The search for utopia is a futile one. For humans to truly appreciate happiness, we must always be reminded of our sadness. If happiness were a constant, it would become no longer desirable. A world without imperfections is a world impure.

And so to truly appreciate Clayton Kershaw is more than to simply watch a glorious seven-minute YouTube highlight video of Vin Scully calling every out of Kershaw’s June 18, 2014 no-hitter against the Rockies in Los Angeles. I mean, yeah, that’s a part of it — watching that specific video is actually one of the required steps; you’ve gotta watch the video — but by only observing Kershaw at his best, by choosing only to remember his triumphs, by only witnessing him accomplish that which leaves his peers in awe, we begin to lose context. For our admiration of Kershaw to be pure, we must always remind ourselves of his fleeting moments of fallibility, for they are what allow us to appreciate his greatness.

I’m a man of my word. And I’d sure like to continue enjoying Clayton Kershaw. So let’s watch him throw some trash pitches.

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The word “move” is used in the context of an offseason to denote any number of varying transaction types. A trade is a move. A free-agent signing is a move. A player being designated for assignment is a move, or claimed off waivers, or sold to Japan. Players coming and going from rosters are the moves of the winter, and they’re the means by which the public tends to evaluate a team’s offseason.

The calculus for the outlook of the upcoming season is constantly changing throughout the offseason as these myriad moves transpire. When a team signs a star free-agent pitcher, we know that that team is several wins better than they were the day before. When a rebuilding club trades away its slugger in the final year of his contract for prospects, we understand that they’ve dropped a couple wins for the upcoming season.

But there’s another sort of move that happens during the offseason that’s more subtle, and it, too, changes the calculus of the upcoming season, though it often seems to be overlooked. We spend so much time and effort analyzing who “won or lost” the offseason that it’s easy to forget how much change should be expected from a team’s returning players. The Rangers didn’t go out and sign Yu Darvish this offseason, but he is expected to be a valuable addition to this year’s roster, an extra four or so wins added without any kind of traditional offseason move. Without doing anything, the Rangers rotation looks significantly better than it did at the end of last year.

Six years ago, Dave Cameron wrote a short post on this site titled 2009 Is Not a Constant. I recommend you read it, and sub in “2015” for “2009” when applicable, but here’s a relevant passage anyway:

We all know about career years and how you have to expect regression after a player does something way outside the ordinary, but regression doesn’t just serve to bring players back to earth after a big year.

Regression “fixes” a lot of problem spots from the prior year, even if the team doesn’t make a serious effort to change out players. The Royals got a .253 wOBA out of their shortstops a year ago. I don’t care how bad you think Yuniesky Betancourt is, you have to expect that number to be higher this year. They didn’t do anything to improve their shortstop position this winter, but the level of production they got from the position in 2009 is not their expected level of production for 2010.

…

You cannot just look at a team’s prior year won loss record – or even their pythagorean record – make some adjustments for the off-season transactions, and presume that’s a good enough estimator of true talent for the 2010 team.

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Maybe the headline is a tad misleading; Joe Blanton-to-the-bullpen looked like something of a success story before he went to Pittsburgh and worked under the tutelage of pitching coach guru Ray Searage. But it was in Pittsburgh and under Searage that Blanton really took off, and without that time in Pittsburgh, Blanton may very well have been Just Another Reliever on the scrap heap, rather than a reliever who receives $4 million on a one-year deal to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s the year 2016, and we live in a world where Joe Blanton is getting guaranteed money to serve as a relief weapon for a contender. What a time to be alive.

Like many of you, I’ve long played fantasy baseball, and I’ve got a history with Mr. Blanton. Beware: I’m currently breaking rule No. 1 of playing fantasy baseball by talking about my fantasy baseball team. Nobody cares, I know, but I promise it won’t take long, and it’s related to the events at hand. My history with Joe Blanton goes like this: when I first started learning about sabermetrics, I learned about xFIP, and thought to myself, “Hey, this could be a useful tool for fantasy baseball.” One single stat, a predictive stat, that shows you potential under- and over-performers who have the peripherals to succeed; it was perfect!

Through the power of the almighty xFIP, I hastily, yet assertively, concluded that Joe Blanton was just unlucky. I concluded that Joe Blanton’s peripherals hinted at better results than he’d shown, and that Joe Blanton would provide Good Value. I drafted Joe Blanton, and then he was bad. Drats. Unlucky. Drafted him again, bad again. It goes on like this for several seasons until I couldn’t draft Joe Blanton anymore because he was no longer in the major leagues. At a certain point, I think I just became pot-committed and was determined to squeeze a good season out of Joe Blanton. It never came.

The point is this: Joe Blanton was always close. It always seemed like he might just be an adjustment away. An adjustment, or a lucky home run season. One of the two. He didn’t get a ton of strikeouts, but he got enough, he didn’t walk anybody, and he got a bunch of ground balls. That’s typically the beginning of a strong recipe for a successful pitcher, except Joe Blanton just gave up so many freaking dingers. Joe Blanton dingered himself right out of baseball, culminating in a 2013 in which he allowed 29 homers in 28 appearances. That was it for Blanton.

Or so we thought — until right around this time last year, when Blanton announced he was coming out of retirement, and we scoffed. Until Blanton received a minor league deal with the Royals, and we scoffed. Until Blanton found his way onto the major league roster and pitched effectively out of the bullpen, and we continued to scoff, but our hearts weren’t really in it, and as we scoffed we kind of looked around the proverbial room at one another, quizzically, as if to say, “Should we still be scoffing?” Until Blanton made his way to Pittsburgh and flat-out dominated, and we all just sat there, dumbfounded.

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Somebody finally signed Justin Upton to a contract late Monday night, and it was the Tigers who seemingly came out of nowhere to lock up the 28-year-old slugger to a seven-year contract. It’s reportedly worth $132 million with a second-year opt-out, but the details aren’t important — at least not in this post. Jeff Sullivan’s got the details, if you want the details.

I’m interested in something specific, something I saw pop up a few times on Monday night after news of the signing broke. I’ll use this one tweet, from the esteemed Jon Paul Morosi of FOXSports, as an example of a common line of thought:

Justin Upton gives #Tigers one of deepest lineups in #MLB, albeit very right-handed. Detroit went 53-70 vs. RH starters in ’15.

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) January 19, 2016

There’s no denying the Tigers now have Justin Upton on their baseball team, and there’s no denying the Tigers now have a deep, formidable lineup. The Tigers already had a formidable lineup, before Upton, and now it’s deeper, and even more formidable. There’s no denying, either, that the Tigers lineup leans very right-handed. It’s something worth questioning, whether it’s a cause for potential concern. It sounds less than ideal, but is it really a problem, given the quality of the right-handed bats in question?

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Way back on April 11 of last year, when the Matt Williams-led Nationals were still World Series favorites and Jed Lowrie was still the starting shortstop for the Astros, an unassuming at-bat took place between Matt Carpenter and Johnny Cueto in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cueto, facing his 45th batter of the season, quickly got ahead in the count, 0-2, spotting consecutive fastballs on the outer edge against which Carpenter could only muster a foul ball. Carpenter, who led the league in pitches per plate appearance in 2014, with 4.4, took a third-pitch fastball just inside for ball one. Then another fastball, outside, for ball two. Then a similar fastball, this one a bit lower and still outside for ball three. With the count now full, Carpenter took one more pitch, a low slider, for ball four, laid down his bat and took his base.

It’s not the kind of thing that makes fans jump up out of their seats, or really have any kind of reaction from their seats. It’s just a walk, seemingly as unremarkable as any other, especially given Carpenter’s role in the event, if not for the fact that it came after an 0-2 count, something Chris Sale only let happen once in 854 batters faced last year. Cueto did it in his second start, and then nine more times throughout the course of the year, more than anyone else in baseball save for Baltimore’s Ubaldo Jimenez.

Cueto was one of only four pitchers to break the 10-walk threshold after 0-2 counts, joining Jimenez, Trevor Bauer and Gio Gonzalez. Given enough tries, a hardcore baseball fan probably could have guessed those three names. Bauer, Gonzalez, and Jimenez are the kind of guys who issue plenty of walks all season long, so they’re the kind of guys one might expect to issue plenty of walks after 0-2 counts, too. Those three each routinely post walk rates close to or north of 10%. Cueto, on the other hand, walked just 5% of his batters last year, and is known for possessing impeccable command.

Going back several seasons, Cueto’s place on the leaderboard of 0-2 counts lost to walks remains equally eye-popping:

Cueto is the only pitcher in the top five with an overall walk rate under 8%, and therefore leads the top 10 in the percentage of his total walks that come after he’s ahead of the batter 0-2. Putting that into more perspective: since 2013, Cueto’s walked 129 batters, and 15% of those walks started out as an 0-2 count. As effective and entertaining as Cueto may be, this must be the sort of thing that’s downright maddening for fans, coaches, and teammates alike.

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You could say the market has agreed upon a price for mid-level innings-eaters around 30 years of age. The Kansas City Royals reportedly agreed on Saturday morning to sign right-handed starter Ian Kennedy to a five-year deal worth $70 million.

It’s a big contract, a surprising contract, but one that falls right in line with similar deals inked by Mike Leake (5/80), Wei-Yin Chen (5/80) and Jeff Samardzija (5/90). Looking back at our crowdsourced contract estimates, it’s clear that nobody expected this class of durable, mid-rotation starters to get paid the way they did:

It’s not the biggest “overpay,” relative to the what the crowd expected, but it’s close. Samardzija, Leake, Chen, and now Kennedy all received an extra year or two, and an extra few million dollars per year more than the crowd expected, adding up to each starter receiving between $20 and $30 million more than what folks thought.

But Kennedy’s contract leads the way, in terms of surprise. Thought was, Kennedy would get something like three years and $36 million. He got an extra two years, opposed to the extra one that the rest of the group received, and a larger AAV. When the crowdsourcing took place, an extra question was included, asking the crowd whether it thought Kennedy would accept the qualifying offer, a one-year deal worth just over $15 million. Nearly 40% of the crowd expected Kennedy to take the qualifying offer, more than double the number of people who thought Leake or Chen might accept. If Kennedy rejected the qualifying offer, there was fear among many that no team would be willing to concede a draft pick to sign Kennedy, even at the terms of 3/36.

Reason being, Kennedy simply hasn’t been as good as his peers. Last season, he allowed the highest OPS among any qualified starter, and whether you go back more years, or look toward the future, it’s tough to find any way to include Kennedy in the same class as Samardzija, Leake or Chen:

Last year, Kennedy was a replacement-level pitcher. In 2013, Kennedy was a replacement-level pitcher. He should be expected to do better than that, but odds are that Kennedy’s true-talent level lies a bit above a +1 WAR starter, with the most optimistic of projections putting him around +2 WAR, in the present. The contract runs for five years. Even if you start with Steamer’s more optimistic 2.2 WAR projections, it’s hard to justify, in a vacuum, Kennedy being worth $70 million:

The estimate comes in $20 million shy of the actual contract, and that’s not including the loss of a late first-round draft pick, likely valued somewhere around $10 million, and the fact that there’s an opt-out for Kennedy after two years, which shifts the needle even more towards Kennedy’s side. If he’s good, he’s gone after two years, and if he’s bad, the Royals are saddled with his salary for the duration.

Of course, moves are to be evaluated in context, and each team’s situation is unique, as well as each player’s situation. There’s more to every deal than the dollars and years.

For instance, maybe the Royals just aren’t too concerned about the loss of the 24th overall pick in the draft? The window of contention might not be open for too much longer with this roster. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Wade Davis, Alcides Escobar, Edinson Volquez and more will all be free agents by 2018, the same year in which Kennedy’s opt-out resides, and so perhaps they just care more about maximizing their chances of winning again during that two-year window, rather than maybe winning down the road. It’s a reasonable thought to have, and you’ve got to applaud the World Series champs, a team that’s always been ran on the tightest of budgets under owner David Glass, for opening up the pocketbook in an effort to continue Going For It. Kansas City’s Opening Day payroll is going to be something like $130 million dollars, up $20 million from last year and up $100 million from five years ago.

At the same time, if Kennedy is bad, as he’s been in two of the most recent three seasons, then Kansas City might have a replacement-level albatross on their hands in the very near future, and it’s the kind of move that might keep the Royals from retaining one of their star players in a couple years, when the franchise isn’t coming off the high of a World Series victory and swimming in extra postseason revenue.

The Royals needed a pitcher. They needed a pitcher who was likely to give them plenty of innings. Banking on the health of Kris Medlen, Danny Duffy and, to an extent, Yordano Ventura, is a frightening proposition, and the Royals wanted to mix in some certainty. In terms of innings, Kennedy will give them that certainty, but at one point due the value of a pitcher’s ceiling, and his floor, outweigh his durability?

Kennedy has thrown plenty of innings lately, but most of them haven’t been good innings. The big problem, for Kennedy, has been the fly balls. He doesn’t induce any grounders, and way too many of the flies have been leaving the park. True, Kaufman Stadium has a massive outfield that suppresses homers, and true, Kansas City has an incredible outfield defense that turns would-be fly ball hits into outs. But Kennedy recently pitched his home games in PETCO Park, a stadium just as pitcher-friendly as Kaufman, against teams that batted with a pitcher in their lineup, and even the greatest outfield defense in the world can’t turn fly balls that land halfway up the bleachers into outs.

Jeff recenty ran through all the pros and cons of Kennedy as a pitcher, and while it’s hard to be overly pessimistic, it’s equally difficult to come away feeling encouraged, and that was before we knew the terms of the deal. On the surface, it seems like an overpay. Kennedy isn’t Samardzija, or Leake, or Chen, and yet he gone Samardzija/Leake/Chen money. But the Royals needed a pitcher, and Kennedy’s a pitcher, and the Royals are better today than they were yesterday. Is the rotation good enough to contend again? Only time will tell, and maybe Dave Eiland can work his magic again, reuniting with Kennedy from their days with the Yankees. It sure looks like an overpay, but maybe that isn’t the point. We always want to see teams boost up their payroll after a World Series run, and the Royals have done just that. They’ve got another two years until things could get ugly again, and doing everything they can to keep this run going. It’s hard not to like the decision to commit to that, and to spend some money. It’s just a little harder to like where the money went.

A pitcher, standing on the mound, peers in toward his catcher for a signal. It’s the first pitch of an at-bat. The catcher puts down a couple fingers, and the pitcher shakes him off once. He shakes him off twice. The pair agree on a pitch. The pitcher starts his windup, rears back, and fires. Miss. Ball one. A league-average batter now has a 37% chance of reaching base in this at-bat, just on the pitcher misfiring on his first offering alone. In an alternate universe, where the pitcher throws a strike, the batter’s chances of reaching are reduced to just 26%. Over the course of a full-length season, two identical batters with equal true-talent levels could bat 600 times each, and batter A, who starts out every at-bat with a ball, would reach 66 more times than batter B, who starts out every at-bat with a strike, the seperation being due entirely to the difference in count leverage.

We know count leverage is important, but its omnipresence makes it easy to undersell its magnitude. Someone’s always got the edge. The battle is winning it back. In the same vein, the other side of the battle is not losing it once you have it.

There’s no worse spot for a hitter to be than an 0-2 count. After falling behind 0-2, the league hit just .171 last year, with a .200 on-base percentage. It’s not any easier against Chris Sale. From a batter’s point of view, the words “easy” “against” and “Chris Sale” don’t mix well. Against Sale last year, batters were held to a .155/.169/.243 line after falling behind 0-2. Sale found himself with the advantage of an 0-2 count plenty of times — 231, to be exact. More than a quarter of Sale’s at-bats went directly to an 0-2 count. And from there, things only got worse for the hitter. Of those 231 counts that went straight to 0-2, Sale recorded a strikeout in 132 of them, with exactly one walk.

Only one time last season did Chris Sale lose an 0-2 count to a walk. Julio Teheran lost just one as well, but in 73 fewer at-bats. And, sure, what David Price did is probably every bit as impressive as Sale, except singularity is fascinating. And fascinations are worth exploring.

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There were only four of them. Blown saves, that is. I presume you’ve read the title. Zach Britton blew four saves last year, which actually isn’t a particularly noteworthy fact. Britton blew four saves in 40 tries, which is great, but it certainly wasn’t the best, and Britton blew four saves the year before too, in one more try. It’s great but not spectacular, especially relative to Britton’s season as a whole, which was both great and spectacular and plenty of other adjectives like awesome (in the literal sense of actually inspiring awe) or remarkable or astonishing or breathtaking or historic. Britton struck out nearly a third of all batters he faced and posted the highest ground ball rate in history. That’s spectacular. “History” in this case dates back to just 2002, but Britton stands alone at the top by a comfortable margin, 3.5 standard deviations above the mean and a full standard deviation above the guy in third place. History doesn’t reach back super far in this instance, but given the magnitude of his lead, we can expect Britton’s place in history to continue for some time, given Britton doesn’t go and break his own record.

The save is a mostly silly statistic anyway, which by proxy makes it’s cousin, the blown save, equally frivolous. But what if I told you that simply by watching how Zach Britton blew his four saves in 2015, you’d come away knowing more about Zach Britton, more about the nature of saves and blown saves, and maybe more about other things, too? Well, you’d either continue reading the blog post or you wouldn’t. That’s what would happen if I told you what I just told you. I’d prefer that you continue reading the blog post, but let’s be honest it’s 2016 and you’ve probably got a phone to look at, so really you could just scan the moving pictures and get the gist. I’m not gonna lie to you. Just know that my words would feel left out and sad. 🙁
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It’s tough to admit that time has begun to pass you by. This is how we end up with middle-aged woman wearing Phat Farm sneakers at the mall or that 60-year-old dude who only shoots threes and never gets back on defense playing basketball at the rec with the college kids every day. And, hey, I’m not here to judge those folks. Matter of fact, I respect the hell out of them. The old dude can really splash and the mom just values her children’s opinion and wants their adoration. I’m sure she’s a wonderful parent, albeit one with a very questionable fashion sense. At the end of the day, it comes down to whatever makes you happy, and if wearing Phat Farm sneakers or being the local wellness center’s version of Mike Miller is what makes you happy, then do it up!

Take the Rockies, for example. Following Tuesday’s acquisition of Gerardo Parra, it’s a near-certainty that the Rockies will be trading an outfielder. The most probable outfielder to be moved is Carlos Gonzalez, at least if the rumors we’ve heard over the last year-plus are any indication. And so if they want to ask for two top-100 prospects in exchange for Gonzalez, then, sure, more power to ’em! If that’s what makes them happy. They’re never going to get two top-100 prospects for Carlos Gonzalez, but there’s no harm in hoping.

There used to be a time when Gonzalez would have commanded two top-100 prospects or better. From 2010 to -13, Gonzalez was a top-25 hitter and a top-25 overall position player, according to WAR. He was a legitimate star. He hit both lefties and righties, he ran the bases well, he was a lock for 20 homers as well as for 20 steals, and the defense graded out fine in the corners. The only thing that ever kept from CarGo from elevating himself from star to superstar status was that he had trouble staying on the field. When he wasn’t hurt, though, there weren’t many better than CarGo.

Thing about injuries, though, is that they’ll take a toll on you quick. Gonzalaz fractured his right wrist way back in the minors, and in 2011, it started hurting again, sending him to the disabled list. The next year it was a hamstring. Then it was a finger sprain in his right hand, then a tumor on his left hand the following year that required surgical removal. The big one came later in 2014 — left knee surgery to repair a torn patellar tendon. Gonzalez remained mostly healthy in 2015, aside from the occasional day off due to “tired legs,” “right knee discomfort,” “sprained left hand,” or the ever-present “flu-like symptoms.” But these last couple years, after the hand surgery and the knee surgery, Gonzalez hasn’t looked like himself.
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