The Corey Dickerson saga concluded Thursday afternoon.

The Rays’ decision to designate Dickerson for assignment last week shocked many in the baseball community given that Dickerson, an All-Star in 2017, had just authored a 115-wRC+, 27-homer, three-win season. But the Rays wanted to rid themselves of his $5.9 million salary. By designating him, they would, at the very worst, be responsible for just 30 days of termination pay.

Jeff opined earlier this week that the Rays managed to trim payroll without getting any worse — a development that included, essentially, swapping out Dickerson for C.J. Cron. The 28-year-old Dickerson struggled in the second half, is projected to produce a 103 wRC+, and is not much of a defender or baserunner. There are quite a few players like Dickerson still available on the free-agent market for a variety of reasons.

While Dickerson is unlikely to provide All-Star value in 2018, this still seems to very much be a sensible addition and a clear win of a trade for the Pirates since it comes at little cost.

Daniel Hudson is coming off an uninspiring season for the Pirates that included a 4.38 ERA, 4.34 FIP, and 0.1 WAR in just over 60 innings. While the Rays are getting cash back in the deal, Hudson is owed $5.5 million in 2018. The Rays also pick up Tristan Gray, who was not ranked among Pittsburgh’s top-25 organizational prospects by Eric Longenhagen.

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Roger Cormier is a new contributor to FanGraphs. This is his delightful and strange first piece.

One could be excused for assuming that Eric Hosmer was made, not born. Made to confound the so-called “advanced” defensive metrics. Built to suppress that uprising known as the “fly-ball revolution.” Manufactured to lead a club written off by the projections — to lead them to a world championship. Engineered, in short, to thwart those who have attempted to harness the wild, loose ends of the game.

This long, chilly Hot Stove season appeared to be designed just for him, a comeuppance for his agitation. He, the One Demanding the Eight-Year Contract, would wait. And wait. And wait.

And then, like all mortals do, he would settle. And it would be glorious. The universe would finally bend towards justice. We would forever look at a picture of Hosmer in a puka shell necklace and laugh until we died, happy.

But we were naive. Instead, he did sign an eight-year deal. And not only that, but the pact would allow him to leave after five years if he wanted. That’s right: he even has Free Will.

How did we get here? How did we let such a polarizing creature into our lives?

As it turns out, Eric Hosmer is neither myth nor machine, but an actual human being — the progeny of two carbon-based lifeforms, even. He wasn’t constructed to singlehandedly defy sabermetric orthodoxy. Rather, he was born in South Miami. He is a person with feelings. He was once a boy.

I wanted to learn more about him, so I turned to primary sources, digging through newspaper and internet archives to build a portrait of the man. It’s a story I found interesting — and which also just so happens to be the truth.

*****

The story begins not with Hosmer himself, but with a seven-year-old named Ileana. Ileana’s family won a lottery for a temporary work visa. They got to fly out of Cuba and into the United States. Cuban officials threatened to cancel the visa the night of their flight because two of her dolls were missing. The neighbor to whom Ileana lent the dolls presented them to the officials just in time, and that was the last time she was ever in Cuba. (Another version of events, the one told by Eric himself, is similar, except Ileana was nine, and the two dolls was one teddy bear. It doesn’t matter.)

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The 1997 Seattle Mariners hit 264 home runs. No team has ever hit more than that. That season, the next-closest team hit 239 home runs, and that particular team played half its baseball on the moon. The next-closest team hit 220. The Mariners hit more than their share of dingers. Didn’t win them a World Series, and, didn’t even win them an ALDS, but those Mariners still hold the single-season team record. It’s something to cling to, which is all anyone wants.

Last year’s Yankees led baseball with 241 home runs. Their lead was narrow, but they still had sole possession of first, and then those Yankees went and traded for Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton was last year’s player who hit the most homers. And that’s not the only factor here, because the Yankees might also get to enjoy a full season from a healthy Greg Bird. It doesn’t take much wonky analysis to figure the Yankees could give that single-season homer record a push. Might even knock it down! The Yankees are as set up as anyone, and, as you’ve probably heard, we’ve entered into an era of high home-run totals, anyway. Seems like it’s all lined up.

Indeed, I can verify this: The 2018 Yankees are positioned to break the home-run record. What’s a little more surprising is they’re not alone. In 1998, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both eclipsed the home-run record set by Roger Maris. We could very well see something similar on the team scale.

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Last May, Jeff Sullivan — along with others like this author and J.D. Martinez — hypothesized that pitchers might already be thinking about a way to adjust in the fly-ball era. The possible antidote? To work higher. After all, the swing changes that helped produce a surge in home runs were designed largely to address pitches at the bottom part of the zone, notably the growing number of two-seam fastballs directed there.

Said Martinez to this author last spring of how pitchers appeared to be adapting:

“Pitchers are countering it right now. The pitchers are always ahead,” Martinez said.

What exactly are the adjustments being made to his swing path? Martinez and I had not, apparently, reached that level of trust.

“That’s one of the things you don’t want to tell anyone,” Martinez said.

While Martinez would not reveal what he believes to be countermeasures to his swing path, it appears pitchers are trying to elevate their fastballs against Martinez.

The home-run surge — whether a function of the changing ball, evolving swing planes across the league, or a combination of factors — began in the second half of 2015 and has since, of course, continued. Jeff found that, in the second half of 2015 and 2016, the increase in home-run damage done by batters had largely occurred in the bottom half of the zone. So it made sense that pitchers, especially those with high-spin fastballs with a rising effect, would turn their attention upwards.

Pitchers like Jake Odorizzi, for example. It was Odorizzi who told this author last spring that he had become more committed to a high-fastball approach. The numbers bear that out: the right-hander utilized the high fastball more than ever last season. Of course, Odorizzi also allowed 30 home runs in 143 innings.

Odorizzi’s 2017 campaign led me to a pair of questions. First of all, were pitchers working up in the zone more frequently last season? And if so, was it working?

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A conversation I had with Rob Whalen on Wednesday took an unexpected, and coincidental, turn. The 24-year-old right-hander brought up the first of the two starts he made for the Seattle Mariners, a game in which he was out-pitched by Boston’s Brian Johnson. A few years earlier, the Red Sox left-hander had taken a leave of absence from baseball to get treated for anxiety and depression.

It turns out that Whalen did the same thing last July — and he should have done it sooner. His mental health had been slowly crumbling, and it finally reached the point where he could no longer function normally — either on or off the field. When Whalen finally walked away from Seattle’s Triple-A affiliate, he did so knowing that he was in serious need of help.

———

Rob Whalen on his battle with depression: “Mentally, I was in a tough place. A lot of it was personal stuff, and it wasn’t one thing. It was how I’d felt for a few years, even when I was having success. The way I’d describe it would be a perfect storm of not feeling very confident in who I was as a man. I was kind of losing my identity as a person. Baseball is our job — it’s what we do — and I kind of lost that, as well.

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The St. Louis Cardinals selected Paul DeJong in the fourth round of the 2015 draft. DeJong was taken more for his bat than his defense. According to his alma mater Illinois State, for example, DeJong spent time at “second base, third base, catcher, right field, and as the team’s designated hitter” during his third and final season with the Redbirds. While suggestive of positional flexibility, that’s not the usual path of a defensive wizard. During that same campaign, however, DeJong also slashed .333/.427/.605 in 246 plate appearances. That kind of offensive performance can play at multiple positions.

The Cardinals used DeJong mostly third base after drafting him. He played 62 games at the hot corner in his first pro season and followed that up with 112 more starts at third in 2016 — but also 11 starts at shortstop. After some more work at short in the Arizona Fall League and a couple months in Triple-A, DeJong became the starting shortstop for the actual Cardinals, a contending major-league club. He finished second in balloting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

Minor-league third basemen don’t generally develop into major-league shortstops. If playing first base is incredibly hard, playing an adequate shortstop is nearly impossible. Even so, MLB is a copycat league. If an experiment works once, others will try it. Which brings us to the Cincinnati Reds and top prospect Nick Senzel.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays’ Carlos Gomez signing, the Padres’ improbable all-time home run leader, and the players’ portion of MLB revenue, then answer listener emails about running a team with the eye test or with stats, the effects of breaking the batting order, a serial rebuilding team, a pitcher fatigue indicator, team-based baby names, a flamethrowing knuckleballer, the value of leverage in transactions, the financial effects of expanding rosters, and an anti-tanking incentive clause, plus a Stat Blast/email answer on the best and worst extra-innings players.

Audio intro: Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, "Lonely Financial Zone"
Audio outro: Parliament, "Wizard of Finance"

Link to franchise home-run leaders Sporcle quiz
Link to Ben’s baseball economics article

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It’s not that I advise always taking teams at their word. Teams have an interest in pushing obvious agendas, and much of what they put out there is essentially some kind of propaganda. Teams always have to be selling themselves, which means emphasizing optimism while downplaying any negatives. But I trust the Rays on what they say they’re doing. Over the weekend, the Rays added C.J. Cron while losing Corey Dickerson and Jake Odorizzi. They said they slashed payroll without getting meaningfully worse, and I agreed. That post was promptly followed by news of the Rays trading Steven Souza Jr. for prospects, but the Rays said that was a baseball trade, not a money move, and that it would be the end of the selling. I believed the Rays; it just didn’t feel like an actual tank-job. There was also the room to make an addition.

An addition has already been made. The Rays have plugged the Souza void by signing Carlos Gomez for a year and $4 million. Gomez is signing from out of the bargain bin, so this isn’t a franchise-altering transaction. And there’s always the chance that, tomorrow or next week, Kevin Kiermaier or Chris Archer is swapped for younger players. The Rays still could tank, if they wanted to. But Gomez will actually earn more in 2018 than Souza will. And I think this is just more evidence of how the Rays are forever attempting to thread the needle. What is Carlos Gomez, as a ballplayer? He’s just an older and more fragile Steven Souza. It’s not the worst exchange, given the four new prospects from the trade.

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Earlier this month, it was announced that every major-league franchise would be extending protective netting to the ends of the dugouts on each side of the field. For some, the move is probably long overdue. Late last year, for example, a ball off the bat of Todd Frazier hit and severely injured a little girl at Yankee Stadium.  The Cubs and Major League Baseball, meanwhile, were sued last year after a fan was blinded in one eye by an errant foul ball in August at Wrigley Field. By one 2014 estimate, as many as 1,750 people per year are injured by foul balls and broken bats at baseball stadiums every year.

But the law is a tricky thing, and the extension of netting might have an unexpected result — at least insofar as the teams are concerned.

There are many sources of laws. Some are statutes. Some are federal regulations. Some are court decisions. And some law comes from what is called a “Restatement.” A Restatement is basically a book which tells us what the majority rules are in certain areas of law. For our purposes, we’re going to be referring to Chapter 17A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. (As to why it’s not the “Second Restatement of Torts,” that is a concern beyond the scope of this piece, but it’s mostly because lawyers have an irrepressible urge to make everything unnecessarily convoluted.)

As explained in the Restatement, there exists in the law a doctrine called “assumption of the risk.” In the context of baseball, that basically means that if you sit in an area without protective netting and you know it’s a possibility that a foul ball might come your way, you can’t sue the team for getting injured by that foul ball. As one court put it in a case called Edward C. v. City of Albuquerque, a fan “must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile” — even if that projectile is traveling upwards of 100 mph.

There’s a really excellent write-up on this that you can read here. In short, however, this “baseball rule” represents the majority rule in the United States. If a foul ball comes your way at a ballpark, the law basically says you should have seen it coming. You’ll probably find language on your ticket saying you assume the risk of injury by foul ball, like the Yankees have on theirs.

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