There is no strict definition of what a super-team is. There’s no cutoff at a certain number of wins, no cutoff at a certain number of standard deviations above the mean. We’re objective people with an analytical bent, so we should probably consider working on this, but for the time being, consider it a “feel” thing. Somewhere, there’s a difference between a super-team, and a team that just plain looks good. We mostly know it when we see it.

And it’s been suggested that we’ve entered a super-team era. An era in which there are a number of very clear favorites. This would all be cyclical, and not a permanent state of being, but it’s hard for me to argue with. There are seemingly a number of clear favorites. You know exactly who they are. It’s impressive what they’ve all managed to build, but you could make the case it’s taken some of the thrill out of the offseason, with so many other teams deciding they just can’t keep up. Super-teams have accumulated much of the power.

You’ve seen the various preseason projections. They’re all based on prior data, and projections inform the odds. We already know which teams are going to have strong World Series odds in 2018. In the interest of shining the light on uncertainty, though, I thought it could be instructive to examine a few super-team failures. As a reminder of how baseball could surprise, we can look at a few prior surprises. These are teams that looked extremely good. These are teams that fell short.

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In 2009, the City of Miami and County of Miami-Dade agreed to pay for 75% of a new stadium for Jeffrey Loria’s Miami Marlins. The projected stadium cost was $645 million, so Miami and Miami-Dade — or, more technically, Miami and Miami-Dade taxpayers — agreed to cover up to $480 million of stadium-building costs, largely from from hotel taxes. (According to some reports, Miami and Miami-Dade ended up paying about $347 million.) Miami and Miami-Dade also agreed not to receive any of the money from the stadium at all. No money from ticket sales, no money for concessions or naming rights. All Miami and Miami-Dade got in return was a guarantee that, if Jeffrey Loria sold the team, they would get a percentage of the net sale proceeds.

In October 2017, Jeffrey Loria did sell the Miami Marlins — for $1.2 billion. Under the terms of that stadium deal, Miami and Miami-Dade are entitled to 5% of the net sale proceeds. So good news for Miami and Miami-Dade, right? Well, not this time: Loria has told them he actually lost money on the sale of the team. So despite that gaudy list price, Miami and Miami-Dade stand to get nothing at all.

On the surface, Loria’s claim seems pretty implausible. After all, he bought the then-Florida Marlins in 2002 for $158 million, $38 million of which was a loan from Major League Baseball. Even after accounting for paying back the loan, that’s still a difference of over a billion dollars. Remember, though, that according to the stadium deal, Miami and Miami Dade agreed to receive 5% of the net proceeds (i.e. profits), not gross proceeds (i.e. the sale price), in the event of a sale.

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As has been documented in some depth this offseason, the new collective bargaining agreement is bringing about consequences that might not have been fully understood — by the players, at least — at the time both sides were celebrating labor peace.

These latest developments weren’t entirely unexpected, however. Consider, for example, some previous statements by Scott Boras on the matter.

“The integrity of the game is at hand here,” Boras said. “Clubs are refusing to employ premium free agents for their true market value because of an artificial, collectively bargained process that does not help the game or the fans’ perception of the game. These players earned their free agency and played at very high levels to get it.

…

“Like any players, they want to play baseball. But they’re also looking at the long-term aspect of their careers. This system has placed them not in free agency, but it’s placed them in a jail.”

…

“The system they’ve been dealt has basically prevented them from free agency,” Boras said.

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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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