Last week, I wrote a retrospective on Jerry Dipoto’s whirlwind first few months as the Seattle Mariners’ general manager. It’s been a time filled with moves, roster churn and intrigue. Yet the biggest curveball of Dipoto’s tenure has occurred since then, as Hisashi Iwakuma’s deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers broke down due to concerns about his physical, which allowed the Mariners to catch Iwakuma on the rebound.

The M’s major offseason moves had apparently been wrapped up, for better or worse, only for this early Christmas present to fall into the team’s lap. (Ironically, the move was announced at the club’s holiday party.) Many lessons can be learned from this turn of events. One is a better understanding of the roles of the player physical and the management of the team salary budget within the business of player procurement. A more subtle, and enlightening takeaway, is how some simple baseball axioms — having defined principles, knowing and scouting your own players better than anyone else’s and letting the game come to you — enabled the Mariners to make their own good fortune.

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As of this morning, at first base, the Pirates had the right-handed Michael Morse, and the right-handed Jason Rogers. As depth, there’s the right-handed Sean Rodriguez, and though the switch-hitting Josh Bell is on the way, he’s got his own stuff to figure out. So for the Pirates, there was an obvious need. They don’t have a lefty-heavy lineup, and last year they about tied for the highest rate of right-handed pitchers seen. The division projects to be righty-heavy again. The Pirates needed an affordable lefty for first.

Chris Davis is a lefty for first. But then, I said “affordable.” A week and a half ago, when Eno looked at this situation, he settled upon John Jaso. Now the word is out that the Pirates have signed John Jaso. He’s getting two years, and he’s getting $8 million, and if this isn’t the very most Pirates move, it’s at least in the conversation. It doesn’t get much more Pirates than this.

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We spend a lot of time talking about value. Which means we spend a lot of time arguing about value, because value is a difficult thing to nail down, given the ambiguity of the word and issues with some of the statistics. We also spend a lot of time talking about future value, which introduces even greater uncertainty on account of the future hasn’t happened yet. Player value is right at the core of FanGraphs, but a lot of the time it’s incredibly complicated. It’s a refreshing break when you can make it easy.

And I don’t know if it gets easier than evaluating relievers, after the fact. It can still be something of a chore, but relative to other players, it’s a breeze. Relievers get inserted in particular places, and they’re supposed to keep the score where it is. A reliever is supposed to do as much as he can to improve his team’s chances of winning. We can see how the performances went by checking WPA. WPA, of course, includes a leverage component, but then, relievers tend to earn their high-leverage responsibilities. Let’s take a brief look back. Let’s talk about some really valuable relievers.

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Little less than a year ago, I wrote a post here called What Happens When Billy Hamilton is on Third Base? Answer: not much! Slightly more detailed answer: less than I was expecting!

What I’d expected, rather, what I’d hoped for the sake of an interesting post, was that every time the Reds had runners on first and third with Hamilton being the guy on third, that the guy on first would just take off every time. Like, no matter what, no matter who you are or what situation the game’s in, just run. It’s Billy Hamilton on third base for crying out loud. If they throw down to second, we’ve got ourselves a run. If they don’t, hey, free steal!

It happened less often than I wanted it to. Which, I thought was kind of peculiar. Couple other things popped up — teams altered their defensive alignments slightly, it made a rundown between first and second turn into a run and a runner on second — but for the most part I came away empty-handed and sad.

I understand this isn’t relevant to anything that’s going on right now. I also understand that my first two post ideas this morning failed miserably and around noon I started to panic, so I opened up the TextEdit document on my laptop titled “rainy day topics.” It isn’t raining outside, but I do need to get my Christmas shopping done today, so this is what you get. “joey votto stealing with hamilton on third” it says here next to this bullet point. Not sure where this came from. Guessing someone tipped me off on this. Wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but I had a pretty good idea.

The last time Joey Votto played a full, healthy season before this most recent one, he stole six bases. Over his previous three seasons, he’d average six steals a year. In 2015, Joey Votto stole 11 bases. Eleven minus six is five. That’s some math. Hey, what’s up with those extra five steals?

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For the first three months of last season, Joc Pederson looked like a future star. At the All-Star break, Pederson was hitting .230/.364/.487 and his 137 wRC+ placed him 12th among National League batters. In the last 20 years, the only players younger than Pederson to hit 20 home runs faster than Pederson (95 games) are Albert Pujols, Adam Dunn, Giancarlo Stanton, Carlos Correa, and Chris Davis, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. In the second half, however, things unfolded quite differently: Pederson recorded 219 terribly unproductive plate appearances, leading to questions about whether the league had figured Pederson out.

Pederson’s strikeouts rose as steadily as he did through the minors, topping out at 27% in his last Triple-A season in 2014 before he was promoted to the majors. The rise in strikeouts was accompanied by a a rise in walks and power, and that pattern continued in the first half of last season with a 16% walk rate and a 29% strikeout rate. Pederson’s first half surge did not last into the summer months, as both his BABIP (from .282 to .232) and ISO (from .257 to .122) plunged — although his walk and strikeout rates remained unchanged.

While it would be easy to point to Pederson’s BABIP decline and hope for a turnaround, there are too many other peripheral statistics that point to a general drop in Pederson’s ability last season. Pederson’s line-drive rate dropped from 18% to 14% from the first half to the second half, his infield-fly percentage went from 10% to 23%, and his soft-contact percentage moved from 15% up to 29% in the second half. His exit velocity was 93.5 mph in the first half, ranking behind only Giancarlo Stanton, Yoenis Cespedes, Ryan Braun, Miguel Cabrera, and Jorge Soler among players with 100 at bats. In the second half, however, it dropped to 89.3 mph, per Baseball Savant.

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At around 4:15 AM this past Sunday morning, I was out getting some pizza with friends, when none other than Alex Rodriguez walked through the door. Like every drunken idiot at Joe’s Pizza that night, I put forth my best effort to initiate an interaction with him, but he paid me no attention. After multiple failed attempts, I enlisted my girlfriend to approach him and ask if he’d take a photo with me on his way out. I told her to say I was with FanGraphs, hoping that would somehow help.

Through some combination of my girlfriend’s attractiveness and the FanGraphs brand, he agreed to take the photo. The end result was the following photo of me, Alex Rodriguez and Alex Rodriguez’s 80-grade pecs. In our starstruck haste, we promised I’d write an article about him. That’s one of the reasons I’m telling you this story. However, since I’m undeniably certain he won’t be checking, it’s more that I wanted an excuse to put this photo on the internet.

Those first two paragraphs explain why I’m writing about A-Rod, though it’s not as though one really needs an excuse to write about A-Rod. He’s arguably the best player many of us have ever seen, and he remains a productive one even as he embarks into his 40s.

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You want to know how the sausage is made? It’s the holiday season, which means there’s not a lot going on. Sure, there can be moves like the Mike Leake signing, but the league overall is about to mostly shut down for a short while. But we’re supposed to write anyway, so I got to thinking and I decided to try to write something about Scott Kazmir. The only question was, what about him? What, that is, besides a simple WAR analysis, which could be done in a paragraph. So I searched and I searched until I found something of moderate interest. I hope that you end up moderately interested.

In a sense it’s funny to have to search for something interesting to say about Scott Kazmir. To the average person, what’s interesting is that he’s a major-league baseball player, and more than that, he’s one of the good ones. To the average baseball fan, what’s interesting is the course that Kazmir’s big-league career has taken. By that I mean he was out of affiliated baseball in 2012. Of the general population, Kazmir is one of the most interesting people. Of the general population of baseball players, Kazmir is one of the most interesting players. Yet this stuff is a given. We’re all familiar with his history. Kazmir is a free agent, and what’s of greatest significance is what he’s become.

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Yesterday, I ran an exercise on this site that required some audience participation. The premise was simple enough: the Royals, for the third consecutive year, haven’t looked like an elite team based on the third-party projection systems we host here on the site. The Royals, of course, have been an elite team, despite what the projections say, so there’s been some understandable hesitation in taking those projections at face value.

I simply asked everyone to take a look at each individual player projection, and either take the over, the under, or push. The idea is that, through crowdsourcing, we might be able to spot the individual places where the community thinks the projections are missing on guys, and then manually adjust the team projection from there.

And now for the seemingly ever-necessary reminder: The projections are not meant to be taken as gospel. They’re to be used as a guide. Anyone who reasonably understands what we do here on FanGraphs should get that, by now. We — we being the authors of FanGraphs — have no say in the projections. Just because the numbers say one thing doesn’t mean that every author has to agree. I can’t change the fact that the projections say what they do. I’m just here to report, and analyze, and think, and discuss.

The numbers are calling the current Royals roster a 78-win roster. That seems sort of silly. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find too many folks who’d think that sounds right. I’d certainly take the over, at least. Let’s see what the crowdsourcing results say. You should be able to click this image to view a larger version:

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Yesterday, December 21, was the deadline for 2016 Baseball Hall of Fame ballots to be submitted. As followers of the process are well aware, quite a logjam has materialized in recent years, due to a confluence of factors, most notably the influx of so-called “steroid era” players, some of whom meet every possible criterion applied to prior candidates, only to be refused entry by the BBWAA. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, two of the ten best baseball players of all time, by any measure, with or without PEDs, languish at the gate of the Hall, ironically gaining just enough votes to deny other worthy candidates the game’s ultimate honor.

Edgar Martinez is one of these players, and arguably might be the one single player (perhaps along with Mike Mussina) whose candidacy has been damaged the most. He became Hall-eligible before Bonds and Clemens, and posted early vote totals that historically would suggest future induction. The tidal wave of talent following him onto the ballot, however, has stopped his vote total in its tracks; this is already his seventh year of eligibility, and to make matters worse, players are now allowed only 10 tries before their name is removed from the ballot and turned over to the Veterans Committee, whose specialty is electing no one.

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Word for a while has been that Mike Leake was looking for a five-year contract worth something in the neighborhood of $80 million. The most recent thing we wrote about him was called The Upcoming Mike Leake Mistake. The Cardinals have now signed Leake to a five-year contract worth exactly $80 million, with a mutual option that won’t be mutually exercised. The Cardinals are without Lance Lynn and John Lackey, and they missed out on David Price and Jason Heyward, so it’s easy to see this as an overpay from a team in an increasingly desperate state. Mike Leake isn’t who you turn to for big, huge upside. He’s Mike Leake. As pitchers go, he’s pretty boring.

Think about it for just one minute, though. It’s fine to have an immediate response. We all have immediate responses. Immediately, nothing seems particularly special about Leake. But the Cardinals have earned some benefit of the doubt, right? They’re not an organization you’d characterize as desperate, or impulsive, or reactionary. They thought their way through this. According to reports, they preferred Leake over Jeff Samardzija. They obviously like Leake enough to give him this sort of long-term guarantee. Let us now attempt to justify this contract. Really, it isn’t that hard.

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