It’s been in the works for a few days, and now this morning, it is finally official: the Yankees have acquired Alfonso Soriano from the Cubs in exchange for a class-A pitching prospect, widely rumored to be Corey Black. For the Cubs, though, this move is less about the prospect than it is about financial flexibility.

Soriano has about $25 million left on his contract between 2013 and 2014, and according to Buster Olney, the Yankees have agreed to absorb almost $7 million of that total, including $5 million next season. It’s not a massive pot of gold, but the Cubs are saving about the same amount of money that they used to sign Scott Feldman over the off-season, and that turned out okay. Odds are good that the Cubs are going to reinvest the savings into their 2014 club and come away with a better (and younger) player than Soriano in the process. That makes this an easy win for Chicago.

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It seems everyone is writing about the sports programming bubble, wondering whether it’s here and when it will burst. Just Google “sports TV bubble” and you’ll find this story from the New York Times in January, and these from FOX and ESPN in March. But it’s not just this year. Forbes warned of a sports TV bubble in late 2011 and followed up in early 2013 declaring that the bubble existed and was about to pop.

What is the sports TV bubble anyway? It’s the hyper-inflated prices sports networks, cable and satellite companies, and consumers pay to produce, show, and watch live sporting events. Live sports means no fast-forwarding through commercials on the DVR. Advertisers pump gobs of money into the system to place their products in front of an engaged 18- to-35-year-old male audience.  Target consumers are valuable. They make sports programming valuable. Networks pay billions to broadcast sports to those consumers but everyone — not just sports fans — foot the bill.

How did we get here? I touched on these issues in this post in May, when Senator John McCain introduced a bill that would eliminate regulatory barriers to a la carte programming by cable and satellite companies:

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Here’s one thing that probably won’t surprise you: at present, the Red Sox are the major-league leaders in wOBA and OPS. Here’s another thing that probably won’t surprise you: at present, the Red Sox are the major-league leaders in average pitches seen per plate appearance. That’s a team that grinds out at-bats, and that’s a team that squeezes juice out of them. Here’s one thing that might surprise you, then: David Price just beat the Red Sox, with a complete game, in which he threw just 97 pitches. Against the Red Sox, Price was able to be effective; against the Red Sox, Price was able to be efficient.

Price has now made five starts since coming off the disabled list, having recovered from an arm injury. In three of those starts, he’s gone the distance, and in zero of those starts has he reached 100 pitches. In one of them, he didn’t even reach 90. I’ll grant that Price has started twice this month against the Astros, and the Astros are terrible, but he’s been doing something unusual, and something he’s never personally done before, at least not to this extent.

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On Monday, the Rangers gave up a pretty hefty haul to acquire the rights to Matt Garza. With so many teams out of the race not selling, the prices that the few teams giving up talent can charge is very high, and so despite Garza’s impending free agency, the Cubs did very well in their return for a few months of a good-not-great pitcher. With Garza off the market, the teams hunting for starting pitching will likely now turn their attention to Jake Peavy.

Peavy doesn’t have quite same reputation as Garza does, and he probably won’t command the same kind of return. But if we actually stop and compare the two, it’s hard to make a case that Garza was the jewel of the summer and Peavy is simply a fallback plan for those who missed out on the big prize. In fact, the evidence actually suggests that Peavy might just be the better acquisition.

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It was just a little while ago that Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore stubbornly refused to throw in the towel and concede defeat. To the media, at least. Though Moore acknowledged his team was below .500 this season, he said he thought they still had a run in them — that the team hadn’t yet settled into a groove. The Royals, he said, weren’t going to be sellers. If anything, Kansas City was going to be buyer. Based on Moore’s words, the Royals were going to keep going for it, and we criticized that here. And lots of people criticized it in lots of places.

There might be a lesson here, about judging general managers by their words instead of by their actions. Sometimes, you have to say one thing while you try to do another, to keep up appearances. And while the Royals have played fine baseball since Moore delivered his message to the press, there are reports  Moore’s position isn’t exactly what he suggested. From Wednesday: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fun little game for you to play. Navigate your browser to the FanGraphs player leaderboards, and then click on the shortstops button. What you see will be automatically sorted in descending order by WAR, and here’s the current top five:

• Ian Desmond
• Jean Segura
• Everth Cabrera
• Jhonny Peralta
• Yunel Escobar

Fine talents, all of them, even if none of them blow you away with name value. Name value doesn’t win championships, and all these guys have been major contributors to their teams from a premium position. But you’ll notice that when you went to this page, the readout included only “Qualified” players. Go ahead and remove that constraint. Let the page re-load. Now there’s a new top five:

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Torii Hunter is a changed man. Remember when he was a power-hitting centerfielder in the middle of the lineup? Torii Hunter is the same man. See that smile? And that stolen home run? Hunter might actually owe his ability to change his approach late in his career to his personality, so I asked him about both things before the Tigers played the White Sox early this week.

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When we last left our discussion of Edge% we were looking at the differences in the rate of called strikes based on the count. Generally speaking, umpires were less likely to call strikes on the Edge in pitcher-friendly counts and more likely to give those calls in hitter-friendly counts.

While we learned a bit from that analysis, it was really just the tip of the iceberg. There are a number of additional ways to cut the data, and that is the focus of this article. Count is just one dimension when we are thinking about what might influence the likelihood of close called strikes. There are a number of additional dimensions we can layer onto count, and that’s precisely what I show in the (admittedly large) table below.

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It was on Feb. 16, 2004, that the Yankees thought they had their questions answered. That day, they added a 28-year-old Alex Rodriguez from the Rangers — along with cash — and what it cost them was Alfonso Soriano and, eventually, Joaquin Arias. It was a deal thought to be lopsided at the time, and Rodriguez, for awhile, performed like a superstar. Rodriguez today resembles Rodriguez then, but only really in terms of genetics; there’s some chance he might never play another game. Which is one reason why the Yankees are rumored to be pursuing Soriano, who now is in Chicago. Rodriguez’s arrival was directly connected to Soriano’s departure. Rodriguez’s potential departure might be directly connected to Soriano’s potential arrival.

Here’s another reason why the Yankees are looking at the ex-Yankee. Soriano bats right-handed, and for a while, he’s produced. Right-handed batters for the Yankees, this season, have racked up more strikeouts than hits. Granted, it turns out that’s hardly unprecedented, so it’s not as impactful as it sounds. But Yankee righties have a .589 OPS. Next-worse is the Marlins, at .622. Yankee righties play in Yankee Stadium. The Yankees are thirsty for a right-handed bat that doesn’t suck, and it just so happens that Soriano’s an outfielder, like Vernon Wells.

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I recently posed a question to 10 players. It was a question that doesn’t have an easy answer. Given the subjectivity involved, it doesn’t even have a right answer.

Is hitting more of an art or more of a science?

The question was phrased exactly that way. It was up to the players responding to interpret the meaning of “art or science” and to elaborate accordingly. Their responses are listed below in alphabetical order. Read the rest of this entry »