When reports emerged in January that the Yankees were intending to contest the home run milestone bonus agreement the team entered with Alex Rodriguez back in 2007, it was unclear whether or not the matter would ever actually come to a head. Following a season-long suspension for performance enhancing drug use, no one knew for sure whether Rodriguez would even make the Yankees’ opening day roster, let alone be given enough playing time to hit the six home runs necessary to tie Willie Mays at 660 (triggering the first of five potential $6 million milestone bonuses under the 2007 agreement).

Rodriguez, of course, did make the team and ended up hitting his 660th career home run on Friday evening in Boston. As a result, attention has once again focused on whether the Yankees have any realistic hope of escaping the milestone bonus agreement.

As I noted back in January, because the bonus agreement has never been released publicly, it is difficult to fully assess the Yankees’ chances of escaping the $6 million payment. However, while there is still much that we don’t know about the contract, recent developments have shed some additional light on the legal arguments the Yankees will likely rely on when attempting to avoiding paying Rodriguez under the agreement.

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A few weeks ago I took a look at Major League Baseball players’ declining share of overall league revenues, noting that the players have gone from receiving just over 56% of MLB’s revenues in 2002 to around 38% today. That post went on to identify a variety of factors that have converged to reduce the percentage of league revenues going to the players, including increased revenue sharing, MLB’s growing television revenues, and more efficient front office decision-making.

One factor that I touched upon briefly in my prior post, but that probably merited a more extended discussion, is MLB’s luxury tax. As I explained the last time around, the luxury tax has helped dampen many of the larger market franchises’ willingness to spend on payroll, as teams will now incur a fine ranging from 17.5% to 50% – depending on how many years in a row the club has exceeded the luxury tax threshold – for every dollar they spend on player salaries over $189 million per year.

Because most clubs will only raise their payroll when they anticipate that each additional dollar spent on player salary will generate more than that in added revenue, the luxury tax provides a natural disincentive for most teams to cross the payroll threshold. Now, rather believe that an extra dollar in payroll will generate at least $1.01 in added revenue, teams must instead anticipate that any increased salary obligations above $189 million will generate anywhere from $1.18 to as much as $1.51 per dollar in new revenue in order to justify the expenditure. As a result, the luxury tax has caused most of MLB’s largest market franchises – the teams that the Major League Baseball Players Association has historically relied on to help drive the free agent market – to become more financially prudent in recent years.

But even this basic account doesn’t fully reflect the impact that the luxury tax has had on the players’ declining share of league revenues, as changes to the luxury tax structure since 2002 have increased the penalties for teams exceeding the payroll threshold, while also significantly lowering the threshold as a share of the average MLB team’s revenues.

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Performances are magnified in October and April. Everyone watches the playoffs with greater focus, and in April everyone is starved for baseball leading to massive consumption and potential over-analysis. Carlos Beltran has had little difficulty delivering in October, with 16 home runs and a .333/.445/.683 line in 219 postseason plate appearances, but this April, coming off his worst season in 15 years, increased scrutiny is coming for the soon-to-be 38-year-old. In the second year of his three-year, $45 million contract, whether Carlos Beltran will be able to produce is a question without an easy answer.

In each of the last two games, Carlos Beltran has come to the plate for the New York Yankees late in the game, trailing by one or two runs with runners in scoring position. On Wednesday, with the Yankees down 3-1, Beltran came to the plate with the bases loaded against Brett Cecil with nobody out. A wild pitch advanced all the runners a base leaving men on second and third. He could not check his swing on a 2-2 offspeed offering.
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A few years ago, Brandon McCarthy threw out a question that baseball Twitter scrambled to research: how often do Opening Day starting pitchers throw a first-pitch non-fastball? Suggested is that first-pitch fastballs, here, are extremely common and extremely predictable, and the results fell in line. It wasn’t clear there had been any first-pitch non-fastballs, and if there had been, there hadn’t been more than one or two, excepting, of course, the occasional knuckler. Baseball season has started. How does baseball season usually start for every team? With a fastball. It’s almost like a ceremonial first pitch, after the ceremonial first pitch, and before the actual baseball stuff.

Monday afternoon, baseball season started for the Yankees and the Blue Jays. In the top of the first, Masahiro Tanaka opened things by pitching to Jose Reyes. That season-opening pitch of 2015: a low slider, for a called strike, at 81 miles per hour. No mystery — it was a certain first-pitch breaking ball. The next pitch was a splitter. The following pitch was also a splitter. Reyes went down on three strikes, and Tanaka was off to the best of all starts.

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And now the final division preview, just in time for Opening Day. If you missed them, here are the first five:

NL West
AL West
NL Central
AL Central
NL East

Now, wrapping things up with the AL East.

The Projected Standings

The only division in baseball where all five teams have a legitimate shot at winning; the projected spread between first and last place in the AL East is smaller than the gap between first and second place in the NL East. The forecasts have a favorite, but this division is wide open, and nearly any order of finish could be reasonable. On to the teams themselves.

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It looks like Adam Warren has a spot in the Yankees rotation going into the season. And, according to our depth charts, he has a chance to hold that spot until at least Ivan Nova’s mid-season return. Given the health histories of some of the veterans ahead of him, that means he could start all year.

Could he start all year? What might we expect from him, given his arsenal and transition from the bullpen to the rotation?

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“Chester wouldn’t play baseball unless Wilson played, and they never swung at the first pitch or slid headfirst.” — Chester’s Way, by Kevin Henkes

Most of us have been taught that running through the bag is unequivocally faster than diving into it. Those who dive into first base are often ridiculed for doing so, risking injury to themselves while simultaneously making themselves less likely to beat the throw. However, a new way of thinking about the physical effects on the runner as he dives through the bag — pioneered by the father/son duo that make up “Baseball con Ciencia” — shows that the diving runner could close the distance to the first base bag at a faster rate. Theoretically.

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It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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The situation for Cuban free agent infielder Hector Olivera is still a bit muddled, even though he’s now a free agent that may sign any day now. Here’s a more complete background with a full scouting report, recap of his workout that I scouted last month and a breakdown of which teams fits him best. Here’s the video from that workout:

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It’s a fascinating and volatile starting rotation in New York. CC Sabathia’s been awesome before, but he’s got injury questions. Same goes for Masahiro Tanaka. Same goes for Michael Pineda. Same, to some extent, goes for Ivan Nova. Nathan Eovaldi has fewer of the injury questions. Just last year he was an out shy of 200 innings. But Eovaldi’s still trying to get close to his ceiling. The upside for the other guys comes from their health. Eovaldi’s upside is somewhere in his arm.

And the Yankees, and Larry Rothschild, are committed to bringing that upside out into daylight. The current mission: polish Eovaldi’s third strikeout pitch. Before I get any deeper, I’d like to acknowledge Matt Tobin, who got me back thinking about Eovaldi in the first place. I want to talk some about the stuff we know he has, and I want to talk some about the pitch he might soon have. It’s the pitch that, very sincerely, might make all the difference.

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