Do you feel that? Spring Training is underway! No, not the part where they play actual games and it’s exciting for three innings. Rather, it’s the part where beat writers from all 30 teams bombard your Twitter feed with videos of pitchers throwing bullpen sessions and hitters taking batting practice and stories of how that one reliever got away from baseball by working on his truck all offseason or how that second baseman just eats a bunch of kale now.

You also get pictures of players with their new teams! Here’s Joba Chamberlain in an Indians jersey! Skip Schumaker with the Padres! Wow! Spoiler alert: Chamberlain gets chased out of Cleveland by a swarm of bugs before he ever pitches a regular season game. Schumaker has an embarrassing Spring Training moment where, while his team is taking the field between innings, he goes around to each position and looks into the dugout as if to say, “Here? Should I play here this inning?” and gets to every position before he realizes that his manager never actually told him to take the field. In fact, no one ever even invited him to camp. He just showed up and they gave him a jersey because they felt bad.

That’s the thing with veterans who sign minor league contracts in the offseason — it can be kinda sad. Like, Matt Joyce can only get a minor league deal now? Bummer. Brad Penny is still trying to make this happen? Yeesh. Ricky Romero? Ricky Romero.

But the other thing is this — sometimes, it’s going to work out! Sometimes, three years removed from professional baseball, the Indians sign Scott Kazmir to a minor league deal and he turns his life around and three years later he’s earned himself an extra $70 million. Sometimes, three years removed from pitching at all, really, the Royals sign Ryan Madson to a minor league deal and he helps win a World Series and gets a three-year contract the next offseason at 35.

A few of the guys who signed minor league contracts this offseason are going to make a real impact at the major league level this season. Most won’t. From a team-building perspective, it’s interesting to see how different organizations used their minor league spots and Spring Training invites. A few weeks back, I looked at how the teams were built, analyzing the makeup of each 40-man roster. In a similar vein, I thought I’d analyze which teams gave out the most minor league contracts this offseason, and to what kind of players.

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There are rumors that Adrian Beltre, a potential free agent next winter, might sign a contract extension with the Rangers this spring, potentially taking him to the end of his career. Jose Bautista in is a slightly similar situation with the Blue Jays. Dave Cameron discussed the potential of signing him to a contract extension one year out. Edwin Encarnacion and Carlos Gomez are also among those veteran players who have previously signed contract extensions but who are eligible for free agency after the 2016 season. Those players could conceivably sign extensions before hitting the free-agent market. If they do, how will the contract look? Will the signing team extract any extra value from signing it? Or is it distinctly an advantage for the player?

On Friday, we looked at players who were bought out before taking their very first crack at free agency — players who signed their first extension just before reaching their free-agent years. Generally speaking, teams paid free-agent prices for those players and received typical free-agent results.

I wondered if the same form would hold true for more veteran players who have already received an extension somewhere along the line or had even already participated in free agency. On the one had, such players are older and thus more prone to decline earlier on in the contract. On the other, the signing teams would already have familiarity with these players and these players might be better given the previous investment, perhaps mitigating the influence of any age-related decline.

Much like I did on Friday, I consulted MLB Trade Rumors and looked for players who signed an extension within a year of free agency. This time, I considered only players who had amassed at least six years of service time, indicating that he’d already signed a previous free-agent contract — either that, or at least signed an extension that bought out a certain number of free-agent seasons. For the most part, these players had been made a priority by their current team or a previous one and their current team decided to make a significant investment in their future and convince them to skip the allure of free agency.

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At ESPN, they recently wrapped up their prospects week. I thought I’d zag from that zig, however, and instead wrote a piece for Insider about 30-year-olds and how they’ll age. Using some research from Jeff Zimmerman on aging by player type, I tried to spot some 30-year-olds who are about to go into the tank, and some that might age better than we expect.

But while working on the piece, I asked Zimmerman to update the research on player-type aging, starting in 2005. That’s the year baseball stiffened their steroid policy. Here’s something strange: in this, what we might call the “post-PED era,” it appears as though certain player types have begun aging in an entirely different way.

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Episode 633
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the exhausting guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

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In the early 1990s, a cerebral New Hampshire native was the best starting pitcher on the Cardinals’ staff. A control artist who relied more on on guile than on gas, Bob Tewksbury went 33-15 over a two-year stretch and made an All-Star team.

Last summer, St. Louis drafted a cerebral New Hampshire native who shares several of Tewksbury traits. Carson Cross is all about changing speeds, sequencing, and hitting spots.

A 14th-round senior sign (Tewksbury was a 19th-round pick), Cross went 10-2, 2.29 in his final season at the University of Connecticut. He then logged a 2.70 ERA in 10 outings with the Cardinals’ State College affiliate.

Cross’s game is “more mental than physical” and command is a strength. Not being a flamethrower, he considers location vital to his success.

“I’m not blowing the doors open like some kids,” explained Cross. “Fastball command is big for me. If you’re out there hoping you have that pitch working and it isn’t, then you’re kind of stuck in the back seat.”

Cross throws a cross-seam fastball, and not always at the same speed. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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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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