Over the last 40 seasons, there have been 752 player seasons where a reliever pitched at least eighty innings out of the bullpen and averaged at least 1 1/3 innings pitched per appearances. Last year was the first and only season of the last 40 where not a single player met that criteria. Increased reliever specialization and larger bullpens have minimized the long reliever, and those who have been given the long reliever role tend to be the low man in the bullpen hierarchy. That was not always the case, and the decreased offensive environment could be a good opportunity to reintroduce the good long reliever to baseball.

In the not too distant past, long relievers were a regular fixture on teams. Relievers making regular appearances longer than two innings has always been a rarity, but some teams had relievers truly earning the the title of long relievers. From 1975-2014, just 110 relievers pitched at least 80 innings and averaged more than two innings per appearance, but those seasons have all but disappeared in the last two decades.

Strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 are omitted
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Not every contract extension is a winner for both sides. Sometimes teams guarantee too much money without getting many prime seasons. Sometimes players give away too many free agent years. In Christian Yelich’s 7-year, $49.6 million contract (corrected from $51 million) — with a team option for an eighth year — the Marlins have secured Yelich’s services through his 20s and bought out three potential free agent seasons, which could bring significant savings down the line. However, $50 million is also a significant guarantee for Yelich, and this deal looks like a winner for both sides.

Signed out of high school five years ago for $1.7 million, Yelich made the minimum for part of a year in 2013 and all of 2014. He would have made the minimum again this season and next, meaning he was faced with earning under $2 million total for his first four seasons, and if he stayed healthy and productive over the next two seasons, his reward would have been an arbitration salary of around $5 million. If he played well and avoided major injury, he could earn $7 million for his first five seasons, with the bulk of that money still three years away. Yelich faced considerable risk with an eight-figure reward not anywhere in his short-term future.
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Yesterday, I went through team rotations to analyze the most cost-effective pitching staffs in Major League Baseball. Today’s post looks at the hitter side. In a rotation with just five members, one superb pitcher can help create value for the entire staff. On the other hand, one bulging salary without production can drag down the entire rotation. On the hitter side, one player has less of an impact. A 220-inning pitcher counts for around 15% of a team’s innings, while a hitter with 700 plate appearances accounts for around 11% of a team’s plate appearances. The burden to score runs is spread among the entire lineup and bench players.

Like with the pitchers, we begin with the projected WAR generated by the hitting side of each team. Taken from the FanGraphs Depth charts, here are the team totals for projected WAR in 2015. The numbers include both starters as well as bench players.

Bringing in Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval looks to have a positive effect in 2015 for the Boston Red Sox as they beat out the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays for the top projected position player WAR. On the other end of the chart, moving Jason Heyward and Justin Upton without finding quality replacements is a 6-7 win downgrade for the 2015 projections. Half of the teams are bunched together with around 20-25 WAR. The payroll is more spread out.
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Even with almost unlimited resources, assembling a good rotation can be a difficult task. The best rotation in Major League Baseball this season is expected to be the Washington Nationals. The Nationals signed Max Scherzer to a huge free agent contract. The franchise drafted Stephen Strasburg and Jordan Zimmerman and both players have missed seasons due to Tommy John surgery. They traded prospects to get Gio Gonzalez and Doug Fister. The Nationals have put together an incredible rotation, but it took a lot of money and prospects to create and the result will be fleeting. Zimmerman and Fister are pending free agents with Strasburg just a year behind them.

Moving pieces around to create a rotation was not easy for the Nationals, and for those with considerably less resources, a cost-effective rotation that looks good on the field is a difficult proposition. There are a few ways to measure the effectiveness of a rotation. The way that matters most is the play on the field. In that regard, the Nationals are the best in baseball with the Los Angeles Dodgers coming in second. The graph below uses the data taken from the FanGraphs Depth Charts for starting pitching.

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Teams have long devoted a majority of Major League Baseball payrolls to starting position players and the starting rotation. Last week’s post reinforced that notion with first baseman and aces receiving more money than any other position. Shifting back to team analysis, we can take a look at how individual teams spend their resources, separating payroll by rotation, starting position players (including designated hitters), bullpen, and bench. Team spending can vary greatly. The New York Yankees’ position players would rank in the top half of MLB salaries while the Los Angeles Dodgers spend almost as much on their bench and bullpens as the Houston Astros and Miami Marlins spend on their entire teams.

One aspect of spending critical to payroll is the number of cost-controlled players a team employs. Last week, looking solely at starters, the overall breakdown was as follows.
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Kris Bryant hit two more home runs yesterday for the Chicago Cubs during the Will Ferrell extravaganza. He stands tall among prospects, ranking number one according to Kiley McDaniel. The FanGraphs Depth Charts have given him a conservative 100 games played, and he still manages to top 3 WAR. The ZiPS projections give him closer to a full season, and he tops four wins despite never having taken an at bat at the major league level. He is not even on the Cubs’ 40-man roster. Despite that inexperience, he is going to make the Cubs look very bad for sending him to the minor leagues to start the season. It brings back memories of the Los Angeles Angels in 2012 holding back Mike Trout in the minors to start the season, but Kris Bryant’s situation is very different from Mike Trout’s.

In 2012, Mike Trout, like Bryant today, was one of the very best prospects in all of baseball and likely ready to play in the majors, but the Angels sent him to Triple-A to start the season. The Angels started the season 6-14, recalled Trout from Salt Lake, went 83-59 the rest of the way, and missed the playoffs by four games. Looking back at Trout’s excellence now, it might be easy to draw the conclusion that the Angels likely make the playoffs with Trout for the entire season and that the Angels were manipulating Trout’s service time to save money. The former is impossible to determine, but the latter is highly unlikely.
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In my post yesterday, I broke down the starters at every position and determined an average salary for all the positions in Major League Baseball. Several comments noted the large amount of minimum-salaried players at several positions and indicated that could be skewing the results. I had indicated that teams appeared to value starting pitching and power hitting over the prime defensive positions. However, it is possible that minimum salaries are weighing the average down, and that the free agent market actually values the differing positions similarly.

As a result, I have dug a bit deeper and separated the salaries into three categories. The first category is players who are making the major league minimum. These are players who have not reached arbitration or signed a contract extension increasing their salary. The second group of players contains arbitration eligible players. This group of players all have less than six years of service time. The group also includes the relatively small number of players who are not yet arbitration eligible, but signed a contract extension prior to arbitration eligibility increasing their salary from the minimum. The third group of player is those with more than six years of service time. These players all signed contracts as free agents or agreed to an extension prior to free agency that bought out free agent years.

In dealing with top starters yesterday, I used the highest salaried starter for each team. For today’s post, I made a modification. The top starter for this post is the starter with highest WAR in the FanGraphs Depth Charts. Yesterday, the top starting pitchers averaged a salary of roughly $15 million. For today, that number drops to $10 million, which would still have put the top starter as one of the top two position groups from yesterday. There are 11 positions total, with the eight position players, one starting pitcher, a designated hitter for American League teams, and a closer. Of those 315 starters, here is how the starters broke down by service class:
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Power is still king when it comes to getting paid. On the pitching side, power pitchers anchoring staffs are paid well. On the hitting side, power hitters are among the highest paid players in Major League Baseball. The defensive positions like catcher, shortstop, and center field are highly spoken of, but nobody gets paid like first basemen and corner outfielders. The defensive spectrum as well as the WAR positional adjustment tends to go, from most difficult to least difficult, C-SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B. However, when it comes to getting paid, the opposite is true.

Using the FanGraphs Depth Charts, and the salary information from Cots at Baseball Prospectus, I took a look at every projected starter in the majors and their salaries. I added designated hitters in the American League as well as closers and the highest paid pitcher for all teams. While the highest paid pitcher is not necessarily a team’s best pitcher, it is an easy proxy in this case. Where a team received money from another to help pay for a player’s salary, only the salary paid by the team employing the player was counted. The money paid by the other team is not included in their own figures.

Top starting pitchers lead the way by a decent margin followed by first basemen.

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The Cincinnati Reds face an uphill battle in 2015. The St. Louis Cardinals are heavy favorites. The Pittsburgh Pirates brought back most of its playoff team and could see improvement with a young roster. The Cubs have made improvements, and even the Brewers bring back many players who put them in first place for most of 2014. The odds of the Reds winning the division are not very good. The FanGraphs Playoff Odds are up, and the Reds have just a 3.0% chance of winning the division. That means out of 10,000 simulations, the Reds won the division around 300 times. Focusing in on the 3% chance side, it is possible to create scenarios where the Reds can win the division.

FanGraphs Playoff Odds are based on ZiPS, Steamer, and the Depth Chart Projections. Those projections are not very kind to the Reds. The projections currently have the Reds at 75 wins, last in the National League Central. For a frame of reference, here are the top five teams per WAR according to those projections.

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Catchers are generally associated with stopping stolen bases on the defensive side. Last season, catchers stopped stealing bases on the offensive side as well. Russell Martin, Carlos Ruiz, and Jonathan Lucroy tied for the Major League Baseball lead for stolen bases by a catcher in 2014 with four. Catchers are not known for their prowess on the basepaths, but four is still an incredibly low number to lead MLB at the position. No catcher had topped his position with that low of a number since Stan Lopata in 1955, also with four stolen bases. A catcher has not topped double figures in steals since Yadier Molina’s 12 in 2012, and only Molina, Russell Martin, Jason Kendall, Ivan Rodriguez, and Joe Mauer have reached double-figures in the last ten years.

A dearth of speed at the catcher position does not cause alarm bells to ring, but whether 2014 was an anomaly or the result of a slow Molina-like progression on the bases is an interesting question. Since 1945, the career stolen base leaders for catcher have a lot of fairly recent names.

Jason Kendall, Ivan Rodriguez, and Brad Ausmus were all playing just a few years ago. Russell Martin is still playing, and he is the only active player on the list. The active player leaderboard is not very impressive. Just 14 career stolen bases gets a player in the top ten.
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