There are a few different ways I could begin this post, and I can’t settle upon a best one, so you’re going to get them all. Prepare for a blitz of introductions. Jason Grilli was the fourth overall pick in the 1997 draft, and he was sent from the Giants to the Marlins in a trade for Livan Hernandez. He made his big-league debut for Florida in 2000, when he was 23 years old, and as a starter he worked 6.2 innings. In that one debut start, Grilli allowed more baserunners than he’s allowed so far in 2013 as the Pirates’ closer. As of Wednesday, he’s up to 16 saves.

Moving on. Every year, a handful of pitchers try to come back from existing completely off the radar. Most of them try to return and fail, but sometimes they succeed and make for improbable stories. A few years ago there was Ryan Vogelsong, and now there’s Scott Kazmir, who everyone previously assumed was never to be heard from again. Another guy trying to come back is Jeremy Bonderman, with the Mariners organization. He’s presently in Triple-A, and while he might not make it back to the majors, at least he knows a part of him is alive and well at the highest level. Because it was Bonderman who gave Jason Grilli some invaluable advice on developing and harnessing a slider.

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“I’m working on catching balls in the pocket,” Pirates’ minor league catcher Wyatt Mathisen told me as we talked about the nuances of his game outside the Greenville Drive locker room last month. Mathisen’s candor left me speechless. When you’re talking to a professional baseball player, there are some things you just assume. And one of those is the ability to catch a ball properly.

So where does he go from here — this 19-year-old converted shortstop, this catcher under construction? Talk to Mathisen for a few minutes and you see a young man who acknowledges his weaknesses; but there’s also a ballplayer who’s eager to improve.

Video after the jump:

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Stetson Allie sat, staring at the ground as Rockies farmhand Drew Beuerlein verbally tore into him. Moments before, the 240-pound Allie delivered a glancing blow on a home plate collision, unable to jar the ball loose from the 24-year-old catcher. As teammates took the field, Allie continued to sit as if he’d been shaken up during impact. The pitcher-turned-first-baseman eventually rose to his feet and gingerly took two steps towards the third base dugout before he quickened his pace.

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The hard-throwing, 24-year-old Matt Harvey has quickly become a must watch when he toes the rubber for the Mets. Called up in late July of last year, Harvey and his blistering fastball (94.6 average velocity) currently sport a 31.3% strikeout rate and an ERA- of 25 — no, not 75, 25. In 2013, Harvey has made four starts, lasting at least seven innings in each appearance. He has only allowed one home run and a paltry 10 hits in 29 innings.

Harvey does feature a number of pitches, but he’s heavily reliant on his four-seam fastball, throwing that pitch 60% of the time. That ranks him fifth among all qualified pitchers in 2013. And that fastball has been deadly.

According to the PITCHf/x leader boards at Baseball Prospectus (powered by Brooks Baseball), Harvey has induced a .042 ISO (2nd best) and a .167 BA (3rd best) against when using his fastball. David Golebiewski from Baseball Analytics recently wrote about Harvey’s ability to win with the high fastball. The numbers were eye-popping. Harvey so far this year has induced whiffs on high fastballs 48.4% of the time, and he’s throwing upstairs over 50% of the time.

I was curious how this compared to others this year and in previous years. So I did some digging.

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A.J. Burnett made some history Wednesday night when he recorded his 2,000th career regular-season strikeout. Of course, he also has 31 career postseason strikeouts, and I don’t know why those don’t matter — but they don’t matter, and this isn’t even the main point of this piece. Burnett nearly made some more impressive history Wednesday when he carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning against the Cardinals. Carlos Beltran knocked a two-out double, and Burnett was removed before the eighth. But even without the history and the complete game, Burnett turned in a hell of an effort and the Pirates improved to .500. Now all the team needs to do is hold this for another five-and-a-half months.

But this post isn’t about Burnett. It’s about is Russell Martin. While that’s a bit of a stretch, Martin was at least catching Burnett on Wednesday, and I needed some sort of topical introduction. When the Pirates signed Martin as a free agent, they presumably considered both his defensive and his offensive skills. In the early going, his offense has been entirely absent, but at least a part of his skillset shows up in the numbers.

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Patience has been a big part of Andrew McCutchen’s game since his arrival in Pittsburgh in 2009. The two-time All-Star walked in at least 10 percent of his plate appearances in all four of his MLB seasons.

For McCutchen, consistency has come with patience. His first three seasons saw wOBAs of .363, .359 and .360 respectively. The jump from All-Star to MVP candidate came in 2012, as McCutchen hit .327/.400/.553 and set career highs in all three slash-line stats as well as ISO (.226), home runs (31) and RBI. And it also came with an added bit of aggression at the plate — controlled agression, but aggression nonetheless.

McCutchen set another career high in 2012: he swung at 45.2 percent of pitches, an increase from 40.9 percent in 2011 and 40.8 percent career. But it was controlled aggression: his zone swing rate went up six percent against just a two percent rise in out-of-zone rate, and according to Baseball Prospectus, most of the extra swings were on pitches over the middle third of the plate (see career and 2012 swing rates). More swings in this zone can only be a good thing; more swings means more contact, and McCutchen has a .640 slugging percentage on contact over the middle third of the plate.

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Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.

We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.

With those caveats, let’s begin.

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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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A lot of people wrote Neil Walker off as a bust before he even had a chance to prove himself in the majors. First, he was a failed catcher. Then, he was a failed third baseman. He needed two years at Triple-A, and didn’t stick in the majors until the age of 24, in his seventh professional season and at his third professional defensive position.

But then a funny thing happened — Walker started producing. Now, he’s one of Pittsburgh’s best players. Last year, when Andrew McCutchen signed his long-term deal, some wondered if Walker would get his as well, but the Pirates wisely waited to see if Walker would produce a similar season in 2012. Since he did, talk about an extension has resurfaced. Is Walker good enough to deserve such an extension? And just what would an extension look like?

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After the Braves acquired Justin Upton, uniting him and brother B.J. Upton on the same team, our very own Jeff Sullivan got curious about brothers playing together, and presented some salient information on the brother effect. Or more to the point, the lack thereof. I became curious about it much after that (I’m slow), and while Jeff already did the pertinent research, nobody has ever accused me of doing pertinent research, so I thought today we could look at the best seasons put together by brothers on the same team.

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