Royals closer Joakim Soria left a spring training game on Sunday with a sore right elbow, a frustrating development for a player looking to rebound from a sub-par 2012. As of this writing, there is no word on whether the issue will cause Soria to miss any time to start the season. If Soria does miss time, it may not have that much of an impact on Kansas City because the team has a deep bullpen. However, this raises a further question regarding whether Soria should have been traded a year or two ago to maximize the return.

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You can try to dispense of these notes on the Alcides Escobar extension, but you won’t be able to: as the title of this post suggests, they’re indispensable.

Regarding Alcides Escobar, The Extension He Signed
The 25-year-old shortstop Escobar and the Royals agreed Thursday to a four-year, $10.5 million extension that includes a pair of club options that could bring the overall value of the contract to $21.75 million. Per the Associated Press, “Escobar will make $1 million this season and $3 million each of the next three seasons. The options are for $5.25 million in 2016 and $6.5 million in 2017 with $500,000 buyouts each year.”

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Salvador Perez won’t be ready for Opening Day.

Less than a month after the Kansas City Royals rewarded him with a five-year, $7 million contract, Perez now has a meniscus tear — an injury serious enough that the Royals decided to send its starting catcher back to Kansas City for surgery. Now that there’s some uncertainty surrounding Perez, it’s unclear how the Royals will respond.

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With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.

League Trends

To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.

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Salvador Perez just joined a very exclusive club. By signing a five year, $7 million guaranteed contract — which includes three additional option years — with the Kansas City Royals, the 21-year-old catcher joins Evan Longoria and Matt Moore as players who have signed significant extensions before accumulating a year of major-league service time. While Longoria’s and Moore’s contracts are considered major steals for the Tampa Bay Rays, the Perez deal is a bit more uncertain. With the Royals starting their build a competitive team, they need to be sure they’re extending the right players.
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I have gone through all of the 2011 MLB transactions and compiled the disabled list (DL) data for the 2011 season. I have put all the information in a Google Doc for people to use

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Kansas City entered 2011 with the undisputed best minor league system in baseball. A year later the landscape has chanced somewhat thanks to promotions (Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, Tim Collins, etc.) and injuries. The organization is not as deep as it once was but it still has some impressive talent and is easily in the Top 10, if not the Top 5, when discussing the best minor league systems.

1. Wil Myers, OF
BORN: Dec. 10, 1990
EXPERIENCE: 3 seasons
ACQUIRED: 2009 3rd round, North Carolina HS
2010-11 TOP 10 RANKING: 3rd

Drafted as a prep catcher, the organization made the difficult decision to move Myers to right field so his defensive development would not hold him back and would allow his potentially-plus bat to dictate his movement through the system. After a dominating performance in A-ball in 2010, Myers struggled at double-A and was merely “average” according to his wRC+ of .104. He continued to show patience (12.5 BB%) but his strikeout rate rose to almost 21 K% and his average slipped to .254. His power output also dipped considerably with his isolated power rate hitting .138. A knee infection knocked Myers out from mid-May until early June and could be somewhat to blame for his struggles; his best power displays came in April and August. Perhaps feeling that he had something to prove, Myers lit the Arizona Fall League on fire after being assigned there for the fall. He hit .360 with 14 extra base hits in 23 games (wRC+ of 178). With the strong showing in the AFL, Myers will likely move up to triple-A for 2012 and could reach Kansas City before the end of the year.

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It is a simple question.

What is sabermetrics?

Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?

Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.

Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.

I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.

Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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Silly monkey, BRAINS ARE FOR ZOMBIES.

Casey Kotchman is in many ways a man without a home — a player equal parts under-appreciated and over-valued, who irks both old and new schools at the same time. Old school analysts say his defense is amazing, but they cannot quantify it, and in 2011, they claimed his cleared vision meant he finally learned how to aim the ball “where they ain’t,” but he’s still a .268 hitter with little power. The new school says he’s worth about 7.6 runs per season defensively, but worth ~1.1 WAR per 600 PAs — not good — and his BABIP was high 2011, so he should not be able to repeat his success.

Despite his inability to build a consistent following of fans in the baseball outsiders communities, Kotchman seems to have some insider communities very much interested in him, as Tom Tango points out:

Kotchman’s last four teams: Redsox, Mariners, Rays, Indians. Can we say that a team that signs Kotchman is saber-leaning?

Indeed, after spending five and a half seasons on the Angels’ and Braves’ rosters, Kotchman has begun to shuffle around with the Nerdz, most recently signing with the Cleveland Indians. It makes sense too — Kotchman’s lack of power keeps him cheap, and his strong defense keeps him amorphous for the old school teams, while the new schools might have different valuations on Kotchman, they can at least quantify his contributions and better know how he fits.

Then, on Monday, the Houston Astros signed Justin Ruggiano, long-time Tampa Bay Rays outfielder who was never good enough to stick on the Rays’ roster, but who possesses strong defensive chops and above average patience. His lack of power and ~.290 batting average, however, must make him a mystery — or at least an undesirable asset — to the old school teams.

Upon Ruggiano signing with the Astros, a once highly old school team, my reaction was all: “Welp, that’s one more team to compete with” — and then it occurred to me! No only have the Astros entered the realm of, so to speak, saber-minded organizations, but so have the long-backward Chicago Cubs.

Suddenly the league looks very different.

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This morning I was scrolling through some of Dan Szymborski’s projections over at Baseball Think Factory, and I noticed that he had run a projection for Matt Stairs. I had not heard any news about the guy we all know now as a pinch-hitter. As I scoured the internets (read: typed “Matt Stairs” into Google) I quickly realized that Stairs had retired, though since he will be a studio analyst for NESN this year, all is not lost. Still, it will be disappointing to not see him on the field any longer.

Few pinch hitters struck fear in my heart the way Matt Stairs did. When Stairs came to the plate against a team for which I was rooting, I always sure that something bad was about to happen. Even still, I couldn’t hate him. A portly slugger with a great sense of humor — I will always remember Will Carroll forwarding the Baseball Prospectus email group an email from Stairs with a picture of his flexed calf muscle and promptly doubling over in laughter — Stairs was exceedingly easy to root for, and in the latter, pinch-hitting days of his career he became somewhat of a nerdy folk hero.

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