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While this past winter moved slowly for a number of free agents, the offseason’s available relievers actually found work pretty quickly. By the time the calendar turned, 13 relief pitchers had received multi-year contracts worth more than $10 million, totaling more than $250 million overall. Addison Reed and Greg Holland would later ink deals for more than $10 million, as well. Much has been made of the fiscal restraint exercised by teams this past winter, but teams didn’t really apply that same sort of caution to reliever deals. Perhaps they should have.

In total, there were 30 deals in excess of $1 million dollars signed by relief pitchers this past offseason. With half the season having passed, it seems like an opportune moment to review how those deals are working out for the players and their clubs. Because of how relievers are typically utilized, we are necessarily dealing with small sample sizes, but that’s also just how things operate with relievers: the difference between a good and bad season might be a few rough innings.

The graph below shows WAR and the amount of guaranteed money the player signed for in the offseason.

Teams would hope that the trendline here slopes up and to the right. That would suggest a general correlation between the money received by a player and his on-field production. The graph above, however, doesn’t look anything like that. Indeed, if a slope exists at all, it goes down and to the right. And even if we omit the Rockies from it — they were responsible for the winter’s three biggest relief contracts — this graph would still pretty much look like a jumbled mess. Seven of the 11 players with more than 0.5 WAR this season signed contracts for less than $10 million total. Of the 13 relievers at replacement level or below, eight received eight-figure guarantees. There appears to be little rhyme or reason at all when it comes to money and performance.

Perhaps the total money skews things somehow. To see if that’s the case, here’s a similar graph, except with average annual value instead of total money.

Still nothing, right? It appears that way.

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Luis Severino currently ranks second among all major-league pitchers in WAR. He’s third by park-adjusted ERA, he’s first by park-adjusted FIP, and he’s sixth by park-adjusted xFIP, and he’s done this while facing the seventh-toughest average opponent, among everyone with at least 50 innings. There was a time when a lot of the attention was on the development of Severino’s changeup. The changeup is there, and it’s not like Severino is afraid of it, but he’s blossomed into one of the best pitchers in either league largely on the back of his fastball and slider. Two pitches can be all you need, when said pitches are elite.

Just Tuesday, Severino blanked the Phillies over seven innings, whiffing nine without issuing a single walk. In all, 95% of his pitches were fastballs or sliders, and Severino’s 101st pitch clocked in at an even 100 miles per hour. It’s been said before that high velocity affords a pitcher a greater margin of error. That’s true, and part of the story behind Severino’s emergence simply comes down to how hard he can throw. Yet there’s more there, more that underscores how difficult Severino is for hitters. Let’s take a look at how his pitches play off of one another.

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Torey Lovullo relies a lot on his coaching staff. Each has his own role and responsibilities, and the Arizona Diamondbacks skipper is well aware of the value they provide. He’d be the first to tell you that 2017 NL Manager of the Year honors — ditto the D-Backs’ playoff berth — wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of his coaches.

He interacts with them frequently. Communication is vital to any relationship, and Lovullo is a big believer in getting input before making a decision. It’s common to see him conferring with one of his coaches during a game, and behind-the-scenes conversations are a constant. Managers may ultimately have the final say — that’s the case here — but when Lovullo makes a move, there’s a pretty good chance collaboration was part of the process.

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Torey Lovullo: “[Bench coach Jerry Narron] understands the strategy of the game — the moving parts of the game — as well as anybody I’ve been around. He understands the rules as well as anybody. And Jerry’s ability to communicate is something I’m really thankful for. We can hit on any range of our daily communication and not miss.

“I rely on him mostly as my backbone. He’s watching the game in much the same way I am, projecting a lot of moves. I can throw an assortment of things out there — machine gun five thoughts — and he’ll quickly find the information whether it’s on one of the iPads or something we have on paper in the dugout. He’ll give me his thoughts on a particular move.

“He’s projecting what’s happening inside their dugout, or in their bullpen, and then giving me options — two or three options at a time — of what we should do. They’re thoughts I’m having, but I haven’t quite got there. And his timing is perfect. He know when, and how, to say things for a given situation.

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A little more than four years ago, on the cusp of the 2014 big-league baseball season, you could have been forgiven for not paying all that much attention to Eddie Rosario. His performance as a 21-year-old between High-A and Double-A in 2013 had been good but not exceptional (a .275/.324/.415 line over 746 plate appearances), and he’d just been popped for use of a banned substance, which would keep him off the field for the first 50 games of 2014. He was a back-end top-100 prospect — No. 60 on BP’s list, 76 on ours, and 119 on Minor League Ball’s — but sufficiently outclassed by the four Twins ranked above him on all three lists (Byron Buxton at No. 1 on our list, Miguel Sano at No. 10, Alex Meyer at No. 23, and Kohl Stewart at No. 32) that he missed out on much of the national attention then showered on his colleagues.

Four years later, it’s a different story in Minnesota. Stewart is in Double-A, Meyer is in Anaheim, and Rosario’s 9.0 career WAR outclasses every single one of the Twins’ prospects from that loaded class, including Sano and Buxton — even if you throw the rest of our 2014 Twins top-10 list into the hopper for comparison’s sake:

Now, let’s be clear about what I’m not saying here: I’m not saying that Rosario will end his career with more WAR than Buxton, Sano, or even Berrios, who’s had a pretty nice start in the majors, as well. At 25, Rosario is older than all three of those men, and more than a third of his career WAR has come in the last three months. We’re nowhere near being able to render a final verdict on the Twins prospects of recent vintage. So I’m not saying Rosario has “won” anything or that his peers have flopped.

What I am saying, though, is that it’s perhaps at least a little surprising that Rosario — and not any of the other men on this list — has been the most productive member of that loaded Twins farm system to date and, further, that perhaps his performance to date merits a little bit of examination as a result. So let’s examine, shall we?

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Taylor Hearn, LHP, Pittsburgh Pirates (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 8  FV: 45
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 7 K, 0 R

Notes
Hearn’s peripherals (27.5% K, 9.3% BB) are exactly the same as they were last year when he was in High-A. He’s a little old for Double-A, but that matters less for pitchers and Hearn’s early-career injuries set back his development pretty significantly. He’ll flash a 55 slider and average changeup, and he throws enough strikes to start, though he’s not overly efficient. He was up to 97 last night and projects as a fourth starter or late-inning reliever. Here are his swinging strikes from yesterday…

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This is the weird story of how Hanley Ramirez, late of the Boston Red Sox, went from unemployed former star to supposed drug kingpin back to unemployed – and unjustly tarnished – former star all in one weekend.

And it’s also a warning about not to jump to conclusions, especially about legal matters.

Once upon a time, Hanley Ramirez was a dynamic shortstop for the then-Florida Marlins. He had power, speed, and youth. Later, he reinvented himself as a middle-of-the-order force for the Dodgers. His tenure with the Red Sox after signing a four-year, $88 million deal was less successful, including a disastrous experiment in left field and culminating in his release earlier this year. Still, he hit 88 homers in a BoSox uniform and remained useful against left-handed pitching. We all expected he would land somewhere in relatively short order, with the Orioles emerging as a frontrunner.

Then all fell silent for a while. At least, until this past weekend.

As with so many things, it all started with a tweet.

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It’s been a strange few months for the Tampa Bay Rays. The front office spent the spring denying accusations they were trying to tank, and even at a half-decent 39-40, the club is nowhere particularly close to the playoff hunt. And yet, if you prefer the BaseRuns standings to the actual ones, the Rays have been a top-ten baseball team, even while playing a difficult schedule. And while injuries and being shorthanded led the Rays toward their “opener” experiment in the middle of May, as a team they’ve allowed the lowest ERA in baseball ever since. They’ve also allowed the lowest wOBA. This is where the Rays have gotten without Brent Honeywell. This is where they’ve gotten without Jose De Leon. Injuries have sidelined Nathan Eovaldi, Chris Archer, Anthony Banda, Jake Faria, and Kevin Kiermaier, among others. A month ago, Denard Span and Alex Colome were traded.

Through one lens, the Rays have been mediocre. They are how they were designed. Through another lens, the Rays have been an inspiring success. One could argue only luck separates them from a wild-card spot. No matter the lens, though, the Rays haven’t been boring. It’s a young club, stocked with talent. The strategy around the starting rotation and the subsequent relievers has been inventive. And on Tuesday, in the ninth inning of a one-run game, manager Kevin Cash played a pitcher at first base. The circumstances weren’t extraordinary. It was done very much on purpose.

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