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Beating the rest of the league to the punch with a large contract extension for Rick Porcello when much better players await in free agency is not going to garner excitement or plaudits, but the Red Sox are anticipating an expensive free agent market in 2016 and providing themselves a safety net. Boston resorted to Plan B before they knew if Plan A would work, but the Red Sox can still implement Plan A and sign a big-name free agent while simultaneously providing depth for their rotation. Five years and $95 million is a lot of money for a player without a world-beating track record, but Porcello has been good and reliable and he is still just 26 years old. This contract is not all that surprising as Mike Petriello predicted a similar contract in February.

Last year, three pitchers signed extensions just a year away from free agency and one of them is apt for Porcello. Clayton Kershaw’s seven-year, $215 million contract is way too big, Charlie Morton’s three-year, $21 million contract is too light, but Homer Bailey’s six-year, $105 million contract (with an option for a seventh year) is right in the same range as Porcello. Bailey was two years older and only twice pitched over 150 innings while Porcello has exceeded that mark in six straight seasons. Bailey was coming off the better season, with around four wins in 2013, but he also received more money with greater risk of injury. According to Jeff Zimmerman’s disabled list projections, Porcello is the second most likely starter to make it through the season without a stint on the disabled list.

Even if we treat Bailey as an outlier for an extension, last year’s free agent class has a pretty close contract to Porcello’s: James Shields, who signed for four years and $72 million with the Padres. Shields has the better track record, but he’s headed into his decline years while Porcello is headed into his mid-20s. While Shields’ deal ends when he’s 36, the Red Sox have only committed to Porcello up to age-30.
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Ben and Sam banter about pace and time of game and then discuss why the structures of player extensions haven’t evolved.

While I ran through my thoughts on all 30 teams in the division previews, I had a few stray things that didn’t fit into the capsule format, so I’m tackling them here. A year ago, I wrote this same post, including gems like this one:

2. I believe the Royals are being overrated.

Let’s see if I can do better this year. On to the five things I believe about the 2015 season. Read the rest of this entry »

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A player can become a poster child of sorts for his club’s offense. Edwin Encarnacion notwithstanding, I think of Jose Bautista and his pull power when I think of the Blue Jays. Mark Trumbo’s free-swinging ways embody the Diamondbacks, at least for me. Ben Zobrist hasn’t even played a game for the A’s yet, and his multipositional nature and OBP-centric skill set already makes him my go-to guy. The closest correlation between club and player, though, is an easy one for me. The Cardinals’ team-wide hit-it-hard-to-all-fields philosophy is most completely embodied by Matt Holliday. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the winter, new commissioner Rob Manfred made pace of play one of his primary agendas, talking openly about removing some of the standing around time in between plays, and even experimenting with a pitch clock to convince everyone to move things along a little faster. It was a point of emphasis for the league, and is likely going to be one of the primary storylines of the early part of the 2015 season. So, while we only have 15 games in the books so far, did the threat of fines speed things up at all on day one?

Take this with as many grains of salt as you can find, because again, 15 games, but on the first day of the season, things did move along a at a slightly brisker pace than in previous years.

Here’s starting pitcher pace during the PITCHF/x era:

And here’s reliever pace from the same time frame.

Starting pitchers were down about half a second from last year’s average time between pitches; relievers were down nearly a second and a half. When you add those changes up over the 4,000 pitches thrown yesterday, you find a reduction of about 48 minutes, or a little over three minutes per game.

That’s not a life-changing figure, and the time between pitches yesterday was still higher than it was from 2007-2011, but I wouldn’t think that walking back years of slowing pace is going to happen overnight. Even just beginning to reverse the trend would be a good first step, and the league could make small incremental steps back towards 20 seconds between pitches. And that’s essentially what we saw yesterday; good small steps.

Again, 15 games. It’s going to take a lot more than one day before we can draw any conclusions, and it’s possible that everyone is just abiding by the rules early on and then hoping to go back to their old way of doing things once people stop paying as close of attention. But for the first day of 2015, at least, things were a little quicker. Here’s to hoping this continues.

This time of year, we’re always asked, what should fans believe in? For five or six weeks, we issue constant reminders not to pay much attention to spring-training statistics. And when there are finally real, new, meaningful statistics, it’s still important to bear in mind that small sample sizes make noise of almost everything. It’ll be weeks before some numbers stabilize. For others, months. For still others, even longer than that. You think taking things away from baseball is easy? Conclusions are actually difficult to reach! Unless your conclusion is “this team won the game”, or “this team lost the game”, or “this number might mean this one thing but then again it might not.”

You want to know what’s really interesting, from a statistical perspective? Evidence of real change. For a pitcher, maybe it’s a new pitch, or a change in velocity. For a hitter, maybe you’re talking about a new swing. Some years ago, I remember getting excited about Michael Saunders in spring training. It wasn’t that his numbers were good — it was that he was showing in-game power to the opposite field, which he’d never really done before. That seemed like a real thing, and sure enough, Saunders became an actual decent big-leaguer.

You follow? Yeah, you follow. And, while you’re following: Monday, in Kansas City, Mike Moustakas hit an opposite-field home run. It’s considered to be his first-ever opposite-field home run. This is the kind of thing that draws my attention. If you want to know what I’m willing to care about in the early going, an easy answer is firsts.

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Baseball is back, and fans came out of months of hibernation to watch their favorite team play their first game of the year. Social media, particularly Twitter, allowed fans to share their experiences, reactions and news in real time.

I was able to sample over a half-million tweets predominately from fans containing any of the 30 Major League Baseball teams’ mascot names or Twitter handles. From this I was able to construct time-series graphs reflecting the Twitter volume at any given time over the course of the two days of Opening Night and Opening Day games.

Below is a composite chart of Sunday through Monday night delineated by team. Typically, each team’s heaviest traffic comes during their first game. However, San Diego and Atlanta bucked this trend when the Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton trade was announced. In fact, this news created the highest tweet volume of the entire time frame.

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It’s far too early to put serious weight on just about anything (save for injuries, or growing concern about those injuries) you see in the first 36 hours of a baseball season. It’s far too early to do much of anything other than say, “hey, baseball’s back, isn’t that great?” I mean, Buddy Carlyle and Chris Hatcher are on pace for 162 saves. The Red Sox are on pace for 810 homers. Probably not going to happen. Could happen. Won’t happen.

So we know not to look at the in-season numbers for at least a few weeks, lest we forget what Charlie Blackmon and Dee Gordon did last April as compared to the rest of the season. But it’s not like we’re simply not going to talk about baseball until then, and it’s not like there aren’t takeaways we can make from what we’re seeing right now. Like this one, for example: Seemingly years after most smart baseball team gave up on the save rule, why are we still seeing managers risk victories in service of it? Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 547
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 discusses Mookie Betts versus Cole Hamels, the Craig Kimbrel trade, and other relevant matters.

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 41 min play time.)

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