International baseball has been in the news often lately with the ongoing saga of Yoan Moncada (he’s in America now), the signing of Yasmany Tomas and yesterday’s news that Cuba-U.S. relations could be getting much better.  In recent news, at the yearly international scouting directors’ meeting at the Winter Meetings last week, sources tell me there was no talk about the recent controversial rule change and no talk about an international draft, as expected.

So much has been happening lately that you may have temporarily forgotten about last summer, when the Yankees obliterated the international amateur spending record (and recently added another prospect). If the early rumors and innuendo are any indication, the rest of baseball isn’t going to let the Yankees have the last word.

I already mentioned the Cubs as one of multiple teams expected to spend well past their bonus pool starting on July 2nd, 2015.  I had heard rumors of other clubs planning to get in the act when I wrote that, but the group keeps growing with each call I make, so I decided to survey the industry and see where we stand.  After surveying about a dozen international sources, here are the dozen clubs that scouts either are sure, pretty sure or at least very suspicious will be spending past their bonus pool, ranked in order of likelihood:

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The Red Sox have tried to erase the painful feelings of their botched Jon Lester negotiations by completing a flurry of pitcher transactions. While that’s unlikely to fool people who still just want Lester back, the pitchers acquired (or reportedly acquired) — Wade Miley, Rick Porcello and Justin Masterson — all have one thing in common in that they generate a lot of ground balls. Before that, they acquired Joe Kelly, who also generates a great deal of ground balls. Are ground balls the hip new thing on Yawkey Way?

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Everyone knew heading into the offseason that the Red Sox starting rotation was going to need some help, and so the first thing they went and did was sign Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval. Those guys are not pitchers, so while it gave the Red Sox perhaps the best lineup in the MLB, they still needed pitching.

The Red Sox rotation essentially consisted of a bunch of question marks — plus Clay Buchholz and Joe Kelly, who are question marks themselves. Buchholz is 30 years old, has never thrown 110 innings in consecutive seasons and had a 5.34 ERA last year. Kelly’s numbers as a starter aren’t particularly impressive. Some clubs entered the offseason looking for a frontline starter. Some clubs needed depth to fill out their rotation. The Red Sox needed both.

A Cole Hamels trade or James Shields signing are still possibilities for the Red Sox, as they’re still in the market for that frontline starter after whiffing on Jon Lester, who was the crowd favorite to return to Boston and fill the void at the top of their rotation.

The depth, on the other hand, appears to be shored up. As I was writing this post, the Sox dealt Yoenis Cespedes to the Tigers in exchange for Rick Porcello. (By the time I was done, they’d inked Justin Masterson). A full analysis of the Porcello deal will come in a different post, but for now we’re going to focus on Wade Miley, who the Sox are expected to acquire in the very near future for starting pitchers Rubby de la Rosa and Allen Webster. de la Rosa and Webster are both guys who had higher stock a couple years ago. Both have electric stuff, both have serious command issues, and both may be destined for the bullpen. Dave Cameron wrote up a quick InstaGraphs post on the deal last night, which you can read here.
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There’s an awful lot you can learn from the way that a player gets pitched. Often, you could just look at the player’s statistics, I suppose, but let’s make believe we live in a world without publicly-accessible performance statistics. All right, so, now we’re imagining. Last year, no regular player saw a higher rate of fastballs than Ben Revere. Why would that be? No regular player saw a lower rate of fastballs than Josh Hamilton. Why would that be? First basemen saw far, far fewer fastballs than American League pitchers. If all we had was this information, we could still interpret it, figuring out clues as to how the hitters are perceived.

Of course, it’s not just about fastball rate. You can look at fastballs, or you can look at pitches in the zone, or you can look at types of pitches in particular parts of the zone — there’s a lot you can examine. Players get pitched according to the scouting reports that teams have on those players, and since we can’t look at those scouting reports, we can use the information we have to examine them indirectly.

One thing you can do is look at a guy’s pitch patterns. Yet another powerful indicator of something can be a change in a guy’s pitch patterns. What that would suggest is a change in a guy’s ability level or approach. Yasiel Puig, for example, was pitched differently in 2014 from how he was pitched as a rookie. That’s because Puig evidently corrected a weakness against inside fastballs. If we look at drop in rate of fastballs seen, no hitter saw a bigger drop between 2013 and 2014 than J.D. Martinez. There’s a pretty simple explanation: Martinez changed his swing mechanics and became an out-of-nowhere slugger. So pitchers found themselves having to be more careful.

At the other end, Mike Trout saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents tried to seize a perceived weakness against high heat. Allen Craig saw an increase in his fastball rate. Opponents identified that he was missing bat speed and couldn’t get around on hard pitches in. And yet, of all the players, no one saw a bigger year-to-year fastball-rate increase than Hanley Ramirez. Ramirez was productive, and Ramirez just signed a big contract with the Red Sox, but clearly, pitchers saw him differently in the season recently completed.

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Two years ago, the Los Angeles Angels signed Josh Hamilton to a whopping, surprising five-year contract that paid the mercurial outfielder $125 million dollars. The deal came one year after the Halos signed Albert Pujols in perpetuity for a twice-weekly fistful of diamonds, so Hamilton’s mammoth contract came as a shock.

After his two seasons in Anaheim, the deal doesn’t exactly look like a winner. Hindsight being what it is, is it easy to say the signing was doomed from the start. A look back through the archives both here at Fangraphs and at MLB Trade Rumors shows a lot of first guessing and some otherwise hilarious comments from around baseball. There were plenty of red flags around Hamilton, from his health to his performance and just about everything in between.

At the time of the deal, Hamilton was headed into his age-32 season and coming off a 43 homer year. He was unquestionably talented but also eminently questionable. The approach, the off-field history, the spotty medical records; all of it made for a bizarre free agent pursuit. The team that knew him best wouldn’t guarantee a fifth year, according to reports. The Angels rushed in with five years and no strings, much to the chagrin of Rangers GM Jon Daniels.

With two years of history on our side, we can see flippantly say this contract was doomed from the start. The biggest question is this: did Jerry Dipoto and the Angels front office offer Hamilton this deal knowing it was bad the moment he signed it?

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Most of the Arizona Fall League attendees have been seen enough that the scouting community has a well developed opinion on each player before they arrive in the desert. Even that year’s draftees (such as Nick Howard and Trea Turner this year), while new on the pro scene, were heavily-scouted, top-of-their-class players who many have seen at least a time or two and have some sort of background with. This year saw three reasonably high-profile Cuban prospects get Fall League reps in Raisel Iglesias, Rusney Castillo and Daniel Carbonell who had scarcely been seen on domestic soil by scouts.

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Lately, Tony has written some pieces touching on the Fenway park factors. Though he’s provided detail, you already had some understanding of how the park plays. The Green Monster is unlike pretty much anything else in the game today, and it changes what happens to balls in play. To right field, and to center field, Fenway is more or less fair, if not a wee bit pitcher-friendly in places. To left field, though, and especially to left-center, balls that would be outs elsewhere clang off the Monster for singles or doubles. Every so often, the Monster will claim a would-be dinger, but that’s little consolation to pitchers; if they give up a ball headed to left, it’s probably putting a guy on base, and maybe in scoring position.

There’s nothing subtle about the Green Monster. You can’t miss it. It’s right there, casting a shadow over everything, and what it does makes absolute sense. Of course it leads to more singles. Of course it leads to more doubles. Of course it makes that part of Fenway hitter-friendly. Pitchers know all about it when they go to work, so I got to wondering, does that in any way change the way the pitchers pitch? I’m going to go ahead and spoil the rest of this article: yes. You already know how. The remainder is just going to confirm your suspicions.

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The Red Sox came into the winter with a clear need for starting pitching, and a lot of money to spend. Yesterday, they spent a big chunk of that money, adding $41 million in AAV to their payrolls for the next four or five years. And yet, today, they still have the same glaring need for starting pitching. Evaluating the wisdom of the Red Sox spending spree is an interesting challenge, because unlike most free agent signings, these feel like half of the transaction.

We can still evaluate the signings of Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez based on the production the Red Sox should expect going forward and the money that was surrendered to acquire that future production, but we don’t really know the whole picture here. The signings of two of the winter’s premier free agent hitters very likely mean that Yoenis Cespedes is getting traded, and I think Mike Napoli might be on his way out of town too. What the team gets back in trade, and how they choose to reallocate money that could be saved through those trades, will affect what else the Red Sox can choose to do this winter. They know they need pitching, and it seems essentially impossible that they won’t make further moves to address that need; moves that were made possible by these signings.

So without those pieces of information in place, I’m hesitant to draw any strong conclusions about the new contracts given to Sandoval or Ramirez. If the team trades Cespedes and Napoli for young arms, then spends the $25 million in savings on Max Scherzer, then these moves start to more clearly address the team’s need for a frontline starter. But we don’t know if they’re going to do that. We don’t know what they’re going to do, so we can’t be too strongly convicted about whether these signings were a wise use of resources.

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The Boston Red Sox, as you might have heard, currently have an outfield glut. There is ten pounds of outfield meat in their five pound bag. Something has to give, and that something is likely Yoenis Cespedes.

When the Sox acquired Cespedes from Oakland in the Jon Lester trade, it felt more like a rental than a long-term investment in the player. Cespedes’ unique contract allows him to become a free agent at the end of the 2015 season, so Boston put themselves in an enviable position. They received an established big leaguer in exchange for their walk-year ace and got an up-close and personal look at a potential big free agent bat.

Whether or not a look under Cespedes’ hood informed their decision to sign both Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, that’s the route they went down. Now Cespedes is trade bait, the precious “right-handed power” commodity in a marketplace clambering for those skills. He’s headed into his age-29 season, he’s owed $10.5 million this year, and there’s going to be a line around the block to bid for his services. Where might he land?

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A few weeks ago, I found myself messing around on one of the projections pages, and I happened upon something I didn’t expect: the Mariners were projected for the highest team WAR in the American League. I wrote all about it for Fox, and while people made their jokes about the Mariners only looking like a contender after the end of the season, I thought it was neat to be able to establish a sort of pre-offseason baseline. What the numbers say right now isn’t meaningless. At the start of the offseason, the Mariners looked solid. How they look at the end depends on their own moves, and on the moves of the others.

So, about those others. Consider the Mariners knocked out of first place, if only until the next domino falls. The Red Sox have reached an agreement with Hanley Ramirez, and he will play some position. The Red Sox have also reached an agreement with Pablo Sandoval, and he will play third base. Go into the numbers now and you see a new best team in the American League. It’s only based on projections, and it’s not even December, but last year the Red Sox finished in last, and that doesn’t look real likely to repeat.

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