A year ago, one of baseball’s best individual player stories was Kris Medlen, of the Braves. Previously something of a forgotten man, Medlen threw 138 innings as a reliever and then as a starter, allowing just 26 runs and six dingers. The year before, Pirates sinkerballer Charlie Morton made a name for himself by starting 29 times and allowing just six dingers. The year before that, Brett Anderson was outstanding for the A’s when healthy, making 19 starts and riding his sinker while allowing just six dingers. This year, the Royals are looking like an early American League surprise, and one of their best arms out of the bullpen is Kelvin Herrera. But over just 14 games, Herrera has already allowed six dingers, his latest coming on Monday.

Maybe we don’t need to compare Herrera to other pitchers, who don’t have anything to do with him. As fun as it is to compare opposite extremes, if we want to make a point we need only compare Herrera to himself. Already in 2013, Herrera has seen six batted balls fly over the fence. Last season — over a full season — Herrera saw four batted balls do the same thing. Against 17% as many opposing hitters, Herrera has allowed 150% as many home runs, and that’s a thing for us to talk about.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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Although the “bunt wars” may not rage on, they are at least still simmering. The older, stale debates about whether sacrifice bunts are good strategy or the wastes of outs often miss the point by leaving aside game situation, game theory, the skill of the bunter, and other considerations. Even when such things are taken into account, discussions can get a bit abstract. Concrete examples of bunts and the situations around them can illustrate what complexities are involved in deciding whether a bunt is the right call. So let’s make it concrete: the sixth inning of the Red Sox-Royals game on Saturday provided two bunts worth closer consideration.

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Whatever else was made of the Royals’ off-season makeover, most agreed that the bullpen was a strength. Tim Collins and Aaron Crow had shown to be good relievers who might even be worthy of closing for some teams, but were only the the third and fourth options in the Royals bullpen. Kelvin Herrera came up and dominated in 2012 with a fastball that touched triple digits, and projected closer Greg Holland had been one of the best relievers in the American League over the two previous seasons. There were serious questions about the reconstructed rotation aside from James Shields and an offense that would no longer have Wil Myers projected to come up and save them from The Right Field Horror. However, the bullpen seemed safe.

The first week of the season, particularly the weekend series in Philadelphia, has gone a very different direction. The rotation has not dominated, but other than Wade Davis‘ start on Friday night, the starters has gone at least six innings in every game so far. The offense was dormant in the opening series, but exploded against the Phillies for 25 runs in three games. However, the bullpen — more specifically, Holland — was shaky. Holland blew a save on Saturday in one of the most frustrating ways possible, by walking three batters in a row, striking out two more to almost get himself out of a jam, then finally losing the game on a hit by Kevin Frandsen. Holland looked bad again on Sunday. He came into the game in the ninth after J.C. Gutierrez managed to turn a 9-4 semi-laugher into a 9-7 semi-nail-biter. Holland gave up two hits before Ned Yost had seen enough and brought in Herrera, who himself just eked out of the game, 9-8, after giving up a run.

Naturally, fan insta-reaction to Holland’s problems has been, shall we say, less than measured. There has not been obvious buzz coming from the team about a closer switch, but many fans would welcome it. One way or the other, the over-reactions will likely be forgotten by mid-season. We are not to mid-season yet, though, and the situation provides a nice opportunity for a few reflections on this sort of situation more generally.

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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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Would it be too hack-tastic to use the experience of the spring season as a figure for the annual rebirth of baseball in Spring Training? Yes. So I won’t. Indeed, I suspect at this point Spring Training feels for others like it does for me: not an exciting time of newness, but as a never-ending sea of pointlessness that makes one ashamed for ever having enjoyed it at all. (I would make a joke about Harry Potter here, but after the Cougar Town outrage, I am steering clear of controversy.) At this point during Spring Training final roster decisions are being made. There is not much else to write about, so one can hardly blame people for latching on to last-minute stuff like this, even if the alleged contests are pretty much set from the beginning.

Case in point: the (alleged?) battle for Royals back-up catcher between George Kottaras and Brett Hayes.

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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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In 2008, Mike Aviles was a 27-year-old minor league infielder in the Royals’ system who had to get a lucky break for the club to play him over this historically terrible Tony Pena, Jr. Yesterday, the soon-to-be 32-year-old Aviles got his first multi-year, guaranteed deal with Cleveland, which bought out his last two years of arbitration for $6 million and a club option for 2015. It has been quite the odyssey for Aviles, who was drafted by the Royals seventh round in 2003, in large part because he would sign for a $1,000 signing bonus (David Glass is great, isn’t he? Let’s give a hand to David Glass, folks!), has seen himself passed over for the likes of the aforementioned Pena, Yuniesky Betancourt and Chris Getz, and was traded twice this winter, including once for a manager.

Despite all that, Aviles has shown himself to be a useful player — and while this contract is hardly huge in itself — it might have interesting implications for how Cleveland’s roster might shake out in the near future.

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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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