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Justin Masterson is scheduled to be a free agent at the end of the 2014 season, but over the last few days, he’s made it clear that he hopes he never gets there. He wants to re-sign with the Indians, and in fact, he’s made them an offer, and one that seems pretty generous on the surface, to be honest.

According to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Masterson has asked the Indians for a three or four year extension in the range of $40 to $60 million. I think we can safely assume that a three year deal would be closer to the $40 million figure and a four year deal would be closer to $60 million. Just to make the math easy, let’s say that his offer is $40 million for three years with a $5 million buyout on the fourth year, making it either 3/$45M or 4/$60M, depending on if the option is picked up. That’s the kind of structure that would make sense given the range of numbers being tossed around.

And of course those numbers pale in comparison to what the Reds just gave Homer Bailey a few weeks ago. Bailey, also set to be a free agent at the end of the year, got $90 million for five years with a $5 million buyout on a sixth year option, so the Reds either paid 5/$95M or 6/$115M to keep Bailey in Cincinnati for the long term. Even the low end of Bailey’s total guarantee is 50% higher than the high end of Masterson’s reported asking price, making this seem like an obvious no-brainer for the Indians.

I even said as much on Twitter yesterday after reading the report on his request. But the more I look at it, the less sure I am that Masterson’s offer does represent a significant discount to the Indians. I think that instead, the Bailey deal may have skewed our perceptions for what a reasonable price point looks like for this situation.

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FanGraphs already had Inside Edge data from the past two seasons, but David Appelman rolled out an upgrade this week with new material showing up on the leaderboards and on player pages. It’s an exciting development, providing new stuff we get to play around with while we wait for reams of reliable information from the new MLBAM project in the future. Because there’s a new feature on FanGraphs, I feel somewhat obligated to put it to immediate use in a post. In this post, Giants shortstop Brandon Crawford will be your guide through the near-impossible.

All balls in play are classified by the likelihood of a play being made. It’s somewhat subjective, but the classifications are: Impossible, Remote, Unlikely, Even, Likely and Routine. Most balls in play make for routine outs. No defender has converted an impossible play, which I suppose is in keeping with the definition. Last year, 8.3% of remote plays were converted into outs. Digging deeper, 6.0% of remote plays were converted into outs by shortstops. Last season, there were 31 players who converted exactly two remote plays. There were six more players who converted exactly three. Aaron Hicks converted four. Brandon Crawford converted five.

Put another way: At least in theory, remote plays capture the most difficult, yet makeable, plays. Brandon Crawford was the 2013 league leader in the category, turning five (of 24) remote plays into outs. So, below, let’s go over those five remote plays, in chronological order. No, the point isn’t that Crawford is the best defensive shortstop in baseball. Let’s just be content to watch Crawford at his best. You can get back to thinking about Andrelton Simmons tomorrow.

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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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We have a new section on both the leaderboards and player pages that now displays Inside Edge fielding data.

Inside Edge scouts watch every play and grade how easy or difficult it is to successfully field on the following scale:

• Impossible (0%)
• Remote (1-10%)
• Unlikely (10-40%)
• About Even (40-60%)
• Likely (60-90%)
• Almost Certain / Certain (90-100%)

We’ve aggregated all the data and made it available for you to peruse on a player-by-player basis:

In addition, this data will be updated nightly during the 2014 season!

This morning, I presented some data on the off-season price of a projected win in free agency, noting that one could come to a reasonable conclusion ranging between $5 and $7 million per win, depending on preference for average versus median or how significantly to discount future spending. That was mostly just an explanation of the assumptions and a data dump, but there’s plenty more to say about the market price of a win, so let’s dig into the data a bit more.

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While there are still a few lingering holdouts — or, perhaps more simply, a few players who still aren’t yet convinced that they’re not worth what they’re asking for — the off-season is pretty much over at this point. In fact, we’re only a couple of weeks away from a pair of actual baseball games that count in the standings. The 2014 season is almost here, so we can begin to make some declarations about what we can learn from the recently completed off-season. And one of the things I like learning the most about is the economics of baseball’s closest proximation to a free market.

For every team, their off-season goal can essentially be drilled down to the attempt to purchase future wins. Whether they’re signing a free agent, making a trade, claiming a player on waivers, or even building academies in foreign countries, most decisions made by a baseball operations staff are in the pursuit of buying wins for their team on the field. They aren’t always wins that manifest in the short term, and the exchange of dollars for wins is not always so straight forward, but this is the transaction that front offices are hired to make. Buy wins, as many as you can afford.

The most obvious market for this exchange is free agency; players market themselves and the wins they can bring to an organization, and the team that bids the most usually lands the player. While players come in all shapes and sizes, they are all essentially selling the same product, just in different types of packaging. If a team finds one player’s asking price too high, they’ll simply buy their wins in a different form. Free agency is the great equalizer, allowing players of all varieties to sell themselves next to players who they are rarely compared against, and for the observing public to find out exactly what teams think different packages are worth.

The resulting bids can essentially be translated into dollars per wins, or $/WAR, as we often refer to it around here. And now that we’ve got most of the free agents signed, let’s look at what wins were going for over the winter.

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There are three primary benefits of spring training. One, all the players get to get ready for the regular season. Two, Arizona and Florida get to have people want to go there on purpose. Three, it’s like a two-minute warning for writers. It’s irrelevant, transitional baseball that reminds writers they’re running out of time to look back on the previous season. Right now, I can still get away with a post about stuff that happened in 2013. A month from now that’d be a waste of everyone’s time. So here’s a review of last season’s bunt doubles. If this doesn’t interest you, that’s fine, and soon enough we’ll have plenty of other posts about projections of the future that will turn out looking lousy in retrospect.

Here’s a fun fact for you: last year, there were more bunt doubles around baseball than Astros wins. That isn’t true, but here’s a fun fact that is true: last year, from September 13 onward, there were more bunt doubles around baseball than Astros wins. Two years ago, Quintin Berry bunted for a double for his first major-league hit. Juan Pierre also had a slap-bunt double, and that was it for the season. Last year, there were three legitimate bunt doubles. And to make things even more interesting, all three were different in structure and sequence. Below you’ll find .gifs, screenshots, and attempted explanations. Nothing here has been doctored, except for the players, who have probably been to the doctor.

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Well, this is something. At the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston this morning, Bob Bowman — CEO of MLB Adavanced Media — announced that they are creating an entirely new model to capture data at the MLB level. And it sounds pretty great.

Here’s a video example of what MLB hopes to be able to do with this data.

And a few comments from people involved with the building of this product.

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This post isn’t about Ervin Santana, who remains a free agent. This post was inspired by fly-ball pitchers, and, interestingly, Santana is no longer one of those, despite his reputation. Definitely, he’s still somewhat homer-prone, but his groundball rates have been creeping up over a few years. He’s pretty neutral, but still, people see him as this fly-ball guy, and so as rumors have flown around, people have questioned the wisdom of certain places being potential destinations. Would you really want a fly-ball guy in, say, Baltimore? Would you really want a fly-ball guy in Toronto? Those are pretty homer-friendly parks. In theory, they’re not suited to Santana’s skillset.

So there’s a question to research: how much does it matter? How much are fly-ball guys hurt by homer-friendly parks? How much do fly-ball guys benefit from non-homer-friendly parks? Beyond the simple park factors, of course. Everybody gives up more homers in more homer-friendly parks, but we know how to adjust for that. What can we say about fly-ball pitchers after that adjustment, for example? Hopefully, you follow. If not, well, I’m still typing. Maybe you’ll start following soon.

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Mike Trout is reportedly close to signing a long term deal with the Angels that will value the free agent years he’s giving up at around $30 to $35 million apiece. At the time he signs the deal, he’ll almost lock in the largest single season salary ever guaranteed to a Major League player, topping the $33 million that Clayton Kershaw will earn in the last year of his freshly minted extension. And even with that, he’s still going to be drastically underpaid.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a few conversations with folks where I’ve unsuccessfully tried to explain why Trout is worth something between $40 to $50 million per year for his free agent years. In a time where even the best free agents are signing for half of that, it’s a tough sell, and I’ve realized that most people just generally don’t believe that Trout is twice as valuable as other star players.

So, this post is an effort to help illustrate the dramatic gulf between Trout’s value and the kinds of players that are signing for $20 to $25 million per year. I’m going to try to make the math as non-scary as possible, and avoid using fancy acronyms or models that rely on black box data. We’re just going to deal with the basics.

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