A lot of things happen when you’re guaranteed a hundred thirty-five million dollars. That’s a guess on my part, since I’ve never been in that particular situation, and I can’t speak to what many of those things might be. I presume an overwhelming number of old acquaintances try to re-establish contact. One thing I know for sure is that people talk about you a lot. Lots of people out there talking about Freddie Freeman at the moment, on the heels of his contract extension and also on the heels of literally nothing else happening. Freeman’s eight years are the subject of much dialogue.

Some of the talk is new, and some of the talk is old. There’s just a whole lot of talk, in sum, because even with baseball’s rampant inflation, people are still getting used to the idea of nine-figure contracts and especially nine-figure contracts to non-superstars. People want to know how good Freeman actually is. People want to know how good Freeman will become. And, relatedly, people want to talk about Freeman’s power upside, since he’s a first baseman and first basemen are supposed to hit for more power than Freeman has to date.

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As the calendar has flipped to February, we are officially transitioning out of free agent season — though a few stragglers remain — and moving into extension season. With arbitration providing the nudge for teams and players to run valuations and negotiate over their differences, it’s only natural that these discussions often turn into conversations about long term deals that avoid the process entirely, and the spring training months provide the best opportunity for a team and a player to come to a mutual agreement on a mutli-year extension. While Clayton Kershaw kicked off the extension season a few weeks ago, Freddie Freeman’s new deal with the Braves is a reminder that extension season isn’t limited to just big market teams with overflowing revenues, and also a reminder of just how important a player’s age has become in long term valuations.

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Jason Heyward was supposed to be going to court in a few weeks. His agents had filed a salary number for arbitration, and his team was a file-to-trial team — once a player has filed an arbitration number with a file-to-trial team, it’s supposed to mean that they are headed to court to debate their respective cases in front of an arbitrator. We thought about this situation when they filed, and it seemed that were reasons on both sides for the public fight over $300 thousand — the team wanted to discuss more reasonable numbers quicker and needed the threat of trial, while the agents in this case were aggressive and didn’t mind the consequences, apparently.

But today, look in the news, and there’s an announcement — the Braves and Heyward have agreed to a two-year $13.3 million deal. This seems to go against the file-to-trial policy, at first. Until you look around the game and realize that two other file-to-trial teams, the Rays and the Blue Jays, have also made deals like this after filing numbers. Now it looks like there was one last benefit to the file-to-trial policy that we didn’t get to: leverage in negotiations for a multi-year deal.

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Something somebody once said about Greg Maddux is he could throw a ball into a teacup. I don’t know why a teacup was chosen to represent a small target, but it certainly conveys the intended idea. Something somebody else said about pitchers is this:

“And don’t believe it when you hear that a pitcher can throw the ball to a two-inch slot. A foot and a half is more like it, I mean with any consistency. When I first came up I thought major-league pitchers had pinpoint control, and I felt terrible that the best I could do was hit an area about a foot square. Then I found out that’s what everybody meant by pinpoint control, and that I had it.”

Jim Bouton was referring to a lot of pitchers when he wrote that, and Bouton wasn’t wrong. Bouton also wrote that in the time before Greg Maddux, which was a time that didn’t know how dark it really was. It’s possible there’s been no pitcher in recent history more able to hit a spot when he wanted to, and Maddux usually wanted to.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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People don’t really argue about Tom Glavine anymore. It’s been some years since he pitched, and we have younger, Troutier, Cabreraier things to argue about. But when people did argue about Tom Glavine — and they used to do it a lot — his critics routinely pointed to the same thing. And when Glavine was voted into the Hall of Fame just the other day on the first ballot, the old familiar argument popped up again in certain places. Glavine, many people believe, was a product of a strike zone that extended several inches off the outside of the plate.

An alleged strike zone, it should be said, that Glavine kind of allegedly earned. The theory is that Glavine established that area and was given the benefit of the doubt by the umpires because he could so consistently put the ball there. So, with his command, Glavine was said to get strikes on balls. That would be a credit to his ability, but that also puts hitters at a disadvantage, and a lot of people want to know how Glavine would’ve held up under a more uniform zone. There’s a belief that, had Glavine been more squeezed, he would’ve been punished more often. The only problem is that Glavine doesn’t seem to have been a product of his strike zone at all.

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Every career in the history of baseball, every life that’s ever been lived — they all could’ve turned out differently, unrecognizably differently, given one little change along the way. Sometimes, you have to search for what those changes could’ve been. Other times, they flash in blinding neon. Tom Glavine was born in 1966. In June of 1984, he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves. In June of 1984, he was also drafted by the Los Angeles Kings. The Braves chose him 47th, while the Kings chose him 69th, ahead of some future superstars. There was the opportunity for Glavine to play hockey and go to college for free. He chose, with some difficulty, to go where baseball might lead him. On this day, he’s become all but an official Hall-of-Famer.

Frank Thomas is going into the Hall of Fame. The talent of Frank Thomas was obvious from the beginning. Thomas left no doubt in any observer’s mind that he was one of the best hitters there ever was. Greg Maddux is going into the Hall of Fame. Maddux had plenty of talent, and also the dedication to maximize it. Maddux required a bit of a longer look, but it was immediately apparent he could do things with the baseball others just couldn’t. Tom Glavine is going into the Hall of Fame. Glavine didn’t have Thomas’ gilded skillset, and he didn’t have Maddux’s ability to miss bats and hit gnats. Glavine’s greatest strength was getting something extraordinary out of considerably duller parts.

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Last week, Grant Brisbee made the very salient point that the Atlanta Braves are essentially akin to a small-market team these days. Since the ballclub has stacked their team with homegrown talent, this has not been a glaring problem in years past, but this offseason we have seen them lose both Brian McCann and Tim Hudson. Which was bad, in a sense — the team has replacements at the ready, even if they might not be as good.

The real problem though — and it is no doubt a good problem — will come two-to-three years down the road. Justin Upton, Jason Heyward and Kris Medlen are set to become free agents following the 2015 season, and the next season, Freddie Freeman and Craig Kimbrel (and Brandon Beachy) are also due to become free agents. It’s pretty unlikely that the ballclub will be able to keep all five (or six, if you count Beachy). So, who should they keep?
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There was what seems like a relatively unremarkable trade today, that went down between the Braves and the Twins. The Twins sent to the Braves one Ryan Doumit, in the last year of his contract. The Braves sent to the Twins one Sean Gilmartin, 23 years old and still in the minors. Doumit is expected to fill some kind of role on Atlanta’s bench. Gilmartin might be a Twins starting rotation candidate down the road. It’s a competitive team maybe exchanging a little longer-term value for a little shorter-term value, and it’s a rebuilding team doing the opposite of that. Perfectly understandable, ordinary trade that does very little to capture the imagination.

There might be something buried here, though, beneath the immediate layers. Something nothing more than statistical, but then numbers are so much of everything. It depends on how Doumit ends up being utilized by the Braves, but there’s a chance this could mark the end of an era, beyond just the era of Doumit playing for Minnesota. On the surface, the trade is mildly interesting. Below the surface, it’s a little bit more so.

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Earlier this year, Bill Petti mentioned in his CLIFFORD work the single largest driver in a player’s wOBA collapse from one year to the next was Z-Contact%. Players that saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had a 1.68 times the odds of seeing their wOBA collapse that season than those that did not experience such a decline.

As with any correlation, nothing is a guarantee. Just because a player improves or declines with any one statistic does not guarantee that the results will behave in lockstep. The five players who saw their Z-Contact% improve the most in 2013 were Gerardo Parra, Everth Cabrera, Brandon Moss, Carlos Santana, and David Murphy. Parra, Cabrera, and Santana saw their wOBA improve by 1, 38, and 20 points respectively while Moss and Murphy’s dropped 33 and 80 points.

It was equally volatile on the other end of the scale. Raul Ibanez‘s Z-Contact% dropped 5.3%, yet his wOBA improved by 19 points. Chris Young‘s Z-Contact% dropped 6.2% from 2012 to 2013 as his wOBA dropped 36 points.  Marlon Byrd’s 6.7% decrease was the third-largest decrease in Z-Contact% in the sample size, yet his wOBA improved an amazing 148 points last season. The two largest declines in Z-Contact% from 2012 to 2013 had one thing in common – a last name.

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