Well, a new team, for starters. What Jay Bruce is missing is a new team. Rather, a new team is missing Jay Bruce. Twice now, the Reds have reportedly been on the verge of trading Bruce. First, to the Mets at last year’s trade deadline, more recently to the Blue Jays, just last night. Twice, Bruce has reportedly been on the verge of being dealt, and twice, the deal has fallen apart.

Maybe that tells you something about Jay Bruce. Or maybe it tells you something about the other players in the deal, as both deals collapsed due to medical hangups concerning the players whom the Reds were attempting to acquire. In July, it was the Reds who backed out of the proposed deal that could have netted them Zack Wheeler, in the midst of his recovery from Tommy John Surgery. Last night, it wasn’t even Michael Saunders‘ bum knee that gave the Reds pause.

Neither proposal fell apart because of Bruce, specifically, but that doesn’t mean the failed deals don’t tell us something about Bruce, because they do. What they tell us about Bruce is this: thus far, teams have only appeared willing to give up already-injured players for him.

Which is shocking, given where Bruce’s career was just two years ago. Just two years ago, he was a 26-year-old Gold Glove-caliber right fielder who doubled as one of the game’s most prolific home run hitters. Now, the Reds are struggling to rid themselves of his salary for anything more than damaged goods.

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Do you feel that? Spring Training is underway! No, not the part where they play actual games and it’s exciting for three innings. Rather, it’s the part where beat writers from all 30 teams bombard your Twitter feed with videos of pitchers throwing bullpen sessions and hitters taking batting practice and stories of how that one reliever got away from baseball by working on his truck all offseason or how that second baseman just eats a bunch of kale now.

You also get pictures of players with their new teams! Here’s Joba Chamberlain in an Indians jersey! Skip Schumaker with the Padres! Wow! Spoiler alert: Chamberlain gets chased out of Cleveland by a swarm of bugs before he ever pitches a regular season game. Schumaker has an embarrassing Spring Training moment where, while his team is taking the field between innings, he goes around to each position and looks into the dugout as if to say, “Here? Should I play here this inning?” and gets to every position before he realizes that his manager never actually told him to take the field. In fact, no one ever even invited him to camp. He just showed up and they gave him a jersey because they felt bad.

That’s the thing with veterans who sign minor league contracts in the offseason — it can be kinda sad. Like, Matt Joyce can only get a minor league deal now? Bummer. Brad Penny is still trying to make this happen? Yeesh. Ricky Romero? Ricky Romero.

But the other thing is this — sometimes, it’s going to work out! Sometimes, three years removed from professional baseball, the Indians sign Scott Kazmir to a minor league deal and he turns his life around and three years later he’s earned himself an extra $70 million. Sometimes, three years removed from pitching at all, really, the Royals sign Ryan Madson to a minor league deal and he helps win a World Series and gets a three-year contract the next offseason at 35.

A few of the guys who signed minor league contracts this offseason are going to make a real impact at the major league level this season. Most won’t. From a team-building perspective, it’s interesting to see how different organizations used their minor league spots and Spring Training invites. A few weeks back, I looked at how the teams were built, analyzing the makeup of each 40-man roster. In a similar vein, I thought I’d analyze which teams gave out the most minor league contracts this offseason, and to what kind of players.

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It might be the biggest debate in baseball, statistically speaking. We’re well past RBI and pitcher wins, by now. WAR is a big debate, but not so much because of the offensive statistics, or the baserunning figures. WAR is debated largely due to the thing I had in mind when I wrote that first sentence, the one about the biggest debate in baseball, statistically speaking: defense.

There’s still a strong “eye test” contingent. Folks who believe you just can’t put a number on defense. On the other side, there’s a staunch numbers crowd. The crowd that argues, well, you can’t see every play from every defender, and you also can’t ignore or probably even be aware of your own internal biases; I’ll stick with the numbers. Where it gets real tricky is that, even within the numbers-oriented crowd, there’s some skepticism of those very numbers. There’s some concerns with the methodology. Defensive shifts make things extra tough.

So for the most part, we shrug our shoulders and accept that, for as far as these things have come over the years, we’ve still got to do some leg work. If we really want to gain an idea of a player’s defensive ability, we’ve got to just take it all in, and look for clues along the way. What does each defensive metric say? When they agree on one thing or another, we’ve got ourselves a clue. How about errors? They’re not the best, but they’re not worthless. Do they line up with what we saw in the advanced stats? Clue. Check out some spray charts, or Inside Edge. Watch some film, and read some scouting reports. Plenty of clues to be found in there, especially given all you’ve learned along the way. Do all this, and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Even if one number or one play or one quote goes against what you’ve concluded, that’s the point; your body of research holds more weight than that one thing that purports to invalidate your findings.

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Each year, Tom Tango does a fun little project called the Fans Scouting Report. The nature of the project, essentially, is to crowdsource the eye test. There’s plenty of ways to use the data, and I’ve settled on one, for now. I wanted to look for improvement, and I wanted to look for agreement, using both the eye test, and the advanced numbers. I used three sources of defensive metrics (UZR, DRS, FRAA) for fielders with at least 500 innings in 2014, and 2015. I averaged those to get component defensive runs above average figures, and then, I compared against the Fans Scouting Report’s numbers. Using some z-scores, I could come up with an overall ranking of agreed-upon improvement.

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One of the great virtues of baseball is its abundance of individual, miniature virtues, which are appreciated to varying extents by some, and perhaps go unnoticed by others. Maybe one of the small things you enjoy looking for is what a player does with his batting gloves upon reaching first base. Is he a back-pocket kinda guy? Give them to the first base coach? Hold ’em in one hand while he runs the bases? Keep them on the entire time? Or how about a pitcher’s tendencies between pitches? When does he go to the rosin bag, and how often? Does he walk around the mound, or kick dirt? Take off the hat, run the fingers through the hair? Lick the hand? You could just be enthralled by a very particular type of pitch — say, a backdoor two-seam fastball, or a splitter in the dirt. Maybe you’re captivated by the different ways in which players react when they feel slighted by questionable calls.

We enjoy baseball, in a larger sense, because of the competition, and the displays of human achievement. The storylines, and the lessons to be learned. Our childhood, and a sense of both geographical and familial pride. On a more primitive level, we probably just find pleasure in watching dingers and heaters. But it’s the little intricacies that we only notice after countless hours playing and watching the sport that we adopt as our own and grow attached to that give us a deeper appreciation for the game that we love.

One of my favorite small pleasures in baseball is a well-executed check swing. Baseball is such a reactionary game, where the margins are in the milliseconds, and the check swing is a beautiful tug of war between a human’s physical reactionary ability and cognitive reactionary ability. The moment a pitcher releases that breaking ball destined for the dirt, the hitter’s first reaction is to hunt, and his limbs are set in motion. Yet, instantaneously, like an evolving caveman playing with fire, the brain kicks in and says “Nuh uh uh, remember what happened last time?” and sends that signal to the limbs to stop what they’re doing just in time to lay off the pitch that would’ve been strike three, had the brain waited a split-second longer to intervene.

But the brain doesn’t always get that signal out in time. Whether by fault of the batter or by virtue of the pitcher, you as a batter are sometimes halfway through your swing when you have the dreadful realization that, “Crap, I shouldn’t be swinging right now.” Some batters have a greater ability to halt their ill-advised swings than others, and on the other hand, some pitchers have a greater ability to prevent check swings. Some pitchers can throw junk ball after junk ball that hitters just can’t lay off. Using BaseballSavant’s PITCHf/x search, I was able to identify these pitches, those which batters had the hardest time laying off last year. Let’s dive in.
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Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday, I addressed the White Sox desperate need to bolster their rotation to be taken seriously as a contender, and suggested Yovani Gallardo as a sensible addition. The White Sox apparently agreed with me on the first count and rendered the second moot by agreeing to terms with Mat Latos just hours after the post went up.

The deal went down for one year and $3 million, a figure that jumps out as being essentially nothing in today’s free agency landscape. Especially so, when you consider what Latos was expected to receive:

Looking just at guaranteed dollars, it’s the fourth-cheapest contract of the offseason, relative to the crowd’s guess. The crowd expected Latos would earn $22 million this offseason, and what he actually got was $3 million.

Look beyond that, and Latos’ deal stands out even more. We all know about the funky Cespedes contract, and even though he got $57 million fewer guaranteed than expected, that’s largely offset by him actually getting a higher AAV. Iwakuma’s price tag dropped after failing a physical. Gordon got an equal AAV, just one fewer year. In terms of just AAV, Latos is the bargain of the offseason, so far, according to this one-track methodology. His AAV is $8 million less than the crowd predicted; no other free agent has had a gap larger than $4 million.

How did this gap come to be? Did the crowd wildly overestimate Latos’ value? Did the White Sox get a total steal?

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Let’s check in on the latest in Yovani Gallardo rumors:

• Jan. 22, @ChrisCotillo: Source: Barring the late entry of a mystery team, Yovani Gallardo will decide between Astros, Orioles, Rockies.
• Jan. 23, @harding_at_mlb: #Rockies GM downplays Gallardo talks
• Jan. 28, @ChrisCotillo: Fister to Astros means one less suitor for Gallardo. Orioles still thought to be involved, with Rockies on outskirts. No clear favorite.
• Feb. 4, @JonHeyman: orioles continue to have interest in Gallardo, and remain in contact
• Feb. 7, @Buster_ESPN: The Orioles are taking another look at Yovani Gallardo, writes Roch Kubatko

It took a while for any Gallardo talks to surface, but when they did, it was the Orioles, Rockies, and Astros at the forefront. Everyone agreed: those three were the lead suitors.

But the thought of a non-contending Rockies team forfeiting a draft pick for a pitcher entering his age-30 season seemed a bit peculiar, and then GM Jeff Bridich came out and said the talks were “overblown,” so people scratched the Rockies off the list. The Astros went and signed Doug Fister, and people scratched the Astros off the list. So on January 28, just the Orioles were left. On February 4, just the Orioles were left. And on February 7… just the Orioles were left.

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The not-so-breaking news is this: at various points in this year’s offseason, the Twins came to terms with Korean first baseman Byung-ho Park, the Orioles did the same with Korean outfielder Hyun-soo Kim, and the Dodgers signed Japanese starting pitcher Kenta Maeda.

The actual breaking news, depending on your definition of the word breaking: those guys now have FanGraphs player pages! Technically, their player pages appeared on the site late last week, but now they’re equipped with their own unique 2016 Steamer projections and have been factored into our depth charts.

Projections for any player should be discussed, questioned, and mentally tweaked when seen fit, because they’re not meant to be taken as gospel, they’re meant to be used as a guide. For all players, especially those with unique circumstances, the projections come with error bars. “Never having played in America” certainly counts as a unique circumstance, and so of course the projections for Park, Kim, and Maeda fit the bill.

Steamer does what it can. It starts with international league stats, and adjusts them based on estimated quality of league, just like it does with minor leaguers transitioning to the bigs. There’s also an adjustment for the frequency of events between leagues — for instance, there are slightly more strikeouts in the MLB than the NPB, and way more strikeouts than in Cuba. Jared Cross, creator of Steamer, wrote about some of these adjustments for ESPN when Jose Abreu came to America.

Below, I’ll reveal the projections for each of the three players, spend a bit of time discussing what we know about each guy and their expected role in the major leagues for 2016, and I’ll leave a poll to crowdsource the opinions of the projections. I don’t see the need for a follow-up post on the results, it’ll just be nice to know the public opinion for these guys, seeing as they come with more uncertainty that most any other player, and it might be something that gives us a chuckle when we look back at it.

Let’s begin!

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It’s over. Maybe.

Mark Buehrle has told reporters this offseason that he is “not planning on playing next season but is not ready to officially announce retirement,” which is a sort of confusing follow-up to the rumors we heard in October that the 36-year-old veteran starter was planning to retire. If Buehrle does wind up pitching in 2016, it sounds like the only team that could lure him back are his hometown St. Louis Cardinals. If Buehrle winds up retiring, it will mark the end of a remarkable and fascinating career.

Buehrle’s no Hall of Famer. But he’s close. Closer than you might think. He’ll be on the ballot in five or six years, and he’ll get a handful of votes. By our WAR here on the site, which underrates Buehrle by using FIP, Buehrle ranks 40th all-time among starting pitchers in the expansion era. By RA9-WAR, the Preferred Buehrle Method of Evaluation, he jumps up to 30th, with a WAR of 61 that places him right on the verge of the generally accepted Hall of Fame consideration threshold.

And if you think of Buehrle simply as a “compiler,” you’d be mistaken. Buehrle had the peak. When Buehrle entered the league in 2000, his contemporaries included Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, who were turning in some of the most dominant single-season pitching performances baseball has ever seen. Buehrle didn’t have any of the strikeouts or any of the dominant peripherals, but believe it or not, he was right there, just a few steps behind the Pedros and Units and Schillings of his time. Buehrle put up 26 WAR between 2001-05, making him the seventh-most valuable pitcher during that half decade, just a win or so per season behind the true greats. Buehrle’s peak ranks 67th among all pitchers in the expansion era, just ahead of Fernando Valenzuela and just behind David Cone.

But to simply state the WAR figures does a disservice to Buehrle, who is truly one of a kind. In an age where pitchers are hurt more than ever, Buehrle’s never been on the disabled list. He fell five outs short of throwing at least 200 innings for what would have been an unthinkable 15th consecutive season. During that time, Buehrle logged 3,232 innings. That’s 300 more than second place, 500 more than third place, 1,000 more than 18th place.

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Late in the 2014 season, the Red Sox wrote a check worth $72.5 million and handed it to a stranger. The organization had barely missed out on prized Cuban first baseman Jose Abreu less than a year earlier, and they ensured they wouldn’t be topped in the international market again by giving Rusney Castillo the largest-ever deal to a Cuban defector. Castillo wasn’t a complete stranger, of course. They’d seen him play plenty of baseball, they’d met him in person; he was no more a stranger than any other international free agent coming to America. But with Abreu, there was the kind of raw power that can’t be ignored. With guys like Yoenis Cespedes and especially Yasiel Puig, the tools were off the charts. Undeniable freak athleticism.

With Castillo, the figures of the contract could be difficult to see through a thick layer of foggy uncertainty. The upside and athleticism were there, of course. Even the Red Sox don’t hand out seven years and $72.5 million without upside and athleticism. But there wasn’t the Abreu power. There weren’t the Cespedes and Puig tools. Instead, there were concerns of a swing deficiency, and “fourth outfielder” labels, and comparisons to Rajai Davis and Shane Victorino. It was uncertain what the Red Sox new Cuban investment might be, as is the case for any Cuban investment. It’s just that, with Castillo, the comps weren’t as rosy, especially in contrast of the instant success stories of Abreu, Cespedes, and Puig.

Which brings us to the present. Here we are, more than a year later, with Castillo having played in parts of two seasons, and the thick fog of uncertainty still looms, and now it’s shading our view of the Green Monster, locked into a place in left field on Opening Day for a team with hopes of contention and little in the way of a viable, everyday backup plan in the event that the fog happens to grow thicker, and darker.

What can we make of Rusney Castillo? What’s gone right? What’s gone wrong? Where are the points of optimism, pessimism?

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