A couple of weeks ago, you the attentive reader, will surely have observed the introduction of our depth charts and standings pages. It was a long time coming, and we remain pretty freaking excited about it. As such, we thought that every two weeks that we’d take a look at some sort of change or happening or goings-on that occurred.

We’re not going to cover every team, because let’s face it, there really is only so many times that one can write a variation of “the Marlins aren’t even trying” without wanting to scrape out your eyebones with a rusty screwdriver. But we’ll still try to pry out an objective look in some way. This week, we’ll take a look at the three biggest movers — one positive and two negative — in terms of ranking of projected full season winning percentage. (One note — the looks here are from last Tuesday, the 14th, to this morning, but in future editions we’ll likely use Monday as the cut-off day for a number of reasons, nearly all of which involve my sanity.)

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Okay, so Tuesday night, instead of Bryce Harper, Jayson Werth, and Denard Span, the Nationals played Eury Perez, Tyler Moore, and Steve Lombardozzi. Theirs was not a particularly good lineup opposite Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Kershaw was dominant for an out shy of nine innings. It should probably never be surprising when Kershaw is dominant, because he’s a dominant pitcher with dominant stuff, and by the way, he’s younger than A.J. Griffin. His final line on Tuesday included a walk and 11 strikeouts, with 96 strikes. The last pitcher to throw that many strikes in a game was Justin Verlander in 2012. In 2010, Brandon Morrow threw 97 strikes in a near-no-hitter. After that you’re going back to 2002. Tuesday night, Kershaw was on top of Sandy Koufax‘s game.

As is the case with all players who have established themselves as terrific, it’s easy to take Clayton Kershaw for granted, to not appreciate him as much as he ought to be appreciated. One can’t really help it, because that’s just how the brain works, but one can pause to step back and consider of how much a given player is capable. Here I feel like pausing over Kershaw, and I also feel like committing a lot of attention to his curveball, because the pitch was aces for him Tuesday and because a Clayton Kershaw curveball is one of baseball’s signature experiences. Kershaw’s about a lot more than his curve, but allow me this freedom.

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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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Plenty has gone wrong for the Nationals in the early going. Dan Haren is basically broken, Gio Gonzalez might be and Stephen Strasburg — while pitching well — has not kept up the star pace expected of him in the early going. The offense might be just as concerning, however. Despite Bryce Harper’s continuous blossoming, a combination of injuries and underperformance has conspired to make the Nats’ offense one of the worst in the game.

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A year ago today, the Washington Nationals called Bryce Harper up to the big leagues, so he officially has one full season of Major League Baseball under his belt. One of the coolest little known features of the site is a split called “Past Calendar Year”, which allows you to see how a player has done in the last 365 days, giving you a rolling one year look at a player’s most recent performance. Here is the Major League leaderboard for the year that has included Bryce Harper:

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After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.

But here is the deal:

A) Pitchers do not consistently practice hitting. (Simple fact.)

B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)

C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)

All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.

Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
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Sunday was the beginning of the 2013 MLB regular season, and it kicked off with a bang, as the Astros bombed the Rangers and we all learned a lesson about the real value of a one-game playoff. Not like the stakes were the same, so the game was managed differently from how it could’ve been, but in any one given game, a team like the Houston Astros can beat a team unlike the Houston Astros. Of course, it should be noted that the difference between the Astros and the best team in baseball might be like the difference between a city’s best restaurant and a city’s 29th or 30th best restaurant. That 29th or 30th best restaurant is probably still a very good restaurant! It’s just outclassed relative to the elite. It still beats the hell out of Hardee’s.

Monday is more of a baseball extravaganza, with several games on the schedule, none of which involve the Astros. Monday feels more like a true opening day, and below, I’ve assembled some quick thoughts based on some of the early games. I didn’t watch a single inning from spring training so, for me personally, baseball couldn’t feel more fresh. It will feel like this for the rest of the day, and then tomorrow, it will feel like baseball as usual. Savor the feeling of today, or tomorrow.

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As we explained yesterday in Part 1 of the series, we’re looking at the financial health of all thirty major league teams. The focus is on attendance, local TV contracts, and estimated 2013 payroll. We’re not ranking the teams one to thirty because we lack the kind of detailed information that would make such a ranking meaningful. We do, however, 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.

We’ve grouped the teams in tiers. Today we look at the ten teams in the middle.

In alphabetical order, by team name:

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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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Last season, after joining the Nationals, Gio Gonzalez threw 3,198 pitches in the regular season, plus 209 more in the playoffs. That is an awful lot of pitches, but this article isn’t about that sort of pitcher abuse. It’s about a different sort of pitcher abuse to which the headline can also misleadingly refer. Of those thousands and thousands of pitches thrown by Gonzalez in 2012, many were thrown to opposing pitchers. It is on those pitches that we’re going to focus.

Pitchers have a lot of success when they’re pitching against opposing pitchers as batters. This is because pitchers are pitchers and not batters, and pitchers who are better at batting than pitching tend to become batters instead. Last season, pitchers struck out in 37% of their plate appearances. They struck out in nearly 42% of their plate appearances that didn’t result in sacrifice bunts. Collectively, they posted a .162 OBP. Collectively, they posted a .165 slugging percentage. Pitchers suck at hitting! You come to FanGraphs for the cutting-edge analysis.

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Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.

Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.

If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.

As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.

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This is, as you may have surmised from the title, the third in a series on trades that players have vetoed, as is sometimes their right. You can find the first two parts here and here.

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There’s plenty of debate out there — you’ve seen some of it — regarding the size of the Major League Baseball active roster. You might also know it as the 25-man roster, because the roster is to include 25 men. There are people who want a 26th man, and a 27th man, and there are people who want to eliminate the 25th man. As is, there’s the related argument over whether the last spot should go to a bench bat or a seventh reliever. Most teams (all teams?) opt for seven relievers, much to a stathead’s consternation. But between a bench bat and a reliever there exists a compromise: a bat/pitcher hybrid. In theory, this is a stathead’s dream. In reality, there’s been Brooks Kieschnick. There aren’t many people who can hit well and pitch well, relative to the greater population.

Kieschnick is gone, leaving behind a .760 career OPS and a 4.59 career ERA. He hasn’t actually appeared in the majors since 2004, but now we could be seeing the passing of the torch:

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For at least three franchises, this offseason could have taken a very different path. When Justin Upton vetoed a trade to the Mariners, he altered the direction of Seattle, Arizona and Atlanta, at the very least. Such negated transactions make for fascinating what-if’s, and now that we are edging into the time of year when all we will read is “best shape of my career” posts, I thought we could step back and take a look at some of these.

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It has been a rough week for the population of former Montreal Expos in the major leagues. On the heels of Nick Johnson’s retirement, former Expos, Nationals, Mets, and Phillies catcher Brian Schneider announced that his baseball playing career was over. Schneider started his professional career after being drafted by the Expos back in 1995, when they still may have seemed to have a viable future in Montreal (remember that 1994 team?). Schneider was never a star or even a “what if” guy like Johnson, but he he did manage to play 13 seasons in the majors. Schneider was hardly a career backup, either, as he started at least 95 games at catcher every season from 2003 to 2008. He was not ever an average bat (other than in his 48 plate appearance stint in 2001), but he was not terrible, especially considering his position. Schneider was good defensively. He threw out more base runners than average, and the limited records we have show Schneider to have been good at framing pitches.

Schneider was on two teams (the 2010 and 2011 Phillies) that made the postseason, but never got a plate appearance in the playoffs. Schneider may not have been much more, at least by the numbers, than an adequate catcher with a diverse combination of skills, but even players like that can have some pretty exciting hits. As we often do on these occasions, let’s take a look at Schneider’s three biggest hits according to the “story stat,” Win Probability Added (WPA).

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When the Nationals acquired Denard Span, it essentially meant they’d have to choose between Adam LaRoche and Michael Morse. When they re-signed LaRoche to a multi-year contract, it essentially meant Morse would have to be traded. One might have thought this would have reduced the Nationals’ negotiating leverage, but a three-team trade on Wednesday saw the Nationals still manage to turn Morse into legitimate value.

The overall summary, in case you haven’t seen it:

To Seattle, from Washington: Michael Morse
To Oakland, from Seattle: John Jaso
To Washington, from Oakland: A.J. Cole, Blake Treinen, PTBNL

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Coming into the offseason, Rafael Soriano had a choice: return to the Yankees in 2013 for $14 million, or opt out, collect $1.5 million, and become a free agent. Consensus around these parts was that Soriano should stay put. Soriano opted out. The Yankees extended to Soriano a $13.3 million qualifying offer, and there was a strong argument that Soriano should accept it and stay with New York. Soriano turned it down and entered the market with compensation reducing his appeal. Many of those players who declined qualifying offers have struggled to find the contracts they wanted. For a while, Soriano’s market, at least publicly, wasn’t developing. It was unclear for a while what was going to happen to Rafael Soriano, and it was easy to conclude that he’d made the wrong decisions.

Soriano just signed a two-year contract with the Nationals worth $28 million. He turned down $14 million over one year, a year in which he wouldn’t close much, and ended up with $14 million over two years, years in which he’ll at least initially be the closer. There’s also a $14 million vesting option at the end, just in case the contract wasn’t good enough for Soriano already. Soriano, and his agent Scott Boras.

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Adam LaRoche lost a lot of 2011 to injury, okay, and in 2012 he had himself a bounceback season, okay. Sometime during the season, the Nationals approached LaRoche — a free-agent-to-be — about a contract extension. Nothing was agreed to; the Nationals were willing to give LaRoche two years, and LaRoche was seeking three years, citing a desire to stop bouncing around. Come the offseason, the Nationals extended to LaRoche a qualifying offer, and LaRoche turned it down; LaRoche was seeking three years. LaRoche kept on seeking three years. On Tuesday, LaRoche re-signed with the Nationals. He re-signed for two years, with a mutual third-year option. I’ll quote Amanda Comak:

“[The negotiations] were pretty much not moving for a couple months,” LaRoche said. “It got to a point at one time where I really thought ‘OK, I probably am not going back to Washington.’ We were in talks with some other teams and things were looking promising and Washington wasn’t budging.”
[...]
The deal, which a source said is the same one that had been on the table for the first baseman for much of the offseason[...]

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Adam LaRoche finally gave in and took the Nationals two year contract today, after having sat it on it for most of the off-season. He’ll return to Washington and play first base, which means Mike Morse will not be playing much first base, and that means Mike Morse is going to get traded. Two years ago, Morse was really good. Last year, not so much. Teams thinking about acquiring Morse are going to have to figure out whether they think 2011 was a fluke, or whether he’s an impact bat who just had a down year while struggling with some health issues.

Because, let’s be honest, you’re only acquiring Morse for his offensive capability. The Nationals didn’t consider him an outfielder any more, which is why he’s available in the first place. His career UZR/150 in the OF is -15, which is pretty close to the line at which you see teams decide that the lack of range is too much of a problem to continue the experiment. He’s also been a negative baserunner for most of his career, and last year, only David Ortiz, Jesus Montero, Prince Fielder, and Billy Butler were worse at advancing around the bases. Morse is a guy who fits best as a 1B/DH, and if he doesn’t hit, he’s not particularly useful.

So, will he hit well enough at age 31 to justify not only his $7 million salary, but also the talent required to outbid other suitors and strike a deal with the Nationals? To find out, I decided to look at how other hitters have done, focusing on guys who have succeeded in a not too dissimilar way from what Morse has done the last three years.

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Brad Lidge is 36 years old. In December, when he was still 35, he announced his retirement from professional baseball. He hadn’t been much of a factor since 2010, so in that sense it felt inevitable that Lidge would hang them up. In discussing Lidge’s career, Mike Axisa wrote up the memorable moment that was Albert Pujols taking Lidge deep. Below, in the comments section of that post, some Phillies fans chimed in to say they most remember Lidge for completing the 2008 World Series. Me, I find both of those to be memorable moments, and when it comes to most memorable, that’s entirely subjective. But when I think of Brad Lidge, I don’t think first of Albert Pujols, nor do I think first of Eric Hinske. I don’t think of any one particular moment. I think of the whole sequence of moments that was Lidge’s 2004 season with the Astros.

Craig Kimbrel is coming off an impossible season with the Braves, in which he struck out more than half of the batters he faced. Opposing batters made some sort of contact 61% of the time that they swung. Aroldis Chapman, too, was incredible with the Reds, collecting 122 strikeouts. Opposing batters made some sort of contact 62% of the time that they swung. Going further back now, Eric Gagne was downright unfair as a Dodger in 2003. He won the National League Cy Young, and opposing batters made some sort of contact 56% of the time that they swung.

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