Beating the rest of the league to the punch with a large contract extension for Rick Porcello when much better players await in free agency is not going to garner excitement or plaudits, but the Red Sox are anticipating an expensive free agent market in 2016 and providing themselves a safety net. Boston resorted to Plan B before they knew if Plan A would work, but the Red Sox can still implement Plan A and sign a big-name free agent while simultaneously providing depth for their rotation. Five years and $95 million is a lot of money for a player without a world-beating track record, but Porcello has been good and reliable and he is still just 26 years old. This contract is not all that surprising as Mike Petriello predicted a similar contract in February.

Last year, three pitchers signed extensions just a year away from free agency and one of them is apt for Porcello. Clayton Kershaw’s seven-year, $215 million contract is way too big, Charlie Morton’s three-year, $21 million contract is too light, but Homer Bailey’s six-year, $105 million contract (with an option for a seventh year) is right in the same range as Porcello. Bailey was two years older and only twice pitched over 150 innings while Porcello has exceeded that mark in six straight seasons. Bailey was coming off the better season, with around four wins in 2013, but he also received more money with greater risk of injury. According to Jeff Zimmerman’s disabled list projections, Porcello is the second most likely starter to make it through the season without a stint on the disabled list.

Even if we treat Bailey as an outlier for an extension, last year’s free agent class has a pretty close contract to Porcello’s: James Shields, who signed for four years and $72 million with the Padres. Shields has the better track record, but he’s headed into his decline years while Porcello is headed into his mid-20s. While Shields’ deal ends when he’s 36, the Red Sox have only committed to Porcello up to age-30.
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While I ran through my thoughts on all 30 teams in the division previews, I had a few stray things that didn’t fit into the capsule format, so I’m tackling them here. A year ago, I wrote this same post, including gems like this one:

2. I believe the Royals are being overrated.

Let’s see if I can do better this year. On to the five things I believe about the 2015 season. Read the rest of this entry »

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A player can become a poster child of sorts for his club’s offense. Edwin Encarnacion notwithstanding, I think of Jose Bautista and his pull power when I think of the Blue Jays. Mark Trumbo’s free-swinging ways embody the Diamondbacks, at least for me. Ben Zobrist hasn’t even played a game for the A’s yet, and his multipositional nature and OBP-centric skill set already makes him my go-to guy. The closest correlation between club and player, though, is an easy one for me. The Cardinals’ team-wide hit-it-hard-to-all-fields philosophy is most completely embodied by Matt Holliday. Read the rest of this entry »

This time of year, we’re always asked, what should fans believe in? For five or six weeks, we issue constant reminders not to pay much attention to spring-training statistics. And when there are finally real, new, meaningful statistics, it’s still important to bear in mind that small sample sizes make noise of almost everything. It’ll be weeks before some numbers stabilize. For others, months. For still others, even longer than that. You think taking things away from baseball is easy? Conclusions are actually difficult to reach! Unless your conclusion is “this team won the game”, or “this team lost the game”, or “this number might mean this one thing but then again it might not.”

You want to know what’s really interesting, from a statistical perspective? Evidence of real change. For a pitcher, maybe it’s a new pitch, or a change in velocity. For a hitter, maybe you’re talking about a new swing. Some years ago, I remember getting excited about Michael Saunders in spring training. It wasn’t that his numbers were good — it was that he was showing in-game power to the opposite field, which he’d never really done before. That seemed like a real thing, and sure enough, Saunders became an actual decent big-leaguer.

You follow? Yeah, you follow. And, while you’re following: Monday, in Kansas City, Mike Moustakas hit an opposite-field home run. It’s considered to be his first-ever opposite-field home run. This is the kind of thing that draws my attention. If you want to know what I’m willing to care about in the early going, an easy answer is firsts.

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It’s far too early to put serious weight on just about anything (save for injuries, or growing concern about those injuries) you see in the first 36 hours of a baseball season. It’s far too early to do much of anything other than say, “hey, baseball’s back, isn’t that great?” I mean, Buddy Carlyle and Chris Hatcher are on pace for 162 saves. The Red Sox are on pace for 810 homers. Probably not going to happen. Could happen. Won’t happen.

So we know not to look at the in-season numbers for at least a few weeks, lest we forget what Charlie Blackmon and Dee Gordon did last April as compared to the rest of the season. But it’s not like we’re simply not going to talk about baseball until then, and it’s not like there aren’t takeaways we can make from what we’re seeing right now. Like this one, for example: Seemingly years after most smart baseball team gave up on the save rule, why are we still seeing managers risk victories in service of it? Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago, Brandon McCarthy threw out a question that baseball Twitter scrambled to research: how often do Opening Day starting pitchers throw a first-pitch non-fastball? Suggested is that first-pitch fastballs, here, are extremely common and extremely predictable, and the results fell in line. It wasn’t clear there had been any first-pitch non-fastballs, and if there had been, there hadn’t been more than one or two, excepting, of course, the occasional knuckler. Baseball season has started. How does baseball season usually start for every team? With a fastball. It’s almost like a ceremonial first pitch, after the ceremonial first pitch, and before the actual baseball stuff.

Monday afternoon, baseball season started for the Yankees and the Blue Jays. In the top of the first, Masahiro Tanaka opened things by pitching to Jose Reyes. That season-opening pitch of 2015: a low slider, for a called strike, at 81 miles per hour. No mystery — it was a certain first-pitch breaking ball. The next pitch was a splitter. The following pitch was also a splitter. Reyes went down on three strikes, and Tanaka was off to the best of all starts.

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Because there’s a lot of noise, we tend to look past spring training stats. But recent work suggests that using spring training stats can improve projections, and our own Mike Podhorzer worked with Matt Swartz to show that a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks in the spring are meaningful results.

In other words, if we use our small-sample tools, maybe Spring Training really is a little bit like September: expanded rosters, some meaningless games, but still baseball, being played at a high level. The veterans usually play veterans early in the game, and the minor leaguers don’t get the same number of innings or plate appearances to be grouped with the veterans in any statistical mining we might do.

So, that said, let’s look at the starting pitchers, and their strikeouts. These strikeout rates are basically half-way to the stabilization point — the point at which they represent more signal than noise — and they’ve been (mostly) facing the veterans before they leave early, along the right field line.

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The Cleveland Indians already had much of their team in place for many years on the position player side after extensions for Michael Brantley, Jason Kipnis, Yan Gomes, and Carlos Santana. In one weekend they solidified their future on the pitching side as well, locking up ace and Cy Young Award winner Corey Kluber as well as fellow rotation member Carlos Carrasco. Deals for pitchers are never a guarantee of performance, but with the cost to acquire pitching outside the organization so high, the Indians made out very well in securing potentially six years of free agent years with $60 million in guarantees.

Carlos Carrasco was not the player most likely to receive an extension, but he will now be guaranteed $22 million over the next four years with two club options after that believed to be worth around $10 million. Carrasco entered arbitration for the first time this year and was set to make close to $2.3 million this season. Extensions for players in their first year of arbitration are not common. Before this offseason, there had not been an extension for a player with between three and four years of service time since January 2011, when Johnny Cueto signed a four-year deal with the Cincinnati Reds for $27 million that included a team option and bought out two potential free agent years, per MLB Trade Rumors Extension Tracker. Even expanding the parameters a little finds few players close to Carrasco’s situation in the recent past. Gio Gonzalez signed his five-year, $42 million deal as a super-2 three years ago, and Jaime Garcia was about two months from arbitration when he signed his four-year $27 million in July 2011.
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We made it through. We’re still here, baseball’s still here, and we can all agree that everything is better today. Opening Day is when we crack the first egg to make a massive, delicious omelet. In many ways, there isn’t a better point in our yearly lives than the moment just before the first pitch of the first game for our favorite team: the amalgam of our hopes and expectations stretch out in the green expanse before us, realized in our mind’s eye all at once, and we drink them in.

Every once and a while, we see something a little more special than usual on Opening Day: a player hitting the ground running, acting like they could’ve been done with spring training weeks ago. They dominate on a day when many players might be hoping to ease into things.

In honor of this auspicious day, and to welcome back the time of the year when games mean something, I’ve combed through some particularly noteworthy pitching performances for the first counting games in the historical record (live-ball era) of previous seasons. With any luck, we’ll have another one to catalog today. Let’s get to it.

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