I imagine that, for a front office exec, there’s nothing quite like the buzz you get from picking up another team’s non-tender and getting value from that player. Maybe it’s just ‘one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,’ but in a business where one sector of the market has to continually work to find value in surprising places, it’s an important moment.

But is there much success to be found in the bargain bin? These are players that their own team has given up on — and we have some evidence that teams know more about their own players than the rest of the league, and that players that are re-signed are more successful. What can we learn from the successes and failures that we’ve seen in the past?

To answer that question, I loaded all the non-tendered players since 2007 into a database and looked at their pre- and post-non-tender numbers.

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Episode 402
Nathaniel Stoltz is a very thoughtful prospect writer for FanGraphs et al. He’s also the guest on this terribly pleasant edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 48 min play time.)

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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 has published today his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Miami Marlins.

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 Marlins 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.

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Austin Brice is a legitimate prospect. The Marlins spent $205,000 to sign him out of high school in 2010, and he was ranked as the sixteenth-best farmhand in the Miami organization by Baseball America coming into the 2013 season, an area of prospect lists he will likely to continue to reside in this offseason. He’s just 21, has two pitches that flash plus, and has a prototypical pitcher’s body and smooth, easy, delivery.

He also has 190 career walks in 279 2/3 professional innings, including 82 in 113 frames in 2013. That’s a career 14.88% walk rate and a 15.16% mark in 2013, a number that was actually a step back from 2012 (14.08%) even though he was repeating the Low-A level (his ERA also shot up from 4.35 to 5.73, and his K-rate fell from 25.26% to 20.52%. Certainly, this past season did not bring the young righthander much good news.

Plenty of pitching prospects pair tantalizing stuff with frustrating inabilities to throw strikes, but Brice (whom I saw five different times in 2013, a virtue of living 45 minutes from NewBridge Bank Park) is an especially frustrating case because, as I said above, his delivery is one of his strengths. In this piece, I’m going to examine the root of his control problems and tie it to some more general and important lessons about the process behind throwing strikes.

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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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Although the end of regular baseball is sad for both fans who blog and those who do not, for the former it at least provides a time to look back on the season and write about certain achievements. For me, it is a nice time to whip out some silly awards based on toy stats. On Monday, we looked at 2013’s Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award winner, which compared RBI totals with linear weights runs created. Today, we look at a more specific situational stat that someone (not me) suggested a few years back and that I have looked at annually. It is not the same thing as clutch, but does use situational metrics to see how much a player contributed on offense beyond what is measured by traditional linear weights, in this case by looking at the specific game states the player faced. For better or worse, we call the winner of this award the King of the Little Things.

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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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I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the other sports, so I can’t speak to situations more messed up than what we’ve got in baseball. But in baseball — little details aside — we’ve got the A’s, and we’ve got the Marlins.

The A’s consistently try really hard to win, despite the odds being stacked against them. Oakland has a brilliant front office, and they play in a ballpark plagued by sewage leaks in the clubhouse and in the dugout. The Marlins are crooks. Money-hungry crooks. They play in a brand-new ballpark they didn’t pay for — a ballpark they’ve made no effort to fill after a disappointing debut season. The Marlins did what the Marlins do: They got some people excited, then they undid the goodwill and more.

Some baseball teams have reputations. The Yankees are the big spenders. The Dodgers are the other big spenders. The Twins are lovable throwbacks. The Braves are slightly less-lovable throwbacks. The Royals are run by people who shouldn’t be running the Royals. And so on. The Marlins’ reputation is that they’re run by criminals who deceive with every word. Two offseasons ago, it looked like they were trying hard to turn the page, to create a new identity. Two offseasons ago, the Marlins tried to spend to build a powerhouse. But their identity is still their identity. You know how it went. The Marlins are as the Marlins have been.

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It isn’t often you can say this, but the best show in baseball Wednesday took place in Miami. Though it was a game between the going-nowhere hosts and the certainly-going-somewhere Braves, the hosts had Jose Fernandez on the mound, and before the Marlins equivalent of a full house, Fernandez did everything in what would be his final start of the season. There were twists, there were turns. There were big swings and big pitches. There were players yelling at one another, and there were fans yelling louder. Wednesday night, Miami and Fernandez had it all.

Fernandez was dominant, but Fernandez has often been dominant, and the game was so much more than that. He got involved not just on the mound, but also at the plate and on the basepaths. Everybody knew it would be his last turn, and it doesn’t seem like he left anything on the table.

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