There are certain statistics that get tallied on scorecards such as hits, walks, runs, and strikeouts.  These aren’t the modern, comprehensive measures of performance we typically use here at FanGraphs, but they are the building blocks of those metrics. Without singles/doubles/triples/etc, there is no way to build wOBA or wRC+. Without strikeouts, walks, home runs, and innings pitched, there is no FIP.

While we’ve generally moved beyond caring about certain counting stats, we use them to build the things about which we care a great deal. But there is at least one standard scorecard event that doesn’t get a lot of attention when we build these metrics because it’s extremely rare and also extremely subjective: the balk.

The layman’s description of a balk is easy enough to understand: it’s a movement made by the pitcher intended to deceive the runner into thinking that same pitcher is about to throw towards home, when in reality he (the pitcher) is not. Any reasonably informed fan knows that the specifics of the balk rule are complicated and enforced at the whims of the umpire. It’s a judgment call, and one that doesn’t seem to be uniformly implemented at any given moment in time. But there are trends in balking:

This graph deserves two explanations. First, let’s discuss 1988. The balk rule was changed in 1988 and if you didn’t know the results of the change, the actual difference in the wording of the rule might not catch your eye. I’ll allow Theron Schultz of Recondite Baseball to explain:

Baseball Official Rule 8.01(b): The pitcher, following his stretch, must (a) hold the ball in both hands in front of his body and (b) come to a complete stop.

1988 Baseball Official Rule 8.01(b): The pitcher, following his stretch, must (a) hold the ball in both hands in front of his body, and (b) come to a single complete and discernible stop, with both feet on the ground.

The difference between the two rules is that the 1988 version replaced “complete stop” with “single complete and discernible stop, with both feet on the ground.” This slight change, intended to make balk calls more uniform throughout major league baseball, instead sparked one of most frustrating summers ever for major league hurlers. Only six weeks after opening day, Rick Mahler of the Atlanta Braves committed the 357th balk of the 1988 season, breaking the MLB record for most balks in a complete season… with three-quarters of the season to play. Before all was said and done, American League pitchers were called for a staggering 558 balks. Their National League brethren had it a little easier, “only” committing 366 balks.

This is a wonderful bit of trivia, but it obscures the broader trend: fewer balks are being called across the league. We have data back to 1974, and since that time, there has been a clear decline in the number of balks called in major-league baseball (shown in the graph as balks per 162 games). Here’s the same graph a before, now with a truncated y-axis for easier viewing:

It’s unclear if umpires are letting pitchers get away with more balking behavior or if pitchers are less guilty than they used to be, but the trend is rather clear. There was also a rule revision before 2013 outlawing the fake-to-third-throw-to-first move, which shaved about a balk per team season from the league.

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There’s a lot to like about spring training. Hey, it’s baseball! Sort of. Games end in ties, Will Ferrell gets to play all the positions. That’s fun. Also, there’s a lot not to be thrilled about during spring training. Games end in ties! And games don’t actually count.

Although, if you’re a fan of the Cubs, Pirates, and especially the Orioles, you’re probably happy about that last point so far this March. Those teams are a combined 3-23 in spring-training play. Fortunately, we’re just finishing the first full week of baseball games, just getting our first real look at starting rotations, and many teams (like Baltimore, with their 0-9 record) have been marching out many unrecognizable and/or split-squad rosters (which would at least partly explain the zero in the wins column). But what does spring training mean for the season ahead? Can we really glean anything from March performance, especially team-wide? It’s good to remind ourselves of what this means.

We’re mainly going to be looking at the very obvious: how do team win-loss records correlate between spring training and the regular season? Is there any sort of relationship between terrible March teams and terrible regular-season teams, or vice versa with good teams? Take a look at a plot of the spring training and regular season records of all teams between 2006-2015 — and feel free to mouse over the chart:

This chart is all over the place: lose more games than you win in spring training? Doesn’t mean you’re going to do so during the regular season. Win more than you lose? Doesn’t mean you’ll be successful. A month of games in March is the same as a month of games at any other point during the season — a relatively small sample, prone to all the pitfalls we see in any other small sample. If we tried to glean something from this 10-year sample, there are examples warning us not to be woefully awful in spring training. If a team covers that — finishing above .300 — our data provides evidence that the team probably won’t be unrecognizably terrible. Then again, we simply don’t see teams lose more than ~110 games very often during a regular season, whereas finishing with a winning percentage that low is doable in one month of baseball.

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The first thing to consider when we think about Hyun-soo Kim’s hitless, OBP-less first 23 at-bats is that it’s 23 at-bats, and it’s Spring Training. Not that everyone hasn’t been considering this all along, but it’s always worth a reminder. Jose Bautista had an 0-for-25 run last year, and those were in games that count, and that wasn’t his first time ever facing major league pitching. It happens. Sometimes, it even happens to the best of them.

Yet, it’s still fair to wonder on this a bit, because this is the first we’ve seen of Kim, meaning it’s all we’ve seen of Kim, and it’s not like dudes are running 0-fers over 23 at-bats all the time — it would’ve been the 12th-longest hitless streak of last year, and the third-longest streak of not having reached base. This was a notable stretch of futility, Spring Training notwithstanding. The past tense being used here, of course, because Kim has snapped the streak. He reached base for the first time this spring after being hit by pitch on Thursday, and later got his first hit — a bases-loaded, RBI single off a Yankees reliever named James Pazos.

Through 25 plate appearances, Kim’s spring slash line is now .042/.080/.042. The hit is the new story, but we can learn more about Kim through the 23 outs. Let’s see.

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Kim observation No. 1: Not all of this is on video

This one actually serves as a double-observation, with the latter half being a reminder that really, none of this too much matters. Proof of that being, not all of it is even televised. It’s 2016. If something matters, you can sit on your couch in your underwear and watch it on television. You can watch plenty that assuredly doesn’t matter, too, so it says something about those events which are consciously not televised. The first few games of Baltimore’s Spring Training weren’t televised, and neither was a select game in the middle. The rest were, though, and I watched 13 of Kim’s 24 hitless plate appearances and took some notes.

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Yesterday, the Orioles agreed to terms with Pedro Alvarez, potentially bringing him in — though we’ve learned to not count our chickens with Baltimore signings — to add some additional left-handed power to their line-up. As August noted this morning, Alvarez is a weird fit for the Orioles, because the Orioles needed an outfielder, and Alvarez is a DH. Signing Alvarez forces Mark Trumbo to right field, where he’s terrible, the effect of weakening the team’s defense probably will cancel out most of the offensive gain Alvarez might bring at the plate, making this a non-upgrade, or at least an inconsequential one.

But there’s also another potential story with the Alvarez signing. Pedro Alvarez strikes out a lot. In that way, the Orioles are a natural fit for Alvarez, because the Orioles clearly don’t mind strikeouts. They have Chris Davis, after all, and they traded for Mark Trumbo, and most of their role players don’t make a lot of contact either. Last year, the Orioles ranked third in the majors in strikeout rate (22.2%), and with Alvarez and Trumbo now in the fold, that number is probably going up in 2016.

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ORIOLES DISCLAIMER: Signings are not official until announced by the team. Player must still pass physical, which is apparently very difficult.

Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing this. I’ve been burned once before. But I’m going to go ahead and submit to the gambler’s fallacy and say there’s no way another medical snafu happens in Baltimore this offseason. Not after the first two. Not this year!

Baltimore’s exploits in the free-agent market this year, at least with regard to bringing in new players, have been like the construction of the Swamp Castle. The Orioles nearly signed Dexter Fowler to fill their void in right field, but at the last second, that deal sank into the swamp. Then they were linked to Austin Jackson, but that idea burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the third one! The third one stayed up.

Baltimore’s third attempt at building a castle in a swamp is Pedro Alvarez, with whom the team reportedly agreed to terms last night. Those terms are one year and $5.75 million, with another million or two in possible incentive dollars. It’s probably a little more than we’d expect a platoon bat without a position who was non-tendered in December to receive in early March, but when the terms of a deal begin with “one year and…” the money is almost always inconsequential. Alvarez got what he got, and now the Orioles stand to benefit from whatever he can offer them.

But what can Alvarez offer the Orioles? Well, he can offer them oodles of power, of course. If one were to distribute the $5.75 million Alvarez will reportedly earn according to the importance of his tools, north of $5 million would probably be attributed to his power. The power is Alvarez’s entire game, and it comes from the left-hand side, which helps protect Baltimore’s righty-heavy lineup.

And, despite the non-tendering, and the having-to-wait-until March, and the one-year deal, Alvarez’s bat is as there as it’s ever been. You probably wouldn’t guess it based on the inactivity surrounding Alvarez’s market, but, just last year, he tied a career-high in wRC+. He’s striking out less than he used to, and while the uptick in ground balls could be a small cause for concern, last year’s power output was second only to his 2013 season. Alvarez hits. The reason he had no market was because he needs to throw his glove into a swamp, and there just weren’t many designated-hitter openings for him in the American League.

But there’s a catch. With free-agent signings on March 7, there’s almost always a catch. For one, Alvarez can’t hit lefties at all, and so someone like Nolan Reimold or Joey Rickard will still have to take over for Alvarez in most, if not all, of Baltimore’s games against left-handed starters. But more importantly, the catch is that, in a more ideal world, Baltimore’s March 7 signing is an outfielder. In a perfect world, Baltimore would have already acquired a third outfielder by March 7. But we know about Fowler, and we know about Jackson. Alex Rios and Marlon Byrd were still available, and a trade was always an option, and so even after the first two whiffs, the expectation was that Baltimore would add a competent right fielder. Pedro Alvarez is not a competent right fielder. Neither is Mark Trumbo, but he’s the default square peg for Baltimore’s round hole.

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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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It all makes the Orioles look bad, which isn’t fair. It was supposed to be easy enough for the Orioles to sign both Yovani Gallardo and Dexter Fowler. Then, within a few days, the Gallardo talks nearly fell apart, and the Fowler talks did fall apart. Instead of the Orioles and Fowler having an agreement, it turns out Fowler wanted a one-year opt-out, which the Orioles wouldn’t give him. That’s a perfectly defensible stance, but here’s where we are now: Baltimore doesn’t have Dexter Fowler. Fowler has gone back to the Cubs, for a year and $13 million. It’s all been a pretty stunning turn of events, and the breakdown in the Baltimore talks has allowed the Cubs to answer the last big question they had.

For the Orioles, it’s a bad look, and it’s frustrating, because now they have to keep poking around to fill a hole they thought they’d fill. It’s probably somewhat bad for morale, and now you can likely expect the Orioles to get in contact with the Reds about Jay Bruce. It’s not the worst fallback in the world. Yet this is all really about the Cubs. The Cubs get to keep Fowler, if only for a year. It reduces the uncertainty for what’s pretty clearly a World Series favorite.

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You can give it this — the Orioles’ signing of Yovani Gallardo seemed like it was going to be pretty dull all-around, but now it’s becoming fascinating, thanks to a recent and familiar little twist. See, Gallardo still isn’t officially signed, and word is it’s because the Orioles aren’t comfortable with what they’ve seen so far in his medicals. I believe they’re waiting on results from more tests; I believe the issue is the health of his shoulder. So for the time being, the Orioles don’t yet have a starting pitcher they want, and that same starting pitcher is having to worry about an even further depressed market for his services. Nobody roots for these things.

It feels familiar because it’s the Orioles, and this is far from the first time the organization has wound up in a place like this. This further cements the team’s reputation for having an almost impossibly rigorous physical, and it can be rough, on Orioles players and fans alike. No one likes having the rug taken out from under them, and that’s exactly how it feels when these issues come up. It seems like it reflects poorly on ownership, and Peter Angelos has certainly taken a large amount of crap over the years. I’m not here to broadly attack or defend Peter Angelos. It just feels like it’s time to talk about the Orioles’ reputation, how true it is, and what it could mean.

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A couple weeks back, Dave Cameron wrote about how Dexter Fowler would be a good fit for the Orioles in the wake of the presumed Yovani Gallardo signing — and when he did so, the post began like this:

“While nothing is officially done yet, it seems reasonable to assume the Orioles are going to sign Yovani Gallardo, with reports that a deal just needs some tweaks before it is finalized.”

Dave had no reason to believe the Gallardo signing wouldn’t work out, but now it hasn’t, as the Orioles seemingly have a higher expectation than most when it comes to physicals, and so you understand that I’m cautious to say anything is set in stone between Fowler and Baltimore.

That being said, it sure looks like Dexter Fowler’s going to be playing in Baltimore next year! Just need to see that physical! Operating under the assumption Fowler does indeed pass his physical, it sounds like the Orioles will pay him $33 million over three years. That’s a year and some AAV fewer than the crowd’s estimation of four years and $56 million back in November. The qualifying offer strikes again.

If the Gallardo deal falls through, and it looks like it could, then the Orioles will surrender the 14th-overall pick in next year’s draft for Fowler. With Gallardo in the mix, it would be 14 and 28. Doesn’t much matter who’s responsible for the loss of which pick — 14 is gone either way. The 14th pick is worth something like $15 to $20 million, and so you can factor that into Fowler’s cost, if you’d like. Even with an extra $20 million tacked on for the pick, Fowler’s total guaranteed money falls short of the crowd, and so it’s easy to think of this as something of a bargain price for a quality outfielder who’s still on the right side of 30 for another 27 days.

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Thinking so much about Yovani Gallardo is in part a function of context. Had Gallardo signed a couple months back, he probably wouldn’t have drawn all that much coverage, but the longer he remained available, the less news he was competing against. Gallardo became increasingly interesting on a relative scale not because he was getting more interesting, but because the landscape became less interesting around him. I know that Gallardo isn’t very exciting, from an analytical perspective. I know he’s no one’s idea of a big splash.

But, here’s the deal. For one thing, we need to write about baseball! For another thing, Gallardo has finally signed with the Orioles, for three years and $35 million. They give up a draft pick, and so on and so forth. It’s a risky move, and quite possibly or probably not a good one. And for a last thing, there’s a bit of a bias in the conversation, because so much talk about Gallardo focuses on his declining strikeouts. And that’s important — strikeouts are important — but there’s more that’s been going on. Yovani Gallardo is about more than his strikeout rate, and just in the interest of presenting him as something fuller than one-dimensional, I’d like to show you three more things. They might not do much to predict the future, but they at least allow you to understand him a little better.

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