A true and old expression, paraphrased, is that you never know what you might see when you go to the ballpark. A similar old expression is that whenever you go to the ballpark you’ll see something you’ve never seen before. Taken completely literally, this is true — every single pitch, every single swing, every single ball in play, every single act, specifically, is unprecedented. A baseball game has infinite coordinates and infinite possible paths. Taken less literally, some games are boring and feel like games you’ve seen before, but baseball is nevertheless full of surprises. If it doesn’t always show you something you’ve never seen, it at least frequently shows you something you’ve seldom seen. This is the magic of a sport with so many repetitions. Put another way, this is the magic of baseball.

On this particular Monday, two games are in the books as of this writing. The Indians walked off against the Mariners, and the Blue Jays hosted and defeated the Rays. Both of those things have happened before, but the games themselves included a handful of rarities. I thought it’d be a good idea to show some of them off, just to remind you that this sport we watch is insane. Below, you’ll see four things that happened that very rarely happen. For all I know I missed a couple more. Not included is that Colby Rasmus went a full game without striking out, but know that I thought about it. On now to four bits of weirdness.

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Drafting 15th in 2012, the Indians selected Texas A&M right fielder Tyler Naquin. A collegiate standout, Naquin earned the Big 12 Player of the Year Award before Cleveland selected him and shifted him from right field — where he started 115 games as a freshman and sophomore — to center field. As Marc Hulet noted last month, Naquin’s ability to play his new position will determine his success.

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A few weeks ago in one of my FanGraphs chats, I was asked who had a better chance of rediscovering his old self, between Scott Kazmir and Ubaldo Jimenez. I made the same sort of crack any one of us would’ve made at the time, like how you’d respond to the idea of Rich Harden or Nick Johnson staying healthy. Kazmir or Jimenez getting on track was practically unthinkable, or so I assumed, before Kazmir turned it on and Jimenez turned it on also. Now the Indians are tied with the Tigers for first place in the Central, with a suspect pitching staff looking a little less suspect than projected.

Jimenez has been one of the more perplexing starters in baseball over the years, thanks in large part to the fact that he used to throw a hundred miles per hour. He doesn’t do that anymore, and people want to know why. He ran into some unsightly struggles, and people want to know why. Jimenez tried to win himself a Cy Young in 2010, and he hasn’t been the same pitcher since, and these sorts of guys are always fascinating. Proposed explanations for Jimenez’s decline have concentrated on his mechanics, which sounds insightful until you realize, well, yeah, of course. But Jimenez’s mechanics have always been unusual and complicated. So they’ve drawn attention.

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Scott Kazmir‘s return to Major League Baseball has been pretty well documented at this point. After bottoming out by pitching in independent ball, Kazmir’s velocity started to pick back up this winter, and the Indians brought him to spring training on a non-roster invite. The velocities continued to impress and he pitched extremely well in Arizona, and with the Indians in need of useful starting pitching, they gave him a spot in their rotation, but then a strained ribcage forced him to begin the season on the DL. In his first start of the year, he gave up six runs in 3.1 innings, beating back some of the spring optimism about whether or not Kazmir could ever get back to what he used to be.

In the two starts after his debut, he was better, but neither the Royals nor the Twins are offensive juggernauts. There were encouraging signs, as his velocity was picking up and he was getting strikeouts again, but he hadn’t really put it all together yet. Until yesterday.

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I’ve often wondered what would happen if a group of umpires came together to make a call that was so obviously wrong, so over-the-top blatantly inaccurate as to be completely nonsensical. Like, what if a pitcher threw a pitch, and the batter grounded out, and the umpires signaled for an automatic double? Obviously, the defensive team’s manager would get ejected, and a bunch of other guys would probably get ejected too, but, then what? If the umpires all agree that the batter doubled, who steps in to prevent the double? Does the defensive team leave the field in protest? Are they then given a forfeit? Does the commissioner get involved? The commissioner would have to get involved. But this is a thought experiment — of course, something like this would never happen.

But, you know. There are bad calls every day. Some of them are dreadful. Inexplicably dreadful. And now we have one that even followed a video review. You already know all this by now, but Wednesday night in Cleveland, in a high-leverage spot, the umpiring team did something nonsensical, and shortly thereafter the A’s were handed another loss. At least, Oakland should’ve played a bottom of the ninth. They didn’t, and won’t.

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Major League Baseball introduced interleague play in 1997, in part to boost interest in the game after the 1994 season was cut short by the players’ strike. More than 15 years after the first interleague game between the Giants and the Rangers at The Ballpark at Arlington, MLB continues to boast about attendance at interleague games. Last season, the average attendance at interleague games was 34,693, the highest since 2008, when 35,587 fans, on average, attended interleague games.

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If you thought the Chase Headley/Padres extension rumors were exciting, just wait until you get a load of the Michael Brantley situation! Cleveland has been rumored to be talking to Brantley and his representatives about an extension during the off-season. Despite things changing a bit since the signing of Michael Bourn, and Brantley himself saying he has not heard anything about ongoing talks, apparently a potential agreement is still on some people’s minds.

I have no idea whether or not talks are still ongoing between Brantley’s representatives and the team. The question I have is whether it makes sense for the team to give him an extension at this point.

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When the Indians selected Francisco Lindor 8th overall in the 2011 draft, he possessed a high floor and upside. Drafted out of Montverde, Florida, he was an accomplished shortstop but questions about how long it would take his bat to develop surrounded the young Puerto Rican. In his full season, Lindor has put rest to any doubt whether he will be one of the game’s brightest stars. Coming into 2013 he was ranked 20th by Marc Hulet, 9th by my colleagues at Bullpen Banter, and 8th by myself and early returns suggest he has staked his claim on next year’s top spot.

Lindor projects to be an elite defender, if he isn’t already. While not he’s a burner – his time from home to first is consistently a shade below four seconds, great but not excellent for the position – his defensive range can be attributed to the quickness of his first step, not his speed. His ability to covers yards of dirt in a single step is bolstered by his confidence using his backhand on balls hit towards third base. At 19 years old, his instincts actions at shortstop are remarkable making Mike Newman’s nickname for him – “Bruce Lee Lindor” – oddly fitting.

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Earlier, we took a look at the young season’s most impeded home run so far, which is the home run that faced the most opposition from the game conditions at the time. All necessary data was recovered from the ESPN Home Run Tracker, which is among my most favorite of Internet resources. If we look at one extreme, then, it follows that we should look also at the other extreme, or else the matter will feel incomplete, and this is a website devoted to completeness. And so we now turn our attention to the home run that has gotten the biggest boost from the game conditions. Home runs like this are probably more interesting than home runs that remain home runs despite strong winds and cold conditions, because these might be identified as “lucky”.

In terms of impeded home runs, we had one dinger at -20 feet, and another dinger at -17 feet. So it was a close race, and the error bars probably overlap. Here, in terms of aided home runs, we have one dinger at +64 feet, and another dinger at +43 feet. That’s a much bigger difference, but there might still be some error-bar overlap, for reasons we’ll get into. Let’s look at the home run in question!

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Yes, well obviously Roberto Hernandez is not Fausto Carmona. The name Fausto Carmona belongs to someone else, and though the history of Cleveland Indians starting pitcher “Fausto Carmona” belongs to Roberto Hernandez, the two pitchers (the one pitcher) are not the same.

What I’m saying is: Roberto Hernandez is striking out batters.

He has a 22.5% K-rate right now. His previous career high was 17.1%, but that was mostly as a rookie reliever. As a starter, his highest K-rate was 15.6%. In fact, if we dig even deeper, we find his 22.5% K-rate is the highest strikeout rate he’s ever posted over a four game period:

His recent success — underscored and even underappreciated in his 3.75 FIP and 3.60 SIERA — appears to be the product of deliberate changes. That suggests he could maintain a new level of success.
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Rarely do players successfully transition to more difficult positions, but the Cleveland Indians believe second base prospect Tony Wolters can be the next infielder to be successful converted into a catcher. It’s common for a player to move to a less valuable position when his abilities fall short of major league competency, but occasionally a player will increase his value by moving to a more demanding position. At Florida State University, Buster Posey played third base before permanently moving to catcher. Philadelphia’s backstop Carlos Ruiz was a second baseman before making the switch. Like Posey and Ruiz, the Indians think Wolters can be a starting catcher on a championship caliber team.

Wolters was selected in the third round of the 2010 Rule 4 draft out of Vista, Calif., and signed for $1.35 million, the equivalent of a mid-to-late first round bonus. He’s a grinder — an intense, hard working scrapper who plays above his tools — with a chatty demeanor that fits perfectly behind the plate. As a hitter, Wolters derives surprising power from his quick hands and aggressive line drive swing. When he starts swinging for the fences he isn’t as short to the ball, but generally he stays within himself with a crisp gap-to-gap approach.

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Wouldn’t you know it, but Scott Kazmir is relevant again. Jeremy Bonderman is relevant again, too, and that’s also amazing, but Kazmir’s actually got himself a big-league rotation job and that gives me an opportunity to talk about an incredible Kazmir fun fact. I could’ve talked about it anyway, even if Kazmir were completely off the radar, but now it’ll be less insignificant. You’re thinking about Scott Kazmir, and here’s another thing to think about him.

Pitching with the bases empty is different from pitching with at least one runner on. For many pitchers, the delivery changes, and of course the situation and the intensity changes. The defense changes. Things change when there are people on base, so it can be informative to look at the base-state splits. In such situations it’s always important to remain aware of small sample sizes, but when you get to talking about whole careers, those concerns by and large go away.

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In Arizona, J.D. Sussman and I hit the back fields together to scout talent from the Mariners, Indians, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Cubs. Each of us took notes, collected radar gun readings, worked angles and collected the best information we could.

Back from the warm weather, we decided to rank the 10 best prospects we scouted together to highlight differences in opinion and player preference. Scouting is an inexact science. Prospect followers tend to pit opinions of writers against each other, but of course there’s room for dissent and discussion even among friends and colleagues.

Here’s my top-10 of players I liked the most. J.D.’s list will follow in an hour.

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In Arizona, the Cleveland Indians were a “must see” franchise for me. A few years ago, their Lake County (Ohio) affiliate left the South Atlantic League for the convenience of the Midwest League. This created a blind spot in my scouting coverage remedied by my time in the Cactus League.

Current buzz surrounding the Indians organization is centered around a pair of young shortstop prospects in Dorssys Paulino and Francisco Lindor.

Lindor, a 2011 first rounder posted a .257/.352/.355 triple slash line in Single-A.

Paulino combined for a .333/.380/.558 triple slash line across two levels of short season baseball as a 17-year old.

There’s no question about both being top flight prospects within the organization, but the debate over the shortstop of the future continues to be a hot topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.

We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.

With those caveats, let’s begin.

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When arriving at Cleveland camp to scout future Indians, a trio of A-Ball infielders were tops on my list of “must see” players. Francisco Lindor, Dorssys Paulino and Ronny Rodriguez stretched and ran sprints on back fields and I was content to watch them doing morning drills.

Then, a conversation with volunteer field staff forced a change of plans.

In the “B-Game”, the Indians would be playing the Mariners. Out of curiosity, I hurried to the far field to see which Seattle prospects made the trip.

Taijuan Walker? Check.

James Paxton? Check.

Nick Franklin? Check.

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Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.

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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.

Let’s get on to the rankings!

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Bill James headlined the second annual SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix last weekend. Brian Kenny from MLB Network’s Clubhouse Confidential acted as a roving emcee of sorts.  Joe Posnanski was there. Rob Neyer was there. And our own Dave Cameron and David Appelman were there. The three days of sessions led to lively discussions about WAR and knuckleball academies and the mythical analytics-scouting divide.

But this year’s conference wasn’t limited to questions about how best to measure and project on-the-field performance. Analytics have moved to the business side of the front office. And it’s your off-the-field performance in watching, listening to, and attending ballgames that is now the subject of intense study. Sports marketing isn’t new but the techniques used to measure fans, create new ones, and motivate both groups to purchase tickets and merchandise have become much more sophisiticated.

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Previously, it was Oliver Perez. Earlier in his career, Oliver Perez was a good major-league pitcher. Then he was a worse major-league pitcher, then he was a bad major-league pitcher, then he was nothing, thought to be hopeless. Perez resurfaced in winter ball, allegedly reaching his old velocity levels as a reliever. The Mariners gave him a chance, and he worked his way into a big-league bullpen. Perez will be back in that bullpen in 2013, armed with a rich new contract, and just like that, Oliver Perez has been resurrected.

Now we have the case of Scott Kazmir. Earlier in his career, Kazmir was a good major-league pitcher. Then he was a worse major-league pitcher, then he was a bad major-league pitcher, then he was nothing, thought to be hopeless. Kazmir was awful the last time he pitched in affiliated ball, and he wasn’t particularly good with the independent Sugar Land Skeeters. Kazmir resurfaced in winter ball, allegedly reaching his old velocity levels as a starter. The Indians gave him a contract, and right now Kazmir is on his way to making the starting rotation out of camp.

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The other day, the Cleveland Indians announced that Justin Masterson will be their starter on Opening Day, barring some sort of injury. One might consider this damning with faint praise, as the Indians aren’t even necessarily ankle deep in proven quality starters, but what this provides is an opportunity to talk a little bit about Masterson, and what he is, and what he could be, maybe. Masterson stands to be important if this year’s Indians are to make a run for the playoffs. Masterson stands to be in the majors for a while yet, as he’s only 27 and as he’s demonstrated that he can throw 200 reasonable innings.

We have a pretty good idea of the Justin Masterson skillset. He’s got a big, sweeping motion and he leans heavily on a low-90s sinker. Sometimes he’ll threaten to go entire games without throwing anything else. Masterson keeps the ball on the ground, he strikes out about one batter for every six, and he issues the occasional walk. Last year, he posted about the same FIP as Jon Lester and C.J. Wilson, which is good company at least in terms of name value. Masterson’s ERA was elevated, but, ERA.

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