For the first time in four decades, the U.S. Supreme Court will have an opportunity to reconsider baseball’s notorious exemption from antitrust law. On Wednesday, the city of San Jose, California filed an appeal with the nation’s highest court, asking it to overturn professional baseball’s nearly century-old immunity from the Sherman Antitrust Act.

The appeal is the latest step in the litigation surrounding the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose. Back in 2013, the city sued Major League Baseball claiming that the league’s failure to approve the A’s relocation violated federal antitrust law. The district court dismissed the lawsuit later that same year, concluding that baseball’s exemption shielded MLB’s relocation decisions from antitrust scrutiny. That decision was upheld earlier this year by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

While these lower courts were constrained by a series of Supreme Court precedents exempting baseball from the Sherman Act, the Supreme Court itself is not bound to follow the prior rulings. So San Jose is asking the Court to seize this opportunity to overturn baseball’s highly controversial antitrust immunity. Like any appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, however, the odds that the Court will agree to take San Jose’s appeal are rather slim.

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Oakland A’s first baseman/left fielder Mark Canha is off to a fine start to the 2015 season. Through the year’s first week and a half, he’s hitting a solid .333/.353/.515, and leads all rookies with 11 hits. This is obviously a teeny tiny sample, and we all know better than to read too much into seven games. But even so, an excellent performance from a previously unknown player is a little hard to ignore, especially after his six homers and .297/.342/.635 batting line from spring training. The A’s have to be happy with the return they’ve gotten on their rule 5 choice so far.

Although this is his first taste of big league action, Canha’s no youngster. He turned 26 this past February, and has been playing professionally since 2010, when the Marlins drafted him in the seventh round out of the University of California. Although he started out as a 21-year-old in short-season ball, Canha moved through the Marlins system relatively slowly. He spent a full year at each minor league level, so he’s just now making it to the big leagues.

Canha’s slow climb up the minor league ladder wasn’t due to a lack of hitting. His wRC+s from 2010-2014 were 139, 144, 128, 141 and 131. He’s never hit worse than his league’s average, nor has he come particularly close. But, year after year, the Marlins chose to let Canha mash as an old-for-his-league slugger instead of challenging him with more polished pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball fans who happily allow themselves to be consumed by information, we know, automatically, what certain number sequences refer to. Take, for example, 40-40. That’s homers and steals, applying to the rare player both speedy and powerful. 30-100? Homers and RBI, which, whatever, don’t act like you didn’t know. 6-4-3? That’s a run-of-the-mill double play. 2-1? Padres game. It’s all a different language, and we’re fluent in it, even if it isn’t the sort of fluency you’re comfortable declaring on a resume.

But numbers are just numbers, and they can refer to anything. I mean, it’s possible that 6-4-3 could also mean six runs on four hits, with three errors. You just can’t be sure right away. Now, baseball makes this promise: any day at the ballpark, you might see something you’ve never seen before. It’s an element that helps to keep the game fresh, despite 162 repetitions. Not everyone, granted, might appreciate something rare, something historical. Kind of depends what we’re talking about. In this case, we have something appealing only to dorks. Sunday afternoon in Oakland, Mike Zunino and Felix Hernandez of the Mariners turned a 2-1 double play.

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Last night, Brett Lawrie went 0-for-4, making the game’s last out as the potential tying run. Worse, he had four strikeouts. Worse, he saw 12 pitches. It was the perfect golden sombrero, and, seldom am I given a more obvious article topic. Indeed, seldom is the Internet given a more obvious article topic, and this has already shown up everywhere. As such, I want to begin with an anecdote that isn’t showing up everywhere. Phillies fans already know about this, but you probably aren’t a Phillies fan, so this is probably new.

1983. Mike Schmidt is 33, and one of the best players in baseball. He’ll eventually finish third in MVP voting, and he’ll be worth 7 WAR. He’ll lead the league in dingers. On May 28, he starts at third in a game against the Expos. Montreal’s started Charlie Lea. The Phillies counter with John Denny. That part doesn’t matter.

Up in the first with men on the corners, Schmidt strikes out on three pitches. Up in the third with a man on first, Schmidt strikes out on three pitches. Up in the fifth with men on first and second, Schmidt strikes out on three pitches. Up in the seventh with a man on first, Schmidt strikes out on three pitches. Word gets around. Schmidt’s being taunted even by fans of his own team.

Goes to the ninth, 3-3. Montreal turns to Jeff Reardon. Schmidt comes up with two down and the winning run on second. The homer is Schmidt’s eighth of the year. The Phillies move a game north of .500, and go on to win the division and lose the World Series. Schmidt’s game was by no means forgotten — it’s now a minor part of Phillies franchise lore.

What happened to Brett Lawrie happened to someone as outstanding as Mike Schmidt. All Lawrie was missing was the dramatic walk-off dinger.

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The least interesting thing about recovering from a shoulder injury might be trying to figure out how it happened. It happened, and life has to move on. In Sean Doolittle’s case, it might — might! — have happened while he was taking anti-inflammatories for his oblique late last year, meaning the pain was “slightly masked” by the drugs as the pitcher put it. Who knows.

The best you can do is strengthen the muscles around the injury and work your way slowly back to health. You can’t just start throwing. “Your instinct is to open it up as soon as you get a ball in your hand,” said Doolittle before the A’s first game this season. So the team keeps the ball away from you for a bit.

Kyle Boddy, who founded pitching development complex Driveline Baseball, isn’t surprised to hear Doolittle talk about that instinct to throw hard. “Guys literally have no idea how to play catch,” Boddy said. “They line up from 45 feet and start throwing like 65-70 MPH. This is because many pro organizations give you ten minutes to throw before taking the field, which is ultimately pretty injurious and limiting to the arm.”

So before the throwing come the strengthening exercises. These might be familiar to any pitcher, but Doolittle says he’s just been doing them more often, in more variations, with more sets.

Many involve resistance bands and shoulder and arm movements against the resistance created by those bands. Other exercises have him holding the bands in static positions as a trainer pushes in different directions on his arm. Each time his body attempts to bring the hand back to that static position, a different small muscle is activated. Even without a resistance bad at home, you can test the theory by balancing on one foot with your eyes shut — notice all the little muscles in your legs and torso that work hard to keep you upright.

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Last season the Oakland Athletics had four players qualify for the batting title and seven players take more than 400 plate appearances for the team. With Coco Crisp out for 6-8 weeks for elbow surgery, none of those seven players will be with the A’s when the season starts. The A’s hectic winter, including the additions of Ben Zobrist, Billy Butler, Brett Lawrie, and Ike Davis, clouded somewhat exactly how far backward they went on the win curve. As Jeff Sullivan wrote in December, The A’s Are Just Doing What They Have To Do, but all the moves they made have the A’s taking a potentially significant drop from last season when they were the fourth-highest scoring team in the league. With Reddick out for the first few games and Crisp now out for an extended period, giving more plate appearances to Billy Burns and Eric Sogard further weakens an offense that was already due for a step back.

With Josh Reddick and Coco Crisp out to start the season, not one of the top nine in plate appearances for the A’s last season will begin the season with Oakland.. Of those top nine, six provided very good production with a wOBA above .330 and Reddick is the only returnee among them. In the FanGraphs Depth Charts projections, 93 Major League Baseball players have a wOBA projection above .330, but only Ben Zobrist plays for the A’s. Imports Billy Butler, Ike Davis, and Brett Lawrie should provide above average offense and a hopefully full season of Josh Reddick will help, but the offense could take a big step back this season.
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Yesterday, we kicked off our look at each division by going through the NL West. Today, we’ll do the AL version from the land of pitcher’s parks.

The Projected Standings

There are two pretty strong contenders at the top, two somewhat interesting teams hanging around the middle, and a likely also-ran. The top of the AL West is unlikely to be as strong this year as it was a year ago, but the low-end of the division should be somewhat better, and the race is open enough to remain interesting all year long. Let’s take a look at the teams.

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At a lazy spring pre-game meeting with Bob Melvin a few weeks back, he mentioned off-hand that Marcus Semien wasn’t going to play every day. For half a second, it seemed we had a bit of a scoop on our hands, an emerging platoon at shortstop for the Athletics. But then, that was worth a confirmation — “You just mean he’s an Athletic, right?”

Yeah, Melvin said, “We don’t play anyone everyday. But when he’s playing, he’s playing short.” Less of a scoop, but still interesting, was this confirmation of what Billy Beane said during the winter meetings about Semien’s new-ish position.

Here’s a player that had played all over the diamond in Chicago, coming to a new team to take over one position as a starter. That hasn’t happened much before. In fact, only four players since 2002 have left one team as a utility man and arrived on their new team as a shortstop — Adeiny Hechavarria, Craig Counsell, Jed Lowrie, and Julio Lugo.

The manager and the player were upbeat about what the position switch would mean for his defense. As the latter three names show, it isn’t a move that’s usually done with defense standouts, but there might be something about focusing on one position that helps.

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Over the last few years it’s become pretty well accepted that a strikeout isn’t dramatically worse than any other kind of out for hitters. But that being said, making contact is still almost always better than not making contact. There might be a rare instance in which you’d prefer to swing through a pitch because the next one is going to be right in your wheelhouse, but on balance, making contact when you swing is the goal. As such, a high contact percentage is a valuable trait.

Of course, not all contact is created equal and you don’t necessarily want to maximize your contact rate at all costs if it means you won’t be hitting with the same authority. If you can make contact without it turning into weak contact, that’s probably what you want to do.

Every year, I like to look at the biggest gains and losses in particular statistics and contact rate is always one that’s pretty interesting. You can luck into a nice BABIP or wind up with a few extra home runs without changing your game, but a significant change in a plate discipline stat is usually not occurring at random. The change might not always help you predict the future, but it’s unlikely a big spike in contact rate is simply noise.

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Oakland Athletics. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Oakland’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the A’s system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Oakland system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Raul Alcantara, RHP (Profile)

The right-handed Alcantara produced a strikeout- and walk-rate differential just above 15% in 2013, placing him at approximately the 90th percentile among all minor-league pitchers by that measure who recorded at least 100 innings or more. That he did it as just a 20-year-old facing older competition in the Midwest and then California Leagues (between which he split his season almost precisely) is more impressive. Owing to elbow trouble followed by a Tommy John procedure, Alcantara made only three starts in all of 2014 — and the earliest likely return is the middle of 2015. Despite the lack of current data, however, the Steamer forecast still calls for run prevention at something slightly better than replacement level — best among Oakland’s rookie-eligible pitchers.

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