One of the most interesting aspects of the Rich Hill story was his decision to break from convention and make his curveball – one of the game’s most effective pitches – his primary offering, a decision about which I wrote earlier this week.

That decision was one of a number of factors that has led to Hill’s late-career resurgence. As you’re probably aware, Hill led all major-league pitchers in curveball usage (49.7%) last season, throwing it more often than his fastball (47.2%). By this standard, Hill is an outlier. Conventional wisdom in baseball stipulates that the fastball should be the primary pitch for just about every arm. Rejecting that wisdom allowed Hill to become one of the most productive per-inning pitchers last season — and to receive a three-year, $48-million contract this offseason despite a limited track record of success.

The only regret Hill might have is that he didn’t change things earlier. What would Hill wish he had told a younger version of himself?

It’s that question which brings me to talented young Phillies starting pitcher Aaron Nola. Nola isn’t left-handed like Hill. His curveball doesn’t have quite the same shape. It is, perhaps, the next best thing to Hill’s curveball among major-league starters, however, depending upon how you judge performance and aesthetic beauty. It’s certainly part of a small group and a candidate in the discussion.

The curve tracks so well horizontally it made Jose Bautista flinch:

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Kevin Kiermaier is underrated. How do I know? I guess I don’t know, but by and large, Kiermaier is not considered one of the best players in baseball. This despite having performed like one of the best players in baseball. The last three years, by WAR, Kiermaier has been as valuable as Robinson Cano, Andrew McCutchen, and Yoenis Cespedes, all while collecting far fewer plate appearances. Kiermaier is projected to be as valuable as Carlos Correa and Giancarlo Stanton. The numbers are in love, and they paint a certain picture. Kiermaier is presently the most important player on his team.

Being a FanGraphs reader, you at least kind of know what Kiermaier is about. He’s underrated because his standout skill is outfield defense, and he swings a roughly average bat. I’ll say this: Although Kiermaier’s UZRs are extreme, DRS loves him even more. He has a career outfield UZR of +60. He has a career outfield DRS of +81. That would be another two wins, more or less.

So, the major reason Kiermaier’s underrated: His strongest skill is underrated. Beyond that, it doesn’t help him that he’s played for a nationally invisible ballclub. Let me add a third reason. For this part, I’m going to call in Jorge Soler.

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If you haven’t heard the news, the St. Louis Cardinals received their punishment from Major League Baseball this week in response to the actions of former director of amateur scouting, Chris Correa. Correa hacked the database of the Houston Astros using some variation of the password Eckstein. As Jeff Sullivan explained, the Cardinals are expected both to pay the Astros $2 million and give them two draft picks, numbers 56 and 75. The consensus seems to be that the Cardinals got off light.

As Grant Brisbee noted, the second of the Cardinals’ picks has actually been given to them in the form of a competitive-balance pick, which provides convenient timing to discuss whether the Cardinals should even have that extra pick to begin with.

Per the recently established CBA, 14 teams will receive competitive-balance picks every year. Teams qualify for these picks by placing among the bottom 10 of major-league teams either by (a) revenue or (b) market size. According to Forbes, the Cardinals actually place among the top 10 of all clubs when it comes to revenue. They rank 24th, however, by market size. Therefore, they qualify for an extra pick.

While there seems to be much consternation about the Cardinals’ hacking penalty right now, wait 18 months. If the club loses Lance Lynn to free agency and then receives a better comp in addition to their own normal pick, they’ll possess three picks among the top-40 selections.

Question of the hacking scandal aside, there are questions about whether the Cards deserve any comp picks in the first place. By one definition, they certainly do: they meet the criteria agreed upon by the league.

There are plausible arguments against the characterization of the club as a “small-market” franchise, however. Most of them begin with a discussion of fanbase. Consider: here are the annual attendance averages per team over the last five years, with data collected from Baseball-Reference.

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The St. Louis Cardinals’ former director of amateur scouting, Chris Correa, is serving 46 months in jail for gaining unauthorized access to the Astros’ player information/evaluation database, codenamed Ground Control. A few days ago, MLB announced St. Louis’s penalty: they’d have to send $2 million and their top two draft picks to Houston.

From a network-security perspective, the case is interesting. It illustrates how difficult true network security really is, which raises the strong possibility that another team will attempt this in the future (if indeed one isn’t doing it right now).

Here’s a timeline of the incident up until it was made public:

• March 2013 – April 2014: Correa accesses Ground Control using passwords of various Astros staff. (Source: David Barron and Jake Kaplan of the Houston Chronicle.)
• June 2014: Deadspin posts leaked documents that were retrieved from Ground Control, mostly regarding trades or potential trades during the 2013 season. This action causes the Astros to contact MLB, who contacts the FBI to begin an investigation into the breach. (Source: Derrick Goold and Robert Partrick of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.)
• June 2015: Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times reports that the Cardinals are the prime suspects in this investigation.

Why didn’t the Astros detect the unauthorized access themselves? I don’t know anything about how they ran their security team, so I can only speculate. But I do have several years of experience in the network-security industry. I’ll use those to provide a perspective.

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It’s easy to look at the overall team projections. Check them out. They’re right over there! (I’m pointing.) More than anything else, you care about wins, and, therefore, also losses. Team record is everything. Just about, anyway. Happiness is strongly correlated to your favorite team’s winning percentage.

It takes more work to dive into projected team components. Earlier this very week, I did that to show that the Royals have moved away from the style they made so famous. I also did that to show that the Astros have suddenly become a contact-oriented offensive ballclub. It takes more work, and it’s also of lesser significance, you could say. Overall value is overall value, and components, by definition, are only a part. It makes perfect sense why most people don’t go beyond just the projected standings.

Yet components are interesting, if only because we care about how teams will play. They can tell you who might win by slugging the crap out of the ball. They can tell you who might have a little advantage on the bases. They can tell you who might have a strikeout problem. And, defense? We can look at the defenses. Let’s do that right now!

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The St. Louis Cardinals lack stars. Sure, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright are well known and remain solid even as they age. Sure, Matt Carpenter has developed into an important member of the club. In terms of big-time production, though, the Cardinals have few options upon which they can reasonably rely.

Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the Cardinals support this observation: per ZiPS, no position player on the St. Louis roster is likely to produce more than 3.1 WAR in 2017; only one pitcher is projected for more than 2.1 wins. That pitcher — and, incidentally, the only player on the Cardinals whom one might reasonably classify as a “star” — is Carlos Martinez.

Yesterday, the Cardinals very wisely locked that star up. Martinez and the club agreed to a five-year extension worth a guaranteed $51 million. The deal includes two options that could keep Martinez in St. Louis through 2023 and buy out four years of free agency, leading to a possible total value of $85.5 million.

A week ago, I suggested that the Wil Myers deal — for six years, $83 million guaranteed — indicated that extensions for players who possessed more than three and less than four years of service time might become a lot more expensive. This contract appears to provide evidence to the contrary.

In that post I noted that, among such position players, only five had recently reached contract extensions — and that those were either upside bets on riskier players like Michael Brantley and Josh Harrison or big-money contracts for big-time players like Freddie Freeman. The one contract in the middle involved Dee Gordon and his five-year deal for $50 million, an agreement that also includes an option. Martinez’s contract is like Gordon’s, except with an additional free-agent year surrendered by the player.

On the pitching side, meanwhile, there’s virtually no precedent for this type of deal.

Martinez’s deal breaks the record for biggest guarantee to a starting pitcher entering arbitration, a distinction which previously belonged to Corey Kluber after he was guaranteed $38.5 million heading into the 2015 season. That deal might also potentially last seven seasons. At the time, however, Kluber was a super-2 player. He was entering arbitration for the first time, but he was still four years from free agency, unlike Martinez’s three. He was also coming off a Cy Young Award and heading into his age-29 season, meaning he was four years older than Martinez is now. Kluber’s deal provided some guaranteed income, but also gave away all of his prime years: he won’t be a free agent until after his age-35 season.

That isn’t the case for Martinez, who enters just his age-25 season. Even if all of the options are exercised, Martinez will still head to free agency after his age-31 season, the same age as Zack Greinke when he signed his $206 million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks.

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If baseball teams had 10 man rosters, the Washington Nationals might be the team to beat heading into 2017. With an enviable group of star talent, the top of the Nationals roster compares favorably with just about any other group in MLB. For instance, here are our projections for the just the 10 best players on the Cubs, Dodgers, and Nationals, who we have forecasted as the three best teams in baseball.
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Yesterday, the Colorado Rockies traded right-hander Eddie Butler to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for a modestly promising relief prospect (James Farris) and the 28th international bonus slot.

Even as recently as last year, the notion of such a move would have seemed improbable. Butler appeared twice — as recently as 2015 — on Baseball America’s top-100 prospects list. The Rockies’ rotation, meanwhile, has been quite poor, producing the second-lowest collective WAR in the majors over the last five years. They haven’t been a club, in other words, that had the luxury of giving up on a promising young pitcher.

But Colorado’s rotation has improved rapidly, while Butler’s stock has declined just as quickly. In the end, general manager Jeff Bridich concluded there wasn’t space on the roster for Eddie Butler. He made a deal.

But this isn’t just a late-January transaction that ought to be forgotten. Because Butler has shown promise. Let’s instead follow his story up to this point. He deserves it after toiling in Coors for so long, and it might provide us a glimpse of his future.

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The Angels, Mariners, and Rangers are all situated within a game of each other in FanGraphs’ projected standings.

The Blue Jays, Orioles, Royals, Tigers, and Yankees are also all bunched together with the those AL West clubs, all situated within in just three games of each other, suggesting there could be a crowded and parity-laden AL Wild Card race.

Any added value could be significant. For the Texas Rangers, there might be good news on that front. A full season of Jonathan Lucroy – who was acquired last summer – could offer additional benefits for Texas beyond the 3.7 WAR projected for him in the ZiPS forecasts.

Earlier this week, Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister was asked by the Dallas Morning News about the benefits of Lucroy having a full season to work with the Rangers pitching staff.

“I think that it’s definitely going to be a benefit. He’s going to be able to learn the core guys that were here last year a little better. Obviously there’s some new guys coming in, but just to put his stamp and his brand on what he likes to do behind the plate and how he likes to call a guy. But we had a guy in Robinson Chirinos behind the plate that was a quality catcher too that helped these guys out. But I think the addition of Lucroy and what he’ll be able to do, just him as a hitter but also his game planning and our overall philosophy all year long will be a plus.”

To quantify all the ways Lucroy and the Rangers might benefit from Lucroy’s ability to work with his pitchers in February rather than on the fly in August is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Last season, was a different kind of year for Lucroy.

Consider: from 2011 to 2015, Lucroy never caught more than 22 different pitchers in any given season. In 2016, meanwhile, Lucroy caught 40 different pitchers, including 18 new Rangers teammates after coming over from the deadline.

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I talk about James Paxton a lot. I talk about him a lot because I like him a lot. I’m probably the biggest Paxton fan on staff. I might be the biggest Paxton fan on the continent. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I have more confidence in 2017 James Paxton than James Paxton does. Why am I losing my mind over a 28-year-old with less than 300 big-league innings? This is basically why:

That plot shows every starter who threw at least 50 innings in each of the last two years. I’ve highlighted the Paxton dot in blue. This one is easy to eyeball. By strike rate, Paxton had the biggest year-to-year improvement. And by average fastball speed, Paxton also had the biggest year-to-year improvement. That’s a hell of a one-two punch, and it makes you wonder about the Paxton breakout. More specifically, does this make Paxton a breakout candidate, or did the breakout already happen? “Mid-breakout” might be the best way to describe him. He’s on the way, but he could be more consistent.

In the plot above, Paxton stands way out from the crowd. Yet that doesn’t make him the only pitcher of interest. Who else gained both strikes and speed? Spoiler alert: Read this post’s headline.

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