Things have been enthusiastic around the Marlins lately. They surprised the industry by managing to lock up Giancarlo Stanton, and then they turned their attention to trying to extend a handful of other promising young big-leaguers. Also, the Marlins swore to improve the immediate big-league roster, signaling that they want to get to the playoffs. There’s been a sense that, for the first time, the Marlins are serious about getting good and staying good, and paying money to do so. The Marlins are trying to convince everyone they’re entering a new era. Which is all well and good, until you make a misstep in trying to improve. That’s the real dangerous bit.

So just to restate: #Marlins getting Dee Gordon and Dan Haren from #dodgers for Heaney, Kike Hernandez, Austin Barnes and Chris Hatcher

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) December 11, 2014

I’m not sure if this is the worst move of the offseason. If it is, I’m not sure if this will remain the worst move of the offseason. But my later response continues to match my initial response: Andrew Friedman and the Dodgers are making out like bandits, successfully selling Dee Gordon about as high as possible. The Dodgers are losing a probable regression candidate, about to enter his Super-Two seasons. They’re getting probably the Marlins’ best prospect, and then even more to boot. The Dodgers picked up some more long-term assets. The Marlins might not have gotten better at all.

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Matt Kemp was an atrocious center fielder. There’s really no way around that. Of the 60 center fielders with at least 6,000 innings played since 2002, only the decline years of Ken Griffey, Jr. and Bernie Williams show up as being worse. His 2010 is the single worst DRS ranking of any player season we have on record dating back to 2008. We generally use Rafael Palmeiro’s 1999 Gold Glove in a season where he played only 28 games in the field as the paragon of atrocious award choices, but it could have just as easily been Kemp winning not one but two such awards.

That was true before the endless run of injuries — notably multiple hamstring pulls, a severely injured ankle and a badly damaged shoulder — that sidetracked his career, and it’s even more true now. At 30, with years of injuries behind him and speed that isn’t what it once was, Kemp can no longer outrun his mistakes and questionable instincts in center. You know that. We know that. The Dodgers know that, having forced him out of center in the middle of a May road trip when the immediate alternatives were no better than Andre Ethier and Scott Van Slyke. Kemp himself might not know that, having made noises he wanted to return to center, but Jeff did a wonderful job here back in July explaining just why that was such a bad idea. Whether or not the Dodgers trade him or hang on to him, it seems all but certain that Kemp will never be a regular center fielder again.

Now Kemp is a corner outfielder, and that’s opened up some new questions, issues that are particularly relevant as the Dodgers field endless trade discussions this winter. They have to weigh the positive and negatives between the facts that he’s still owed $107 million, that the team has a well-known outfield glut, that Hanley Ramirez has taken part of the Dodger offense with him to Boston, that second-half adjustments made him one of the best hitters in the game down the stretch… and that by the metrics, he’s not seen as being a good corner outfielder, either.

That’s an important distinction, because as teams try to figure out how much to weight his hot second half and year of full health against his future projections, what he can offer on defense plays a big part in that. There’s a big reason that his very good 140 wRC+ in 2014 led to only a 1.8 WAR, because it was weighed down by 1,195 innings of awful defense. Now we have a question to attack — how much of Kemp’s awful rating was because of his time in center, a position he’ll never play? How much of his lousy rating in the corners can we rely on because of sample size? Is he just a DH with a glove, or is he worse because teams will actually let him play the outfield rather than forcing him to DH?

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There’s an awful lot you can learn from the way that a player gets pitched. Often, you could just look at the player’s statistics, I suppose, but let’s make believe we live in a world without publicly-accessible performance statistics. All right, so, now we’re imagining. Last year, no regular player saw a higher rate of fastballs than Ben Revere. Why would that be? No regular player saw a lower rate of fastballs than Josh Hamilton. Why would that be? First basemen saw far, far fewer fastballs than American League pitchers. If all we had was this information, we could still interpret it, figuring out clues as to how the hitters are perceived.

Of course, it’s not just about fastball rate. You can look at fastballs, or you can look at pitches in the zone, or you can look at types of pitches in particular parts of the zone — there’s a lot you can examine. Players get pitched according to the scouting reports that teams have on those players, and since we can’t look at those scouting reports, we can use the information we have to examine them indirectly.

One thing you can do is look at a guy’s pitch patterns. Yet another powerful indicator of something can be a change in a guy’s pitch patterns. What that would suggest is a change in a guy’s ability level or approach. Yasiel Puig, for example, was pitched differently in 2014 from how he was pitched as a rookie. That’s because Puig evidently corrected a weakness against inside fastballs. If we look at drop in rate of fastballs seen, no hitter saw a bigger drop between 2013 and 2014 than J.D. Martinez. There’s a pretty simple explanation: Martinez changed his swing mechanics and became an out-of-nowhere slugger. So pitchers found themselves having to be more careful.

At the other end, Mike Trout saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents tried to seize a perceived weakness against high heat. Allen Craig saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents identified that he was missing bat speed and couldn’t get around on hard pitches in. And yet, of all the players, no one saw a bigger year-to-year fastball-rate increase than Hanley Ramirez. Ramirez was productive, and Ramirez just signed a big contract with the Red Sox, but clearly, pitchers saw him differently in the season recently completed.

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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A month and a half ago, Yasiel Puig was struggling. In the playoff series against the Cardinals, Puig struck out seven times in a row at one point, and there was a pretty clear book on him: try to beat him with heat, away. He was having trouble catching up, so the Cardinals were having less trouble putting him away, and that’s among the reasons the Dodgers were unable to advance. Anyway, nevermind the bigger context. Nevermind the Dodgers. It’s interesting how Puig was being pitched.

Because the book on Puig late in 2014 was sort of the opposite of the book on Puig late in 2013. A year ago, it seemed like pitchers solved Puig by busting him with fastballs inside. That was the scouting report at the time, and there’s no reason to think it wasn’t valid. It’s just, accurate scouting reports can be temporary scouting reports, sometimes. Over the course of 12 months, Yasiel Puig changed his own book.

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I understand why the BBWAA announces finalists for awards before it announces the winners — they’re trying to build some suspense, some anticipation, and, okay, that’s fine, even if the finalists don’t tell us much we couldn’t predict. For example, we’ve long known the AL Cy Young was going to come down to Felix Hernandez vs. Corey Kluber. All the non-contenders have been officially eliminated, which does nothing. It’s even funnier when you get a race that isn’t a race at all, like Jose Abreu and the AL Rookie of the Year. Or, say, Clayton Kershaw and the NL Cy Young. According to the BBWAA, Kershaw is a finalist, along with Johnny Cueto and Adam Wainwright. The ESPN forecast is somewhat torn between Felix and Kluber, in one league. In the other league, it’s less torn:

Unanimous, in other words. And this is the way things are likely to play out. Clayton Kershaw ought to get every single first-place vote, because of the gap between himself and the others. You can eyeball the gap if you want, but we can also put some numbers to the idea. What would it have taken for Kershaw to come away resembling Cueto or Wainwright?

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The days of having to rail against runs batted in as a particularly useful indicator of individual offensive value are long behind us. That does not mean there might not be potentially interesting research to do on situational hitting or the like, but simply that the straight-up use of RBI is not something that really needs to be debated.

Nonetheless, it is still interesting to see what sorts of hitters can accumulate high numbers of RBI, something we recognize with an award named for two players who managed big RBI numbers despite less than impressive advanced hitting metrics: the John Carter-Tony Bautista Award.

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Nearly a year ago on these very electronic pages, I wrote a post entitled “The Dodgers And Too Many Outfielders,” investigating the fact that the Dodgers had four starting outfielders — Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier — for three spots, a situation that would only get more complicated when top prospect Joc Pederson arrived. A move, it seemed, was a necessity, and I counted down six ways it could happen.

A year later, a lot has changed, both in terms of how some of those players are viewed and in what outfield positions they play. But what never did change is that Ned Colletti wasn’t able to move any of his veterans, and now Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi and company are left with an even more constricting situation. Puig, Kemp, Crawford, and Ethier are still Dodgers. Pederson put up the first 30/30 season in the PCL in decades on his way to winning the league MVP and Rookie of the Year awards before making his major league debut in September. Most unexpectedly, lightly-regarded backup Scott Van Slyke became one of the league’s most valuable bench players and clearly deserves more time.

Four outfielders? If only. These Dodgers have six, and if we thought a move last year was a probability, now it seems like more of an imperative. But how is this going to resolve itself? Here we go again.

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Back in September, we announced the creation of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, in order to have an outlet to honor the player we felt performed at the highest level of any player in Major League Baseball each season. We wanted to try and avoid a lot of the semantical arguments about the meaning of different awards, and eliminate many of the divisions between leagues or player types, and simply recognize the most outstanding performer of the season.

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Due in large part to Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, analytical baseball ideology has often sold as a necessity for low-revenue franchises to compete with teams who have vastly more resources. The A’s story was written as brains overcoming riches, and a number of teams in smaller markets decided to emulate their success. Over the past decade, the front offices most known for their analytical decision making processes inlucded teams like the A’s, Rays, Indians, Astros, and Cardinals, and because of this, Moneyball was the catch-all phrase for poor teams that used analytics to compete with teams that didn’t need it.

Except that story hasn’t been entirely true for quite a while now. It’s an easy story to tell, because low revenue teams have used these kinds of tools to allow themselves to make up for their revenue deficits, but the notion of analytics being only for small market teams is outdated and now just not correct. The Red Sox were probably the first big market team to really buy into the combination of efficient spending while maintaining a very high payroll, but the Yankees weren’t far behind, with a significant analytical department of their own. And of course, the Dodgers already hired one analytically-oriented GM, with Paul DePodesta running the team in 2004-2005, though that didn’t last.

When the Cubs new ownership wanted to build a sustainable winner, they poached Theo Epstein from Boston, and are now not too far away from being a very scary competitor for the rest of the NL Central. And now, the Dodgers have lured Rays GM Andrew Friedman out of Tampa Bay, making him the President of Baseball Operations for the team with the largest payroll in baseball. With Friedman heading west, arguably the four most historic franchises in MLB — and certainly four of the teams with the highest revenue potential — fit the mold of a Moneyball front office. This kind of structure is no longer the domain of poor somewhat less rich teams, and this transition serves to make the Dodgers an even more formidable opponent in the NL West.

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