The big news broke over the weekend, when the Cubs finally pulled Yu Darvish off the free-agent market. Not only is that good short-term news for the Cubs; it’s also bad short-term news for the Brewers and the Cardinals. It was, of course, expected for a while that the Cubs would eventually do something significant, but Darvish is about as significant as it was going to get. The division rivals already had needs, but the signing might’ve provoked a little greater urgency.

You can imagine the jokes when Monday morning brought news the Cardinals were signing Bud Norris. You might not actually need to imagine them — you might have authored some of them! It comes off as an uninspired response. Now, teams don’t actually need to make responses to other transactions. That’s just offseason narrative. And the Cardinals have already made an impact move in trading for Marcell Ozuna. It’s not like the Cardinals have been completely silent. But they haven’t made that Josh Donaldson-level move. They haven’t made that Manny Machado-level move. There’s impatience among the fan base, and the Darvish/Norris juxtaposition isn’t making anything feel any better.

I understand, in that Yu Darvish is analytically sexy. I understand, in that Bud Norris isn’t. Norris has never been a household name, nor has he been a particularly remarkable major-league pitcher. Let me put things differently, though. How would it feel if the Cardinals were instead signing Greg Holland? I have some tables to show you.

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So far this offseason, the Chicago Cubs have signed seven free-agent pitchers. That’s a lot. (According to ESPN Stats & Information, it’s actually the second-most ever behind the 2001 Rangers.) You may have heard of one of them: Yu Darvish.

Travis Sawchik has already written about who Darvish is as a pitcher, and how he and the Cubs needed each other, and I agree with most of that. I want to write about something else — namely, the signing’s impact on Chicago’s bullpen, and how it’s really rather bad news for one rather excellent pitcher: Michael Paul Montgomery.

The big reason for that, of course, is that Montgomery was, prior to Saturday’s news, projected as Chicago’s fifth starter. Following Sunday’s news, meanwhile, Montgomery is now projected as Guy Who Joe Maddon Uses for More Relief Innings Than You’d Exepect.

This second role was actually the one Montgomery played for much of 2017, throwing out of the bullpen in 30 out of 44 appearances, and averaging a bit over two innings in those games. Seven times, he pitched three or more innings in relief. Once, he threw 4.1 innings. No pitcher in the game who recorded as many relief innings also threw more innings per relief appearance in 2017.

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Rian Watt will now be contributing regularly to FanGraphs. This represents his opening salvo for the site.

I read last week that 100% of the S&P 500’s gains over the last quarter-century have come between 4:00 pm and 9:30 am, Eastern Standard Time. These are the hours during which the market is closed. For the last 25 years, in other words, you would likely have been better off buying at close and selling at open every day than bothering one bit about trading stocks outside those times.

This fact astonished me.

It also caused me to wonder who the heck would learn such a thing and draw from it the conclusion, as the New York Times did, that a sensible thing to do in response would be to sell at open and buy at close every day, and trade no further. This is partially because I have a natural skepticism of any market advice that involves participating in the market in the first place.

But it is also because it seems to me that, if you’re going to play the stock market, you might as well play during the day time, when everyone else is playing, too. The other way might make you money more surely and in larger quantities, but it’s also tremendously boring and does little to liven up the interval between when you’re born and when you die. So why bother at all?

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While the free-agent market remains largely in a state of gridlock, a few teams have begun to zag when others are zigging. The Cubs, of course, have invested somewhat heavily in pitching, signing Tyler Chatwood, Yu Darvish, and multiple relievers. The Brewers and Mets, meanwhile, have made some of the most significant signings of the New Year, agreeing to terms with Lorenzo Cain (Brewers), Jay Bruce (Mets), and Todd Frazier (Mets) between them.

While the Cubs have remained near the top of the projected standings all offseason, the Brewers and Mets entered the winter generally perceived as teams residing in something of a middle ground between the league’s Super Teams and rebuilding clubs. By investing in free agents, Milwaukee and New York are betting on themselves. It’s a refreshing approach in what has been objectively the slowest offseason ever.

Perhaps more of the bubble teams will be betting on themselves as spring training nears and anxiety amongst unsigned players reaches even higher levels. There is likely to be a lot of value out there. There is certainly a lot of inventory. The shopping season is winding down. This is an after-Christmas sale of sorts.

We’ve discussed the New Year’s Effect before at this website, and we perhaps have seen that in play with a player like Frazier, whom the FanGraphs crowd and Dave Cameron each projected for a three-year, $42-million deal. Frazier settled for a two years and just $17 million last Monday.

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The players are mad right now. They are mad at owners for not spending and they are mad at union leadership for not anticipating the lack of spending this winter. The owners are also mad — or at least pretending to be — because the players aren’t signing the contracts that the owners want them to sign. Finally, the fans are mad. Mad at the owners for not spending, at the players for not signing, and at writers like me for not writing more about baseball.

What we all really need are actual games. We won’t have that for a while, of course — although the wait for a new collective bargaining agreement between players and owners will continue even beyond this season. Because the players have to wait years for that shot, there isn’t a whole lot they can do right now. Maybe that’s why they are voicing their frustrations to the press. A spring-training boycott, such as was rumored recently, is unlikely to get them very far. Disbanding the union is a rather drastic step for the moment.

However, there is one thing players could do right now that would help them in the future — namely, stop signing contract extensions before reaching free agency.

This year’s hypothetically amazing free-agent class is missing. Jose Altuve, Paul Goldschmidt, and Mike Trout all signed team-friendly contract extensions earlier in their careers. The same thing was true last year when Madison Bumgarner, Freddie Freeman, Buster Posey, Chris Sale, and Giancarlo Stanton would have all been able to offer their services to any of the 30 teams.

The year before that, it was Wade Davis and Andrew McCutchen in a free-agent class that was already very good. It might seem counterintuitive to propose that players should be trying to get to free agency without extracting larger guarantees from their teams when the problem right now is that teams are not spending in free agency, but getting more, higher quality players to free agency would help the players immensely.

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This offseason, clearly, has been defined both by inactivity and an attempt to understand it. As free agents sit home just days before pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report, baseball and its fans have engaged in a conversation about economics and worth, value and spending. For some, inherent to that conversation is a sense that players ought to be content with what they have, that front offices presented with aging sluggers and hurlers have their hands tied. Voices as estimable as Bill James have endeavored to distance ball players from those who do so-called “real work.” Others have posited that owners are just being smart, and that really, don’t grown men playing a game make too much compared to the rest of us already? They aren’t teachers or firefighters, after all.

Players and analysts often seem surprised by this reaction. How can normal folks side with billionaires over millionaires? The incredulity is understandable: when moved to attribute avarice to strangers, it seems as if those with billions would make for more compelling targets. We get worked up over it, furious at the dearth of solidarity, fearful for what it might mean for other, less public struggles that involve our friends and neighbors.

But I wonder if we haven’t made a mistake. We’ve assumed that the sides are clear. But I think most fans don’t see millionaires pitted against billionaires; I think most fans don’t see the owners much at all.

Players stretch out over green fields. They thump home runs. They give us little bits of themselves to take with us. But players also leave. They give themselves to new people, people who aren’t our folks, who live in different places. They do that to us, or that’s how it can feel. The fan’s relationship with a player must necessarily be flexible. Players are a source of great fun and joy, but also embodiments of frustration. Fans weave those feelings, those experiences, together into a fabric in which we can cloak ourselves, a name across our backs, but one which is also liable to be pulled taut and ripped apart when we perceive conflict with the name on the front.

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Taylor Hearn is the top left-handed pitching prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates system. Long and lanky, the 23-year-old native of Royse City, Texas possesses a high-octane heater and a changeup that he considers his best pitch. He also has a background unlike that of any other player in professional baseball.

According to the young southpaw, his grandfather was the first African-American to attend Oklahoma State on a rodeo scholarship, and the first professional black cowboy. Dubbed “Mr. Black Rodeo,” Cleo Hearn joined the calf roping circuit in 1959.

The tradition was passed down, both within the family and throughout Texas. Robby Hearn followed in his father’s footsteps, and he went on to teach his own son the tricks of the trade.

“Growing up, it was kind of bred into me to do that,” Taylor Hearn told me. “I did it until I was 17. It’s still a big thing in Texas, including for African Americans. Cory Solomon has been in the national finals the past few years.”

Hearn doesn’t do much calf roping these days —“only now and then, because I don’t have the time” — but he does hope to get back into it down the road. For now, he’ll settle for (ahem) showing his girlfriend the ropes. Read the rest of this entry »

“You don’t want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run there’s so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization. But we have a lot of players who have reasonable salaries who contribute an awful lot who might put us in a position to consider it going forward and in the future… It’s not our preferred method. We would prefer to make a small deal and find another Jake Arrieta, but you can’t do that every year, either.”

– Cubs president Theo Epstein

The Cubs know the pitfalls of free agency.

Yet, as I wrote back in November and as esteemed colleague Craig Edwards also noted more recently, the Cubs needed Yu Darvish.

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Everything in life is cyclical; just look it up. Depending on your subject of interest, you can likely find some meditation on the cyclic nature of events in that particular field. Politics, history, sociology — heck, even opera has cycles. Baseball is no different. Whether it’s the dynamic between pitchers and hitters, strategic trends, or the success of individual teams, each side of the coin will come up eventually.

One key area in baseball that exhibits this cyclic nature is in the relative strength of organizational prospect talent. Every year, we see various outlets publish their rankings of the league’s assorted farm systems, thus giving hope to downtrodden franchises everywhere. Baseball America just released their list, while Baseball Prospectus and John Sickels will surely follow soon with their own. As all these lists are published, it’s worthwhile to consider how clubs tend to navigate the crests and troughs of such rankings, and what that movement implies for a team’s future.

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Yesterday, Kiley and I ranked the prospects who graduated in 2017. As part of the that re-evaluation exercise, I came across a subset of players whom I thought merited a deeper dive. Many prospects “graduate” off of prospect lists but remain unfinished developmental projects who get bounced to and from Triple-A for an extended period of time. Others get hurt at an inopportune time and virtually disappear for years.

Nobody really covers these players in a meaningful way; they exist in a limbo between prospectdom and any kind of relevant big-league sample. To address this blind spot in coverage, I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting players who fall under this umbrella — players who have either made relevant changes or whose profiles have changed based on relevant info we could only have learned with a big-league sample.

As far as Future Value grades for this group are concerned, they look like this:

Now, on to the reports.

*****

Francis Martes, RHP, Houston Astros
Martes’s stuff is nasty enough that he’s very likely to play a significant big-league role even if he never develops starter’s command, and Houston obviously has a recent history of finding ways to maximize what guys with fringey command — like Lance McCullers and Brad Peacock, for example — are able to do. Martes sits 95-99, while his mid-80s curveball features a spin rate around 2600 rpm. Curveballs with that combination of velocity and spin are rare. Jose Fernandez, Ariel Hernandez, and Yordano Ventura are all recent peers by that criteria. Scouts think it could be a 70 curveball.

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