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Maybe the headline is a tad misleading; Joe Blanton-to-the-bullpen looked like something of a success story before he went to Pittsburgh and worked under the tutelage of pitching coach guru Ray Searage. But it was in Pittsburgh and under Searage that Blanton really took off, and without that time in Pittsburgh, Blanton may very well have been Just Another Reliever on the scrap heap, rather than a reliever who receives $4 million on a one-year deal to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It’s the year 2016, and we live in a world where Joe Blanton is getting guaranteed money to serve as a relief weapon for a contender. What a time to be alive.

Like many of you, I’ve long played fantasy baseball, and I’ve got a history with Mr. Blanton. Beware: I’m currently breaking rule No. 1 of playing fantasy baseball by talking about my fantasy baseball team. Nobody cares, I know, but I promise it won’t take long, and it’s related to the events at hand. My history with Joe Blanton goes like this: when I first started learning about sabermetrics, I learned about xFIP, and thought to myself, “Hey, this could be a useful tool for fantasy baseball.” One single stat, a predictive stat, that shows you potential under- and over-performers who have the peripherals to succeed; it was perfect!

Through the power of the almighty xFIP, I hastily, yet assertively, concluded that Joe Blanton was just unlucky. I concluded that Joe Blanton’s peripherals hinted at better results than he’d shown, and that Joe Blanton would provide Good Value. I drafted Joe Blanton, and then he was bad. Drats. Unlucky. Drafted him again, bad again. It goes on like this for several seasons until I couldn’t draft Joe Blanton anymore because he was no longer in the major leagues. At a certain point, I think I just became pot-committed and was determined to squeeze a good season out of Joe Blanton. It never came.

The point is this: Joe Blanton was always close. It always seemed like he might just be an adjustment away. An adjustment, or a lucky home run season. One of the two. He didn’t get a ton of strikeouts, but he got enough, he didn’t walk anybody, and he got a bunch of ground balls. That’s typically the beginning of a strong recipe for a successful pitcher, except Joe Blanton just gave up so many freaking dingers. Joe Blanton dingered himself right out of baseball, culminating in a 2013 in which he allowed 29 homers in 28 appearances. That was it for Blanton.

Or so we thought — until right around this time last year, when Blanton announced he was coming out of retirement, and we scoffed. Until Blanton received a minor league deal with the Royals, and we scoffed. Until Blanton found his way onto the major league roster and pitched effectively out of the bullpen, and we continued to scoff, but our hearts weren’t really in it, and as we scoffed we kind of looked around the proverbial room at one another, quizzically, as if to say, “Should we still be scoffing?” Until Blanton made his way to Pittsburgh and flat-out dominated, and we all just sat there, dumbfounded.

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Considering the potential ramifications of a victory by the plaintiffs in the Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball lawsuit, the odds always favored Major League Baseball eventually reaching a settlement in the case. Indeed, considering that the sport’s entire existing broadcast model was under attack – with the lawsuit alleging that MLB violates federal antitrust law by preventing its teams from competing in the local and national broadcast marketplaces – allowing the Garber case to proceed to trial would have been extremely risky for the league.

As a result, it was no great surprise to learn that MLB did in fact reach a tentative settlement agreement with the Garber plaintiffs on Tuesday morning, just minutes before a two-week trial was slated to begin in the lawsuit.

The terms of the deal will not be officially announced until after the attorneys have committed the tentative agreement to writing. Nevertheless, various media reports have revealed a number of details regarding the proposed settlement. In particular, it appears that by agreeing to create new viewing options for fans, and lowering the price for its MLB.TV package, the league has succeeded – at least for the time being – in preserving its oft-criticized blackout policy.

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Here’s a graph posted at Baseball Prospectus a week ago:

You see, for each of the last six years, an estimate of Jonathan Lucroy’s pitch-framing value. Now, there are freely available pitch-framing numbers you can browse through at StatCorner. Those will give you a good sense, but the numbers at Baseball Prospectus are the gold standard, with countless variables and adjustments, and what we observe when we look at Lucroy on Baseball Prospectus is that, statistically, it seems like his pitch-receiving has dropped almost all the way to league average. It was only a few years ago he ranked as one of the best, if not the best, so this is fairly astonishing. And Lucroy is said to be on the market, so this is also relevant. What are we supposed to believe as far as Lucroy and pitch-receiving go?

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Episode 625
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he examines the return of Chris Davis to Baltimore, agent Scott Boras’s role in that return, and also some possibly notable arbitration cases.

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 48 min play time.)

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Sometimes I’ll write a post I know is going to be popular. Like, some weeks back, I wrote about how the Cubs seem like the best team in baseball, and that was obviously going to be big. Sometimes the popularity of a post takes me by surprise. A good example would be when I wrote over the summer about Ryan Goins taking pitches and hitting other pitches hard. And then there are the posts almost exclusively for the nerds. For the nerdiest of the nerds. For the people who love thinking about baseball simply for the exercise. This is one of those. Nothing contained here is all that important, but this is the stuff I find most interesting, and I touched on this briefly last night when writing about Justin Upton on the Tigers. The Tigers play half the time in Comerica Park, and Comerica Park suppresses strikeouts.

I’ve written about some of these weird park factors before. The obvious park factors don’t require much explanation. It’s easy to see why there are more homers in Colorado. It’s easy to see why there are more triples in San Francisco. It’s confusing, though, to think about why some environments might increase or decrease strikeouts or walks. It feels like those things should happen independent of the ballpark, and the effects tend not to be huge, but effects do exist in some places. Detroit is one of them. People always ask how these factors can be. It’s never easy to know for sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a conversation.

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Ben and Sam talk to former international cricketer Kieran Powell about his attempt to become a professional baseball player.

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No two offseasons are alike. Some free-agent crops are bountiful, some less so. Sometimes, like last year, the trade market is on fire. Last winter, position players were on the move in huge numbers, due in part to a spate of new GMs — in particular, A.J. Preller — attempting to make their respective marks. Some years, the Winter Meetings are a virtual swap meet, while in others, they’re marked by a bunch of meetings leading to nowhere. Sometimes, the free-agent market dries up quickly, while in other years, Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Upton, Dexter Fowler, Ian Desmond, Yovani Gallardo, Doug Fister, Mat Latos and many others are still looking for work more than halfway into January.

When I wrote the first draft of this post yesterday, I was going to focus on the first two names in that list. Both entered the offseason with designs on a $150-million guarantee. Despite the relative lateness of the free-agent season, Justin Upton nearly reached that mark last night. Yoenis Cespedes remains available, however — and that availability has forced both him and all 30 clubs to step back and reassess his market.

For Cespedes, that means deciding whether to prioritize short- or long-term financial goals, while also considering competitive issues and quality of life. Meanwhile, clubs which might not have previously considered themselves as a possible destination for Cespedes are now having to decide whether to make a move in the event that his asking price drop far enough. After all, there really is no such thing as a “buyer” or a “seller”; hypothetically, if the price drops sufficiently low, all 30 clubs should dabble in the buyers’ end.

So let’s remove all preconceptions and determine which of the 30 clubs have a hole that could best be addressed by the signing of Cespedes, and examine whether the finances make sense both for player and club.

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This post was written by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren, the co-founders of NEIFI Analytics, an outfit which consults for Major League teams. Guttridge began his MLB career in 2005 as an intern with the Colorado Rockies, and most recently worked as Manager of Baseball of Research and Development for the Milwaukee Brewers until the summer of 2015, when he helped launch NEIFI. As part of their current project, they tweet from @NEIFIco, and maintain a blog at their site as well.

Analysts in the public space often assume a very deferential position. Surely, they may say, teams are doing similar work with far more information, using far more sophisticated tools, and know vastly more than those working in the public sphere.

We’d venture that the true size of that gap is far, far smaller than is often suspected. Injury information? Of course teams have far greater detail. But as regards primary questions like “who has pitched better?” or “how should one separate batted ball skill from variance?” — in terms of the salient data, there simply has not been a remarkable gap between what’s available to teams and what’s available to the public.

At least, perhaps until recently.

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