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David Forst was appointed to his current position in February of 2004 after serving as an assistant to the general manager and coordinator of professional scouting for the Oakland Athletics. His primary duties include assisting Billy Beane in all player acquisitions, contract negotiations and player evaluations. He agreed to sit down and talk at baseball’s Winter Meetings in San Diego, California.

Eno Sarris: A lot of people are asking: What are the Athletics doing? Here’s a different version: Was there a plan for the offseason, was there an overarching idea, or is it always just “Get better, piece by piece”?

David Forst: There’s definitely a plan. We certainly spend the first couple of weeks after the year, when the season ends, talking on a macro level about what direction we should go. The specifics of who to trade and who to target don’t necessarily come into focus until a little bit later in the offseason, but certainly the plan is talked about immediately. And frankly, it was probably something we talked about in September, before the season was over.

I think Billy [Beane, General Manager] has articulated in a couple of places that we knew that just bringing back the current team, assuming the losses of [Jon] Lester, and [Luke] Gregerson, and [Jed] Lowrie and some of those guys that we didn’t have an opportunity to sign — bringing back that team wasn’t going to work. The Angels were obviously 11 games better than us and the Mariners were right on our tail, and poised to get better. Just bringing back our group and just supplementing it with little pieces, wasn’t going to give us a chance to compete, and was also going to leave us further down the path of having an older, more injury-prone club, frankly.

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Jeff Samardzija will call The Cell his new home, and this shark has never regularly infested waters as unfriendly as these before. After calling neutral or pitcher-friendly parks and leagues home so far in his career, the former wide out is is now in a tighter spot. And he’s already given up homers so far in his career. But why? Why has he been homer-prone?

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You’re not going to get anywhere using dollars per projected wins when it comes to relievers. Not usually. You have to pay a premium if you’re buying an established closer with a multi-year track record — that’s what the past shows. And so if we look at David Robertson, and the four-year, $46 million deal he just received from the White Sox through that lens, we won’t find happiness.

But what happens when we investigate how this reliever with below-average velocity has managed to be so dominant for the last four years? Does the deal look better?

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You might have heard offense is down around baseball. There’s talk of new rules to stop the shift, as if that was the cause. But maybe the game will police itself without help from the rules committee. It looks like there’s already some batters that shouldn’t be shifted as much as they are currently.

First, it seems strange to blame the shift for the current state of run scoring, even if you ignore that it’s been around for a long time. Here’s a handy little chart showing the batting average on balls in play since free agency began. There have been more shifts, as the number of players shifted 100+ times has gone from 15 to 44 from 2013 to 2014 alone. But it doesn’t look like more shifts have moved the overall BABIP needle at all.

BABIP used to live in the .280s until the mid nineties. Since then, it’s been within a few points of .300 most years. You’d think shifting would catch a few more of those balls in play as they’ve become more prevalent.

You might think we’ll take the easy way out here, and say that we should stop shifting the guys that are hitting well into the shift. But only three players — David Ortiz, Ryan Howard, and Brian McCann — were shifted as much as 300 times. If we focus on their results (Ortiz had a BABIP that was 100 points higher when the shift was on), we’re basically looking at the fate of a few bouncing balls in what amounts to one half-season of at-bats.

So no mention — other than in passing — of the fact that Matt Adams led baseball in shift BABIP (.374) or that Victor Martinez was top-five in that department (.332).

Let’s instead identify the type of hitter that we would not want to shift against. Beyond just “goes the opposite way.”

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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When the Rockies came to town this year, there was a tap on my shoulder. Adam Ottavino wanted to talk pitching. For some reason, I didn’t turn on my recorder. That’s fine, I guess, sometimes you just lose yourself in the conversation and want to kick yourself later when you look down. We had a good time talking, is what I remember. I even got some grips pics from him.

But anyway, I don’t have the exact quotes and so I can’t provide you a break down of Ottavino’s season peppered with the interesting things that Ottavino said about his craft. Just know that, yes, he thinks about platoon splits. And the primarily fastball/slider righty thinks about changeups. But a changeup hasn’t worked for him yet, and the strategies he’s had to deal with platoon splits have had varying success.

What stuck with me since that conversation was a pitcher he was interested in: Steve Cishek. Really, Ottavino was interested in how a primarily fastball/slider pitcher could avoid platoon splits. So, Adam, if you’re out there, let’s take a look at Steve Cishek for a bit. The rest of you that are still here, come along for the ride!

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Late this season, Padres righty Andrew Cashner came back from a shoulder injury with a new twist on his repertoire — again. This time, he featured a few more high fastballs and big curves than he had in the past. You’d think those two pitches are often linked across baseball, but the numbers aren’t as clear.

The last time Cashner came back from injury, he focused on throwing more two-seamers to get quicker outs, altered his changeup grip, and changed his grip on his breaking pitch. These changes were made with his health in mind, but they also served to make him a more complete pitcher.

This year, when he came back from shoulder inflammation that sidelined him for two months, Cashner again came back from a wrinkle. “I started throwing the four-seamer more in order to establish the high strike,” Cashner said before a game against the Giants in late September. Of course the pitcher knows best about his approach, but it’s worth noticing that he only threw an average of three more four-seam fastballs per game when he returned compared to the same time frame before his injury. And that his heat maps before and after his injury aren’t conclusive on the subject of high four-seamers.

He pointed out that he threw more curveballs when he came back, too. He’d thrown nine in his first fourteen starts before he got hurt. He threw 18 curves in the seven starts that came after his stint on the DL. This September was the month in which Cashner showed the best whiff rate on his curve ball in his career.

The second part of the plan was paired with the first, he admitted. That high fastball is “on the same plane” as the curveball. That makes all sorts of intuitive sense, considering the way the the idea of a high 94 mph high fastball coming the same general area as a big, dropping slow curve. It’s the kind of thing that seems to work for other pitchers.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Whether or not the deal for Pablo Sandoval was a good deal, the Giants are now faced with the unenviable task of finding a replacement in a bad market for third basemen. The good news is that they probably have close to $100 million they can spend on finding a solution. What might be their best way forward?

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