Everyone loves to observe a rebuild, so along those lines, we’re all waiting to see where the White Sox ultimately deal Jose Quintana. The Yankees have been in there, and the Pirates have been in there, but another team to draw frequent mention has been the Astros. As the Astros have been evaluated, it’s been my impression that the rotation is considered the potential weakness. Hence the Quintana link. You get how this works.

You’ve presumably noticed that Jose Quintana doesn’t play for the Astros yet. The Astros themselves are inclined to open the year with what they already have. Among the in-house options is a free agent the team signed fairly quietly last November. The Astros inked Charlie Morton to a two-year, sort of speculative contract after he was injured last year in his fourth start. Morton is entering his mid-30s, and he has an extensive injury history. Plus, there’s the 119 career ERA-. What grabbed the Astros’ attention was this:

Before Morton got hurt, he was throwing harder than ever. He had his hardest sinker, his hardest curveball, and his hardest splitter, plus a new-ish, hard cutter. Among pitchers who started games in both 2015 and 2016, Morton had the third-biggest fastball-velocity improvement, behind only David Phelps and James Paxton. It was enough to take a chance, considering Morton’s injury was to his leg. There’s upside in ground-ball pitchers with new velocity.

The question was whether the velocity bump would be real. So far, so good.

Morton, who saw a velocity spike last March and April before blowing out his hamstring, said afterward he felt like the ball came out of his hand well. His sinker sat between 94 and 96 mph, according to one scout’s radar gun.

The bulk of spring-training results are pretty much useless. Velocity is one of those things that’s difficult to fake. Beyond that, historically, spring velocity has been a little lower than regular-season velocity, since pitchers are still working up to 100%. So: It’s early, but it’s very encouraging. Charlie Morton seems to still have that zip, at a time when not having the same zip would be forgivable. More velocity tends to make pitchers better.

Morton’s sinker is a proven ground-ball pitch. With more speed, it would also become a less hittable pitch. He trusts his splitter, and as far as his curveball goes, last year’s closest pitch comp was Stephen Strasburg’s curveball. Morton’s curve ranked 10th in average spin rate, out of 507. He’s there ahead of names like Jeremy Hellickson and Lance McCullers. The Astros also intend to have Morton keep using that cutter to keep lefties honest.

It doesn’t mean anything’s a lock. It certainly doesn’t mean Morton will stay healthy enough to make 20 or 25 starts. But the Astros took a chance, and based on how Morton is throwing, he resembles a legitimate power pitcher with ground-ball and putaway stuff. The Doug Fister flier didn’t pan out. This one could make a good rotation great.

Every week, for the Effectively Wild podcast, we solicit listener emails and questions. The questions lean heavily toward the hypothetical and absurd, and an email we got last week asked what it would look like if some given eccentric baseball team owner cared only about winning the most games in spring training. What would the preparation be like? What would the strategy be like? How, in general, would the baseball team look?

You could argue that baseball team would look a lot like the Angels. Last Friday afternoon, against the Brewers, the Angels rallied back from an early 3-0 deficit. They tied the game in the fourth, and after they eventually fell behind again, they rallied again, before walking off in the bottom of the ninth. A player named David Fletcher singled against a player named Tyler Spurlin, and the single scored a player named Matt Williams, but not that Matt Williams. The Angels stretched their spring-training record to 7-0. They stretched their spring-training unbeaten streak to 18.

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Over the weekend, I had the fortune of attending the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and participating on the baseball panel with Mike Petriello, Harry Pavlidis, Patrick Young, and Brian Kenny, which was a lot of fun. While the baseball panel was my only actual obligation at the conference, Petriello was doing double duty, having just presented — along with Greg Cain, one of the lead engineers at MLBAM — the latest update to Statcast, and introducing two new public metrics for 2017, Catch Probability and Hit Probability. These are the kinds of numbers people have been hoping for, and are one of the first steps in moving from collecting interesting single data points into providing more valuable calculations based on the combination of factors the system is measuring.

To help promote the new metrics, Jeff Passan wrote a piece on Statcast over at Yahoo, focusing mostly on what Statcast could do in the future.

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Perhaps no player in Florida is the object of greater expectations this spring than Gary Sanchez.

Consider: in the fantasy baseball world, only Buster Posey is being drafted earlier at catcher. Generally conservative projection systems forecast that Sanchez will be a star this season. ZiPS pegs Sanchez for 27 homers a 112 wRC+ and a 3.4 WAR season. PECOTA’s 70th percentile outlook has Sanchez recording 33 homers, a .504 slugging mark, and 4.8 wins. And the Fans’ average crowdsourced projection for Sanchez is a .274/.344/.488 slash line and 5.4 WAR season. The Fans believe, in other words, that Sanchez and Bryce Harper are going to produce similar value this season.

Last week, ESPN ran a poll asking respondents to guess how many home runs Sanchez will hit in 2017. Fewer than 10 home runs? That option received 1% of votes. How about 10 to 20 homers — i.e. the range within which he’s resided over each of his first five professional seasons in the minors? That seems like a reasonable wager, right? Only 4% agreed.

The most popular range was 21-30 homers, receiving 44% of votes. Forty-one percent predicted he will slug between 31-40 homers, and 10% think he will hit more than 40.

There’s much to like about Sanchez. This is a player with pedigree, who was regraded as the top catcher in the 2009 international class, and perhaps the second-best bat in that class after Miguel Sano.

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The news is in. As Rob Bradford reported late last week, Boston lefty David Price will only miss seven to ten days with an elbow strain and won’t require surgery for the moment. That’s fortunate for the Red Sox, as the loss of Price would immediately have tested the club’s somewhat suspect depth.

Before news of Price’s injury surfaced, I was looking at his 2016 campaign to see what was amiss. It looks like the cutter was a big part of the problem. Given what happened on that pitch, and the information we now possess about Price’s elbow, it’s possible we can understand Price’s 2016 season much better.

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This is Kate Preusser’s first piece as part of her month-long residency.

In Molloy, Samuel Beckett tells us: “There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common.”

Thyago Vieira is a freak. I mean this in the nicest, but also the meanest, way. The Mariners prospect and Brazilian native has been turning heads across the league after blazing through the California League and the AFL this past year, victimizing hitters with his triple-digit fastball and newfound slider and just generally looking like a Brazilian golem looming atop the mound with his cold stare and imposing stature. And that’s before he throws 104 at you. Vieira is officially listed at 6-foot-2, but his height is often given offhand by manager Scott Servais or GM Jerry Dipoto as 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4. The average Brazilian male, meanwhile, is 5-foot-7. There is a little of everything in nature but, as the fifth-most populous nation in the world, a lot of everything in Brazil.

Perhaps part of the height inflation is Vieira’s frame. He’s listed at 220 pounds but looks bigger than that in person, with a Bunyan-esque lower half fueled by daily workouts and a newfound love of American food like the Cheesecake Factory. Having grown up with a single mother who often gave up her own meals so Thyago and his brother could eat, his love of Instagramming his food with heart and praise hands and cake emojis comes into clearer focus.

I first became interested in Vieira last year, when he moved into a closer role with the Bakersfield Blaze, the Mariners’ Low-A team. His picture showed a kid with a big, easy smile and thick black-framed glasses, a la Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. Unfortunately, his command had also emulated Charlie Sheen’s character, leading Vieira to have been stuck in the Mariners’ system since he was drafted in 2011, never making it past A-ball. Brazilian prospects, maybe more so than any other group, are raw, lacking the kind of resources teams pour into talent powerhouses like Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.

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Over the last few years, the quantity of terrific baseball writing has exploded online, with a widening variety of publishers putting out interesting commentary and analysis about the game we all love. While we are proud of the work we do here at FanGraphs, there are a lot of people putting out fantastic pieces at other outlets, and we’ve long had a desire to connect some of these great baseball writers with our audience, and help you guys discover other talented scribes to whom you may not have been exposed before.

So, today, we’re proud to announce the FanGraphs Residency program. We’ve reached out to a number of writers we like, and will be giving them an opportunity to publish their work here on FanGraphs during a given month. The number and types of articles they publish will vary, as we’ll mix in research, analysis, and commentary, and our hope is that the different voices to which the program will give a platform will help provide a wide array of content. With different kinds of writers taking turns, we think there’s a good chance everyone will find a new voice to follow, and that this program will help provide some additional exposure to those who have been doing good work at outlets who might not get as much traffic as FanGraphs does.

We’re excited to launch this program by announcing our Resident for the month of March: Kate Preusser. Kate is currently the Managing Editor at Lookout Landing, and if you purchased the 2017 Hardball Times Annual, you likely enjoyed her AL West review, which was highlighted by Paul Swydan as one of his favorite chapters in the book. She also co-hosts the Icosahedron Podcast, and we think you’re going to enjoy getting to read more of her work here during the month of March.

Along with the written articles, each resident will also be joining Carson for an episode of FanGraphs Audio during their month with us, so you’ll get to hear their voices, as well as read their work, during their time here. We hope that this combination will allow you to get to know writers of whom you may not previously have been aware, and hopefully you follow them at their other outlets after their residency here is finished.

We should note that we’re using the residency term more to describe the short-term nature of this position, and won’t be working our residents to the bone in the way that medical residents are sometimes used. These are also paid positions, so we’re not simply asking these writers to provide content to us in exchange for exposure; we believe they are quality writers who deserve larger audiences, and we simply want to give them that opportunity.

We’re excited about this program, and hope that you guys enjoy what each resident brings to the site, as well. Some of the names who are lined up for this summer will already be familiar to you, while others will likely be new, and we think this mix of voices and perspectives will help round out the content that our staff currently provides on a daily basis.

If you have someone you’d like to nominate for a residency position, we’d love to hear about them; you can email residency@fangraphs.com to suggest a writer for a future spot here. This position is designed primarily for those who already have shown that they can provide quality published content, but if you know someone who may not yet have had an opportunity to publish their work but has interesting and insightful things to say about baseball, we’d be happy to consider them as well. If you’re a writer who is interested in a spot, we will ask that you do not nominate yourselves for a residency position, but instead be referred by someone who has enjoyed your work and thinks you would benefit from access to a wider audience.

A few hours from now, you’ll be reading Kate’s first piece here on FanGraphs, and we think you’ll enjoy getting to know her (or know her writing a bit more) over the next month. We hope this program can be a win for both interesting writers and our audience, and look forward to connecting you all with people we think you might really enjoy.

Mike Harkey saw his career go south in 1991. Coming off a rookie year where he went 12-6, with a 3.26 ERA for the Cubs, the former fourth-overall pick suffered a shoulder injury that essentially squelched a promising future. He persevered after surgery, pitching parts of another six seasons, but he was never the same.

The what-could-have-been hurler doesn’t blame anyone for what happened.

“I think it’s one of those things where everybody is preordained,” said Harkey, who is now the bullpen coach for the Yankees. “X amount of pitchers are going to get hurt, and it was just my turn. I don’t feel I was ever overused. I threw every Friday night at Cal State Fullerton, and when I got to pro ball I pitched every fifth day.”

Four games into his 1991 campaign, he succumbed to the inevitable. His shoulder had begun barking the previous September, but thinking it was tendonitis — “I always had a high tolerance for pain” — he soldiered on. As he said when we spoke last summer, he didn’t know how bad it was until he couldn’t pitch anymore.

Harkey doesn’t begrudge his fate, but he does admit looking back. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2015-16 free-agent class was big, full of talent and ultimately resulted in seven $100 million contracts — along with another seven worth $50 million or more. This offseason led to more contracts (a total of eight, precisely) in the $50 million to $100 million range; however, among the entire class, only Yoenis Cespedes received more than $100 million.

As Cespedes himself could tell you, a player’s value can change significantly in a season. Despite having aged a year, Cespedes received $35 million more in guarantees this winter than he did last. While Cespedes had a strong 2016, though, many of his free-agent peers who signed big contracts last offseason have proven to be big disappointments.

First, let’s take a quick look at the contracts signed last year. The table below includes not only the actual amounts of the contacts themselves, but also an estimate of the value said player would have been expected to provide starting with the time he signed. To calculate this estimated value, I began with each player’s WAR forecast from last year’s FanGraphs Depth chart projections, started with $8 million per win with 5% inflation, and applied a standard aging curve. The rightmost column indicates whether the player in question was expected to outperform or underperform the cost of his contract.

There’s about a $94 million surplus among these deal. That said, there were also nine qualifying offers made to the players — which attached draft-pick compensation to the signings — while seven of the contracts included opt-out clauses. Those two factors might wipe out any surplus value.

At this time last year, the numbers indicated that Jason Heyward was a colossal bargain, a four-win player just entering his age-26 season. Heyward, as well as Ben Zobrist and Wei-Yin Chen, made Dave Cameron’s free-agent bargain list. Based on the projections, both Justin Upton and Alex Gordon seemed like decent bets to pay off. Cameron wasn’t buying on Upton, however, placing him among the free-agent landmines along with Jordan Zimmermann and Chris Davis.

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