A couple of years ago, Logan Morrison was one of the best prospects in baseball. Before the 2009 season, Baseball America rated him the #18 prospect in baseball, and before the 2010 season, he was rated 20th overall. Then as a 22 year old rookie in 2010, he hit .283/.390/.447 in his debut, good for a 129 wRC+. He took walks, he made contact, he hit for some doubles power, and he looked like one of the game’s best young hitters.

And it’s been all downhill since then. In 2011, he annoyed the Marlins enough that they sent him back to the minors for a week to teach him some humility. His wRC+ regressed to 116, which combined with atrocious outfield defense made him a marginally valuable player. The last two years, he’s been even worse, posting below average hitting lines while struggling to play the field, and knee surgery limited both his playing time and his mobility.

So now, here we are heading into 2014, and Morrison has nearly 1,500 plate appearances, a 108 wRC+ over the years he’s spent in the big leagues, and a career WAR of +1.0. He will head to arbitration for the first time as a 26 year old who has been a replacement level player for each of the past three seasons. What once looked like a promising young hitter now looks like more of an opportunity to salvage a former prospect in his post-hype stage.

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Hey, Tony Blengino here. You might remember me from such Mariner classics as “MMIX – Negative Run Differential Theater” , or “2010 – A Spaced Odyssey”. For some years, I was a scout with the Brewers, and in more recent years I was an assistant to the GM with the Mariners. While I’m between baseball adventures, I’ve been given the privilege of writing on the storied pages of FanGraphs. I know the bar is high here, and I’ll do my best to reach it.

Alas, I am no longer a Mariner, but I was one long enough to help assemble a crew of talented, relatively inexpensive youngsters that made the Robinson Cano Era possible. This article will not attempt to say whether a 10-year, $240M commitment to Cano is a sign of the apocalypse, the gateway to a golden era in Mariner baseball, or something in between. There will be plenty of other articles for that. In this one, I will simply take a look at the player’s potential aging curve, from a couple of different perspectives — one historical, one more qualitative. Let’s get this out of the way from the get-go — Robinson Cano is pretty good. Clearly the best bat on the free agent market, and certainly a sturdier asset than Prince Fielder and Josh Hamilton were at the time they entered the free-agent market. He has been remarkably consistent, and remarkably healthy throughout his career. He provides offense at a position where it is not plentiful. But where does Robby Cano fit in with other offensive 2Bs in baseball history, and how did they age? Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

This time around, there was no Mystery Team. Rather than reports of back room dealings or whispers of an unreported offer, this courtship was about as public as it gets. The Mariners wanted Robinson Cano, and were willing to pay a premium to get him. And with the Yankees holding firm on their offer at roughly $175 million over seven years, the Mariners convinced Cano to leave New York by simply blowing away the next best offer. The final tally, according to Enrique Rojas: $240 million over 10 years.

It’s a monster of a contract, tied for the third largest in baseball history. Alex Rodriguez has signed two contracts larger than this, and Albert Pujols signed this same contract with the Angels two years ago. The Rangers paid the Yankees to take the first A-Rod deal off their hands, the Yankees are hoping MLB helps them get out from under part of the second one, and I just rated the Pujols contract as the most untradable contract in baseball a few months back. So, yeah, the history of contracts at this level isn’t exactly flowing with reasons for optimism.

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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:

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The polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet — with assistance from celebrity guest Jason Churchill — has published today his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Seattle Mariners.

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 Mariners 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: Chicago AL / Miami.

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Earlier this week, I posted about the best bunts of the 2013 regular season according to Win Probability Added. You can read about the basic idea (and its limits) there. Now that we have looked at the best, why not a few of the worst?

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Sure, Game 163 is looming, and it counts as part of the regular season, but aside from some tweaks, the numbers are pretty much in for the 2013 season. We are close enough for at least some simple retrospectives on certain numerical accomplishments from the almost finished season. Some of the metrics involved are more meaningful or useful than others, but this post will not focus on analysis. As long as one does not confuse the listing of some metric below with an endorsement — or a criticism, for that matter — of its value, it is fine to simply take pleasure these accomplishments..

Some of these achievements have more historical resonance than others (and to a certain extent that is in the eye of the beholder). This is not presented as an exhaustive list, either. To begin, though, we do have two all-time marks set by relief pitchers this season.

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Early on, every team and every game in baseball is interesting. For the first few weeks of the season, things feel so fresh, and things are so unpredictable, that you’re thirsty for any kind of action. As things progress, teams fall off the radar of interest. Fans start to focus more on the teams that might make the playoffs, and teams in basements continue to play largely un-discussed, save for the event of trade rumors. Few, then, would’ve been paying attention to the Mariners and Astros over the weekend, given their respective identities, but what the teams managed to accomplish on Saturday was unprecedented. And for all the talk about trades and the playoffs, it’s important to recognize that any kind of baseball can be interesting, and we shouldn’t forget it. You never know which games you might find remarkable.

A big part of the appeal of perfect games, or, I don’t know, cycles, is rarity. People love seeing things in baseball they don’t see very often. But rarity isn’t enough alone to make something worth talking about. Never before, in the recorded history of baseball, has a starting pitcher gone 4.2 innings, with four walks, two hits, and a strikeout. Not once. So many thousands of games. But if that happened tomorrow, no one would care, just like no one cares about a weird leaf on the ground. That leaf is unique, but really, it’s just another leaf. There needs to be some blend of rarity + achievement, and I think the Mariners/Astros game qualifies.

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Some time ago, in talking about the upcoming trade deadline, Dave offered Jesse Crain as a potential alternative to the potentially expensive Jonathan Papelbon. Relievers are always in demand around midseason, and Crain was proving himself to be a hell of a weapon. Shortly thereafter, Crain went and landed on the disabled list, and while his value wasn’t completely obliterated, it was dealt a blow and Crain is right now in the rehab process. He’s not the target he was, and he’s going to have to prove himself if he is to get moved.

I’m here now not to offer another alternative to Papelbon, but to just highlight a good reliever who’s available. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Oliver Perez has been pitching really well, and though he’s probably not reliable closer material, Perez throws hard with his left arm, and the things that used to plague him seem to be history. Perez is a lefty reliever on a bad team in his contract year, and if he gets traded — and there’s no reason why he shouldn’t — his new team should end up pleased as punch, whatever the hell that means.

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