Yesterday, I went into the best bargain position players for 2015, using projected WAR and salary figures to find out who is likely to give teams the least cost per win. Today, we’re going to go over starting pitching, and see where the bargains can be found in the groups of pitchers both pre-and-post arbitration. Thanks to our awesome, ever-active commenters chipping in on the piece from yesterday (you guys are awesome), we’re also going to hone the calculation a bit to look at the surplus WAR value and get some of the low-priced bias out of the sample.

First of all, it should be noted that this is just going to pertain to starting pitching. Relief pitching is something to tackle for another day, as I believe it should be grouped separately from the starters in a study like this. As I did yesterday, I’ve taken contract data for the 2015 season, merged it with ZiPS WAR projections, and then calculated each player’s cost, in dollar value, per win.

Again, the sample is separated into two groups, those who have reached above-league minimum deals (generally through free agency or arbitration) and those who haven’t. For those who haven’t, I’ve simply set their contract as the league minimum, $507,500. This can vary slightly — each team deals with pre-arbitration pay raises differently, and always in a clandestine manner – but it’s a small enough change to barely influence the data. There is one exception for pre-arbitration players: if a player has negotiated a contract with their team above the league minimum (so they actually show up on the contract reports we have), they will show up in the first group. This didn’t come up often, but it’s best we’re all on the same page.

Let’s begin. First we’re going to look at the first group of starting pitchers — these are mostly the players who have reached free agency or arbitration. I’ll present these findings in both graph and table form: here’s the graph comparing salary vs. projected 2015 WAR for our top 30 starting pitchers:

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There’s a lot of talk about market inefficiency in the long aisles of the baseball analysis superstore: which teams find value where others don’t, and, conversely, which teams see value that maybe isn’t there anymore (or even in the first place). For small market teams, finding inefficiencies is a matter of successful survival, and for large market teams, it’s a way of adding something extra to the x-factor that works: money.

Whatever the case may be, it’s part of our job to measure how teams are faring in the efficiency department, and we do that generally by looking at how much teams are spending in relation to what they’re actually getting, production-wise. Today, we’re not exactly going to go into specific strategies, like what the most recent Billy Beane magic wand looks like, but rather see which position players are projected to provide the most amount of production (WAR) for the least amount of money ($).

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Hisashi Iwakuma is perhaps the most underrated pitcher in baseball. Since his debut in 2012, he has posted an xFIP of 3.24: good for 12th-best among qualified starters, and bracketed on either side by Max Scherzer and Madison Bumgarner. The former of that duo just signed a well-publicized seven-year, $210 million dollar contract; Iwakuma is on the last year of a three-year deal worth a total of $20 million.

Iwakuma won’t make Scherzer money in free agency next year, mostly due to the fact that he is four years older than the new Nationals right-hander, but it gives us an idea of the company he’s kept for the past three years. Always the groomsman, never the groom, Iwakuma lives with his near elite-level production in the shadow of perennial Cy Young candidate Felix Hernandez: while he finished third in Cy Young voting in 2013, he is usually forgotten when the final lists of best pitchers are made — left instead to plan the year-end parties for the King.

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Last week, I explored the rumor of Matt Harvey’s new curveball, and what it might mean in the future given his curve’s effectiveness in 2013. Despite the lowest movement in the league — both horizontally and vertically — Harvey had the 12th-most successful curveball in baseball by pitch run value that year, pointing to the incredible strength of his other pitches (especially his fastball) in setting up his curve. Today, we’re going to focus on more curveball news, this time coming from the man who opposed Harvey on Friday in the Grapefruit League.

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2014 was not a normal year for the two Joes. Both Joey Votto and Joe Mauer dealt with fallout from injuries, with Votto not having effective use of his lower half, and Mauer possibly dealing with lingering effects of a concussion sustained in 2013. For both players, the injuries affected overall production when they played, but it was especially acute in the power department for Votto. Joe Mauer, with the exception of one year in which his home run to fly ball ratio was off the charts, never had much power to begin with.

Both Joes still posted wRC+ numbers north of 100 in their playing time in 2014, because that’s what both Joes do, almost without fail. Votto and Mauer are some of the best contact hitters in the game, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today. Yes, they share other traits as well: they’re both 31, left-handed, and they walk a lot, with Votto being a particular master in that category. Maybe they both also have the same type of small dog, or are baritones.

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Matt Harvey hasn’t been featured in these digital pages since the illustrious David Temple pointed out in early August that the Mets right-hander was throwing again after 2013 Tommy John surgery. With his coming start on Friday against the Tigers in the Grapefruit League, Harvey is about to be pitching again to major league hitters; that is not only cause for much celebration, but also cause for his goodly reintroduction into the halls of our analyses and postulations.

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We all know Pedro Alvarez had a pretty rough year in 2014, as he hit just 18 home runs, half of his total of 36 in 2013. That was almost the whole story, as hitting home runs (usually impressive, towering ones) is what Pedro Alvarez does well. Unfortunately, he happened to time the failure of the thing he does well with the continued failure of the thing he has never done well — making ignominious throwing errors at third base — thereby forcing the playoff-bound Pirates to take his glove out of the infield (and bat out of the lineup) by platooning him toward the end of the year.

What is less publicized is that Alvarez made some plate discipline strides last year, posting career-best walk and strikeout rates (10.1% and 25.4%, respectively), so 2014 wasn’t all bad. In fact, if you were an extremely optimistic person, you might say that 2014 was an important year for El Toro, as he seemed to make adjustments to improve the glaring holes in his plate approach. However, entering his age-28 season in 2015, a realist would say Alvarez is now facing a crucial test: given his defensive shortcomings and struggles against left-handed pitching, the prospects of a bounce-back campaign at the plate aren’t just a nice expectation, they’re now more of a necessity.

With Ike Davis out of the picture, the Pirates’ plan is to have Alvarez play first base, getting his bat back in the lineup and allowing him to almost never have to throw the ball – though you get the sense his leash as a starter might not be all that long. Let’s look into what was behind Alvarez’ power decline in 2014, and if his plate discipline improvements will help drive a return to form.

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Trevor Bauer is a lot of things – former first round pick, pupil of Ron Wolforth’s unique coaching style, permanent breakout candidate, and now part of a rotation in Cleveland that many predict will be one of this year’s best. Bauer is a part of the current and future plans for Cleveland, but he’s also a work in progress: a not yet fully realized starter that suffers from real control problems on the mound. The most intriguing thing about Bauer isn’t his upside, however — it’s the fact that he throws a pitch almost totally lost to the modern game: the screwball.

Today, we’re not going to speculate on what Bauer might accomplish this year. Instead, we’re going to focus on the screwball, a pitch thrown by just one or two other pitchers in the majors. It’s an exceedingly rare pitch, and we’re going to look at how he throws it, and see where it fits in his arsenal.

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As a matter of self-preservation, I don’t listen to what Curt Schilling says very often. The guy could pitch, however, so when he’s talking about throwing baseballs, not the other stuff, I tune in. When he happened to be on television last year (talking about throwing baseballs), he said something about “going to the well”. Schilling was referring to a starting pitcher getting into trouble — giving up a few hits, walking a batter — and then having to dip into a metaphorical “well” of grit and determination (and most likely velocity) to get out of the inning without further damage.

We know baseball games find themselves at fulcrum points: high leverage situations where the outcome of one at-bat can tip the balance of win expectancy one way or the other. Thinking about Schilling’s “well” comment further, I wondered – how does a starting pitcher’s velocity change in different leverage situations? Does it increase above the pitcher’s usual average when men are on base or when the game hangs in the balance, as we might expect it to?

Does the well really exist?

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Finally, after what seems like an age, the appointed heroes amongst us mortal men and women have descended upon the ebullient corner of the nation, ball and glove in hand, to throw and to catch. Yes, it still snows 12 inches every week in the Northeast, but the dream is once again here — may we all rejoice in the date of winter’s true passing.

In honor of the fine March spectacle we’re about to witness, or rather to honor the sometimes low-level professional baseball that passes for spectacle because of the state of our desperation, I thought it might be a good exercise to relive some of the glories of past spring trainings. The reason for this is twofold: to remind everyone that spring training stats are next to worthless, and also to celebrate how weird baseball can be when constrained to a small sample size. Today we’re going to revel in the fact that we’re playing the game again by looking at freak occurrences that can only happen in Arizona in March.

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