After losing on a 14th-inning walk-off home run by the Giants’ Andrew McCutchen on Saturday, the Dodgers found themselves one swing of the bat away from falling to 2-7 to start the 2018 season — a pit that few teams escape, even in this age of expanded playoffs — during the 10th inning of Sunday’s game at AT&T Park. Fortunately, Kenley Jansen was finally able to tap into the mojo that’s made him one of the game’s best closers, striking out the Giants’ final two hitters to preserve a 2-1 victory, the Dodgers’ first win in a week. Even so, at 3-6, the defending NL champions are off to the worst start of any of the presumptive preseason favorites. How worried should they be?

The Dodgers entered 2018 just about as heavily favored to win their division as any team. But because Major League Baseball insists upon games being played on the field instead of on paper or pixel, things haven’t gone as planned, and they’ve matched the franchise’s worst start of the Wild Card era.

Now, nine games is a small sample size, obviously — just 1/18 of a season, in fact. While such a hiccup wouldn’t raise an eyebrow anywhere else in the schedule — each of last year’s 10 playoff teams went through at least one skid of 3-6 or worse, with the Dodgers themselves (in)famously losing 16 of 17 late in the year — it gets late early out here, as Yogi Berra allegedly said. Since the start of the 1995 season, 114 teams have begun the season 3-6, of which just 18 (including the 1996 Dodgers) made the playoffs. That’s 16%, which sounds high until you consider that, in the period during which two clubs from each league have qualified for the Wild Card, one-third of all teams makes the playoffs. Since 1995, 29% of all teams have done so. With apologies to the post-2001 Mariners, the dance just isn’t that exclusive.

Historically speaking, the real point of inflection through nine games is at 2-7, where just two Wild Card-era teams out of 37 (5.4%) have made the playoffs — namely, the 2001 A’s and 2007 Phillies. It’s four out of 54 (7.4%) if you count the two teams that began 1-8 (the 1995 Reds and 2011 Rays). Prior to the Wild Card era, just seven teams that started 2-7 made the playoffs, including two often referenced in the context of miraculous comebacks, the 1914 Braves and 1951 Giants. But these Dodgers aren’t in such dire straits yet.

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Between Shohei Ohtani’s strong six-inning start against the A’s on Sunday and home runs in back-to-back games against the Indians on Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s fair to say that the 23-year-old phenom’s major league career is off to an impressive and unprecedented start. Obviously, it will take much longer before Ohtani’s attempt to star as both a hitter and pitcher can be judged a true success, but as Travis Sawchik pointed out, he has, at the very least, already shown off the tools that created all the hype in the first place– namely the triple-digit heat/nasty splitter/slider combo as a pitcher, as well as the raw power as a hitter.

Ohtani is doing things that haven’t been done at the major league level in nearly a century. Not since June 13-14, 1921 has a player followed up a win as a starting pitcher with a home run as a position player in his next game, and not since 1919 has a player served as both a starting pitcher and position player with any kind of regularity. Both of those feats were accomplished by Babe Ruth, of course. The Bambino spent his final two seasons with the Red Sox, 1918 and 1919, pulling double duty, then made cameos on the mound as a Yankee in 1920, 1921, 1930 and 1933. His last two Yankees pitching appearances came on the final day of the regular season, allowing him no chance to homer the following day. The other three times — including an October 1, 1921 relief appearance — that he pitched, he homered in his next game. Of course he did.

While other players have split time between the mound and position playing in a given season, the majority of them predate Ruth. Combing through the Baseball-Reference Play Index, since the inception of the American League in 1901, 20 players pitched at least 15 times in a season and played a position (besides pinch-hitter) at least 15 times as well; four of them did so twice. Fifteen of those 24 player-seasons predated Ruth, with all but one of those falling between 1901-1909. Only two have occurred since the start of World War II:

That’s quite a motley assortment, one that will test your knowledge of deadball era team nicknames (the Orphans became the Cubs, the Blues and Naps became the Indians, the Superbas became the Dodgers). As you can see, most of the early two-way players were pretty lousy hitters and nothing special as pitchers, at least within the seasons in question. I’ve highlighted the ones who were better than average at both tasks. A few of these players stand out and deserve worth closer looks.

Zaza Harvey

On name alone, I had to include this guy, though I know almost nothing about him other than his real name (Ervin King Harvey) and the fact that he switched roles due to a trade. After debuting with the Orphans in 1900, he jumped to the White Sox in 1901 and pitched all of his games for them before being purchased by the Blues in mid-August, after which he was exclusively an outfielder; apparently, he requested not to pitch. He hit a sizzling .333/.375/.443 and stole 16 bases in 227 PA as a 22-year-old that year. Illness limited him to 12 games the next year, and he disappeared from baseball entirely.

Doc White

Known by a nickname due to his degree in dentistry from Georgetown University, White was a very good pitcher during a 13-year career that ran from 1901-1913, going 189–156 with a 2.39 ERA (89 ERA-) and 48.9 RA9-WAR. Though he played 85 games in the outfield, he simply wasn’t much of a hitter; baseball history makes no mention of his prowess at filling cavities. As a hurler, he led the NL in strikeout rate in 1902 (5.4 per nine) while serving as the staff ace and occasional left fielder for the seventh-place Phillies, hitting just .202/.331/.232 in 120 PA. He found more success after jumping to the White Sox in 1903, and posted ERAs below 2.00 from 1904-1906. In the first of those years, he reeled off 45 straight scoreless innings via a major league record five consecutive shutouts; he would live to see Don Drysdale break that record 64 years later.

He led the AL with a 1.52 ERA in 1906 and starred in the World Series as the “Hitless Wonder” White Sox upset the Cubs, pitching a complete game in the clincher after earning a three-inning save the day before. The next year, he led the AL with 27 wins in 1907. He spent about six weeks as the White Sox’s regular center fielder in May and June of 1909, posting a .398 OBP for that stretch and hitting .234/.347/.292 in 238 PA on the season before his focus returned to the mound.

Nixey Callahan

Callahan spent 13 years in the majors between 1894 and 1913, winning 20 games twice for the Orphans (1898 and 1899) and totaling 99 wins and 16.8 WAR (18.3 RA9-WAR) as a pitcher. He dabbled at other positions as early as 1897, when he pitched 23 games and made 18 or more appearances at second base, shortstop and in the outfield, and he played a total of 23 games in the pasture in 1902. That year, he threw the first no-hitter in AL history on September 20 against the Tigers, but by then, he was more or less done with pitching; he made just five more starts, three of them in 1903, the year he took over as the White Sox manager.

He led the Sox to a 60-77 record while serving as their regular third baseman, and was replaced as manager by Fielder Jones — who would lead the White Sox to the aforementioned upset of the Cubs — early in 1904. He spent that season and the next as the team’s regular left fielder; over the 1903-05 span, he produced a combined 7.0 WAR while hitting for a 115 wRC+. He missed out on the White Sox’s biggest triumph, spending 1906-10 leading the semipro Logan Squares, much to the consternation of AL president Ban Johnson, then rejoined the Sox as a player in 1911, and as their manager from 1912-14.

Jack Coombs

Coombs pitched a shutout in his July 5, 1906 major league debut for the A’s, and later that year pitched a 24-inning (!) complete game victory against the Red Sox, striking out 18. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he developed arm troubles that limited his effectiveness in 1907, and when A’s right fielder Socks Seybold broke his leg in spring training the following year, manager Connie Mack installed Coombs as his regular. He started hot, but by June he had played his way back to the mound. While he hit just .255/.287/.355 in 235 PA for the full season, he posted a 2.00 ERA over 153 innings the rest of the way. He continued to improve as a pitcher, and in 1910, led the AL with 31 wins (against nine losses) with a 1.30 ERA in 350 innings, setting a record with 53 consecutive scoreless innings along the way and adding three more wins in the A’s World Series victory over the Cubs. Though his ERA shot to 3.53 the next year, he had a league-high 28 wins and helped Philadelphia to another championship.

Later, he helped the 1916 Brooklyn Robins win the NL pennant, and got the team’s lone win in their World Series loss to Ruth and the Red Sox. As his pitching declined, he made a 13-game foray to the outfield for the 1918 Robins, but his .168/.223/.230 line in 122 PA confirms that was the wrong way to go about it.

George Sisler

As a rookie in 1915, Sisler dabbled on the mound, with seven relief appearances and eight starts, six of which were complete games. In one of them, he outdueled Walter Johnson. He hit a thin .285/.307/.369 in 294 PA as a rookie, but soon developed into a contact-hitting machine whose career bridged the dead-and live-ball eras, winning a pair of batting titles with averages above .400 in 1920 (when he set a longstanding record with 257 hits) and 1922 and placing among the league’s top five seven times in that category, mostly before scoring levels got silly. He occasionally took the mound after his rookie season, throwing a total of 41 innings from 1916-1928, but as his career .340/.379/.468 batting line, 2,812 hits and 1939 election to the Hall of Fame attest, he made the right call.

Johnny Cooney

In a 20-year major league career that spanned from 1921-44, with a five-year foray to the minors (1930-34) in between, Cooney did it all: played, coached and managed in both leagues (albeit on an interim basis, with his AL stint confined to one game while Al Lopez attended a funeral). He even umpired a game. He broke in primarily as a pitcher with the Braves, but hot hitting (.379/.414/.394 in 73 PA in 1923) and good defense led to additional work in center field, though he hit a meager .254/.302/.285 in 1924 while throwing 181 innings.

Focused almost entirely on pitching the next year, he set a career high with 245.2 innings while going 14-14 with a 3.48 ERA. And he again hit well enough (.320/.346/.388 in 112 PA) to resume double duty, which came in handy when he was beset with arm trouble that limited his mound work. He hit .302/.367/.357 in 147 PA, primarily as a first baseman, while throwing just 83.1 innings in 1926. He didn’t pitch at all in 1927, and did so only sporadicly from 1928-30, but after his lengthy minor league detour, he returned as a center fielder, first with the Dodgers (1935-37) and then back to the Braves (1938-42), averaging 120 games a year in that capacity from 1936-41. He finished his career with an 86 wRC+ in 3,675 PA and a 95 ERA- in 795.1 innings, totaling 10.9 WAR.

Willie Smith

Of all the players to pull significant double duty, Wonderful Willie Smith is the only one to do so since World War II, and is the only black player to do so. He played his first professional baseball in the post-integration Negro Leagues, with the Birmingham Black Barons, and was good enough to play in the Negro American League’s 1958 and 1959 East-West All-Star Games. As a 22-year-old southpaw, he pitched three scoreless innings of relief and singled in the winning run in the former, and started and hit an inside-the-park homer in the latter.

Signed by the Tigers, he spent 1960-62 in the minors, and got a cup of coffee in 1963, playing a total of 17 games, with 11 on the mound and the balance in pinch-hitting and -running roles. Traded to the Angels in 1964, he pinch-hit and threw 31.2 innings on the mound in 15 appearances, all in May and June, and nearly all in mop-up duty, with a 2.84 ERA. On June 8, manager Bill Rigney sent him to right field in the late innings. “I didn’t dare say I wouldn’t play out there,” Smith later said. Rigney then brought him in to pitch, but he faced three batters and gave up two homers.

After taking one of his four losses in relief on June 13, he started the nightcap of a doubleheader the next day in left field and homered. He made just one more mound appearance that year but became a semi-regular at the outfield corners, hitting .301/.317/.465 with 11 homers and seven steals in 373 PA. He would spend seven more years in the majors, never replicating that success (.248/.295/.395 lifetime) and making just three relief appearances in 1968 as his further mound work. The highlight of his post-double duty career was a game-winning pinch-hit homer for the Cubs on Opening Day in 1969.

…

As interesting as those players are, their relatively minimal success in one role or the other can’t hold a candle to the expectations for Ohtani. And while the accomplishments of the nascent Ruth in 1918-19 may stand as the closest analogue to what the Angels are attempting, it’s important to understand the on-the-fly nature of Ruth’s journey from star southpaw to Sultan of Swat. After breaking in as a 19-year-old in 1914, Ruth went 65-33 with a 2.02 ERA in 867.2 innings over the next three seasons, topping 20 wins twice, leading the AL with a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts in 1916 (when he helped the Red Sox beat the Robins in the World Series) and with 35 complete games the following year. Through the end of the 1917 season, he hit .299/.355/.474 (148 wRC+) with nine homers in 405 PA, but his non-pitching work was limited to pinch-hitting.

Ruth was the Red Sox’s Opening Day starter on April 15, 1918, and started four times that month, with two pinch-hitting appearances thrown in as well. After another start on May 4, during which he hit his first home run of the season, he started Boston’s next game, on May 6, as a first baseman, batting sixth. He homered. He tied the major league record by homering again in his third straight game, and thereafter his pitching was sporadic. He made just two more starts on the mound that month, one in June (when he hit eight of his MLB-leading 11 homers), and three in July, then eight in August, the season’s final month; due to World War I, the regular season ended on September 2, and the World Series, in which Ruth beat the Cubs twice, ended on September 11.

In 1919, Ruth started nine times in May and June, but just six times the rest of the way; after he tied the major league record with nine homers in July (against just three starts on the mound), he took the hill just once in August and twice in September. He finished the year hitting .322/456/.657 with 29 homers, a record he would demolish in 1920, with 54 homers, and then 59 the following year. You don’t need me to tell you that part of the story.

Here’s a breakdown of Ruth’s 1918-19:

Even working within the Angels’ planned six-man rotation, Ohtani figures to surpass Ruth in games started; our Depth Charts forecast has him down for 24 (one to date plus 23 for the rest of his season). If he’s DHing three times a week, that’s another 78 starts, and while that may be less taxing than playing the field for nine innings, it’s also true that the caliber of competition he’s facing is much higher.

We’ve grappled with other ways of looking at players who have spent time as both pitchers and hitters, but we’re really in uncharted territory with Ohtani. And while the hype may be a bit much to endure, based on what we’ve seen so far, this promises to be a fun and fascinating ride. Buckle up.

With over 3,000 hits and his status as one of the greatest defensive third basemen in history, Adrian Beltre is already a lock for Cooperstown. On Thursday, he claimed a particularly cool slice of history. With his double off A’s starter Daniel Mengden, he collected hit number 3,054, surpassing Hall of Famer Rod Carew, whom he had tied on Tuesday night, for the most hits of any player born in Latin America.

Here’s the record-setting hit, whose significance was acknowledged by the Rangers’ broadcasters a few moments after the clip:

With this hit Adrian Beltre passes Rod Carew as the @MLB career hit leader for Latin-born players. Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/XlISb2HhG1

— Bally Sports Southwest (@BallySportsSW) April 5, 2018

At some point later this season, Beltre will likely overtake Ichiro Suzuki, now a 44-year-old reserve, as the all-time leader in hits for a player born outside of the United States:

Note that I’ve included Puerto Rico-born players here. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated US territory, and its citizens are US citizens, but the Caribbean island is also considered part of Latin America, and its ballplayers have long been recognized and celebrated within that context, particularly during and after the career of the iconic Clemente.

Looking at the above list, it’s remarkable that for all of the talented Latin American players that have starred in the game over the past several decades, only four have reached 3,000 hits (out of 24 such players since World War II), with Pujols poised to become the fifth; none has advanced much further than that. Clemente ranked 11th on the all-time hit list at the time of his December 31, 1972 death, but the total number of players above him has more than doubled in the 45 years since. He was 16th at the end of 1985, Carew’s final year, while Carew himself was 13th. Beltre, who turns 39 on April 7, is still playing at a consistently high enough level to think beyond 2018. Assuming he can total 200 hits over this season and next — a conservative assumption given that he had 106 in just 94 games last year — he’d climb to 14th all time, with 3,248, seven shy of Eddie Murray at number 13, and 35 shy of Willie Mays at number 12. He’d need a total of 3,320 to crack the all-time top 10.

(All of these rankings rely upon the inclusion of Cap Anson’s National Association stats from 1871-75 towards his career total of 3,435, as recognized by Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference. Elias Bureau and Major League Baseball, which do not recognize NA stats, credit him with 3,011 hits.)

Beltre is also bearing down on another very cool distinction within this group. His 84.2 WAR is the second-highest total of any player born outside of the US, trailing only Pujols, who’s at 89.1 but moving backwards (-2.1 since the start of 2017). Beltre will probably need at least another season to close the gap, but if he does, the Hall of Fame will have to break out a very narrow typeface for his plaque in order to fit all of his accomplishments.

It’s fair to say that the Yankees’ 2018 home opener didn’t go quite as planned. New York City’s heaviest April snowfall since 1982 forced the postponement of Monday’s scheduled 1 pm game against the Rays, and it was made up on Tuesday afternoon under soggy, frigid conditions. In his first official game in pinstripes, Giancarlo Stanton recorded a platinum sombrero — 0-for-5 with five strikeouts — and was booed by moronic ingrates, and the vaunted Yankees bullpen blew a three-run lead. Then Didi Gregorius, who had already hit a three-run homer that created the short-lived lead, broke the game open with his second three-run blast, and later tacked on a two-run single that turned the game to an 11-4 laugher. It was an impressive, two-curtain call day for a player who often flies beneath the radar amid the Bronx Bombers’ bigger names.

Not that anyone should worry about Stanton (who launched a 458-foot homer in his first plate appearance on Wednesday), but Gregorius can relate. Tasked with replacing the iconic, Cooperstown-bound Derek Jeter as the Yankees’ shortstop, he was burdened with the weight of massive expectations and heard the Bronx boo birds and chants of “Der-ek Je-ter!” frequently in early 2015. Gradually, Gregorius has settled into the job, to the point that he’s almost overlooked, whether the point of comparison is the Yankees’ modern-day Murderer’s Row (with Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez and now Stanton), a work-in-progress infield brimming with young talent and versatility, or an incredible shortstop cohort featuring Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, Corey Seager, Xander Bogaerts, Trea Turner and now Manny Machado, all in their age-25 seasons or younger.

The 28-year-old Gregorius doesn’t quite belong at their level, but over the past three seasons, he’s a solid seventh in WAR at the position, including a career-high 3.9 WAR in 2017 (also seventh):

By WAR, Gregorius has been the most valuable Yankees position player in that span, though to be fair, that’s only because of his head start on Judge and Sanchez, who arrived for good in late 2016.

Born in Amsterdam in 1990, the grandson of Juan Gregorius, a star hurler in Curaçao in the 1950s and the son of Honkbal Hoofdklasse pitcher Johannes (Didi) Gregorius Sr. of the Amsterdam Pirates, Mariekson Julius Gregorius was raised in Curaçao from age 5, and signed by the Reds as an amateur free agent in 2007. He debuted in the majors in September 2012, but with his position blocked by Zack Cozart, he was dealt to the Diamondbacks in December of that year as part of a three-way, nine-player blockbuster involving Cleveland-bound Trevor Bauer and Cincinnati-bound Shin-Soo Choo. At the time, Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers audaciously compared Gregorius to the man he would eventually replace:

When I saw him, he reminded me of a young Derek Jeter. I was fortunate enough to see Jeter when he was in high school in Michigan. He’s got that type of range, he’s got speed, more of a line-drive-type hitter, and I think he’s got the type of approach at the plate and separation to where I think there’s going to be power there as well.”

After cracking the Baseball America Top 100 Prospects list in the spring of 2013, Gregorius scuffled over the course of two seasons as the Diamondbacks’ regular shortstop, hitting a combined .241/.314/.368 for an 85 wRC+ with a meager 1.8 WAR. He even spent two months back in Triple A early in 2014. After Towers was fired in September 2014, it was hardly a coincidence that Yankees GM Brian Cashman, under whom Towers had worked as a special assignment scout between GM stints in San Diego and Arizona, dealt for Gregorius in another three-team deal in December of that year.

Despite the impossible task of filling Jeter’s shoes in a figurative sense, Gregorius quickly illustrated that he could cover far more ground at shortstop than the aging superstar, whose glovework was generally notoriously overrated. While he’s had his own ups and downs in his three seasons at the position, he’s been a massive improvement upon the Captain and fill-ins such as Eduardo Nunez and Jayson Nix, who got the bulk of the work during Jeter’s injury-shortened 2013 season:

Over the last four years of the Jeter era, Yankees shortstops (all of ’em) averaged a godawful -19 DRS and -15 UZR. Over the first three years of the Gregorius era, those averages have been boosted to -3 DRS and +3 UZR. I’ve dispensed with the rounding here, but that’s a 17- or 18-run per year improvement, or nearly two wins per year. Excluding 2013, Jeter averaged 1.6 WAR over his final three full seasons, with Gregorius doubling that average during his tenure.

Indeed, though he’ll never be the on-base machine that even the latter-day Jeter was prior to his October 2012 broken ankle, Gregorius has advanced markedly as a hitter during his pinstriped tenure, from an 89 wRC+ in 2015 to 98 the next year and 107 last year. The power that Towers envisioned has indeed emerged, as his ISOs have increased from .105 to .171 to .191 in those three years, with his homer totals climbing from nine to 20 to 25. And no, that’s not just Yankee Stadium at work; while 29 of his 54 homers during that span came at home, he’s got an 86 wRC+ there (.251/.292/.415) compared to 110 on the road (.300/.335/.448). That split is driven by groundball and flyball rates that are basically reversed (38%/42% at home, 42%/37% away), a 51-point BABIP gap (.265 versus .316) and a substantial strikeout split (15.4% versus 11.8%).

Gregorius’s game has its dings, most notably an anemic walk rate (4.4% from 2015-17, 13th-lowest among the 232 hitters with at least 1,000 PA) borne of a tendency to chase (39.1% O-Zone rate, also 13th) en route to a .313 on-base percentage (56th lowest in that same set). Even so, the overall package — which includes a few extra runs per year on the bases — has developed into such a solid one that he’s become the cornerstone of a Yankees’ infield that’s otherwise unsettled. Heading into 2017, Gleyber Torres, Jorge Mateo and Tyler Wade all ranked among the team’s top prospects after spending a substantial portion of 2016 playing shortstop for either their High A or Double A affiliates. Mateo is now an Oakland Athletic via last July’s Sonny Gray trade, Wade is a utilityman whom Cashman envisions as the team’s Ben Zobrist, and Torres is the heir apparent at second base.

Gregorius, in his first year of arbitration eligibility, is making $8.25 million and has two more years under club control. And while he may not get the attention of Judge, Sanchez or Stanton, he’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon — except, perhaps, out of Jeter’s shadow, one step and one season at a time.

The 2017 season was a disheartening one for the Blue Jays. After back-to-back trips to the ALCS in 2015-16 — their first two postseason appearances since 1993 — they faceplanted out of the gate, losing 11 of their first 13 games. They never reached .500, going an improbable, Sisyphean 0-8 in games that would have evened their record. Amid injuries to Josh Donaldson, Russell Martin, Aaron Sanchez, Troy Tulowitzki and others, not to mention the collapse of Jose Bautista, they finished fourth in the AL East with a 76-86 record, their worst showing since 2013. This winter, they stayed out of the deep end of the free-agent pool, making a few low-cost additions plus a handful of trades that hardly qualified as blockbusters. Yet as of Opening Day, they were projected for 84 wins, the league’s fifth-highest total. What in the name of Cito Gaston is going on?

To these eyes, the Blue Jays’ projection is like the flip side of the Brewers’ one that raised my eyebrows a few weeks ago. Recall that the Brew Crew quickly turned around from their rebuilding effort and won 86 games last year while remaining in the NL Wild Card hunt until the season’s final weekend. They added Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich over the winter, and didn’t lose anyone of importance save August acquisition Neil Walker, yet their projection called for just 78 wins.

As for the Blue Jays, when one considers that they had the majors’ oldest lineup (weighted average age of 30.9 years according to Baseball-Reference), and that even with the jettisoning of Bautista, all of this year’s projected regulars save two are on the wrong side of 30, it’s at least worth wondering why our projection system (which is driven by Steamer and ZiPS but with manual judgment in terms of distributing playing time) is so keen on them.

As I did for the Brewers, here’s a position-by-position comparison between our Depth Charts (as of March 29, Opening Day) and last year’s splits. All rankings are AL-only:

The first thing to note is how distressingly godawful the Jays were at so many positions last year. In terms of WAR, they ranked among the league’s bottom four teams at five positions, including dead last at catcher and shortstop, and received 0.5 WAR or less from six different positions including DH, with a net of 0.1 WAR for those half-dozen spots. Only at first base (Justin Smoak) and third base (Donaldson) did they receive significantly above-average work; in the latter case, that was despite the majors’ top third baseman playing just 104 games at the position due to a calf strain. Thankfully, they also received above-average production from their pitching staff, without which they might have been relegated to the independent Canadian-American League.

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Don’t expect to see Yasmany Tomas at Chase Field anytime soon. The 27-year-old Cuban slugger was placed on outright waivers on Saturday, removing him from the Diamondbacks’ 40-man roster even as starting right fielder Steven Souza Jr. is sidelined for at least the first month of the season. The waiver move only further underscores the mistake the Diamondbacks made in signing Tomas to a six-year, $68.5 million contract in December 2014, a deal that has cost the team far more than money. He’s become the opposite of the gift that keeps on giving.

Tomas played in just 47 games for the Diamondbacks last year, hitting .241/.294/.464 with eight homers, an 89 wRC+, and 0.1 WAR before being sidelined by a groin injury that eventually required two surgeries, first in August and again in December. The additions of Souza via trade and Jarrod Dyson via free agency made clear at the outset of spring training that Tomas wasn’t guaranteed a starting job. Even with Souza’s pectoral strain, the Diamondbacks optioned Tomas to Triple-A Reno on March 25, and Sunday’s move now allows them to put that 40-man spot to better use. Given that he’s owed around $46 million through 2020, Tomas is unlikely to be claimed on waivers. Refusing an outright assignment and opting for free agency would void the remainder of his deal.

With the move, Tomas has become the game’s most expensive minor leaguer, making $10 million in salary plus another $3.5 million in the final installment of his signing bonus. You don’t see that every day, and for evidence how far out of sight and out of mind such a player can become, one need look only to the man he supplanted for that dubious title, countryman Rusney Castillo. The Red Sox signed Castillo to a seven-year, $72.5 million contract in August 2014. He recorded just an 83 wRC+ in 337 plate appearances spread over 2014-16 before the Sox outrighted him off their 40-man roster in June 2016. Now he’s buried in Triple-A — in part because adding him back would push them even further over the luxury-tax threshold. The Diamondbacks don’t have to worry about going over the $197 million threshold, but their $131.5 million Opening Day payroll nonetheless set a franchise record.

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A celebrity chef and restauranteur, a philanthropist, an icon in two cities, an All-Star in three, and the only player to collect at least 500 hits with four different franchises — Rusty Staub was all that and more. “Le Grand Orange,” who played in the major leagues from 1963 through 1985 and collected 2,716 hits including 292 homers, passed away on Thursday, hours before the start of the 2018 season and three days shy of his 74th birthday. If he wasn’t quite a Hall of Famer as a player, he most certainly was as a humanitarian, raising more than $100 million to combat hunger and to benefit the widows and families of police, firemen, and first responders killed in the line of duty.

“He was a George Plimpton character who didn’t have to be invented,” wrote Faith and Fear in Flushing’s Greg Prince.

A native of New Orleans, Daniel Joseph Staub — the son of a minor-league catcher — gained his first nickname from a nurse at the hospital he was born, for the red fuzz covering his head. Playing alongside older brother Chuck, he helped Jesuit High School to the 1960 American Legion national championship and the 1961 Louisiana State AAA championship. Major-league scouts from 16 teams beat a path to his door, and Staub wound up signing for a bonus of either $90,000 or $100,000 (sources differ) with the expansion Houston Colt .45s in 1961. He put in a big season for the Class-B Durham Bulls in 1962, leading the league with 149 hits and the next year, just eight days past his 19th birthday, was the Colts’ Opening Day right fielder. He went 1-for-3 that day, collecting an RBI single off the Giants’ Jack Sanford for his first hit, but batted a dismal .224/.309/.308 with six homers in 150 games for the 96-loss team, which was in its second year of existence.

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After examining the most player-friendly free-agent contracts of the 2017-18 offseason, here I turn to the winter’s most team-friendly deals. As I explained previously, given the perfect storm of factors that suppressed free-agent spending relative to past winters, it feels unseemly simply to celebrate “winners” and pick on “losers.” I’m not here to punch down at a player such as Mike Moustakas, whose one-year, $6.5 million deal was less than one-tenth the value of estimates projected by Dave Cameron, the FanGraphs crowd, the MLB Trade Rumors crew, FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, and MLB.com’s Jim Duquette back in November.

Instead, I think it’s more appropriate to view the free-agent contracts in terms of team- and player-friendliness. While acknowledging that shorter deals are inherently more team-friendly, I’ve stuck with apples-to-apples comparisons for this column and the previous one by considering the one-year, two-year, and three-year deals in their own separate categories — and grouping those of four years or more together due to the small sample size. Here, price and expected WAR aren’t the only considerations: player age, fit with a team’s roster, and competitive situation are among the additional factors to weigh.

As a refresher, here’s a graphic breaking down major-league free-agent deals by contract length over each of the past six winters, using data from the MLB Trade Rumors Free Agent Tracker. I’ve omitted minor-league deals as well as those signed by international players, including Shohei Ohtani.

Four Years or More

Lorenzo Cain, Brewers: five years, $80 million

Of the winter’s five deals that offer four years or more, only those signed by Cain and Alex Cobb (four years, $57 million from the Orioles) feature a total value under $100 million. Between those two players, Cain (who turns 32 on April 13) has the longer track record for productivity than Cobb, having averaged more than four wins per season over the past four years. He recorded 4.1 WAR in 2017, his last in Kansas City. Cobb was worth 2.4 WAR last year and hasn’t been above 3.0 in any of his four seasons with at least 100 innings pitched, plus he lost most of 2015-16 to Tommy John surgery and (checks roster) remains a pitcher.

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With the arrival of Opening Day on Thursday (!), a look back at the best and worst free-agent contracts of the winter would seem long overdue — except for the fact that dozens of free agents still haven’t signed and the ink is barely dry on several other deals. Just last week, Alex Cobb, whom Dave Cameron ranked 10th on his Top 50 Free Agents list, inked a four-year, $57 million deal with the Orioles. Five other players from among Cameron’s top 15 — Jake Arrieta, Lance Lynn, Jonathan Lucroy, Mike Moustakas, and Neil Walker — have signed since March 10. Prior to that wave, any attempt at an overarching analysis would have felt premature.

On the free-agent front, it was a weird winter of discontent, the slowest of the millennium when it came to free-agent signings. True, this year’s class was a relatively weak one, with the top free agents almost uniformly dealing with recent performance regression, injuries, and/or short track records of success.

The bigger story is the way in which the ramifications of the most recent collective bargaining agreement rose up to bite the players in the derriere. None of the five teams that paid the luxury tax for 2017 — the Dodgers, Yankees, Giants, Tigers and Nationals — signed anyone to a deal worth more than $10 million in total salary. The Dodgers, Yankees, Giants, and Nationals were particularly cautious about shimmying under the $197 million threshold so as to reset their marginal tax rates, while the Tigers were among several teams who used their status as rebuilders to justify meager expenditures in the market.

(The Cubs and Red Sox were initially reported by USA Today as having paid the tax, an error that was repeated here.)

Mid-market players who turned down qualifying offers and had the drag of a lost draft pick attached to their services were hit particularly hard, in part because an increasingly analytics-driven industry has gotten wise to the perils of paying aging ballplayers for past production.

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Thanks to the magic of Statcast and PITCHf/x before it, the means by which to evaluate pitchers have grown exponentially. Beyond ERAs and per-nine rate stats — and beyond DIPS, FIP, and BABIP, too — we now quantify pitch usage, velocity, spin rate, movement, whiff rates, pitch tunnels, quality of contact and more. It can get dizzying, and you can find some way in which just about every pitcher this side of Clayton Kershaw is below average. Last year, 68 pitchers threw at least 120 innings and finished with an ERA- below 100. Only 54 finished with a FIP- below 100, as well. Raise the bar to 162 innings and the count falls to 32 pitchers, occupying 21% of the majors’ 150 rotation jobs. As balls fly out of the park at record paces, relatively few starters have enough stuff to dominate. The vast majority are just trying to command a fastball well enough to get a shot at fooling hitters with their offspeed stuff.

Given 30 major-league rotations, 15 have to be below average, and among them are all too many pitchers easy to ding for their middling velocity, lack of command, failure to get hitters to chase their breaking stuff, or inability to stay healthy. Their projections inevitably look dire or at least uninspiring, and writing about them can feel like shooting fish in a barrel. Yet even among these lesser rotations, tiny miracles that defy our projections occur all the time. A pitcher learns a new grip, or irons out his mechanics, or gets a competent defense behind him. Suddenly, he’s living up to the visions of the men who scouted him, or at least outpitching the numbers that tell us all of the ways in which he is lacking.

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