We end at the beginning. If you need to catch up, here are parts one, two, three, four and five.

Vetoed/Completed trade: October 1969, Cardinals send Curt Flood, Byron Browne, Joe Hoerner and Tim McCarver to Phillies for Dick Allen, Jerry Johnson and Cookie Rojas.
Addition to vetoed/completed trade: April 1970, Cardinals send Willie Montanez and Jim Browning to Phillies for unknown compensation due to Flood’s refusal to report to Philadelphia.
Completed trade: Phillies send Flood and player to be named later (Jeff Terpko) to Senators for Greg Goossen, Gene Martin and Jeff Terpko

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Unless you make it a habit to read FanGraphs only on Fridays (and if you do, what’s up with that?), you’ve likely read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. So you know the score. We’re taking a look at team financial health as we head into the 2013 season. You also the know which teams are in the top tier, because you’re smart and can figure that out for yourself. But we’ve come this far, so we’re going to complete the exercise. We’re nothing if not true to our word.

The top tier teams, in alphabetical order by team name.

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Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.

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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.

Let’s get on to the rankings!

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Chase Utley gets hit by a lot of pitches. Pretty much always been that way. Over his career, about 8% of the time Utley has reached base, he’s reached base on a hit-by-pitch. He led the league in hit-by-pitches for three consecutive years between 2007-2009. Utley ranks fourth among active players in career hit-by-pitches, and he ranks 21st all-time, sneaking up quickly on Brady Anderson and Fred Clarke. Since 2000, 676 different players have batted at least 1,000 times in the major leagues. The average player got hit in 0.9% of his plate appearances. Utley has gotten hit in 3% of his plate appearances, ranking near the very top of the list (albeit well below Carlos Quentin). Utley gets hit, and people have noticed.

Now, usually, people try to stay away from making direct accusations. There’s often the suspicion of an intentional hit-by-pitch, but it’s usually just alluded to, rather than stated outright. On the matter of Chase Utley maybe getting hit all the time on purpose, Charlie Manuel follows the pattern:

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Everybody’s aware that, by and large, spring-training results are meaningless. Not everybody always acts like it, but everybody gets it, on some level. The stats don’t really matter, and the wins and losses don’t really matter. But spring training can still serve some purposes, for us as fans. As we discussed yesterday, spring training can generate highlights as good or almost as good as the highlights generated during the regular season. That is, of plays in isolation, separated from context. And there’s also some analysis that can be done, if done carefully. Previously, Michael Saunders never demonstrated any ability to hit to the opposite field or cover the outer half of the plate. Between 2011 and 2012, he re-worked his swing, and in spring 2012, he covered the other half of the plate. It was promising, and, sure enough, Saunders had a breakthrough season. Spring training isn’t entirely devoid of substance.

Which brings us to the matter of Domonic Brown, on Tuesday, February 26. On this Tuesday, Brown generated a highlight, and he also did something maybe worth talking about for analytical purposes. Behold, what Domonic Brown did to a thrown pitch by a member of the Yankees organization:

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They say that, when it comes to understanding anything about the subsequent regular season, you should never pay attention to numbers in March. That’s good advice, and it doesn’t even bother to mention numbers in February. Today is February 25, spring-training competition has only just begun, and nothing matters. To whatever extent any baseball matters, February baseball matters less than April baseball, which matters less than September baseball, which matters less than October baseball. Today’s baseball is only one step ahead of intrasquad action, and there’s not much of anything to be read into.

But even meaningless baseball can generate baseball highlights. It’s been a long time since we were given fresh, new baseball highlights, and earlier Monday, Miguel Cabrera did a mean thing to a Jonathan Papelbon delivery. It doesn’t matter that the game was meaningless; Papelbon wasn’t trying to give up a home run, he threw a normal pitch, and Cabrera blasted it out. Within pointless baseball, there are glimpses of regular baseball, and here is some video for you.

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The Tampa Bay Rays used to be the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays used to have a player named Bobby Smith. On August 24, 1999, in a game against the Chicago White Sox started by Jim Parque, Smith finished 0-for-4, striking out looking four times. To get more recent — just last June 14, in a game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Texas Rangers, Justin Upton finished 2-for-5, striking out looking three times. Many strikeouts are called, but most strikeouts are not. This is something you knew, even if this isn’t something you knew.

Last year, Jerry Sands got into nine games, batting 24 times. He struck out nine times, and he struck out looking four times. Last year, Delmon Young got into 151 games, batting 608 times. He struck out 112 times, and he struck out looking four times. Of Delmon Young’s strikeouts, 4% were called strikeouts. No regular or semi-regular player posted a lower rate of called strikeouts.

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As promised, there’s only a few instructs reports left but it’s lasted me the (most warm in Florida) winter as junior colleges started this week and I was in the Dominican last week to see the top July 2 players. Along those lines, this wrap-up from Phillies camp will lead off with a high profile American but finish with three recent international signees that caught my eye.

Larry Greene signed with the Phillies for $1 million as the 39th overall pick in the supplemental round of the 2011 draft. Greene is from the South Georgia, the same area that has recently produced Buster Posey, Kaleb Cowart and Byron Buxton. Unfortunately, Greene isn’t the same kind of prospect but, as the signing bonus suggests, he has the tools to be a successful big leaguer. The first thing you notice about Greene physically also stands out on the roster—the Phillies updated his height and weight to 6’1, 259. That should create a certain mental image, but Greene isn’t fat and runs better than you’d expect; think NFL fullback. And don’t think Ryan Howard because that’s really lazy.

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It has been a rough week for the population of former Montreal Expos in the major leagues. On the heels of Nick Johnson’s retirement, former Expos, Nationals, Mets, and Phillies catcher Brian Schneider announced that his baseball playing career was over. Schneider started his professional career after being drafted by the Expos back in 1995, when they still may have seemed to have a viable future in Montreal (remember that 1994 team?). Schneider was never a star or even a “what if” guy like Johnson, but he he did manage to play 13 seasons in the majors. Schneider was hardly a career backup, either, as he started at least 95 games at catcher every season from 2003 to 2008. He was not ever an average bat (other than in his 48 plate appearance stint in 2001), but he was not terrible, especially considering his position. Schneider was good defensively. He threw out more base runners than average, and the limited records we have show Schneider to have been good at framing pitches.

Schneider was on two teams (the 2010 and 2011 Phillies) that made the postseason, but never got a plate appearance in the playoffs. Schneider may not have been much more, at least by the numbers, than an adequate catcher with a diverse combination of skills, but even players like that can have some pretty exciting hits. As we often do on these occasions, let’s take a look at Schneider’s three biggest hits according to the “story stat,” Win Probability Added (WPA).

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I recently wrote about my attempt to design an indicator that would predict when players were at a higher risk for having a collapse-type year. I named the metric CLIFFORD, referring to the fact that players identified by it were at risk of falling off a cliff offensively. My inspiration was Adam Dunn and his disastrous 2011, in which his wOBA declined by .113.

My initial research showed that 58% of collapse candidates identified by Marcel actually experience a wOBA decline of at least .03 (or 30 points)–2.43 times the likelihood of non-collapse candidates. Collapse candidates identified by CLIFFORD actually decreased by at least 30 points of wOBA 53% of the time–2.14 times the likelihood of non-collapse candidates.

Marcel initially appeared to do a better job identifying these candidates. If we knew nothing else outside of just the Marcel projection, our chances were better at identifying collapse candidates than if we used CLIFFORD (and, yes, the difference between the relative risk for both measures is statistically significant).

However, and here’s the bright spot, there was not much overlap between the two metrics.

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