Minor-league contracts don’t really matter all that much in baseball, no matter how much some fans might think they do. Each year, teams sign dozens of guys to non-guaranteed deals that may or may not include an invite to major league camp, and much of the time you never hear those names ever mentioned again after March. It’s not an official FanGraphs rule that minor-league deals aren’t worth covering, but it might as well be; when Delmon Young got a guaranteed contract from Philadelphia last year, there was a post about it. When the Orioles made him an NRI last week, there wasn’t.

Yet here I am, talking about Milwaukee’s decision to add Mark Reynolds to the first base mix on a non-guaranteed contract, partially because it seems likely that he will have a real impact on the team this year, and partially because of what it says about the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

We officially learned yesterday that John Axford had a tipping problem. Specifically, the Cardinals scouting staff noticed he had been tipping his pitches nearly the entire time they had scouted him. This is actually something that Axford himself hinted at during an interview in early September, as he explained to FoxSports Ohio.

Axford, who had lost his job as the Brewers’ closer early in the season, found another reason to be glad to land with the Cardinals in his first meeting with his new coaching staff. The Cardinals gave him some pitching advice — the specifics of which he declined to discuss — that he says immediately helped his performance. “When a team has been looking at you for five years, trying to kill you every single time you’re out there on the mound, they pick up on every little detail they can — what you may be showing, or tipping, or what you’re doing different,”

Maybe this quasi-intervention was what Axford needed to get the message, because this was not the first time this issue has come up in his career.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Milwaukee Brewers.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Brewers or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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I’ve always been fascinated with how teams and players react to advance scouting reports. I love to read up on how players incorporate the reports into their game plan and how managers use the information to inform their decisions. But it’s an aspect of baseball that is difficult to access for an outsider. Generally speaking, we don’t know what scouts are saying about any player. We can look at the data and do a little amateur scouting in order to make a guess, but we don’t know.

What I wondered was if by looking at the data, we could find some examples where it appeared that a scouting report was dead wrong. Since sample size issues make it a necessity, I had to look for players that every team scouted incorrectly. One of the things contained in an advance scouting report is how aggressively an opposing hitter should be attacked, so the first place I went looking was plate discipline data to see if any hitters were pitched more or less aggressively than the data suggests was wise. To my surprise, I found somebody immediately – Carlos Gomez.

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Logan Morrison came up with glove, power and patience and a big twitter presence. It was exciting. Then he was injured, the power waned, and he used that twitter account to upset his franchise. Now he’s a Mariner, traded for Carter Capps. And all of this means something for the Mets and Ike Davis.

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One of baseball’s most compelling storylines during the 2013 season was the monster breakthrough campaign of Chris Davis. One of baseball’s most quietly hilarious storylines during the 2013 season was the very similar campaign of Khris Davis down the stretch. Last year, the Brewers didn’t have a whole lot going for them, but Davis shined rather unexpectedly, and the team liked what it saw. As an organization closer to rebuilding than contending, the Brewers want to see what Davis can do going forward, and with Carlos Gomez and Ryan Braun also around, it wasn’t hard to see coming that Norichika Aoki could end up on the outside looking in.

Aoki’s too old for a team like the Brewers, and he’s under contract only one more season. It made sense for them to try to ship him to a contender, and that’s precisely what they’ve done, as Aoki has joined the Royals. In Kansas City, Aoki should play more than he would’ve in Milwaukee, and he has a chance at seeing the playoffs. In exchange, the Royals gave the Brewers Will Smith. It’s a low-profile transaction, considerably lower-profile even than the earlier Dexter Fowler trade, but what makes the trade worth taking about are the signs of Smith’s progress as a young lefty.

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I imagine that, for a front office exec, there’s nothing quite like the buzz you get from picking up another team’s non-tender and getting value from that player. Maybe it’s just ‘one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,’ but in a business where one sector of the market has to continually work to find value in surprising places, it’s an important moment.

But is there much success to be found in the bargain bin? These are players that their own team has given up on — and we have some evidence that teams know more about their own players than the rest of the league, and that players that are re-signed are more successful. What can we learn from the successes and failures that we’ve seen in the past?

To answer that question, I loaded all the non-tendered players since 2007 into a database and looked at their pre- and post-non-tender numbers.

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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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Everyone understands that not all bunts are a bad idea, right? The auto-sacrifice has (I think) mostly fallen out of favor with fans and teams, but as a nice illustration of sabermetrics’ infinite task, the analysis of bunts continues to evolve. The bunt as a piece of traditional baseball strategy was (and in some circles, continues to be) a target for early sabermetric analyses. But as the field grew more sophisticated, the analysis grew more subtle: a bunt may or may not be a good idea depending on the base/out/game situation, the skill of the bunter, and the position of the fielders.

A more sophisticated analyzing which bunts represent the best process (as opposed to results) would take, well, days of searching through game logs. Analyzing which bunts were the best executed would be an even more onerous burden. For this particular annual tradition, I have chosen the much simpler task of which bunts of the 2013 regular had the best result as measured by Win Probability Added.

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Back in March, Khris Davis described his power as his secret weapon. “Me being kind of small, no one looks at me and is like, ‘He’s got power,’” Davis told Brewers.com beat writer Adam McCalvy. “I do, but it’s kind of a secret.” Now that he has mashed eight homers in his first 93 big league plate appearances, it’s safe to say that his secret is out. He’s even stole the spotlight from the other Chris Davis, which is tough since the Orioles’ Davis is still humming right along. The question is, how much longer will the Brewers’ Davis get to keep sharing his secret weapon?

These days, it’s hard to sneak onto the major league radar, and maybe Brewers fans were well aware of Davis. After all, he entered this season hitting .294/.400/.513 across four minor league seasons, the last of which concluded with a very similar line in 140 plate appearances in Triple-A. Still, Davis has always had a poor defensive reputation, and that kept him from sniffing any prospect lists heading into this season. None of the major prospect outlets — Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, Bullpen Banter, ESPN or here at FanGraphs even mentioned Davis in their top 10/15 prospect lists this spring. Along with the bad defense, he may have appeared a touch old for his leagues, and he also seemingly had no opportunity in a Brewers outfield with three set starters in Ryan Braun, Carlos Gomez and Norichika Aoki.

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