The Pirates have a lot of talented players. This is a good thing. But one of the issues with having a lot of good players is that you run out of spots for them. This happened to some degree last season after the team re-acquired Aramis Ramirez. Ramirez, despite possessing starter-type talent, was forced to contend with a crowded third-base depth chart. Now the club might have similar crowding on the other side of the age spectrum — in this case, with the rise of prospect Alen Hanson.

Hanson has been a prospect for a little while now, and his star has dimmed somewhat since he moved to second base. Or so you might have thought. How you feel about second-base prospect Alen Hanson may depend on how you view your prospects, in general. Both Chris Mitchell’s KATOH and Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS rate Hanson as a top-40 prospect (22nd by KATOH, 38th by ZiPS). Scouts aren’t as bullish on him, however, even if they like him fine. Last year, Kiley McDaniel palced him toward the bottom of his top 200 list, and Baseball America more or less would have had him in the same position this year. In other words, many see him as a top-10 prospect on a team, but not a top-100 prospect in the game.
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While it’s technically true that both the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies are Major League Baseball teams, their 2015 seasons were different in a number of non-superficial ways. Yes, they both employed Ben Revere last season, but it’s difficult to find other substantive similarities between the 93-69 AL East champion Blue Jays and the 63-99 cellar-dwelling Phillies.

The Blue Jays had a 117 wRC+, while the Phillies registered a meager 86. The Blue Jays had an average, or slightly better, pitching staff (93 ERA-, 100 FIP-) and the Phillies were among the worst (120 ERA-, 111 FIP-) in the league. On defense, the Blue Jays sported a +15 DRS and +1 UZR while the Phillies delivered a -92 DRS and -31.1 UZR. The Blue Jays were good and the Phillies were not. That comes as a surprise to no one, even as we pause to note that the Phillies took steps to put their franchise on the right track during the same period.

These two very dissimilar clubs, however, did have one pretty interesting similarity during the 2015 season. They both flanked excellent center fielders with horrible defenders in the corners.

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Teams are constantly trying to sign young players to contract extensions, buying out both the remainder of the player’s cost-controlled seasons and then years of free agency after that. Doing so provides great benefits to the team, chiefly by allowing them to avoid the expenses of the free-agent market.

Not every player is offered or signs that type of extension, however. Some players choose to avoid extensions altogether, hoping for the big free-agent payoff as soon as possible. Other players might develop later and miss the window for an extension. Still others might lack the requisite talent to attract a deal. In every case, the player in question moves on, and that’s the end of it.

There’s a final scenario, however — one in which the club and player both possess an interest in reaching an extension but, for whatever reason, are unable to agree on the terms until the player’s final season of team control. In this case, a team isn’t buying out team-control years, only free-agent ones. And that changes the calculus a little bit. Because, while it’s possible the team might be receiving something of a discount from free agency, the odds of these deals working out for the team are not great.

Contracts for pending free agents (how I’ll refer to these players in their last year of team control) aren’t common. Players who’ve reached the brink of free agency have a major incentive to play out the year and see what the market provides. Having been unable to reach a deal for years, the odds that a player and his club will have a change of heart are low. This is particularly true for players who have never signed a contract extension and are heading into their sixth (or, because of service-time manipulation, seventh) year in the majors, and are now faced with their first chance at free agency.

Despite their rarity, there are a few examples of these contracts for pending free agents every season. Last year, for example, Rick Porcello signed a five-year deal with the Red Sox, while Clayton Kershaw and Brett Gardner have also signed similar contracts in the past couple years.

Looking at contracts from late-2007 through 2013, we can see how those deals have worked out for the teams that have signed them. Using MLB Trade Rumors’ extension tracker I looked for players with between five and six years of service time who were pending free agents and then signed contracts buying out at least two years of free agency. Those deals needed to be at least half-completed by this season to provide a decent idea on the deal’s outcome. In all, I found 26 such contracts. To determine value, I used $8 million per win for this season, and to approximate past and future years, adjusted by $250,000 per season. For contracts still active in 2016, I used the FanGraphs Depth Charts projection for the player, and if there were any years after 2016, I decreased the 2016 projection by half a win per year.

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Yesterday, I ran a post about the teams that we’ve run posts about. Turns out we haven’t written very much about the Twins over the years. We all kind of already knew that. People commented and here is one of them:

Twins fan here. The Twins bring some of it on themselves. For the umpteenth year in a row, they finished dead last in strikeout %. I suppose that in itself is worth thinking about. But now that I actually think about it, who isn’t getting his due? Trevor May? Who, Twins fans, should fangraphs be writing about that they’re not writing about?

I didn’t actually intend for things to work out this way, but let’s talk about the Twins pitchers and strikeouts.

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Mickey Jannis wasn’t allowed to throw a knuckleball when he was in the Rays system. That was in 2010 and 2011, his first two seasons of professional baseball. He’s a Met now, and the butterfly is out of his back pocket.

The bridge between Tampa Bay and New York was unaffiliated. Jannis pitched in the independent Frontier and Atlantic leagues from 2012 to 2014. Non-baseball options were available — the 28-year-old righty has a degree in business administration from Cal State Bakersfield — but he wasn’t ready to give up his dream. Not when he had a secret weapon to employ.

Flummoxing hitters with his floater, Jannis put up a 1.18 ERA for the Long Island Ducks early last summer. Subsequently inked to a contract by the Mets in July, he proceeded to hold his own in 11 appearances between high-A St. Lucie and Double-A Binghamton.

Jannis discussed his atypical journey, and the evolution of his equally atypical go-to pitch, at the tail end of the Arizona Fall League season.

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Jannis on knuckleball commitment: “I mentioned it to (the Rays) toward the end of my second season, when I was with Hudson Valley, but I wasn’t able to throw it in a game. My manager, Jared Sandberg, was kind of all for it. He was, ‘Yeah man, that’s good enough to throw,’ but it just didn’t work out to where I could. I only threw it on the side. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam preview the Athletics’ season with SB Nation’s Claire McNear, and George talks to San Francisco Chronicle A’s beat writer Susan Slusser (at 21:09).

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It’s no secret that, over the last several years, we’ve been seeing more and more high velocity in the major leagues. The league-average fastball keeps getting hotter, thanks to different training techniques, and thanks to different young-player development, and thanks to God knows how many other things. It’s not that everyone now can throw 95; it’s that the guys who can throw 95 are no longer thought of as freaks. Every team has at least a few of them stashed away.

The velocity trend has lifted many boats. As you can imagine, with league-wide velocity increasing, the same has been apparent on the team level. The Pirates, just as one example, have pretty clearly targeted hard throwers, and that’s just a part of their complicated plan. Not every team has participated, however. The Angels haven’t featured too many hard throwers, as Jered Weaver has taken it upon himself to counter Garrett Richards. The Diamondbacks were more finesse-y for a stretch, before picking it up last season. And the Giants have been another exception. Probably the greatest exception — no team has averaged a slower fastball over the last four years. Presumably related to that, the Giants have also thrown the lowest rate of fastballs.

Yet now they’re a team in transition. I’m not saying this is intentional, but looking ahead, the Giants are lined up to be a harder-throwing baseball team. After years of sagging velocity, the 2016 Giants could be almost league average.

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