many doubters by bringing Yoenis Cespedes at the trade deadline and making the World Series, but due to insurance for David Wright’s injury and the PED suspension for Jenrry Mejia, the payroll increase was not significant. As a result, calls for the Mets to spend were heard again during the offseason, and again, the Mets have silenced their critics with Yoenis Cespedes.

The Mets’ revenues are driven by many factors, including the massive New York market that affords them a fantastic television deal that nets them around $100 million per year. However, nothing drives revenue like success, and the Mets, despite significant ownership debts and upcoming payments totaling over $60 million related to the Madoff scandal, the Mets were able to raise payroll due to their on-field success in 2015 and the fan response to that success. Team sources have pegged the revenue due to the Mets World Series run at around $45 million, per the New York Post. Fortunately for Mets fans, it appears almost all of that amount is being invested back on the field.

Let’s break it down.

Regular Season Revenue from 2015

Additional revenue from the regular season was not included in the $45 million estimate, but it is helpful to note that, due to the increased number of fans, the Mets did substantially better at the gate in their competitive 2015 season than they did the prior year. In 2014, the Mets drew 2.15 million fans and had an Opening Day payroll below $85 million — both figures down more than 30% from when Citi Field opened in 2009, but within a few-hundred thousand fans of the previous three seasons as the payrolls dropped beginning in 2011.

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In the offseason, teams are frequently characterized as “winners” and “losers” based on the players they’ve acquired relative to the players who have left. Often, the so-called winners are simply the clubs who’ve been most active, bringing in the most players — regardless of cost — while the losers often are those clubs which have been more idle, making smaller moves to improve their rosters. These characterizations do not always translate to the field, as the case of the San Diego Padres illustrates. The Padres followed an active 2014-15 offseason with a poor 2015 campaign.

With that caveat having been made, many have declared the Washington Nationals losers this offseason not simply because Ian Desmond, Drew Storen, and Jordan Zimmermann are gone — replaced by a relatively modest group including Shawn Kelley, Daniel Murphy, Ben Revere — but mainly because they failed to land Yoenis Cespedes, Jason Heyward, or Ben Zobrist in free agency. While the team might be hidden winners of the winter, the Nationals are claiming their failure is due to a tightened budget caused by the Baltimore Orioles’ refusal to pay market value for their television rights.

For those who might not be aware, the Orioles — principally Peter Angelos, through regional sports networks MASN and MASN2 — air the Nationals broadcasts. The Orioles control the Nationals broadcasts as a result of negotiations with the team when the Nationals moved to Washington, D.C., thus encroaching on the Orioles’ television territory. Nathaniel Grow characterized the situation like this after the last major decision in the legal dispute between the teams:

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

The Orioles believed they should pay the Nationals roughly half the amount the arbitrators awarded and appealed, getting the decision thrown out due to conflicts with the Nationals’ counsel. (For more on the decision, read Grow’s full piece linked above.) The case is still ongoing without a resolution and the Nationals are pushing the Orioles to head back to arbitration. The Nationals retained new counsel, and have filed a motion to compel the parties to arbitrate the case and set a value for the television rights. In their recent motion, the Nationals indicated that the Orioles’ failure to pay fair-market value for television rights has hamstrung the team in signing free agents to multi-year contracts.

“MASN’s underpayment of rights fees has already required the Nationals to fund payroll and other expenses from its own reserves, and further delay could require the Nationals to seek new financing,” says the team’s memorandum. “This is not only burdensome in its own right, but it places the Nationals at a competitive disadvantage to other baseball clubs, which typically receive fair market value from their regional sports networks for their telecast rights. Without this added income, the Nationals are handicapped in their ability to invest in efforts to improve the team. For instance, without this added and steady income, the Nationals cannot bring full economic confidence to investments in multi-year player contracts to keep up with the fierce competition for top players — especially when such control over finances is in the hands of a neighboring club.”

This might sound a bit like whining coming from a billionaire owner who just one year ago signed Max Scherzer to a seven year, $210 million contract, and reportedly made offers to Jason Heyward for roughly $200 million and Yoenis Cespedes $100 million, but those claims do have some merit.

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