As the calendar has flipped to February, we are officially transitioning out of free agent season — though a few stragglers remain — and moving into extension season. With arbitration providing the nudge for teams and players to run valuations and negotiate over their differences, it’s only natural that these discussions often turn into conversations about long term deals that avoid the process entirely, and the spring training months provide the best opportunity for a team and a player to come to a mutual agreement on a mutli-year extension. While Clayton Kershaw kicked off the extension season a few weeks ago, Freddie Freeman’s new deal with the Braves is a reminder that extension season isn’t limited to just big market teams with overflowing revenues, and also a reminder of just how important a player’s age has become in long term valuations.

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If you’ve been following this series from the start, then this post doesn’t need any introduction. If you haven’t, you’re probably not starting now, so this post doesn’t need any introduction. If this counts as an introduction, then, I’m certain that it’s entirely unnecessary. If this doesn’t count as an introduction, then, what does it count as? “A waste of my time,” is probably a popular suggestion.

Here are the first three installments, from earlier in the week:

• The 2013 Season In Inside Home Runs
• The 2013 Season In Outside Home Runs
• The 2013 Season In Low Home Runs

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On Saturday, Buster Olney mused on who would hit leadoff for the Red Sox this season. And it’s an interesting question, since the Red Sox had grown accustomed to Jacoby Ellsbury at the top of the batting order. As we’ve discussed a couple of other times this offseason, it’s one of those good problems — Boston has a plethora of talented hitters, so it isn’t like they have to shoehorn a bad hitter into the top spot. But a decision still has to be made, so let’s take a look.
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On yesterday’s podcast, Carson and I had a brief conversation about how different history can look with the benefit of hindsight. Or, maybe more accurately, how different baseball history can occasionally look if you apply our current tools and analysis to players and transactions from before the statistical revolution really became popular. That isn’t to say our current tools are perfect — I’m sure in 15 to 20 years, we’ll look back at our current analysis and see a bunch of problems — but I think it’s pretty clear that both the people running baseball teams and watching baseball games understand the relative value of different players better now than they used to. And there’s perhaps no single transaction that better illustrates the stark changes in player valuation we’ve seen over the last 15 years than the trade that sent Ken Griffey Jr to the Reds after the 1999 season.

Griffey was, at that point, one of the game’s true elite. He’d racked up +20 WAR from ages 27 to 29, and that’s with defensive metrics that thought his defense was just average in center field, a sentiment which opposing managers didn’t agree, given that he won a gold glove in each of those three seasons. If he wasn’t the best player in the game, he wasn’t far off from that mark, and because he decided he didn’t want to play in Seattle anymore, the Mariners had to put him on the trade block.

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Jason Heyward was supposed to be going to court in a few weeks. His agents had filed a salary number for arbitration, and his team was a file-to-trial team — once a player has filed an arbitration number with a file-to-trial team, it’s supposed to mean that they are headed to court to debate their respective cases in front of an arbitrator. We thought about this situation when they filed, and it seemed that were reasons on both sides for the public fight over $300 thousand — the team wanted to discuss more reasonable numbers quicker and needed the threat of trial, while the agents in this case were aggressive and didn’t mind the consequences, apparently.

But today, look in the news, and there’s an announcement — the Braves and Heyward have agreed to a two-year $13.3 million deal. This seems to go against the file-to-trial policy, at first. Until you look around the game and realize that two other file-to-trial teams, the Rays and the Blue Jays, have also made deals like this after filing numbers. Now it looks like there was one last benefit to the file-to-trial policy that we didn’t get to: leverage in negotiations for a multi-year deal.

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The ESPN Home Run Tracker is a wonderful resource, and I feel like I don’t even need to point that out, because by now you’re all already well aware. One of the bits of information it calculates for every dinger is the apex. This is the highest point above the field reached by the batted ball, in feet. The average home run maxes out right around 85-90 feet above the field of play before beginning its descent, and last year’s standard deviation around that, for example, was 20 feet. On the site, you can sort by apex, allowing you to see the season’s highest-hit home runs, and the season’s lowest-hit home runs.

This has nothing to do with that, despite the misleading post headline. Monday, I looked at the 2013 season’s most inside pitches hit for home runs. Later, I looked at the season’s most outside pitches hit for home runs. Now this is about the season’s lowest pitches hit for home runs, because I’m continuing a series just like I did a year ago. I suppose I could’ve spread these out a little more, but I don’t know what that would accomplish. Might as well get them all done quickly and then get back to regular business. There is not an overwhelming demand to read these posts.

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In its current state, the Yankees’ system is rather pedestrian, or middle of the road, when compared to the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. The talent in the upper levels of the system underwhelmed in 2013 and many of the top prospects also dealt with significant injuries. The good news, though, is that the club has drafted extremely well and paired that with a strong international scouting presence, which made good use of their limited budgets. If a few of the lower level sleepers break out in 2014, this could turn into a Top 10, if not Top 5, system in short order. Read the rest of this entry »

While a lot of the current focus is on the remaining starting pitchers from this free agent class and where they will end up, we are getting close to the point where the focus starts to shift to the players who are going to hit free agency after next season. Generally, spring training is the time of the contract extension, and for players under team control for only one more season, this is often the last time they’ll negotiate an extension before testing the free agent market. Last year, we saw guys like Martin Prado and Carlos Gomez sign new contracts during this stretch of the off-season, and the year before, we saw Matt Cain, Ryan Zimmerman, and Howie Kendrick sign deals that kept them from playing out their walk year. And of course, Clayton Kershaw just reset the bar on long term extensions for players with only one year of team control remaining.

With the recent trend of teams ponying up nearly free agent prices to keep players from testing the market, we should expect that Kershaw won’t be the last pitcher to choose guaranteed security now rather than playing out the string and opening himself up to a bidding war next winter. So, today, let’s take a look at the 2013 lines from the five big remaining starters who are either going to land an extension in the next few months or hit free agency next winter.

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Kansas City designated Emilio Bonifacio for assignment over the weekend in order to make room for the return of Bruce Chen, and that’s normally the kind of thing that would fall through the cracks of a baseball news cycle. In Bonifacio’s age-28 season, he put up a .295 OBP between the Blue Jays and the Royals, getting shipped to Kansas City in August for “cash considerations,” which is another way of saying “you deal with him now.” Now he’s been cut loose barely more than a week before camp starts, and when that happens in late January or February, that generally means player number 40 on the 40-man roster just got whacked to clear a spot for someone new. That’s Chaz Roe, or Everett Teaford, or Pedro Figueroa, the previous three guys who were DFA’d across the bigs. I’d wager less than a quarter of you can name all three teams who let them go. These kinds of moves just aren’t all that interesting.

Except that Bonifacio’s DFA is somewhat interesting, because the Royals signed him to a $3.5m deal to avoid arbitration not three weeks ago, and the fact that he’s suddenly gone now when they didn’t just non-tender him earlier this offseason strongly indicates that Chen is taking his budget slot, as well as his roster spot. (That the Royals appear to be calling it a day with a payroll of around $89m-90m, thus forcing them to go with the abysmal Pedro Ciriaco as a backup instead, is another matter entirely for a team with holes that hopes to contend.) Before the Royals signed Omar Infante, there were non-ludicrous discussions to be had about Bonifacio starting 2014 as the team’s starting second baseman, then moving to the super-sub role he’s best suited for if and when the team improved at the position.  Read the rest of this entry »

When you’ve got something that lends itself to a series, you might as well just complete the whole series. In recycling an old idea, I just wrote about the most inside pitches hit for home runs during the 2013 season. The natural follow-up, then, is to write about the most outside pitches hit for home runs during the 2013 season, so that’s what’s going to be below, because that’s the way these things work. Later on, we’ll find the lowest pitches and the highest pitches hit for dingers, and then we’ll move on. Or we’ll take the series deeper somehow. I don’t know, but we’ll find out.

I mentioned in the earlier post that the overwhelming majority of inside pitches hit for dingers were hit by righties. Correspondingly, the overwhelming majority of outside pitches hit for dingers were hit by lefties. Of the 100 most outside pitches hit out this past season, 69 were hit by lefties and 31 were hit by righties. The numbers are closer to being even than they were a year ago, but they clearly are still not even, and my presumption is that lefties get pitched outside more often, and also stand closer to the plate, perhaps because they get pitched outside more often. We know that the left-handed strike zone is shifted more away, so everything else follows. If we had data about pitch distance from batter bodies, that could tell us a bit more, but we don’t have that and maybe never will. What we’ve got is pitch location relative to the plate. So. That’s how this is all sorted.

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