Strength of schedule, usually, is more of a football concern. The schedules are a lot shorter, meaning there’s a more narrow distribution of opponents, and that can make for some significant differences. It’s a worthwhile consideration in the evaluation of any given team — losses are more forgivable if you’re facing juggernaut after juggernaut. There’s not much impressive about clobbering a pushover.

You see less discussion of strength of schedule in baseball. This is easy enough to explain — the schedule sometimes feels interminable, and so people naturally assume that, over six months, differences more or less even out. On the other hand, we know that schedules are unbalanced. We know that some divisions are stronger than others. What that means is that there will be differences in schedule strengths, and then considering playoff spots can be determined by one win, that makes this important. Granted, that makes everything important. In a tight race, every run and every win are critical, so that goes for any advantage or disadvantage.

With teams essentially set, and with schedules having been laid out ages ago, I decided now would be a good time to project 2015 schedule strengths. How big are the differences between the toughest schedule and the weakest? Even though this isn’t a thing that’ll make a whole world of difference, it could very well make some difference, so now it’s time to take a look at that.

The method is simple. At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don’t know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing.

No adjustments have been made for home games or road games, since those even out. In the chart below, you’ll see American League teams on the left in blue, and National League teams on the right in green. It’s immediately apparent that all the NL teams are projected to have lower opponent WARs than the AL teams. This is because the AL is still considered the stronger league of the two.

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Spring Training statistics might not matter, but injuries can certainly make an impact on a team’s outlook heading into the season. After being hit by a pitch in yesterday’s game against the Chicago Cubs, Hunter Pence is expected to be out six to eight weeks with a broken forearm. Missing the first month of the season is far from a catastrophic loss for the San Francisco Giants as they defend their World Series crown, but if they want to fill Pence’s vacated role from outside the organization, there are multiple teams with too many outfielders.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres, and Cleveland Indians are all teams that should be willing to move outfielders this spring, per Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. The Dodgers currently have Yasiel Puig, Carl Crawford, Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Scott Van Slyke in their outfield with Andre Ethier apparently the odd man out. The Dodgers are eager to move Ethier and are reportedly willing to pay around half of the $56 million owed to Ethier over the next three years. A trade with the Dodgers is not impossible for the Giants, but as Dave Cameron recently noted, some rivals rarely trade with each other. The Giants and Dodgers have completed just one trade since 1985, when they traded Mark Sweeney to the Dodgers in August 2007 for a player to be named later that turned into Travis Denker.

Outside of the difficulty of trading with a rival, the Giants current outfield poses problems with taking on a long term deal for a player who expects to start. The Giants currently have an interesting composition of present and future. At 31, Pence is the youngest projected outfield starter for the Giants with Angel Pagan and Nori Aoki expected to start in center field and left field, respectively. Pence is also signed through 2018 and has the contract with the longest duration among the Giants outfielders. He is not the only Giant signed past 2015. Angel Pagan has one more year to go after 2015 and is scheduled to receive $10 million in 2016. The Giants have a club option on Aoki for 2016 at just $5.5 million. It is conceivable that the Giants projected outfield for 2015 will be the same for 2016. The age, term, and relatively small amounts owed to Pagan and Aoki do not preclude a long term solution for the outfield. However, even if Ethier were to cost the Giants under $10 million per year, a three year commitment through his Age-35 season to cover one month of missed time is likely more than the Giants would want to take on.
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The Dodgers are (reportedly) willing to pay half of Andre Ethier’s contract! As Dave Cameron pointed out, he seems a bit superfluous to the current state of the Dodgers. Now that he’s only going to cost a team around $28 million over the next three years, can we find him a home?

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As an MLB team, it’s awful hard to reduce your payroll. All those long-term contracts you agreed to years ago come equipped with incremental annual raises, and then the free agent market inflates every year in the meantime. Cutting payroll can’t happen by accident: it’s a shift in organizational direction across all tiers of the operation.

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When it comes to making demands about improving a team’s roster, a fan’s simplest complaint is that the team is not spending enough. Ownership is the easiest target for criticism because they sign the checks. There is a lot of information hidden from the public and even the players when it comes to a team’s finances. Many assumptions are made, but still questions persist: Are the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves cheap? Are the Detroit Tigers outspending their market for a shot at a championship?

Without delving deeply into the finances of individual teams, the answers are not easy to come by. Even if everyone got a look inside the books, there would be reasonable differences regarding subjective definitions of the word cheap. What we can do is take a look at recent spending patterns within baseball. Looking at the known financial aspects of a franchise and attendance, a comparison can be made within the ranks of ownership. The owners might very well all be cheap, and that we cannot know for sure, but we can find out which franchises are cheaper.
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2014 was not a normal year for the two Joes. Both Joey Votto and Joe Mauer dealt with fallout from injuries, with Votto not having effective use of his lower half, and Mauer possibly dealing with lingering effects of a concussion sustained in 2013. For both players, the injuries affected overall production when they played, but it was especially acute in the power department for Votto. Joe Mauer, with the exception of one year in which his home run to fly ball ratio was off the charts, never had much power to begin with.

Both Joes still posted wRC+ numbers north of 100 in their playing time in 2014, because that’s what both Joes do, almost without fail. Votto and Mauer are some of the best contact hitters in the game, and that’s what we’re going to focus on today. Yes, they share other traits as well: they’re both 31, left-handed, and they walk a lot, with Votto being a particular master in that category. Maybe they both also have the same type of small dog, or are baritones.

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When it comes to trading, almost every team plays favorites. Perhaps a former co-worker is now running another club, making conversations easy and player valuations similar. Or perhaps two GMs just happen to get along well, and when one needs to make a minor deal to round out his roster, he’s comfortable asking his friend for help before polling the rest of the league. There are plenty of reasons why some organizations just fit as better trade partners than others.

This goes the other direction as well. Many teams are hesitant to make trades with their division rivals, not wanting the player they gave up on to come back and haunt them for 19 games per season, or in the case of trading a young prospect, for years into the future. Shipping a player across the country, or even to the other league, minimizes the chances that your home town fans will be regularly reminded that not every trade works out in your favor.

Of course, for a few teams that share a large market, there is another franchise in the other league that happens to also be a challenging trade partner. If you want to avoid your fans seeing the traded player turn into a star, having him play for the in-town rival is probably the worst case scenario, which is why trades between market sharing teams are pretty rare. The Cubs and White Sox, for instance, haven’t made a trade since 2006 — the Neal Cotts for David Aardsma blockbuster — and hadn’t made a deal before that one since 1998. The A’s and Giants haven’t made a deal since 2004, when Oakland bought Adam Pettyjohn from the Giants for cash; they last made a deal with players going both directions back in 1990. The Mets and Yankees last swapped players in 2004, when they exchanged Mike Stanton for Felix Heredia.

But beyond those easily explainable barriers to making a deal, I was curious which other franchises have engaged in long cold wars. Whether for philosophical reasons or just because they haven’t ever matched up, which teams just don’t make trades? Thanks to the particularly nifty Trade Partner tool from Baseball-Reference, we can highlight the teams who seem least likely to make deals with each other, even without the in-division or in-market explanations.

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Last week’s report that Josh Hamilton could be facing an imminent suspension from Major League Baseball following an alleged violation of his drug treatment program has brought a renewed focus on MLB’s Joint Drug Agreement (JDA), and in particular its treatment of non-performance enhancing drugs. As I noted last week, in addition to PEDs and stimulants, the JDA also restricts MLB players’ use of various “drugs of abuse,” including: THC, hashish, marijuana, synthetic THC, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, PCP, GHB (the date rape drug), and various opiates (oxycodone, heroin, morphine, etc.).

Interestingly, not all of these drugs are treated equally under the JDA. In particular, the JDA specifically carves out three – marijuana, hashish and synthetic THC – for special treatment. Although this carve-out wasn’t relevant to my post last week given the nature of the allegations against Hamilton, based on some of the comments it appears that MLB’s marijuana policy is of particular interest to some readers.

Because the JDA provisions governing drugs of abuse rarely come up, though – Jon Morosi reported last week, for instance, that no MLB player has been suspended for using an illegal narcotic since Josh Hamilton was himself suspended back in 2004 – relatively little attention has been paid to the intricacies of MLB’s marijuana policy.

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It’s the early days of spring training, with the exhibition games just kicking in, and “the best shape of my life” stories still fresh in our memory. It’s also the latter days of contract extension season, with many players expressing their desire to put such talks on hold once the real games begin. One potential extension candidate who may soon be locked up for the intermediate term is Twins’ second baseman Brian Dozier. His is an interesting case; this is no flashy, long-time high-end prospect we’re discussing here. Dozier has kind of crept up on people, quietly becoming a better major league player than he was a minor league prospect. Who and what is Brian Dozier, and is he the type of player to whom the Twins should make a major commitment?

One fact that is not in doubt is that Dozier was an exceptional pick in the 8th round of the 2009 draft out of Southern Mississippi, signing after his senior season. He was a starter from the get-go at Southern Miss, their regular shortstop his last three seasons. This was no tooled-out mega-prospect; Dozier was a ballplayer, the grinder type that a club hopes can learn to handle the wooden bat at the lower levels of the minor leagues. He was pretty young for his class, not turning 22 until May 15, a trait that has proven to correlate with professional success for both college juniors and seniors. Basically, the Twins were getting a junior age-wise, while paying him a discounted senior rate in the draft.

Though Dozier did bat a solid .298-.370-.409 in just over 1600 minor league plate appearances, those numbers aren’t quite as impressive as they seem. First, they’re influenced significantly by the gaudy .353-.417-.438 line he put up straight out of the draft in the rookie level Appalachian League. Even more importantly, in that and all of his other minor league seasons, Dozier was not among the younger players at his minor league level. He didn’t notch his first Double-A at bat until age 24, in 2011, though he certainly did perform well once he got there, unfurling a .318-.384-.502 line at New Britain.

Each season I compile an ordered list of minor league position player prospects based on their offensive performance relative to their league and level, adjusted for age. It basically serves as a follow list, with traditional scouting methods then utilized to fine-tune it. 2011 was the only year in which Dozier qualified for this list, at #185. Many defensively-oriented major league shortstops and catchers ranked near that level on my minor league list. Dozier was not seen as a future MLB shortstop in the minors, however, nor was he seen as particularly defensively-oriented. For him to start in the majors, his bat, and particularly his power potential, needed to develop.

And develop it has. Brian Dozier hit all of 16 homers in 1613 minor league plate appearances, but has already hit 47 in the major leagues in barely more major league plate appearances, hitting 23 in 2014 alone. How has he done it, and what is the near-term prognosis for his performance going forward? Let’s take a deeper look at his offensive game by analyzing his 2014 plate appearance outcome frequency and production by ball-in-play type data. First, the frequency information:

Though Dozier did strike out 129 times in 2014, he did so in 707 plate appearances, which ranked among AL leaders. His K rate percentile rank of 49, therefore, was quite acceptable for a reasonably powerful hitter. His ability to draw a walk is arguably his foremost offensive strength; he posted a 12.6% walk rate, good for a percentile rank of 92. He is not afraid to work a count, and put up a very low swinging strike rate of 5.9%.

His BIP frequencies, however, are just as unimpressive as his K and BB rates are impressive. He ranked among MLB leaders in popup rate at 14.4%, for a 97 percentile rank. Most big popup guys are big power guys, and with all due respect, Dozier doesn’t quite fit in that category. His line drive rate percentile rank is also quite low at 21. That isn’t a huge deal, as liner rates fluctuate much more than those of other BIP types, and he did post a 62 mark in 2013. What is a bit worrisome is the imbalance between his fly ball (72) and ground ball (16) percentile ranks. Dozier is on the verge of becoming one of the very few players in any given year to hit more fly balls than grounders; such hitters’ performance (such as Nick Swisher and Raul Ibanez in 2013-14, to name two) tends to decline significantly the next season.

To this point, we have not taken BIP authority or direction into account. As we shall see, both are pretty central to what Dozier is today and could be tomorrow. Next, let’s get a better feel for his BIP authority by taking a look at the production by BIP type data:

Dozier’s actual production on each BIP type is indicated in the AVG and SLG columns, and it’s converted to run values and compared to MLB average in the REL PRD column. That figure then is adjusted for context, such as home park, luck, etc., in the ADJ PRD column. For the purposes of this exercise, SH and SF are included as outs and HBP are excluded from the OBP calculation.

On the surface, Dozier’s actual 2014 performance seems to be fairly well supported by his batted-ball authority; the contextual adjustments for each BIP type are quite small. His actual 101 REL PROD on fly balls is adjusted slightly downward to 98 ADJ PRD, with fairly similar adjustments for liners (from 111 to 109) and grounders (135 to 127). For all BIP combined, his actual 97 REL PRD and 96 ADJ PRD marks are almost identical. Adding back the K’s and BB’s gives him a solid boost to a 113 REL PRD and 111 ADJ PRD. In a vacuum, Dozier’s actual 2014 numbers give a very accurate portrayal of the underlying granular data.

But there’s a catch. Brian Dozier has now established himself as one of the most extreme pull hitters in the game. I have developed a fairly simple statistic called “pull ratio”. It is calculated separately for fly balls, line drives and ground balls. For a righthanded hitter, it is (number of balls hit to LF + LCF)/(number of balls hit to RCF + RF). A typical righthanded hitter might have a pull ratio of a little over 1:1 on fly balls, about 2:1 on liners, and 4:1 on grounders. Dozier’s marks were 2.35 for fly balls, 3.17 for liners, and 6.20 for grounders in 2014.

Extreme pulling is generally a hallmark of a player harvesting power near the end of a career, when it’s basically all that he has left in his offensive game. The most comparable 2013 pull factors were posted by the likes of Jonny Gomes, Raul Ibanez, Chris Young and Andrelton Simmons; three guys who appeared cooked in 2014, and another who is struggling to find an offensive identity. Dozier didn’t become an extreme puller to extend his major league career; he did so just to have one, at least as a regular, in the first place.

What is the potential harm in this approach moving forward? It comes in several forms. First, even though he’s righthanded, infield shifts await Dozier. He batted .272 AVG-.333 SLG on grounders in 2014, above MLB average, and it was supported by solid BIP authority. That assumes a typical defensive alignment, however. At the very least, one would expect infield overshifting to cut Dozier’s grounder production to MLB average (.245 AVG-.267 SLG), which would cut his overall ADJ PRD from 111 to 106. A drop in grounder production to say, .200 AVG-.220 SLG, might be a perfectly reasonable expectation for an overshifted extreme puller; that drops his overall ADJ PRD even further to 99.

That isn’t the biggest risk related to his extreme pull tendency. First of all, let’s temporarily forget about the existence of LCF in the above pull ratio calculation. Ignoring that field sector, Dozier’s fly ball pull ratio would be 1.41, and his grounder pull ratio would be 4.60. He is an “extreme extreme puller” who hits an inordinate number of batted balls toward the LF line. Sit the third baseman on the bag, and his 10 ground ball doubles go away. Dozier hit an incredible 52 fly balls to the LF sector in 2014 — more than Miguel Cabrera, Giancarlo Stanton and Mike Trout combined. He hit 22 of his 23 homers to that sector, with the other one barely in the LCF sector. A great deal of them were of the “just enough” variety, in HitTracker parlance. This too, is the mark of a hitter whose power isn’t built to last.

Why is this a big deal? For part of the time I was with the Mariners, Jose Lopez was a regular infielder. He too hit almost all of his homers to the exact same spot, to his extreme pull side. Lopez had more raw and useable power than Dozier, Dozier a superior eye. Pitchers develop a book on such hitters, and over time will give them nothing they can pull for distance. Hitters must then adjust, or perish. Unfortunately for such hitters, extreme pulling is quite often their last adjustment. Dozier has not shown an ability to hit a ball even reasonably hard the other way in the air, on a line, or on the ground. Pitchers are going to pitch him away, and all Dozier is going to be able to do is draw a walk……for a little while at least, until that skill begins to decline as his ability to inflict damage erodes.

Every club needs Brian Doziers in their system. He is an overachiever who has constantly figured it out as he has advanced, through college, into the minors, and then into the major leagues. To become a starter at that level and have some success, he has had to totally sell out to the short term fruits of extreme pulling. Pitchers are now likely to have the last word. To borrow a contemporary nightly news sound bite, one doesn’t know whether a deal is bad until the particulars of that deal are known. There are certainly terms which would make a Dozier deal look good from the Twins’ perspective. Chances are, though, that a long-term deal for Dozier would look at 2014’s 23 homers and 4.6 WAR as a base expectation rather than the career peak that it more likely represents, and that wouldn’t likely end well for the Twins.

With Spring Training slowly motoring into life, that means another cash-flush free agency session has come to its conclusion. In truth, though, maybe we should think of this time of year — extension-signing season — as the time and place where all of the true money is spent.

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