Ever have one of those days where as soon as you wake up, things begin going awry? Simple tasks suddenly seem difficult? You burn your toast. You go to feed the dog, but it’s dark in the pantry and you accidentally dump the food in the adjacent water dish rather than the food bowl. You’re in the shower, hands lathered up with shampoo, and you feel a tickle in your eye. You know better than to scratch it but it’s early and you haven’t had your coffee and the whole time you’re raising that hand towards your face your mind is telling you no no no stop right now damnit you’re going to ruin your morning idiot and then you just plunge that finger in there and scratch away. I’m talking a deep prod.

As the burn persists, you begin to stew. Why? How? Am I not a full-grown adult, capable of moving from simple task to simple task throughout my life without being met by wretched, shameful failure along each step of the way? Have I made it this far on good fortune alone? Once the burn subsides, you consider going back to bed. Just for 30 minutes. Pull the covers up, set an alarm, get yourself up in a half hour and pretend like none of that ever happened. Reset. But you know you can’t. It’s too late now. You’ve already gotten up and started the day; it would be a coward’s move to let it beat you this quickly. Besides, you’ve got to start writing your morning blog post.

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Sometimes, pitchers throw a really bad pitch.

We explored this topic yesterday with regards to the non-competitive pitch, or a pitch that ends up several feet from the center of the strike zone. Plenty of these pitches come on two-strike counts, which makes sense. In two-strike counts pitchers tend to work outside the zone, leaving less room for error for the difference between a slightly-outside pitch and a way-outside pitch. Consider also that pitchers are usually trying to throw strikes, meaning there’s less muscle memory for the times that they’re trying not to throw strikes. In a way, it goes against what their body is most accustomed to doing. You’d figure that every now and then, one would slip.

It’s one thing for a pitcher to do this in a two-strike count when he’s already thrown 83 pitches that day and he’s not really even trying to throw a strike. Sometimes, pitchers throw a really bad pitch. But sometimes, pitchers throw a really bad pitch on the first pitch of the game. Pitchers always want to throw a strike on the first pitch of the game! Like, all of them. It’s one of the only things in baseball that’s an absolute guarantee. It’s literally the only reason Alcides Escobar became a thing in the postseason, because he decided to start taking advantage of the most obvious, telegraphed plan of attack in all of sport. Every pitcher wants to go out there and pound one in the zone. Every one. Yet, sometimes, it still doesn’t happen. Sometimes, a pitcher puts his jersey on, laces up those cleats, grabs his hat and his glove, walks out on the mound and just shoves a fingerful of shampoo in his eye. The same thoughts go through his mind. The why, the how, the can I go on or should I just go back to bed? Too late now. He’s got a game to pitch. As for the why and the how, it’s impossible to say for sure, but we can give our best guess.

No. 10 – Garrett Richards

• Location: 3.86 feet from the center of the PITCHf/x strike zone
• At-bat result: Fly out
• Outing result: 7.0 IP, 5 H, 1 ER, 0 HR, 2 BB, 5 K (1.99 ERA, 2.99 FIP)
• Explanation: Shampoo in the eye pre-game. These athletes really aren’t that different from you and I.

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While the early off-season has mostly been driven by trades — with Jerry Dipoto seemingly involved in about 80% of them — we’re reaching the point of the winter where we should expect to start seeing some free agents come off the board. Teams have had a few weeks to negotiate with various options, narrow down who might actually be a viable acquisition, and pick a direction in which to head. While there’s often a lot of activity at the winter meetings, a number of significant free agents likely won’t wait three more weeks before they pick their next home, and so I’d expect a few big dominos to start falling into place relatively soon.

So, with that background, it’s time for my annual list of free agent recommendations. For the last few years I’ve picked through the crop of free agents and selected a handful of players I think would be good values at the prices that we expect players to sign for, and as you’d expect, looking back at those recommendations is a pretty mixed bag. Teams following my suggestions maybe would have landed some bargains in Francisco Liriano, Scott Kazmir, and Russell Martin, but they also would have been stuck with Omar Infante, Nick Swisher, and Melvin Upton. Picking free agents is fraught with risk, and it’s not like we have it all figured out over here.

But as is the case every year, there are some guys that I think would be worth pursuing, as my perception of their value is higher than what we think the market is going to give them. In some cases, MLB teams might agree with me and drive up the bidding to a reasonable point — Brian McCann a few years ago, for instance, when the crowd’s estimate proved way too low — but some of these guys will likely sign a diminished price due to some flaws that teams discount more heavily than I do. In my view, these are the guys who are present the best opportunity for upside value in this free agent class.

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The sabermetric movement has grown up over the last decade. A thing that you regularly hear now that you maybe wouldn’t have heard 10 years ago is this: I don’t know. So that’s where we start today. We don’t know what the going rate for ace relief pitchers is. That said, we do have one strong data point following this weekend’s trade of Craig Kimbrel by the Padres to the Red Sox, and it suggests that the cost to grab one of the best relievers in baseball is now substantial, akin to what it might have cost to get an ace starter some years ago.

Kimbrel is an elite relief pitcher, but it was surprising to see Boston acquire him for four prospects, including two top-50 prospects in outfielder Manuel Margot and shortstop Javier Guerra. On top of that already substantial talent the Red Sox tossed in starting pitcher Logan Allen and infielder Carlos Asuaje. That’s a ton of young talent to give up for anyone, let alone for three years of a reliever. It looks quite possibly as though the Red Sox have reset the cost for acquiring a top reliever. But have they?

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The Reds rumors are coming in hot and fast, or at least hot and fast for the weeks right before Thanksgiving, when most of baseball seems to be watching football. Mostly, it’s the obvious scuttlebutt: Aroldis Chapman and Brandon Phillips are available, for packages of varying quality, and mostly for players close to the major leagues.

Depending on what you think of the Reds and their current competitiveness, you’ll read “listening to any and all offers” differently. If you like the Reds’ young starting rotation, you think you might sell anything that’s not nailed down for 2017, meaning the focus is on jettisoning Jay Bruce and getting a haul for the Cuban closer. If you think there’s no hope and the division is too awesome for the Reds, you think they should probably trade Todd Frazier, and maybe even Joey Votto.

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The Mariners needed a center fielder after they sent Brad Miller and Austin Jackson packing over the past year. They had an extra reliever, maybe, after they acquired Joaquin Benoit from the Padres last week. And, even given all the flaws in their new (probably platoon) center fielder, it’s hard not to like such a low-risk, high-reward move. Even if you value relievers highly.

But these are the things you have to talk about when you try to evaluate the trade that sent center fielder Leonys Martin and reliever Anthony Bass to the Mariners and reliever Tom Wilhelmsen and outfielder James Jones to the Rangers.

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Early in this year’s postseason, the excellent Jessica Mendoza made several references in the broadcast booth to the idea of the “non-competitive pitch.” We know that pitchers, most often, are trying to throw strikes. We know that, other times, a pitcher will intentionally locate a ball outside of the strike zone, attempting to coax a batter into a misguided swing. For these pitches to be effective, they need to be reasonably close to the edges of the zone. Otherwise, the batter won’t swing. When located well, even if the batters don’t swing, you’ll hear these referred to as “good misses.”

What a pitcher is rarely, if ever, trying to do is locate dramatically outside of the strike zone. I’m talking several feet. These pitches happen, but for all intents and purposes, they’re unintentional and serve no use. They’re an extra tally on your pitch count and they almost exclusively go for a ball without any real chance of a swing. This was something upon which I briefly touched in my review of Gerrit Cole’s rough Wild Card start, in which he threw three of these non-competitive pitches consecutively to Kris Bryant to issue a walk after getting ahead in the count, 1-2.

When I wrote that post, I knew I’d revisit the topic in the offseason. The thing about a data set is, there’s always a most extreme something. Someone threw more non-competitive pitches than anyone else. One ball may not seem like a huge deal, but the difference between a ball and a strike changes the nature of an at-bat. After a first-pitch strike this season, batters had a .609 OPS. That’s Alexi Amarista. After a first-pitch ball, batters had an .815 OPS. That’s J.D. Martinez. The average run value of the difference between a ball and a strike is typically worth between one- and two-tenths of an entire run! Throw a lot of non-competitive pitches — automatic balls — and it will add up. We just need to define non-competitive, and then find them.

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Ben and Sam discuss the Craig Kimbrel trade and the way to talk about closers in 2015.

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Luck. We know it’s a large part of baseball. It’s also the foundation for the central questions we ask when trying to analyze the game: what was a certain player or team’s actual performance? How much control did they have over their production? Can they recreate it next year? We never stop debating these points. We create new statistics to try to answer them a little better than we did last season. And, despite there being certain influences we can’t measure when looking at individual and team production, we do have a few tools at our disposal to tell us who might have been underperformed, and who might have overperformed.

One of those tools is Fielding Independent Pitching, which strips away some of the influences a pitcher can’t control — namely what happens when a ball is put into play and the timing of events that unfold against them. With FIP, we can see who might have gotten unlucky with batted balls finding holes in the defense more often than expected, and conversely, who might’ve benefited from batted balls being hit straight at defenders. After a lot of groundbreaking research, it was found that pitchers don’t have a lot of control over what happens once the ball leaves their hand. Comparing FIP to actual performance — namely ERA — we can see the teams and players who might’ve gotten lucky and unlucky over the course of this past season.

Today, we’re going to look at which team’s starting rotations overachieved and underachieved, as judged by FIP. I’ve charted each starting rotation’s ERA and FIP in an interactive graph, sorted by the best ERA in 2015. If a rotation’s FIP (their expected average runs against) was lower than their ERA (their actual average runs against), they underachieved; if their ERA was lower than their FIP, they overachieved. One of the best things about FIP is that it can be used exactly like ERA, so understanding it is intuitive: treat it exactly like you would Earned Run Average. After we look at the chart, we’ll go through some individual examples, but this should give us a good primer on the subject. Again, feel free to mouse over the chart to see each team’s specific data:

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