Less than a week ago, Clayton Kershaw had to worry about every single pitch he was throwing in the World Series. And then after he threw most of those pitches well, but some of those pitches not well enough, he had to worry about the future of his career. Kershaw had to decide whether to opt out of his existing contract, which promised him $65 million over the next two years. If you’ve stayed in touch with baseball at all this week, you knew Kershaw and the Dodgers had moved the decision point to Friday. Decision’s been made. Kershaw will stay in LA, and he’s effectively getting a one-year extension.

Kershaw breakdown: $31M in 2019, ‘20 and ‘21, plus $1M each for 24 starts, 26 starts, 28 starts, 30 starts. Also gets $1.5M for Cy Young, $500K for second- or third-place finish.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 2, 2018

Instead of two years and $65 million, Kershaw’s contract has been reworked to three years and $93 million, with some achievable bonuses. This doesn’t guarantee that Kershaw will stay with the Dodgers for the rest of his life, but it’s a major step in that direction, since when this is over Kershaw will be approaching 34 years old. This was the clearest opportunity for Kershaw to leave. The opportunity wasn’t seized, and while I have no specific rooting interest, I’m rather pleased about that.

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Unlike Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, who retired after the 1973 and -76 seasons, respectively, Willie McCovey was still playing in 1978, which means that I was old enough to see the tail end of his career, and to have more than an inkling of his significance. My father and grandfather, lifelong Dodgers fans, spoke with a mixture of awe and “ohhhh” regarding the towering slugger nicknamed “Stretch,” while my eight-year-old brain marveled at the back of his 1978 Topps card, which required a different, smaller font than the standard cards in order to contain every season, and every home run — 493 of them, 92 more than any other player in the set — of a career that stretched back to 1959. McCovey was power-hitting royalty, with a regal bearing and a uniform number (44) that linked him both to Aaron, whose home run heroics I’d already read about, and Reggie Jackson, whose exploits I’d seen on television.

 
Indeed, McCovey was the only player to reach the 500 home-run plateau — which he did on June 30, 1978, the 12th player to do so — between September 13, 1971 (Frank Robinson) and September 17, 1984 (Jackson), and when he retired with 521, he was tied with Ted Williams for eighth on the all-time list. Jackson had only just passed McCovey when I encountered the two at Phoenix Municipal Stadium in March 1986. The former, entering his final season as an Angel, merely growled at my request (and the requests of several others) for an autograph, but the latter, a newly elected Hall of Famer and a spring instructor for the Giants, cracked a modest smile as he slowly and methodically signed every last scrap of paper handed to him.

So it was a sizable pang that I felt upon hearing Wednesday night’s news that McCovey passed away at the age of 80 after what the Giants called “a battle with ongoing health issues.” Of the small handful of Hall of Famers whose autographs I’ve obtained myself, I don’t think any had shuffled off this mortal coil until McCovey.

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Free agency officially begins on Saturday. While clubs have had the right this week to negotiate exclusively with their own departing players, that stops tomorrow. Tomorrow, anyone can talk to anyone.

As we enter free-agent season and attempt to understand which deals are likely and which are less so, it helps to have a sense of how much each club has to spend. Last offseason unfolded slow: teams and players battled on contract terms until spring. When the dust finally settled, payroll hadn’t actually increased from the previous year — a relatively rare occurrence, especially in an era when the game is so financially healthy.

That lack of upward movement in salaries was attributed, in part, to the impressive free-agent class of this winter. By looking at payrolls from the past couple years, we can get an idea of who has the most money to spend and who will need to significantly increase payroll if they want to get in on free-agent spending.

To begin, let’s consider what payrolls looked like at the beginning of the 2018 campaign.

That massive payroll worked out pretty well for the Red Sox: the World Series winners took advantage of the attempt by others clubs to stay under the competitive-balance tax threshold. At the other end of the payroll spectrum, meanwhile, Milwaukee, Oakland, and Tampa Bay managed to win a bunch of games without spending big, though the relationship between payroll and wins remains relatively strong.

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This past Sunday’s notes column led with Scott Radinsky’s evolution as a pitching coach. Admittedly old-school when he first started out, the former big-league left-hander has since incorporated a heavy dose of new-age into his approach. TrackMan and the Angels’ analytics team were his allies as he served as Anaheim’s bullpen coach each of the past three seasons.

Today we’ll hear from Radinsky on several of the team’s relievers going forward. He won’t be with them — along with a few other Angels coaches, he won’t be returning — but he certainly knows each of them well. Having been hands-on with their development — particularly the youngsters of the bunch — he sees plenty of blue skies ahead for the club’s bullpen.

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Radinsky on Hansel Robles: “Sometimes it takes awhile for a guy to buy in to what we’re sharing with them, but once he does, he can make real strides. It’s not the Bible, but it is well-thought-out information. This isn’t like back in the day when a pitching coach was on his own island and relying on the naked eye. It’s valuable data that is given to us as coaches, and it’s our job to translate it and pass it along to the players. We can use it to make them better.

“We had guys come [to the Angels] and buy in. They would realize, ‘Damn, man.’ Hansel Robles, from the Mets. This guy was headstrong about using his fastball. His fastball is a great pitch — he can really backspin it at the top of the zone — but our encouragement was, ‘When the catcher puts down slider, you don’t always have to shake. Utilize the thing.’ And do you know what? The more he used it, the better it got. Not only that, the more respect his fastball got. The next thing you know, he became more of a complete pitcher, and we were able to use him in higher-leverage situations.

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One of the worst called balls of the season was thrown, and called, in the seventh inning of a White Sox game on September 10. I always just measure these things by the distance from the center of the strike zone. Lucas Giolito threw a two-strike pitch close to the center of the strike zone. It was taken, and called a ball. I’m only bringing this to your attention because of the subsequent call on the Royals TV broadcast:

Steve Physioc: Right down the middle for ball three.
Rex Hudler: [laughing] Wowwwwww. Woo! We got away with one there.

Physioc and Hudler were *on it.* They talked through a slow-motion replay and everything. And, I mean, the call was clearly absurd. It merited some attention. But we’re talking about a mid-September game between the White Sox and the Royals. At the end of the day, who cares, right? Still, the announcers were sufficiently locked in. Just four days later, we saw the true worst called ball of the season. It happened in the seventh inning of a game between the playoff-hopeful Dodgers and the playoff-hopeful Cardinals. As usual, a pitch sailed right down the middle, and it wasn’t called as a strike. It obviously should’ve been a strike. But no one said a word about it. Not on either side, not on TV or radio. It was as if the call didn’t happen at all. The worst such call of an entire baseball season.

That makes it sound ridiculous. Ridiculously negligent, on the part of everyone involved. In reality, there was a good reason. There’s usually a good reason. What happened is that Dakota Hudson threw a slider, right down the middle, and it was called a first-pitch ball. It was also maybe the least interesting part of the entire sequence.

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One would think that setting a 15-year record for wins would feel more satisfying than it ultimately did for the 2018 edition of the Mariners. Alas, the world is as cruel as the Wheel of Fortune suggests: consonants are free but you have to pay for vowels. The A’s finished ahead of the M’s, giving the former club a place in the Wild Card Game.

The Setup

One of the defining features of the Seattle Mariners during the Jerry Dipoto regime is that the payroll has increased — from among the bottom 10 in 2012-13 to the back of the top 10 in 2018 — even though the club hasn’t been particularly active in free agency or signing young talent to long-term extensions.

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Nearly eight months ago, I asked you to predict the future. Here are the words I used to introduce that piece:

In 2017, the fastball rate fell again. It’s been falling for some time now, but in 2017 it fell again, from 56.7% in 2016 to 55.6% last year. There’s some reason to think that the drop in the fastball rate is linked to the increase in baseball’s increasing swinging-strike rate, which in turn is linked to the rise in strikeouts and hit batsmen, and on and on and on. Baseball is a complex system of action and reaction, and small changes can grow large quickly.

So this year, I want to know: what do you think will happen to some of baseball’s key stats, league-wide, in 2018? Maybe you think home-run rates will go up and strikeouts will fall. Maybe you think if home-run rates go up then strikeout rates have to fall. Maybe you think it’s the other way around. I don’t know. But I want to hear from you, and most of all I want to hear why you think certain changes are linked, and others aren’t.

Below are a series of tables featuring 10 years’ worth of data for a few key metrics. I’ve also included percentage changes year over year. Below each table is a poll which asks you to indicate whether you think a given statistic will increase or decrease — and, if so, by how much. Answer each poll, if you wish, and then also indicate in the comments why you voted the way you did on one statistic and not others. In a year or so, I’ll come back to this and we’ll talk about it as a group. Maybe it’ll be interesting. Maybe it won’t! We’ll see.

A lot has happened since I wrote those words: I’ve gotten married, my wife and I moved from Boston to Seattle, and I became a telecommuter (in my day job; this one has always been virtual-only). Oh, and the 2018 season came and went. The future I asked you to predict is now a part of the history books. Let’s see how good you were at reading ahead.

Note: a reader of the March post suggested he/she was unsure if answers should be submitted in percent or percentage point. It’s possible, as a result, that a few ballots could distort the overall results. Because I presented all the original deltas in the form of a percent, however, that is how I have once again presented them here. Fortunately, none of this matters at all!

Fastball Rate

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Usually these posts follow some kind of narrative structure. You wouldn’t necessarily say you come to FanGraphs for the storytelling, but any decent article is supposed to tell a story, even if it’s mostly statistical. I’m not going to bother this time. I’m not going to lead in with some manner of gripping anecdote. I just want to show you all a bunch of postseason numbers. I want to show them to you, because some of them are interesting, and postseason numbers aren’t always the easiest things to track down. Certainly not if you want to compare them to the same year’s regular-season numbers. That’s why I’m here today.

I’ve shown some of these plots in the past. What’s different now is that I have a few more plots, and also that the 2018 postseason is officially complete. Below, eight images, and limited commentary. How has playoff baseball compared to regular-season baseball over the years? I’ve gathered a whole host of statistical indicators, mostly with the help of Baseball Reference. Join me, if you will, on a quick analytical journey. We always guess at how the playoffs might play out, or which trends we might observe. We don’t have to guess about what’s already in the books.

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In the binary world of most baseball conversation, a party should be either (A) going big, or (B) going home. In baseball, the way this manifests is that fans frequently think a team should either go for it or blow it up. There are, of course, other options — a lot of other options, all somewhere in the middle — but people like dramatic action, especially right now, on the heels of the playoffs. And when you look at the Nationals, you can almost see one side of things. I’ve seen it asked whether the Nationals should take a step back. They’ve already taken a step back in the standings, and the Braves and Phillies might only get better, and Bryce Harper is probably a goner. How do you make up for probably losing Bryce Harper? Are the Nationals at the end of an era?

With or without Harper, the Nationals can contend. The idea of them blowing it up was always silly. Far too much talent remains, and on Wednesday, the club has made a notable addition. The Nationals signed a free agent. Not a new free agent, but rather, a preexisting free agent. Trevor Rosenthal spent the 2018 season rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. Now he’s the newest member of the Nationals’ bullpen. A bullpen they hope can lead them back to October.

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The Detroit Tigers have a rich history. The franchise has claimed 11 American League pennants and four World Series titles since being established in 1901. An “Olde English D” has emblazoned the jerseys and caps of numerous all-time greats.

The fan base is reliably loyal. The club is coming off a pair of 98-loss seasons, and there hasn’t been a championship to celebrate since 1984, but people in Detroit, and throughout the state of Michigan, continue to show their support. They love their Tigers.

In celebration of the iconic franchise, I asked a cross section of people within the game if they could share their thoughts — and perhaps a few anecdotes — on baseball in Detroit.

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Michael Fulmer, Tigers pitcher: “With the new renovations and Little Caesars Arena, it’s cool to have all four major sports teams in a four-block radius. And I feel that Detroit is a diehard baseball city. Michigan as a whole. The fans are unbelievable. They’ll let you know when you’re doing good, and they’ll also let you know when you’re not doing so good. That’s OK. You can’t blame them for that. They want us to win, and we’re doing everything we can for them. But they are sticking with this team through thick and thin. They’re excited about the younger players. The feedback we’ve gotten, and the high energy we’ve gotten from this team, is cool to watch.

“Mr. Kaline and Alan Trammell bring a lot of history. Willie Horton. Those guys are around the clubhouse quite a bit, and it’s really cool to be able to talk those guys. They’re legends. I grew up hearing those names, so to be able meet them in person and talk baseball with them… it’s really cool.

“Jack Morris isn’t around as much as some of the other guys, but I have talked to him a few times. They’re obviously retiring his number this year, and last year I got to catch a first pitch he threw out. That was pretty cool, too.”

Dave Dombrowski, former Tigers GM: “It’s a great baseball city. It’s a historic franchise — Detroit is one of the original baseball cities — with a lot of great players in different eras. Detroit supports all sports, including baseball. The fans are very passionate. They love their Tigers.

“I remember when I first took the job. They weren’t drawing very well, but people who had known the city for a long time were telling me what a sleeping giant it was. That’s because of the love people had for the team. And that’s what it turned out to be.

“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to win a championship while I was there. We won everything short of that a couple of times. But again, the fans are very supportive. You see Tigers memorabilia items everywhere. They welcome the old-timers, the guys who were part of the franchise in the past.”

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