We can all agree that WAR does a pretty good job of sorting, right? Like, even if you can quibble with the numbers, it paints a pretty good general picture. Good players tend to have better WARs than worse players. Great, okay. Over the past couple seasons, 130 different players have batted at least 1,000 times. Recognize right away there’s selection bias here — it’s mostly just decent players, and better players, who would play that much. The sample is already skewed somewhat toward quality, toward talent. Within that pool, by WAR, Odubel Herrera ranks 38th. He’s statistical neighbors with Daniel Murphy, Dexter Fowler, Dustin Pedroia, and Kole Calhoun. Herrera turns 25 in a couple of weeks, and as a Rule 5 grab, he’s been fantastic.

It makes all the sense in the world that the Phillies would want to get Herrera locked up. And from Herrera’s side, of course he’d want guaranteed money. Two winters ago his old team left him unprotected. There’s vulnerability there, vulnerability no one wants to feel again and again. Herrera now has an extension, which isn’t strange. But it’s another extension that leaves a young player looking like he sold himself short.

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The Angels and Brewers recently made a trade, with Milwaukee ending up with Jett Bandy. I’m going to guess you didn’t linger on the deal, if you heard about it at all. It’s not a move that’s going to change the landscape of either league. But I saw an interesting tweet on Tuesday:

David Stearns says Bandy has plus raw power that hasn’t necessarily shown up in his stats. Playing time split with Susac/Pina remains TBD.

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) December 13, 2016

Jett Bandy: plus raw power! But for the most part invisible, at present. This is fairly typical scout-speak, and if you just concentrate on Bandy’s profile, there could be something there. He’s an extreme fly-ball hitter, and he stands 6’4. He turns 27 in March. He could be a really strong guy.

Thinking about the tweet, however, got me thinking about Statcast. What might we be able to learn about raw power from baseball’s new tracking technology?

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The Pirates almost traded Andrew McCutchen. That’s all anyone could really think about when McCutchen was present at the Pirates’ annual PirateFest, the Saturday after the end of the winter meetings. Maybe the public never should’ve had any idea in the first place, but teams leak information, and the McCutchen rumors ran rampant. It made the occasion a little awkward, an occasion where fans would prefer to simply embrace the homegrown superstar, free of complicating thoughts. It’s anyone’s guess how much longer McCutchen might last where he is.

The reality of the Pirates’ situation is that the commitment to McCutchen probably isn’t forever. He’s under contract one more year, with a club option after that, and it’s hard to see the two parties together in 2019. It would’ve made plenty of sense for the Pirates to make a deal last week. It also made plenty of sense for the Pirates to hold off. It would now appear McCutchen will at least open the next season in Pittsburgh. Beyond that, it’s murky, but no one yet has to say their goodbyes.

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A lot of people were taken by surprise when the Diamondbacks non-tendered Welington Castillo, but it did at least set up an inevitability. It felt like a foregone conclusion that Castillo would end up signing with the Orioles. It was only a matter of the contract length. Castillo was said to want three years. The Orioles were said to want not that.

The arrangement now, as has been reported: Castillo has signed with Baltimore for one year and $6 million. He also has a second-year player option, worth $7 million. So Castillo won’t go broke, and now the Orioles have another power bat they can install in the lineup. In that sense, hey, mission accomplished for everyone. The only issue for the Orioles is that Castillo still doesn’t seem like he should be the starter.

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There are certain club options we just take for granted. Andrew McCutchen has only one guaranteed year remaining on his deal, but it’s almost unimaginable that his employer might turn down his $14.5-million club option for 2018. Similarly, Chris Sale has only one guaranteed year remaining, but then he has consecutive club options, worth $12.5 million and $15 million, respectively. These are very good players, so for all intents and purposes, McCutchen’s locked up two years, and Sale’s locked up three.

I was wondering last night just how bad McCutchen would have to be in 2017 for his option to be declined. I then quickly one-upped myself. The McCutchen answer was maybe somewhat interesting. But what about an even more team-favorable option? Enter Jose Altuve. Altuve is under guaranteed contract for 2017. Then he has a club option, worth $6 million. And, for the sake of being thorough, that’s followed by another club option, worth $6.5 million. The question to be addressed: How bad would Altuve have to be this year for the Astros to not want to pay him $6 million the year after?

This hypothetical is exceptionally stupid. Let’s get on with it, then.

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A couple years ago, I wrote an article titled “Dan Duquette and Avoiding the Awful.” Within, I ran a pretty simple study, adding up every team’s negative WAR. The Orioles came away scoring pretty well — that is, one of the explanations for the Orioles’ overall success was that they hadn’t given very much playing time to players who performed below replacement-level. It was far from a perfect study, but I liked it anyway, for how it worked and what it said. And so now I’m providing an update!

In that post, I mostly focused on 2012 – 2014. In this post, I’m going to focus on 2014 – 2016. Why not just get things started? Here’s a long table, showing every team’s combined negative WAR from individual players over the past three years.

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Over the past couple months, I’ve felt somewhat bullish regarding the Angels’ chances of being competitive in the season ahead. They’re not a great team, and they’re maybe not even a good team, but they feel to me like an underrated team. Everyone points to a shaky pitching staff and, indeed, there’s not much in the way of depth there. The bullpen could use some assistance. But there should, at least, be solid arms in the starting rotation. Matt Shoemaker ought to make a successful return from his brain injury, as crazy as that sounds as a sentence. Tyler Skaggs is finally all recovered from his elbow surgery. And Garrett Richards is going to pitch. That’s the way things look right now, anyway.

The Richards case is going to be a big one. If he’s able to regularly take the mound and throw five or six innings, that could prove to be a game-changer, in the smaller and bigger pictures. Richards’ health won’t affect only Richards and the ballclub around him. All of baseball is going to be paying attention closely, because a successful future could spark a revolution.

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We all agree that Kenley Jansen was never going to leave the Dodgers, right? Certainly not after Aroldis Chapman agreed to terms with the Yankees. The Nationals might’ve been a player, but they have their limits. It was almost unimaginable that Jansen could choose to join the Marlins on purpose. As long as the Dodgers were in there, they had to be considered the heavy favorites, and now there’s an agreement in place. All three of the big free-agent closers have signed new contracts in the span of a week.

Mark Melancon is really good, but he just doesn’t work as a comp. Chapman works a lot better, and his deal made these negotiations easy. Chapman and Jansen are basically the same age. They’ve been similarly dominant, and Chapman signed for five years and $86 million, with an opt-out. So Jansen is getting five years and $80 million, with an opt-out, taking a small penalty because Jansen had a draft pick attached. Do you value a pick around $5 – 10 million? Voila! We’re all agents.

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While you were off doing something else over the weekend, the Angels picked up a new second baseman. Granted, their new second baseman was to be someone else’s bench player, so we’re not talking about a blockbuster, and that same would-be bench player had just expressed frustration over losing his starting job. And so Danny Espinosa was sent to California, with the Nationals picking up Austin Adams and Kyle McGowin.

You want to know another way to know this wasn’t big? The Nationals made a trade for Angels prospects. As we all understand, the Angels don’t have prospects, and here Adams might be the one who’s slightly interesting. He’s been a tough-to-hit Double-A reliever with significant control problems. The Nationals didn’t get a lot for Espinosa’s final year of team control. The Angels, though, should probably be pretty happy. They’ve plugged what had been a gaping hole, and Espinosa suffers from a perception problem.

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