It’s been well documented that the Toronto Blue Jays’ season hasn’t exactly gone as planned. A rash of injuries to the veteran pitching staff has created a number of holes. Those gaps have been difficult to fill with competent contributors because the organizational depth was compromised in an effort to beef up the big league product. It’s been speculated in the Toronto media that pitching prospect Sean Nolin, currently at the Double-A level, is viewed by the Jays front office as the next-in-line for a promotion, should the need arise.

Toronto has made a few moves this year that could be considered desperation moves and the promotion of Nolin may not be in the best long-term interests of the club or the young pitching prospect.

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Knuckleballers aren’t like other pitchers, or so the saying goes. Their pitches flutter like butterflies, they pitch at less than max effort, they don’t depend on velocity, and they can pitch into their fifties. All of these things seem true, and yet the more we know about knuckleballers the more they might actually be more like all the other pitchers out there. So when 38-year-old R.A. Dickey has lost some oomph on his seminal pitch, maybe it means something, just like it usually does for other pitchers.

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J.A. Happ got hit in the head by a line-drive comebacker. When the same thing happened to Doug Fister, he got lucky; when the same thing happened to Brandon McCarthy, he also got lucky, if you understand that “luck” can go both ways, like “accelerate.” Happ is fortunate in that he seems to be doing well, but the scene at the time was terrifying, with Happ on the ground and blood on his face. It was the kind of incident that makes you wonder if we’re going to see a player die, and it’s sparked back up the familiar debate regarding pitcher protection. This post isn’t about that, because there’s nothing new to be said. (It would be nice.) (Reality hasn’t yet matched up with the theory, in that no one’s yet invented anything worthwhile.)

This post is about the result of the play. Desmond Jennings was the player who drilled the line drive, and he wound up standing on third base with a two-run triple. A screenshot taken moments after ball-head impact:

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I offered my explanation for Clay Buchholz’s success this season yesterday, citing improved fastball command and a recently harnessed but always nasty changeup. Jack Morris, now on the radio call for the Toronto Blue Jays, has other ideas:

I found out because the guys on the video camera showed it to me right after the game,” he said. “I didn’t see it during the game. They showed it to me and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ and I said, ‘Well, he’s throwing a spitter. Cause that’s what it is.

The scandal, if one can even call it such, involves video of rosin on Buchholz’s left forearm. The accusations are tenuous at best, and as Morris himself put it, “I can’t prove anything. I can’t prove anything.” Although Morris wasn’t the only one to accuse Buchholz of throwing a spitter — former pitcher Dirk Hayhurst, also with the Blue Jays radio team, joined in — it’s hard to imagine these accusations going anywhere.

However, Morris and Hayhurst give us an opportunity to revisit the spitball, in my opinion one of the most unique pieces of baseball history, from its time as a legal pitch in baseball’s early years to Gaylord Perry’s Hall of Fame spitball and everywhere in between.

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Before the season season started, members of our staff took a shot at prognosticating the season, despite the fact that we all know You Can’t Predict Baseball. Of the 31 authors who participated, 15 of them — myself included — selected the Blue Jays as the favorites to win the AL East, and nine of the 16 who didn’t pick Toronto to win their division had them as a wild card club. The Blue Jays off-season makeover convinced most of us that they were a good team with a good shot at playing in October.

It might only be April 29th, but there’s a pretty good chance that 24 of us are going to end up being wrong, because while we’re still in the first month of the season, the Blue Jays season is in jeopardy.

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Colby Rasmus is amazing. Still just 26, and an elite-level talent, Rasmus is presently slugging .536. He’s a center fielder who clubs like a DH, and his slugging percentage is beating those of Albert Pujols and Anthony Rizzo. Rasmus owns a 135 wRC+, which was Joe Morgan’s career wRC+. It’s a better wRC+ than those being posted by Carlos Beltran, Andrew McCutchen, and Michael Morse. Rasmus is finally coming into his own, and he’s looking like the superstar the Blue Jays have wanted him to become.

Colby Rasmus is a nightmare. For every seven plate appearances, he’s struck out three times, whiffing more often than batters have whiffed against Max Scherzer. His on-base percentage is being supported by a lofty BABIP, and Rasmus has swung through the ball with nearly half of his swings. With nearly half of his swings! Rasmus’ approach has shown no signs of improvement, and it looks like he’s going to continue to be exploitable for as long as he’s a part of the game.

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I’m probably always going to remember Ryan Franklin for three on-field performances. One, as a starter in the minors, Franklin was involved in two consecutive no-hitters — the first one combined, the second one done by Franklin all on his own. Two, in April 2005, Franklin went head-to-head against Mark Buehrle in Chicago in a game between the Mariners and the White Sox, and it was all over in just 99 minutes. Three, I actually just have those two, because this is Ryan Franklin we’re talking about and I’m a little surprised I’ll remember him for anything. Anything, at least, having to do with his performance.

On that day in 2005, Franklin was a quick worker. Working in his favor is that he threw strikes and allowed plenty of contact. But he was opposing the very king of quick work, a guy who manages to spend so little time between pitches you’re reminded all over again of how much you can’t stand Jonathan Papelbon. I wouldn’t refer to Pace as an ability, per se, but in one statistical category, Buehrle is the undisputed leader.

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Not all that long ago, I wrote about Gio Gonzalez striking out a ton of opposing pitchers. Though Gonzalez set a modern-day record, the achievement itself was not entirely surprising: Gonzalez is a durable pitcher who gets a lot of strikeouts, and pitchers strike out a lot as batters. This is because pitchers are by and large terrible batters, dragging down the offensive numbers of the National League. What was more surprising, to me, was something I noticed about R.A. Dickey, which I included in the post as a note.

Dickey is a knuckleballer, and the league’s only knuckleballer worth a damn. He became a regular with the Mets in 2010, and as a Met, he threw more than 600 innings. Over that span, Dickey faced 2,344 non-pitchers, and he struck out 19% of them, or at least 19% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. Over the same span, Dickey faced 172 pitchers, and he struck out 17% of them, or at least 17% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. In other words: with the Mets, R.A. Dickey struck out a lower rate of pitchers than position players.

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As we explained yesterday in Part 1 of the series, we’re looking at the financial health of all thirty major league teams. The focus is on attendance, local TV contracts, and estimated 2013 payroll. We’re not ranking the teams one to thirty because we lack the kind of detailed information that would make such a ranking meaningful. We do, however, 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.

We’ve grouped the teams in tiers. Today we look at the ten teams in the middle.

In alphabetical order, by team name:

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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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