In the World Series, broadcasts from both TBS and Fox kept telling us how good of a center fielder Jon Jay was. In between plaudits, Jon Jay would inevitably get a poor jump, take a bad route, or just drop an easily catchable ball, sometimes all in the same game. It became something of a running joke, as Jay appeared to be a defensive disaster in the postseason, even while the networks kept insisting that he was terrific with the glove.

Well, the Cardinals clearly weren’t swayed by the rhetoric, and today, they’ve acquired Peter Bourjos from the Angels to be their new center fielder. And now TBS and Fox can properly say that the Cardinals have one of the best defensive center fielders on the planet, because Peter Bourjos is what Jon Jay was supposed to be.

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The Phillies re-signed Carlos Ruiz to a 3-year, $26 million deal. Also: Brayan Pena and Geovany Soto have locked down their 2014 teams (the Royals Reds and Rangers respectively). And now it appears Jose Molina is in the final stages of returning to St. Pete for another two years of expertly framed and eh, who cares about blocking? pitches.

So where does that leave the catching market? As far as I have seen, the Yankees, Red Sox, Rockies, Angels, Rangers (still), Blue Jays and Twins have all been connected with free agent catchers on MLBTR. Using their handy free agents leaderboards (with a few additions), we can examine the remaining free agent catchers and try our hand at predicting the right fits for each.
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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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I’ve been working on an interactive tool that allows you to create spray charts using Game Day data from the past two years for a few weeks now. I’ve always loved the Katron Batted Ball tool, and it’s been a great resource of mine for years. However, I wanted to put something together that was a bit more interactive, allowed for more filtering, and made side-by-side comparisons easier.

Our writers here at FanGraphs have been kind enough to play around with it and offer suggestions. After some tweaks I am ready to officially release the tool into the wild so that anyone can use it.

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Award season is upon us. It is a time for arguing about ERA versus FIP, pitching to the score, defensive value, and the meaning of “valuable.” Fun, right? It is also a time for me to whip out fun little toys to recognize different kinds of offensive contributions. One of these is the basis for the Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award, which annually recognizes the hitter whose RBI total most overstates his actual offensive contribution.

Spoiler alert: it was a banner year for the National League Central. Taste the excitement!

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If one were willing to go out on a limb, one might say that Blue Jays’ catcher J.P. Arencibia did not have the best year. Sure, he hit 21 home runs and, well, that is about it. With the rumor mill firing up in anticipation getting into full swing after the World Series, word has it that the Blue Jays are interested in acquiring one of the Angels’ catchers: either Chris Iannetta or Hank Conger.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about some interesting platoon splits of a couple of left-handed hitters who had my attention. When I started looking at some right-handed hitters who had splits I wanted to discuss, they also turned out to be players with a big impact this year: the winner of the 2013 National League batting title, the most exciting young player in years, and the hero of last night’s NLCS game. Their splits are interesting in themselves (at least to a certain type of baseball fan), but also are concrete way of thinking about more general principles with respect to platoon skill.

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Look at the numbers for Robert Coello’s third pitch and you might not get it. It’s a forkball. It gets a below-average swinging-strike rate for a breaking pitch. It’s a ball half the time. It looks flawed. But then you watch Coello pitch, and this happens.

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You won’t get Mike Trout to say he should win the Most Valuable Player award this year because his Wins Above Replacement total is higher than another player’s. But if you listen closely to him describing his game, you will hear the basic constructs for the argument that can be made in his favor. It’s a simple one.

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Episode 375
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the mediocrity of the LA Angels and the consequences of same.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 43 min play time.)

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