What follows is coverage of a pitch thrown by a Tampa Bay Ray, a pitch that was taken and therefore not swung at. It was taken for a strike, and it was sufficiently unusual to end up sparking this post, but this isn’t really about pitch framing. Jose Molina didn’t even play, and while we’re here, just for the record, relative to Jonathan Lucroy, Molina gets too much framing love. It’s not that Molina isn’t outstanding. It’s that Lucroy is, quietly, similarly outstanding, but people forget about him. But this isn’t about Jose Molina or pitch framing.

The Rays hosted the Indians on Sunday afternoon, and however many people were watching at the start, far fewer people were watching in the top of the ninth, when the Indians held an 11-run lead. And of those watching, fewer still were paying close attention, so few noticed Fernando Rodney’s first pitch to Mark Reynolds leading off the ninth inning. The pitch was a fastball for a called strike, and you can see the pitch embedded below:

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After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.

But here is the deal:

A) Pitchers do not consistently practice hitting. (Simple fact.)

B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)

C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)

All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.

Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
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Fun fact: Jose Molina‘s FanGraphs player ID number is 25. Mike Trout’s is 10155. All right.

According to numbers provided to me by Matthew Carruth, last year there were 78 catchers in baseball who caught at least 1,000 called pitches. Carruth defines his strike zone not by the rule book, but by an average of the strike zones big-league umpires actually call. Out of those 78 catchers, Molina posted the fifth-lowest rate of pitches in the zone called balls. Molina tied for the second-highest rate of pitches out of the zone called strikes. Overall, Molina posted the highest rate of extra strikes per game, at +2.5. The other guys over 2 were David Ross, Chris Stewart, and Jonathan Lucroy. Molina caught more than 6,000 called pitches. We’ve had an idea for some time now that Jose Molina is an expert pitch-framer.

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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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It sounds like the Yankees have one more name to take off of the list of potential Mark Teixeira replacements. Aubrey Huff is saying he is “pretty much retired.” Although earlier in the off-season he sounded like he still wanted to play, not surprisingly, there was not much interest in a 36-year-old first baseman coming off of a 87 wRC+ in 2011 and a 76 wRC+ in 2012. That should not be how we remember Huff. As Craig Calcaterra noted this mornining, Huff actually had a pretty nice career, and is hardly unique in having to have the game tell him it is time to say goodbye rather than the other way around. There are worse ways to go out than winning two World Series rings in three years. Huff is no Hall of Fame candidate, but his career is interesting for other reasons.

(I guess there is still a chance that Bruce Bochy will get nervous about Brandon Belt and give Huff a call, but we will leave that possibility aside for now.)

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The impossible finally happened. Miguel Cairo retired. Cairo hung on for 17 seasons — he made his debut the season after Mariano Rivera. One would be hard-pressed to find one season in which he was much good. His highest seasonal WAR came in 1998 with the good ol’ Devil Rays at 2.7, and that was mostly due to 22 Total Zone fielding runs. That season and 1999 were the only seasons in which Cairo received more than 500 plate appearances, and he only got more than 400 in one other season — 2004 with the Yankees. Cairo could not really play shortstop, he was no defensive whiz at second, and as his career .264/.314/.361 (77 wRC+) line shows, he was, outside of a few lucky seasons, a pretty lousy hitter. Yet he hung on. And on. And on. And now he is going to be a working for the Reds. I think it is safe to say that teams liked and like having Cairo around.

Despite his limitations, over 17 years Cairo managed to have some very dramatic hits. In honor of his passing on to the next phase of his career of baseball, here are three of the biggest.

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Last summer, Major League teams had to operate under the new rules imposed on amateur signings put in place by the CBA last winter. While international free agents had previously signed for whatever the market would grant, MLB imposed a $2.9 million spending cap on each Major League team. As Ben Badler noted over at Baseball America today, however, the Rays exceeded the limit and are going to face some significant penalties for doing so:

The CBA limited every team to a $2.9 million bonus pool for the 2012-13 international signing period that began on July 2. The strongest penalty in the CBA is that any team that exceeds its international bonus pool by 15 percent or more will pay a 100 percent tax on the overage and won’t be able to sign a player for more than $250,000 during the 2013-14 signing period. Since July 2, the Rays already have spent more than $3.7 million (not counting players signed for $50,000 or less, since there are exemptions for those players), which is 28 percent beyond their international pool.

As a result, the Rays won’t be able to sign anyone next year for more than $250,000 and probably won’t make any major international splashes until July 2 either because of the tax. Going well beyond the bonus pool is a curious move, but the Rays did pull in a considerable amount of talent, including arguably the two best 16-year-old pitchers on the market. Given that their 90-win season last year will give them one of the lower bonus pools for the 2013-14 signing period, which many scouts believe is shaping up to be a down year for international talent, perhaps it will be a worthwhile gambit.

The 100% tax means that the Rays will owe the league an extra $800,000, which isn’t a huge penalty, but the inability to sign any player for more than $250,000 next summer is a significant issue, and continues to show why the current international limits simply don’t work to promote competitive balance.

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Since I missed Taylor Guerreri in Rays instructs, the biggest name player I saw in camps was recent first round pick Richie Shaffer. The Rays took Shaffer 25th overall out of Clemson and was seemingly the second-highest player on the board for many clubs in the first round, with at least one team in the top 10 picks having Shaffer in their final group. I didn’t see Shaffer as an amateur but got a solid look before he went to the Arizona Fall League and he’ll be an interesting player to monitor in 2013 to see how his tools play in pro ball.

The one thing scouts would mention first about Shaffer when I talked to them before the draft was bat speed. Not his hit or power tools, but bat speed specifically. If you’ve read my other articles you know that I focus on power and fastball velocity and how it is created—if it’s natural arm speed or strength or if the player is cheating mechanically to enhance his tools. Bat speed is to hitters what arm speed is to pitchers. It’s the building block of hitting and power so you don’t have to cheat to get either and have a chance to have both. A player can be raw at the plate but if he has bat speed there will always be a scout willing to overpay the player.

Shaffer doesn’t disappoint in this regard because it’s true plus bat speed, especially rare to find in a college hitter for the aforementioned reasons. Normally bat speed comes from a wiry strong, athletic, skinny-frame player, typically dual sport guys that can run a little bit. Another reason scouts lead with the bat speed on Shaffer is that he doesn’t fit in this box. Shaffer has a pro body, a strong, lean, tapered 6’3, 210 pounds with broad shoulders and an above average arm that could play anywhere on the field. That said, Shaffer isn’t a quick-twitch type athlete, as a below average runner with some stiffness and mechanical movements in his defense at third base. He could move to right field but given the foot speed and a body that should only get bigger, first base seem like his eventual home.

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James Shields was traded this off season from the Rays to the Royals. He has been known for his durability over the years. Spanning the last two seasons, he is first in complete games with 14. Also, he is second to Justin Verlander in innings thrown. The durability and consistency he is known for may be coming to an end. At the end of the last season, he showed signs of breaking down because he was not able to throw strikes and wasn’t able to maintain a consistent release point.

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