We’ll get a full write-up on this deal up soon, but the Cardinals and Braves just made a fun trade, with the Braves shipping Jason Heyward and Jordan Walden to St. Louis for Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins. A quick look at the particulars:

Hewyard: $8.8M salary, final year of contract, Steamer projects for +4.8 WAR in 2015. Obvious qualifying offer/potential extension guy, though the Braves reportedly tried to sign him last winter and didn’t like the price tag. It has very likely gone up since.

Miller: Pre-arb, four years of team control, Steamer projects for +0.8 WAR in 2015, but Miller has dramatically outperformed his peripherals through this point in his MLB career. Everything went the wrong way in 2014, but he put together a strong second half and just turned 24.

Walden: Arb eligible through 2016, Steamer projects for +0.5 WAR in 2015. Very underrated reliever, but often hurt. When healthy, he’s one of the more effective bullpen arms around.

Jenkins: 2010 first rounder, hasn’t gotten out of A-ball, and didn’t strike anyone out at that level either. As a second piece in a deal like this, not a bad get for the upside.

Essentially, the Cardinals take a big step forward in 2015 — replacing Miller in the short-term shouldn’t be that hard — by filling their right field hole, and get first dibs to sign him to a long-term deal, but it comes at the cost of Miller’s future. If the Braves think they can fix Miller’s 2014 issues, or that his second half means he fixed them himself, then they’re buying low on four years of a quality starting pitcher.

Is this a fair price for one year of a star right fielder? What will Heyward cost the Cardinals to sign a long-term deal? This is your chance to weigh in, and we’ll have our full write-up on this later this afternoon.

Back in September, I ruminated on when an extension for Giancarlo Stanton might look like, and a run through the numbers gave me an estimate of $300 million over 12 years. The Marlins, reportedly, are negotiating a deal with Stanton that could be worth as much as $325 million over that same time period, so it seems like the estimates in that post weren’t too far off.

Except they kind of were, because I just eyeballed the projections and decided to be a little conservative, so the calculations were based on Stanton starting out from a +5 WAR level. Stanton’s actual Steamer projection is for 2015 is up on the site now, and it has him as a +6 WAR player for 2015, suggesting I maybe underestimated his expected value by a full win each year. Here’s the same table from that post, just starting from a +6 WAR base instead of a +5 WAR platform.

That projection values his 10 free agent years at a total of $390 million, and doesn’t include the payments he’s basically already guaranteed through arbitration. Toss in another $35 million for the two seasons before the 10 year extension kicks in, and this would suggest a value of $425 million, $100 million more than the Marlins are reportedly offering.

Yeah, I know, it sounds insane. I don’t think Stanton’s worth $425 million either. For one, the aging curve is probably not aggressive enough, especially for a guy his size with a history of knee problems. If we start his decline phase a couple of years earlier, having him drop from +6 WAR to +5.5 WAR at age-28, then the trickle-down has him end up at $313 million for the 10 free agent years, which would put him around $350 million over the life of the deal. Still a bit more than the rumored price, but definitely closer, and probably a bit more reasonable.

The other key we haven’t talked about is a potential opt-out, and how that might affect the valuation. Opt-outs are a way of giving the player non-monetary value in exchange for a lower AAV, and if the Marlins include one in an extension for Stanton, it could help them drive salaries down. Given the Marlins history of selling off players not too long after signing them, I’m guessing Stanton will demand either (or both) a no-trade and an opt-out, giving him the leverage to decide where he goes if he wants to get out of the deal.

If the opt-out is early enough in the deal, making Stanton’s commitment to the Marlins far shorter, then it could give him enough additional value to take less than the $30 million AAV he’s pretty clearly worth. We’ll do a full rundown on the deal when it’s done and the details are known, but it sounds like Stanton’s going to get a monster contract, and he deserves it.

We’ve never conducted an official poll, but for my money, the most difficult statistics on FanGraphs for a newcomer to figure out are Pitch Type Linear Weights, also called Pitch Values. If you’re scanning through a player page and come across something that says “wFB/C” you’d be forgiven for throwing up your hands and going outside to mow the lawn.

But fear not, we’ve updated our Library entry regarding Pitch Type Linear Weights with hopes of making that alphabet soup of a statistic easier to understand. These statistics measure how each pitch thrown changes the run expectancy of the individual plate appearance through their impact on the count. Pitch values aren’t something you’re likely to chart while you watch a game, but if used appropriately, they can provide a richer understanding of which pitches have been most effective during a given season.

As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments section, on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or during our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats, Wednesdays at 3pm.

Last December, the Seattle Mariners signed Robinson Cano to a contract worth slightly more than the GDP of all Palau. Insofar as Cano had been good previously and seemed likely to continue that trend for the time being, the move wasn’t an illogical one.

But acquisitions don’t occur in a vacuum, either. While it’s generally the case that a club will draft the best talent available, it’s also true that free agency is utilized primarily as a means by which to address a club’s weaknesses or positional holes. And among the Mariners’ weaknesses entering the 2014 season, the second-base position wasn’t the most urgent. In fact, one could reasonably argue that second base was a strength. For example, the ZiPS projections for Seattle, published here at the end of last December, rated Nick Franklin as the third-best position player on the club, with a 3.2 WAR, behind only Kyle Seager (3.7 WAR) and Brad Miller (3.2 WAR). Corey Hart and Logan Morrison and Justin Smoak, meanwhile — all expected to play major roles in a corner-outfield/first-base role with the club entering the season — were projected to produce just one win a piece.

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Dean Anna just landed a contract and a 40-man spot with the Cardinals.

— Lohud Yankees Blog (@LoHudYankees) November 11, 2014

The St. Louis Cardinals have found success in recent years in a number of ways — among them, by consistently identifying players who, despite a lack of power or other overwhelming physical tools, nonetheless are capable of providing offensive value while occupying a place on the more difficult end of the defensive spectrum.

Matt Carpenter and Jon Jay are perhaps the best examples of this type. Together, they’ve recorded eight major-league seasons of 300 or more plate appearances — and, in all eight of those seasons, Carpenter and Jay have produced a 100 wRC+ or better despite never having once hit more than 11 home runs. At the same time, they’ve played the majority of their defensive innings at second and third base (in Carpenter’s case) and center field (in Jay’s). A strong foundation, that, towards creating runs and wins.

Carpenter and Jay were paid a little more than $4 million in 2014 in exchange for a combined six-plus wins — or, roughly $35 million of production. That’s almost a 1000% return on the Cardinals’ investment. This afternoon, St. Louis signed a player who — were he given a full complement of at-bats — would appear to be a candidate to provide an even higher ROI.

Infielder Dean Anna is projected by Steamer to produce a 1.9 WAR over 600 plate appearances — on the strength, mostly, of his ability to control the strike zone and play a combination of passable shortstop defense and slightly above-average second or third base. Assuming his deal with St. Louis is for the league minimum of $500K and also assuming a dollar-per-win value of about $5.5 million, Anna is (theoretically) a candidate to provide a return of ca. 2000%. That’s unlikely to happen, of course: between Carpenter and Jhonny Peralta and Kolten Wong, the Cards have a strong infield contingent. What they also have now, though, is a strong utility infielder — one who, not unlike some of his new teammates, is a candidate to provide decent offensive value relative to his position, even despite a lack of loud tools.

Credit to Kiley McDaniel for urgently bring this information to the author’s attention.

FanGraphs now has a free agent tracker, complete with filtering, crowd sourced contracts, WAR projections, and current contract information!

The CS Years / CS Salary fields are the FanGraphs crowd sourced contract projections for the top 55 free agents.

The 2015 WAR listed in the free agent tracker is the 2015 Steamer600 projections.

If you think of anything else you’d like to see in a a free agent tracker, just let us know in the comments and we’ll try to oblige.

While certain parts of sporting media have welcomed a wide variety of sabermetrics, it looks as if almost every corner of the baseball word is integrating a few choice metrics into their broadcasts. One of those, which is the focus of this week’s Library update, is batted ball data.

It’s growing increasingly common to see line drive rate, ground ball rate, or fly ball rate dropped into casual baseball conversations outside of the analytics community, which makes this new entry on batted ball statistics for hitters a useful tool for those just learning about these numbers. Follow the link to learn about the classifications, uses for the data, limitations, and handy reference points.

As always, please comment below if you have questions, find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or stop by our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats, Wednesdays at 3pm.

As suggested by the 9.74 ERA he recorded over 44 innings in the California League this season — or even his most recent start in the Arizona Fall League, during which he conceded six runs over 4.0 innings — Houston right-hander Mark Appel’s professional career hasn’t been entirely free of difficulties. That he continues to exhibit promise, however, is still very much the case. And that he’s capable still of throwing a slider with what is known alternatively as “two plane break” and “furious pleasure” — that he’s capable of doing so is made evident by the footage above, of Appel throwing that same breaking pitch to Washington catcher prospect Spencer Kieboom in a different AFL game currently underway and available by way of MLB.com.

Left-hander Masahiro Yamamoto, who turns 50 next August, has renewed his contract with the Chunichi Dragons of the Japanese NPB, according to Jun Hongo of the Wall Street Journal.

Yamamoto made his debut for the Dragons in 1986 — which is to say, the same exact year in which many American children (the author included) received the original Nintendo for their birthdays and wore Jams-brand shorts while so doing.

Given the Tokyo native’s birth date (i.e. after July 1st, by which date “baseball age” is calculated), next year will only technically represent Yamamoto’s age-49 season, a feat equaled in the major leagues by only three pitchers ever: Jack Quinn (1933), Hoyt Wilhelm (1972), and Jamie Moyer (2012). Of that triumvirate, only Quinn made any appearances as a 50-year-old, facing a combined 12 batters over two appearances during the six days after his birthday.

Satchel Paige notably made zero appearances as a 49-year-old, having left major-league baseball following his age-46 season with the St. Louis Browns. He did, however, throw three innings as a 58-year-old in 1965 with the Kansas City Athletics.

Of Yamamoto specifically, one finds that he actually threw about 150 innings for Class-A Dodgers affiliate Vero Beach in 1988 as part of an agreement between the Dodgers and the NPB. There, he was teammates with Jose Offerman, for example, who’s been retired for nearly a decade.

In conclusion — and for the benefit of everyone — here’s an animated GIF of Satchel Paige’s delivery:

Yesterday, the author published in these pages a pair of leaderboards featuring — care of PITCHf/x data from MLB Farm — featuring the top Arizona Fall League velocities among both the entire population of pitchers and then among that population who’d made half their appearances in a starting capacity.

As I noted in that post, the numbers appeared to skew lower than one might otherwise expect. And, as one particularly intrepid reader observed, there actually is a curious error present in the tables when one attempts to view the velocities for all pitch types at once.

What follows is an amended version for each of the aforementioned leaderboards. As in that first post, FF continues to denote a four-seam fastball; FT, a two-seamer. Count denotes the number of the relevant pitch type to have been recorded by PITCHf/x cameras.

Below the leaderboards are three additional observations of limited merit.

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