It’s January, and the story of the offseason is that it’s actually lived up to its monicker. Outside of Giancarlo Stanton and Shohei Otani’s respective moves to new teams essentially on the same day, MLB clubs have been in hibernation this winter. And so instead of evaluating trades or free-agent contracts, we’re left instead to ponder what is causing the inaction.

The potential culprits are numerous. If you’re inclined to see owners as evil profiteers, it’s easy to talk yourself into a collusion theory. Or this is the consequence of the Players Association accepting a luxury tax that might be acting as a de facto salary cap. Or maybe it’s just that every team has figured out that prices go down as spring training draws closer, so now everyone is trying the same wait-it-out game plan. Or maybe these particular free agents just aren’t that good. Or maybe it’s that next year’s free agents are too good.

Each of those theories seem to have some validity, and I think there’s probably a bit of most of that going on. But I think there’s also an explanation that makes everyone’s passivity perfectly rational: a lack of sufficient divisional competition to create the sort of pressure that justifies high-risk free-agent signings.

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The Blue Jays traded a couple prospects for a versatile infielder this weekend following a season during which their own infielders had trouble staying on the field. That much about the Yangervis Solarte trade makes sense.

What makes a little less sense? A Toronto team projected to finish almost 10 games worse than the best two teams in their division just improved their 2018 roster at a potential cost down the road. It might be a fine trade in a vacuum, but is it a well-timed one?

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If you read this past Sunday’s notes column, you know that Lars Anderson has taken his left-handed stroke — and his storytelling skills! — to Australia. After beginning his escapades in the Southern Hemisphere with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, Anderson is now playing for the Sydney Blue Sox in the Australian Baseball League. More so, just as he did last summer as a member of the Kochi Fighting Dogs, he is chronicling his baseball experiences on the other side of the world.

Once again, the multi-talented former big leaguer has agreed to share some of his stories with FanGraphs readers. Following up on last year’s well-received Lars Anderson Discovers Japan series, here is the first installment of Lars Anderson Discovers Australia.

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Lars Anderson: “I took my first steps in the Southern Hemisphere in my trusted black flip-flops. The rest of my wardrobe consisted of a thin, long-sleeved shirt and shorts (overdressed by Cambodian standards, but hey, airplanes can be cold). Being that it was, in fact, summer Down Under, I thought I’d be overdressed again. I was wrong and I was freezing.

“The research I had done prior to landing said Adelaide, my new home city, boasts two seasons: cold and super hot. Although it was technically summer, the heat wave had yet to come. I had shipped all of my warm clothes back to the states before leaving Japan so I was high, cold, and dry. A Radiohead remix.

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The Colorado Rockies are acting like a team with expectations for 2018. Before the start of the offseason, Cot’s Contracts projected a salary of $131 million for the team, an all-time high for the franchise. That was before they added $40 million in average annual value by signing Wade Davis, Chris Iannetta, Jake McGee, and Bryan Shaw. The players seem to expect big things as well, and have used this energy in their pursuit of free agents. McGee, according to Patrick Saunders, helped sell Wade Davis on the Rockies saying, “[T]his was a team that was going to win now.”

Now, many questions remain for the Rockies, and those questions have led some to doubt Colorado’s ability to contend. Can the pitching keep up its pace from last year? Can Charlie Blackmon repeat his MVP-type performance? Is Jonathan Lucroy back? While all three of those uncertainties can be addressed by playing the actual games, there’s another question that might have been answered recently.

#Rockies outfielder Dahl (rib/back) cleared to swing bat https://t.co/YEDOKU62RT via @MLB

— Thomas Harding (@harding_at_mlb) January 4, 2018

David Dahl saw only 82 plate appearances in 2017, all at the minor-league level. After a breakout 2016 rookie campaign in which he slashed .315/.359/.500 over 237 plate appearances while adding average defense in the outfield, Dahl was expected to be a key contributor to the Rockies going into the year. There were thoughts of a .300 hitter with 20-20 potential, enough to get most fanbases excited.

Unfortunately, those fantasies had to be postponed. On March 6th of 2017, the Rockies released a seemingly innocuous announcement that Dahl had suffered a stress reaction in his ribcage and would be reevaluated in two weeks. That injury would persist for basically the entire season.

Reports concerning Dahl’s return to health give the Rockies some hope of improving an outfield that was horrendous outside of the aforementioned Blackmon; however, the combination of Dahl’s profile as a hitter and the consequences of missing a full year suggest that enthusiasm ought to be curbed.

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Ben Lindbergh and his Ringer MLB Show co-host Michael Baumann speculate about how the slow offseason will end, answer listener emails about sabermetrics and salary depression, sumo wrestling and the Hall of Fame, and baseball in winter weather, compare the careers of Omar Vizquel and Nomar Garciaparra, and analyze unorthodox new Padres relief pitcher Kazuhisa Makita. Then Michael makes a case for college baseball, and he and Ben talk to Justin Volman, founder and CEO of the Collegiate Baseball Scouting Network, about how he’s assembled and trained a nationwide network of (mostly) college-aged scouts to cover games that MLB scouts might miss.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
One will notice, upon a cursory examination of the projections below, that five of the Royals’ position players are forecast to produce roughly two or more wins in 2018. A closer inspection of the names attached to those figures, however, reveals that three of them — Lorenzo Cain (579 PA, 3.1 zWAR), Eric Hosmer (654, 1.9), and Mike Moustakas (559, 2.5) — appear here not because they’re currently employed by the Royals, but rather because they were formerly employed by the Royals, have been granted free agency, and simply remain unsigned as of January 8th.

Indeed, of the players currently under contract with the club, only Whit Merrifield (648, 2.5) and Salvador Perez (525, 2.6) are projected to record more than two wins next season. Perhaps more remarkably, ZiPS calls for only a single other hitter, Alex Gordon (498, 1.4), to cross even the one-win threshold. Five of the club’s most likely starting nine, meanwhile, feature WAR projections that round to zero. As presently constructed, this team appears almost to be an experiment designed to test the validity of “replacement level” as a concept.

Of some interest here, in a way that isn’t wholly relevant to the Royals, is ZiPS’ assessment of Eric Hosmer. On Friday, Craig Edwards endeavored to give Scott Boras the benefit of the doubt in the latter’s appraisal of Hosmer’s value. With a number of caveats and conditions, he was nearly able to support Boras’s claims with logic, but even that optimistic calculus was based on the assumption that Hosmer is at least a three-win player right now. Dan Szymborski’s model suggests that isn’t the case.

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There was a fear back in 2014 and 2015 that professional baseball was merely experiencing the early stages of a Tommy John epidemic.

There were concerns that sports specialization, the focus on velocity over feel for the craft, was stressing arms even before they arrived in the majors. It seemed possible that rising league-average velocity marks — for which there’s now a new record set each year — were creating demands on pitchers’ elbows that their bodies couldn’t withstand.

Tommy John surgeries reached a record level in 2014, a level surpassed again in 2015. Velocity kept inching up. Pitchers with medical histories and red flags kept flowing into the game via the draft. Said Pirates GM Neal Huntington to this former newspaperman in 2014:

“They were blown away by the number of significant injuries high school and college pitchers had this year compared to three years ago, five years ago. The level of injuries is growing exponentially,” Huntington said. “We are just starting to get to the front edge of this (Tommy John surgery) wave. We might not even be through the worst of this yet.”

That was not an encouraging sentiment from someone with a commanding view of the game. The wave of Tommy John surgeries did seem to have become an epidemic that was growing in strength, one which would cost both pitchers and teams millions upon millions of dollars.

And then a funny thing happened: the surgeries began to decline.

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When I talked to Brady Aiken in August, he claimed that he wasn’t concerned with his radar gun readings, nor was he worried about ”trying to please people with velocity.” He was just trying to get outs any way he could, “regardless of whether (he was) throwing 100 or throwing 80.”

Two years after the Indians drafted him in the first round — and two years post Tommy John surgery — Aiken spent his summer pumping low-octane gas. A heater that touched 96 in high school was now hovering in the high 80s, and only occasionally inching north of 90. Other numbers were a concern as well. The 21-year-old southpaw had a 4.77 ERA and walked 101 batters in 132 innings for low-A Lake County.

Aiken was amiable yet defensive when addressing his performance and his velocity. With the caveat that “everyone wants to throw hard,” he allowed that he’s not where he once was. And while he’s not sure what to expect going forward, he sees positives in what is hopefully a temporary backslide.

“I’ve had to learn to become more of a pitcher, because I can’t just blow balls by guys anymore,” said Aiken. “At this level, you’re also not facing high school or college guys — this is their job, and you have to be better at your job than they are at theirs. If you can command the ball well at 90-92 you should be able to find holes in bats, and be able to get outs.” Read the rest of this entry »