You might remember Rob Mains from the work he contributed to this site’s Community blog. More recently, he’s been doing great things over at Baseball Prospectus. Just this past month, he was nominated for a SABR award.

Mains wrote a piece over at BP in the middle of January that I found to be of interest. It came shortly after the Pirates shedded Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen, with Pirates owner Bob Nutting claiming he couldn’t afford to keep star players around at market rates.

Mains’ piece is, in part, a meditation on what we ought to expect of a pro sports team’s ownership — and, in particular, if there should be a moral obligation, or civic responsibility, inherent to holding such an asset.

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Surely you’ve noticed that a number of prominent free agents have yet to find work. Less surely, but still probably, you’ve noticed that today is February 1, and the start of spring training is only a few weeks away. The good free agents are going to get jobs, and so are many of the worse ones, but we haven’t really seen a delay like this, not on such a large scale, and the reasons for it have been driving the wider baseball conversation over the past month or so. I doubt you’re a baseball fan because you just really like digging into the terms of collective bargaining agreements, but this is where we’ve gotten to. This is what’s up for debate at the moment, because baseball has provided little else.

At the heart of it all is league spending. I suppose it’s more about league spending versus league revenue, but with revenues, we’re mostly stuck with estimates. Spending, we know a lot more about. So let me show you a plot. I’ve spent a lot of time today navigating around Cot’s Contracts. That site includes opening-day payroll information going back to 2000, and there are also projected opening-day payrolls for 2018, including league minimums for roster filler.

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We all love Christian Yelich the baseball player. Or, at least, we all should love Christian Yelich the ballplayer. He’s coming off back-to-back 4.5-win seasons and is just entering his age-26 campaign. ZiPS calls for him to produce just slightly more than 20 wins in the next five seasons. He is, in short, one of the game’s great young stars.

The Brewers certainly made their love for Yelich evident recently, shipping off a rich prospect package to Miami in order to acquire him. No doubt part of their interest in him is due to the fact that he’s also signed to one of the most club-friendly deals in the sport. If he produces wins at the sort of rate that ZiPS suggests, the Brewers will be quite happy no matter what becomes of Lewis Brinson and company.

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Health issues have thrown Patrick Murphy a curve. Toronto’s pick in the third round of the 2013 draft has had Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and a nerve moved in his elbow. As a result, he went into last season having amassed just 94.2 professional innings.

He more than doubled that total in 2017. Four years into what had been a frustrating career, the 22-year-old right-hander was finally able to cast aside his injury demons and demonstrate an ability to flummox opposing batters. Featuring a hook-heavy three-pitch mix, Murphy fashioned a 2.94 ERA with the Low-A Lansing Lugnuts, then finished up the year by making two starts for high-A Dunedin.

Late in the season, I asked the 6-foot-4 curveball specialist about the arduous path he’s taken to what now qualifies as promising prospect status.

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On this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, four former players saw at least a 10-point increase in their voting share over the previous year. Vladimir Guerrero sailed into the Hall of Fame, Edgar Martinez solidified his status as a near-lock for next year, and Mike Mussina looks like a strong candidate for the 2020 class, if not the 2019 one.

Larry Walker, on the other hand, needs a lot of help. He received just 34.1% of the vote this year, leaving just two more cycles for him to reach the 75% threshold required for election. It’s not just that Walker needs some help to get elected: he wants it, too. And, most importantly, he deserves it.

Paul Swydan previously made a good case for Walker’s inclusion in the Hall, comparing him very favorably to Vladimir Guerrero. Here, though, I’d like to directly address a few points that still seem to cause confusion.

He Wasn’t Just Good Because of Coors Field

A lot of the arguments for Larry Walker’s inclusion in the Hall — including on sites like this one — are based on his very impressive 68.7 WAR. That figure ranks 66th all-time among position players and 39th since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. His WAR is sixth in that time among right fielders, just behind Reggie Jackson and ahead of every other right fielder you can think of except for a handful of all-time greats in Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, and Frank Robinson

Walker doesn’t lack for impressive numbers by traditional measures. He has a lifetime .313 batting average, for instance, behind only Clemente, Vlad Guerrero, Tony Gwynn, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams among outfielders who’ve recorded at least 8,000 plate appearances over the last 70 years.

Walker also fares well by counting stats. He hit a lot of home runs, a ton of doubles, and stole over 200 bases. The list of players with more doubles, triples, homers, and stolen bases is a pretty small group, composed of just Aaron, Carlos Beltran, Barry Bonds, Andre Dawson, and Willie Mays. He won an MVP award in 1997, receiving more than three-quarters of the first-place votes from the writers. He also has seven Gold Gloves, five All-Star appearances, three Silver Sluggers. He earned at least one vote for MVP in eight different seasons.

There are those who might dismiss Walker’s accomplishments out of hand simply because of Denver’s thin mountain air. It’s certainly true that, with regard to the counting stats, some mental adjustment is necessary. As for estimates of his overall value, though, such considerations are irrelevant: WAR already penalizes Walker for whatever benefits he received from playing half his games at Coors Field.

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Last week, I asked you to project too much of the future. And, bless your hearts, you complied. Every offseason, in February or March, I poll the FanGraphs community to see how many games it thinks each team will win in the season ahead. That project is still coming down the road, when opening day gets closer and more of these free agents have signed. This experiment was more ambitious; instead of asking you about single-season wins, I asked you about entire five-year windows. Five-year win totals, for every single team. It’s far too much, given how little of the future is knowable, but you voted in the polls anyway. I appreciate your doing that.

For every polling project, there is an analysis post. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a point. Below, you can see what the community thinks about the near- and medium-term futures for every club. The idea here is to try to get a sense of which teams are and aren’t well-positioned in the bigger picture. Or, at least, how this community thinks about that. There’s more to this evaluation than just the state of the major-league roster — there’s also the state of the farm system, the identities in the front office, the resources supplied by ownership, and so on. A baseball team is a big, complicated business. It’s time to look at what you think about these businesses.

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I’ve been waiting for the Diamondbacks to sign Alex Avila for months. It’s not like it’s been some obsession, and it’s not something I’ve thought about every single day, but the fit just always seemed more or less perfect. Avila is younger than the departed Chris Iannetta, and, unlike Iannetta, he swings from the left side, which makes him a better partner for Jeff Mathis. Importantly, Avila had a highly promising 2017; importantly, he was never going to cost a fortune, and the Diamondbacks are dealing with limited financial flexibility. It’s a move that I thought was inevitable. Oftentimes, those inevitable moves fail to come to fruition, but at least this one is finally crossing the finish line. Avila is joining the Diamondbacks, on a two-year contract.

He’s going to get paid $8.25 million, and there are additionally some modest incentives. Avila’s likely to be something of a semi-regular, and last year’s 112 games played was his highest total since 2014. When a team uses Avila, he should be platooned, because southpaws just give him awful fits. There are so many reasons to just see this news and move right on by it, like seeing that David Hernandez signed with the Reds. But in case you don’t play much with Statcast tools, Avila’s 2017 was outstanding. He resembled, by one measure, a frightening threat.

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To be completely honest with you, I’ve been kind of bored. Bored and feeling uninspired. Maybe it’s just a winter funk, but there’s also the reality of the slow-motion baseball offseason. I know I’m not the only writer whose topic well has begun to run dry. It’s not a big deal; everything’s cyclical, and writing has its ups and downs. I’m just trying to explain to you how I got here.

When I’m feeling stuck, I frequently just play around on various leaderboards, searching for inspiration. I’ll run through leaderboards here, I’ll run through leaderboards on Baseball Reference, and I’ll run through leaderboards on Baseball Savant. Most recently I was bit by the Statcast bug, so I found myself on Baseball Savant’s familiar pages. I was looking at the exit velocity page. I was looking at the sprint speed page. Suddenly, a name jumped out I didn’t expect. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t ignore this.

I considered all the current Padres position players for whom there’s a decent sample of 2017 Statcast information available. The player with the fastest average sprint speed? It’s not Manuel Margot. It’s Franchy Cordero. And, the player with the fastest average exit velocity? It’s not Wil Myers. It’s Franchy Cordero. A few days ago, I knew next to nothing about Cordero’s skillset. I knew only of his existence. Now I realize he’s one of the more exciting young players around.

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“The strategy the Marlins have adopted is tried and true in baseball. I’m not saying it’s without pain… But it was a process that ultimately produced a winner [at times, including Houston this season], in terms of smaller markets’ ability to win.”

–Commissioner Rob Manfred on the Dan LeBatard show, Dec. 20

 
Rebuilding, of course, has long been a part of baseball.

Before the Astros and Cubs parlayed dramatic rebuilds into World Series titles, the Marlins conducted fire sales of their own amid championships in 1997 and 2003. Young, cheap, talented labor has been prized since the origins of the professional game.

However, it is the depth of baseball’s current rebuilds that has begun to create more concern recently, notably among the league’s 120 unsigned free agents. It seems like something is different is occurring, that organizations are thinking more extreme, more like an NBA team when retooling.

If the Cubs and Astros did not inspire these more extreme retooling efforts, the Cubs’ and Astros’ success has nevertheless allowed clubs to follow the “tanking” model with greater conviction.

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Last week, we found out that Vladimir Guerrero — among others — will go into the Hall of Fame. The Guerrero news was hardly surprising, given how well he fared his first time on the ballot, but still, the Hall of Fame is considered a black-and-white issue, and for all but the most obvious of cases, there emerge criticisms, cases against. Arguments that a given player might not be good enough. Guerrero’s career generated some of those arguments, as he wound up with a WAR under 60. WAR has never been and will never be the sole defining metric for Cooperstown, but it’s true that Guerrero’s number might be surprisingly low. It’s right there on his player page, one estimated summation of all he achieved.

One consequence of Hall-of-Fame conversations is that great players get nitpicked. Everyone who gets so much as close to induction had a remarkable career spanning more than a decade. Another consequence is that players can get reduced to totals, with little attention given to how they were amassed. In a case like Guerrero’s, this means there’s something left out. And maybe it’s better that way, I don’t know — maybe all that should matter are the final results. The numbers a player has to show for his career. Yet players play in different ways, and there are different paths to accumulate value. You might not need to be told this, but Guerrero was something extraordinary. He wasn’t just a regular great player. He was a great player in a way all his own.

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