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“Kyle Gibson?”

That was the first comment from my piece, yesterday, on Francisco Liriano, who embodies a league-wide trend of pitchers subtly altering their approach and hitters seemingly failing to adjust. You see, Gibson’s name was twice invoked in a group of unique pitchers, and, given the context of the groups, Gibson stuck out as something of a stranger in the room.

The first group looked like this:

• Carlos Carrasco
• Jacob deGrom
• Kyle Gibson
• Corey Kluber
• Max Scherzer
• Madison Bumgarner

OK, then.

The second group looked like this:

• Francisco Liriano
• Kyle Gibson
• Dallas Keuchel
• Wade Miley
• James Shields
• Tyson Ross
• Jeff Locke
• Jon Lester
• Gio Gonzalez

The second group is less illustrious than the first, but Gibson finds himself surrounded by some impressive company regardless. The first group, the distinguished group, is made up of the pitchers who most often got batters to chase pitches out of the zone in 2015. The second group is made up of the pitchers who worked out of the zone most often in 2015.

So, you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, in both these groups, throwing pitches outside the strike zone all day long and getting batters to chase at them like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer. And you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, who had one of the lower strikeout rates in baseball last year, and has K’ed fewer than six batters per nine innings over the course of his career, while his chase-inducing contemporaries like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer are striking out 10 batters per nine and overpowering lineups across the major league.

What gives? Where are all of Kyle Gibson’s whiffs? He already turned himself into a solid pitcher, a three-win pitcher, last season, racking up nearly 200 innings with an ERA, FIP, and xFIP all under 4.00. He’s proven himself as a quality arm. Take a quality arm and add some extra strikeouts, and you’ve got a dominant arm. And it seems like he should be getting those extra strikeouts. Yet, here we are.

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Featuring Chris Davis, Zack Greinke, Jason Heyward, David Price, and Justin Upton, this offseason’s free-agent class was one of the best in recent history. Of that group, Davis, Heyward, and Price entered free agency with the minimum six years of service time, while Greinke was taking his second bite at the free agency apple and Upton had his slightly delayed by a contract extension signed with Arizona before the 2010 season. Of this year’s class, Mike Leake, Jeff Samardzija, and Jordan Zimmermann also went without contract extensions before hitting free agency, creating one fantastic class. Next year’s class is much weaker — not because there are fewer valuable players who’ve recorded similar service time, but rather because so many great players entered contract extensions delaying free agency.

Yoenis Cespedes has a one-year opt-out in his new contract with the Mets that will enable him to enter a poor free-agent class with aging hitters like Jose Bautista, Adrian Beltre, and Edwin Encarnacion; mid-level outfielders like Carlos Gomez and Josh Reddick; just one elite pitcher in Stephen Strasburg; and a few elite closers in Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen. Next year’s class was not always like this. A slow erosion of free-agent eligible players occurred over the last several years, robbing the market of what could have been one of the greatest free-agent classes of all time.

Consider the following timeline:

• March 26, 2012 — Milwaukee Brewers sign catcher Jonathan Lucroy to five-year deal worth $11 million with an option to take the deal through the 2017 season.

• April 16, 2012 — San Francisco Giants sign Madison Bumgarner to five-year deal beginning in 2013 worth $35 million with two options that could take the deal through the 2019 season.

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Pitch-framing as an idea has existed for almost as long as the game, but it wasn’t until we started getting numbers for it that people really started to think about it in depth. At that point we were introduced to the idea of a catcher potentially being worth a few extra wins just because of how he catches pitches behind the plate. That was startling, and it was fascinating, but there was an important question that wasn’t being discussed enough — is the existence of pitch-framing good? Valid arguments on either side. But it seemed that there was nothing to be done until we got an automated strike zone. Humans will be humans, after all.

On the other hand, humans can change. Humans can learn; humans can be trained. One interesting observation during the PITCHf/x era is that, over time, those human umpires have collectively started to call an increasingly consistent zone. PITCHf/x provided feedback, and umpires could get better as a result. Now, I can’t help but wonder if we’re seeing the beginning of the end for pitch-framing. Catchers are always going to catch a little differently, but I wonder if there are fewer available rewards.

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Episode 627
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 explores the non-issue of tanking in baseball, the prolonged mediocrity of the Colorado Rockies, and also the prolonged mediocrity of everything else, probably.

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 43 min play time.)

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Two things were dumped on the DC area over the course of the weekend: an unfathomable volume of snow, and the news that Yoenis Cespedes was turning down the Nationals’ offer and returning to the Mets. In Washington, Cespedes would’ve replaced someone who’s already a decent center fielder. In New York, Cespedes will replace someone who’s already a decent center fielder. But now Juan Lagares is valuable depth, instead, and for either team, Cespedes represented some sort of improvement. So it was a damaging blow, effectively concluding what for the Nationals has been a frustrating offseason of almosts. The Mets, on the other hand, have reason to celebrate. They kept Cespedes, and on their own terms.

In a way it’s an extension of the Nationals’ narrative of disappointment. It’s also an extension of the Mets’ narrative of triumphant underdogging. There’s carryover from the last regular season, when the Nationals were one of the most disappointing winning teams in memory. That’s going to remain the most recent baseball until there’s even more recent baseball, but for the Nationals it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Spoiler alert: this is going to be another poll post. I’m going to ask you to pick the top of the NL East. I’ll offer my own pick, but I’ll put it down in the comments, so as to avoid any bias.

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Ben and Sam banter about Mike Trout moonlighting as a weatherman, then discuss which teams have seen their World Series odds fall or rise the most since the beginning of the offseason.

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Evan Gattis was probably never fast. That is, he wasn’t fast in comparison to many baseball players he was around while coming up through the minors. He certainly isn’t fast now, and at this point, we can confidently say that he probably never will be. And that’s fine, because speed isn’t really his game: coming into the 2015 season, he had zero stolen bases and one triple in his career. We’re all familiar with how Gattis contributes in other ways, like hitting baseballs 450 feet. Yet despite his lackluster speed, by the end of the 2015 season, he updated his career statistics to read zero stolen bases – and 12 triples.

In the span of one season, Gattis increased his triples total by a factor of 12. Because of that fact, this was a big story for most of the season; a simple internet search yields many articles ranking and commenting on his ever-increasing number of triples during 2015. Today, instead of viewing and ranking each one, we’re going to go deep on how strange and rare it is for someone as slow as Gattis to do this.

To begin with, we’re going to use a statistic called Speed Score. Very simply put, it’s a way of measuring a player’s speed and baserunning ability. Speed Score is on a scale from zero (walks around the bases) to ten (fastest/best baserunning human who has ever lived), so it’s fairly easy to grasp, and it tends to make some intuitive sense. There are a few main factors that go into a player’s score: stolen base rate, number of stolen base attempts, triple rate, and double play rate being a few of the main ones. To give you some examples, the best qualified hitter by Speed Score since 1920 is Jarrod Dyson. If you’ve watched the playoffs during the past two seasons, you know how fast Dyson is. The worst players by Speed Score are usually catchers, with Chris Snyder (who mainly played for the Diamondbacks in the early-to-mid 2000’s) at the very bottom.

So let’s see where Gattis fits into this Speed Score spectrum. First let’s look at the first two seasons of his career combined – 2013 and 2014. Here are the worst position players by Speed Score in those two years (minimum 750 plate appearances), with the number of triples each player hit:

We have three designated hitters here, a catcher, and a first baseman. Then we have Evan Gattis. We said before that he wasn’t fast, but let’s put it another way: Gattis was one of the very slowest — and worst — baserunners by Speed Score during 2013 and 2014. He was around the first or second percentile in the majors. These ten players above hit a combined three triples during these two seasons — basically, these types of players very rarely hit triples (and that helps bring their score down as well). Gattis actually improved remarkably by Speed Score in 2015, getting all the way up to 3.9 (46th percentile!) — but we can be quite confident that most of that increase was due to the number of triples he hit, and not other factors, like his aptitude at stealing bases (which did not improve).

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Tanking. It’s a buzzword, and over the last few months, one that has gained some traction in regards to Major League Baseball. Back in December, Buster Olney wrote about the issue as one of his 10 things to watch in 2016.

The Houston Astros and the Chicago Cubs both had great seasons in 2015, reaching the playoffs with young and exciting and talented teams built through a tear down to build up approach. After cutting spending and losing a lot of games in successive years and finishing at the bottom of the standings, the Astros and Cubs had picked at or near the top of the draft and had access to players such as Carlos Correa and Kris Bryant.

The impolite phrase for this is much more common in the National Basketball Association: tanking.

Now it appears that the Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta Braves and Milwaukee Brewers are in the midst of a similar approach, with the possibility that the Reds and other teams could follow. MLB might have a situation in years to come that 10 percent to perhaps a quarter of the teams are designing failure.

A few weeks ago, Jayson Stark went into greater detail.

But on the other side of that divide, we have the Phillies, Reds, Brewers and Braves. And we can find some execs out there who would throw the Rockies and Padres into that mix, too.

Those teams have various ways of describing what it is they’re up to. But assembling a team that’s built to win a World Series in 2016? Let’s just say that wouldn’t make the top 25 ways other clubs would describe it.

“I’ve never seen the game so messed up,” grumbled one exec from an NL team on the “win-now” side of the Not So Great Divide.

“I think it’s a problem for the sport,” said an executive of an American League contender, looking at the state of the NL from afar. “I think the whole system is screwed up, because I think it actually incentivizes not winning. And that’s a big issue going forward.”

It’s interesting that this issue is being raised at a time when baseball is experiencing a golden age of parity. The Kansas City Royals just won the World Series, the New York Yankees are the only team not to sign a free agent to a Major League contract this winter, and, in my view, we have more teams than ever before trying to win in any given season. While there is absolutely a huge divide between the good and bad teams in the National League, that is a byproduct of the fact that the American League is so condensed that all 15 teams see themselves as contenders this year.

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