Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

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The Pirates had reportedly made re-signing Francisco Liriano their top priority, and on Tuesday they officially got it done, with Liriano returning for three years and $39 million. Dave wrote a little thing earlier and concluded it was a pretty good deal, as these things go. Here is that little thing. Okay, great, we’re done here!

If it’s analysis of the move you want, it’s pretty simple and Dave touched on the major points. Nothing involving Francisco Liriano could be described as low-risk, but the terms themselves aren’t too risky. Liriano’s effective when he pitches, and he hasn’t actually had an arm problem related to pitching since 2011. Last year he went on the DL with an oblique strain. The year before, he had an arm fracture after taking a fall. These aren’t good things, but Liriano probably isn’t as fragile as his reputation. He misses bats, he likes being in Pittsburgh, and the Pirates had a need. There’s not really anything not to like, here.

Yet perhaps you want to know more about Liriano. He came to the Pirates labeled as an intriguing but frustrating live arm, with stuff and poor location. He still isn’t particularly stingy with the walks, but he’s been able to push himself over a hump, getting to the other side of tolerability, and a whole lot of it has to do with his changeup. The Pirates love what Liriano’s done with his changeup.

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Over the last few years, the Pirates have developed a bit of a reputation for being exceptional at extracting value from discarded pitchers: Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, and Mark Melancon are three of the more recent examples, for instance. However, before any of those three got to Pittsburgh, the Pirates worked their voodoo on A.J. Burnett, taking him off the Yankees hands in the winter of 2011 and extracting two excellent years from him after New York decided to pay him to play for anyone else but them.

Over the 2012-2013 seasons, Burnett threw 393 innings with a 92 ERA-/85 FIP-/82 xFIP-, providing well above average performance and durability, and because the Yankees were financing his costs, the Pirates paid just $13 million for those two seasons. However, the cost-conscious organization declined to make him a qualifying offer last offseason, and despite some mutual desire for another contract between both sides, Burnett ended up taking a two year contract to go pitch for the Phillies.

It didn’t go well for either side. Burnett was bad, his teammates were worse, and so both sides decided to opt-out of the second year of the contract, allowing Burnett to become a free agent again. And now, with the choice of where to pitch once again, Burnett has decided to go back to Pittsburgh, signing on for the 2015 season for $8.5 million. By opting out of his Phillies deal and signing with the Pirates, he ended up leaving $4 million on the table, so this represents a pretty significant pay cut for Burnett, but as a 38 year old who has made over $100 million in his career, happiness clearly came ahead of maximizing dollars earned.

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Did you read the article from a week ago about the Astros trading for Hank Conger? Great, then you’ve already read this article, too. The Pirates just followed a similar path, sending Justin Wilson to the Yankees in exchange for backstop Francisco Cervelli. Wilson’s left-handed and cost-controlled, and he throws hard, so the Yankees see him as a valuable part of the bullpen right away. But it’s Cervelli who’s the more interesting piece, here. He’s the more interesting piece for reasons you might be tired of reading about.

The Pirates, as you know, are probably going to lose Russell Martin to a team with a higher payroll. Listen to them tell it, and getting Cervelli doesn’t close the door on a Martin return; the front office is still hopeful. But the team sounds prepared to give Cervelli the bulk of the playing time, if necessary, just as the Yankees were in 2013. Cervelli is unproven as a regular, but he’s fairly proven as a framer, which is a skill the Pirates appear to value.

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Do you guys know Jaack? That’s not a very good introduction. We’ve run live game chats during the wild-card playoffs the previous two nights, and Jaack is the screen name of at least one participating commenter. This is Wednesday’s live chat, and this is Jaack, at 11:05pm EDT:

Comment From Jaack
There needs to be an article about how much better last night’s game was. Like inning by inning breakdown.

Jaack’s the best. Thank you, Jaack! Following is such a breakdown.

Tuesday’s game, of course, set an impossible standard. It feels like it’s an all-time kind of playoff game, and while I’m fully aware of recency bias, I felt the same way after Rangers/Cardinals Game 6 in 2011, and that one’s stood up. We can debate how amazing it was to watch the A’s and the Royals, but there’s no debate that it was some kind of amazing. So there was no chance at all that the Giants and Pirates would follow that show with at least an equivalent show of their own, but Wednesday was a total dud. The saving grace was that Madison Bumgarner pitched and was awesome, but for the most part he was awesome without any danger, and when the outcome feels decided, the entertainment value plummets.

This isn’t about the quality of the baseball. This is about the quality of the show. We already know that Tuesday’s show was several times better, but now let’s put some actual data to it because what else do you have to do for the next few minutes? If you started reading this, you can finish reading this.

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Three years ago, Edinson Volquez was one of the worst pitchers in baseball. Two years ago, thanks in large part to calling Petco Park home for the first time, he was just okay, putting up a 1.1 WAR season that is still his second-best WAR year ever. One year ago, he was one of the worst pitchers in baseball, but even that requires some further detail, because the Padres took the exceptionally rare step of DFA’ing him less than a week before the September roster expansion when they didn’t even have a full 40-man roster. When the Dodgers picked him up for depth a few days later, he didn’t make the NLDS roster, then never threw a pitch when he was surprisingly added to the NLCS roster.

On Wednesday, Volquez is going to start for the Pirates in the one-game, no-tomorrow NL wild card game against the Giants. Oh, baseball. You’re so great and terrible and weird, all at the same time.

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How many players per team would you say you know? Ten? Fifteen? Twenty? Even if you can easily rattle off 20 players per team, 600 of the 750 players on a normal active roster, the last five that you couldn’t name would probably include some relief pitchers. Unless you’re a first-round draft pick (like the Royals’ Brandon Finnegan) or the team’s closer, it’s hard for a reliever to gain much notierity — they’re rarely voted to All-Star teams, and very few people like the Hold statistic (I like Shutdowns and Meltdowns, but they’re not universally accepted stats). So, rookie relievers can sneak up on you when the postseason starts, just like Francisco Rodriguez did in 2002.

In case you’re too young to remember 2002, or are conversely too old to remember things that happened way back in 2002, Rodriguez came up as a 20-year-old on Sept. 18. In his five games, his leverage increased, until his pLI hit 1.54 in his final regular-season appearance, when he struck out five batters of the seven Mariners’ batters he faced across 2.1 innings on Sept. 27. Overall, he struck out 13 batters and walked two in 5.2 scoreless innings, which was good for a FIP- of 1. As in, 99 percent better than league average. A tiny sample, no doubt, and not even worth paying attention to. That is, until the now-famous loophole came into play.
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Teams are behaving more and more alike. There’s less separation between front offices by the month, and talent is fairly equally distributed, and people everywhere believe many of the same things. There are, of course, better situations and worse situations, but when it comes to team strategies, generally speaking everyone agrees: play the best baseball. Pitch the best pitches, swing the best swings. The Dodgers have a better on-field product than the Rockies, but they try to go about their business similarly. Neither really has a signature philosophy you can observe in the numbers.

Such philosophies are few and far between. People believe one of them is the Diamondbacks and pitching inside, but in reality the Diamondbacks pitch inside as a staff an average amount, and they’ve hit a roughly average amount of batters. They’ve just had a tendency to talk. The Diamondbacks don’t have a team philosophy of brushing hitters back. You don’t see a lot of philosophies that stand out, because successful ones will be copied, and unsuccessful ones will be abandoned. But some do still exist. You’ve presumably heard about each, but I feel like they should be put together in one place. I can think of three standout examples. Do let me know if I’m missing any others.

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When your job is to write about everybody, you’re allowed to have a favorite team. Still, you need to be objective, and it’s bad form to write about that team too often. So a workaround is writers will identify favorite players and favorite themes. A favorite FanGraphs player and theme is Mike Trout. You might’ve noticed. But I personally have my own assortment of favorites, and among them is the super-weird Vance Worley. I love any opportunity to write about him, and wouldn’t you know it? Worley’s back, and he’s thriving like he did when he was a rookie. Worley isn’t a guy who used to be fascinating. Worley is a guy who’s back to being fascinating.

And you’ll remember the Pittsburgh Pirates got him pretty much for free. There’s an argument to be made that Worley’s been the best starter on the team, and while he’s not the most talented starter on the team, the numbers are compelling. Worley’s certainly been good enough to have fit with the Minnesota Twins, which dealt him in March. Vance Worley now is doing what he used to do, only now he’s doing things even better. And now he’s in a perfect situation for success.

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Back in early June, I wrote about Pittsburgh’s impending recall of Gregory Polanco, with the viewpoint that while he would be a welcome upgrade over Travis Snider and Jose Tabata in right field, he wasn’t going to single-handedly save the Pirates’ season, since he wasn’t a pitcher.

Or as I put it at the time:

They were the worst in April. They were the worst in May. If you prefer RA9-WAR rather than FIP-based WAR, it’s 27th. If you like FIP, they’re 29th. ERA has them at 15th, which is something. You’d have to do some serious contorting to make the argument that the Pirates have anything other than a considerably below-average pitching staff.

Which was true! Even taking into account a much better June, the first-half Pirates pitching situation wasn’t much to be proud of, ranking either last or in the bottom third, depending on whether you like your WAR based on FIP or RA9. Though the offense, even with Polanco’s fade and Andrew McCutchen’s absence, has generally been outstanding, the pitching wasn’t holding up its end of the bargain, especially compared to how good they had been last season.

It wasn’t hard to see why, really. Francisco Liriano had taken a step back, and Gerrit Cole hadn’t taken the expected step forward. A.J. Burnett was gone, and Edinson Volquez wasn’t exactly matching Burnett’s 2013. Wandy Rodriguez had been a disaster. So had Jason Grilli. Jameson Taillon blew out his arm, taking a possible reinforcement out. The Pirates haven’t been in first place since April 8, and with the Brewers surging, the season was quickly fading. At one point in late June, they were one game over .500 and eight games out.

GM Neil Huntington’s solution to the pitching crisis was, let’s say, muted. Rodriguez was released in May, and reliever Bryan Morris was sent to the Marlins for a competitive balance pick on June 1. Grilli went to the Angels on June 27 for Ernesto Frieri; Grilli has excelled in Anaheim, while Frieri contributed 14 awful outings and was released three weeks ago. John Axford, who had lost his closing job in Cleveland, arrived in an August waiver trade. That’s it. Really.

There was no David Price, or Jon Lester, or Jeff Samardzija, or Jason Hammel, though calls existed in certain areas — including here, probably — that said the Pirates would be the perfect home for any of them. If there was to be improvement, it was going to have to be with what they had laying around.

Now, there’s less than a week left in the season. The Pirates have allowed six runs in their last seven games, have had one of the best run prevention units in baseball in the second half, and are all but certain to play the Giants in the wild card game next week. They still have an outside shot at unseating the Cardinals for the NL Central division title. This is better. Read the rest of this entry »