Chatting from 11:30 to 1:00 ET today

11:26

Jason Collette:

11:29

Comment From KSSoxFan Any hope for any of the vets in the Marlins infield? Late round fliers?     Jason Collette: I actually like the youth best here in Hechevarria and Dietrich. This has a Major League movie type feel to this roster – Salty even resembles a younger Jake Taylor

11:31

Comment From Bill Are you concerned about Encarnacion’s wrist? Feel like we’ve heard nothing about it recently.     Jason Collette: Yes, a bit. Toronto hasn’t exactly had the best luck with health in recent seasons so any bit of injury news from there concerns me. Their lack of action on the free agent/trade market leads us to believe that all is well up there, but if Anthopoulous shows up to a presser in a ROTC uniform, be worried.

11:33

Comment From Brad What are your thoughts on Kevin Gausman? Thanks.     Jason Collette: I like him a ton. When he’s commanding his fastball and throwing his offspeed pitches, it can be NC-17 material.

11:36

Comment From Pale Hose The Rays model is based on turning over expiring contracts for future talent. If they can’t do this with Price is it the beginning of the end for their competitive cycle?     Jason Collette: The beginning of that cycle has happened in recent years with the restrictions on the international market and added rules to the draft process. The Rays are in a catch22 here as the current team, on paper, is arguably the best in franchise history. Trading Price now changes that dramatically. They are apparently comfortable with that they will lose in potential trade compensation by holding onto him another season will be offset by possible postseason glory. The recent deals of Torres, Hahn, Lobaton, Vettleson, and Rivero to add depth to the upper levels of the minor league depth chart in terms of pitching help offset poor drafts from a few seasons ago. They need to develop more young hitting to keep this thing going though.

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Last week, Colin Zarzycki reviewed the Milwaukee Brewer bullpen on RotoGraphs. The projected bullpen included the likes of Jim Henderson, Brandon Kintzler, Tom Gorzelanny, Michael Fiers, and Will Smith, among others. The 12 names on the depth chart combined for 12.009 years of MLB service time, with Gorzelanny accounting for half of that total. The depth chart contained some intriguing upside, but was certainly lacking in experience. Enter Francisco Rodriguez, again.

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11:57

Comment From Perplexed Fantasy Owner Hey Jason. Thanks for doing the chat today. I’m in an 11-team AL-only league, and I need your guidance. I own Brandon Morrow and Scott Kazmir on the cheap this year, but they both terrify me! What do you expect out of each of them in 2014? Should I hang on to them or cut bait before the season starts?     Jason Collette: I have Kazmir myself and not terrified as I really liked what I saw from him as the season progressed. Morrow would terrify me as health is a problem that does not go away and Toronto, for whatever reason, seems to have more injury issues than most teams.

11:58

Comment From jesse pneumonia, that sound like an excuse, man up and rub some dirt on hit!     Jason Collette: I’ll paste what I said last week when someone else asked the same thing – I’ve been writing about fantasy baseball since 1999 where I got started at the old RotoJunkie.coom (now rjbullpen.com). In 2008, Fanball plucked me from there and then I was split between BP and Rotowire in 2011 when Fanball was shut down by Liberty Media. I’m still doing a lot of work at Rotowire and also do monthly contributions to BaseballHQ.com and guest spots on the ESPN Sweetspot blog. Lastly, I’ve been writing about the Rays since 2007 between time spent at DRaysBay, Dock of the Rays (now in the hands of the talented Jason Hanselman) and now write with R.J. Anderson & Tommy Rancel at TheProcessReport.net. I believe in the DH, roofed stadiums, fake grass, and yoga pants.

11:59

Comment From Zach I see this is only your third chat and you’re a fairly new FG contributor. What’s your brief bio? What do you like to chat about?     Jason Collette: well, this is the question I meant to reply to previously. I blame the meds

11:59

Comment From Brad Pitcher keeper: Pick one: Bailey, A. Sanchez or Teheran and why? Thanks.     Jason Collette: I’m a big Homer Bailey guy. You want my non-Kershaw pick for the NL CY, there it is.

12:01

Comment From Brian I just traded for Mike Trout as a 15th round keeper for the rest of his career. I can’t come up with a way to celebrate that lives up to this moment.     Jason Collette: Streaking in the quad while holding a large growler of a Russian River brew would work for me

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The Cy Young Award.

The Jackie Robinson Award.

The Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award.

Players dream of earning these awards during their career. To be a part of the prestige and history of the game in that manner is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Then, we have the award named after baseball contemporaries.

Matt Klaassen started the Carter-Batista Awards (CBA) in 2009 to recognize those players whose offensive value is exaggerated by their RBI totals.  Joe Carter’s name is listed first because not only does he own the highest CBA score since 1990, he owns three of the top seven.
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11:04

Comment From Mitch Is there any hope Carlos Quentin can become relevant again?    Jason Collette: Guys do not get healthier with age. Ideally, he’d be in the AL as a DH, but the fact he has exceeded 100 games played just 3 times in his career is not good.

11:05

Comment From Sandy Alderson Am I going to actually pull the trigger on Stephen Drew?    Jason Collette: You would have done it already if you were doing to do so. Milking it out only gives more leverage to he and his agent as the open market could create new opportunities with injuries that happen during camp.

11:06

Comment From Kev Hey Jason, what do you think we can expect from Miguel Gonzalez?    Jason Collette: No more than what he’s done so far, maybe a bit less.

11:09

Comment From Brad If aj burnett signs with Orioles, who gets bumped from rotation?    Jason Collette: Inserting the required “assuming he passes the physical” comment, one would have to think that adding Burnett does not initially bode well for Gausman opening the season in the rotation.

11:11

Comment From Earl I’ve always been a fan of betemit, back when we he was a great platoon option in video games (it’s been a while for me). Anywho, what do you see him doing for the Rays this season?    Jason Collette: For now, providing depth assuming he’s willing to report to Durham as it is tough to see him making the 25 man roster as it looks today. Ideally, he would give up switch hitting as he is simply a poor hitter from the right side but platooned effectively, I’ve always seen some hidden value in his bat from the left side.

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A part of the allure of Greg Maddux was how he was able to post an above-league average K/9 during the prime years of his career despite not having the velocity of many of his peers. He was the epitome of sacrificing velocity for movement and location in a time when pitchers were observed peeking over their shoulder to the scoreboard to see what they hit on the in-park radar gun.

Thomas Boswell encapsulated Maddux rather well in repeating an anecdote from a time the two spent together in the early 90’s:

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11:58

Comment From Jason Collette Jr. odds jays make the playoffs    Jason Collette: slim to none and slim has a foot out the door

12:00

Comment From Burris How surprised are you that Garza signed in Milwaukee?    Jason Collette: Very surprised. Without the comp pick hanging on him, I thought he would have a lot of suitors but the scuttlebutt on his medicals clearly limited that pool. Milwaukee’s staff looks very good with him on it.

12:01

Comment From Jason Collette Jr. can i draft Goldy 2nd overall?    Jason Collette: I honestly don’t have a problem with that, but Cabrera is more of a sure thing.

12:02

Comment From Guest Hi Jason, do you think Burnett retires or returns to a contender?    Jason Collette: I’m all for guys leaving the game before their skills leave them, but I think Burnett still has more to give. This is a nice way to avoid the grind of Spring Training, and his services should have multiple suitors once he stops straddling the fence.

12:03

Comment From Pick #5 Trout, Miggy, Goldy, Cutch… who’s next? Still Cano? Kershaw? Puig? H2H points, thanks!    Jason Collette: Kershaw or CarGo for me

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The lineage of closers can, in part, be traced back to Jerome Holtzman’s creation of the save statistic. Table 2-2.1 in The Book outlined how the use of pitchers in the ninth inning with no outs and none on has quadrupled in the past 30 years and doubled since the late 1980s. The other half of that puzzle is where exactly closers come from. Closers are rarely drafted for the role coming out of the amateur draft, with names such as Chad Cordero, Ryan Wagner, David Aardsma, Josh Fields, Huston Street, Chris Reed and Drew Storen being some recent exceptions.

The closer role is revered by commentators and fans for its importance in how teams win games. But where those closers come from remains mostly a mystery. What pitchers did while in the minor leagues, where they are drafted or where they are drafted from offers little clarity.

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We officially learned yesterday that John Axford had a tipping problem. Specifically, the Cardinals scouting staff noticed he had been tipping his pitches nearly the entire time they had scouted him. This is actually something that Axford himself hinted at during an interview in early September, as he explained to FoxSports Ohio.

Axford, who had lost his job as the Brewers’ closer early in the season, found another reason to be glad to land with the Cardinals in his first meeting with his new coaching staff. The Cardinals gave him some pitching advice — the specifics of which he declined to discuss — that he says immediately helped his performance. “When a team has been looking at you for five years, trying to kill you every single time you’re out there on the mound, they pick up on every little detail they can — what you may be showing, or tipping, or what you’re doing different,”

Maybe this quasi-intervention was what Axford needed to get the message, because this was not the first time this issue has come up in his career.

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When you are the 726th player drafted in a draft, your odds of making it to the major leagues are incredibly slim. Only two players drafted in that spot (and signed) in the history of the draft have donned a major league uniform: Milt Hill and Dane De La Rosa.  It took De La Rosa five seasons of pitching, in any league, to throw his first pitch above A-ball. That time frame included stints in places such as Yuma, Helena, Long Beach, and Victoria with stops in between. It also included a stop in the real estate market in 2006 trying to close deals on houses.

The Rays gave him another chance in 2010, and he finally reached the major leagues on July 20th, 2011. He went on to pitch 11 more games in Tampa Bay before being traded to the Angels late in the 2013 Spring Training season. De La Rosa went to the Angels as a pitcher that struggled to command his fastball.  Yet another new location for De La Rosa, but with it came a new approach to his craft.

In looking at video of De La Rosa from the past two seasons, he has made some minor tweaks to his delivery. The first changes come in his setup for his delivery (click all images to enlarge).

The first image is from 8/27/12 when De La Rosa mopped up a 13-3 blowout against Boston while the second one came in his second save of his career against his former team. The 2013 image shows that De La Rosa has changed where he starts on the rubber while also starting his hands a bit higher, and closing off his front side more than he did in 2012.

At the max lift portion of his delivery, he now resembles the man he was called up to replace on the roster in 2013, Jered Weaver.

De La Rosa has more bend in his back leg, has brought his hands closer to his body, and has more twist in his upper body as he shows his back to the opposing hitter. These adjustments allowed him to stay closed easier in order for him to open his hips up to come to the plate in rhythm with his delivery.

One of the thing that stands out in reviewing De La Rosa from 2013 is his increased velocity.

The data from BrooksBaseball shows that shows that the average velocity on De La Rosa’s four-seam fastball rose nearly each month of the season in 2013, continuing the trend that started in 2012.

The data also shows that De La Rosa was throwing from a bit of a higher release point, which pitchers can use to add velocity while sacrificing horizontal movement. The increased velocity led to increased results. Opponents slugged just .277 against him last season, which was in the top tenth percentile of all relief pitchers that faced at least 200 batters in 2013. His Contact% as well as his opponents wOBA were both in the top-third of the same sample size. The improvements led to more success against right-handed batters as his swing and miss rate against those batters (35.5%) was higher than the likes of Koji Uehara (35.1%) and Craig Kimbrel (34.0%).

The Angels have had their issues in recent years harvesting pitching talent from their farm system, but they appear to have done quite well thus far here. They’ve turned an undrafted organizational middle reliever into an opportunity for a home town kid to go good. So far, so good.