It’s tough to get an athlete to say much of substance in a postgame press conference. Without the benefit of a personal, one-on-one setting, and without much time for the player to gather his thoughts and reflect on his personal performance, more often than not a reporter simply could pick the cliché responses they’re most likely to hear out of a hat and arrive at a close approximation of the real thing. I’ve found this to be especially true of a starting pitcher who’s just suffered a loss.

“[Insert pitcher name here], what was giving you trouble tonight?”

“Mostly fastball command. Just wasn’t locating my fastball.”

It’s a boring answer, one that a beat writer hears something like 100 times over the course of a typical season, but it’s also an answer with which it’s usually hard to argue after a starting pitcher struggles through a start. If you really had to boil down the art and science of pitching to a one, most important thing, you might pick fastball command. Pitchers throw their fastball more than any other pitch, by far, and without fastball command, a pitcher will almost always end his night with a high number in the walks or hits column of the box score.

If there’s something you know about Gerrit Cole, it’s that he’s one of the very best pitchers in baseball, largely because he has an amazing fastball. By average velocity, it’s the third-hardest heater in the league. By PITCHf/x run values, it was the second-most valuable fastball in the league. Cole complements that fastball with a great slider and a good changeup, but he largely lives, and subsequently dies, by the fastball.

In Wednesday’s 4-0 Wild Card loss to the Cubs, it was the latter.

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It should be pretty well understood that there isn’t one “right” way to pitch. Some pitchers succeed by throwing curveballs, others with changeups. One may get by with grounders, while another flourishes with fly balls. Corey Kluber works out of the zone for whiffs, and Bartolo Colon bombards it for balls in play. Every pitcher is different. It’s important to find what fits one’s unique style, and stick to it.

Dallas Keuchel has found what works for him. And he’d never looked less like himself in Tuesday’s superb Wild Card start than on his final pitch of the evening:
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Before you understand Jeff Locke, you should know that you probably won’t understand Jeff Locke. This will be a post without a real conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be interesting!

A couple things we know to be true about Locke: Over the last two seasons, he’s made 51 starts, and has logged 292 innings. In that time, he’s posted a very respectable ERA of 3.69, which puts him in the same company as guys like Jeff Samardzija and Dallas Keuchel. Over that same time period, however, he’s also posted a less-respectable FIP of 4.18, which puts him in the same company as guys like Travis Wood and Edinson Volquez. Put another way: Locke has outperformed his peripherals like few others in baseball.

Now, some things we know to be true about the Pirates: They have, arguably, baseball’s most distinct organizational pitching philosophies, which include both pitching inside and pitching low at extreme rates. As a team, they’ve outperformed their peripherals like few others in baseball, and that’s likely at least partially a result of their organizational pitching philosophies. The last thing we know is that they recently chose Locke over Vance Worley for the final spot in the rotation, which came as a bit of a surprise considering Worley’s dominant comeback last season.

Worley still made the rotation, on account of Charlie Morton’s injury, but that’s beside the point. The Pirates chose Locke over Worley, and, to an extent, that’s telling. For these facts alone, we have reason to be interested in Locke. It’s not often one finds oneself saying that, so the time is now. Let’s investigate Jeff Locke.
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R.A. Dickey’s entire career has, essentially, been one giant experiment. You know the story by now. Dickey was drafted by the Texas Rangers back in 1996, and took a signing bonus for nearly $800,000 less than what was originally offered after team doctors discovered he just didn’t even have an ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow. Dickey scuffled through the minor and major leagues for more than a decade before reinventing himself as a knuckleballer and promptly becoming one of baseball’s best pitchers, winning a Cy Young Award in the process.

Dickey’s experiment, obviously, was the knuckleball. But around Dickey, other experiments followed. Like the Mets giving light-hitting catcher Josh Thole regular playing time due in large part to his ability to catch Dickey’s knuckleball. Catching a knuckleball is quite hard, you see. But Thole could do it, and the two built a strong rapport together.

Then, the Blue Jays took over the experiment by trading top prospects Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard for Dickey, and, of course, his personal catcher, Thole. In Toronto, Thole’s position was reduced to exclusively serving as Dickey’s catcher. He couldn’t hit worth a lick, but he could catch Dickey’s dancing knuckler, and that was enough to keep him on the roster.

In the offseason, the Blue Jays signed Russell Martin to a contract worth $82 million, which, alongside incumbent Dioner Navarro, gave the Blue Jays something of a logjam at catcher if they wanted to continue carrying Dickey’s personal backstop on the roster.

Then, on Tuesday, some news:

Thole was sent to Buffalo today, so Russ Martin will catch the knuckleball. #bluejays

— Brendan Kennedy (@BKennedyStar) March 31, 2015

In 2015, a new R.A. Dickey experiment begins. Maybe you’d prefer to call it a Russell Martin experiment, because Dickey’s largely going to continue throwing his knuckler the same as he ever has. Martin is the one learning something new.
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Probably should have seen this one coming. Last week, FanGraphs overlord David Appelman announced some minor improvements to the way WAR is calculated on the site, one of them being the inclusion of a double play avoidance stat (wGDP). Shortly thereafter, managing editor Dave Cameron wrote a post regarding The Thing Adam Dunn Was Surprisingly Great At (hint: it was avoiding double plays) and mentioned, in passing, that Mike Trout happened to be the very best at that particular thing last season.

As a quick refresher course, I’ve created an entirely underwhelming flowchart which I believe accurately represents the state of Major League Baseball in the year 2015. My sincerest apologies go out to Sean Dolinar, for I assume this single-handedly ruins all the hard work he’s done over the past couple months in an effort to unify and improve the site’s graphics.

Behold:

So that’s how we got here. A new stat was born, and, like clockwork, Mike Trout just so happened to be the best at it. Well, he was last year at least. In 2014, Trout led the MLB by creating an additional three runs above average by avoiding the double play. If you want take it back a bit further, here’s what a top-15 leaderboard looks like over the last three years, or since Trout has been a full-time regular:

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I came across a stat the other day that took me by surprise. Someone on Twitter was defending Starlin Castro, and made the point that he’s already amassed 1,000 hits before his 25th birthday. I thought to myself, “Surely, that can’t be true. Surely, Starlin Castro isn’t already one-third of the way to a milestone that all but guarantees one’s place in the Hall of Fame.” Turns out, it’s not entirely true, but this is:

Starlin Castro is only 24 and has 846 career hits. That’s the 18th-highest hit total in MLB history thru age 24, right behind Robby Alomar.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_MLB) March 20, 2015

846 hits! Not bad, Starlin Castro. Especially considering it was around this time just a year ago when many were leaving Castro for dead after he put up one of the worst offensive seasons by a shortstop in recent history. In hindsight, that notion seems like quite the overreaction, given that Castro followed up the dreadful year with the best offensive season of his career and has re-cemented himself as the young, exciting Cubs shortstop of both the present and future.

But Castro’s case got me wondering: do we, as a community, take young talent for granted? Are we too quick to write off young players as one-hit wonders who burst onto the scene and then struggle — even if those struggles last for a full season or more? Seems to have been the case with Castro. Surely, I thought, there are others like him.

Naturally, my attention then turned to Bryce Harper.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data below is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems, with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Yes, we know WAR is imperfect and there is more to player value than is wrapped up in that single projection, but for the purposes of talking about a team’s strengths and weaknesses, it is a useful tool. Also, the author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

Positional power rankings! Second base! Let’s do this. Here comes a graph of projected team WAR:

Well, would ya look at that. Robinson Cano is still good at baseball. For the third consecutive year, Robinson Cano’s team lands atop the second base rankings of power. There’s a pretty defined top three, a pretty defined top 10, and then the rest. You can see that. Let’s talk about it.

Wait — really quick before we begin, the disclaimer: decimal points of WAR really don’t matter. Team X with 3.0 WAR isn’t demonstrably better than Team Y at 2.7 WAR. It’s less about an exact order and more about visualizing, roughly, where each team falls within the landscape of the league. Okay, now with that in mind, let’s begin.
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When the White Sox signed Adam Eaton to a five-year, $23.5 extension over the weekend, the move in and of itself, wasn’t huge news. It wasn’t huge money, and Eaton isn’t a huge player, literally or figuratively. But the move wasn’t just about Eaton, necessarily, rather it was part of a bigger plan.

Take it from Eaton himself:

“I think I’m going to play more than that contract is worth, but again, we want to win here and there’s money to go elsewhere,” Eaton said. “The next three, four, five years, if I can be a savings to bring some guys in, that’s key for us.”

This quote pretty much nails it all. Eaton talks about the value of cost certainty, he talks about being part of a bigger plan, and he talks about what extensions for pre-arb players like this allow teams to do. With the Eaton extension, the White Sox have added a fourth member to a pretty clear “core four” who are now locked up through at least 2018, when the oldest of the bunch (Eaton) will be 32 years old. Both Sale and Quintana have club options for ’19 and ’20, and if all options are exercised by the end of the contracts, here’s what the White Sox are on the books for:

• Chris Sale: $53.15M through 2020 (two club options)
• Jose Abreu: $51M through 2019, though he can opt into arbitration when eligible
• Jose Quintana: $40.15M through 2020 (two club options)
• Adam Eaton: $42M through 2021 (two club options)

That’s 24 combined years of control for $186.3M, where one of the players is a top-5 pitcher on the planet and one of those players is a top-5 hitter on the planet, and all four guys are playing through their prime years. That’s a pretty enviable position for the White Sox.
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It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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At this point, it only makes sense to talk about Rafael Soriano. That’s not something you hear every day, but it makes sense to talk about Rafael Soriano because these are the remaining names that currently populate our free agent depth charts:

• Ryan Doumit
• Brett Hayes
• Lyle Overbay
• Rafael Furcal
• Scott Hairston
• Jason Kubel
• Andrew Brown
• Tony Campana
• Sean Burnett
• Brian Wilson
• Rafael Soriano

We used to have something like 100 names on our free agent depth charts, and now we’re down to 11. More specifically, those 11. If you weren’t keeping track at home, that’s two catchers who combined for -1.3 WAR last year, a first baseman who’s retiring, a 37-year-old second baseman who’s played nine games since 2012, a group of three outfielders who are projected for a combined -0.6 WAR, another outfielder who’s out for the season, a reliever coming off three consecutive years of elbow surgeries, a pitcher who no longer amounts to much more than a beard, and a closer who’s saved 117 games the last three years.

That’s the long-winded way of saying, Rafael Soriano is the Last Man Standing in this year’s free agent class, and at this point, he sticks out like a sore thumb.
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