Early Sunday morning, Twitter was abuzz with news that the Dodgers and Fox Sports West had agreed to a 25-year broadcast deal valued between $6 billion and $7 billion. By Sunday afternoon, Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times had confirmed the outline of the deal, but cautioned that the Dodgers and Fox were still negotiating, with a November 30 deadline looming.

As I explained last week in this post, the parties’ existing agreement gave Fox an exclusive, 45-day window in which to negotiate a new deal to govern the 2014 season and beyond. Hence, the November 30 deadline. If an agreement isn’t inked by Friday, the Dodgers must submit a final offer to Fox by December 7. Fox then has 30 days to accept or reject the offer. If Fox rejects the offer, the Dodgers are free to negotiate with whomever they want.

However the negotiations play out, it’s clear now that the Dodgers’ local TV revenue is about to enter the stratosphere. A 25-year deal worth between $6 billion and $7 billion would net the Dodgers between $240 million and $280 million per year. Per year. That’s more than any team has ever spent on player salaries in a single season — even the Yankees. And it’s nearly double the amount of local TV revenue pulled in annually by the team with the second-most lucrative deal — the other Los Angeles team (the Angels) — which entered into a 17-year deal with Fox Sports West worth $2.5 billion.

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It’s the bottom of the eighth inning. Men are on first and third base, there’s one out and your team is down by one run. The opposing team has one of the best ground-ball pitchers on the hill, and the infield is playing back and is looking for a double play. All you need is a fly ball to tie the game and significantly swing your chances of winning.

So who do you want at the plate?

It’s likely that the opposing manager will either bring in a ground-ball specialist or just tell the pitcher to stay away from pitches that could be hit in the air to the outfield. Knowing who you’d want to hit requires an understanding of what pitches are the most likely to induce a ground ball — and what hitters manage to hit fly balls against those pitches most often.

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Earlier this week I posted about the Best Bunts of 2012 according to Win Probability Added (WPA). Nothing like that is really complete, however, without talking about the worst. So here, divided into some rather arbitrary categories, are some of the worst bunts of 2012.

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That’s right: end of the season, time for me to hand out awards based on semi-goofy. questionable stats. Along with the Carter-Batista Award, this is one of the first I started publishing.. In fact, my very first post at FanGraphs (three years this week! Time flies when you’re wasting it.) back in 2009 was a King of Little Things award presentation. You can also check out the 2010 and 2011 versions for the thrilling results. So which 2012 hitter contributed to most his teams wins in ways not measurable by traditional linear weights?

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Here are the four rookie position players above 3.0 WAR in the 2012 season:
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You’re going into the bottom of the ninth inning, and your favorite baseball team is trailing 7-0. The game’s being played in a roughly neutral run environment, and so your team’s odds of winning are about 0.2 percent. That’s one-fifth of one percent. Maybe you’ve stopped paying close attention, and maybe you’ve stopped watching entirely, because the game is basically hopeless. It’s clearly not impossible to score at least seven runs in one inning, but it is exceedingly rare.

The first batter draws a walk. The next batter draws another walk. Now maybe the guy after that strikes out, but then a single loads the bases, and another single scores two. A walk loads the bases once more. You’re paying close attention again, if you didn’t turn the game off, because suddenly things are interesting, and your team has tons of momentum. Your team’s odds of winning with one out and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a 7-2 game are about four percent.

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Announcers and hitting coaches love to talk about hitting the ball to all fields, and especially hitting the ball to all fields with power. Not every elite hitter uses such an approach — Jose Bautista uses left field almost exclusively, for example. But Bautista’s way of hitting — pure pull power, with tons of fly balls — has it’s drawbacks; it is a finely tuned system available to a select few specimens.

After the 2010 season, it wasn’t clear Ryan Braun would become the elite power hitter suggested by his explosive 34-homer, .634 SLG, .310 ISO debut season. Every season after he came up, his ISO dipped by at least 34 points until he slugged just .501 with 25 homers in 2010. Braun was never the kind of pull power hitter Bautista embodies, but much of his power away from left field came in the form of doubles (45 in 2010), not home runs.

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The Milwaukee Brewers have been one of the biggest disappointments of the 2012 season, underperforming expectations that had them contending for back-to-back divisional crowns in the mediocre NL Central. The bullpen imploded in spectacular fashion, Alex Gonzalez suffered a season-ending knee injury early on, Zack Greinke is now pitching in Los Angeles, and Shaun Marcum threw for the first time in more than two months on Saturday.

Despite all of those misfortunes, the Brewers’ starting rotation has not been part of the problem — well, other than the recently-released Randy Wolf — and owned a combined 3.78 FIP coming into Sunday’s games.  That’s only ticks above their 3.75 FIP from last year, when they reached the NLCS.

The unit as a whole has improved in some aspects, though. Coming into Sunday, Milwaukee’s starting rotation has compiled the best strikeout rate in all of baseball.

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In advance of the trade deadline, the Angels seemed poised to make a run, and that was before they traded for Zack Greinke. The Angels traded for Zack Greinke and at least on paper, that made their starting rotation laughably awesome. Even though the trade might’ve had more to do with the playoffs and signing Greinke long-term, the Angels still had to finish well in the regular season, and there was little reason to believe Greinke wouldn’t help them do that.

Greinke hasn’t helped them do that, at least not yet. He very easily still could — there’s a lot of season left — but so far the Angels are 1-4 in Greinke starts, and he’s averaged about a walk or a hit batter every other inning. He’s allowed 22 runs in 32 innings, and all in all he just hasn’t looked like the same Zack Greinke capable of posting comical strikeouts and walks. Greinke’s another player for whom the Angels are crossing their fingers, where the idea was that Greinke would be a player they could take for granted.

What follows isn’t intended to explain everything that has gone wrong. I think the best explanation for what’s happened with Greinke might be Baseball!, just as that’s the best explanation for how Chris Davis earned a win over Darnell McDonald. What follows might not actually explain anything, but Greinke’s struggles provided a convenient opportunity to bring this up and I’m nothing if not opportunistic. Actually that isn’t true, one could never be nothing. By definition, one is always something. I am something, and possibly opportunistic. All right, moving on.

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The 2012 MLB season began with a very public bounty of international talent — Japanese stars, Cuban expats and even a Taiwanese surprise. With the season dipping into its final six weeks, we are beginning to see both the good and the bad of these international players who made the direct transition to MLB rookie.

SP Yu Darvish — The biggest star from Japan since Daisuke Matsuzaka has had a very Daisuke Matsuzaka season — much despite steady predictions of the opposite. Well, actually, he has an 86 FIP-minus and 94 xFIP-minus. That’s at least a better FIP than Daisuke’s rookie year, but an identical xFIP.

Dave Cameron has written extensively on Darvish lately, noting Darvish has a command problem, the league has realized Darvish has a command problem, and Darvish has a scary group of command problem comparables.

At the same time, though, Darvish has been adjusting his approach to a less-aggressive (compared to the NPB) league. He has been toying with his repertoire, and I would not be surprised if he entered the 2013 season with a streamlined pitch selection that sets up his elite slider (one of the best in the league) more effectively and simply.
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