Jhonny Peralta got four years and $52 million from the Cardinals to be their shortstop, or so reports Jon Morosi. That’s the longest contract given to a free agent after a suspension for performance-enhancing drugs — a fact that has made some in the game angry. But that’s only one of the reasons this signing is so interesting.
In the World Series, broadcasts from both TBS and Fox kept telling us how good of a center fielder Jon Jay was. In between plaudits, Jon Jay would inevitably get a poor jump, take a bad route, or just drop an easily catchable ball, sometimes all in the same game. It became something of a running joke, as Jay appeared to be a defensive disaster in the postseason, even while the networks kept insisting that he was terrific with the glove.
Well, the Cardinals clearly weren’t swayed by the rhetoric, and today, they’ve acquired Peter Bourjos from the Angels to be their new center fielder. And now TBS and Fox can properly say that the Cardinals have one of the best defensive center fielders on the planet, because Peter Bourjos is what Jon Jay was supposed to be.
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:
The official 2013 National League Most Valuable Player is Andrew McCutchen, who was terrific. From what anyone can tell, he’s a very deserving winner, but the voting still came with a few little controversies. For one, Paul Goldschmidt didn’t pick up a single first-place vote, and all season he was incredibly clutch. For two, a pair of first-place votes went to Yadier Molina, both of them coming out of St. Louis. One of those writers put Matt Carpenter second, and it’s easy to write that off as simple bias. If you’re the only people to vote for a guy, and it’s a guy on your hometown team, and everyone else votes for another guy, that’s going to be pretty conspicuous.
My first impression, though, was that, even if they followed the wrong process, they might well have stumbled upon the right answer. Or at least, a good answer. Those people in St. Louis see Molina more than anybody else, and Molina, more than anybody else, seems to have value that’s tricky to measure. Catchers are hard, and Molina might be the best one, and he’s a leader who has the pitching staff’s full respect. Pitchers don’t shake Molina off. They say he’s the heart and soul of the ballclub, and I’m open to the idea that a bunch of Molina’s real value is basically hidden in other numbers. But I wasn’t satisfied with just a belief.
The St. Louis Cardinals need a shortstop and have a surplus of talent with no obvious places to fit onto their roster. The Colorado Rockies have a superstar shortstop but need more good players than they currently have. These facts have people — including noted scribe Ken Rosenthal — speculating about what a Tulowitzki-to-STL deal might look like. In fact, it is probably now the most interesting trade rumor of the off-season.
For their part, the Rockies say that they aren’t interested in trading Tulowitzki. When you have one of the best players in the game signed to one of the most team-friendly contracts in the game, there shouldn’t be a huge sense of urgency to unload said player and contract. Over the summer, I rated Tulowitzki as the 13th most valuable trade chip in baseball, sliding in between Miguel Cabrera and Stephen Strasburg. For the Rockies to move Tulowitzki, the offer would have to be substantial.
The Cardinals have substantial talent though. Matt Adams looks like a nice player, but he’s blocked by Allen Craig at first base. Trevor Rosenthal wants to start, but there isn’t an obvious spot for him in the rotation at the moment. If Jaime Garcia is healthy by next spring, the Cardinals won’t even have room for all the starters they already have, not even counting the potential for Rosenthal or Carlos Martinez to transition back out of the bullpen. The team also has Kolten Wong now blocked by Matt Carpenter at second base, and if they end up re-signing Carlos Beltran, they’ll probably have to trade Jon Jay whenever Oscar Taveras proves ready for the big leagues.
So, yeah, the Cardinals have expendable talent that is basically the envy of every team in the sport. They have enough depth that they can probably target any player they want and make a serious offer that at least forces the other club to listen. The real question, though, is should they?
Award season is upon us. It is a time for arguing about ERA versus FIP, pitching to the score, defensive value, and the meaning of “valuable.” Fun, right? It is also a time for me to whip out fun little toys to recognize different kinds of offensive contributions. One of these is the basis for the Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award, which annually recognizes the hitter whose RBI total most overstates his actual offensive contribution.
Spoiler alert: it was a banner year for the National League Central. Taste the excitement!
The 2013 postseason was a wild ride. We witnessed crazy endings, ill-timed errors, bizarre managerial gaffes, and plenty of the usual heroics. Perhaps you may be interested to learn how certain plays affected a team’s odds of winning the World Series. Luckily, we have a stat for that.
It is perhaps no longer appropriate to talk about the 2013 St. Louis Cardinals as a current baseball team. As of late Wednesday night, there are no current baseball teams, with all teams now to be referred to in the past tense. In the end, the Cardinals came up just short of the Red Sox, and though they lost the finale by five runs, they did manage to strand runner after runner against John Lackey and bits of the Boston bullpen. It was a theme for the Cardinals in the World Series — though they didn’t perform much worse than Boston at the plate, their timing was worse, and as Dave noted earlier Thursday, the Cardinals were let down by a lack of timeliness that had driven them all regular season long.
Oddly and interestingly, some semblance of Cardinals magic was with them in October. In the playoffs, with runners in scoring position, the Cardinals batted just .259 with a .701 OPS. Those numbers aren’t particularly good, but in the playoffs, with the bases empty, those same Cardinals batted a woeful .190 with a .522 OPS. On the one hand, the Cardinals weren’t automatic in run-scoring situations, like they were during the year. On the other, they still significantly elevated their performance, and this gets to a subject most perplexing.
The St. Louis Cardinals are often referred to as a “model organization”, and for good reason. Despite playing in one of the smallest markets of any team in Major League Baseball, they have built a sustainable model of success, flowing through nearly every aspect of the game. They draft and develop talent exceptionally well, leading to a seemingly never ending pipeline of young talent flowing into the big leagues. They manage their financial resources very well, and consistently add quality veterans at prices that won’t prohibit them from making other necessary improvements. They have a formula in place that has allowed them to win in both the short and long term, and have shown that it doesn’t take a $175 million payroll to be one of baseball’s elite franchises.
But, of course, they aren’t perfect. No organization is. So, while the Cardinals 2013 season was a remarkable success, and should be viewed that way no matter how the season ended, there may be a few things that can be learned from their final series loss to the Red Sox.
In the little picture, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The better baseball team clinched the World Series, on its own home field. One of the truths about the MLB playoffs is that the format doesn’t always reward the best team in baseball. This time, though, the Red Sox have a hell of an argument, and they’re a more than deserving champion. In the big picture, also, Wednesday’s was a perfectly sensible conclusion. The Red Sox won their third title in a decade. They’re always thought of as a powerhouse. The magic is in the medium picture. The picture in which you realize the Red Sox did go from worst to first. Just one season ago, the Red Sox lost 93 games. This season, the Mariners lost 91 games. The Mets lost 88 games. The Padres lost 86 games. There was a lot of talent already in place, but the Red Sox badly needed some work, and the franchise identity shouldn’t blind people to the near improbability of the turnaround. No World Series champion has ever had a worse previous season.
For Sox fans, this was another opportunity to celebrate, and an opportunity to celebrate a Series win at home for the first time in almost a century. For Sox fans and all other fans too, this made for a relatively stress-free game by the middle innings. The top of the seventh offered a glimpse of possible stress, but there was no real stress to be felt after the Sox went up 3-0 in the third and double that in the fourth. Stephen Drew’s homer put Boston’s win expectancy over 90% and it never sank back down below. For several innings, the Sox all but had the clincher in the bag, after chasing the un-chase-able Michael Wacha.