It both makes a lot of sense and it doesn’t. Grant Balfour is good, and the Rays have signed him for two years and $12 million. You’ll recall that’s $3 million less than it looked like he would be getting earlier in the offseason. That’s the sensible bit. This is the more confusing bit:

There’s also a price to pay with that, as Friedman acknowledged their payroll is projected to be higher than the franchise-record of $72.8 million in 2010.

“I think it’s an unaffordable figure for our franchise,” Friedman said.
[…]
“But it’s certainly not a sustainable number in terms of where we are revenue-wise, but we felt like we had a really good chance to be great next year, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

That’s from the beginning of January. That’s when the guy in charge of the Rays’ roster referred to the payroll as “unaffordable” and not sustainable. You wouldn’t expect that team to add another eight-figure player, especially with that player being a relief pitcher. But, let’s just assume the Rays have a better idea what they can afford than I do. Let’s assume they’re prepared to move ahead with David Price in the rotation, salary and all. If you grant that the Rays can afford this, then it would appear like the Orioles gave them a gift.

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All along, it was suspected that Masahiro Tanaka was holding up the whole available pitching market. Teams wanted to know if they could get the best available pitcher; other available pitchers wanted to know which teams might be reduced to going after them. Wednesday, we all found out that Tanaka had made his decision. A day later, the Matt Garza domino has fallen. Out of nowhere, the Brewers swooped in and claimed Garza for four years and $52 million.

So, it’s that contract, for a pitcher going to a team that’s maybe on the fringes of the race. It’s identical to the contract Edwin Jackson signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. It’s basically the same as the contract Ricky Nolasco signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. None of these guys were given qualifying offers, so none of them cost any draft picks. They simply cost money, and as far as this particular move is concerned, it’s hard not to like it. I’d say it’s also hard to love it, but for the Brewers it’s a good upside play.

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If you had told me at the start of this week that Logan Forsythe was going to headline a seven-player trade, I’d have said that you just must be bored because nothing has been going on. After all, how often do seven-player trades happen? I mean, that’s just crazy talk. That it did actually happen, and that the headliner has compiled a grand total of 1.7 WAR is cool, in an odd sort of way. The trade is also rare in the sense that it both fills distinct needs for both clubs, but also is a bit of a challenge trade.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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Now that Masahiro Tanaka has agreed to terms with the New York Yankees, it appears quite likely that offseason player movement will finally be allowed to resume. In fact, the Rays and Padres kicked off the post-Tanaka era yesterday with a pretty interesting transaction of their own. Seemingly next on the docket would be negotiations for the consensus next three best starting pitchers on the market — Matt Garza, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Ervin Santana. Let’s take a look at those three, and most specifically their 2013 batted-ball profiles, to determine the talent gap among them, and assess the level of investment of which each is worthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Now kids, I’m not a user of the Twitter, but I did follow a link to it in one of Eno’s articles last week, whereupon I came across an interesting question posed in a tweet by one @b_g_h: “Are hitters with low BB% also more volatile [because] of BABIP variance?”  There are different ways to address the question statistically, but it seemed to me that with an altered version of my pitching correlation tool, one could provide insight into issues like this, at least regarding pitchers.  A hitting version is waiting in the wings, don’t worry.  So, what I bring to you today is an interactive and downloadable spreadsheet that allows you not only to analyze the relationship between any two pitching statistics, but also to filter your data by any three statistics of your choosing. Read the rest of this entry »

On the one hand, I’d feel like an unoriginal hack for going over Grady Sizemore’s career history. It is, after all, familiar to just about everyone — or at least everyone reading this website. He’s kind of like an outfield version of Mark Prior or Rich Harden: unbelievable talent, unbelievable fragility. He was amazing in 2008. But Franklin Gutierrez was amazing in 2009. Sizemore’s just another guy who hasn’t been able to stay on the field, and he’s well past the point of people thinking it might be bad luck.

On the other hand, over the past couple years it’s not like Sizemore’s provided anything to write about. Since the start of 2012, Sizemore has as many big-league plate appearances as Barry Bonds and Eddie Collins. And so if you’ll indulge me, I think it’s worth the very briefest of refresher courses.

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The Royals have a solid system with depth and impact talents — both on the mound and in the field. Kansas City is one of few organizations with two potential top-of-the-rotation arms that could be ready to contribute at the big-league level by the end of 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the old days, like WAY back in the old days, the running game was an integral part to baseball. I mean, look at the stolen base totals from the 19th century. Dudes were running wild. That was how the game was back then. Hitters didn’t (or couldn’t, more likely) rely on power nearly as much, and the pitchers threw a lot softer, making it easier on the potential thieves. Base stealing was incubated by the culture of baseball at the time. The way baseball is played now would seem entirely foreign to fans in the 1890s.

Since those high-flying days of the Grover Cleveland administration, aggression on the base paths died down. It saw its peaks and valleys, certainly, but swiping bags never quite reached that pinnacle of the early days of the game. The most recent influx of base-stealing came in the late 1970s through the 1980s. These were the times of Lou Brock and Vince Coleman and Rickey Henderson. And we applauded these speedsters. Running became a valued part of the game again. Though running saw a decline over the 90s as power came to prominence, it’s still a much speedier game than it was in those slow-poke days of the 60s. Read the rest of this entry »

Like the Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals often have good problems. The Cardinals are likely to have a top 10 rotation in 2014, but they still have to figure out who is going to slot into the rotation, and who will be the odd men out. Men is the key word here, because the Cardinals don’t have just six options, or even seven, but rather eight legitimate candidates for the starting rotation. Let’s walk through it, shall we?

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