It’s Spring Training, and everyone is trying to improve their game. That means everyone — I mean everyone — is seeking unsolicited advice from baseball writers who have no individual experience in their line of work. Right? Rather than call this advice, because I alone am not qualified to give advice in this particular field, let’s call it a discussion.

A few months back, I wrote a post titled The Outfielders Who Threw 100, in which I used Statcast data to identify the 15 outfielders who cracked 100 mph on a throw last season, and broke down the various types of 100-mph outfielder throws. The post, of course, was full of video clips — clips of the year’s most exciting throws.

But we didn’t always see the throws. Instead, we saw the ball hit to the outfielder, and the outfielder corralling it, and we felt the palpable suspense of watching the outfielder position himself to unleash a momentous throw, except as soon as he did, we saw a quick cut to a baserunner, and then another quick cut back to the fielder receiving the throw we’d just prepared ourselves to witness — a throw that ended up being one of the most impressive of the year.

This is how they all went. All of the year’s most impressive throws weren’t witnessed in full on the live broadcast, and were instead interrupted by a distracting, one-second interjection of a baserunner scrambling toward the next bag. After seeing this a dozen times in a row, I grew frustrated.

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Billy Hamilton did last year what we all were afraid he’d do: not hit. Somehow, despite a .274 on-base percentage, Hamilton managed to steal 57 bases, which is exactly why his shortcomings at the plate can be so frustrating — think of what he could be if he just hit a little. Despite missing some time to a shoulder injury and being one of the 10 or so worst hitters in baseball, Hamilton managed to be worth two Wins Above Replacement, so it’s not like he wasn’t still a productive player for the Reds, what with his elite speed and center field defense. It’s just, a guy can’t run a .226/.274/.289 slash line forever. That will eventually wear thin with any team, regardless of the player’s contributions outside the batter’s box.

So of course, Hamilton wants to get better at the plate — he needs to get better at the plate — and with Hamilton, it seems like it starts with the approach. These last two years, Hamilton’s put the ball in the air more often than Nelson Cruz. He’s put the ball in the air more often than Josh Donaldson, Albert Pujols, Matt Kemp, Evan Gattis and plenty more sluggers whose fly-ball rates, ideally, should dwarf Hamilton’s. Yet, his swing plane seemingly disagrees with his speed and strength (or lack thereof), and Hamilton has mastered the unbecoming art of the harmless fly out.

Jeff Sullivan wrote last year about this phenomenon, and concluded, understandably, that Hamilton needs to do a better job of putting the ball on the ground, and maximizing his strengths. Now, Hamilton has seemingly come around to that idea, and here’s an excerpt from a recent C. Trent Rosecrans article in the Cincinnati Enquirer to support that idea:

Hamilton said he and [third base coach] Hatcher not only worked on the physical approach — his hands, bunting and such — but also the mental side. Hatcher showed him just how many times he hit the ball where, how many times he popped up and to where and why he was and wasn’t being successful.

“We really sat down and went over all that stuff,” Hamilton said. “I have a plan and I just have to put it together.”

And a remarkably candid quote, from later on:

“I’m going to bunt way more than I did last year.”

Hamilton desperately wants to be Cincinnati’s leadoff hitter, and understands that he’ll have to raise the OBP in order to remain at the top of the lineup. To raise the OBP, he’ll have to change his game, and the way to achieve that goal seems to be clear: more balls on the ground.

Except, here’s a quote from a Mark Sheldon piece during Spring Training last year:

Price would also like to see Hamilton take advantage of his speed by hitting more line drives and balls on the ground instead of lifting them into the air. That would include more bunting.

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Last season, major-league baseball teams, on average, used 23 different position players throughout the course of the year. On Opening Day, most every club will carry 13, and it’s easy to just think of that as this year’s team. Those 13 guys are the team that’s there on Opening Day, that’s the team that will be there at the All-Star break, and, God willing, that’s the team that will be there come playoff time.

Of course, that isn’t ever the case, and I don’t mean to question your intelligence by assuming you might actually believe the New York Yankees were only going to use 13 position players this year. It’s just, sometimes, when you start mapping out a season in your head for a certain team with World Series aspirations, it’s easy to forget in March that, “Oh yeah, Pete Kozma is probably going to have to play for the Yankees at some point this year.”

Backups are going to play, and, like any player, backups are going to have to try and make an impact for some contending ballclubs. Most won’t. But some will! Some of these guys are really going to matter. And it’s probably worth exploring who might stand the best chance.

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Every player in baseball is having a good year. I mean it! No one’s had time to screw it up yet. Every prospect is going to be a star. The pitchers will all remain healthy. Any veteran whose career took a nosedive last year is on track to regain his old form. All the guys who played over their head have shown no indication they can’t maintain last year’s pace. Spring Training games don’t even count!

And all of the hulking 23-year-olds with tools through the roof and devastating contact problems haven’t swung and missed one time yet! What contact problems?

It’s only natural, as the fake-games begin and the regular season breaches the horizon, that we develop irresponsible fixations upon certain players. The way I see it is this: players have upside, and they have downside. Upside is always present — it’s like this mythological thing that cannot be seen or touched or heard or felt, but we know that it exists. But with the regular season comes meaningful games, and meaningful games present scenarios that remind you of your fixation’s flaws, the very things that will prevent Him from reaching His upside. During the offseason, those flaws cannot be seen; only upside exists, and we dream big.

I’m here to talk about Domingo Santana. But first, I want to talk about George Springer.

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Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?

This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”

That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.

But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.

Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!

Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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It’s not that anything more needs to be done. It’s not like Mike Trout desperately needed to fix the hole in his swing, lest he be in danger of suffering a complete collapse. Things were going just fine. That hole in Mike Trout’s swing, the one that kept him from hitting high fastballs, is like the Pablo Honey record in Radiohead’s discography. Would everything be better if it were just gone? I mean, yeah, technically. But the discography, as a whole, is still essentially flawless even with Pablo Honey, so we can all live with it.

Mike Trout went and deleted Pablo Honey anyway. It wasn’t necessary for survival, but everyone knew it was a problem, and everyone knew we’d be better off without it, so Trout went and fixed the hole in his swing. He started hitting those high fastballs, and no one ever had to hear Creep again and the world was a better place. But, listen. Someone’s gotta get in there and wipe out Fake Plastic Trees, too. Not all of The Bends; the rest of the record can stay. But Fake Plastic Trees has gotta go. Maybe I’m getting greedy, asking for even more tweaks after the big one’s already been made, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

This next tweak, it doesn’t have to do with Trout’s swing. For all intents and purposes, that’s about perfect. The high fastball was the only real weakness, and that’s been patched. When pitchers stopped throwing him high, they started throwing him outside, but that didn’t really work. Maybe you’d like to see Trout swing at a first-pitch curveball or two, but that’s a very minor thing, and Trout literally never swinging at first-pitch curveballs might actually be a feature, rather than a bug. Point is: the swing, for now, requires no further adjustments, and I’ve already linked to Jeff Sullivan about a hundred times in this piece. When Trout’s swing requires another adjustment, he’ll let you know.

It was exciting last year, knowing that Trout had this weakness, and knowing that Trout knew about this weakness, and knowing that Trout planned to fix the weakness. He’s never been shy about these things. During Spring Training, he came right out and said it:

“Plain and simple, I was chasing the high pitch. Everybody knows that,” Trout said. “The majority of time, they’re balls, and I was chasing them.”

Usually, us writers have to seek out these adjustments. We’ve got to watch with a close eye, and see if the numbers back it up, and then ask the player about it. In this case, Trout came right out and told us. “Hey, everybody. Makin’ an adjustment here. Free blog content.”

The next item on Trout’s to-do list isn’t exactly a secret, but Trout’s done us the favor of letting us know he’s planning on another adjustment:
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As far as topic ideas go, they’re typically the product of one of three circumstances:

1. stumbling upon a unique storyline or stat that could serve as the root of an interesting/fun article
2. reacting to a recent transaction
3. asking a question that leads to an unshakable curiosity

Door number one is probably the most common. Door number two is the majority of the offseason, and while those sometimes feel contrived, they’re the most necessary and topical. Door number three is almost always the most fun, both for the writer and reader.

What follows is sort of a mixture of what’s behind doors one and three. See, I was reading an article the other day written by Mike Petriello, formerly of FanGraphs and who’s now doing excellent work for MLB.com, usually using or explaining Statcast numbers. Mike wrote about which players, according to Statcast, got down the line from home to first the fastest. Billy Hamilton wasn’t the fastest, but he was third-fastest. Dee Gordon was second. Billy Burns, surprisingly, or maybe not, was number one. No matter the order, these three guys are the kind of guys you’d expect. They’re young, they’re obviously extremely fast, they steal plenty of bases, they’re all very relevant; this all passes the smell test, and why shouldn’t it?

But Mike’s leaderboard went five deep. And there was a tie for fifth place:

Mike’s parenthetical bewilderment says it all. Ichiro! Ichiro is still one of the five fastest players (from home to first) in baseball at 41 years old! Let’s run through our smell test checklist from just a second ago and apply the criteria to Ichiro. Young? Ha, nope. Obviously extremely fast? Eh, debatable, at this point. Steal plenty of bases? Nope. Very relevant? Mostly when pitching.

This is when the unshakable curiosity took over. If Ichiro at 41 is one of the five fastest down the line in baseball, how fast could he have been in the early 2000s? Let’s begin with a quick Google query, our search terms being: “ichiro home to first time.”

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A couple weeks back, Dave Cameron wrote about how Dexter Fowler would be a good fit for the Orioles in the wake of the presumed Yovani Gallardo signing — and when he did so, the post began like this:

“While nothing is officially done yet, it seems reasonable to assume the Orioles are going to sign Yovani Gallardo, with reports that a deal just needs some tweaks before it is finalized.”

Dave had no reason to believe the Gallardo signing wouldn’t work out, but now it hasn’t, as the Orioles seemingly have a higher expectation than most when it comes to physicals, and so you understand that I’m cautious to say anything is set in stone between Fowler and Baltimore.

That being said, it sure looks like Dexter Fowler’s going to be playing in Baltimore next year! Just need to see that physical! Operating under the assumption Fowler does indeed pass his physical, it sounds like the Orioles will pay him $33 million over three years. That’s a year and some AAV fewer than the crowd’s estimation of four years and $56 million back in November. The qualifying offer strikes again.

If the Gallardo deal falls through, and it looks like it could, then the Orioles will surrender the 14th-overall pick in next year’s draft for Fowler. With Gallardo in the mix, it would be 14 and 28. Doesn’t much matter who’s responsible for the loss of which pick — 14 is gone either way. The 14th pick is worth something like $15 to $20 million, and so you can factor that into Fowler’s cost, if you’d like. Even with an extra $20 million tacked on for the pick, Fowler’s total guaranteed money falls short of the crowd, and so it’s easy to think of this as something of a bargain price for a quality outfielder who’s still on the right side of 30 for another 27 days.

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