By most measures, the 2017 season was a very good one for the Brewers. On the heels of back-to-back sub-.500 seasons, the first of which saw them shift into rebuilding mode, they spent over two months atop the NL Central, from mid-May to late July, and remained in the Wild Card hunt until the season’s final weekend. Their 86 wins and second-place finish in the NL Central represented the franchise’s best showing since 2011. They made a big splash in late January, signing free-agent center fielder Lorenzo Cain and trading for left fielder Christian Yelich. They made some lower-cost moves as well, most notably adding a solid starter, Jhoulys Chacin, to a rotation that finished in the NL’s top five in ERA and WAR.

It’s not unreasonable to think that those improvements would put a team that missed a playoff spot by a single game in the thick of this year’s race. Yet, as of publication, the Brewers are projected to finish just 78-84. What in the name of Bernie Brewer is going on?

It bears repeating that projections are not destiny and that, at the team level, the error bars on a given year of preseason projections tend to average six to eight wins in either direction. The 2017 Brewers were one of those teams that push such averages higher, because as of Opening Day last year, they were forecast to win just 70 games. In terms of overachievement, they matched the Diamondbacks (77 projected wins, 93 actual wins) for the majors’ largest discrepancy; the Giants, projected for 88 wins but finishing with 64, had the largest discrepancy in the other direction.

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Right before the start of spring training, Cincinnati prospect Nick Senzel received a phone call at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. It was from Reds headquarters. The club had a question for its top rookie-eligible player: could he handle shortstop?

“I said, ‘Yeah,’” Senzel told FanGraphs recently in Arizona. “And they got me there now.”

Even before taking the call, the No. 2 pick of the 2016 June draft was taking ground balls at third, second, and shortstop — and even fly balls in the outfield — on the playing surface of Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the baseball home of his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. A third baseman in college, Senzel wanted to make himself as versatile as possible entering this season.

It was prescient planning, as the Reds have since begun one of the great experiments of the spring.

As players advance through professional baseball, as they age at the major-league level, they typically move down the defensive spectrum. What is so interesting about Senzel playing shortstop, even if it’s short-lived, is that it represntns a case of a player moving up the spectrum.

There is an argument to be made that more teams should be identifying players who can move to more challenging positions. Why? Because over the last decade, about 20% of defensive opportunities — as in batted balls in play — have evaporated. In this three-true-outcomes environment, it’s easier to hide a bat, to trade some glove for bat, when the ball is less of a threat to reach the field of play.

There were 60,249 “plays” by defenders in 2007, according to FanGraphs data. Last season, there were just 49,809 — or roughly 10,000 fewer.

Consider opportunity trends by position:

It’s not just Senzel. Paul DeJong, who appeared at a variety of positions during his junior campaign at Illinois State, received over half the Cardinals’ starts at shortstop last season. Lonnie Chisenhall and Jason Kipnis were deployed in center at times in 2017, aided by a staff that recorded the highest strikeout rate of all time. Dee Gordon is transitioning to center field in Seattle.

Could it work? Could teams benefit from more aggressive defensive assignments? Could it be the next big thing? Or at least a little thing at no cost to clubs ever in search of efficiency and hidden value?

***

Senzel believes he can stick at short and has ambitions to make the team as the club’s starter out of spring training, although the realities of how clubs manipulate service time make that all but impossible. Still, Senzel reported early to camp. He’s worked with Barry Larkin. He’s participated every day in a particular drill where rubber balls are thrown off a wall, forcing Senzel to quickly reset his feet and transfer the ball into throwing positions.

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The Minnesota Twins continued a productive offseason over the weekend, signing Lance Lynn to a bargain-rate one-year, $12 million deal. Lynn turned down a $17.4 million qualifying offer from the Cardinals in November. He also reportedly turned down higher guarantees from other teams, per Jon Morosi. 

Not clear regarding those other offers is whether the average annual values of the contracts would have been equivalent or if Lynn would have had to forfeit the opportunity to explore free agency next offseason in exchange for a few extra million dollars. Whatever the case, it appears as though Lance Lynn will have to try his hand at free agency next winter if his ambition is to find a long-term home.

As for the Twins, they get great value on a player seemingly overlooked by the market. Indeed, the club seems to have specialized in this sort of deal over the winter. Heading into the offseason, for example, the crowd believed Addison Reed was in line for $27 million, the third-highest guarantee among relievers behind only the figures estimated for Wade Davis and Greg Holland. Reed ultimately agreed to join the Twins for just $16.75 million in mid-January — or less than the overall deals received by seven other relievers who’d signed at that point in the offseason.

The addition of Logan Morrison represents another instance in which the Twins have taken advantage of a slow market. The crowd expected Morrison to sign for $20 million. At the end of February, however, Derek Falvey et al. signed him for just one-third that amount.

Finally, there’s Lynn. Projected by the crowd to receive $60 million over four seasons, the right-hander settled for 20% of that figure. When the offseason began, it was reasonable to think that the Twins would need to guarantee $107 million to acquire all three players mentioned here. With just $35.25 million, though, the club signed the trio at a rate discounted by 67% from initial estimates.

The Twins’ bargain-shopping was not limited to free agency: the team also took on Jake Odorizzi and his $6.3 million salary in exchange for a prospect of little significance. Odorizzi went to the Twins not because of their willingness to provide Tampa Bay with considerable talent but because they were willing to pay his salary.

There are some logical explanations for the Twins’ apparent good fortune. For example, all the players acquired by the club come with significant question marks, and none are currently projected to provide more than two wins this season. That said, each possesses some kind of upside and a relatively recent track record of success. The combined five wins the club is projected to receive will cost just $33 million in 2018 salaries. Given the recent cost of wins on the free-agent market, the Twins’ efficiency should be lauded. More important than getting a good deal, though, they have also obtained solid major leaguers at areas of need.

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Mickey Haefner, man.

*****

That left-handed knuckleballer. Hit Ted Williams with a pitch in a tune-up game before Teddy’s only World Series. Williams said his arm “swelled up like a boiled egg,” whatever that means, then went just 5-for-25. All singles. Red Sox lost in seven. Thanks to ol’ Mickey.

*****

It wasn’t his idea to have the Red Sox scrimmage against the American League All-Stars while the National League had their best-of-three playoff to decide their World Series representative. Still. How did Ted Williams not have him killed? How did Mickey Haefner survive long enough to make history?

*****

*****

Paul Lukas admitted the bullpen historical record is imprecise. He also wrote that a 1950 newspaper report mentioning a “little red auto” was the first known instance of a report on bullpen vehicles. Then you found it: Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1950. You trust Lukas. You trust the Tribune. Cleveland 5, White Sox 2. Cleveland didn’t need a reliever that day. White Sox brought in Haefner first. Might as well figure it was Mickey freakin’ Haefner.

*****

That game was in Cleveland. The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, 2d ed. sounds trustworthy and regal. Said Cleveland GM Hank Greenberg came up with the whole bullpen cart idea.

*****

Mickey damn Haefner.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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TEMPE, Ariz. — The center-field fence at the Angels’ spring-training home sits 420 feet away from home plate. Beyond it are craggy, red-rock hills, and nearer but still beyond the playing field, a green, aluminum batter’s eye that has a height perhaps around 30 feet.

At Angels camp last week, I asked the club’s hitting coach, Eric Hinske, if he’s experienced any “Wow,” slack-jawed moments while observing the early days of Shohei Ohtani as a major-league hitter.

All the time, Hinske says.

“He hits the ball over the batting eye like with every swing in batting practice,” Hinske said.

To get a sense of what that swing looks like at its best, here’s footage of all Ohtani’s NPB home runs:

The power — at least the BP variety — is real.

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Justin Upton hits the ball in the air. Just over 63% of his batted balls were classified either as liners or flies in 2017, the 28th-highest mark among 144 qualified hitters. His career mark of roughly 60% is nearly as high. At a time where launch angle is all the rage, the 30-year-old outfielder is doing what a middle-of-the-order hitter is expected to do. That includes output. Upton is coming off a campaign where his loft-efficient right-handed stroke produced 109 RBIs (yes, those are still counted), a .540 slugging percentage, and a 137 wRC+.

It would be inaccurate to say that J-Up is following a trend.

“I don’t try to hit the ball in the air,” Upton told me recently at the Angels’ spring camp in Tempe. “To be brutally honest with you, I’ve never in my career tried to hit the ball in the air. I’ve always tried to hit line drives, and if you just miss a line drive it becomes a deep fly ball.”

He hits a lot of deep fly balls. The lucrative contract he signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in November came on the heels of a 35-dinger explosion. The total represented a career high, but it wasn’t an anomaly. Over the past five seasons, Upton has bopped 148 home runs, 11th most during that stretch.

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The Mariners made the Ichiro Suzuki signing official on Wednesday, returning the 44-year-old outfielder to the team for whom he starred from 2001 until mid-2012, when he was traded to the Yankees. Aside from a genuinely useful 2016 season in a part-time role — highlighted by his 3,000th major league hit — he hasn’t been a very productive player over the past five years, totaling 2.5 WAR over the span, and he may not have much to offer the Mariners beyond wisdom, leadership, warm fuzzies, and other soft factors. Still, there are worse ways to end a storied career, as Rian Watt pointed out when the news of Ichiro’s westward return first broke.

The history of such homecomings among Hall of Fame-bound players isn’t filled with many resounding successes, and in Seattle’s case, the most immediate example that comes to mind represents a worst-case scenario in this realm: an old, underperforming player outright embarrassing himself in some way, as Ken Griffey Jr. did in 2010. Junior hit just .184/.250/.204 without a homer before being released on June 2, shortly after he allegedly fell asleep in the clubhouse and missed a pinch-hitting opportunity. That’s no way to go, whether or not you’re a member of the 600 home-run club.

Via a quick skim through annals of the game, I counted 13 other stints in which a Hall of Famer wrapped up his career with a return to his original team, plus one that deserves an asterisk. That count doesn’t include players who finished with the team for whom they became stars after previously breaking in elsewhere, as was the case with Early Wynn coming back to the Indians, Dennis Eckersley to the Red Sox, or Fergie Jenkins and the Cubs. Nor does it include players who moved on again after their second stint with their original team, such as Greg Maddux with the Cubs, Tim Raines with the Expos, or Ivan Rodriguez with the Rangers. Listed chronologically, these are the most noteworthy.

Eddie Collins (A’s 1906-14, 1927-30)

During his first run with the A’s, the Columbia University-educated Collins played the keystone in Connie Mack’s “$100,000 Infield,” which led the team to four pennants and three championships. But after losing the 1914 World Series to the “Miracle” Braves, Mack broke up the team for financial reasons — one of the earliest tank jobs. Sold to the White Sox for $50,000, Collins spent 12 years on the South Side, helping the team to pennants in 1917 and 1919 (he was not part of the World Series fix), becoming the sixth player to collect his 3,000th hit in 1925, and serving as player-manager for that season and the next.

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Matt Harvey’s first appearance of the spring quickly became a punchline. Back on February 8, the New York Daily News‘ Peter Botte tweeted a photo of the 28-year-old righty throwing a bullpen alongside Jacob deGrom and looking particularly paunchy thanks to the way the wind blew his t-shirt. Even this scribe couldn’t resist throwing a jab to the midsection. To be fair, Harvey hardly looks like the second coming of Bartolo Colon, and four weeks later, with the Grapefruit League season underway, he at least appears to be a hurler who can help the Mets rather than harm them.

Granted, that sense is based upon all of two early spring outings against sub-.500 teams whose offenses project to rank among the majors’ bottom-third (namely the Braves and Tigers) when at full strength. Thus far, those offenses have been patchworks of established major leaguers and career minor leaguers, with the odd prospect thrown in — all still looking to regain their timing because, you know, it’s March (or actually February 28 in the case of the Braves outing).

Facing the Tigers on Monday at Port St. Lucie, Harvey threw 48 pitches over three scoreless innings, allowing two hits, a sharp double by Derek Norris, and an infield dribbler by Jose Iglesias. He walked Miguel Cabrera in the first inning after getting squeezed on a borderline 96 mph fastball with the count at 1-2. That was his fastest pitch of the day, but he followed it with three straight balls. He struck out one, 28-year-old right fielder Jason Krizan, who’s spent the past three years bouncing between Double- and Triple-A.

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Over the past several years, we’ve seen a trend away from signing young stars to long-term extensions. As Bryce Harper and Manny Machado head to free agency in their mid-20s, Mookie Betts, Kris Bryant, and Francisco Lindor all appear on their way to the same. With stars saying no, teams have been forced to get creative, signing good players to extensions and taking more risk by signing players with very little service time in the majors. The Cardinals’ deal for their shortstop covering six years for $26 million along with two team options fits the bill on both accounts. Paul DeJong is a good player, but he has hardly proven himself with under a year in the majors.

The Cardinals have made a habit of such extensions, reaching agreements with Matt Carpenter, Allen Craig, Stephen Piscotty, and Kolten Wong in the recent past. Carpenter would have been a free agent this year without such a deal, and Wong is a solid player with the potential to provide considerably more value. Even when the contracts haven’t worked out, the Cardinals haven’t been troubled by them: they were able to deal Allen Craig, for example, before health derailed his career. The jury is still out on Stephen Piscotty, but the club netted two decent prospects when dealing him over the winter.

This deal, both in dollars and the proven quality of the player, mirrors the one for Tim Anderson and the White Sox a year ago.

Consider the following stat lines.

We have two young shortstops who strike out a lot and walk very little. DeJong has shown more power, while Anderson is the better baserunner and presumably better defender. (The sample size for the fielding metrics is too small to draw any conclusions from the numbers.) It remains way too early to pass judgment on the Anderson deal, as the potential benefit for the White Sox doesn’t really begin for another five years, but the first year did not go well. Anderson still struck out a ton, managed to walk even less, and his BABIP dropped by 50 points. He did put up good numbers on the basepaths, but his poor defensive numbers meant a basically replacement-level 0.2 WAR. Even with slightly above-average defense, he would still be a roughly average player. Paul DeJong carries some of those same risks.

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