Around the start of the offseason, there was talk that Nelson Cruz was after a $75-million contract. He eventually settled for $8 million. At the same time, there was talk that Ervin Santana was after a $100-million contract. He’s now settled for $14.1 million. Put those numbers together and you have $175 million requested and $22.1 million received. That difference of $153 million is the amount for which the Yankees signed Jacoby Ellsbury. So, that’s some perspective.

Santana reached a one-year agreement with the Braves Tuesday, and it became official early Wednesday. Over the weekend, all the talk was about how Santana would be choosing between the Orioles and the Blue Jays, but then the Braves developed a desperate need, with Kris Medlen preparing for probable Tommy John surgery. In need of a starting pitcher, the Braves signed pretty much the only available free-agent starting pitcher, and so Santana will pitch in the National League for the first time in his career. Probably, that’s a big reason why he made the decision he did.

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There’s a pretty strong and obvious relationship between speed and baserunning. Speed is best demonstrated when running, and “baserunning” has “running” right in the word. There usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a fast guy who runs the bases well. Likewise, there usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a slow guy who runs the bases poorly. It’s more uncommon to hear about a fast guy with baserunning limitations, but we can make sense of that — baserunning skill isn’t 100% footspeed. Speed’s just a component, along with instincts and awareness and reaction time.

But it’s a major component. Not all good runners will be good baserunners, but it feels like all good baserunners should be good runners. Check out the top of last year’s baserunning value leaderboard. Jacoby Ellsbury is a good runner. Rajai Davis is a good runner. Eric Young, Elvis Andrus, Mike Trout, Alcides Escobar — all these guys, good runners. An almost infallible rule is, you need to be able to run pretty well to be able to run the bases pretty well. But note that I had to throw an “almost” in there. And I had to throw an “almost” in there on account of Daniel Murphy, baseball’s premier player with speed without speed.

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I remember a Sunday several years ago, when I was in college, when I got myself all interested in pitcher release points. I wasn’t interested in anything, specifically — I just wanted to come up with some kind of measurement, because I hadn’t seen data like that before. So I spent many, many hours capturing screenshots from MLB.tv and marking pixel coordinates on a spreadsheet. In that way, I worked hard to estimate a handful of release points from one pitcher, and I was satisfied, at least with the concept. I felt like the labor was worthwhile. These days you can get release-point information instantly, and it’s better and a hell of a lot more thorough.

The advantage of having all this information is that we get to have all this information. If there’s a disadvantage, it’s that it used to be fun to try to figure things out by hand. Analysis used to take longer, and be longer. It was a journey, for everyone involved. Now almost everything’s quantified. The ESPN Home Run Tracker can spit out tons of details about every single home run hit during the season. It’s insane, how far we’ve come. Oh, but, the ESPN Home Run Tracker isn’t active during spring training. And Giancarlo Stanton plays in spring training.

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There’s nothing at all strange about a city the size of Denver having a major-league baseball team. I’ve been to Denver. Not only is it big enough to have multiple gas stations — it’s big enough to have multiple kinds of gas stations. Where things do get strange is in the details. Denver, of course, is really high up, relative to where sea level is, and that makes for an unavoidably different baseballing experience. There’s nothing, really, to be done about it. Baseball in Denver’s played at altitude, so baseball in Denver’s a different sort of baseball.

Things happen differently there, and for that reason Denver’s a perfect case for why park factors have to exist for analysts to get anywhere. It’s simply an extreme hitter-friendly run environment. Now, when it comes to games in Denver, everyone, at least, is on a level playing field (literally!) (figuratively too). But there are games played outside of Denver, and additionally, there are players who are removed from Denver. Whenever a position player leaves the Rockies, people get worried that he’s going to fall apart, because he’ll miss the lopsided circumstances. With players who used to play in Colorado, there’s a tendency to be cautious, and perhaps even skeptical.

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It’s no secret that strikeouts are up, league-wide. And they aren’t only up from where they were in the past — they continue to rise, having risen eight consecutive years. The average batter last year struck out about once per five trips to the plate. Compared to 2005, last year there were five more strikeouts per two games. There is, of course, a limit to how high the strikeout rate can go, and strikeouts in 2013 were barely up from where they were in 2012, but still, it’s an important trend, and for some people it’s a worrisome one. I know that former colleague Rob Neyer has expressed much concern over how many strikeouts there are in the game today.

No one disagrees about the fact. Strikeouts are recorded by record-keepers, and the frequency of strikeouts is up. The real question concerns the explanation. Plenty of people have provided plenty of possible reasons for why the game has gone as it has. For example, a year ago, Dave noted a connection between the recent rise in strikeouts and the roll-out of PITCHf/x. The system allows for an accurate evaluation of the zone, and as it turns out, the zone has been growing. That’s some fascinating research, right there, but I wonder: how might we be able to isolate the strikeout effect of PITCHf/x? We can’t, really, but we can try. We just need to look somewhere else.

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As we know, in any given year, the playing field isn’t exactly even. It’s just one of those things that we quietly accept, because there’s not really much of anything to be done about it. The hope just has to be that, over time, things more or less balance out. (They don’t, at least for teams in the AL East.) For 2014, as for all seasons, the playing field won’t be even. I already took a look at this by projecting divisional WAR. But that can still be taken to the next obvious step — team-by-team projected strengths of schedule, also by WAR.

See, some teams will play easier schedules, overall. Some teams will play more challenging schedules! The effect is relatively small, compared to just levels of talent, but at the extremes it can make a difference of a few wins. Which means it can make a difference between a playoff spot and not a playoff spot, or a protected pick and not a protected pick. From the divisional post, one could already kind of work out the toughest and the easiest schedules, but I thought I might as well just calculate the breakdowns.

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I hope you don’t think this is going to be an extensive study. I hope you don’t want for this to be an extensive study. Because, look, here’s the deal:

And that’s it. Those are the results. You can leave now, enlightened, if you so choose. All that’s coming is explanation, commentary, and history, and some people want that and some people don’t. The AL East projects to be strong! The NL East projects to be strong, too, relative to something other than the rest of this year’s major-league baseball. Relative to that, it’s pretty weak.

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Pitch-framing research isn’t really new anymore. I mean, in the grander scheme of things, it’s only been a blink of an eye since the work first debuted, but we’re beyond the discovery stage. We’re at the point where the work is going into refinement, and earlier this week Baseball Prospectus published the latest update. The research was good, and the effort was extraordinary, but ultimately the piece offered a lot of confirmation. The guys we suspected were good are still good. The guys we suspected were bad are still bad. With framing, researchers are almost all the way there.

So, we know about framing, and we know about the numbers. We’re also on the outside, looking in. Whenever this comes up, there’s always the question: so, how is framing actually valued right now within the industry? For example, Jose Molina might be the face of the whole field of study. By the end of 2015, he will have played four years with the Rays for a total of less than eight million dollars. The framing numbers would suggest he’d be worth that much in a month or three. Teams just must not believe in it, right? Or they’re at least being super-cautious.

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FanGraphs already had Inside Edge data from the past two seasons, but David Appelman rolled out an upgrade this week with new material showing up on the leaderboards and on player pages. It’s an exciting development, providing new stuff we get to play around with while we wait for reams of reliable information from the new MLBAM project in the future. Because there’s a new feature on FanGraphs, I feel somewhat obligated to put it to immediate use in a post. In this post, Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford will be your guide through the near-impossible.

All balls in play are classified by the likelihood of a play being made. It’s somewhat subjective, but the classifications are: Impossible, Remote, Unlikely, Even, Likely and Routine. Most balls in play make for routine outs. No defender has converted an impossible play, which I suppose is in keeping with the definition. Last year, 8.3% of remote plays were converted into outs. Digging deeper, 6.0% of remote plays were converted into outs by shortstops. Last season, there were 31 players who converted exactly two remote plays. There were six more players who converted exactly three. Aaron Hicks converted four. Brandon Crawford converted five.

Put another way: At least in theory, remote plays capture the most difficult, yet makeable, plays. Brandon Crawford was the 2013 league leader in the category, turning five (of 24) remote plays into outs. So, below, let’s go over those five remote plays, in chronological order. No, the point isn’t that Crawford is the best defensive shortstop in baseball. Let’s just be content to watch Crawford at his best. You can get back to thinking about Andrelton Simmons tomorrow.

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