Position: TrackMan Stringer/Operator

Locations: Durham, NC; Montgomery, AL; Port Charlotte, FL; Bowling Green, WV; Wappingers Falls, NY; Princeton, WV

Description:
The Tampa Bay Rays are seeking highly motivated and detail oriented candidates for their affiliate TrackMan Stringers/Operators. These individuals will be responsible for running the TrackMan system for Rays’ affiliate home games. The number of games each stringer works varies by week based on availability and the season schedule. The duties require that this role arrive one half-hour before first pitch and continue to the final out. Stringer(s) will start as soon as possible coinciding with the affiliate season.

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for setting up rosters and tagging information in TrackMan.
• Log information for the entire game – monitoring the system and making any changes throughout the game (i.e. roster changes, defensive substitutions, etc.).
• Assist in troubleshooting system issues with Trackman, fixing any errors, and uploading the game to the TrackMan site.
• Other reasonable and related duties may be assigned.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Candidate must be motivated, well organized, and detail oriented.
• A firm understanding of baseball is required.
• Candidate must be able to make games in affiliate city fairly regularly and able to work nights during the week and weekends associated with home games.
• Previous experience using TrackMan software is preferred but not required.

All offers contingent on a satisfactory background check.

To Apply:
Please email bbopsresumes@raysbaseball.com with the subject line “Trackman Stringer”

On the heels of a pair of injury-shortened seasons, it was a rough spring for Felix Hernandez, who was drilled by a line drive in his first Cactus League start. Fortunately, he bounced back in time to build up his pitch count, and when he takes the mound tonight for the Mariners at Safeco Field, he’ll claim a little slice of history.

Hernandez will be making the 11th Opening Day start of his career, putting him into a tie with CC Sabathia for the lead among active pitchers, and the 10th-highest total since 1908, as far as the Baseball-Reference Play Index now reaches. He’ll also be making his 10th consecutive Opening Day start, moving him into a tie for fourth place with Hall of Famers Walter Johnson and Steve Carlton as well as Roy Halladay.

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Good news everyone! You can now make your picks in FanGraphs: The Game for the 2018 season!

For those of you who played in previous years, you will be able to change the team of any of your players up until you first spend money. So, if you want your players to be on different teams, I advise doing it before you make any picks. You can do this on the settings page.

In addition, your player will keep all of his stats from all previous seasons and continue on to the next year of their career.

Lastly, if you had autopick set last year, it has now been unset. If you want to keep playing with autopick on, you will need to make your autopick selections again.

And for those of you who are rookies to FanGraphs: The Game…

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Next Thursday, the author of this post and a group of people much more interesting than the author of this post will be discussing the Blue Jays over drinks and then even more drinks at the historic Royal Cinema in Toronto.

Among the most interesting people scheduled to appear is Mark Shapiro — a person of some consequence in the Blue Jays organization, it would seem. Early-bird tickets have sold out, but the general-admission variety are still available — and readers can get a $5 discount by using the promo code “fangraphs.”

Click here to purchase tickets.

Or click here to purchase tickets.

Or consider clicking here to purchase tickets.

Recently, I posted notes on Cleveland ace Corey Kluber to give readers some idea of what a pitcher of such obvious talent looks like on a scouting report. Well, I recently ran into Rockies righty German Marquez — a 55 FV on his final FanGraphs prospect list and a 2.5 WAR pitcher as a rookie (which is a 55) — so here’s a similar rundown.

Marquez’s body looks like it’s backed up a bit, but he was still generating premium velocity with ease, sitting 94-96 with his fastball throughout my viewing. It, along with his low-80s curveball, is comfortably plus, and he threw several 70-grade curveballs. Marquez is clearly working on developing two other pitches — an upper-80s slider and mid-80s changeup — that are both below average right now. The change has promising movement, Marquez just lacks feel for it.

Marquez barely threw anything other than his heater and curve last year and was able to succeed anyway because they’re both excellent. If a tertiary offering is his focus this year, it’s reasonable to expect some growing pains and regression, though this is probably best for his long-term development. His fastball velocity has fluctuated a bit this spring (as low as 92 in other outings), but that’s to be expected.

He’s not technically a prospect, but Rockies righty Jairo Diaz looks poised to make an impact in the bullpen this year. Diaz missed all of 2016 and most of 2017 due to Tommy John, but his stuff has been vicious this spring. In two looks at him, Diaz has been 96-99 with a plus slider in the 87-90 mph range.

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The Astros have reportedly come to an agreement on a second extension for their second baseman, and the reigning AL MVP, Jose Altuve. Only, this time, Altuve did not sign as cheaply.

The reported five-year, $151-millon deal will begin in 2020, or Altuve’s age-30 season.

Entering the 2014 season, the Astros signed Altuve to a pre-arb buyout deal that included two club options. At the time, it was unclear if the undersized Altuve would ever become more than a high-contact, low-power second baseman.

He was coming off an uninspiring season that included a .283/.316/.363 slash line, an 84 wRC+, and 0.7 WAR. Over three full seasons, the maybe 5-foot-6 dynamo had compiled just over two wins. The four-year, $12.5 millon deal with club options — options which, when exercised, will make it a six-year, $23.2 millon pact — seemed like a reasonable deal.

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For more than a decade — longer than Sandy Alderson has been general manager – the Mets’ handling of injuries has led to raised eyebrows, shaken heads, and an endless series of punchlines. Think back to the handling of Ryan Church‘s 2008 concussion, the battles over Carlos Beltran‘s 2010 knee surgery, the “angry bullpen session” that effectively ended Johan Santana’s career in 2013, and last year’s Noah Syndergaard mess, in which the pitcher suffered a season-wrecking strained latissimus dorsi days after refusing to climb into an MRI tube. Any Mets fan can offer you a multitude of additional instances, including a number of stretches where the team played shorthanded while trying to avoid placing a player on the disabled list.

All of that was supposed to change after last season, when the Mets dismissed trainer Ray Ramirez and set about hiring a high-performance director “to oversee players’ health and institute policies throughout the minor league levels.” On January 23, the team announced the hiring of Jim Cavallini with the title of director of performance and sports science; earlier, they promoted assistant trainer Brian Chicklo to replace Ramirez.

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In a maneuver already utilized too often by clubs this offseason, the Phillies have selected a weekend night — a time when right-thinking people everywhere have already filled their glasses with some of the unmixed Falernian — to announce a deal of some note. In this particular case, what Philadelphia has done is to sign free-agent right-hander Jake Arrieta.

Bob Nightengale was among the first with the terms of the deal:

Jay Jaffe will address the agreement in greater detail soon. For the moment, however, it makes sense to consider the implications of this transaction on two fronts — in the context both of (a) the Phillies’ rotation and (b) this winter’s very strange free-agent market.

First, the Phillies. Here, we recognize one of the great benefits of acquiring a frontline starter — namely, that he replaces not another frontline starter, but whichever pitcher has been designated to occupy the very last spot in the rotation. Our depth-chart projections call for Arrieta to produce something just shy of three wins in 2018. How does that compare to whomever he’s displacing?

By way of reference, here were our projections for the Philadelphia rotation before the addition of Arrieta:

The rotation spots of Eickhoff, Nola, Pivetta, and Velasquez are all probably safe. In this case, Arrieta is probably replacing some combination of Leiter and Lively. The immediate benefit to the Phils, in that context, appears to be about two wins for 2018. The secondary benefit is that, if and when a Phillies starter is unable to make an appearance, his spot will be assigned to Mark Leiter and not someone residing even closer to replacement level.

So that’s the signing from Philadelphia’s side. What about Arrieta’s?

At the end of February, Craig Edwards made a noteworthy observation — namely, that free agents who receive the largest projected contracts in our annual crowdsourcing exercise are actually the most likely to exceed their crowdsourced estimates.

Consider this table from Edwards’ piece:

Players who have been projected to receive $80 million or more have actually signed worth about 8% more than the crowd anticipated. Players forecast for lower amounts have actually received less. Edwards points out that, despite this strange offseason, the top free agents were still doing quite well.

Consider the free-agent signings of $80 million or more at the time of his piece:

While neither Darvish nor Martinez hit quite the 8% mark, both basically nailed their crowdsourced projections. And overall, including the Hosmer deal, the top free agents were actually outperforming previous seasons.

Since Edwards’ post, however, both Mike Moustakas and (now) Jake Arrieta have signed. The results for the $80-plus million demographic are a bit less impressive:

Arrieta was forecast for $110 million but came up $35 million short of that. As Jon Heyman notes, there’s actually a strange clause in the deal that could allow the Phillies to extend the deal to five years and $135 million, but it’s based on a couple unlikely contingencies. So, for the moment, we’ll treat it as $75 million. Unlike top free agents in years past, Arrieta has signed for considerably less than the crowd anticipated. It seems possible, as a result, that even more than baseball’s middle class is embattled.

One of the fun things about baseball, I think, is that players on opposing teams spend quite a lot of time standing next to each other and not moving very much. You don’t get this in basketball. If Dikembe Mutombo spent too much time standing still next to Michael Jordan, he was liable to find his face on a poster somewhere. Not so in football, either — the possibility for interaction is limited mostly to comings and goings on and off the field, and there’s a martial quality to the whole affair that inhibits relaxed conversation of the type you and I might have were we standing together quietly on a baseball field and not doing very much at all.

Anyway, last night I was mucking around on YouTube and found this video called “MLB Friend Joke“. This is a video title apparently conceived with a search engine, and not a human being, primarily in mind, and this is also what my friends fervently hope I am leading up to when I start sentences with phrases like “so I heard this great story about the 1940s Cincinnati Reds last night.” I watched this video because I was tired and didn’t have anything else to do.

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Because the author of this post is someone who mistakenly believed in the “transformative power of literature” as an undergraduate, $6.5 million remains only a hypothetical sum of money for me as a person. In the context of major-league baseball, however — and, specifically, in the context of compensating slightly above-average major leaguers — it’s roughly equivalent to zero dollars. It also, turns out, is roughly how much Mike Moustakas will earn in 2018.

Handsome Jeff Passan reports from the front lines of Baseball:

Jeff Sullivan will address the deal in greater depth tomorrow. For the moment, however, a collection of three bullet points should suffice to convey the improbability of this news.

Consider:

• Over the last three years, Moustakas has been worth $29.6, $5.8, and $17.6 million by the methodology used at this site — or just under $18 million annually on average.
• According to this site’s depth-chart projections, Moustakas is likely to produce about two-and-a-half wins in 2018 — or the equivalent of about $23 million, if one presumes (as people seem to presume) that a win is worth roughly $9 million.
• When Dave Cameron composed his list of the offseason’s top free agents, he ranked Moustakas eighth, projecting a deal for five years and $95.0 million. The crowd estimated only a slightly lower figure: five years and $85.0 million.

What all this information suggests is that Mike Moustakas probably should — to the extent that anyone should — be earning something just shy of $20 million in 2018. He won’t be, though. He’ll be earning probably $6.5 million, as noted above.

That’s merely one reason why this deal seems inexplicable. Why else, though, is because other notable alumni from the Royals’ world-championship team appear to be faring well enough.

For each player here, I’ve included not just his projected 2018 numbers but also the terms of the contract to which he agreed this offseason. Cain and Hosmer both signed for amounts greater than estimated by either Dave Cameron or FanGraphs’ readers. Dyson signed with Arizona for less than anticipated; however, he agreed to a greater sum of guaranteed money than Moustakas. Which, allow me to repeat that in slightly different terms: Jarrod Dyson received a larger guaranteed deal this offseason than Mike Moustakas.

The objectively slowest offseason ever has been surprising in a number of ways. This way is number + 1.