This is Alexis Brudnicki’s third piece as part of her March residency at FanGraphs. Alexis is the Director of Baseball Information for the Great Lake Canadians, an elite amateur baseball program in London, Ontario, Canada. She has written for various publications including Baseball America, Canadian Baseball Network, Sportsnet, The Hardball Times, and Prep Baseball report. She won a 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. She can also be found on Twitter (@baseballexis). She’ll be contributing here this month.

Juiced or not juiced?

While the question has become a persistent topic of conversation in Major League Baseball of late, similar rumblings about the state of the baseball have begun to pick up steam across the world.

After the six teams in the Australian Baseball League combined for 171 home runs over 119 total regular-season games during the 2016-2017 season, those same squads hit 379 long balls in the same number of matchups during the most recent winter.

A comparison of the offensive stats of the 2016-17 season to the 2017-18 season highlights the shift:

And the pitching stats diverge similarly:

Power numbers went way up, offensive numbers increased in every statistical category across the league, and pitching stats were abysmal, with more runs scored per game than ever before. It was a significant enough difference to inspire the players and fans to speculate on the causes.

The obvious answer in Australia was that the equipment was different. Though there has been speculation about modifications to the baseballs in MLB, the Aussie league’s transition to a new equipment provider — moving from Rawlings balls and SAM BAT sticks to bats and balls from Brett Sports — removes any need to speculate.

Or does it?

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After examining the most player-friendly free-agent contracts of the 2017-18 offseason, here I turn to the winter’s most team-friendly deals. As I explained previously, given the perfect storm of factors that suppressed free-agent spending relative to past winters, it feels unseemly simply to celebrate “winners” and pick on “losers.” I’m not here to punch down at a player such as Mike Moustakas, whose one-year, $6.5 million deal was less than one-tenth the value of estimates projected by Dave Cameron, the FanGraphs crowd, the MLB Trade Rumors crew, FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, and MLB.com’s Jim Duquette back in November.

Instead, I think it’s more appropriate to view the free-agent contracts in terms of team- and player-friendliness. While acknowledging that shorter deals are inherently more team-friendly, I’ve stuck with apples-to-apples comparisons for this column and the previous one by considering the one-year, two-year, and three-year deals in their own separate categories — and grouping those of four years or more together due to the small sample size. Here, price and expected WAR aren’t the only considerations: player age, fit with a team’s roster, and competitive situation are among the additional factors to weigh.

As a refresher, here’s a graphic breaking down major-league free-agent deals by contract length over each of the past six winters, using data from the MLB Trade Rumors Free Agent Tracker. I’ve omitted minor-league deals as well as those signed by international players, including Shohei Ohtani.

Four Years or More

Lorenzo Cain, Brewers: five years, $80 million

Of the winter’s five deals that offer four years or more, only those signed by Cain and Alex Cobb (four years, $57 million from the Orioles) feature a total value under $100 million. Between those two players, Cain (who turns 32 on April 13) has the longer track record for productivity than Cobb, having averaged more than four wins per season over the past four years. He recorded 4.1 WAR in 2017, his last in Kansas City. Cobb was worth 2.4 WAR last year and hasn’t been above 3.0 in any of his four seasons with at least 100 innings pitched, plus he lost most of 2015-16 to Tommy John surgery and (checks roster) remains a pitcher.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, a slider or split-finger fastball in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. As the quality of competition improves, a pitcher frequently needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the first installment of this series, we’ll hear from Jeff Hoffman, T.J. McFarland, and Drew Smyly on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Jeff Hoffman (Rockies) on His Slider

“The one pitch in my repertoire that I haven’t thrown my whole life is my slider. I picked that up in college. It actually started as a cutter, but I couldn’t really keep it small, like a cutter, so it turned into a slider. I’ve kind of just hung with it through the years, embracing it as a slider.

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With the arrival of Opening Day on Thursday (!), a look back at the best and worst free-agent contracts of the winter would seem long overdue — except for the fact that dozens of free agents still haven’t signed and the ink is barely dry on several other deals. Just last week, Alex Cobb, whom Dave Cameron ranked 10th on his Top 50 Free Agents list, inked a four-year, $57 million deal with the Orioles. Five other players from among Cameron’s top 15 — Jake Arrieta, Lance Lynn, Jonathan Lucroy, Mike Moustakas, and Neil Walker — have signed since March 10. Prior to that wave, any attempt at an overarching analysis would have felt premature.

On the free-agent front, it was a weird winter of discontent, the slowest of the millennium when it came to free-agent signings. True, this year’s class was a relatively weak one, with the top free agents almost uniformly dealing with recent performance regression, injuries, and/or short track records of success.

The bigger story is the way in which the ramifications of the most recent collective bargaining agreement rose up to bite the players in the derriere. None of the five teams that paid the luxury tax for 2017 — the Dodgers, Yankees, Giants, Tigers and Nationals — signed anyone to a deal worth more than $10 million in total salary. The Dodgers, Yankees, Giants, and Nationals were particularly cautious about shimmying under the $197 million threshold so as to reset their marginal tax rates, while the Tigers were among several teams who used their status as rebuilders to justify meager expenditures in the market.

(The Cubs and Red Sox were initially reported by USA Today as having paid the tax, an error that was repeated here.)

Mid-market players who turned down qualifying offers and had the drag of a lost draft pick attached to their services were hit particularly hard, in part because an increasingly analytics-driven industry has gotten wise to the perils of paying aging ballplayers for past production.

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After several posts and roughly 100,000 words, we’ve come to the end of the 2018 Positional Power Rankings. It’s our own FanGraphs version of a season preview, and in case you’ve missed anything — or in case you’ve missed everything! — you can navigate through the series using that little handy widget up above. We’ve got write-ups about every single team at every single position, informed by our own depth-charts projections. The projections don’t consider, say, character, or morale, but they do consider what players have done on the field. What players have done on the field is a great indicator of what players are likely to do on the field.

If you read all the way through the series, you might not need this post. You would already have an inkling of which teams have value, and where. All this is is a summary of what we’ve already published. Here, you can look at everything in one place, to maybe get the fullest understanding of how all the teams are presently built. If you’re game, let’s all examine some big giant tables.

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PHOENIX, Ariz. – You are probably aware of Rich Hill’s story.

You are probably aware of his remarkable comeback and the excellent second act of his career. You probably know he is something of a sabermetric darling, having challenged conventional wisdom with his pitch usage. The A’s and Dodgers were willing to invest in his small sample of success in 2015 and 2016 thanks, in part, to spin rate, which has become newly measurable. Hill also appealed to traditional scouting eyes due to the deception of his delivery and his ability to make his curveball look like two or three pitches by mixing speeds, arm slots, and shapes.

This author certainly finds Hill to be of great interest. So when I visited Dodgers spring-training camp earlier this month, Hill was one of the players I was hoping to interview.

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Spring training is far too long. I think just about everyone agrees on that. But spring training is also wonderful, and it’s wonderful for two reasons. One, there’s baseball to watch. Baseball free of stakes and emotion, sure, but baseball, precious live baseball. And two, new baseball means new baseball statistics. They’re statistics we hardly make anything of, and they’re statistics that can be hard to track down in the first place, but numbers are numbers, and after an offseason spent reflecting on the same data over and over, it’s good to have new figures to consider. New numbers help fill the void in between new games.

You know that, on the individual level, spring-training stats are nearly worthless. The signal is drowned out by the noise, for so very many reasons. And even on the team level, you don’t want to take anything too seriously. Yes, four of the five best spring-training records in the American League belong to the Red Sox, Astros, Indians, and Yankees. But over in the National League, the Marlins have a better record than the Nationals. The Padres have a better record than the Cubs. Why should we care about team-level results? Even the teams barely care about team-level results.

And yet, there are league-level results. League-level results, covering hundreds of games and tens of thousands of plate appearances. Only there, when you put everything together, can you find numbers that might have real meaning. To get to the point more quickly, I’m just updating something I wrote about three weeks ago. Spring training is just about complete, with opening day right around the corner, and the league-level numbers are striking, in two areas in particular.

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Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings series, tackling the top half of the bullpen rankings. Just in the last decade, we’ve witnessed the game achieve record offensive levels by certain measures. One positional group, shortstops, is enjoying a golden era. Some positions are weaker, some are stronger. The game and its positions experience peaks and troughs of production. But relief pitchers give us a constant: they keep marching forward, to greater workloads and relevance.

Last season, bullpens accounted for a major-league record 38.1% of total innings thrown, up three percentage points (35.1%) from 10 years earlier. In 2017, relief pitchers beat their previous record for workload — set the previous season — by 578 innings. Thirty years earlier, bullpens accounted for 31.8% of innings; 50 years earlier, for 26.0%. This trend has been a constant.

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