Last week, I gave my thoughts on the best and worst transactions of the winter, but those lists only covered 16 different moves — four trades appeared on both lists — so they don’t exactly represent a complete overview of the offseason. So, in the spirit of thoroughness, I figured it was worth giving a brief overview of my take on every team’s moves this winter. As always, a reminder that my opinion is just that, and you can put as much or as little weight on it as you’d like; a lot of the comments below are going to look silly in 12 months.

And as I mentioned in the worst transactions write-up, MLB teams have gotten a lot better at making decisions in the last five years, and it is now much more difficult to find moves that are clearly destructive to the organization. In general, teams are mostly making smart decisions, or at least justifiable ones, well within the margin of what can be known at the time a decision has to be made. There will be deals that don’t turn out, and moves organizations regret making with the benefit of hindsight, but with just a few exceptions, most of the moves made this winter appear to be rooted in reasonable assumptions.

The result of more efficient decision making? The offseason probably matters a lot less than it used to. Because the market is doing a better job of valuing players rationally, and we don’t have as many rogue GMs just giving away star players, it’s tough to dramatically overhaul your franchise in just one winter. The magnitude of what a great offseason means has been diminished, and sustained winning in baseball is now more about making a long series of good decisions than it is about winning big on a handful of moves. But, with all that said, there are still some teams who helped themselves more than others this winter, and what follows is my assessment of how each team fared in their attempt to upgrade their organizational standing.

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Do you feel that? Spring Training is underway! No, not the part where they play actual games and it’s exciting for three innings. Rather, it’s the part where beat writers from all 30 teams bombard your Twitter feed with videos of pitchers throwing bullpen sessions and hitters taking batting practice and stories of how that one reliever got away from baseball by working on his truck all offseason or how that second baseman just eats a bunch of kale now.

You also get pictures of players with their new teams! Here’s Joba Chamberlain in an Indians jersey! Skip Schumaker with the Padres! Wow! Spoiler alert: Chamberlain gets chased out of Cleveland by a swarm of bugs before he ever pitches a regular season game. Schumaker has an embarrassing Spring Training moment where, while his team is taking the field between innings, he goes around to each position and looks into the dugout as if to say, “Here? Should I play here this inning?” and gets to every position before he realizes that his manager never actually told him to take the field. In fact, no one ever even invited him to camp. He just showed up and they gave him a jersey because they felt bad.

That’s the thing with veterans who sign minor league contracts in the offseason — it can be kinda sad. Like, Matt Joyce can only get a minor league deal now? Bummer. Brad Penny is still trying to make this happen? Yeesh. Ricky Romero? Ricky Romero.

But the other thing is this — sometimes, it’s going to work out! Sometimes, three years removed from professional baseball, the Indians sign Scott Kazmir to a minor league deal and he turns his life around and three years later he’s earned himself an extra $70 million. Sometimes, three years removed from pitching at all, really, the Royals sign Ryan Madson to a minor league deal and he helps win a World Series and gets a three-year contract the next offseason at 35.

A few of the guys who signed minor league contracts this offseason are going to make a real impact at the major league level this season. Most won’t. From a team-building perspective, it’s interesting to see how different organizations used their minor league spots and Spring Training invites. A few weeks back, I looked at how the teams were built, analyzing the makeup of each 40-man roster. In a similar vein, I thought I’d analyze which teams gave out the most minor league contracts this offseason, and to what kind of players.

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There are rumors that Adrian Beltre, a potential free agent next winter, might sign a contract extension with the Rangers this spring, potentially taking him to the end of his career. Jose Bautista in is a slightly similar situation with the Blue Jays. Dave Cameron discussed the potential of signing him to a contract extension one year out. Edwin Encarnacion and Carlos Gomez are also among those veteran players who have previously signed contract extensions but who are eligible for free agency after the 2016 season. Those players could conceivably sign extensions before hitting the free-agent market. If they do, how will the contract look? Will the signing team extract any extra value from signing it? Or is it distinctly an advantage for the player?

On Friday, we looked at players who were bought out before taking their very first crack at free agency — players who signed their first extension just before reaching their free-agent years. Generally speaking, teams paid free-agent prices for those players and received typical free-agent results.

I wondered if the same form would hold true for more veteran players who have already received an extension somewhere along the line or had even already participated in free agency. On the one had, such players are older and thus more prone to decline earlier on in the contract. On the other, the signing teams would already have familiarity with these players and these players might be better given the previous investment, perhaps mitigating the influence of any age-related decline.

Much like I did on Friday, I consulted MLB Trade Rumors and looked for players who signed an extension within a year of free agency. This time, I considered only players who had amassed at least six years of service time, indicating that he’d already signed a previous free-agent contract — either that, or at least signed an extension that bought out a certain number of free-agent seasons. For the most part, these players had been made a priority by their current team or a previous one and their current team decided to make a significant investment in their future and convince them to skip the allure of free agency.

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At ESPN, they recently wrapped up their prospects week. I thought I’d zag from that zig, however, and instead wrote a piece for Insider about 30-year-olds and how they’ll age. Using some research from Jeff Zimmerman on aging by player type, I tried to spot some 30-year-olds who are about to go into the tank, and some that might age better than we expect.

But while working on the piece, I asked Zimmerman to update the research on player-type aging, starting in 2005. That’s the year baseball stiffened their steroid policy. Here’s something strange: in this, what we might call the “post-PED era,” it appears as though certain player types have begun aging in an entirely different way.

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In the early 1990s, a cerebral New Hampshire native was the best starting pitcher on the Cardinals’ staff. A control artist who relied more on on guile than on gas, Bob Tewksbury went 33-15 over a two-year stretch and made an All-Star team.

Last summer, St. Louis drafted a cerebral New Hampshire native who shares several of Tewksbury traits. Carson Cross is all about changing speeds, sequencing, and hitting spots.

A 14th-round senior sign (Tewksbury was a 19th-round pick), Cross went 10-2, 2.29 in his final season at the University of Connecticut. He then logged a 2.70 ERA in 10 outings with the Cardinals’ State College affiliate.

Cross’s game is “more mental than physical” and command is a strength. Not being a flamethrower, he considers location vital to his success.

“I’m not blowing the doors open like some kids,” explained Cross. “Fastball command is big for me. If you’re out there hoping you have that pitch working and it isn’t, then you’re kind of stuck in the back seat.”

Cross throws a cross-seam fastball, and not always at the same speed. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have a lot of talented players. This is a good thing. But one of the issues with having a lot of good players is that you run out of spots for them. This happened to some degree last season after the team re-acquired Aramis Ramirez. Ramirez, despite possessing starter-type talent, was forced to contend with a crowded third-base depth chart. Now the club might have similar crowding on the other side of the age spectrum — in this case, with the rise of prospect Alen Hanson.

Hanson has been a prospect for a little while now, and his star has dimmed somewhat since he moved to second base. Or so you might have thought. How you feel about second-base prospect Alen Hanson may depend on how you view your prospects, in general. Both Chris Mitchell’s KATOH and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS rate Hanson as a top-40 prospect (22nd by KATOH, 38th by ZiPS). Scouts aren’t as bullish on him, however, even if they like him fine. Last year, Kiley McDaniel palced him toward the bottom of his top 200 list, and Baseball America more or less would have had him in the same position this year. In other words, many see him as a top-10 prospect on a team, but not a top-100 prospect in the game.
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Teams are constantly trying to sign young players to contract extensions, buying out both the remainder of the player’s cost-controlled seasons and then years of free agency after that. Doing so provides great benefits to the team, chiefly by allowing them to avoid the expenses of the free-agent market.

Not every player is offered or signs that type of extension, however. Some players choose to avoid extensions altogether, hoping for the big free-agent payoff as soon as possible. Other players might develop later and miss the window for an extension. Still others might lack the requisite talent to attract a deal. In every case, the player in question moves on, and that’s the end of it.

There’s a final scenario, however — one in which the club and player both possess an interest in reaching an extension but, for whatever reason, are unable to agree on the terms until the player’s final season of team control. In this case, a team isn’t buying out team-control years, only free-agent ones. And that changes the calculus a little bit. Because, while it’s possible the team might be receiving something of a discount from free agency, the odds of these deals working out for the team are not great.

Contracts for pending free agents (how I’ll refer to these players in their last year of team control) aren’t common. Players who’ve reached the brink of free agency have a major incentive to play out the year and see what the market provides. Having been unable to reach a deal for years, the odds that a player and his club will have a change of heart are low. This is particularly true for players who have never signed a contract extension and are heading into their sixth (or, because of service-time manipulation, seventh) year in the majors, and are now faced with their first chance at free agency.

Despite their rarity, there are a few examples of these contracts for pending free agents every season. Last year, for example, Rick Porcello signed a five-year deal with the Red Sox, while Clayton Kershaw and Brett Gardner have also signed similar contracts in the past couple years.

Looking at contracts from late-2007 through 2013, we can see how those deals have worked out for the teams that have signed them. Using MLB Trade Rumors’ extension tracker I looked for players with between five and six years of service time who were pending free agents and then signed contracts buying out at least two years of free agency. Those deals needed to be at least half-completed by this season to provide a decent idea on the deal’s outcome. In all, I found 26 such contracts. To determine value, I used $8 million per win for this season, and to approximate past and future years, adjusted by $250,000 per season. For contracts still active in 2016, I used the FanGraphs Depth Charts projection for the player, and if there were any years after 2016, I decreased the 2016 projection by half a win per year.

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Yesterday, I ran a post about the teams that we’ve run posts about. Turns out we haven’t written very much about the Twins over the years. We all kind of already knew that. People commented and here is one of them:

Twins fan here. The Twins bring some of it on themselves. For the umpteenth year in a row, they finished dead last in strikeout %. I suppose that in itself is worth thinking about. But now that I actually think about it, who isn’t getting his due? Trevor May? Who, Twins fans, should fangraphs be writing about that they’re not writing about?

I didn’t actually intend for things to work out this way, but let’s talk about the Twins pitchers and strikeouts.

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Mickey Jannis wasn’t allowed to throw a knuckleball when he was in the Rays system. That was in 2010 and 2011, his first two seasons of professional baseball. He’s a Met now, and the butterfly is out of his back pocket.

The bridge between Tampa Bay and New York was unaffiliated. Jannis pitched in the independent Frontier and Atlantic leagues from 2012 to 2014. Non-baseball options were available — the 28-year-old righty has a degree in business administration from Cal State Bakersfield — but he wasn’t ready to give up his dream. Not when he had a secret weapon to employ.

Flummoxing hitters with his floater, Jannis put up a 1.18 ERA for the Long Island Ducks early last summer. Subsequently inked to a contract by the Mets in July, he proceeded to hold his own in 11 appearances between high-A St. Lucie and Double-A Binghamton.

Jannis discussed his atypical journey, and the evolution of his equally atypical go-to pitch, at the tail end of the Arizona Fall League season.

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Jannis on knuckleball commitment: “I mentioned it to (the Rays) toward the end of my second season, when I was with Hudson Valley, but I wasn’t able to throw it in a game. My manager, Jared Sandberg, was kind of all for it. He was, ‘Yeah man, that’s good enough to throw,’ but it just didn’t work out to where I could. I only threw it on the side. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that, over the last several years, we’ve been seeing more and more high velocity in the major leagues. The league-average fastball keeps getting hotter, thanks to different training techniques, and thanks to different young-player development, and thanks to God knows how many other things. It’s not that everyone now can throw 95; it’s that the guys who can throw 95 are no longer thought of as freaks. Every team has at least a few of them stashed away.

The velocity trend has lifted many boats. As you can imagine, with league-wide velocity increasing, the same has been apparent on the team level. The Pirates, just as one example, have pretty clearly targeted hard throwers, and that’s just a part of their complicated plan. Not every team has participated, however. The Angels haven’t featured too many hard throwers, as Jered Weaver has taken it upon himself to counter Garrett Richards. The Diamondbacks were more finesse-y for a stretch, before picking it up last season. And the Giants have been another exception. Probably the greatest exception — no team has averaged a slower fastball over the last four years. Presumably related to that, the Giants have also thrown the lowest rate of fastballs.

Yet now they’re a team in transition. I’m not saying this is intentional, but looking ahead, the Giants are lined up to be a harder-throwing baseball team. After years of sagging velocity, the 2016 Giants could be almost league average.

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