I’m not sure if baseball is that much of a copycat league, but even if it is, the Royals make things a little tricky, because they’re the defending champs, but they didn’t exactly have just one identity. Think about the various team strengths. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the defense that catches everything. Some people think of the Royals as being the team with the bullpen that doesn’t ever budge. And some people think of the Royals as being the team with the lineup that puts everything in play. Really, they’re all true — the Royals have played good defense, and they’ve relieved well, and they’ve kept opposing defenses on their toes. If you’re looking to copy the Royals, you have some decisions to make.

What I want to talk about here is contact, and therefore not striking out. We’ve seen teams load up on relievers, and it’s interesting. We’ve seen some other teams focus on improving the defense, although in fairness that’s been going on for a while. Contact is interesting because strikeouts have been going up, and the game just isn’t rewarding discipline like it used to. Hitters are more incentivized now to be aggressive, and though the Royals didn’t prove that, they’ve helped to drive the point home. I think, more than we’ve seen in a while, teams are searching for contact. They want to counter this undeniable trend.

It’s February now, the month in which spring training begins. Certain free agents remain available, but pretty much all the impact moves have been made. Rosters are nearly complete. Because of that, we can look at the projected strikeout landscape. Some numbers are more difficult to project, because they bounce around. I’m referring to stats like batting average. Strikeouts, though, are a good deal more stable. So which teams, right now, look like they’ll make the most and least contact?

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The Detroit Tigers, though they have yet to win the ultimate prize, have clearly been one of the game’s premier franchises over the past few seasons. Before 2015’s 74-87 disappointment, they had reached the playoffs the previous four seasons, earning one AL pennant and two other ALCS berths over that span. In the five previous seasons, going back to the beginning of the Jim Leyland era, they reached .500 in all but one season. It’s been a while since the Tigers’ immediate future appeared bleak.

Last year had to be quite a shot to the old solar plexus for Tiger fans. A team that had been built for the present, featuring relatively newly acquired mercenaries such as Yoenis Cespedes and David Price, was reduced to trading-deadline seller. They have continued to resist the impulse to rebuild; Mike Ilitch isn’t getting any younger, you know.

Well, in the tightly congested 2016 AL Central, within the just as tightly congested AL, there is reason to be bullish on the Tigers. Yes, it is a stars-and-scrubs type of team, and they do lack impact depth at both the major and minor league levels. There are two veteran players, in particular, who were significantly better than they appeared to be last season, and could be key drivers to a post-hype drive to the front for the club this time around: starting pitcher bounce-back candidates Anibal Sanchez and Justin Verlander.

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For the third consecutive year, Ben and Sam draft the 20 minor league free agents they hope will earn the most major league playing time in 2016.

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We recently went through the 2015 qualifying-offer season, the basic facts of which Five Thirty Eight’s Rob Arthur provided a helpfully summarized back in November. In that piece, Arthur asserts that “Each offer is essentially a bet that the player… will be worth 2 or more WAR in the coming year.” He adds that “the math works out so that teams tender offers to almost every remotely deserving free agent [and] [w]ithout fail, those free agents refuse them.” Arthur was writing before the deadline for players to accept their offers, and for the first time this year, there were players who accepted their qualifying offers (Brett Anderson, Colby Rasmus, Matt Wieters).

While teams may have been very liberal in giving out qualifying offers in the past, now that there is a precedence of players accepting the offers, teams will likely need to be more cautious about giving out offers in the future. This article attempts to build a model that determines at what WAR threshold it makes sense for teams to give out qualifying offers.

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Billy Burns was going to be one of those interesting test cases. His numbers in the minor leagues were strong — he drew walks about 12% of the time, and he infrequently struck out. He could motor, too, adding to his value both at the plate and in the middle of the outfield. Yet he had just two professional homers to his name, over 1,800 opportunities, and we’ve seen these failures before. So the question was, could Burns get pitchers out of the zone often enough to keep his OBP respectable, or would he wilt upon being challenged?

I don’t know what you expected from Burns, but I can tell you something I didn’t expect: here was this passive, speedy minor-league outfielder, and then as a rookie he posted baseball’s fifth-highest swing rate. For the sake of comparison, the name right ahead of him was Pablo Sandoval. And Burns wasn’t just aggressive in general — he wound up with baseball’s second-highest rate of swings at first pitches. Burns cast his history aside and turned himself into a swinger, and that’s not something that happens by accident. And no one, I don’t think, would have a problem with the results.

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You may have noticed Major League Baseball unveiled new spring training jerseys. This is important. Spring training gets going in a few weeks and what would we fans be without new spring training jerseys to wear over our winter parkas while we shovel pile after pile of snow, hoping our hearts don’t give out in the process. But, if we do go down, at least we go down with our teams on our chests. And like your proverbial mother and her proverbial obsession with clean underwear, you wouldn’t want to go down with an outdated spring training jersey on. These are the stakes and they are high.

As such, I have viewed the gallery of new jerseys and I have some thoughts which is why this article is called Some Thoughts on the New Spring Training Jerseys. Because we prioritize truth here. It’s above other things, like lies, and candy corn, which, let’s face it, is just terrible.

First Thought: Diamondbacks, Why?

If your team name is too long for the front of your jersey then there are acceptable solutions. For example, you could write it like a signature, emphasizing certain letters joined by scribbles. For example, you might render my name as follows: “M [scribble] H [scribble] K [scribble] y.” Who says team names need be legible? Or, like the A’s do, you could just go with a single letter. The point is, there are options. But what you can not do is this whole “D-backs” thing, because it’s kind of awful — and, as you can probably tell from the first couple paragraphs of this piece, I am personally acquainted with awful. Going with “Arizona” and turning the “i” into a snake would let us leave the “D-backs” in the cul-de-sac of uniform design where it belongs. Good gosh, do I have to do everything, people?

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On Sunday night, Ken Rosenthal wrote a provocative piece over at FoxSports, based on an experience he had at a PITCH Talks event up in Toronto last week. Given the recent success of the Blue Jays and the impending free agency of both Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, the question of whether or not the organization would re-sign either naturally came up. I’ll let Rosenthal take the story from there. Read the rest of this entry »

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I don’t believe I’m out of line when I say that, of life’s most enjoyable pleasures, many are to be used, collected, consumed, or practiced in moderation. “You can have too much of a good thing,” they say. Food and alcohol, for example. Both delightful. Both substances which, were I unaware of the consequences of surplus consumption, I would regularly consume in excess. Both substances, in fact, which I do regularly consume in excess, despite being completely aware of the consequences. Likewise, I’ve taken nary a vacation which I didn’t find overindulgent. Don’t get me wrong — a break from the norm for a bit of traveling is always welcome, but I’m perpetually exhausted by the degree of stimulation that comes with falling asleep and waking up in a new bed, having to process an unfamiliar environment and having to create and enact routines that differ from the ones to which I am accustomed. Perhaps I’m just outing myself as a homebody, but without fail, I long for the comforts of a familiar bed, environment, and routine approximately 24-48 hours prior to the conclusion of any extended trip.

I recently sought to find an example of overindulgence in a baseball. A player whose approach, for example, was perhaps hindered by too much of a good thing. It was sort of an offshoot of the post I wrote yesterday which concerned Miguel Sano’s surprisingly disciplined approach against breaking balls. In that post, I found, among other things, that Sano took plenty of early at-bat breaking pitches for balls, and so he found himself in plenty of hitter’s counts, and not only that, but he capitalized on his abundant hitter’s counts by amping up his aggression and attacking pitchers when he had the upper hand.

It’s a fairly fundamental strategy, but there’s a most extreme everything, and someone had to be on the other end. There has to be someone who finds themselves in plenty of hitter’s counts but, for whatever reason, actually becomes notably less aggressive and less attack-oriented when they hold count leverage over the pitcher.

So I ran some BaseballSavant queries and I produced a couple lists in a spreadsheet that showed me overall swing rate, and ahead-in-the-count swing rate, and I calculated the difference between the two. Some interesting names popped up near the top — Xander Bogaerts, Matt Carpenter, Anthony Rizzo — but something seemed off, and I realized an unaccounted-for variable in my search: not all batters are pitched the same when they’re ahead in the count. Certain hitters get far more or fewer pitches to hit when ahead in the count, and so their swing rates are partly dictated by the pitcher. To control for this, it would be wiser to search only for the difference between overall in-zone swing rate and ahead-in-the-count in-zone swing rate. This was a search that yielded a particularly intriguing result.

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