The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.

Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.

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The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.

Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.

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So, look, I feel like I need to explain why I’m looking at something you’ve probably never even thought about before. Obviously, I write a lot about pitch-framing, and about the different strike zones that different players get. Some time back, I was writing about Zack Greinke‘s favorable zone with Milwaukee. As such, I wrote about Jonathan Lucroy‘s receiving, and I wrote about Martin Maldonado’s receiving. Afterward, I received an interesting idea from a player:

I’m convinced the background in Milwaukee affects the home plate umpires’ depth perception and expands the zone down and away. Is there a home road split for both of the catchers? Maybe that will make some sense for my possibly distorted perception of balls and strikes in Milwaukee.

Not something I’d considered. Made sense, in theory. Perhaps a hidden park factor was inflating the framing numbers. Maybe Milwaukee is like the Colorado of expanding the strike zone. For whatever reason I never got around to researching this, until this afternoon, when I compiled the relevant data.

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Every year, as Spring Training winds down, a GM somewhere will look around and come to the conclusion that his teams needs, for lack of a better term, something extra. Perhaps an injury recovery is taking longer than expected, or maybe a rookie didn’t pan out quite the way everyone thought. This is usually the time to scour the growing free agent pool, as some veteran or expendable “quadruple A” guy will inevitably be given their walking papers when teams shore up their rosters. This is a perfectly acceptable way to find a 25th man — a bench bat or a lefty specialist. But if there’s nothing to be found in the recently-waived, or if a team has to make a move fast, a rare Spring Training trade might happen.

Dave Dombrowski needed to — or at least thought he needed to — make a move fast, when it became clear that shortstop Jose Iglesias would be out for a significant amount of time with stress fractures in both legs. He traded for Austin Romine, and then for Alex Gonzalez. The Gonzalez move, especially, came off as a bit of a head scratcher as Gonzalez was a non-roster invitee for the Orioles, and frankly, hasn’t really ever been good. But it’s fairly clear that Dombrowski was willing to take a bit of a hit in exchange for bodies he could install at short. While this particular move doesn’t seem that great, trades that happen during Spring Training aren’t usually impact trades in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past two weeks, we’ve been taking a look at some of the most interesting teams in baseball – one contender and one rebuilder from each league. What makes a team “interesting”? Taking advantage of the extreme nature of its ballpark, for a couple of clubs. Bucking some of the game’s most prevalent current trends and having success, for another. Or almost completely breaking from every pattern displayed in a club’s fairly successful recent past. In this final installment, let’s look at our NL rebuilder, the Colorado Rockies, who finally may have developed a concrete plan of attacking their ever-present conundrum – how on earth does one build a winning ballclub in Coors Field? Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox aren’t close, but they’re building a long-term core. Earlier in the week they signed starting pitcher Jose Quintana to a five-year contract with two more years of club options. Appropriately, given the player, the news didn’t capture the nation’s interest. In fact, the biggest immediate effect was Quintana could stop being such a nervous, uncomfortable wreck. It’s a smaller deal than Starling Marte’s new contract with Pittsburgh, in both guaranteed money and in relevance to the average fan’s interests.

There’s something here, though. Something one wouldn’t expect. Quintana’s 25 years old. Last year, by WAR, he was tied for 24th among major-league starters — neck and neck with the likes of Homer Bailey, Madison Bumgarner and Patrick Corbin. By RA9-WAR, he was tied for 23rd, equal to Jordan Zimmermann and Chris Tillman. He made all of his starts, and he threw 200 innings. A season ago, ever so quietly, Quintana was one of the better starters in the majors. Which leads  to this: What the heck is a Jose Quintana?

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Two years after signing a new local television contract with Fox Sports San Diego, the Padres will have their games carried by all the major cable and satellite operators in the team’s viewing area. The same cannot be said for the new Dodgers network called SportsNetLA, or for the year-old Comcast SportsNet Houston, which broadcasts Astros games.

In their inaugural season with FSSD in 2012, Padres games were broadcast only on Cox Cable and DirecTV. Last season, DISH Network and AT&T U-verse came onboard, which still left Time Warner Cable customers — more than 180,000 households or approximately 40% of the market — without access to the Padres on TV. TWC finally cut a deal with FSSD last month. Come Opening Day, anyone in San Diego or Hawaii with service from Cox, DirecTV, DISH, AT&T U-verse or TWC will be able to watch Padres games.

FSSD’s slow rollout reflects the economic realities of sports on TV. Advertisers love live, DVR-proof programming that’s watched by 18-to-45-year-old men, and they spend wildly on commercials during those programs. Sports networks — regional and national — see the money the advertising generates and bid obscence amounts for the broadcast rights. But the ad money isn’t nearly enough to cover the fees paid to the leagues and teams, and still turn a profit. For that, the networks turn to the cable and satellite operators that would like to offer the sports programming to their customers. The two sides negotiate the carriage fee — the price the cable and satellite operators will pay, per customer, in order to “carry” network as part of its sports programming packages.

The Padres-FSSD contract is valued in the range of $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion, putting average annual payments to the Padres in the $50 million to $75 million range. It’s thought the initial payment for 2012 was closer to $30 million. Before the 2012 season, Cox and DirecTV reportedly agreed to pay FSSD $5 per subscriber, but TWC, AT&T and DISH balked at that fee, leading to the impasse. It is not clear whether the holdouts eventually came around to a $5 per subscriber fee or if FSSD agreed to a lower fee to get those cable and satellite operators to join on.

The battle over carriage fees isn’t limited to regional sports networks, as I explained in this post last July. But when it comes to local sports programming, cable and satellite operators are digging deep — beyond the ratings reported by Nielsen — to understand who watches the local sports teams, when and for how long. Based on that information, many pay-TV providers simply have decided that paying carriage fees in the range of $5 per subscriber doesn’t make financial sense for them or for their customers.

SportsNet LA launched in February with around-the-clock Dodgers programming, but only customers with TWC or Bright House can view the network in their homes. Every other cable and satellite operator in the Los Angeles market has balked at the network’s carriage fee demand. And TWC hardly counts as an arms-length agreement, as it is the Dodgers’ broadcast partner in SportsNet LA. Indeed, TWC will essentially pay itself the carriage fee for SportsNet LA, and then pay the Dodgers their monthly rights fee as part of the 25-year, $8.3 billion megadeal. TWC CEO Rob Marcus apparently isn’t worried. He recently told a media conference that Opening Day has a way of making these deals shake out.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, DirecTV is pushing for an a la carte pay structure with SportsNet LA; that is, DirecTV will pay the carriage fee only for those customers who specifically subscribe to the network. The Dodgers have rejected that proposal, and for good reason. The economics of their deal don’t make sense if customers can pick and choose whether to pay for the network.

Bad economics are precisely what unfolded in Houston, where the Astros are embroiled in several lawsuits and a bankruptcy proceeding involving CSN Houston and the Astros’ broadcast rights. I explained what led to the legal mess in this post from last November. In short, CSN Houston couldn’t reach carriage fee deals with any cable or satellite provider other than Comcast. Disputes arose between and among Comcast, the Astros and the Houston Rockets — which collectively own CSN Houston — over how to negotiate the carriage fee deals and at what price. Comcast forced the parties into bankruptcy court. The Astros sued former owner Drayton McLane, claiming he misled new owner Jim Crane on the financial viability of the new network. Four months later, nothing’s been resolved.

There is a glimmer of hope for Astros fans, though. The Houston Chronicle reported this week the Astros are hoping to make their games available in the Houston area through the MLB Extra Innings Package. Typically, local games are blacked out on Extra Innings or MLB.tv, as a way of protecting the regional sports networks’ economic interests (often called their monopoly). It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which CSN Houston willingly allows games to be broadcast on Extra Innings, as that would further undercut the little leverage the network has in trying to reach carriage deals and work its way out of bankruptcy.

At some point, you’d think sports networks would stop dolling out huge rights fee deals.

What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position. The author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

Because of the length of these write-ups, we’ve broken the starting pitchers and relief pitchers down into two posts apiece. The top half of the rotations are listed below, with the second half coming later this afternoon.

In this post, we deal with the left. You might notice that #15 is exactly even with #16. That’s an example of why the WAR is more important than the rank. Except for rank #1, where the leader is head and shoulders above the runner-up. The gap between first and second is bigger than the gap between second and tenth. So the #1 team probably has the best rotation in baseball, unless the projections end up wrong, which is possible if not probable. I’ll say this much: last year’s projected #1 rotation ended up as the actual #1 rotation. And this year it’s the same rotation!

One other note: our system admittedly doesn’t deal well with starter/reliever role shifts. In that it doesn’t deal with them at all, just plugging in the same projected numbers regardless. I’ll take care to note instances where that’s relevant and where the numbers might be misleading. An important instance is coming soon!

That all being said, let’s have some more be said, below. I’m comfortable with most of what’s to follow.

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There’s a good chance you might’ve missed it, but over the weekend, baseball began, by which I mean the kind of baseball that counts in the standings. The Dodgers played two games against the Diamondbacks, and the Dodgers won two games against the Diamondbacks, incrementally improving the playoff odds of the former, and incrementally hurting the playoff odds of the latter. The most likely outcome over two games is a split. As much as it’s early — it’s not even April! — the games were significant. Oh, and another reason they were significant is that they were played in Australia.

Specifically, they were played in the Sydney Cricket Ground, which was turned into a regulation baseball field in a matter of weeks. Someone asked recently how FanGraphs would deal with the park factors of two games played at such an unfamiliar location. The correct answer is, “it doesn’t matter, who cares?” Another answer is, “good question, let’s investigate and speculate on the Sydney Cricket Ground!” What if — hypothetically — what if the Sydney Cricket Ground played as a team’s home for a full regular season? For several full regular seasons?

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Well, this is a pretty neat example of what journalism can look like with multiple mediums incorporated: video, interviews, heat maps, and pitch data. ESPN talked to the D’Backs pitchers about their various pitch types, and while some of them are basically the same thing — you even hear Brandon McCarthy refer to his two-seam fastball as a sinker in his video, even though Brad Ziegler is the official sinker guy — it’s still a pretty neat interactive way of looking at pitch types and mechanics.

Kudos to ESPN for featuring this kind of baseball analysis. More and more, I think the average fan is interested in the why and the how, and media pieces like this will help promote some understanding of things that are basic to the players but haven’t always been easily accessible to the public.

Check it out, and let’s hope the baseball media in general sees the market for stuff like this going forward.