While the J.D. Martinez signing was certainly baseball’s headline news item from Monday, the announcement of Jarrod Dyson’s two-year deal with the Diamondbacks represents an intriguing undercard.

Dyson is a versatile piece for Arizona. He’ll be able to spell A.J. Pollock in center field while also possibly playing a platoon role with the right-handed and defensively challenged Yasmany Tomas in left.

Left field projects to be the Diamondbacks’ weakest position, and Dyson’s glove-first game should play up in a Chase Field that is expected to better suppress run scoring with the news that it is adding a humidor to reduce the impact of baseballs batted into the desert air.

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The only thing that could’ve stopped this would’ve been a mystery team, and such a team never came out of the woodwork. From day one, the Red Sox were the favorites to sign J.D. Martinez as a free agent. The Sox just struggled to hit home runs in the absence of David Ortiz, and Martinez went deep a career-high 45 times. Boston had the desire, the money, and the roster space. Oh, sure, the Diamondbacks were in there somewhere, having fallen in love with what Martinez brought to them down the stretch, but they just had the desire and the space, and not so much the funds. They couldn’t have been considered a legitimate threat. And so there was no legitimate threat. Martinez and the Red Sox just needed to accept the circumstances.

Martinez wasn’t going to hold out much longer. But some late give by Boston compelled an actual agreement. The terms: five years, and $110 million. It’s more complicated than that, however, because Martinez can opt out after two years and $50 million, or after three years and $72 million. As such, what we’re seeing is a front-loaded deal that essentially has consecutive multi-year player options. This is more valuable than $110 million, in other words. Given the market, it’s a good deal for Martinez and it’s a good deal for Scott Boras. The final few years are like a safety net.

The Red Sox being a Dave Dombrowski operation, the future can figure itself out when it gets here. We can talk about Martinez’s contract deeper down. For now, for right now, the Red Sox have one of the best hitters in baseball. They’re not going to give the division to the Yankees without a fight.

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Rob Manfred wants the game to move faster. Funny thing is, he’s not alone. The players also want the game to move faster. Who would ever want to spend more time at work? Everyone’s aware that baseball games now are taking longer than ever. Everyone knows that’s far from ideal. As possible fixes go, there have simply been differences of opinion. The conversation about the slow free-agent market bled into the conversation about making the game speed up, so for some time it seemed like Manfred might unilaterally introduce his own pace-of-game directives. But now we have news that the league and the union have gotten along. There will be new rules for 2018.

A pitch clock isn’t among them. For months, it felt like a 2018 inevitability, because Manfred is so clearly in favor. It’s no coincidence the pitch clock has been implemented at various other levels of competition — Major League Baseball is slowly getting surrounded. The idea of the big-league pitch clock isn’t going to go away. But it has been set aside for now, as players collectively didn’t like it. They didn’t want to agree to such a fundamental change to the game. What we’re going to have are limits on mound visits, as well as shorter breaks between innings and pitcher substitutions. For the most part, for now, baseball is leaving the pace to the players. And the players get to celebrate a victory.

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Late Saturday, the Tampa Bay Rays acquired SS prospect Jermaine Palacios from Minnesota in exchange for RHP Jake Odorizzi. Palacios has a fairly long track record of offensive performance — he’s a career .290/.345/.426 hitter over four pro seasons — and is a viable defensive shortstop, but his game has some blemishes that may be exploited at the upper levels of the minors.

Chief among those is Palacios’s approach. He is not a selective hitter. Palacios has a quick bat, is loose-wristed, and has terrific hand-eye coordination, but his propensity to swing at just about everything is likely to be exploited as he reaches the upper levels of the minors. The physical tools to hit are here and, after flopping at Low-A in 2016, Palacios seemed to adjust to full-season pitching last year. (Nothing obvious changed mechanically, he just looked more comfortable than he did the year before.) This might be something he’s slow to do at each level. It’s tough to project Palacios’s hit tool because his barrel quickness and bat control are both excellent, but his on-paper production is going to play down unless he starts hunting driveable pitches.

Defensively, Palacios has a 55 arm, enough to play the left side of the infield, and average range, hands, and actions. He makes the occasional acrobatic play but he’s also a bit prone to mental mistakes. He’s a shortstop prospect but isn’t such a good defender that he’ll profile without providing dome offensive value, too. Whether or not that happens will depend on how his approach and general baseball acumen matures. If it doesn’t, he looks more like a utility guy, and he might be that anyway with Willy Adames in the farm system. Look for Palacios to start playing positions other than shortstop, which he hasn’t done since 2015.

The Chicago White Sox are projected to win 65 games in 2018 and lose 97. That’s fewer projected wins, and more losses, than are forecast for any other team in the league — including the majors’ new go-to bogeyman, the Miami Derek Jeters Marlins. The 2018 White Sox are projected to be the worst team in baseball.

But pretty soon, the White Sox are going to be pretty good. That’s not just me saying so; you believe it, too. A few weeks ago, when Jeff Sullivan asked readers to project out each team’s next five years, you collectively gave the Sox a little over 81 wins a year for each of the next five years — and that includes 2018, during which you presumably expect the Sox to be terrible.

It’s not that 81 wins is a tremendously impressive total on its own. It does, however, represent the 14th-highest figure readers gave to any of the 30 teams. For the next five years, you expect the Sox to be just above average. And, more than that, you expect the White Sox to trail only the Astros and the Phillies in terms of their performance over the next five years relative to their performance over the last five.

And I agree with you. Since kicking off their rebuild last winter with the Chris Sale trade, the Sox have managed to turn their star pieces of yesterday into a tremendous collection of young talent for tomorrow, sufficient to give them (according to Baseball America) the fifth-best farm system in the game and (according to Kiley and Eric) six of the top-100 prospects in all of baseball. So far, so good.

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Last March, I approached Jake Odorizzi in the Tampa Bay Rays’ spring-training clubhouse to learn more about the cult of the high fastball he was leading among the club’s pitchers.

The Rays led baseball in 2016 by the volume of four-seamers thrown up in the zone. The reason: to negate the effect of swing planes more and more designed to damage pitches lower in the zone. The Rays were again one of the dominant high-fastball teams last season, ranking second in the sport by volume and percentage of fastballs located in the upper third and above the zone according to Statcast data via Baseball Savant. (They ranked 14th in spin rate.)

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Every now and again I’ll forgo my usual spot in the Fenway Park press box and watch a game in the stands, an overpriced adult beverage in hand. Such was the case last September when the visiting Blue Jays made a pitching change and the friend I was with asked what I knew about the left-hander jogging in from the bullpen. My response was something along the lines of, “Not a whole heckuva lot, but maybe I’ll talk to him tomorrow and see what I can learn.”

That’s exactly what I did. I approached Tim Mayza the following day, and as he’d thrown almost exclusively sliders, I began our conversation by inquiring as to why.

“It’s is my out-pitch,” explained Mayza, who’d come into the previous night’s game with 13-and-a-third big-league innings under his belt. “I’ll throw it at any time, in any count, and I faced two lefties. With deception and the different shapes of the slider, it tends to be more effective than a fastball, per se, left on left.” Read the rest of this entry »

The last time the Padres won at least half of their games was 2010. Last year’s team finished with 71 wins and 91 losses, and, according to the underlying numbers, the club was actually even worse than that. Looking immediately ahead, the picture doesn’t look much better. Steamer thinks the Padres are the worst team in the NL West. PECOTA agrees. We don’t have everything we need from the ZiPS projections yet, but that system’s probably in agreement with the others. The 2018 Padres almost certainly aren’t going to make the playoffs. They’re just another organization that’s tried to rebuild.

The 2018 Padres are also going to play Eric Hosmer just about every day. News came out Saturday evening that Hosmer finally decided between the Padres and the Royals. The terms from San Diego, given to the 28-year-old first baseman: eight years, $144 million. There’s an opt-out after year five. Hosmer will get $105 million over the first five years, with the last three worth $39 million, in the event Hosmer sticks around. Reports recently had the Padres offering seven years, while Scott Boras wanted nine. These things so often end up with the obvious compromise.

Hosmer has been out there so long, and he’s been polarizing so long, that there’s hardly even anything new to say. If you’re a regular reader of FanGraphs, you know what Hosmer is, and what he isn’t. I wrote about the idea of Hosmer signing a big contract with the Padres back in the middle of December. Everything I said then still applies. This is an interesting deal, of course; Hosmer is admittedly fascinating. But what might be even more interesting is the signal this sends. The biggest contract of the offseason was given by a last-place team. That last-place team clearly has no intention of remaining there very much longer.

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The Mets are giving Jason Vargas a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Orioles are giving Andrew Cashner a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Blue Jays are giving Jaime Garcia a one-year contract worth $10 million, and what’s funny about that is Garcia is probably better than Vargas and Cashner, but, reasonable people may disagree. Clearly, reasonable people do disagree. And, I don’t know, maybe Garcia badly wanted to play for Toronto. Everyone operates under different circumstances, and of the three pitchers, only Vargas was a 2017 All-Star.

Vargas, I guess, was an All-Star in the classic sense, in that he was literally on the All-Star roster. But Vargas isn’t an All-Star in any other sense. He doesn’t have a track record of being an All-Star performer, and very few people would recognize him were he just walking down the street. The Mets aren’t signing Vargas because they think they can put him between Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. They know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. Vargas himself would understand he belongs at the back of a big-league rotation. That’s his talent level, and it always has been.

That’s not a criticism. The league needs back-of-the-rotation starters. The Mets in particular need reliable back-of-the-rotation starters, given their health problems, although it’s curious that Vargas is considered so safe even though he recently had Tommy John surgery on his elbow. All forms of pitching are dangerous. But anyway, Vargas is being installed to be a provider of half-decent innings. Let us now recall the season he had.

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Around the same time the Orioles were finalizing a two-year deal for Andrew Cashner, the Toronto Blue Jays signed a better pitcher at about half the cost. After multiple arm and shoulder surgeries, Jaime Garcia isn’t what he once was, but the 31-year-old was an average starter last year and should repeat that level of production in the coming season. For $8 million over one year plus a $2 million buyout on a $10 million option for 2019, the Blue Jays are paying for less than average.

Garcia fits the mold of many of the Blue Jays’ moves this offseason. In addition to other formers Cardinals Aledmys Diaz and Randal Grichuk, the Blue Jays have also acquired multiple low-cost, quality players like Curtis Granderson and Yangervis Solarte, allowing for the possibility of catching lightning in a bottle to make a run for the playoffs. On the other hand, if the season goes south, the team has plenty of flexibility to take the franchise in a different direction and try to reload as Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. get closer to the majors.

Injuries took away the bulk of Jaime Garcia’s prime. He barely pitched in 2013 and 2014, and wasn’t ready at the start of 2015, either. He had a resurgence in 2015, though, making 20 starts and pitching like a top-of-the-rotation starter, with a 3.00 FIP and 2.43 ERA. Garcia was more good than ace for the first part of 2016, but still showed some flashes of greatness before falling apart at the end of the season. The Cardinals traded him to the Braves, and he had a roughly average season, putting up a 4.25 FIP, 4.41 ERA, and 2.1 WAR over 157 innings for a combination of the Braves, Twins, and the Yankees.

The lefty pitched better for the Braves than he did with the Yankees. In New York, struggled to throw strikes, pitching in the zone just 40% of the time — well below his career average of 48% — and experiencing a similar dip in first-strike percentage. Even with those issues, he was only slightly below average as a starter for the Yankees. Assuming his 21% HR/FB rate was more a reflection on the small 37.1-inning sample and not his true talent level, he didn’t pitch too poorly. 

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