All along, the thought’s been that the Colorado Rockies were pretty likely to trade one of their three left-handed hitting outfielders before the start of the regular season. So naturally, they kept them all and then went out and signed another.

It won’t stay like this for long. The Rockies agreed to terms with Gerardo Parra on Tuesday afternoon on a three-year deal worth $27.5 million. Chris Cotillo reports a fourth-year option is included for $12 million. The contract looks fine; our crowdsourcing project pegged Parra for a three-year deal between $24-27 million, and that’s essentially what he received. What’s interesting is that Parra joins Carlos Gonzalez, Corey Dickerson, and Charlie Blackmon in a suddenly crowded and similarly-skilled outfield:

At this stage in their respective careers, Gonzalez and Dickerson are near-clones of one another. While Gonzalez has the name recognition, Dickerson is three years younger than Gonzalez and is likely the better hitter. On the other hand, Dickerson is very limited defensively and is coming off an injury-plagued season that featured trips to the disabled list both for plantar fasciitis and a pair of broken ribs. Both struggle mightily against same-handed pitching.

At this stage in their respective careers, Blackmon and Parra are near-clones of one another. Both are roughly league-average hitters who struggle against same-handed pitching. Both can play center field and not be a total disaster, though you’d rather see them in a corner. Parra once graded out as an elite corner outfielder — someone you’d think could transition to center with ease — but there’s more than one reason to believe in the defensive decline portrayed by the metrics over the last couple seasons.

There’s just too much going on here. Something’s got to give. And it might not take long:
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There’s a pretty dramatic difference between the two leagues. Anything, of course, could go on to happen, but the American League and the National League are looking at some wildly different 2016s. In the AL, you’ve got a whole gradient of could-be or would-be playoff squads. No single team appears to be dominant, and no single team appears to be a non-contender. Everyone should have some kind of chance, and there’s currently no obvious favorite. In the NL, meanwhile, there are two tiers. There are the clear contenders, and there are the others, those being the teams either admittedly rebuilding or the teams that should be. People talk about “tanking” as an industry problem. The bad teams are all clustered together.

In between the two NL tiers, there are, I think, two clubs caught in the middle. Two clubs that would fit in the AL picture, two clubs that could end up going either way depending on certain breaks. One of them is the Diamondbacks, who have spent the offseason trying to beef up. And then there are the Marlins, who have too many good players to be bad, but too little depth and reliability to be great. The Marlins want to be a contender, though. Believe it or not, Jeffrey Loria hates to lose. So now the Marlins have addressed a team weakness on the free-agent market, spending pretty big to lure Wei-Yin Chen. Chen is no one’s idea of a major splash, but he is, at least, a healthy starting pitcher, which is something the Marlins have sorely lacked.

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A year ago today, things were looking pretty good in Ian Desmond’s world. He was 29 years old and the starting shortstop for the Washington Nationals, heavy favorites to win the National League East. A few months earlier, Desmonds completed his third straight season of at least 20 home runs and 20 stolen bases. Defensive metrics indicated he was roughly average to above average at shortstop, and in terms of overall value, he was sitting on three straight seasons of more than four wins above replacement. In matters related to his bank account, he was just one season from free agency with no other big-name shortstops and a big payday.

But now, after a disastrous year, Desmond is still unsigned and his market is unclear.

There were some signs heading into last season that Desmond was in decline. His wRC+ went from 128 to 116 to 107 from 2012 to 2014, and his strikeouts moved in the opposite direction: 20% in 2012, 22% in 2013 and way up to 28% in 2014. Noticing a decline and expecting a collapse are two different situations, however. This is the list of players who, along with Ian Desmond, produced at least four WAR in each season from 2012 to 2014: Andrew McCutchen, Buster Posey, Dustin Pedroia, Ben Zobrist, Adam Jones, Alex Gordon, Robinson Cano, Miguel Cabrera, and of course, Mike Trout. A year ago at this time, MLB Trade Rumors rated Desmond as the fourth-best pending free agent and mentioned a potential $200 million contract with another good season.

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We usually turn to the tried and true method of analyzing players season by season. There’s a point at which we have to demarcate sections of a player’s career, and the beginning and end of a season give us a handy and obvious way of doing so. But there are often many changes and adjustments that go on within a season, and looking at six months of baseball as one unit misses a lot of trends that we might otherwise notice. With that in mind, today we’re going to look at a few players who improved their eye and contact rate at the plate from the first half of the 2015 season to the second, giving consideration to how those improvements might help them in the upcoming 2016 season.

We’ll be looking at the most-improved players for two main plate discipline statistics: the rate of swings at pitches outside of the strike zone, and the rate of contact on pitches swung at in the strike zone. There are more plate discipline categories than just these two, but these carry a lot of weight in respect to strikeout and walk rates, so this is a great place to start. The other good news is that these types of improvements have been shown to stabilize over a short period of time – that is, once they show up, it doesn’t take too long before we can be confident that what we’re seeing is actually an improvement instead of just random noise.

To begin with, let’s look at which players showed the most improvement at laying off pitches outside of the strike zone (called O-Swing %) during the second half of the season compared to the first. I’ve included each player’s first and second half stats, the difference between them, and the second half O-Swing % minus a three year average for each player. That final column is to try to discern whether the second half improvement was actually real, or whether it was simply a response (regression) to a first half that was outside of the player’s “normal” performance from the past three years. For players with less than three years of MLB service time, as much playing time as possible was included in the final column. Let’s see our top 10 for O-Swing improvement:

Evan Gattis basically became a completely different hitter in the second half of the season. Jeff Sullivan already pointed this out in September, and this should act as further confirmation: after a rough first half in which he struck out 22.4% of the time, Gattis showed a remarkable transformation, cutting down on the rate of swings at out-of-zone pitches by 13.5%. That lowered his second half strikeout rate to 16.3% — better than league average – and raised his walk rate from 3.5% to a more palatable 6.8%. These are very good signs for him getting back on track for the Astros in 2016 after a tough campaign last season.

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Allow me to share with you an unremarkable batting line: .235/.308/.412. It doesn’t belong to Logan Morrison, but it might as well. This line belongs to another veteran, and it covers the last four years, and it’s worked out to a 98 wRC+. You can tell there’s seemingly nothing too special about the bat. To that, I’ll add that the player isn’t a particularly strong base-runner, nor is he a particularly strong defender. Some time ago, he had a $3-million club option declined, and that might just tell you enough. This is a player with some legitimate uses. This is a player with a fairly low value.

As far as 2016 is concerned, we’re talking about a role player. Currently a free agent, he’ll get a shot with someone in the coming month or two. He should be a weapon off somebody’s bench. But what’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn isn’t what he projects to be for the immediate future. What’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn is exactly how he’s arrived at such an uninteresting overall four-year performance.

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Just how good is a particular owner or ownership group, relative to the rest? It’s just about impossible to say. As fans, what we see is pretty well removed from what goes on at the ownership level, so it’s not like those executives can be evaluated like a pitcher with a sub-3 FIP. So we don’t know that much about who’s good or bad, really. But that never stands in the way of opinions. Oh, people have opinions, and those opinions aren’t based on nothing. A few days ago, I asked you all for your thoughts on your teams’ owners. What follows is the resulting information, based on many thousands of votes from presumably many thousands of participants.

The polls were simple. After each prompt, you could select from two positive opinions, two negative opinions, and one middle-of-the-road opinion. People don’t usually compare ownership groups, since situations are so different, but now we can at least try to do that, with numerical data. Of course, what you see won’t be infallible evaluations. This is opinion-polling, but I think it’s just interesting to see what people think, even if it turns out plenty of people are wrong. I love what crowd-sourcing can indicate, and I love that we get to do it. Thanks again for all your help.

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Every June, about 1500 players from the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico are selected in the amateur draft in June. Some of these amateur players are drafted out of high school, while others are drafted from two-year and four-year colleges. The majority of these players will elect to sign a professional contract, thus ending their amateur careers, and beginning their professional careers in minor league ball, with hopes and dreams of making it to the majors. Only a fraction of these players will eventually make it to the highest level of professional baseball.

This article will look at an unlikely group of MLB feeder colleges: US News and World Report’s top-25 national universities.

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We’ve had the 2016 Steamer Projections up on the site for a while now, but until this morning, the only way to look at the aggregate team projections was to look at a team’s total projected WAR and eyeball how that might translate to wins and losses. WAR is a good enough proxy to get you in the right neighborhood, but because of differences between the leagues and the fact that wins aren’t perfectly linear, ideally, you want to run the raw numbers through a run estimator and then use BaseRuns to convert those runs scored and allowed numbers into an expected win total. Well, as of today, we’ve updated our Projected Standings page to do exactly that, taking the individual Steamer projections and the playing time projections from our depth charts to produce estimated win-loss records for every team in baseball.

Probably to no one’s surprise, the Cubs currently stand atop the projections with a 95-67 forecasted record. The Cubs were excellent a year ago, built around a core of exciting young players, and then added Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist, and John Lackey in free agency. Yes, they’re projected to win two fewer games than a year ago, but that’s simply a function of the fact that projections are attempting to project context-neutral performance, not accounting for wins that can be added (or lost) due to clutch performance; taking away the effects of sequencing naturally results in a smaller spread from top to bottom.

So, instead of looking at the projections relative to a team’s 2015 win-loss record, here are the current Steamer projections — these can and will change as more free agents sign, trades are made, and the depth charts become more clear as we get closer to the season — compared to each team’s own BaseRuns expected record from a year ago.

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The Hall of Fame voting was revealed last week. Maybe you heard the shouting. There’s nothing that brings out some good internet shouting like the Baseball Hall of Fame. Pretty strange when you think about it. People don’t typically freak out over museums or old baseball players, but put them together and things get all crazy like a conversation about sandwiches on the internet up in here. Watch the heck out!

But with regard to the voting. As it turns out, two players were voted in, both deserving, and one other specific player, Nomar Garciaparra, was not elected. Because he was not deserving. But oh, he could have been because, oh, what could have been! Garciaparra — a name I just had to force my computer to learn due to it inexplicably and repeatedly trying to change it into “Garcia parrot” — received just 1.8% of the vote. By rule, players receiving less than 5% of the vote are dropped from the ballot.

So. This is it. Nomar is officially not a Hall of Famer, meaning he’s officially not as good as Derek Jeter. The day much of South Boston literally believed would never come has come. But that doesn’t mean Nomar wasn’t Hall of Fame-good. He was. Just not for long enough.

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