Everyone knows not to make too much of spring-training numbers. This is a time for everyone to be optimistic. Good results are signs of improvement; bad results are to be dismissed because, come on, the games don’t even count. No one takes this time of year too seriously. Not even the players! But especially the fans. Look around. The current league leader in batting average is Mike Freeman. The current league leader in OPS is Billy McKinney. The current co-league leaders in at-bats are Raimel Tapia and Sam Travis. The Marlins, at 7-4, have a better record than the Nationals and the Dodgers. This is all practice. It’s practice, with the pointless quirk of keeping score.

But a funny thing happens when you have enough high-level baseball players playing enough practice games. As noisy as all the individual numbers are, when the sample size gets large, you can start to see real signal. Even in spring training, baseball has a way of finding its level — spring numbers often predict what we’ll see league-wide the subsequent summer. As such, I’ve gone in to investigate, because I’m impatient. This year’s spring training is roughly 40% complete. The league is past 15,000 total plate appearances. What might we be able to tell about the 2018 regular season? The answers might surprise you. (They will not surprise you.)

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The Mariners made the Ichiro Suzuki signing official on Wednesday, returning the 44-year-old outfielder to the team for whom he starred from 2001 until mid-2012, when he was traded to the Yankees. Aside from a genuinely useful 2016 season in a part-time role — highlighted by his 3,000th major league hit — he hasn’t been a very productive player over the past five years, totaling 2.5 WAR over the span, and he may not have much to offer the Mariners beyond wisdom, leadership, warm fuzzies, and other soft factors. Still, there are worse ways to end a storied career, as Rian Watt pointed out when the news of Ichiro’s westward return first broke.

The history of such homecomings among Hall of Fame-bound players isn’t filled with many resounding successes, and in Seattle’s case, the most immediate example that comes to mind represents a worst-case scenario in this realm: an old, underperforming player outright embarrassing himself in some way, as Ken Griffey Jr. did in 2010. Junior hit just .184/.250/.204 without a homer before being released on June 2, shortly after he allegedly fell asleep in the clubhouse and missed a pinch-hitting opportunity. That’s no way to go, whether or not you’re a member of the 600 home-run club.

Via a quick skim through annals of the game, I counted 13 other stints in which a Hall of Famer wrapped up his career with a return to his original team, plus one that deserves an asterisk. That count doesn’t include players who finished with the team for whom they became stars after previously breaking in elsewhere, as was the case with Early Wynn coming back to the Indians, Dennis Eckersley to the Red Sox, or Fergie Jenkins and the Cubs. Nor does it include players who moved on again after their second stint with their original team, such as Greg Maddux with the Cubs, Tim Raines with the Expos, or Ivan Rodriguez with the Rangers. Listed chronologically, these are the most noteworthy.

Eddie Collins (A’s 1906-14, 1927-30)

During his first run with the A’s, the Columbia University-educated Collins played the keystone in Connie Mack’s “$100,000 Infield,” which led the team to four pennants and three championships. But after losing the 1914 World Series to the “Miracle” Braves, Mack broke up the team for financial reasons — one of the earliest tank jobs. Sold to the White Sox for $50,000, Collins spent 12 years on the South Side, helping the team to pennants in 1917 and 1919 (he was not part of the World Series fix), becoming the sixth player to collect his 3,000th hit in 1925, and serving as player-manager for that season and the next.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Oakland Athletics. 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.

55 FV Prospects

Puk had back issues in college and scouts weren’t enamored with his conditioning, but he also featured premium velocity and a plus slider while performing against SEC hitters. He somewhat surprisingly fell to Oakland’s sixth overall selection in the 2016 draft. Reports were even stronger in 2017.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Rays’ latest Tommy John surgery victim and the team’s potential plans for a four-man rotation, players’ decreasing IP and PA totals, exhibition-game walk-off celebrations, Marlins spring-training invitees, and Jon Lester’s new bounce pass to first base, then answer listener emails about lower-level clutchness, how quickly changes to the ball would be noticed, Shohei Ohtani’s underrated offensive ability, how teams could spend their way out of scrutiny by the Players Association, whether teams should swap outfielders in certain parks, how much MLB might expand in the future, Jason Heyward opt-out scenarios, a non-throwing Mike Trout, the value of a player who doesn’t fly for road trips, and how much experience helps players, plus a Stat Blast about league-wide spring-training rates so far.

Audio intro: Shout Out Louds, "Four By Four"
Audio outro: The Posies, "That Don’t Fly"

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Earlier, Travis Sawchik wrote about the struggles of the middle class in this free-agent market. Sawchik called attention to those players predicted by the FanGraphs community to sign for under $45 million, and he found that the actual terms have been significantly lower than expected. Sawchik highlighted eight players in the group who have done better than the forecasts, despite the trend around them. Something those eight players have in common? They’re all relievers.

For all the talk of how slowly the free-agent market progressed — and, I suppose, continues to progress — relievers have seemingly been the exception. Relievers have come off the board in droves, and even back around the winter meetings, when all anyone could think about was Giancarlo Stanton and Shohei Ohtani finding new teams, relievers were finding contracts left and right. There was some obvious market enthusiasm, and to this point, free-agent relievers have signed for more money than free-agent starters. There are 24 relievers who have signed for multiple years, and that doesn’t count Mike Minor, who’s going to be tried as a starter again. One market is only one market, but still, what’s going on? It’s actually pretty simple to understand. You might even already know the answer.

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Today is Stacy Piagno’s birthday. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Piagno has made some history over the last couple years, becoming (along with outfielder Kelsie Whitmore) not only the first woman to appear on a professional roster in over half a century, but also the first to win a game as a pitcher in roughly that same period of time.

Nor were Piagno’s appearances the product of a mere promotional stunt. After debuting in 2016 for the Sonoma Stompers of the independent Pacific Association, she returned to the team last year, posting a 4.20 ERA, including seven innings of one-run ball against an all-male lineup in a July 15 victory. (The Stompers, you may recall, were the subject of the excellent book The Only Rule is It Has to Work by Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller.) The Stompers have sent several players to more advanced leagues, including to affiliated ball. Succeeding in that context isn’t a negligible feat.

Piagno and Whitmore (who’s not even 20 yet) are hardly the only women to distinguish themselves on the field against men. The Negro Leagues, which hosted some of the greatest players of all time (Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige) and which, by some estimates, featured a talent level roughly equivalent to that found in the NPB, also had a number of female players right alongside the men. Toni Stone hit .243, played a competent second base, and is most known for recording her team’s only hit in a game against Satchel Paige. Mamie Johnson posted a 33-8 record and a .276 batting average. (I recognize that pitcher record and batting average aren’t ideal stats, but advanced metrics aren’t really available for a lot of Negro League players.) So there is at least some precedent for women playing capably at a relatively high level.

And there’s more recent history, too. Ila Borders threw over 100 innings across four independent-league seasons between 1997 and 2000. Knuckleballer Chelsea Baker, who dominated her high school (boys’) baseball league, threw batting practice to the Tampa Bay Rays in 2014. And fellow knuckleballer Eri Yoshida held her own across both Japan and North America. There is also a National Women’s Baseball Team and the Japan Women’s Baseball League, and a Women’s baseball world cup.

The issue of women in baseball has already been addressed by writers far better than I. I’m not here to re-cover that ground. I’ve cited women’s history in the game, though, simply to establish both that women have exhibited both (a) a desire and (b) sufficient skill to play it professionally. (More on that latter point below.) What I’d like to do here is address the possibility that women have been excluded from the game — both as players and umpires — for reasons other than merit. And while I’m not the first to write about this, I’d like to take the opportunity of Piagno’s birthday to propose a legal theory by which women could potentially play affiliated baseball.

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Matt Harvey’s first appearance of the spring quickly became a punchline. Back on February 8, the New York Daily News‘ Peter Botte tweeted a photo of the 28-year-old righty throwing a bullpen alongside Jacob deGrom and looking particularly paunchy thanks to the way the wind blew his t-shirt. Even this scribe couldn’t resist throwing a jab to the midsection. To be fair, Harvey hardly looks like the second coming of Bartolo Colon, and four weeks later, with the Grapefruit League season underway, he at least appears to be a hurler who can help the Mets rather than harm them.

Granted, that sense is based upon all of two early spring outings against sub-.500 teams whose offenses project to rank among the majors’ bottom-third (namely the Braves and Tigers) when at full strength. Thus far, those offenses have been patchworks of established major leaguers and career minor leaguers, with the odd prospect thrown in — all still looking to regain their timing because, you know, it’s March (or actually February 28 in the case of the Braves outing).

Facing the Tigers on Monday at Port St. Lucie, Harvey threw 48 pitches over three scoreless innings, allowing two hits, a sharp double by Derek Norris, and an infield dribbler by Jose Iglesias. He walked Miguel Cabrera in the first inning after getting squeezed on a borderline 96 mph fastball with the count at 1-2. That was his fastest pitch of the day, but he followed it with three straight balls. He struck out one, 28-year-old right fielder Jason Krizan, who’s spent the past three years bouncing between Double- and Triple-A.

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