If you made it to Opening Day and wondered why there hadn’t been a greater number of contract extensions signed this spring, you weren’t alone. Just a few days ago, Dave Cameron wondered that very thing, noting that Kolten Wong was the only player to sign an extension, opting for the promise of guaranteed money rather than betting on the arbitration process and hitting free agency. Over the weekend the number of recent extensions doubled, or increased by one, as Gregory Polanco and the Pirates came to terms on a contract extension worth $35 million over five years — with two team options for another $25 million total — according to Ken Rosenthal after Jeff Passan first reported the deal. Polanco only has one year of service time, and with the extension not kicking in until next year so this contract has the potential to buy out three free-agent seasons, but given Polanco’s lack of production thus far, the team is making a bet that Polanco will be better than what he has shown.

The past few springs have seen quite a few contract extensions, and this year is certainly a down year in that regard. Here are position-player extensions from the past few years, including Polanco and Wong. The statistics included here are those produced during the player’s last season prior to the extension.

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I know this goes against the spirit of opening day, when anything can happen and everyone’s tied for first place. Opening day is a magical time precisely because no one’s yet been mathematically eliminated. The season hasn’t started to go down any path, which means the season could still go down any path conceivable. On opening day, everyone’s supposed to be happy; everyone’s supposed to be jazzed about baseball, because there’s not yet any reason not to be. Baseball’s back! It’s been a long time. The Royals just proved the numbers wrong the last time around. Maybe now it’s another team’s turn.

If you’re a fan in New York, you’re excited about baseball. If you’re a fan in Atlanta, you’re excited about baseball. If you’re a fan in Arizona, you’re excited about baseball. But: One of the dominant spring-training storylines was that the Dodgers were being undone by injury after injury. And it’s true; The Dodgers have already had their depth challenged, because they’ve got a busy disabled list. Yet, the Dodgers came equipped with reinforcements, so it seems like they should be able to handle this. Right at the end of spring training, the Diamondbacks lost A.J. Pollock. They might’ve lost him for the entire season. With one blow, Arizona has probably been hurt more than Los Angeles, and while anything is still able to happen, it’s a devastating turn of events. Their season hasn’t started yet, and the Diamondbacks might well be screwed.

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It’s Opening Day 2.0, so in what is becoming an annual tradition, let’s talk about some things I believe about what we’re going to see this year. These aren’t things I can definitively back up with evidence, but they are things that I think could be proven true as the year goes on. You can take them with all the necessary grains of salt, but as we head towards 2016, here are the five things that I believe for this year.

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Although the potential health risks of using smokeless tobacco are by now well established, countless Major League Baseball players nevertheless continue to use these products both on and off the playing field, much to the chagrin of MLB. And despite these dangers, the league has, to date, been largely unable to convince the Major League Baseball Players Association to agree to prohibit players from using tobacco products in MLB stadiums.

Recently, however, MLB’s efforts to curtail its players’ use of smokeless tobacco products gained new momentum from a rather unlikely source: local municipal governments. In recent months, three major-league cities – Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – have each passed new laws formally banning the use of smokeless tobacco in public facilities, including MLB ballparks. Meanwhile, with a similar tobacco ban set to take effect throughout the entire state of California in 2017, along with comparable legislation currently making its way through the city governments of Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Washington D.C., smokeless tobacco use could soon be legally prohibited in more than one-third of MLB’s 30 ballparks.

When these local ordinances were initially enacted, many were skeptical that the laws would actually deter MLB players from using tobacco products, since any player intent on ignoring the new prohibitions would easily be able to afford to pay a relatively modest monetary fine in exchange for breaking the law.

However, while the threat of punishment under these local laws alone may not be enough to change players’ behavior, these ordinances have created a new avenue for MLB to attack the problem, one that could potentially let the league punish players for their tobacco use.

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It’s difficult to write about the bigger picture when there have been precisely three games played in the regular season. The picture, as it stands now, is microscopically small. So we focus on the little things. We observe, but we try not to draw conclusions. Mostly, we wonder and speculate about the upcoming year, just like we have been throughout the entire offseason, except now, we do so with a tiny bit of knowledge about what that year actually entails.

One of the things I’m interested to watch this year is the development of an eight-year trend of pitchers throwing fewer and fewer pitches in the strike zone while getting batters to chase more and more balls. Most specifically, I’m interested in watching Francisco Liriano, the leader of the “throw strikes never” movement. The last couple years, Liriano has simultaneously thrown the fewest percentage of pitches inside the zone while also generating one of the highest chase rates.

Liriano already walks a ton of batters, and knowing those two facts, the logical question one asks oneself is, “Why do batters keep swinging?” Seems it should be easy to let Liriano beat himself. Spoiler alert: nothing about baseball is easy.

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Javier Baez has been burdened by strikeouts. The promising young Cub has a 38.5% k-rate and an 18.5% swinging strike rate in 309 big-league plate appearances. There were a plethora of whiffs in the minors as well, so his contact issues extend beyond the expected MLB learning curve.

Baez has plus power, especially for a middle infielder. He hit 37 home runs between high-A and Double-A in 2013, and a year later he went deep 23 times in 434 Triple-A at bats.

Reaching the bleachers isn’t his primary goal.

“I’m not trying to hit for power,” Baez told me this spring. “I’m just trying to make contact, and if it goes over the fence, fine. I’m trying to hit the ball hard.”

Hitting it at all has been a challenge, and the 23-year-old former first-round pick is aware of his deficiencies. Ironing them out is the hurdle. In his eyes, mechanics aren’t the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh my, it’s prediction time. Can you feel it? Another season is upon us. Another chance for us to look like huge idiots. Like last season, when none of us pegged Kansas City to make the playoffs, and just five of us pegged the Mets as a playoff team. Being wrong on the internet can be an annual thing, but rarely do we crystallize just how wrong we are in one single location. Yes, it’s good to be back.

This year, there are a couple of no-doubt teams, according to everyone who voted. Chicago and Houston enter the season as our two locks to make the postseason. Considering that, as recently as 2013, these teams won 66 and 51 games, respectively, this seems pretty remarkable. We can save the tanking discussion for another day, but no matter your name for it, these franchises have really built themselves up into something. Houston has had an especially sharp transformation. Last season, they got zero votes for the postseason, and this year they got every single vote.

The Astros and Cubs aren’t the only teams in which we’re big believers, of course, but let’s get right to looking at the actual predictions.

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Spring Training stats don’t matter. Right? Right. Well, mostly. It’s true — you shouldn’t be paying attention to things like batting average, ERA, or even home-run figures in the spring. There’s just too little time, too much volatility in the statistics, and too much uncertainty surrounding the quality of opposition for those numbers to have, well, any meaning. But last year, Dan Rosenheck’s excellent work in The Economist, later nominated for a SABR Analytics Conference Research Award, revealed that certain peripheral Spring Training statistics actually can have some predictive value for the regular season.

It needs to be stressed: even then, the effects are small. Nothing that happens in Spring Training should drastically alter your perception of a player. And for most guys, nothing should change. But, for the few players at the very end of each spectrum in these particular statistics, it’s okay to move your expectations up or down a tick or two.

You should read Rosenheck’s article and also view the slides he used to present his research at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, but I’ll briefly summarize his findings here anyway:

• For batters, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and isolated power on contact.
• For pitchers, the three most predictive statistics that stabilize most quickly are: strikeout rate, walk rate, and ground-ball rate.
• Each player’s Spring Training figures should be compared against his own projections to find the largest outliers.
• We can learn the most in the spring about younger players, who have less major-league playing time, therefore less significant data to fuel the projections, therefore more uncertainty within those projections

Using those four basic principles from Rosenheck’s work, we can fairly easily use the Spring Training leaderboards from MLB.com and our depth chart projections here on the site (a mix of ZiPS and Steamer projections with author-updated playing-time estimates) to find the players who changed their outlook the most this spring (though still not that much!).

The Hitting Winners

Jake Lamb

• 2016 projections: 25.6 K%, 8.4 BB%, .200 isolated power on contact
• 2016 spring stats: 24.2 K%, 19.7 BB%, .405 isolated power on contact

By this measure, Arizona’s third baseman Jake Lamb has had the single most encouraging spring of any batter in baseball. He’s still striking out more than the average batter, but he also has the highest walk rate of any qualified batter in the spring — more than double his projected rate — and he’s doubled his power output, perhaps thanks to a change in his swing path, inspired by his teammate, A.J. Pollock.
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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York (AL) / New York (NL)  / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / St. Louis.

Back in November, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Atlanta Braves. In this companion piece, I finally get around to looking at that same Atlanta farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Braves have the 13th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH. Read the rest of this entry »