Trevor Oaks hopes to stand tall on a big-league mound this season. In order to do so, he’ll need to regain his worm-killing ways. The 24-year-old right-hander relies heavily on his sinker, which didn’t do its usual diving last summer. One year after logging a 64.5% ground-ball rate at Double-A Tulsa, Oaks saw that number tumble to 50.8% with Triple-A Oklahoma City.

Oaks is a member of the Royals now, having been acquired by Kansas City from the Los Angeles Dodgers in January’s Scott Alexander deal. He believes that his old bread and butter will be accompanying him to America’s heartland. Not only is he fully recovered from an oblique issue that dogged his 2017 campaign, he was able hit the reset button on his mechanics over the offseason.

And then there are the lessons learned. Despite not having his best stuff, Oaks put up a solid 3.64 ERA in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League — and a veteran teammate deserves some of the credit. When words of wisdom were in order, Justin Masterson was there to provide them.

———

Oaks on Masterson’s influence: “Baseball-wise, Masty talked to me a lot about tunneling and making sure that everything comes out on the same plane. Even though we have different arm slots, the same principles apply. His slider is like a Sergio Romo slider, so that wasn’t exactly in my bag of tricks, but with his sinker… he turns the ball over a little bit more.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Seattle Mariners farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

45 FV Prospects

Lewis’s pro career just cannot get off the ground. After signing in 2016, he was sent to short-season Everett — a pretty cushy assignment for a top college draftee, but not unusual for a small-school prospect — where he played for a month before tearing his right ACL in late July. When Lewis got back into games during extended spring training in Arizona the next year, he didn’t look ready. His bat speed was intact, but he was noticeably hobbled in a way that scouts thought impacted him on both sides of the ball. They suspected he was rushing back too quickly.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the installation of a humidor at Chase Field, how peak Ichiro would have hit at Coors Field, and what to make of reports about players in the best shape of their lives, then answer emails about which team performances would qualify as surprising in 2018, projecting players who’ve had hard times off the field, evaluating launch angles, how much better teams get when they go for broke, NPB teams poaching unsigned free agents, how many non-athletes a team of the best players in baseball could carry without being bad, and how to define a platoon, plus a Stat Blast on post-humidor Coors, a meditation on the free-agent market, and an update on Jose Ramirez’s mysterious Twitter handle.

Audio intro: Sparks, "Instant Weight Loss"
Audio outro: Yo La Tengo, "Is That Enough"

Link to Alan Nathan’s humidor research
Link to Ben’s BSOHL research
Link to Mike Trout Pecos League hypothetical

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After years of false starts and uncertainty, we’re finally here — the Diamondbacks are going to start storing their baseballs in a Chase Field humidor. The idea itself isn’t particularly new, and of course the Rockies beat the Diamondbacks to the punch by more than a decade and a half. But, well, this isn’t a race. Arizona took its time to get to this point, and Chase does happen to be the second-most hitter-friendly ballpark around. It’s behind only…Coors Field, which the humidor didn’t render neutral, but the humidor there is still serving a purpose.

When the Diamondbacks have talked about this installation, they haven’t so much indicated a desire to drive offense down. Rather, the goal seems to be to make the baseballs more “grippy.” Pitchers have complained about the balls in Arizona being slick, and that has a lot to do with the low relative humidity of the climate. Now, you can’t exactly help pitchers without hurting hitters as a consequence. But there’s also just more going on. A humidor wouldn’t change only the surface of the baseballs. Moving forward, Chase Field might no longer be a hitter-friendly environment.

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When I met Alex Cobb nearly a year ago, he was searching.

He had just missed most of the previous two seasons, first undergoing and then recovering from Tommy John surgery, when I spoke with him at the Rays’ spring-training facility in Port Charlotte, Fla. Cobb knew what he was searching for. He had all the movement, pitch-location, velocity, and release data that the public has at FanGraphs, Brooks Baseball, and elsewhere.

A data-savvy player, Cobb noted how he was using the pitch-tracking tools available in the Rays’ bullpen and spring complex to evaluate his pitches’ characteristics last spring compared to the benchmarks he had established before surgery. From 2012 to 2014, he produced a 3.41 FIP and 84 ERA-, numbers which ranked 24th and 22nd, respectively, in the game.

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This represents the first post by new contributor Sheryl Ring. An attorney in the Chicago area, Ring will cover legal matters for FanGraphs. We’re excited to have her!

Until this week, Juan Carlos Nunez was most famous for having made a website for a fake company selling a fake product, in an attempt to convince the world that Melky Cabrera’s flunked drug test in 2012 wasn’t really Melky’s fault. Since those revelations, Nunez has been barred from baseball permanently and also spent a few months in prison for his involvement with Biogenesis. You would have been forgiven for thinking it would be the last you’d hear of Juan Carlos Nunez.

But if baseball is done with Nunez, it seems as though Nunez isn’t quite done with baseball. This week, Nunez filed a 30-page lawsuit against his former employer, Athletes’ Careers Enhanced and Secured, Inc. (ACES, for short), demanding $3 million in damages. ACES is one of the largest and most well known baseball agencies.  According to MLBTradeRumors’ Agency Database, ACES is the current representation for stars like Charlie Blackmon, Carlos Carrasco, and Dustin Pedroia among more than 50 other notable major leaguers. And in 2012, ACES represented Cabrera, as well. You might also have heard of ACES’ two most high-profile names, Sam and Seth Levinson, who are also named as defendants in Nunez’s lawsuit. Sam is the President of ACES; Seth is its CEO.

Nunez contends in the Complaint that the Levinsons knew about Nunez arranging for players to receive performance enhancing drugs like HGH from Anthony Bosch and Biogenesis and actually instructed Nunez to distribute those PEDs to players. Nunez says that better performance meant better numbers and bigger paychecks for players — and bigger commissions for the Levinsons and ACES. According to the Complaint, the Levinsons wanted Nunez to make Biogenesis a selling point in his pitch to get new players to sign with ACES. Nunez even namechecks a couple of stars in his Complaint, alleging that he personally, with the Levinsons’ knowledge and approval, arranged for Nelson Cruz to receive HGH in the early 2012 to help him recover from an infection. And Nunez also says that the whole fake-website debacle was the Levinsons’ idea. As you can imagine, there is a lot to unpack here.

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Last week, I published KATOH’s 2018 top-100 list. It was the fourth such preseason list to appear at FanGraphs. Unfortunately, it will also be the last.

I am embarking on a new opportunity in the baseball industry that prohibits me from working in the public sphere, which means no more KATOH. As much as I’d love to brag about how awesome this opportunity is, unfortunately that is all I can say about it.

Writing for FanGraphs was something I aspired to do since I stumbled upon the site as a teenager nearly a decade ago. I’ll be forever grateful to Dave Cameron and David Appelman, who hired me based on what was little more than an idea and stuck with me as I continually worked out the kinks. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Paul Swydan, who first brought me into the fold at the Hardball Times despite my undeveloped writing skills.

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Me, I’m kind of sick of hearing about J.D. Martinez. I’m sick of hearing about all the free agents. All I want is for the ones who’ll get jobs to get jobs so that we can move on with all our affairs. Seems like Martinez is destined to end up in Boston. Arizona is reportedly trying to stay involved by playing with what present and future money they have, but you can never really tell what information is just out there because Scott Boras wants it to be. It would remain surprising if Martinez doesn’t spend 2018 in a Red Sox uniform. Someone will simply have to give in.

To Martinez’s credit, a lot of us probably do take him for granted. When you talk about free agency, you talk about the future, but Martinez has put together a remarkable past. At least as far as the recent era goes, Martinez is among the original so-called swing-changers. He’s a daily reminder that even the Astros don’t get everything right. And, since 2014, 289 players have batted in the majors at least 1,000 times, and Martinez has ranked fifth in wRC+, between Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt. Martinez isn’t much of a runner, and he isn’t much of a defender, and he turned 30 years old in August. Guy can hit, though. He was perfect for the home-run era, even before the era began.

That’s an introduction about J.D. Martinez. Now let’s use him to talk about somebody else.

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