The World Baseball Classic is, of course, its own tournament, fully enjoyable all by itself. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll concede that we think of the regular season first. So we watch the WBC with the year ahead very much in mind. The Seattle area had particular interest in Wednesday night’s game between Venezuela and the United States, in San Diego. The US was scheduled to open with Mariners starter Drew Smyly. Venezuela was scheduled to open with Mariners starter Felix Hernandez.

Felix, at this point, is among baseball’s more intriguing unknowns. One of the best pitchers in the world is coming off the most disappointing season of his career, a season in which all the numbers went in the wrong direction. That’s typically a sign of decline, but Felix spent the winter working hard to try to regain his strength. His outing was sure to be monitored closely, and he wound up spinning five shutout innings, without a single walk. The public is forever keeping track of Felix’s velocity, and on a few occasions, he pushed his fastball past 92. There were reasons to be encouraged, as Felix blanked a strong lineup.

And yet maybe that’s missing the point. So many times, the story has been about Felix Hernandez’s fastball. In this case, the story should probably be about Drew Smyly’s fastball.

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The Mariners are trying something that has never been attempted before. In Jarrod Dyson, Mitch Haniger, and Leonys Martin they’re rolling out three legitimate center fielders that were center fielders last year. We’re in love with fly balls right now, but fly balls will not love Seattle this season.

There’s obviously some precedent for strong defensive outfields. The Cubs and Royals, for example, have both appeared in the World Series recently thanks, in no small part, to their ability to take away hits. But even if you stretch the definition of center fielder, something approximating Seattle’s current experiment appears to have been attempted only three times previously. And even then, it doesn’t appear to have happened exactly this way. While the three outfielders themselves don’t think it’s a big deal, there might be a few reasons no other teams have tried this.

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Episode 722
Kate Preusser is the managing editor of Seattle Mariners SB Nation blog Lookout Landing. She’s also (a) FanGraphs’ inaugural writer-in-residence and (b) the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Would you like to nominate someone for a residency? You can do that here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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This is Kate Preusser’s first piece as part of her month-long residency.

In Molloy, Samuel Beckett tells us: “There is a little of everything, apparently, in nature, and freaks are common.”

Thyago Vieira is a freak. I mean this in the nicest, but also the meanest, way. The Mariners prospect and Brazilian native has been turning heads across the league after blazing through the California League and the AFL this past year, victimizing hitters with his triple-digit fastball and newfound slider and just generally looking like a Brazilian golem looming atop the mound with his cold stare and imposing stature. And that’s before he throws 104 at you. Vieira is officially listed at 6-foot-2, but his height is often given offhand by manager Scott Servais or GM Jerry Dipoto as 6-foot-3 or 6-foot-4. The average Brazilian male, meanwhile, is 5-foot-7. There is a little of everything in nature but, as the fifth-most populous nation in the world, a lot of everything in Brazil.

Perhaps part of the height inflation is Vieira’s frame. He’s listed at 220 pounds but looks bigger than that in person, with a Bunyan-esque lower half fueled by daily workouts and a newfound love of American food like the Cheesecake Factory. Having grown up with a single mother who often gave up her own meals so Thyago and his brother could eat, his love of Instagramming his food with heart and praise hands and cake emojis comes into clearer focus.

I first became interested in Vieira last year, when he moved into a closer role with the Bakersfield Blaze, the Mariners’ Low-A team. His picture showed a kid with a big, easy smile and thick black-framed glasses, a la Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn. Unfortunately, his command had also emulated Charlie Sheen’s character, leading Vieira to have been stuck in the Mariners’ system since he was drafted in 2011, never making it past A-ball. Brazilian prospects, maybe more so than any other group, are raw, lacking the kind of resources teams pour into talent powerhouses like Venezuela or the Dominican Republic.

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It’s rare that the scouting community, projections wonks, and enthusiastic fans all possess more or less the same opinion about a player. More commonly, a player comes up and drives some kind of wedge between certain crowds. So Dan Vogelbach, guy who fans like more than scouts, isn’t necessarily rare in that regard. In Vogelbach’s case, however, the difference of opinion are more pronounced. And in Vogelbach’s case, the stakes are higher — in more ways than one.

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Here’s the thing about bunting: it can be a good idea if the third baseman is playing too far back. The chance of a hit goes up in that case, and a successful bunt often causes the third baseman to play more shallow in future plate appearances, so future balls in play receive a benefit. That’s one of those games within a game we see all the time in baseball: once the positioning deviates from “normal” by a certain degree, the batter receives a benefit. Then the defender has to change his approach.

This tension created by the bunt illustrates how offenses and defenses react to each other’s tendencies. That same sort of balance between fielder and hitter might be playing out on an even broader scale, however, when it comes to the shift in general.

Too many shifts in the game, and the players begin to adjust. They develop more of a two-strike approach, they find a way to put the ball in play on the ground the other way, or they make sure that they lift the ball if they’re going to pull it. There’s evidence that players are already working on lifting the ball more as a group, pulling the ball in the air more often than they have in five years, and have improved on hitting opposite-field ground balls. So maybe this next table is no surprise.

The league has improved against the shift! The shift is dead! Or, wait: the league has actually improved as a whole over this timeframe, and the difference between the two is still about the same. And every team would take a .292 wOBA against over a .297 number. Long live the shift.

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Felix Hernandez looks like a new man. He’s created a new self because he wants to more closely resemble his old self, the self that ranked consistently among the best pitchers in baseball. There are many different ways to tell the story of his decline, but I could note that he was most recently a one-win pitcher, where he used to be a six-win pitcher. The season before last, he was a three-win pitcher. That’s one way to put it all simply. Here’s another:

You don’t have to know anything about baseball to spot those directional changes, and you don’t have to know much about baseball to know those directional changes are bad. This is an easy thing to discuss: Over the past couple years, Felix has lost his command, and he’s become more hittable. Now that he’s almost 31 years old, we could say, well, yeah, this is how players decline, and his age is pretty decline-y. Felix, though, has worked to reverse all this. As with Noah Syndergaard, you could say Felix is presently in the best shape of his life. The whole point is to be hopeful.

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The Dodgers signed Franklin Gutierrez over the weekend. Now, I didn’t realize the Dodgers still had room on their major-league roster, but they probably know better than I do. Here is a list of problems that have sent Franklin Gutierrez to the disabled list over the past several years:

• stomach gastritis
• strained left oblique
• torn right pectoral
• concussion
• strained right hamstring
• strained right hamstring

Related to the above, here are Gutierrez’s year-to-year plate-appearance totals after getting traded to the Mariners:

• 2009: 629
• 2010: 629
• 2011: 344
• 2012: 163
• 2013: 151
• 2014: 0

That zero stands out. Gutierrez missed all of 2014, making the personal decision to sit out so he could focus on treatment. Treatment for what? Treatment for ankylosing spondylitis! Young athletes are not often diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, but Gutierrez was, and there isn’t a cure. It’s a condition he’ll deal with for the rest of his life, and it costs him flexibility and mobility. It’s cruel and unrelenting, and when Gutierrez elected to not play, he couldn’t have known whether he’d ever be able to return.

But he tried in 2015. He tried, and he succeeded, having settled on a treatment plan that left him feeling somewhat okay. Gutierrez batted almost 200 times with the 2015 Mariners, and then he batted almost 300 times with the 2016 Mariners. And the player that Gutierrez turned himself into was and is dramatically different from the player he’d been before.

That’s a comparison of recent Gutierrez to what’s basically peak, healthy Gutierrez. Earlier in his career, Gutierrez was as smooth an outfield defender as anyone had ever seen. He was one of the best defensive players in baseball, and at the plate, he showed some promising pop. Now look at the last two years. Gutierrez has become a negative defensive asset, because he simply doesn’t move so well anymore. For the same reason, he’s seldom aggressive on the bases. So much of that old athleticism is gone, and it’ll never return. But Gutierrez has found a way to compensate. He’s gotten bigger, and he’s made a conscious effort to try to just beat the living crap out of the ball.

Some percentile rankings from the last two years:

• HR/FB%: 100th
• ISO: 96th
• Hard%: 99th
• wFA/C: 99th
• Exit Velo: 96th
• Contact: 7th
• K%: 5th
• Fastball%: 4th
• Def/600: 19th

No hitter in baseball has managed a higher rate of home runs per fly ball. Gutierrez has some of the best hard-contact measures around, having sacrificed contact to get there. At this point, he has a lot of power and a lot of swing-and-miss, and so pitchers increasingly treat Gutierrez like a terrifying threat, avoiding fastballs and avoiding the zone. As far as other things go, Gutierrez can still play the outfield, but he isn’t very good at it. And there will be days he’ll wake up and he simply won’t be able to play. On those days, his condition won’t let him.

The reality is, Gutierrez isn’t getting healthier. And teams are reluctant to sign a player whose availability is unpredictable. From time to time, the Dodgers might end up frustrated, playing games with a short bench. But they know what they’re getting into, and they know what Gutierrez has been able to do since his return. Having lost a lot of his ability to move around, Gutierrez has focused on more light jogs and fewer hard sprints. He remains active with his 34th birthday coming next week, and given where he’s been, that’s almost impossible to believe.

A classic Super Bowl is behind us, large trucks are headed to Florida and Arizona, and spring is in the air — at least in some places a distance from my Wisconsin residence. We’re entering the home stretch of our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality, utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data. Last time, it was National League right fielders. Now, it’s the catchers’ turn. We begin with a look at the 2016 AL regulars at that position.

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It’s no secret that this winter has not been kind to veteran hitters, particularly those with limited defensive ability. Mike Napoli is still a free agent, as are Chris Carter and Pedro Alvarez. Brandon Moss just signed with the Royals yesterday, getting a backloaded $12 million on a two year deal. Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Bautista, and Mark Trumbo all took significant discounts relative to their initial asking prices. As we discussed a few weeks ago, the market for offense-first players was remarkably poor this year, to the point where it could be seen as an overcorrection; perfectly useful players are signing for less than what similarly valuable players with different skills are getting paid.

What is perhaps most interesting about this development, however, is that the teams who could are most in need of a first base upgrade are also teams that should be trying to squeak out every marginal win they can find.

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