When the Nationals acquired Denard Span, it essentially meant they’d have to choose between Adam LaRoche and Michael Morse. When they re-signed LaRoche to a multi-year contract, it essentially meant Morse would have to be traded. One might have thought this would have reduced the Nationals’ negotiating leverage, but a three-team trade on Wednesday saw the Nationals still manage to turn Morse into legitimate value.

The overall summary, in case you haven’t seen it:

To Seattle, from Washington: Michael Morse
To Oakland, from Seattle: John Jaso
To Washington, from Oakland: A.J. Cole, Blake Treinen, PTBNL

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When plans were revealed for Marlins Park’s left-center home run sculpture, people freaked out. When the sculpture was actually constructed and emplaced, people freaked out all over again, having been given a better sense of scale. The thing drew criticism from all corners, and while I’m sure some of that was just piling on, and while I’m sure some more of that was just standard Internet overreaction, people had a lot to say about the aesthetics of the monstrosity. People were not prepared to see in real life what they would…see in real life…in left-center field, and for a while it seemed the Marlins’ sculpture was more frequently discussed than the actual Marlins.

But it wasn’t only the beauty of the thing, or the lack thereof, that made for a topic of discussion. There were also some on-field concerns, some actual baseball concerns, that I believe were first voiced by Greg Dobbs. Quote:

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Coming into the offseason, Rafael Soriano had a choice: return to the Yankees in 2013 for $14 million, or opt out, collect $1.5 million, and become a free agent. Consensus around these parts was that Soriano should stay put. Soriano opted out. The Yankees extended to Soriano a $13.3 million qualifying offer, and there was a strong argument that Soriano should accept it and stay with New York. Soriano turned it down and entered the market with compensation reducing his appeal. Many of those players who declined qualifying offers have struggled to find the contracts they wanted. For a while, Soriano’s market, at least publicly, wasn’t developing. It was unclear for a while what was going to happen to Rafael Soriano, and it was easy to conclude that he’d made the wrong decisions.

Soriano just signed a two-year contract with the Nationals worth $28 million. He turned down $14 million over one year, a year in which he wouldn’t close much, and ended up with $14 million over two years, years in which he’ll at least initially be the closer. There’s also a $14 million vesting option at the end, just in case the contract wasn’t good enough for Soriano already. Soriano, and his agent Scott Boras.

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People will tell you that practice makes perfect. This is untrue, at least as far as it has to do with humans. Humans will forever be imperfect, and a better and more accurate saying would be “practice makes better”. If you’re trying to do something, and you practice it, you’ll probably do better than you would have had you not practiced it. This is the whole idea behind practice, so I’m glad we finally have this cleared up.

Major-league baseball players have practiced baseball. An awful lot! For years and years and years, on a regular basis, and you could even make the argument that games are just practice for future games. Everything is practice for the next such opportunity. What we can figure is that these players are better for having practiced, and without so much practice, they might and presumably would be worse. We can’t really measure the effect of practice, though, since they’re all practicing all the time. We don’t have a practice-less control group.

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Like many Americans, Delmon Young is presently unemployed. Like few presently unemployed Americans, Young should shortly become employed, and somewhat lucratively. Young, presumably, will land a major-league contract, and even the major-league minimum guarantees several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Relative to the rest of the unemployed, Young’s in a good situation. He’s in a far worse situation, though, than people figured he would be around this point in his career.

Delmon Young is 27 years old. This guy, he’s 27. Granted, this guy is even younger, but we’re not really here to judge people on their looks. Young is 27, and he’s more newly 27 than nearly 28. He’s younger than Mitch Moreland. He’s younger than David Price, and he’s only months older than Mark Trumbo. This is supposed to be Young’s career peak, and Young was supposed to have an incredible career peak. Young, last year, was bad. By our metrics, in three of his six full-ish big-league seasons he’s been below replacement-level. In another, he was exactly replacement-level. For his career, he’s at 0.8 WAR. In his initial 30-game campaign in 2006, he was worth 0.9 WAR. You’re getting the Delmon Young idea.

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Earlier, I wrote about the season’s worst called ball. It only made sense to attempt a companion piece, regarding the season’s worst called strike. I’ll blockquote from that other article, because even though blockquoting is lazy, it’s Friday afternoon and shut up:

Last season, in baseball, there were more than 700,000 pitches thrown. Of those, nearly 400,000 were taken, or un-swung at. Every single one of those taken pitches was determined to have been a ball or a strike by a trained human umpire. Trained human umpires are very good at their jobs — to confirm, one need only watch an untrained human umpire. The umpires in the major leagues get almost every call correct. But they do miss some, and when it comes to nearly 400,000 called balls and called strikes, it stands to reason that there are going to be mistakes, and there are going to be really bad mistakes. It’s simple probability. Within any such data pool, there are going to be extremes.

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Last season, in baseball, there were more than 700,000 pitches thrown. Of those, nearly 400,000 were taken, or un-swung at. Every single one of those taken pitches was determined to have been a ball or a strike by a trained human umpire. Trained human umpires are very good at their jobs — to confirm, one need only watch an untrained human umpire. The umpires in the major leagues get almost every call correct. But they do miss some, and when it comes to nearly 400,000 called balls and called strikes, it stands to reason that there are going to be mistakes, and there are going to be really bad mistakes. It’s simple probability. Within any such data pool, there are going to be extremes.

Herein, we will reflect on the 2012 season’s worst called ball. That is, the called ball that was most like a strike. As it turns out, I actually wrote about this before, but at that point I had less than three months of data. Now I’m looking at data for the season entire. For the record, I’m not doing this to criticize the umpire, or to make some statement about instant replay and automated strike-zone judgment. I’m doing this for the sake of exploration, for the sake of curiosity satiation. As you watch what unfolds below, try not to be frustrated. Try instead to be interested. If anything, you should be trying to eliminate frustration from your life.

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The Brewers signed Kelvim Escobar to a minor-league contract with a spring-training invite. You know the story with these no-risk pseudo-commitments. Teams sign interesting names to these contracts every year, and this offseason we’ve seen Jeremy Bonderman get a deal, and Scott Kazmir get a deal, and Dontrelle Willis get a deal. I’m probably forgetting others. These contracts frequently go to players who used to be something, on the off chance that they might be something again. Most often, the players don’t contribute much, and they’re forgotten about until the next round. Minor-league contracts are great for winter conversation, and by and large irrelevant come April and May.

Escobar, sure enough, used to be something, like the others. He’ll get a chance to make the Brewers’ bullpen out of camp, if he pitches well. With Escobar, whether he’ll pitch well is the second question. Whether he’ll pitch is the first question. Escobar has been through more injury problems than most, and it’s somewhat incredible that he’s racked up more than 1,500 big-league innings. Though he hasn’t added to that total in a while, there was a time that Escobar was able to throw on a regular or semi-regular basis.

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FanGraphs has its own Clutch statistic, as you probably know. If you didn’t know that before, congratulations, you’ve already learned from this article, and it’s only just beginning. Clutch is available all over this website, and it’s fun to scroll through the all-time leaderboard. At the top you find names like Tony Gwynn, Pete Rose, and Dave Parker. At the bottom, you find names like Sammy Sosa, Jim Thome, and Barry Bonds. I should note that by “all-time leaderboard” I mean “leaderboard since 1974”, but that’s a lot of time to many of us. The baseball that existed before roughly 1974ish was a very different sort of baseball. Earlier-baseball statistics are weird.

The Clutch statistic is based in win expectancy, and a high Clutch score doesn’t necessarily mean the player was awesome in clutch situations, just as a low Clutch score doesn’t necessarily mean the player sucked in clutch situations. Clutch is relative to the player himself; a high Clutch score means a player was more clutch than you would’ve expected that player to be. You get it. You’ve probably gotten it for years.

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