Spring is a time for big talk, for positive talk. Spring is when everyone’s sure they’re going to get better. And maybe everyone really does get better all the time. It’s just that some people get less better than others. Mike Matheny is in charge of a really good baseball team that almost won the World Series last fall. But Matheny, like most baseball people, wasn’t completely satisfied. In 2014, he wants his team to be better. And specifically, he’s also looking for his pitchers to be better… at hitting. And he thinks it’s going to happen.

“We’re going to be a better hitting group of pitchers this year,” Matheny said. “They do so much talking about how athletic they are but they were not content with what they were able to do on the offensive side last year.”

Continued:

“There were a lot of swings and misses,” Matheny said. “We were one of the worst teams in baseball with strikeouts from the pitcher’s position. That just shouldn’t be so.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the St. Louis Cardinals.

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 Cardinals 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 / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

Read the rest of this entry »

A little over a month ago, I wrote this piece, examining how minor league catchers cut down on their passed ball rates over time. Indeed, anyone who peruses Baseball-Reference minor league catcher pages probably notices the tendency for teenage backstops to let pitches by them at alarming rates, only to ultimately settle into a more acceptable range as they reach their mid-twenties. On at least an anecdotal level, one can observe a similar phenomenon with left-side infielders–third base and shortstop are the most error-prone positions, and these tendencies can be blown up by inexperience. The worst qualified fielding percentage by an MLB shortstop in 2013 was Jed Lowrie‘s .962, and the worst from a qualified third baseman was Pablo Sandoval’s .940, but in, say, the Low-A South Atlantic League, ten of the fourteen third basemen who got over fifty games at the spot fell below that .940 fielding mark, and twelve of the fifteen shortstops didn’t break .962. And the short-season levels are a level of magnitude worse than that.

As with catchers, then, we can assume that left-side infielders cut down on their error totals significantly as time goes on. In this piece, I’m going to examine the development of shortstops in this area.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Berkman announced his retirement last week. While a week may seem like an eternity in the world of baseball blogs (especially during the seemingly endless off-season), a player of Berkman’s stature cannot be allowed to slip quietly into the night. If for no other reason, Berkman would deserve recognition on the basis of not one, but two of the best nicknames (judged on originality and appropriateness to the subject) in contemporary baseball in “Big Puma” and “Fat Elvis.” But he was also, as one would hope FanGraphs readers know, a tremendous player. As we so often do, let’s look back on some of Lance Berkman’s biggest hits from the perspective on their impact on individual games.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like the Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals often have good problems. The Cardinals are likely to have a top 10 rotation in 2014, but they still have to figure out who is going to slot into the rotation, and who will be the odd men out. Men is the key word here, because the Cardinals don’t have just six options, or even seven, but rather eight legitimate candidates for the starting rotation. Let’s walk through it, shall we?

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals have reportedly signed Mark Ellis to a one-year deal. Ellis will turn 37 next season, but played well enough the last couple of years with the Dodgers that he was sure to find a job. The question is whether the Cardinals really needed him given the presence of Kolten Wong. The answer has to do with the Cardinals’ position as a contender and their concern with depth.

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Boston / Philadelphia.

Batters
There are obvious caveats one should append to the sentence which follows, and yet it’s also true. The St. Louis Cardinals, who’ve just been to the World Series, are likely to enter the 2014 season with a better complement of position players than with which they entered 2013.

Part of that, of course, is having a shortstop at all. Daniel Descalso and Pete Kozma, combined, were never an ideal substitute for Rafael Furcal. That next year’s shortstop is Jhonny Peralta — about whom ZiPS is fairly optimistic — represents a decided advantage. That Matt Carpenter emerged as very possibly an above-average major leaguer has also benefited the club.

In terms of who precisely will play where precisely in 2014, there are some uncertainties regarding that. For the purposes of the depth chart below, I’ve put Allen Craig in right field and Matt Adams at first base. In reality, Jon Jay and (possibly) Oscar Taveras will also play roles with the club, however.

Read the rest of this entry »

This past season was the season of the Red Sox, and in a lot of ways the Red Sox’s season was the season of Koji Uehara. From the emergency closer service to the relief equivalent of a perfect game to all of the playoff heroics, Uehara emerged as an important and unhittable star, becoming widely known to a nation that had almost entirely overlooked the earlier portion of his big-league career. One question we have now is, will Uehara be able to repeat? Another question is, how didn’t we see something like this coming? As a reliever between 2010-2012, Uehara issued 16 unintentional walks, with 183 strikeouts. The biggest concern was durability; in 2013, Uehara was durable. And amazing.

Given Uehara’s rise to fame and the Red Sox’s success, it would make sense for some other teams to try to mimic their model. There existed on the market a relief pitcher with an awful lot in common with Uehara, a guy who might be a bit underrated. Thursday, that pitcher found a new home. Because Edward Mujica has signed with the Red Sox.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »