A few weeks ago, I ventured into the topic of whether the 2016 Cleveland Indians’ starting rotation had a chance at breaking the league-adjusted team strikeout rate record held by the 1990 Mets. Those Mets (comprising a front four of Dwight Gooden, David Cone, Frank Viola, and Sid Fernandez) struck out 47% more batters than a 1990 league-average rotation. That was ridiculously good in 1990, and today, it’d be even more incredible were a team able to do it, given the increase in strikeouts league-wide and the expectation that there probably is a ceiling to the strikeout trend. (Because there has to be, right?)

The reason we focused on Cleveland was simple: they almost reached the level of those Mets for a few months in the beginning of the 2015 season. In April and May, they were striking out around 27% of the batters they faced, a mark which nearly approximated the sort of video-game numbers required to match the league-adjusted total of the 1990 Mets. Though they finished first in baseball by striking out 24.2% of batters (which was also the highest strikeout rate for a starting rotation in baseball history), they finished only 41st-best in terms of yearly league-adjusted K rate. Ho-hum. The conclusion of that previous article was, unsurprisingly, that Cleveland would have to outperform their expectations by a sizeable amount to have a chance at the 1990 Mets.

But one of you astute, noble readers was not entirely satisfied with that rational answer. Instead, phoenix2042 challenged us by putting forth a question: what would a starting rotation that could beat that record look like in the modern game? Which 2016 personnel would a team require in order to best a strikeout rate that’s 47% better than the league average? Well, phoenix2042 — and the rest of you wondering readers — this piece aims to answer that question. We will build rotations worthy of a video game, and they will best the 1990 Mets.

First, as before, let’s look at what rotation-wide strikeout rates would be required to break the record in this coming season. I’ve taken the average yearly increase in rotation strikeout rate for each league: over the past 30 years, strikeout rates for starting rotations have increased by about 0.2% per year, on average, and at a slightly higher rate in the past 10 years. Averaging this trend, I calculated the so-called “holy grail” strikeout rate of just over the 1990 Mets (i.e. >47% above league average):

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You know about the Indians’ embarrassment of riches. Even if you’re not a huge fan of Trevor Bauer, Corey Kluber is fantastic, Carlos Carrasco is sometimes more fantastic and Danny Salazar manages to be fantastic when you’re not paying attention. The Indians are loaded with ace-level talent, and, by the way, now there’s a new one. I didn’t see it coming, either.

Excerpting from David Laurila, just this past Sunday:

Cody Anderson has a pretty good changeup, but it’s not the pitch that is opening eyes in Indians camp. According to Cleveland pitching coach Mickey Callaway, the 25-year-old righty is throwing 95-97 mph with ease. His fastball has been, in a word, “Wham!”

In 15 starts last year — his first in the big leagues — Anderson averaged 92.1 with his heater.

We talk a lot about velocity during spring training. We’ve seen pitchers add velocity in the past, but with all due respect, this case feels exceptional. Cody Anderson might not actually make the Indians’ rotation out of camp, but he might’ve added something like three or four ticks. All of a sudden, Anderson’s repertoire looks a lot like Matt Harvey’s.

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It’s hard to find a flaw within Francisco Lindor’s 2015 rookie season. The numbers say he was a top-five defensive shortstop in baseball; the eye test agrees. He had one of the best offensive debuts by a shortstop on record, combining plus on-base skills with surprising power. He even patched up his weak link from the minor leagues — baserunning efficiency — by stealing 12 bases in 14 attempts at the major league level. Adjusting for playing time, Lindor was one of the 10 most valuable players in baseball last season, using our WAR figure here on the site.

Lindor was excellent across the board, but he wasn’t the best at anything. He wasn’t the very best defender, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best hitting rookie shortstop of all time, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best baserunner, or the number one most valuable player on a per-plate appearance basis, but he was close. There was one leaderboard though, where you can find Lindor at the top, and, coincidentally, it’s also where you can find Lindor’s only real blemish.

Francisco Lindor, in the midst of one of the greatest offensive seasons by a rookie shortstop in history, led all of baseball in sacrifice bunts, with 13, despite playing in fewer than 100 games.

By this point, I don’t think anyone needs too big a primer on sacrifice bunting. It’s certainly got its place as a valuable tool — late-inning, need one run, man on first, no outs, weak and/or slow hitter at the plate, move him over. But there’s a reason sacrifice bunts are on a 90-year decline — because they’re very rarely a wise play, and the more information teams have gained over time, the more that’s become obvious.

Let Indians manager Terry Francona explain:

Outs are valuable, they’re finite, and sacrifice bunts give them away with limited reward. Got it. Everyone understands this. Lindor’s manager understands this. So then, what was going on?

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There is an inherent optimism when contracts are signed. The Cleveland Indians believed they were putting themselves over the top three years ago when they signed Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn to four-year deals. The team did not get the production they were hoping for, and after making the Wild Card their first year with the team in 2013, the team has won fewer games the last two seasons, and the Indians agreed to pay money to the Atlanta Braves to get rid of Bourn and Swisher while taking on the contract of Chris Johnson, who they have also jettisoned. As a result, the Indians have a larger percentage of their payroll going to players not playing for them in 2016 than any other Major League Baseball team.

The Indians might have the largest percentage of their payroll devoted to dead money, but they do not have the largest amount in total. The two franchises from Los Angeles both best the Indians. Thirteen of the 30 MLB teams have money going to players not currently on their 40-man roster. The graph below shows those 13 teams, with data collected from Cot’s Contracts.

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I wouldn’t recommend watching a large percentage of the little spring-training videos they make available at MLB.com, but this is a fun one. Members of the Indians rotation are asked which individual pitch they’d like to borrow from one of their peers. The responses, arranged in my own preferred order for editorial purposes:

• Josh Tomlin: Carlos Carrasco’s changeup
• Corey Kluber: Danny Salazar’s changeup
• Carlos Carrasco: Corey Kluber’s curveball
• Cody Anderson: Corey Kluber’s curveball
• Danny Salazar: Corey Kluber’s slider, by which he means curveball

It’s a gifted rotation, blessed with a number of elite individual weapons, but you see all the support for Kluber’s hook. By how fast it goes, and by the way that it moves, it’s a pitch unlike almost any other, and it’s been a huge part of Kluber’s emergence. That’s easy to see in the numbers we have. What’s easy to see, as well, is that Kluber throws a cutter that’s been roughly as valuable as the curve. Kluber actually has two elite pitches. What if he pitched like it?

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Indians’ starter Trevor Bauer prepares to collect data at Driveline Baseball.

Kyle Boddy spent years getting it wrong. “There were years of inconclusive results that led to more questions,” Boddy told me about his past work at his Driveline Baseball facility in Kent, Washington.

He had the best intentions. After years of day jobs, and coaching youth baseball with some competitive weightlifting sprinkled in, he started writing at The Hardball Times and studying injuries with Josh Kalk, now a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office. They had some success using neural networks on PITCHf/x data in order to spot injuries earlier than usual.

In the end, though, the Seattle-based mechanics analyst wanted to take a look at pitcher development under the same data-based lens that he and Kalk had used to spot existing injury.

So he built a biomechanics lab, complete with high-speed cameras and objects of known size. (That object, known as the Cube, is a square box built of tubing that helps calibrate the cameras so that the video created is all comparable.) It was a lot of work with an uncertain reward. “We got a lot of great kinetic data,” said Boddy of that time. “Then we realized that there was a huge amount of noise.”

Helping Boddy with the realization was Dr. Murray Maitland in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. When approached with analysis based on limb movement and pitchers’ physical tendencies and the link to injury, Dr. Maitland smiled and dropped what might have been a bombshell to Boddy that day. “Just because the joint or limb moves in this direction doesn’t mean the underlying muscle is doing that,” said Maitland in Boddy’s recollection. “The movement could be due to inertia, it could be due to whatever. You can’t infer muscle activity.”

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In absolute terms, we know that strikeouts are at an all-time high. We see it in box scores, talking heads consistently discuss and lament the phenomenon on broadcasts, and in truth, it’s been going on for years. We’re left to wonder and analyze where the ceiling is for this trend, and exactly where the line between passable and unacceptable strikeout totals for batters begins and ends. For pitchers — whose velocity is a main factor in the increased strikeout numbers — going to work must be that much more enjoyable. And, in 2015, it was most enjoyable in terms of strikeouts for the rotations of the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians.

If we look at strikeout rates for individual team seasons over the course of baseball history, no one struck out batters at a higher clip than the rotations of the 2015 Indians (24.2%) and 2015 Cubs (23.9%). That isn’t really surprising given the strikeout trend of recent years, but in mid-June of last season, the Indians’ rotation was actually on pace for the third-highest league-adjusted strikeout rate since 1950. At that point in time, they were striking out a historic rate of batters in a historic strikeout period, which is the sort of thing that tends to lend itself to positive team results. It didn’t, but most of that wasn’t the rotation’s fault (hello, team defense!), and the ridiculous strikeout pace didn’t quite continue into the second half of the season.

In the end, they finished as the 41st-best league-adjusted strikeout rotation, which really isn’t too bad: they ended up striking out almost 27% more batters than the league average starting rotation in 2015. Here’s the 2015 Indians compared to the best 15 league-adjusted strikeout rotations since 1950 by K%+ (percentage points above average compared to a given year’s league average strikeout rate):

In case you’re wondering, the 2015 Cubs finished 105th-best, with a K%+ rate of 120. Also not bad, but it’s illustrative of just how many strikeouts a team has to amass to make a run at breaking the record. And so I wondered: what strikeout rate would it take in 2016 to break the league-adjusted rate? And do the Cubs or Indians (or another rotation) have any realistic shot at breaking it?

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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The 2010 Mariners were a dreadful baseball team, and an unexpectedly dreadful baseball team at that. They were designed to be competitive — they should’ve been competitive — and from a fan’s perspective, I’m not sure I’ve witnessed a bigger letdown. It was a difficult season for countless different reasons, but what’s been most upsetting, both now and back at the time, is that the Mariners being terrible cost me the opportunity to watch more Cliff Lee on my favorite team. I knew he was awesome when he was first brought in, but I didn’t appreciate the extent until I got to watch him every five days.

I bring this up because Lee is in the news:

Sounds like Cliff Lee’s career is over. His agent, Darek Braunecker, told me, “We don’t anticipate him playing at this point.”

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 23, 2016

Lee hasn’t officially retired, and you never know when someone might have a change of heart. Yet it’s never been less likely that Lee will return, so I want to take this chance to offer a quick retrospective. Not everyone is deserving of the treatment, because not everyone is equally interesting, but Lee developed into the perfect pitcher. It took him some time, and he’s not going to end up in Cooperstown, but for a good six-year stretch, there was nothing else you could’ve wanted Cliff Lee to be.

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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