So we know, now. It always looked like Masahiro Tanaka would get six or seven years, and an average annual value a little north of $20 million. There was little to guess about, with regard to his contract. The question was which team would end up being able to give it to him, and now we know that team is the Yankees, who seemed like the favorites from the beginning. After all the rumors, after all the drama, after all the dead nothing in between, Tanaka went to the more or less predictable place for the more or less predictable commitment. As soon as the changes to the posting system were put in place, it was obvious that Tanaka would end up getting free-agent money.

Whenever something big goes down, people want to read about it, because they want to know what it means. Was it smart, or was it not smart? What does this mean for the team, now? What does this mean for the team down the road? What does this mean for the rest of the teams? Basically, what are the implications of the news? One here is that we know where Tanaka is going. Another one here is that the rest of the market should spring back to life. But as far as an evaluation of the deal is concerned, unfortunately that’s next to impossible. So an evaluation isn’t what follows.

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The annoying thing about Masahiro Tanaka’s signing window was that we knew nothing would happen until the very end of it. The convenient thing about Masahiro Tanaka’s signing window was that we knew there was a designated, set-in-stone end of it, so it’s not like things could drag on forever. This put Tanaka in a unique position, and in the end, he didn’t wait until the very last minute to make a choice — with a few days to spare, Tanaka’s elected to sign with the Yankees, for seven years and $155 million.

Also, there is an opt-out clause after the fourth year. Also, there is the matter of the $20 million posting fee. Put the numbers together and it’s a commitment similar to the one the Tigers made to Justin Verlander and that the Mariners made to Felix Hernandez, and while you can’t just add the posting fee to the salary total like that, and while the opt-out clause has its own value, and while some extra time has passed, and while this is the Yankees, and while those other guys weren’t free agents, it’s clear that Tanaka isn’t expected to contribute a serviceable 33 starts. Regardless of the fact that this is Yankees money, the expectation is that Tanaka will pitch like an ace. At least, like he’ll pitch like a good No. 2.

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For me, one of the most memorable pitches of the past few seasons is the fastball that Sergio Romo threw by Miguel Cabrera to clinch the 2012 World Series. On its own merits, Romo’s fastball isn’t particularly good, and for that reason, everybody watching figured Romo would throw a slider. For that reason, Romo threw an effective fastball, and it was the biggest pitch of his life — and it turns out every pitch is connected and one never has to really stand on its own merits. Romo succeeds with his fastball in the way that Tim Wakefield succeeded with his fastball: He uses the pitch to take batters by surprise, because his primary pitch is way better.

Game theory is a complicated concept, but pitch mixes make it simpler to grasp. Say you have a pitcher with an unbelievable changeup. Even though the changeup is his best pitch, it wouldn’t make sense to throw it 100% of the time, because a key component is surprise. Therefore there exists some optimum frequency with which the pitcher would throw something else, even if “something else” is something a lot worse. Because of the changeup, in theory, it wouldn’t look a lot worse in context. A hitter should never be able to know what’s coming, unless the pitcher is Mariano Rivera, who now is retired.

And this brings us to the current matter of Al Alburquerque, who has a slider. He has a very good slider, and he’s thrown it a whole bunch.

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I was reading something about Clayton Kershaw the other day. Kershaw’s been the guy to write and read about, because he’s been amazing, and because he just got paid, and because there sure as shoot hasn’t been anything else happening around the league. This is the article, and it talks about Kershaw’s ongoing search for a reliable changeup, to go along with all of his other weapons. A particular section:

And so I am boundlessly curious about the changeup, the mystical less-is-more pitch, and Kershaw’s curiosity for it, and the evolution of Kershaw as a pitcher and if there is room for another pitch along the way.

Pitchers like to say the hitters will decide. So far, hitters aren’t suggesting Kershaw needs another pitch. One or two fewer, maybe.

Read it over quickly and you might dismiss that as a worthless old bromide. But there’s a lot of truth tucked away in there — hitters will let pitchers know when they need to make changes. If a pitcher isn’t having problems, the pitcher’s having success, and success isn’t something you mess with unless it gets threatened. Kershaw’s facing no threat, but then this isn’t about him.

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We’ve already written about Carlos Santana’s third-base transition once. Mike Petriello jumped on that story almost as soon as it came out, and he figured it was worth a winter attempt. What’s the harm, right? It was all good and it was all worth doing, and it was all nearly forgotten about as the holidays came around and as the Masahiro Tanaka sweepstakes kicked off. Santana, though, kept on playing third base, and now this is more than just a creative idea. Now Santana considers himself a third baseman. Observers have been impressed, and while Santana isn’t forgetting about catching entirely, he believes he’s capable of playing third in the majors. In short, this is a thing to be taken real seriously.

Which is kind of surprising, because this is kind of a weird and unfamiliar endeavor. It isn’t often at all that you see a team convert a catcher to third base, and Santana in particular has never been thought of as a Gold Glove candidate. But then, that could be part of the point, and there’s also the matter of the Indians having Yan Gomes, who is real good. And while you don’t usually think about a catcher playing some third, how strange is that, really? Just how jarring is that kind of 90-foot adjustment?

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Without question, one of the most incredible achievements in baseball during my lifetime was the Braves winning 14 consecutive division titles between 1991 – 2005. There’s an asterisk, since in 1994 the season ended early with the Braves six games back, but what doesn’t count officially doesn’t count officially, and it’s not even like 14 out of 15 is all that much less impressive. Anyhow, another contender is this: since 2008, the Yankees have won the most games in baseball, with 564. The Rays have won the second-most games in baseball, with 550. Over that span, the Yankees have out-spent the Rays by more than nine hundred million dollars.

There’s always been concern over the difference between the Haves and the Have-Nots, and that concern is alive and well today, with the Dodgers having established themselves as a league elite. When it comes to payroll, baseball is far from an even field, and I have a pet theory that over time, as teams get smarter and smarter, the differences between them will get smaller and smaller, and success will correlate more and more with spending. Lower-budget teams, right now, have to focus on so-called market inefficiencies. But while it’s easy to get caught up in the details, perhaps the greatest market inefficiency of all is spending big money in general.

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Pitch-framing! Am I right? It’s still very much a fascinating subject, which is one of the reasons I write about it so often. But by this point we have a pretty good idea who’s good at it and who’s bad at it. That ground’s been covered. We know that Jose Molina is great. We know that Ryan Doumit was a problem. Yet we can break things down further still. Often, people don’t go beyond describing a guy as good, bad, or okay. But there are actually specific types of framers.

Which makes plenty of sense, doesn’t it? There are great hitters and there are bad hitters. Among them, there are guys with tremendous plate coverage, but there are also high-ball hitters and low-ball hitters. Every part of the zone area is different, and every player is different, so we should expect that different players respond differently to pitches in different parts of the zone. How this relates to framing is that some guys might be better with receiving high pitches, while other guys might be better with receiving low pitches. Intuitively, why not? And thanks to some awesome updates at Baseball Savant, this couldn’t be much easier to examine.

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The other day, in making room for John Buck, the Mariners designated for assignment a player named Carlos Peguero. This means absolutely nothing to most of you, but absolutely something to some of you. Peguero’s out of options now, so in order to return to the minors, he’ll have to make it through waivers. Peguero clearing waivers is a decent possibility. What’s clear, at this point, is that Peguero is unlikely to develop into a big-league star slugger. What’s simultaneously clear — what’s been clear all along — is that Peguero has big-time raw upside, not unlike such predecessors as Wily Mo Pena and Wladimir Balentien. Jesus Colome got jobs because of his fastball. Peguero will get jobs because of his power.

For those of you unfamiliar with Peguero, you’re most certainly familiar with his general player type. But still, I’ll summarize him in two images. The first is a video:

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I’m not gonna lie to you — I’d love to be writing about something more compelling. Perhaps some unexplored Clayton Kershaw angle, or perhaps something else entirely. At the end of the day, traffic does have to be there, and traffic follows entertaining, easily-understandable blog posts. It doesn’t so much follow posts about what it’s like, statistically, to pitch to a rookie in Major League Baseball. But we’re all just slaves to the ideas that we have at any given moment, and after I messed around earlier with league-wide leaderboards, I felt the urge to keep messing around in the same place. I promise this is just a phase.

Earlier I did what I could to investigate whether or not veteran pitchers and veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt from home-plate umpires when it comes to the called strike zone. Those are theories I’ve heard repeated time and time again, and they were easy enough to look into. That got me thinking about other well-worn baseball theories, and I wound up growing curious about how big leaguers have approached rookies, relative to how they’ve approached non-rookies. Do rookies get fed a steady stream of breaking balls? Alternatively, do they get fed a bunch of fastballs in the zone? Is there any meaningful difference in how rookies are pitched to? It didn’t take a lot to put some numbers together.

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