By their own standards, the Yankees’ offseason has been strangely quiet. Has the team’s offseason to date flown under the radar? They’re simultaneously busy and quiet, signing two reasonably high-profile free agents and engineering two trades for everyday players. They’re both smart, imminently defensible trades but they don’t quite qualify as Yankee-scale blockbusters.

The team improved, but as it currently stands, New York trails the Blue Jays and Red Sox in terms of talent. Steamer Projections rank the Rays and Yankees as equals, forecasting an offense that marginally outscores the runs their defense and pitching allow. The offseason is far from over, but the Yankees are clearly taking their club into another direction.

The Yankees, against all odds, are getting younger. In doing so, they’re adding an element unseen in the Bronx for many years: uncertainty.

For years, fans of rival AL East teams waited on the mighty Yankees to age, decline, and finally collapse like an Old Vegas hotel rigged with dynamite. For the most part, those fans never got their wish. The Yankees had some down years, but they always had the resources to paper over their mistakes, to throw good money after bad and put together a competitive team. The second wild card spot kept the 2013 and 2014 Yankees within shouting distance of the playoffs when the talent on hand suggested they didn’t belong.

But the one thing the Yankees and their core of established talents always have is known commodities. With all their money and ability to spot a salvage job worth undertaking, the Yankees always manage a reasonably high floor for their talent. They traffic in big leaguers with little mystery. The opposite of the 2015 Chicago Cubs, in other words.

The recent veteran-laden Yankees teams came with long resumes and a whole lot of plate appearances to look back on when looking to their future. Especially over the last few seasons, the Yankees bent but never broke. They won 85 and then 84 games in the past two seasons, unable or unwilling to blow up their roster. It was never stars and scrubs as much as stars and plugs – upmarket scrubs preventing the Yankees from wallowing in rebuild seasons and netting higher draft picks.

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About 16 months ago, I wrote this 3,000-word-plus diatribe about Courtney Hawkins, attempting to make sense of how a 2012 mid-first-round pick could collapse from a .284/.324/.480 line in his post-draft 2012 season (complete with reaching High-A at age 18) to an abysmal .178/.249/.384 mark in 2013 (complete with ghastly 37.6% strikeout rate).

For some, those numbers were grounds for Hawkins’ dismissal as a prospect; for others, his youth and level made that immediate, severe pessimism seem a bit over-the-top and premature; he did manage to slug nineteen homers in 103 games in the midst of all that whiffing, at least. The thought of this latter group was that Hawkins would repeat High-A in 2014 as a 20-year-old and that the tools that made him a first-round pick would again surface as he grew into the level.

A glance at the big outfielder’s 2014 end-of-season results shows that those who held out hope for improvement weren’t off base. Hawkins came through with a .249/.331/.450 line this past season, good for a .352 wOBA and 117 wRC+. He cut his strikeout rate to a more workable 27.8% while raising his walks from 6.8% to 10.3%. If his 2013 season didn’t exist, statistically-minded prospect-watchers would look at Hawkins’ age-20 campaign and declare it a solid success, or at least say he met expectations.

In this piece, I want to look beneath this superficial dramatic improvement and examine what drove Hawkins’ improvements, with an eye toward where his 2014 modifications might lead him in the future.

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It’s the end of the year. At the end of the year, we like to look back before we look forward to the upcoming year. In that vein, I thought it would be instructive — and perhaps a little bit fun — to pull the most popular posts from our fair site for this calendar year. If you read the Best Of post each week (or even some weeks, or maybe you glanced at it while your significant other was in the dressing room that one time and you were suuuuper bored???), you know that I like to throw a little shine at all of the blogs in our family, so we’ll also have a spot for the most popular piece for each blog as well, if they didn’t reach the actual top 10. Onward!

Wait, before we move onward, a note — just because I’m using the “Best of” post here, doesn’t mean that these were necessarily the best posts. They’re simply the most popular. I am grouping them under the “Best of” banner because it’ll be easier to find them at a later date. You know, if you’re curious to find them again at a later date (I know I will be). OK, onward!!!

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This is the final installment of a three-part series looking back at what has been an unusually eventful year for Major League Baseball in the courtroom. Part One recapped the legal maneuvering surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s suspension and the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose, while Part Two looked at MLB’s 2014 minimum wage and gender discrimination issues. This part concludes the series by reviewing the status of various television-related legal proceedings for MLB and its teams, as well as covering an assortment of other legal developments.

Television

Television revenues are vital to MLB’s business, so it should be no surprise that the league was involved in a series of important TV-related legal proceedings in 2014. Perhaps the most significant of these cases is Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a suit challenging MLB’s television policies under federal antitrust law.

Wendy Thurm has previously discussed the Garber suit on several occasions. By way of a brief recap, the case alleges that MLB’s television policies violate the Sherman Act in two ways: first, by imposing unreasonable blackout policies on fans; and second, by selling only league-wide pay-per-view subscription packages (MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv) rather than allowing teams to offer their own individual out-of-market plans. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2014, I had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared via the FanGraphs Q&A series. Others came courtesy of the Sunday Notes column, which debuted in February. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

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“Later on, when they went to the QuesTec system, the strike zone became more of a north-and-south than an east-and-west. I had to learn how to pitch inside more, which wasn’t an easy thing to do.” – Tom Glavine, Hall of Fame pitcher, January 2014

“In my first at bat, I hit a home run and thought to myself, ‘I’m going to hit 30 home runs in this league.’ I ended up hitting five.” – Clint Frazier, Cleveland Indians prospect, January 2014

“As a pitcher, you’re supposed to feel at home on the mound. You’re supposed to feel comfortable and strong. I didn’t feel that way.” – Jesse Biddle, Philadelphia Phillies prospect, January 2014

“My mind was free, because I was only concentrating on one thing, which was getting hitters out. I was in the big leagues, so I was able to relax and do my job.” – Matt Harvey, New York Mets, February 2014

“Twenty-four hours to vent and rage, break things. I punched my door and put a crack in it. I broke a few boat oars out back of the house. I was mad, because I felt I was being stolen from.” – Luke Scott, former big-league outfielder, February 2014

“When I brawled, I blacked out. I don’t really remember much outside of watching the videos. I do remember telling Dean Palmer, ‘They’re about to start hitting our guys and we’ll need to go out there.’ ” – Doug Brocail, former Detroit Tigers pitcher, February 2014

“When I stood on the mound while on Adderall, everything faded away except for the catcher’s mitt. No crowd noise, no distractions. It was almost like being in the Matrix. Although you were sped up, everything slowed down.” – Player X, March 2014 Read the rest of this entry »

Asdrubal Cabrera’s signing with the Rays. There was thought the free-agent middle infielder would get multiple years, given the number of teams looking for a shortstop or a second baseman, but by the reports, Cabrera is signing for one year and something in the vicinity of $8 million. Call it the A.J. Burnett contract, if you’d like. Cabrera’s an unexciting player, signing for unexciting terms.

Whenever you think about a fresh transaction, there’s a desire to find and identify that certain hidden something. That one thing about a given player that made him so appealing to his new team. I don’t think there’s a certain hidden something about Asdrubal Cabrera. He’s a fairly established entity: he’s a relatively poor defensive shortstop who used to be a better player than he is. He can play short but he fits better at second, and his overall offense is close enough to being average you can get away with calling it average. What do you have when you have an average hitter who’s roughly an average overall defender? That’s an average player. Cabrera’s close to that, and maybe a little bit worse.

This isn’t a franchise player, the Rays are signing. This isn’t a player many will remember as having been a Ray five or ten years down the line. This is just one of those small, fine deals every team has to make, and the most interesting thing about it is what it means for other players. The Rays are signing Asdrubal Cabrera, which means more and more people are talking about Ben Zobrist.

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There are many different ways to describe the quality of a pitch. We have movement numbers on this site. There are ground-ball rates. There are whiff rates. There are metrics that use a combination of ground-ball and whiff rates. And metrics that use balls in play. There’s a whole spectrum from process to results, and you can focus on any one part of that spectrum if you like.

But there’s something that’s so appealing about the whiff. It’s a result, but it’s an undeniable one. There is no human being trying to decide if the ball went straight or if it went up in the air or if the ball went down. It’s just: did the batter swing and miss? So, as a result, it seems unassailable.

Of course, there are some decisions you still have to make if you want to judge pitches by whiff rates. How many of the pitch does the pitcher have to have thrown to be considered? Gonzalez Germen had a higher whiff rate on his changeup (30.7%) this year than Cole Hamels (23.7%). Cole Hamels threw seven times as many changeups (708 to 101).

So, in judging this year’s best pitches, let’s declare a top pitch among starters and a top pitch among relievers. That’s only fair, considering the difference in number of pitches thrown between the two. It’s way harder to get people to keep missing a pitch they’ve seen seven times as often. And, in order to avoid avoiding R.A. Dickey the R. A. Dickey Knuckler award, we’ll leave knucklers off the list, and include knuckle curves in among the curves.

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This is the second in a series of posts looking back at the most significant events in what has been an unusually eventful year for Major League Baseball on the legal front. Part One reviewed the legal maneuvering surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s suspension and the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose. This part now looks at baseball’s minimum wage issues and two potentially embarrassing gender discrimination suits filed against MLB and its teams in 2014.

MLB Pay Practices

MLB’s allegedly unlawful pay practices were the subject of considerable legal scrutiny in 2014. Most significantly, in February the league was hit with the first of two class action lawsuits filed on behalf of former minor league baseball players, cases asserting that MLB’s minor league salary scale violates federal and state minimum wage and overtime laws.

In Senne v. Office of the Commissioner, the plaintiffs contend that MLB has violated the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) by paying minor league players as little as $3,300 per year, without overtime, despite often requiring players to work 50 or more hours per week. Moreover, as the suit notes, minor leaguers typically are not paid at all for their participation in spring training, fall instructional leagues, or mandatory offseason workout programs. All told, then, the suit claims that most minor league players receive well below the federally guaranteed minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

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Hello and welcome to the second half of this exercise, in which I do some of the work and you also do some of the work. Here’s a link to the first part, going over the American League. I think this is all pretty simple to understand. I’ll probably also do something like this again just before the season, when rosters are complete and we have more information in general, but we can still learn something from this, which asks you about the present situations, presently. And maybe any kinks experienced through these posts will be smoothed out by the time we re-visit in March. Are you ready to vote in 15 polls? Or, are you ready to vote in up to 15 polls?

Information’s based on the Steamer projections and the team depth charts. While free agents are still available, and while players will still get traded, this is asking about the roster situations right now, and not what you anticipate the roster situations to be by the end of spring training. Thank you all for your participation!

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Hello! Welcome to a post with 15 polls in it. Ordinarily, when you click on a FanGraphs post, it’s the author who’s done all the work. In this case, the author has done some of the work, but the work is to be completed by you, as this is an audience exercise. I’ll explain.

You know about the Steamer team projections. We use them a lot. They’re a super tool, for purposes of discussing, say, the highly active White Sox, or the highly active Padres, or the highly active Dodgers, or the so far highly inactive Orioles. When analyzing any transaction, we want to have an idea of how a given team looks, and the linked page makes it really easy. We’re always trying to project; Steamer has already projected. The depth charts have already depth charted.

But! Sometimes people disagree with the projections. Sometimes certain teams might seem way off. That’s what I want to gauge, here, with what I think are pretty easily understandable polls. There’s a poll here for each American League team, and I want to know what you think of their projections. I understand this is just based on Steamer, since we don’t yet have full ZiPS, and I also understand there are moves yet to be made. Max Scherzer won’t be a free agent forever. But I want to know what you think right now, based on conditions right now. I think there might be a lot to be learned from this. Alternatively, maybe there’s nothing to be learned from this. But the most important thing is, here’s content, and nothing has happened in baseball for like a week and a half, so, participate, please. I want to know where you think we’re wrong. People are always saying we’re wrong! This should be fun.

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