Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.

Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.

If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.

As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.

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On Monday, we looked at three vetoed trades, and I thought today we’d look at three more.

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The Yankees, Mets, Braves and Phillies were all in pursuit of Scott Hairston, and it wasn’t until last week that it appeared the Cubs even had a chance. Now the oft-wanted role player is joining the Chicago Cubs on a 2-year deal worth up to $6 million after incentives.

Hairston’s well-documented ability to hit left-handed pitching (119 wRC+ against lefties, 86 wRC+ against righties) has earned him quality playing time in the majors, but never a starting gig. That trend should continue as he joins a Cubs outfield alignment already featuring a pair of lefties in David DeJesus and Nate Schierholtz.

Schierholtz has a career 96 wRC+ against righties and 90 wRC+ against his brother southpaws. On the merit of two consecutive strong seasons against right-handers (123 wRC+ in 2011, 126 wRC+ in 2012), Schierholtz figures to earn a hearty 500 PA as the Cubs anti-righty platoon mate.

DeJesus, meanwhile, owns a much more pronounced platoon split. His strong defense across the outfield and 117 wRC+ against righties keeps him in the lineup most days, but his 80 wRC+ against lefties may make him — despite being the more proven hitter — a possible platoon partner for Hairston as well.

All told, Hairston and his surprise suitors together make an increasingly interesting team, rich both in flaws and talents. With Hairston and a few other Scotts — Scott Baker, Scott Feldman, Kyuji Fujikawa (“Scott,” to his friends, I believe) — the Cubs look like they may need a hunting cap in 2013. The playoffs may not be out of reach.
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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, will be released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Chicago Cubs. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Astros / Athletics / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers.

Batters
The Cubs are projected by ZiPS to have, in shortstop Starlin Castro and first baseman Anthony Rizzo, to have a pair of basically All Star-type players who are also just 23 years old. Those are good kinds of players to have — especially for a team that isn’t likely to be very competitive this season, but has the resources to invest in free agents if and when such a thing is called for in the near future.

The rest of the starting lineup — besides human-shaped albatross Alfonso Soriano, that is — is a combination of decent organizational products (Darwin Barney, Wellington Castillo) and low-risk free agents (David DeJesus, Nate Schierholtz) acquired since the arrival of Theo Epstein et al.

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Why isn’t there more interest in Michael Bourn? A six-win center fielder is on the market, and our most recent article on the subject is whether or not his agent has waited too long to get him a deal. We don’t know what his asking price is, but the idea that a player coming off a career year and four straight seasons with more than four wins now needs a pillow contract seems to suggest that either there’s a reason to doubt Bourn’s work, or there’s a lack of demand for his services in the market place.

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The Cubs agreed to terms with 29-year-old career swingman Carlos Villanueva on Wednesday. With Scott Baker’s early season availability in question as he rehabs from April Tommy John surgery, Villanueva should have a chance at making the club’s opening day rotation.

Villanueva showed promise in the rotation as myriad Blue Jays injuries opened a spot for him in Toronto. In his first 11 starts, spanning 65.1 innings, Villanueva held opponents to just a 3.03 ERA as he notched 65 strikeouts against 17 walks (3.8 K/BB). But questions about Villanueva as a starter lingered even in early September. Alex Anthopolous hardly gave his player a vote of confidence when asked about his starting chops on September 12th, according to John Lott of the National Post:

“I don’t want to use a term that’s derogatory to the player,” he said. “I don’t want to doubt him. But I have to also be objective and realistic too.”

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Last winter, I was flummoxed at the league’s apparent lack of interest in Edwin Jackson. He’d just put up his third straight solid season at age 27, and had established himself as a durable, effective +3 to +4 win starter. Unfortunately, in that post, I made a pretty bad assumption:

Someone’s going to get a steal with Edwin Jackson, and given what he’s likely to do for the price he’s going to cost, the signing team should probably want to lock him in at these rates for the next few years. From Jackson’s perspective, he’s just been given a thorough rejection in his efforts to land a long term contract in a market where he should have been a pretty well sought after commodity, so he shouldn’t expect that posting another 200 inning season with a decent ERA will land him a raise next winter.

Guess what? Jackson posted another 200 inning season with a decent ERA and now he’s landing a huge raise, as the Cubs are reportedly set to sign him to a four year, $52 million contract.

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Last season, the Cubs lost 101 games. By straight record, it was their worst year since 1966, and they would’ve been the worst team in baseball were it not for the Astros putting on a clinic in how to accomplish exactly that. The Cubs, of course, are rebuilding, and as their 2012 team record would suggest, the process has only somewhat recently gotten underway. As you rebuild, you generally build from the ground up, acquiring youth and spending on short-term free agents. Generally.

Thursday, hours after it was revealed that Josh Hamilton was signing with the Angels, it was reported that Anibal Sanchez was signing with the Cubs. That comes from Bob Nightengale. Nightengale has written up a whole article about this, but no one else is yet confirming his report — Ken Rosenthal says instead that the Cubs are close, but that others remain in play. The Tigers have been Sanchez’s other most serious suitor, and Nightengale puts the Cubs’ offer at five years and $75 million. Let’s say that Sanchez has not yet agreed to a contract. We know now that the Cubs are deeply interested. And at first glance, that seems curious, given the Cubs’ position.

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Before the 2007 season, Major League Baseball Advanced Media partnered with StubHub as the official secondary ticket marketplace for Major League Baseball. All 30 MLB teams participated. Anyone could list MLB game tickets for sale on StubHub, at any price. StubHub charged buyers a handling fee and a delivery fee, often totaling more than $10, regardless of the selling price. The “delivery fee” was the key to the deal, as it allowed buyers to print the tickets at home. Gone were the days of sellers tossing tickets out a window to buyers at midnight. Sellers also paid a fee to StubHub, charged as a percentage of the sale price. StubHub shared about half its fees with MLBAM. In 2011, that amounted to more than $60 million. MBLAM then funneled a portion of those funds to the 30 teams.

Fans rejoiced. During the 2011 season, more than 8 million MLB tickets sold on StubHub, up from 6 million in 2010.

But many teams weren’t as thrilled. The Yankees, in particular, were a vocal critic of StubHub’s pricing policies. With no price floor, Yankees tickets were often available on StubHub for less than $5, a price significantly below the lowest ticket price available at the box office or on Yankees.com.  Critics countered that Yankees ticket prices were too high, creating a fertile market for very cheap tickets on the secondary market. But even teams with lower ticket prices lost sales to StubHub.

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