Since Byron Buxton arrived in the majors, observers have wondered if he’s going to hit. The concern there is valid, but it also misses the point, because Byron Buxton is already special. He’s already a better hitter than Billy Hamilton is, and if the bat moves further along, the Twins will have a superstar. Yet even with Buxton as what he presently is, he’s the envy of many opponents. The non-hitting skills are where Buxton stands out.

He’s a clear Statcast favorite, because of his league-leading sprint speed, and because of his league-leading outs above average. Buxton’s in the conversation for the most valuable defender on the planet, and Twins pitchers have basically given him credit for saving their most recent season. That speed, though, also helps elsewhere. According to our metric, Buxton was 2017’s most valuable baserunner. He ranked third in baseball in stolen-base value, fifth in double-play value, and seventh in all the rest. Buxton, of course, relies on his speed. But he also benefits from good baseball instincts and big-league experience. Buxton just ran with more confidence than ever, and his baserunning season was just about perfect. I’ll tell you what I mean.

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Over the past several years, we’ve seen a trend away from signing young stars to long-term extensions. As Bryce Harper and Manny Machado head to free agency in their mid-20s, Mookie Betts, Kris Bryant, and Francisco Lindor all appear on their way to the same. With stars saying no, teams have been forced to get creative, signing good players to extensions and taking more risk by signing players with very little service time in the majors. The Cardinals’ deal for their shortstop covering six years for $26 million along with two team options fits the bill on both accounts. Paul DeJong is a good player, but he has hardly proven himself with under a year in the majors.

The Cardinals have made a habit of such extensions, reaching agreements with Matt Carpenter, Allen Craig, Stephen Piscotty, and Kolten Wong in the recent past. Carpenter would have been a free agent this year without such a deal, and Wong is a solid player with the potential to provide considerably more value. Even when the contracts haven’t worked out, the Cardinals haven’t been troubled by them: they were able to deal Allen Craig, for example, before health derailed his career. The jury is still out on Stephen Piscotty, but the club netted two decent prospects when dealing him over the winter.

This deal, both in dollars and the proven quality of the player, mirrors the one for Tim Anderson and the White Sox a year ago.

Consider the following stat lines.

We have two young shortstops who strike out a lot and walk very little. DeJong has shown more power, while Anderson is the better baserunner and presumably better defender. (The sample size for the fielding metrics is too small to draw any conclusions from the numbers.) It remains way too early to pass judgment on the Anderson deal, as the potential benefit for the White Sox doesn’t really begin for another five years, but the first year did not go well. Anderson still struck out a ton, managed to walk even less, and his BABIP dropped by 50 points. He did put up good numbers on the basepaths, but his poor defensive numbers meant a basically replacement-level 0.2 WAR. Even with slightly above-average defense, he would still be a roughly average player. Paul DeJong carries some of those same risks.

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Like dozens of other players, Neil Walker is an established free agent still looking for work as the second week of March approaches. Given his solid track record of production and lack of attachment to a qualifying offer, that would normally rate as a surprise, but he’s just one of several middle-class free agents left out in the cold this winter. Despite being linked to a handful of teams, the 32-year-old switch-hitter hasn’t found a deal to his liking. If this report from the Boston Globe’s Nick Cafardo is accurate, it’s tough to blame Walker, whom the Royals allegedly sought to bring into camp on a minor-league deal with a non-roster invitation.

It would be inaccurate to call Walker a star: he’s never, for example, made an All-Star team in his nine-year major-league career, which began with the Pirates in September 2009. But Walker has been quite consistent, producing an average of 2.7 WAR over the past eight seasons, with very little variance. His low of 1.9 WAR was compiled in 110 games in 2010 after being recalled on May 25. His high of 3.7 was set in 2016, his lone full season with the Mets — that, despite missing all of September due to a herniated disc that required season-ending surgery. Though he missed five weeks with a hamstring strain in 2017 and was traded from the Mets to the Brewers on August 12, Walker turned in a typical Neil Walker season: 2.1 WAR in 111 games with a .265/.362/.439 batting line and 114 wRC+.

Indeed, Walker is a career .272/.341/.437/115 wRC+ hitter who’s been strong against righties (122 wRC+) and subpar but still playable against lefties (91 wRC+), with his recent season splits against southpaws all over the place amid smaller sample sizes. While never a threat to win a Gold Glove, he’s been only slightly below average at second base over the course of his career (-4 UZR/150, -3 DRS/150), sure-handed but a bit lacking in range. He was pretty typical at the keystone in 2017 (-2 UZR, -5 DRS) and branched out to gain experience at the infield corners, starting eight games at first base (which he’d never played in the majors) and four at third (which he last played in 2010, after spending 2007-09 there in the minors).

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It’s time to say what I feel like I say every year. The overall team projections are right there, linked up top. You know where they are and you know what to do with them. We’ve talked about them a lot, already, even though the ZiPS projection system was only recently included. We here at FanGraphs are projections dorks. Estimated future baseball is the next-best thing to actual current baseball. And projections offer some relief to panicking over ugly spring-training results.

Mostly, what people care about are wins and losses. That’s obvious and self-explanatory, given that, what’s more fun than winning? But while it’s easy to look at the overall projections, less attention is given to projected components, because the data is harder to track down and see all together. We know the Astros are projected to finish with baseball’s best record. That’s because they’re probably baseball’s best team. They just won the World Series. Okay. But what if you want to know who’s projected to have the best defense? That information is provided. It just doesn’t have its own standings page. It has this blog post instead.

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Felix Hernandez’s 2018 season got off to a rough start, as he was drilled on the right arm by a line drive in his February 26 appearance against the Cubs. The Mariners say he’ll miss just one Cactus League start, but on the heels of two subpar, injury-shortened seasons, M’s fans can be forgiven for curling up into the fetal position.

Hernandez took the hill just 16 times in 2017 due to shoulder bursitis and was lit up for a 4.36 ERA and career-worst 5.02 FIP; his 17 homers allowed in 86.2 innings was more than he served up in four of his eight 200-plus inning seasons. His 2016 campaign, which was shortened to 25 starts by a right calf strain, featured a less-than-inspiring 3.82 ERA and 4.63 FIP, as well. His recent decline probably owes something to eroding velocity. Via Pitch Info, his four-seamer has averaged around 91 mph in the past two years, down from a high of 96 in 2008 and 93.6 as recently as 2014. The story is similar for his sinker. He’s not missing as many bats as he used to, and his home-run rate is soaring along with those of just about every other pitcher in baseball. In short, he looks more peasant than king.

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In December, Twins slugger Miguel Sano was accused of violently assaulting a photographer, Betsy Bissen. Sano has unequivocally denied the allegations. But the report of the incident led to an investigation by Major League Baseball under the “Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy” and “Joint Treatment Program for Alcohol-Related and Off-Field Violent Conduct” in the CBA. On February 27, as part of that investigation, Major League Baseball investigators interviewed Sano for four hours.

The entire process has set off something of a free-for-all on the internet, with people taking sides between Sano and his accuser, throwing around terms like “sexual assault” and “due process.” Under such fraught circumstances, however, precision in one’s language is ideal. So let’s try to clear up some of the confusion.

There’s been a debate regarding whether Sano has been accused of sexual assault, simple assault, or something else entirely. Again, this is not to say that Sano is guilty of any offense. However, it’s probably worth asking the question: assuming Sano actually did what he is accused of, what law would it violate? As for the answer, it really depends upon the state in which the incident has occurred, because there is actually a pretty big disparity between states as to what constitutes a sexual assault.

In this case, we’re looking at Minnesota law. I’m a civil litigation attorney, not a criminal attorney, and we’re dealing with issues here where it’s really important to get the law right. So I spoke with a Minnesota private criminal defense attorney, Erica E. Davis, Esq. from Davis and Egberg, PLLC in Minneapolis, to get her thoughts.

Davis believes, at the very least, that Sano “could clearly be charged” with misdemeanor assault. Under Minnesota law, “assault” is “(1) an act done with intent to cause fear in another of immediate bodily harm or death; or (2) the intentional infliction of or attempt to inflict bodily harm upon another.” Here, we’d probably be talking about misdemeanor assault in the fifth degree under Minn. Stat. § 609.224. Davis said that, for purposes of this statute, if we assume the allegations are true, Sano “clearly caused [Bissen] bodily harm.” She emphasized Bissen’s allegations that her wrist hurt the next day and that she repeatedly told Sano she didn’t want to go with him.

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This time of year, I tend to get stuck staring at projections. I think it’s a mechanism I developed over time as an alternative to making too much of spring-training statistics. I like to look at the projected standings to give myself a constant reminder of how the whole baseball landscape shakes out, but I also like to look at historical projected standings to give myself a similarly constant reminder of how baseball can surprise. Every March, I go back through my projections spreadsheet to remember supposedly good teams that underachieved. And even more fun than that, I browse to remember supposedly bad teams that overachieved.

When I do that, I’m reminded of the unbelievable 2012 Baltimore Orioles. They might be the most improbable recent success story — that team won 93 games, after being projected to win a woeful 70. And the key to the club was that they had the league’s most effective bullpen. This was before the emergence of bullpen monster Zach Britton. And in a way, those Orioles are representative; many of the greatest recent overachievers have been powered by excellent bullpens. Between 2007 and 2008, for example, the (Devil) Rays’ bullpen went from worst to first. A strong bullpen can squeeze wins out of thin air. There’s nothing quite like one, when you’re looking for any kind of separator.

I don’t need to tell you a good bullpen is important. Every fan *knows* a good bullpen is important. The question is, how do you know you have a good bullpen? It’s not as easy as you’d think. Or, it’s exactly as hard as you’d think.

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A few weeks ago, as I dialed in to the fourth of five hour-long conference calls scheduled that Tuesday at my place of regular employment, I began to wonder idly how major-league teams and executives conducted their own sorts of correspondence. These are important people, I reasoned. Surely, they live lives of glamour and fascination, removed from such mundane tasks. Surely, they don’t dial into five hour-long conference calls every Tuesday.

And it’s true: they don’t do that. Over the past few weeks, I’ve asked multiple senior MLB executives a series of questions about how, in the most basic and concrete sense, they talk with their colleagues around the game. It turns out that, generally speaking, they live lives very far removed from glamour and fascination, and the way they communicate is basically the same way you and I do. It turns out that they text. A lot.

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The Phillies don’t look like a very good team this season. They haven’t looked like a very good team in some time, really. That said, they aren’t all that far from contention in a muddled NL Wild Card race. After enduring 96 losses in 2017, the club enters the upcoming campaign with an improved roster, having replaced Freddy Galvis with J.P. Crawford and Tommy Joseph with Carlos Santana. They’re poised to receive a full season from Rhys Hoskins. They’ve also added Tommy Hunter to the bullpen.

The result of those additions to last year’s returnees is a projection for 74 wins. Improving by eight games in a single offseason is pretty impressive. The Phillies aren’t really expected to do that, though. By BaseRuns, which removes sequencing from a team’s run-scoring and -prevention, Philadelphia was actually a 70-win team last year. So the gain this offseason is more like four wins. Still, it’s something.

It’s also something that has come at little expense. Yes, the team added free-agent Carlos Santana this winter for an average of $20 million per season. Given the team’s financial wherewithal and the potential to compete now, however, it’s fair to wonder why the Phillies haven’t done more.

In recent weeks, Philadelphia has been connected both with Jake Arrieta and Lance Lynn but appear reluctant to continue moving forward this offseason. While a 74-win team will get nowhere near the playoffs, the current state of the club’s rotation means that the Phillies could easily spend their way to something closer to contention this season without greatly impacting their ability to contend in future years. In November, Travis Sawchik wondered when the Phillies would spend. With pitching still available in the free-agent market and a relatively mediocre set of Wild Card candidates, the time for the Phillies to spend at least a little bit of their reserves should be now.

Before getting to the Phillies’ present finances, let’s take a brief step back and remember where the club has been. Here are Opening Day payrolls for Philadelphia since they moved into Citizens Bank Park in 2004.

From 2010 to 2014, the Phillies’ payroll placed among the top four in the majors. It went down a bit in 2015, followed by a huge dip in 2016, and then another big drop this year. For some perspective, consider the Houston Astros’ tank-job, for which that club has been criticized. From 2009 to 2011, Astros payrolls averaged $91 million. Then, while tanking between 2012 and -14, the average payroll dropped 57% to $39 million. By comparison, the Phillies’ average payroll from 2013 to 2015 was $161 million, a figure which dropped 48% to $84 million in 2016-18. Philadelphia’s drop in payroll has been nearly as severe as the Astros’ own decline earlier this decade.

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“This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my life.”

– Billy Hamilton on the following proposal

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — There has always been some debate about where to bat Billy Hamilton in the lineup.

He has the world-class speed that managers traditionally prize out of a leadoff hitter. Hamilton, for example, was the fastest man in the game by some measures in 2016 and has trailed only Byron Buxton (30.2 feet/second) in Statcast’s “sprint speed” each of the last two seasons.

The problem, of course, is the rate at which he gets (or doesn’t get) on base. Hamilton recorded a .299 OBP last season, 11th worst amongst qualified hitters. His career mark is almost precisely the same (.298). In the modern era of lineup construction, avoiding outs is regarded as a greater asset for leadoff hitters than speed alone.

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