The Yankees re-signed Stephen Drew, for one year and a few million dollars. It’s a questionable deal — nothing was available much beyond what Drew signed for, for a reason — but it at least seems like a better deal than the Royals giving Kendrys Morales two years. And the idea is simple: Drew’s a known capable defender, and he’s hit before, and if he totally busts, he can be dumped with little problem. The Yankees paid for a little insurance, and as recently as 2013 Drew was an above-average player.

But, there was the matter of 2014. The most recent year is the most significant year, and for Stephen Drew, the most recent year was an absolute nightmare. Drew was described in last year’s FanGraphs player profile as a “line-drive hitter”, so this is appropriately discouraging:

Everything cratered. In his most recent season, Stephen Drew sucked, and thanks to Joel Sherman, we were provided the following quote from some anonymous baseball executive:

There was never a time in which he looked like a major league hitter.

Pretty harsh, pretty bleak. Pretty true, or pretty hyperbolic? That much, we can try to investigate. Did 2014 Stephen Drew ever actually look like a major-league hitter?

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Among others, baseball’s Hall of Fame will prepare to welcome Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson. For them, there was zero suspense: Hall of Famers don’t get more automatic, and as easy as it is to focus on the fact that neither player was unanimous, the percentage matters less than the ultimate outcome. The voting process is a little bit broken, but it would have to be in complete and utter shambles to deny Martinez or Johnson entry — and they’ll no longer have to appear on any ballot. Two of the very greatest ever have been successfully and swiftly voted into the place intended to recognize the very greatest ever.

Of course, neither pitcher was a borderline candidate. Every so often the game has players who are just exceptional, and when you go into the data, you stumble upon fun facts proving said exceptional-ness. For example, let’s consider starting pitcher strikeout rates from 1999. The top of the list, with a 100-inning minimum:

1. Pedro Martinez, 37.5% strikeouts
2. Randy Johnson, 33.7%
3. Tim Hudson, 22.8%

That’s stupid. That leaderboard is stupid. It doesn’t make sense that pitchers could be so good. Not as starters, and not for as long as they were.

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Hello again! This is the National League version of the American League post from a little earlier. In case said American League post contained certain calculation errors, those same calculation errors will be repeated in this very post, as both posts have been written back-to-back and pre-scheduled. In case no such errors are present, you’re welcome, for the absence of errors. This is a link to the NL voting post from last Monday. I don’t know why that would be of use to you now, but there’s a lot of things I don’t know.

So, in this post, a data review, in the same format as the AL post. The same caveats apply: I might’ve biased some of the voters. The pool of voters isn’t identical across the board in identity or size, and about those sizes — the sample sizes don’t number in the hundreds of thousands, or millions. Still, the information will be analyzed, because if the information were not analyzed, what would have been the point of the posts last week? Let’s tie up loose ends, together.

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Hello! Early last week, in part out of curiosity and in part because I had things to do, I asked you to do a bunch of voting related to the site’s Steamer team projections. I put up two posts, and here’s the one about the American League. Basically, we lean on the projections a lot, but we seldom ask for feedback, and I wanted to know how the community felt about projected team records, based on where things stood last Monday. Now, some things have changed since Monday, but nothing important has changed since Monday — excepting, say, Seth Smith — so circumstances remain mostly identical.

At the time, I promised I’d eventually review the data. Here now, the data shall be reviewed, and in this post, I’ll consider the results from the AL polls. I know it’s not perfect science. Different people voted in different team polls. Different numbers of people voted in each team poll. I probably to some extent biased the voters by offering commentary before each poll was embedded. Nevertheless, information is information, and, let’s see what we generated! With which projections do people agree the most? With which projections do people agree the least?

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I’ve been in love with contact rate from the beginning. Admittedly, it doesn’t provide a lot of information you can’t already figure out from strikeout rate, but I like contact rate for its granularity. It’s one of the first stats I look at for pitchers, and it seems like a pretty pure indicator of domination over opponents. What could be better, after all, than a pitch a batter can’t hit? An out on a ball in play, I suppose, but balls in play are dangerous. Nothing dangerous about a swing and miss.

As much as I like contact rate, though, I’ve never thought to try to break it down. Most analysis with contact rate is performed using overall contact rate. Sometimes, it’s using in-zone contact rate, or out-of-zone contact rate. But what I found myself in the mood to do is try to break the numbers down a little bit by count. A thank you, as usual, is extended to Baseball Savant. Because I haven’t spent much time with this data, I can’t really tell you what it means yet, but, you’re here because you want to further your understanding of baseball. I think exploration’s justifiable for exploration’s sake.

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Trades don’t get a lot cleaner than the deal we just recently saw between the Mariners and the Padres. The Mariners needed a left-handed semi-regular outfielder, and had relievers to spare. The Padres needed a reliever, and had left-handed semi-regular outfielders to spare. So the two agreed to swap Seth Smith and Brandon Maurer, and they’re both easy, simple fits. Smith joins Justin Ruggiano in a right-field platoon. Maurer adds another big arm to a team that needed a big arm more than it needed an occasional pinch-hitter.

Just by talent, Maurer is the more intriguing of the two players. With the Mariners, he frustrated as a starting pitcher, then flourished when bumped to relief. All of his stuff played up, and if the Padres keep Maurer in the bullpen, there’s no reason to think he can’t be a big help right away. Out of the Mariner bullpen in 2014, Maurer finished with 38 strikeouts and five walks, and two of those walks were intentional. Of the 209 relievers who threw at least 30 innings, Maurer wound up with the second-lowest unintentional walk rate, and he struck out a quarter of the batters he faced.

A useful statistic is strikeout rate minus walk rate. It holds greater significance than the more familiar strikeout-to-walk ratio. Last year’s bullpen leader in the statistic, naturally, was Aroldis Chapman. Maurer ranked 25th, placing him in the top 12 percent. He was tied with another recent Padres bullpen acquisition, Shawn Kelley. Maurer ranked ahead of names like Glen Perkins and Tyler Clippard. It’s pretty well established that Maurer can be good in relief. He’s a guy with future closer potential.

As a reliever-for-outfielder swap, the trade’s fair. Where it gets really interesting is if the Padres decide to try Maurer as a starter again. In Seattle, he’d had the door all but closed on the possibility. But the Padres say they don’t yet know how Maurer is going to be used, in the short-term or in the long-term. Probably, he’ll end up a reliever, but he’s just 24 years old, in a new organization. And though the Mariners grew frustrated by Maurer’s lack of progress out of the rotation, he shares a lot in common with a member of the current Padres staff, who was sold cheaply by the A’s.

The Padres picked up Tyson Ross in November 2012, giving up Andy Parrino and Andrew Werner. Parrino is a player of no consequence, and Werner hasn’t pitched in the majors since. Though Ross was inconsistent with the A’s, the Padres have turned him into a reliable front-of-the-rotation starter. That’s not an easy thing to do — if it were, it would happen a lot more often — but you can see where Ross changed, and you can see how Maurer might fit a similar profile.

Both Ross and Maurer are right-handed. One’s listed at 6-foot-5, 225 pounds, and the other’s listed at 6-5, 220. They’ve got powerful fastballs that can get into the mid-90s as a starter. Ross and Maurer have also shown powerful sliders, but early on they struggled to find a consistent weapon against lefties. As a starter with Oakland, Ross threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He occasionally dabbled with a changeup at 86. As a starter with Seattle, Maurer threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He dabbled with a changeup at 85, and a curveball at 74.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

Asdrubal Cabrera’s signing with the Rays. There was thought the free-agent middle infielder would get multiple years, given the number of teams looking for a shortstop or a second baseman, but by the reports, Cabrera is signing for one year and something in the vicinity of $8 million. Call it the A.J. Burnett contract, if you’d like. Cabrera’s an unexciting player, signing for unexciting terms.

Whenever you think about a fresh transaction, there’s a desire to find and identify that certain hidden something. That one thing about a given player that made him so appealing to his new team. I don’t think there’s a certain hidden something about Asdrubal Cabrera. He’s a fairly established entity: he’s a relatively poor defensive shortstop who used to be a better player than he is. He can play short but he fits better at second, and his overall offense is close enough to being average you can get away with calling it average. What do you have when you have an average hitter who’s roughly an average overall defender? That’s an average player. Cabrera’s close to that, and maybe a little bit worse.

This isn’t a franchise player, the Rays are signing. This isn’t a player many will remember as having been a Ray five or ten years down the line. This is just one of those small, fine deals every team has to make, and the most interesting thing about it is what it means for other players. The Rays are signing Asdrubal Cabrera, which means more and more people are talking about Ben Zobrist.

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Hello and welcome to the second half of this exercise, in which I do some of the work and you also do some of the work. Here’s a link to the first part, going over the American League. I think this is all pretty simple to understand. I’ll probably also do something like this again just before the season, when rosters are complete and we have more information in general, but we can still learn something from this, which asks you about the present situations, presently. And maybe any kinks experienced through these posts will be smoothed out by the time we re-visit in March. Are you ready to vote in 15 polls? Or, are you ready to vote in up to 15 polls?

Information’s based on the Steamer projections and the team depth charts. While free agents are still available, and while players will still get traded, this is asking about the roster situations right now, and not what you anticipate the roster situations to be by the end of spring training. Thank you all for your participation!

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