­On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the omnibus spending bill currently being considered by Congress may include statutory language insulating Major League Baseball from liability for not paying minor leaguers minimum wage. This may be the first time on FanGraphs that we are going to be discussing an omnibus spending bill. But it’s relevant in this case.

Readers are likely familiar with the lawsuits filed by Minor League Baseball players alleging that their pay — generally around $1,100 per month for first-year players, with no pay for spring training — is a violation of a law called the Fair Labor Standards Act because it failed to pay minor leaguers even minimum wage. Thus far, the suits have had mixed results: one suit that attacked Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption was dismissed last summer, but another suit, which has been pending for over three years now, remains extant. Paying minor leaguers minimum wage would cost MLB franchises an extra $5.5 million per year. Minor leaguers are not members of the MLBPA.

Nathaniel Grow already covered the problems these suits face in a pair of excellent articles I recommend highly. My own take, as someone who has personally litigated about two dozen class actions in one form or another, is that one suit, in particular, has a shot. (The reasons why are complex enough to deserve their own article, but if you’re curious, that case is Senne et al. v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball et al., and I think that Garrett Broshuis, the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, had the right idea in the very clever way he pleaded his complaint.) That said, even if none of the lawsuits had any legal merit whatsoever — which is not, I believe, the case — defending such suits is expensive, and there is always risk inherent to any contested litigation.

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On Monday, Craig Edwards began our positional power rankings series by evaluating the catchers. If you’re unfamiliar with the process or concept, Jeff explained the series yesterday, too. Today, we tackle first base.

First base is at an interesting place. There remains plenty of familiar star power at the top of FanGraphs position rankings here, from Paul Goldschmidt to Anthony Rizzo to Joey Votto, the type of lineup-anchoring sluggers you expect to find at a position that is typically a run-production workhorse. There are also emerging young stars like Cody Bellinger and perhaps Matt Olson.

And first base has become home to a growing number of fly-ball revolutionaries, players attempting to make swing changes to get under the ball and save or extend careers standing by improving their overall offensive efficiency. It makes sense that players like Yonder Alonso, Logan Morrison and Ryan Zimmerman would be among those motivated to launch more pitches into the air since they don’t have much defensive versatility to fall back upon.

First base, from a production standpoint, also appears to be a healthy place. First basemen led all position groups with a 113 wRC+ last season, their second-highest mark of the last decade. First basemen also produced their collective second-highest WAR total (80.7) of the last 10 years.

But the position has become crowded and so loaded with offensive sources that free-agent first basemen were having trouble finding work this winter. Power has become so common, so easy to find, it’s become devalued. For instance, Morrison hit 38 home runs last season and posted a 130 wRC+ but had to settle for a one-year, $2.5-million deal.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Eugenio Suarez and Jose Altuve extensions, whether this offseason’s slow free-agent market will make players more likely to sign extensions, the industry’s latest effort to avoid paying minor leaguers, and the debate about where Shohei Ohtani should start the season, then preview the 2018 Twins (18:52) with Baseball Prospectus’s Aaron Gleeman, and the 2018 Rangers (56:45) with The Athletic DFW’s Levi Weaver.

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Both Kiley and I will be posting in-person scouting reports on draft prospects we see throughout the spring. Well, summer and fall, too. Here is another dump of notes from Arizona and a recent trip to Southern California.
2018 Draft Board

Other in-person notes: Matthew Liberatore, Nick Madrigal, Luken Baker, Jake Wong, TCU Pitching

Oregon righty Matt Mercer threw six innings of two-run ball on Friday night against Arizona State. He struck out eight Sun Devils, walked four, and left scouts with lukewarm feelings about his stuff. Mercer was up to 96, sitting 91-94 throughout his outing, and ASU hitters squared it up pretty often. His best secondary offering was his above-average changeup, which has bat-missing fade and benefits from Mercer’s funky delivery. Neither of Mercer’s breaking balls nor his command impressed scouts. His below-average mid-80s slider lacked movement and mid-70s curveball was fringey. I thought his curveball flashed average and could mature there if it’s used more frequently.

On one hand, Mercer is a college arm up to 96 with an out-pitch changeup and potential average third offering, if you’re willing to project on one of his breaking balls. On the other, he has below-average command right now, not everyone likes his delivery and/or athleticism, and he’s already had one Tommy John. There are some foreseeable avenues that lead Mercer to league-average starterdom but more that run to the bullpen. In the bullpen, maybe his fastball ticks up and singular focus on his changeup means he’s a 60 fastball, 60 changeup reliever with some funk, a la Tyler Clippard.

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This is Alexis Brudnicki’s second 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.

This is also the second installment of a two-part series exploring the lives of baseball players after their playing careers are over. You can find Part 1 here.

The Scout and the Coach

Rene Tosoni and Pete Orr shared the World Baseball Classic clubhouse with Chris Leroux, learning of his impending stint on reality television as they were about to embark on new careers of their own.

The games Canada played against Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Team USA were Orr’s swan song. The squad’s starting second baseman finished his playing career the previous season after 16 years. He spent parts of eight of those in the majors with the Braves, Nationals, and Phillies. He stayed in shape for a year after his career came to an end with the aim of helping his country’s squad in Miami.

As for Tosoni, he wasn’t sure where the season might take him after Canada’s run at the Classic came to a quick finish. The outfielder had played the previous season — his 10th in professional baseball — in the independent Atlantic League with the Sugar Land Skeeters and had an offer to return. The former Twins outfielder had just spent the entire offseason looking for a coaching job, reaching out to all 30 affiliated clubs, hearing nothing.

In the midst of their playing careers, neither Tosoni nor Orr had given much thought to life after baseball. Tosoni felt that his focus on the game led him to stay on the field as long as he did, and Orr knew that someday he would have to face his future, but both hoped that day would just never come.

“When I was still playing, I didn’t know what I was going to do after baseball,” Orr said. “It was something I kind of feared. I knew it was coming, but I just wanted to keep playing. Then once family and kids got involved, I started to really think about it, and I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. It is a little scary, but you take it as another challenge.

“I was fortunate. I had a year after I stopped playing; a full year to kind of let it all sink in that I wasn’t a baseball player anymore, so that helped me. Now that I’m on the other side of it, I know I’m going to miss it for the rest of my life, but I’m okay with that, and I think it’s a good thing that I’m going to miss it. I don’t mind.”

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Earlier today, Jeff Sullivan re-introduced this year’s positional power rankings. Hopefully, you are familiar with our methods for producing these rankings, but if not, a brief reminder: all 30 teams are ranked based on projected WAR from our depth chart projections. With those in place, our writers endeavor to provide additional commentary, some of it useful and some less so. We begin this year’s rankings with catchers.

The catcher rankings start, as they tend to do, with Buster Posey and the Giants. After a gap, the rankings cover the next 28 teams on a slow steady decline, and then there’s the Phillies. While Gary Sanchez and Willson Contreras represent a youthful contingent, the top of the list is still dominated by veterans, with Posey, Jonathan Lucroy, Brian McCann, Salvador Perez, Yadier Molina, and Russell Martin all placing their teams in the top 10. The last-place Phillies could make a big move up this list if former prospect Jorge Alfaro can take a leap forward.

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PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — Rays starter Chris Archer is one of the better pitchers in the game. He’s one of the more thoughtful and intelligent players in the game, too. Besides those distinctions, Archer might also be prescient. He has a sense of what the future will look like for a major-league pitcher. He’s going to be part of an experiment this season in Tampa Bay that could impact what the future looks like for many arms.

“If you don’t have that high-end stuff as a starter, it’s going to get a little blurry,” Archer said to FanGraphs with regard to the future of pitching roles.

The Rays are committed to a four-man rotation this season, although it’s more of a hybrid plan. While it will include only four traditional starting pitchers, the Rays will use bullpen games and a high volume of off-days early in the season to keep their four starters on regular intervals of rest.

MLB.com Bill Chastain reported on the plan a couple weeks ago:

“We’re going to try to stay at four,” [Rays manager Kevin] Cash said. “We’re going to have some bullpen days in there. We’re going to try and do that for a long period of time. We’re going to learn a lot in the first six weeks.

“We’re going to schedule in a bullpen day as our fifth starter. That’s kind of our hope — going past six weeks.”

An evolution from the traditional five-man rotation might be inevitable. Saber-minded voices have screamed for years that starting pitchers are less effective each time they work through a batting order. Pitching labels are blurring. Relievers accounted for an MLB-record 38.1% of total innings thrown last season, up three percentage points (35.2%) and 1,200 innings from just 10 years earlier. The game warps even more toward the bullpen in the postseason. Last October, relievers accounted for 46.4% of innings.

“The playoffs make it appear to be sexy, but over the course of 162, it’s hard to sustain,” Archer said of radical pitching-staff construction.

It wouldn’t be fair to say Archer is an unwilling participant in the Rays’ plan. “The concept makes sense,” says Archer of the four-man rotation as a theory. But he has his doubts about it as a full-season practice. The questions include whether the plan can extend to and succeed over the course of a full season, what it means for player development, and how the club will adapt to inevitable challenges, whether they be in-game or longer-term in nature.

Archer has shared his questions with the front office, which he says extends to him an open line of communication.

“Our front office is open. They talk to me about a lot of different scenarios: ‘How do you feel about this, what do you think about this?… Do you think you could bounce back if you pitch like this?’” Archer said. “I do like that they are asking someone actually doing it as opposed to drawing their own conclusions.”

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As Opening Day approaches, many team’s rosters have rounded into place. However, there is some slight tinkering to be done. With this in mind, let’s consider the careers of two players, blindly — one of whom is a mainstay for his team and the other who used to be.

Both players converted from shortstop to center field. They’re almost the same age. Player A was once a top-25 prospect, however, while Player B was a relatively unheralded signing out of the Dominican. Now, Player A is his team’s unquestioned starting center fielder, while Player B is on the trading block.

Player A is Billy Hamilton, noted speedster, while Player B is Juan Lagares. Recent reports suggest that the Mets have received interest in Lagares and that the club is motivated to move him.

Now, this could be the case for a variety of reasons. Lagares hasn’t hit particularly well this spring, going just 7 for 36 so far with 13 strikeouts. While spring stats only correlate so well to regular season, Lagares hasn’t made an overwhelming case for an expanded role. Lagares also makes $6.5 million this year and $9 million next year, and the Mets have supposedly been interested in shedding some payroll. Finally, there’s the fact that Lagares — one of the best defensive center fielders in baseball — is buried on the Mets’ outfield depth chart by a bevy of corner outfielders masquerading as center fielders. The fact that he is available should pique the interest of many teams, just as much if Billy Hamilton was available.

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Episode 806
Three of the 2018 draft’s top-10 prospects have played near Eric Longenhagen in Arizona this spring. He shares not only his thoughts regarding those prospects but also his ideas about them. Also: scouting a two-time Cy Young winner. And: the concept of “reverse projection.”

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 52 min play time.)

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