Bryce Harper was in the news a couple weeks ago. It had nothing to do with his performance — in 2015, he hadn’t yet performed. It had nothing to do with his health — in 2015, he hadn’t yet gotten injured. It had everything to do with his words. Harper generates three kinds of stories, and this was another one about him not hiding his confidence. Harper spoke openly about how much he believes in his current cast of teammates, and while every player would claim to believe in his cast of teammates, Harper has a way of drawing extra attention, and he didn’t beat around any bushes. Harper went so far as to talk about the disadvantage of facing the Nationals’ starting staff in the playoffs.

Of course, while we like our players to be humble, it’s not like Harper was talking about anything we hadn’t already thought and said ourselves. The Nationals do seem like a juggernaut. The Nationals do seem like they should take the NL East running away. The Nationals do have a rotation that would be terrifying to face in October. Say what you will about Harper’s personality, but he just said what most people already believe. There’s no such thing as a playoff shoo-in this early in the year, but the Nationals are about as close as it gets.

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The Hector Olivera situation is just really strange. As Kiley broke down over the weekend, the market has been saturated with questionable information, and Olivera ended up hiring new representation after the early offers apparently didn’t match the lofty thresholds that were being floated publicly. Toss in his unusual health track record and the fact that this has dragged into mid-March, and the entire situation remains particularly odd.

And that’s before we even get to the teams involved (or not) in the bidding. Olivera is projected as a second baseman or a third baseman, depending on the acquiring team’s need on the infield, but the teams with the most glaring needs at those positions seem mostly uninterested. No contenders need a second baseman more than the White Sox, Blue Jays, or Angels, but none of them have been reported to be particularly interested in signing him as a middle infield upgrade. On the other hand, the Braves have been strongly connected to Olivera, despite the fact that they’re likely to be one of the league’s worst teams in 2015, and at age-30, Olivera isn’t exactly a long-term upside play.

But perhaps no team linked to Olivera makes less sense than the Dodgers. With Howie Kendrick at second base and Juan Uribe at third base, the team doesn’t really have an open spot for a player who is likely going to command $10 million or more per season, and it seems unlikely that Olivera would want to spend a year on the bench waiting for a position to open up. Of course, injuries do happen, and the Dodgers have enough money to stockpile depth, so the presence of Kendrick and Uribe shouldn’t automatically eliminate LA from signing a talented player.

However, when reading scouting reports about Olivera’s expected performance, I can’t shake the idea that the Dodgers already have this player; he just goes by the name of Justin Turner.

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There’s a lot of talk about market inefficiency in the long aisles of the baseball analysis superstore: which teams find value where others don’t, and, conversely, which teams see value that maybe isn’t there anymore (or even in the first place). For small market teams, finding inefficiencies is a matter of successful survival, and for large market teams, it’s a way of adding something extra to the x-factor that works: money.

Whatever the case may be, it’s part of our job to measure how teams are faring in the efficiency department, and we do that generally by looking at how much teams are spending in relation to what they’re actually getting, production-wise. Today, we’re not exactly going to go into specific strategies, like what the most recent Billy Beane magic wand looks like, but rather see which position players are projected to provide the most amount of production (WAR) for the least amount of money ($).

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In my post yesterday, I broke down the starters at every position and determined an average salary for all the positions in Major League Baseball. Several comments noted the large amount of minimum-salaried players at several positions and indicated that could be skewing the results. I had indicated that teams appeared to value starting pitching and power hitting over the prime defensive positions. However, it is possible that minimum salaries are weighing the average down, and that the free agent market actually values the differing positions similarly.

As a result, I have dug a bit deeper and separated the salaries into three categories. The first category is players who are making the major league minimum. These are players who have not reached arbitration or signed a contract extension increasing their salary. The second group of players contains arbitration eligible players. This group of players all have less than six years of service time. The group also includes the relatively small number of players who are not yet arbitration eligible, but signed a contract extension prior to arbitration eligibility increasing their salary from the minimum. The third group of player is those with more than six years of service time. These players all signed contracts as free agents or agreed to an extension prior to free agency that bought out free agent years.

In dealing with top starters yesterday, I used the highest salaried starter for each team. For today’s post, I made a modification. The top starter for this post is the starter with highest WAR in the FanGraphs Depth Charts. Yesterday, the top starting pitchers averaged a salary of roughly $15 million. For today, that number drops to $10 million, which would still have put the top starter as one of the top two position groups from yesterday. There are 11 positions total, with the eight position players, one starting pitcher, a designated hitter for American League teams, and a closer. Of those 315 starters, here is how the starters broke down by service class:
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The first thing you might notice about Kris Bryant is not the prodigious power. You’d have to watch a couple of plate appearances before you could really understand that side of him.

The first thing you would probably notice about Kris Bryant is that he’s tall. But when you ask him how that’s affected his plate discipline, you’ll stump him for a second.

At least when it comes to walks, Bryant hasn’t worried too much about having a bigger strike zone. “I haven’t been 6’5″ my whole life,” he laughed. He may not be an Eddie Stanky, but as he’s grown, he’s “figured out” his own strike zone, and begun focusing on getting to pitches in order to use his length as a strength.

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What if I told you Allen Craig played hurt last year, and I could prove it? You’d probably say something like “uh” or “that won’t be necessary.” Submitted as evidence: last season, Allen Craig sucked. He finished with a wRC+ that was just about half his previous season’s mark. Submitted as further evidence: Craig and everyone around him admitted he was playing hurt (Update: actually, maybe not!). There was absolutely zero mystery Craig had an injured foot, and hitters like to say almost all their success comes from the lower body. We can’t pin all of Craig’s struggles on his ailment, but it sure would make sense as an explanation.

Conveniently, though, we see other indicators. It was widely understood Craig was hurt. Because Craig was hurt, he had a different swing. Because he had a different swing — and different levels of strength — Craig was attacked in a different way. Allen Craig’s pitch pattern in 2014 strongly hinted at something being wrong, and so Craig’s pitch pattern in 2015 will tell us, and tell us quickly, to what degree he’s recovered. Even before Craig has much of a batting sample size, the pitchers will tell us if he seems like a threat.

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It can be a bit tricky to do this job from the west coast. As soon as you wake up, you’re behind, and I find I always have to begin my days reading. On the plus side, it’s usually reading I’d have to do anyway. Also on the plus side, you never know where you might find an idea. Earlier today, I was reading Eno’s latest post, on Joey Votto and Jay Bruce. Not only did the post provide excellent insight — it also took me back to something from last July. Eno was talking to Bruce about shifts, and using the whole field. An excerpt of a response:

But you hear people talk all the time, ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t just hit the ball to left field, or bunt.’ Well, the shifts are getting more sophisticated, where the third baseman is playing in. And the other guys are over. How many guys do you really know that hit for power that hit ground-balls to the opposite side of the field?

This is data I’ve played with a little before. Nori Aoki, for example, hits a ton of grounders toward the opposite field. Aoki also has 19 career home runs. Not a power threat. You already know many of the guys with stronger pull tendencies on the ground. They see a lot of shifts, and the group includes players like Chris Davis, Ryan Howard, and David Ortiz. But let’s see about answering Bruce’s question. Are there any powerful hitters who send grounders the other way? I know I already ruined the surprise before I even started the body of the post, but, do play along, won’t you?

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Eddie Butler of the Colorado Rockies is one of baseball’s most highly-regarded pitching prospects. In addition to wielding lights-out stuff, the 24-year-old righty has pitched admirably in the upper levels of the minor leagues. Butler put up a respectable 3.58 ERA in Double-A Tulsa last year, which earned him a three start cameo with the big club.  If he’s not big league ready right now, he’s very close. Given this combination of stuff and performance, it’s no surprise that Kiley McDaniel is a big fan of Butler’s. He ranked him 42nd overall in his top 200 list and gives him a FV of 55 — equivalent to a #3 or #4 starter or a closer.

Despite his redeeming qualities, KATOH hates Butler. It hates him lot. It pegs him for a putrid 0.7 WAR through age-28, which puts him very, very far outside of KATOH’s top 200 list. His KATOH projection was far worse than most similarly-ranked prospects on Kiley’s list.

KATOH’s down on Butler for a couple of reasons. For one, he was a little old for his level last year. If you’re a 23-year-old in Double-A, KATOH’s not going to like you unless you’re dominant, and Butler was much closer to mediocre than dominant. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays may have won the winter by acquiring Josh Donaldson and Russell Martin, but no team has lost the spring more than Toronto, who saw young hurler Marcus Stroman tear his ACL in a workout on Tuesday morning. Surgery to repair the ligament will cost him the entire season, and opens up a gaping hole in in the Jays rotation; even though he was young, Stroman projected as the team’s best pitcher, and one of the best pitchers in the entire league.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, speculation immediately began to link the Blue Jays and the Phillies, who have been waiting for an opportunity just like this to convince a team to pay dearly for Cole Hamels. GM Alex Anthoplous was pretty quick to downplay that idea, however; after stating there are few aces available this time of year, he added “Actually there might be one, but I don’t know that we can afford that right now.” For now, at least, it seems the Blue Jays will look in-house to replace Stroman.

Young hurlers Daniel Norris and Aaron Sanchez are likely to get much longer looks now, and with Stroman out of the picture, at least one of the two likely break camp in the rotation, with the other fighting Marco Estrada for the last starting spot on the team. Unlike the young guns, Estrada doesn’t possess a particularly strong fastball, and certainly has the least upside of the three. But if the Jays really are going to stay with what they have, then I’d argue that Estrada might be their best option to replace Stroman, at least in the short-term.

There’s no question that Estrada was terrible in Milwaukee a year ago, particularly with his inability to keep the ball in the yard; he allowed 29 home runs in just 150 innings. When you don’t locate an 89 mph fastball particularly well, it often gets crushed, and Estrada looked like he was throwing batting practice for a large portion of the 2014 season. Estrada’s entire game is about commanding the top of the strike zone, and last year, he simply missed his spots too many times.

But there are reasons to think that, even with a mediocre fastball, Estrada’s up-in-the-zone preference can actually work to his advantage. While the result of this style of pitching is often a home run problem, that negative can be offset by inducing a large number of infield flies, which are basically equivalent to a strikeout. And few pitchers in baseball generate popups at the same rate as Estrada.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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