Earlier, we took a look at the young season’s most impeded home run so far, which is the home run that faced the most opposition from the game conditions at the time. All necessary data was recovered from the ESPN Home Run Tracker, which is among my most favorite of Internet resources. If we look at one extreme, then, it follows that we should look also at the other extreme, or else the matter will feel incomplete, and this is a website devoted to completeness. And so we now turn our attention to the home run that has gotten the biggest boost from the game conditions. Home runs like this are probably more interesting than home runs that remain home runs despite strong winds and cold conditions, because these might be identified as “lucky”.

In terms of impeded home runs, we had one dinger at -20 feet, and another dinger at -17 feet. So it was a close race, and the error bars probably overlap. Here, in terms of aided home runs, we have one dinger at +64 feet, and another dinger at +43 feet. That’s a much bigger difference, but there might still be some error-bar overlap, for reasons we’ll get into. Let’s look at the home run in question!

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Yes, well obviously Roberto Hernandez is not Fausto Carmona. The name Fausto Carmona belongs to someone else, and though the history of Cleveland Indians starting pitcher “Fausto Carmona” belongs to Roberto Hernandez, the two pitchers (the one pitcher) are not the same.

What I’m saying is: Roberto Hernandez is striking out batters.

He has a 22.5% K-rate right now. His previous career high was 17.1%, but that was mostly as a rookie reliever. As a starter, his highest K-rate was 15.6%. In fact, if we dig even deeper, we find his 22.5% K-rate is the highest strikeout rate he’s ever posted over a four game period:

His recent success — underscored and even underappreciated in his 3.75 FIP and 3.60 SIERA — appears to be the product of deliberate changes. That suggests he could maintain a new level of success.
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Rarely do players successfully transition to more difficult positions, but the Cleveland Indians believe second base prospect Tony Wolters can be the next infielder to be successful converted into a catcher. It’s common for a player to move to a less valuable position when his abilities fall short of major league competency, but occasionally a player will increase his value by moving to a more demanding position. At Florida State University, Buster Posey played third base before permanently moving to catcher. Philadelphia’s backstop Carlos Ruiz was a second baseman before making the switch. Like Posey and Ruiz, the Indians think Wolters can be a starting catcher on a championship caliber team.

Wolters was selected in the third round of the 2010 Rule 4 draft out of Vista, Calif., and signed for $1.35 million, the equivalent of a mid-to-late first round bonus. He’s a grinder — an intense, hard working scrapper who plays above his tools — with a chatty demeanor that fits perfectly behind the plate. As a hitter, Wolters derives surprising power from his quick hands and aggressive line drive swing. When he starts swinging for the fences he isn’t as short to the ball, but generally he stays within himself with a crisp gap-to-gap approach.

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Wouldn’t you know it, but Scott Kazmir is relevant again. Jeremy Bonderman is relevant again, too, and that’s also amazing, but Kazmir’s actually got himself a big-league rotation job and that gives me an opportunity to talk about an incredible Kazmir fun fact. I could’ve talked about it anyway, even if Kazmir were completely off the radar, but now it’ll be less insignificant. You’re thinking about Scott Kazmir, and here’s another thing to think about him.

Pitching with the bases empty is different from pitching with at least one runner on. For many pitchers, the delivery changes, and of course the situation and the intensity changes. The defense changes. Things change when there are people on base, so it can be informative to look at the base-state splits. In such situations it’s always important to remain aware of small sample sizes, but when you get to talking about whole careers, those concerns by and large go away.

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In Arizona, J.D. Sussman and I hit the back fields together to scout talent from the Mariners, Indians, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Cubs. Each of us took notes, collected radar gun readings, worked angles and collected the best information we could.

Back from the warm weather, we decided to rank the 10 best prospects we scouted together to highlight differences in opinion and player preference. Scouting is an inexact science. Prospect followers tend to pit opinions of writers against each other, but of course there’s room for dissent and discussion even among friends and colleagues.

Here’s my top-10 of players I liked the most. J.D.’s list will follow in an hour.

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In Arizona, the Cleveland Indians were a “must see” franchise for me. A few years ago, their Lake County (Ohio) affiliate left the South Atlantic League for the convenience of the Midwest League. This created a blind spot in my scouting coverage remedied by my time in the Cactus League.

Current buzz surrounding the Indians organization is centered around a pair of young shortstop prospects in Dorssys Paulino and Francisco Lindor.

Lindor, a 2011 first rounder posted a .257/.352/.355 triple slash line in Single-A.

Paulino combined for a .333/.380/.558 triple slash line across two levels of short season baseball as a 17-year old.

There’s no question about both being top flight prospects within the organization, but the debate over the shortstop of the future continues to be a hot topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.

We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.

With those caveats, let’s begin.

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When arriving at Cleveland camp to scout future Indians, a trio of A-Ball infielders were tops on my list of “must see” players. Francisco Lindor, Dorssys Paulino and Ronny Rodriguez stretched and ran sprints on back fields and I was content to watch them doing morning drills.

Then, a conversation with volunteer field staff forced a change of plans.

In the “B-Game”, the Indians would be playing the Mariners. Out of curiosity, I hurried to the far field to see which Seattle prospects made the trip.

Taijuan Walker? Check.

James Paxton? Check.

Nick Franklin? Check.

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Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.

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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.

Let’s get on to the rankings!

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Bill James headlined the second annual SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix last weekend. Brian Kenny from MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential acted as a roving emcee of sorts.  Joe Posnanski was there. Rob Neyer was there. And our own Dave Cameron and David Appelman were there. The three days of sessions led to lively discussions about WAR and knuckleball academies and the mythical analytics-scouting divide.

But this year’s conference wasn’t limited to questions about how best to measure and project on-the-field performance. Analytics have moved to the business side of the front office. And it’s your off-the-field performance in watching, listening to, and attending ballgames that is now the subject of intense study. Sports marketing isn’t new but the techniques used to measure fans, create new ones, and motivate both groups to purchase tickets and merchandise have become much more sophisiticated.

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