If I were to rank the months of the year in terms of difficulty of writing for FanGraphs, February would probably be #1; there’s just nothing going on in the second month of the year. The off-season is over, only the most meaningless parts of spring training are going on, teams aren’t aggressively signing long term contracts yet, and there’s just generally no real news on which to comment. February is the best month for me to take vacation, basically.

But behind February, April might be the second hardest month to write for FanGraphs, because while we have games to watch and data to look at, the overriding reminder of history that is drawing conclusions about anything this early in the season is probably foolish. Last April, Justin Upton was Babe Ruth. Last April, the Texas Rangers looked like the best team in baseball. April games matter in the standings and April performances do have some predictive value, but the samples are so small that we should rarely be willing to believe that a player has made a dramatic transformation from what they were before hand. Realistically, the conclusion of almost every data point we currently have is “That’s interesting; who knows what it actually means?”

But we still have to write about baseball in April, and we have to try and make it as interesting as we can. You don’t want to read five or six pieces a day that tell you to all the numbers right now are useless any more than we want to write them. But most of the numbers right now are useless, so we hunt for stories that are interesting and numbers that might be less useless than the rest. The overarching conclusion is still Beware Small Sample Size, but there are things that are least worth monitoring going forward. They might not continue, but if they do, it’s news. This is one of those things.

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In the first 2014 regular-season baseball game played in the Northern Hemisphere, the Padres hosted the Dodgers. A 1-0 game became a 1-1 game late, and then Yasmani Grandal got on and stole third base. Moments later he scored the go-ahead run, and the Padres held on to win 3-1. That steal happened to be the first of Grandal’s major-league career. It also happened to be the first of Grandal’s professional career. Grandal is a slow-moving catcher and he’s coming off knee surgery. You’re right to identify this as an unlikely turn of events. It was also, in part, the consequence of an unlikely turn of events.

Not long ago I wrote a few posts about the challenge of bunting. Bunting, see, has the reputation of being something absurdly easy to do, but it’s really quite hard, even if certain position players don’t do it enough. Sunday night’s attempted bunting was a mixed bag. There were seven attempts overall. There were two successful sacrifices. There was one blown sacrifice, where the lead runner was thrown out. Two bunts went foul. Another bunt went foul into a glove on the fly. One attempted bunt was missed completely. That missed bunt, by the Padres, was instrumental in the Padres earning the win.

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“I don’t like it, because it hates me.”

That was Dodger catcher A.J. Ellis‘ half-joking reply to me last weekend in Arizona, before the team left for Australia, when I asked him whether he was aware of the recent work on pitch framing or put any stock into it whatsoever. Ellis has a reputation as a particularly thoughtful player, so I didn’t really expect him to say that he had no idea what I was talking about, but then, I’m sure we’ve all read Eno Sarris’ recent Hardball Times piece about the language of the clubhouse, and how bringing up things even as relatively straightforward as FIP and walk rate can very quickly get you on the wrong side of the room if asked in the wrong way or to the wrong player.

Pitch framing, of course, is what passes for the new hot thing in sabermetrics these days, and we’ve written about it extensively here; Jeff Sullivan has made something of a cottage industry of the topic, as have other sites, and for good reason. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s gotten people hired. It significantly changes how we value — or at least how we should value — catchers. We don’t have to necessarily buy into the exact ranges that some studies have come out with, because some of those extremes would indicate that the best framers are providing something like MVP-quality value to their teams, but the effects are real. It’s one of those very unique skills that only a catcher can offer, and we’re finally beginning to properly understand and measure it.

So what interested me was how much, if any, real-world application this work was having. You’d think that players and teams would jump at the chance to learn more about their performances and how to improve them, but you’d also think that in 2014, major league teams wouldn’t employ managers who actively avoid any strategic viewpoint created in the last four decades.

That being the case, do catchers buy into this? If so, is there a capacity to improve?

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Maybe you’ve seen the commercials and are tired of them. Maybe you didn’t like the gimp interview. Maybe you think the hair is ridiculous. That’s fine with Brian Wilson. There might be some ancillary benefits to the way he portrays himself on and off the field, but this is more about his work on the mound. Because, to him, the most important facet of pitching is confidence.

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If it seems like we’ve written about the Dodgers second base competition a lot this offseason, it’s because we have. Two months ago, I looked into the questionable depth the team had at the position; a few weeks ago, Eno Sarris revisited the situation to see whether it would present a problem. Now, barely more than a week before the team kicks off the season in Australia, there appears to be a winner, at least if you believe this beat writer or that one or that one, and it’s not $28 million Cuban import Alexander Guerrero: it’s former shortstop Dee Gordon, who has 3.2 career innings at the position.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Dodgers or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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Baseball, without question, is going to be a worse game without Mariano Rivera. It wasn’t just that Rivera was consistently excellent. It’s that he was also unwaveringly humble and gracious, being the rare sort of Yankee you could like even if you rooted for a team of non-Yankees. But Rivera’s retirement does, at least, open up some questions that previously wouldn’t have been up for debate. When it comes to picking the best at something, Rivera’s absence gives a chance to somebody else.

I was asked in my Tuesday chat to identify the new most dominant pitch in baseball. Before, the answer was automatic: Mariano Rivera’s cutter. It was that way for nearly two decades, as Rivera rode one masterful pitch to glory and a certain place in the Hall of Fame. Rivera never really declined, and his cutter topped the list because of his command, his results and his longevity. But now we’re able to entertain the idea of other pitchers and other pitches. With Rivera out of the picture, choosing another pitch isn’t blasphemous. The way I see it, there are two contenders.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers signed Cuban emigre and infielder Alexander Guerrero this offseason, with a view (it would seem) towards installing him at second base for the 2014 season. Because Guerrero didn’t participate in the most recent World Baseball Classic and because there’s little in the way of other extant footage of him and because there’s only so much his Cuban league stats can tell us — regardless of how responsibly they’re translated — there’s naturally an air of mystery surrounding him. Indeed, Guerrero’s two plate appearances during the Dodgers’ spring-training opener on Wednesday against Arizona were the first which offered competitive footage of him in any sort of broadly available way.

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The Dodgers have a problem at second base. The Dodgers don’t really have a problem. This’ll make sense soon, I promise.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Dodgers rotation from a fantasy perspective for RotoGraphs. At that time, the Dodgers had a pool of starters than went 10 deep. Now they have 11 potential starters. Most teams would be satisfied with 10 starters. They might look to add some minor league depth, like a Rodrigo Lopez type, but they probably wouldn’t give out any more major league contracts.

However, the Dodgers have reason to worry about their depth. Chad Billingsley is currently rehabbing from injury. Prospects Zach Lee and Ross Stripling might not be ready in 2014, or the Dodgers may prefer not to rush either pitcher. Stephen Fife is a decent swing man, but the Dodgers would probably prefer to avoid turning to Matt Magill. Josh Beckett and Dan Haren are penciled into the rotation, although both pitchers were less than stable in recent seasons. Beckett in particular is coming off a nerve impingement surgery that limited him to eight starts last season.

So what have the Dodgers done to combat the flakiness of their rotation depth? Why they’ve hired yet another pitcher who fits into the back of the rotation and comes with health concerns.

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