Notes on a Night at the Ballpark: Twins v. Angels, April 15, 2013

Not On Target

Target Field, while extremely pleasing in terms of architectural aesthetics, is not my favorite place to take in a game. I’m finding, with each new visit, some unpleasant downsides.

The contrivances and distractions around the actual product are simultaneously unnecessary, overwrought and irritating. There’s an horrifically garish mascot race between a cast of characters unworthy of itemization; a pointless fan contest whereby a randomly chosen family segment gets two disparate, utterly arcane questions about some Twins player and tries to answer them for prizes; and a never-ending deluge of fan shots on the jumbotron, set to various songs or themes and captured by roving remote videographers. They have sing-along time in the eighth inning.

At and near field level, the park is (and as a longtime Cubs fan and Wrigley rat, I can assure you this is no small thing) delightfully well-lit. It’s genuinely nice. The upper deck, though, is dreary, and there are several seating areas in the park’s upper reaches that lack easy access to bathrooms or concessions, in addition to being dark and often cold.

None of which prevented me from paying the wonderfully modest fee of $12 for an upper-deck seat directly behind home plate for Monday night’s game there, on Jackie Robinson Day. I got a Diversity Day T-shirt on my way into the park, and actually, the things are pretty cool.

To restate, for all the over-the-top nonsense that has become too much a part of the experience, Target Field is beautiful:

Even on steel-gray days, the vista is hard to beat.

Pre-Game Notes

So I happily settled into my seat, about an hour ahead of game time, and read George F. Will’s Men at Work while I waited for baseball. A couple quick things from the managerial section of that piece, that would stick in my head as I took in the game:

• Tony La Russa, whom Will profiles for that part of the book, was simply dogged about accumulating information. Dave Duncan had thick binders full of hand-drawn charts of pitch types and locations, how often batters swung and how they did when they swung. The Oakland Athletics, for whom those men toiled at the time of Will’s tracking of them, were awash in information about opponents’ tendencies. They knew how often opponents swung at first pitches, which directions they hit the ball, all kinds of things that most teams back then (the late 1980s, heading into the early 1990s) did not know, or knew only in the way that old men know when it’s going to rain.Oakland held team meetings prior to every series to arrive at consensus on how they would defend every opposing hitter, and how they would attack every opposing pitcher. This included not only defensive positioning, but notes to certain defenders on what to be ready to do against various batters, and where to pitch them so as to maximize the effectiveness of their defensive alignments. It also included, for Oakland’s batters, notes on what to expect in certain counts, ways some pitchers tipped pitches and what any former teammates of said pitchers can tell about their mentality or plan.I wonder whether these meetings still take place. I imagine their scale is at least diminished. So much of the information that La Russa and Duncan collected and culled, then delivered in those meetings, is now amassed automatically and electronically, and can be distilled and analyzed just as easily by an individual holding an iPad. I chose my seat for the game primarily so as to be able to take in these macro things, like defensive positioning. More on that later.
• Will indulges in a long digression on advance scouts and sign-stealing. Coaches, in Will’s narrative, are engaged in a perpetual war fought primarily by proxy, by spies in each dugout and by code-crackers all over the diamond. Some batters peek at the catcher for location of coming pitches. Some coaches lock in on whoever gives the opponents’ signs, in the hopes of seeing a pitchout or squeeze play coming in time to thwart the tactic. It’s especially true, or so it seems, when two skippers who know each other well face off.Since managers Ron Gardenhire and Mike Scioscia each have decade-plus tenures in their current positions (for how much longer?), I keyed in on a few of the things Will described, hoping to pick them up. I saw a few, and will mention them down the road, but ultimately, the reverse angle, the same seats out in center field looking in, would have better served that particular investigation.
• Tony La Russa spoke Spanish before he spoke English. I think I knew this already, but it catches me every time. What an advanmtage it must be for a manager in today’s game to be effortlessly bilingual. Lou Piniella had the same blessing, if memory serves me well. Manny Acta came to English later than those two, but Hell, he speaks it more cleanly and concisely than Piniella. On the other hand, it must be very difficult for modern managers who know very limited Spanish, or for Ozzie Guillen, who knows so little of any language, to communicate in the clubhouse.

The matchup for the evening had a pretty thorough symmetry to it. Joe Blanton and Kevin Correia each signed two-year, eight-figure free-agent contracts this winter. Both deals were widely panned, and with good reason, I think. Both managers, as I said, have been in their seats forever, but both, to a greater or lesser extent, are in some jeopardy of losing their job. Each team has a thin and beleaguered bullpen and is offense-centric. Neither is designed to win games 2-1. Despite the fairly brutal cold, one could foresee a fairly high-scoring game.

After one batter, it looked like that was exactly what we would have. Peter Bourjos homered into the bullpen in left-center field on Kevin Correia’s sixth pitch. Correia got Mike Trout, Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton out quickly thereafter, though, striking out Trout and Hamilton.

The Pitching Matchup

In fact, other than a Brendan Harris home run in the third inning, Correia dominated the Angels from then on. He mixes a four-seam fastball, a cutter and a sinker with a curveball, a slider and a changeup, and although not a single one of those offerings is above average (I’m not sure any is even average), they were all working as well as they ever do for him Monday night.

Correia doesn’t disguise his fastball variations very well. His four-seamer comes from a different, lower arm slot than his other offerings, and he stays taller through release of it. That pitch can sit at 90 miles per hour, with good release depth, but it’s fairly easy for hitters to read and he got only two swinging strikes throwing it 32 times Monday night, according to Brooks Baseball.

He also gives away his sinker a bit. When a right-hander throws a sinker, he rolls his wrist counterclockwise at release (this is called pronating, and happens naturally, but you exaggerate the motion as part of throwing the sinker), so that the two fingers gripping the ball move over the top of it and create downward motion. This is also why most sinkers have arm-side run. Correia’s moves nicely and he commands it really well, but the drawback is that in order to do so, he has very pronounced pronation and hitters can see that happening. To get outs and strikes with the sinker, Correia has to make it move a little bit more or a little bit faster or slower than the batter thinks it will, even given the fact that he recognizes it early. Correia was able to do that on Monday night, but it’s why his margins are narrow and nights like those are few and far between.

Correia threw 19 changeups on Monday night, mostly when ahead in the count, and 10 of them were balls. The rest of the results were pretty good, though. His change is a sort of exaggerated version of his sinker, but it’s much better-disguised because he can throw it just like his four-seamer. His grip does the work of pushing the ball down, slowing it down and moving it away from a left-handed batter. There isn’t much velocity separation there, but when you essentially have three fastballs, a changeup doesn’t have be very different from any of them in terms of velocity. It just has to look like one and act like another.

My elevation made it tough to read his breaking stuff. It certainly got a few Angels lunging, and he threw his slider through the back door a couple times against Hamilton, but nothing jumped out to me. Depth seems to be his salvation with both offerings.

To talk about his breaking balls, we need to talk about his mechanics. Correia uses a leg kick that I think makes timing his delivery very difficult. There’s this heel kick at the apex of his lift that sort of sets his whole forward progress in motion, but it also makes it hard for him to coordinate everything and repeat himself. He has a lot of spine tilt, leaning over his glove side to generate overhand action and downward plane.

Like most pitchers whose motions include that lean, he pitches from the glove side of the rubber so as to allow himself to run the ball back to the arm side and still find the strike zone. Yovani Gallardo is the most successful practitioner of that style. Unlike Gallardo, though, Correia has neither the sharpness of movement nor the command of his breaking stuff to use it effectively in the smaller window he gives himself with his mound positioning. He also tends to miss up and to the right with those pitches because of that tilt, which not only strains the arm over time but makes it difficult to be on time and on target at release, so he can really get hurt when trying to be fine with those pitches. His natural arm slot screams slider, but with the tilt, he’s at more of a curve height and plane, and though he throws both, neither is very good because of his mechanical deficiencies.

Enough about Kevin Correia. He had a good start, but it doesn’t feel like an especially indicative or impressive outing.

Joe Blanton is at once similar to Correia, and his polar opposite. Mechanically, he’s very different, although not better. He uses an abbreviated windup, which I like, and has a more efficient leg kick. He really struggles to generate momentum in his delivery, though, more than you would ever expect given his size. He doesn’t ride his back leg downhill well. He gets his weight forward, and though he delays trunk rotation well and stays tall, his center of gravity drifts and his front hip opens too soon. That steals some of his torque, and despite a strong glove-side upper body, he gets stuck in trying to finish over his front leg. The leg lands, and because his front hip has already flown open, he doesn’t have much power with which to catapult himself out over it. Instead, he hitches, and the momentum he has generated until that point in the delivery evaporates. His posture is fine, and he mostly is able to finish his arm swing, but the velocity is gone before the ball leaves his hand. It got worse as the game progressed on Monday, as his fatigue had his hip opening even sooner and he started missing badly.

Here’s how Joe Blanton pitches: Away, away, away. He focuses not on ground balls, but on pounding the strike zone. Whereas Correia succeeds, when he succeeds, by inducing weak contact and worm-burners, Blanton succeeds, when he succeeds, with a great strikeout-to-walk ratio. He’s no longer blessed with elite stuff, but he pitches away from contact whenever possible. Like Correia, he pitches from the first-base side of the mound, and like Correia, he uses that to maximize the value of his lateral movement. Against left-handers, he tries to start fastballs on the outside corner and run them off, discouraging the batter from swinging while making it hard for an umpire not to call a strike. Although the Twins’ big lefties teed off on Blanton a bit when he made mistakes, he got about a half dozen called strikes that way Monday night.

Because his velocity is fading, though, Blanton is more reliant than ever on his changeup, and that’s a problem. Recall that Correia does well with his change despite a very small velocity differential from his heat, because the changeup looks like one fastball but behaves like another. Blanton, too, has a small differential. Unfortunately, he doesn’t really have the multiple fastballs that lend it deception. He throws an occasional cutter, but basically, he’s a four-seam fastball guy whose four-seam fastball has enough fade to be used like a two-seamer when necessary. His changeup does basically the same thing as his fastball, and is not much different in terms of velocity, and that’s a major problem.

Correia and Blanton are each the third-best starters in their rotation, and that’s when everyone is healthy, which everyone isn’t. Is it a wonder both teams ranked among the five worst rotational ERAs in baseball after Monday night?

Oswaldo Arcia’s MLB Debut

Color me impressed. It surprised me that the Twins would call forth Arcia, 21, from Triple-A for such a brief stint—it looks like he’s headed back down when Wilkin Ramirez returns from the birth of his child this week. Now they’ll have to wait at least an extra week or so to call up Arcia for good, so as to ensure that he doesn’t become a free agent until after the 2019 season. Specifically, if he does go back down, he must be there 20 days in order not to have his service time counted as MLB time when he returns to Minnesota. At this point, a guy who could have been up for good by Cinco de Mayo may need to stay in Rochester until Memorial Day.

Still, seeing him for the first time, I had no trouble understanding the team’s enthusiasm and eagerness to see the bat play in the big leagues. He has good bat speed, okay contact skills and a violence and leverage in his swing that promises above-average power. He sharply pulled Blanton the first time up, a stung single to right field that became more when Josh Hamilton played hacky sack with it. He flew out in his second at-bat, and in his third, but the latter really caught my attention.

I had seen Arcia pull the ball, and it looked like his swing was built to do it. Blanton doesn’t throw especially hard, but the ease with which Arcia made sharp, square contact didn’t leave me thinking he would struggle to turn around even pitchers who do reach the mid-90s. I needed to find out whether he could make adjustments, though, when no opportunity to pull the ball presented itself.

Mike Scioscia did me a favor by putting Arcia in just such a situation. With two on and two out in the fifth frame, Arcia was due, and Blanton was done. Scioscia called forth Michael Roth from his bullpen, creating a lefty-lefty matchup.

Roth throws a straight 87 miles an hour, nothing nasty about it. Because of his peculiar delivery, though, with asymmetrical arms and an unusual throwing motion, it seems to come very suddenly off his very shoulder. His only hope is to pitch like Blanton, working a fastball through the strike zone but letting it finish off the outside corner, trying to induce swings at pitches the opponent can’t reach. This approach mostly works when the pitcher has the platoon advantage; hence Scioscia’s choice to get that advantage in a big spot.

The way to combat this (easier said than done) is to contact the ball well out in front of the plate, while it might still be in line with the fat part of the bat. At the same time, though, you have to stay closed, stride very straight and ensure your strength is behind the ball at the moment of contact. Some lefties will roll this over; others will flick it the other way without strength. Few are those, like Joe Mauer, for instance, who have developed the ability to stay on those pitches and generate strength as they attack them.

Arcia hit a low, long line drive. On a warm day, he would have had an opposite-field home run. If Oswaldo Arcia were the Angels left fielder, not Mike Trout, he would have had a clean double. As it was, he flew out, but to have stayed on that pitch and hit it so cleanly was evidence of an advanced overall offensive skill set.

I didn’t see enough to get a read on his approach, but he saw only four pitches in three plate appearances, on a night when everyone else on the diamond was preternaturally patient. He has an aggressive hitter’s body language and swing type, but I don’t know enough to say anything with certitude. He drew 51 walks in 534 plate appearances during his breakout 2012, in the high minors.

We should probably talk about Arcia, the non-batter, too. Yikes. I was struck by his lack of apparent athleticism. I knew him to be a below-average runner, but he also lacked the body control, the coordination, the physical intelligence that had been hinted at in the reports I read. Now, it was a frigid night, it was very windy and he was dealing with different lighting and depth cues than he had ever seen before. Still, he played left field poorly, even beyond the error he committed when he dropped a fly ball later in the game. He looked lost on everything.

Again, that all might improve. His range will always be limited, but he looks like a very real bat for even an outfield corner, and if he has four .270/.340/.480 seasons, it really won’t matter if he defends the outfield like Jason Kubel or Greg Luzinski.

Joe Mauer, Now With Power (Again(?))

Watching Joe Mauer hit is a joy few other things in baseball can match. I spent most of my night keyed in on pitchers, because it happens to be where my head is right now in terms of watching for things and seeing the physical game, but with Mauer at bat, my eyes wandered.

I sort of thought I would find that Mauer is pulling the ball more this season, because he is certainly hitting it with more authority. With the caveat that the samples are very small this early and it might change radically, I was, for the moment, wrong.

Here is his 2012 spray chart:

And here’s 2013:

 

(h/t: baseballheatmaps.com)

Again, too soon to draw conclusions, but he’s certainly not suddenly yanking the ball.

Instead, what I think is happening is that Mauer is gaining confidence in his back leg again. His left knee was the one that gave him trouble at the end of 2010, before the infamous bilateral leg weakness that plagued him throughout 2011. That’s the one twice operated upon. It’s really always been the left knee for him.

In 2011 and even 2012, I noticed Mauer not trusting his left, back leg as he finished his swing. He was always stepping out from under himself, or rotating to shift his weight to his right foot as soon as possible. I imagine occasional soreness is routine for catchers, but maybe Mauer mistrusted his knee when he felt them because of the history of the joint.

At any rate, when you don’t trust your back leg, you will tend to get out on the front foot more often; swing with less torque; and generate less bat speed and upward plane. This is virtually inevitable. You need that back leg to create power.

Mauer has that back now. Even if he hasn’t altered his swing path or his opposite-field mindset, he has gotten more aggressive and has punished pitches much more. I recently read a piece about Jayson Werth’s increased aggressiveness this season. Werth usually draws a lot of walks and leads the league in pitches seen, but hasn’t early on. The Nationals, though, feel this is a good thing, because the reason is that Werth (who really went into take-and-defend mode after returning from a broken wrist last year) feels much better and no longer hesitates to swing when he gets his pitch. I think it’s the same way with Mauer.

Consider these numbers: Mauer swung at just 22.5 percent of all pitches outside the strike zone in 2011 and 2012. He swung at between 52 and 53 percent of pitches within the zone, and a shade under 36 percent of all pitches. He swung and missed only once every 25 pitches or so. In 2013, he is swinging at 27.9 percent of pitches outside the zone; 55 percent of those within it; and over 41 percent, overall. He swings and misses once every 12 pitches. I saw him strike out swinging once Monday.

Clearly, though, it’s because he feels strong and knows he has a chance to impact the game when he does swing, perhaps more than he has since he was the league’s MVP in 2009. He was using his hips to guide the baseball Monday night, getting them clear and pulling the ball hard in the first inning, keeping them on a pitch and driving it out to left field later. When he was struggling, and even last season, when he was good, his front shoulder was in charge of his swing. That’s fine for bat control, but you can’t drive the ball that way. Mauer has power again, and he’s eager to use it, now.

Managerial Machinations

Defensive Positioning

I noted that I watched defensive positioning intently during the game. Some weird things happened.

For one, during Arcia’s first plate appearance, the third baseman for the Angels (Luis Jimenez) played in on the grass, while second baseman Howie Kendrick played several steps out onto the outfield grass, as if her were part of a pull shift. It was a peculiar arrangement for a rookie without a track record, but to the Angels’ credit, Arcia did pull the ball on a line–it was just too far toward the right-field line for Kendrick to make any kind of play.

Peter Bourjos is a very good defensive outfielder, but is putting himself in bad position by adhering to an ancient vestige of machismo. The generation of good defensive center fielders whom Bourjos would have watched closely, Jim Edmonds, Andrum Jones, etc., prided themselves on playing very shallowly, allowing them to steal bloop singles, because they felt supremely confident in getting back to anything hit over their heads. Bourjos was caught doing this against Justin Morneau in the third inning, and Morneau hit a double over his head just to the left of dead center to drive home a run. Bourjos had also been playing Morneau straight-up, although Morneau usually lifts the ball toward left-center field, but that sin was more minor. Still, the ball was playable, and Bourjos was not in position to play it.

Speaking of shallow outfields, right before the Bourjos homer that led off the game, I noticed that the entire Twins outfield was playing him as though he were Tony Campana or Otis Nixon. Bourjos doesn’t often hit the ball hard, but when he does, it goes, and he gets most of his offensive value from extra-base hits. Either advance scouting or coaching instruction failed the Twins there, but it never burned them. After the home run, Borujos’s subsequent plate appearances went groundout, groundout, strikeout.

A middle infield comprised of Brendan Harris and Howie Kendrick is going to allow some cheap singles. You just hope they don’t kill you. Unfortunately, the little ones did kill the Angels on Monday, partially because they were out of position. Mastroianni got a single on a hundred-hopper in the third inning, one probably 20 feet wide of second base on the shortstop side, but Harris had been shading him toward the hole, and Harris has terrible range. Mastroianni came around to score. Later, with Brian Dozier on third and two outs, Kendrick shaded Mauer up the middle to help Harris out, and wasn’t able to get to a ground ball through the hole. Mauer’s hit was one only 30 percent of defenses turn into outs, but Mastroianni’s would be an out if you replayed it with more than half the league’s other shortstops out there.

Last one: Bourjos was up with Luis Jimenez on first base in the fifth inning, and everyone knew he was bunting (this is Scioscia, after all) (or maybe Gardenhire and the Twins stole the sign!). The Twins put on a fairly aggressive bunt play, with both corner men charging but Dozier (the second baseman) selling out completely to cover first and shortstop Pedro Florimon on the bag at second. Had Bourjos pulled back his bat and swung, he had the infield as his oyster, and had he gotten down a good bunt, the Twins might have walked right into a trap by trying to throw out Jimenez. As it was, he fouled off the try, and Scioscia changed tacks.

Tactical Things

Scioscia cost the Angels a few times. After the failed bunt, he had Jimenez attempt a steal, but Mauer easily pegged him. It stunted what looked a promising rally.

He also failed to get guys up carefully enough. On a cold night, one can understand his reticence to dry-hump a reliever, but when Joe Blanton ran out of gas, Michael Roth had just gotten up. Los Angeles was fortunate to escape that jam, but later, Roth gave up a run because Scioscia didn’t have any support ready behind him. Ditto Mark Lowe. Part of all of this is the cold factor, and part is that the Angels just don’t have a bunch of guys who can parade in to the rescue on rough nights. But Scioscia didn’t run that relief corps well Monday night.

Gardenhire earned his own demerits. He bunted in a fairly indefensible spot. Because his team pulled away as the game wore on, though, he got out of their way, and it was for the better.

Brief Player Notes

Pedro Florimon looked like a player Monday night. He was the only competent defensive infielder on the diamond, except Justin Morneau. He also laid down a gorgeous drag bunt to avail himself of the combined immobility of Blanton and Pujols. I don’t know how much to believe in that as a skill, but he did it well. The stats mean nothing this early, but they look good, and the strike-zone control he has shown is encouraging.

Justin Morneau saved at least two throwing errors and was generally more agile at his position than I remembered him. He also had some great at-bats.

Josh Hamilton’s arm saved the Angels a run in the fifth frame. Trevor Plouffe laced a ball toward the right-field corner, but Hamilton cut it off, and because he throws really well, the Twins’ third-base coach stopped Chris Parmelee at third. Hamilton had been properly shading Plouffe toward center, so it was quite impressive to get over so quickly and freeze the runner.

Mike Trout is going to see his eighth-inning at-bat in his nightmares. Down three, he was leading off the inning, and worked a 3-1 count. But a check-swing dribbler in front of the plate wasted his work. Mauer made a great play to get a fast runner on that one, although Trout got a slow start out of the box, not expecting to be so unlucky on his check swing.

The two teams combined to swing at the first pitch just 14 times in 73 plate appearances, a display of collective patience topped only by the Astros-Athletics tilt on Monday. Correia benefited more from the batters’ passivity, because as soon as the count goes past 0-0, the hitter  has to think a bit. Correia is trying to create that uncertainty, and avoid contact for as long as possible. Blanton struggled, getting ahead but finding himself unable to finish hitters. Deep counts don’t help him as much. The Twins hit .400/..438/.733 after falling behind 0-1 on called strikes Monday night.

Hitting the Corners: Indians Lineup, Madison Bumgarner Hits for Himself and a Trade Idea

A few thoughts on just another imperfect day:

• The Indians and Blue Jays played Opening Day in Toronto yesterday, and although Cleveland won, I came away wondering what Terry Francona is up to with that lineup construction. I am not usually a stickler for these things, but here’s how he lined them up yesterday, side-by-side with how I would do it:

  [Table] (Bourn, Cabrera, Kipnis, Swisher, Brantley, Santana, Reynolds, Chisenhall, Stubbs) (Brantley, Bourn, Cabrera, Santana, Swisher, Kipnis, Reynolds, Chisenhall, Stubbs)

  Michael Brantley in the fifth slot is a glaring mistake, to me. No way he fits that role. He’s a contact-oriented singles and doubles hitter. He had a good game, but I would rather see him either at the top or the bottom of the order.

• In the top of the seventh inning Tuesday night, the Giants had a 1-0 lead, and Madison Bumgarner was due up with runners on second and third and no one out. It was the most important situation imaginable in which to get a batter to the plate who could make contact. Bumgarner, to his credit, is an above-average hitter for a pitcher, especially in regard to contact, and had fanned in only 55 of his 196 career plate appearances. Respecting that, or just being an idiot, Don Mattingly made the first move, and brought in Ronald Belisario to face Bumgarner.

  Yes, the opposing manager made a pitching switch to have a reliever face the pitcher. Belisario was locked in, a right-hander on the mound against whom lefties tended to have success, and who had struck out only 15 percent of opposing left-handed batters in 2012. By a stroke of luck, Bruce Bochy had Brandon Belt on his bench, Belt having been given the day off in favor of Joaquin Arias. (Draw your own conclusions there.)

  He didn’t use him. Just as Mattingly had botched a late-game pinch-hit situation and let Clayton Kershaw bat for himself Monday, Bochy blew it and allowed Bumgarner to face Belisario. Just as it had for Mattingly on Monday, the idiot tactic worked, although less convincingly, when Bumgarner bounced a ball to Justin Sellers at shortstop and Sellers threw it toward a pretty girl in the stands, or something.

  I weep for managers. Bochy is one of the best in baseball, tactically, and he still made about as bone-headed a non-move as I have seen in some time. Matt Cain had pitched only six innings Monday, and under the modern construction, that actually means your high-leverage relievers might have been worn out. That’s how much teams have hamstrung themselves by locking pitchers into one-inning roles and filling the last few spots in their pen with such miserable match-up specialists. That’s the closest I can get to defending that decision, and it’s still not a full-throated defense, and it’s also a caveat borne of pre-existing stupidity. Yikes.

• One other, shorter note on the Giants: They racked up 11 base runners on Tuesday night, but only scored three runs. It;s 15 total men on, and just the three runs, for the year now. They’re still waiting on an extra-base hit.

  Aside from Buster Posey, this is a lineup very much lacking power. They’re the most long-sequence offense in baseball, and should expect some frustrating nights and days through the first six to eight weeks of the season. The good news is that, once the weather warms a bit, their BABIP and home-run rates will warm somewhat, too. The bad news is that their pitching staff may need to come up with more big hits to get themselves many wins through Memorial Day.

• With Ryan Ludwick hitting the DL for a long while thanks to his shoulder injury, the Cincinnati Reds need a center fielder. They didn’t have an acceptable one before, and with Shin-Soo Choo blessedly able to slide to a corner again, they literally do not have one. Chris Heisey is going to start there until they find a real, lasting answer.

  I have a few ideas. The guys who fit fall into three categories: long-term additions, stopgap studs and platoon partners for Heisey. The third would be the easiest path, with the Cubs’ David DeJesus available for very little and Julio Borbon of the Rangers offering a bit more upside. Of the potential long-term additions, Dexter Fowler is the sensible fit, really the only candidate playing for a team that might be willing to sell this early in the year. The stopgap stud option is the most intriguing, perhaps. Jacoby Ellsbury would be tough to wrangle out of Boston, but given Jackie Bradley, Jr.’s play in the early going, maybe not that tough.

  Were I Walt Jocketty, I would offer Texas Devin Mesoraco for Borbon and Geovany Soto. In the right environment, with no need to face left-handed pitching at all, Borbon still may thrive, and Soto would be a fine backup behind Ryan Hanigan. Mesoraco might seem a steep price to pay, but if the Reds actually felt it was one, he would be starting for them, and Hanigan would be finding playing time as able. Texas might turn that deal down, but I doubt it. The Rangers could really use that depth at catcher; Soto is no longer even the lefty-masher he once was. He’s a miserable defensive backstop, too.

Marwin Gonzalez and Yu: A Guide

I was glued to my phone as the At-Bat Lite app (don’t judge me) slowly brought me news of Yu Darvish last night. It was a marvel to watch, even if I wasn’t actually watching. Darvish dealt his way through 26 batters, carving up a lineup that has gaping holes and will struggle badly at times this season, although on occasions they will also look quite good.

That Marwin Gonzalez broke up Darvish’s perfect game, and that he did it with a sharp single up the middle, was as enthralling and joyous a moment as the perfect game itself would have been, just for different people. It’s so early. I don’t want to believe that this season is going to mark some sort of inflection point at which the trend toward fewer runs scored and less contact becomes a black mark on the game. I also want to see these stolen moments, the things that define the seasons of bad teams, and make it worth your while to follow baseball even if your club stinks.

Marwin Gonzalez wouldn’t be playing anywhere else in baseball. If someone hadn’t had a mini-stroke, or something, and pressed the wrong button, even the Astros would have been starting Tyler Greene and not Gonzalez. He is in the lineup solely for his glove, even on a team bereft of offensive punch. He couldn’t cut it with the Chicago Cubs after the 2011 season, even though the Cubs went on to play Luis Valbuena for a substantial part of 2012. He’s bad, although perhaps not as bad as he will now be remembered. He is a typical light-hitting utility infielder, and only a strange confluence of events had him on a big-league roster Tuesday night, much less skipping a ball back through the box for the biggest hit he will ever collect. The Astros had to be really, really bad. They had to be willing to embrace that. They had to decide not to start Ronny Cedeno against a right-hander.

Yet, there he was. These are the things you’ll remember about the 2013 Astros. Near misses. Cute moments. Players who poke their heads out of obscurity for just an hour or so, then dive back into infinite anonymity. I am a Cubs fan, so I know the feeling. I remember Juan Pierre stealing a home run from Barry Bonds when Bonds was chasing a milestone, in 2006. I remember Ted Lilly’s lost no-hitter against the Chicago White Sox in 2010, broken up in the ninth inning by Juan Pierre. I remember last season’s final game, when I was among the muted masses who modestly celebrated a walk-off win in the Cubs’ final game, on a ball laced into right field by Bryan LaHair. LaHair had an unconscious April for the 2012 Cubs, and in that final game in October, he hit a towering opposite-field home run before turning in the game-winning hit. That was the last game he will ever play in the Major Leagues.

Yu Darvish will throw a no-hitter someday, maybe even a perfect game. Baseball might really be in trouble, in terms of the entertainment value of its product, because pitching is threatening to dominate the game on a level we haven’t seen since the mound came down in 1969. For one night, though, a player whose career is perpetually on the line got a hit that was more important to him than stopping it would have been, and the story of the evening turned out to be his. That’s great. Baseball is back, and so long as it tantalizes us, promising drama and then obliterating it, withholding it and then delivering it suddenly, it will always captivate me. Marwin Gonzalez carried the day.

Hitting the Corners: Opening Day

Now that teams outside of Texas have kicked off, more quick notes:

• Long plate appearances should be a statistic. I might be found embarrassingly incorrect, but it seems to me that certain batters, while able to attack a first-pitch meatball, are better at really driving deep into counts and making the pitcher work if that doesn’t happen. Jayson Werth is, fairly obviously, the best such hitter on the planet. Look at last year’s game-winning, walk-off home run in the NLDS against St. Louis, but also, look at the nine-pitch strikeout he had yesterday. Werth just takes over the zone once he gets two strikes against him, worrying about making contact and using his long arms to get wherever his bat needs to be in order to foul something off. He works that way until he thinks he knows what’s coming next, and then he loads up for a real Werth swing.
  Sure, I can see that Werth ranked highly with 4.37 pitches seen per plate appearance last season, and new-fangled data can even tell me he had a slightly abover-average percentage of foul balls. However, to really get a feel for Werth’s uncanny ability to derail an opponent’s inning by forcing them to throw eight or nine pitches, we probably need a separate statistic. Batters hit very well on the first pitch. What we need is a number that captures a guy’s ability to adapt and adjust within an at-bat, and make a pitcher throw three or four more pitches than he meant to throw if nothing easy presents itself.
  I love Werth, Bryce Harper (no big deal, just two home runs on Opening Day at age 20) and Stephen Strasburg. They’re among my 10 most favorite players to watch, anywhere in baseball. That said, I picked the Atlanta Braves to win the NL East this year, and they showcades a few of the reasons yesterday.
  All that came against Cole Hamels, who in addition to being very good, is left-handed. It stings less to face a lefty with Brian McCann shelved anyway, but still, what Freeman and Heyward were able to do against an elite southpaw is a good sign.
• In 1993, the Montreal Expos won 19 of 21 at one stretch in August and September, and overall, took 30 of their last 40 contests. It wasn’t enough to catch the Phillies in the old NL East, but they finished at 94-68, and there was a general feeling that they had done quite well to make such a run after trading their ace, Dennis Martinez.

  The Milwaukee Brewers went 24-6 at one stretch toward the end of 2012, and finished 29-13 in their final 42 games. They couldn’t catch the Cardinals for the second Wild Card entry, but they finished at 83-79, and there was a general feeling that they did quite well to make such a run after trading their ace, Zack Greinke.

  As Montreal was then, MIlwaukee is baseball’s smallest market now. As Montreal was then, though, Milwaukee is an encouraging story about fans who really do come out in droves when given a good club for which to cheer. As Montreal was then, Milwaukee is a talented team with a bit of youth and some great cornerstone parts, despite a thinning farm system. I don’t want to carry the comp too far, but you get the point. Surprising rotation strength, bullpen regression (the good kind) and a bounce-back season from Rickie Weeks will push the Brewers to 90 (or so) wins and an NLDS berth, one the Expos never got thanks to the 1994 strike. To draw another parallel, the Brewers feel a bit like the 2007 Philadelphia Phillies, a team with a very good offense and good enough run prevention, despite sort of a patchwork approach, to make it work. The Phillies had more depth in the outfield, and better gloves, but the Brewers probably have better pitching.

  Yesterday, the Brewers only allowed runs on home runs by three very good players, in the homer-friendly ballpark they call home. John Axford blew a save, it’s true, but I don’t take that as an omen of doom for the bullpen again. I think Axford will figure it out, and if he doesn’t, I think the Brewers have sufficient confidence in Jim Henderson to turn things over to him. I always want to see a contender build everything aside from the bullpen, and let that part just fall into place. First of all, building a consistent contender in a systematic way will eventually churn out some relievers, the way lard was just a byproduct of making other food that turned out to be a delicious additive. It can happen when you have enough strength at the top of the 40-man roster to make aggressive claims and moves on the margins, or it can come when a solid starter gets relegated thanks to a logjam of solid starters. In the Brewers’ case, it was a bit of both, as they nabbed some left-handed depth in free agency, then were able to move Chris Narveson once they signed Kyle Lohse to flesh out their rotation.

  In short (okay, maybe too late for that), I’m the high man, the big believer in this team. There’s no one else on this limb with me, but that’s kind of fun, really. If the Brewers reach October, you heard it here first, okay?
• The Bruce Rondon saga, from its hysterical beginning to its half-baked end, was a farce all along. The Tigers let a poor pitcher whose velocity was running away from him and which he was never going to catch, because he was fat and said velocity was not a delicious glazed doughnut, walk away this winter, and slotted a 22-year-old fat guy who throws much, much harder in as their presumptive closer instead of lunging out into free agency and making bad choices. Reaction was mixed, but histrionics were for everyone.
  Rondon played Jekyll-and-Hyde all spring (joke: he could actually BE both guys, he’s that big. Hey-O!), and public opinion swayed in the wind with each appearance. In the end, they elected not to carry Rondon Redondo, and the predictable cries went up about their lack of a closer, even their lack of a bullpen. It kind of makes you wonder what, if anything, has gotten through in the two decades that statheads have been shouting the right answers at the world.
  THis is a fine, even a potentially strong bullpen. It goes something like Joaquin Benoit-Phil Coke-Al Alburquerque-Octavio Dotel-Duane Below- -Drew Smyly, which just means you have to play matchups. No one there is dominant, and all have limitations, but if you get them into the game at the right times, keeping them healthy and facing same-handed batters, they’re going to be quite good. Jim Leyland did just that yesterday, and lo, the lead held. Alburquerque, whose fragility could always become an issue but who has the most performance upside, struck out two in tow thirds of an inning. Benoit got four outs, from the start of the bottom of the eighth through Josh Willingham leading off the ninth. Coke came in to face Justin Morneau and closed it out. Obviously, you’d prefer guys who can pitch full innings, and even multiple innings, because relievers can’t just pitch every day. But today is the obligatory off day after Opening Day, and Justin Verlander pitched only five frames yesterday. Leyland had a chance to use those guys optimally within the game, with almost no penalty in the longer view, and he took it. If he does more of that this season, Detroit will have nothing to fear from its lack of a normal bullpen hierarchy.

And some specific notes pon starting pitchers:

• Jeff Samardzija – I am unsure which lineup I would rather face, of Miami’s and Pittsburgh’s. It’s probably Miami’s under neutral conditions, but since it was approximately 40 degrees as Samardzija mowed down the Bucs yesterday, I think Strasburg’s effort rates as more impressive. Still, it was lovely to see Samardzija not miss a beat after a season in which he broke out, and it looked very real, but no one was left 100-percent convinced he could repeat the feat. He’ll face his share of tough offenses this summer. He may as well get some extra Spring Training in until the time comes. Removing A.J. Burnett’s two three-pitch strikeouts, Samardzija got 13 groundouts, and 13 swings and misses on 104 pitches.
• A.J. Burnett – Needlessly picked a fight with Mother Nature, and the natural cycle of the baseball season. At a time when strikeouts are at their lowest rates of the season, before his stuff has cranked itself up to full, Burnett was wading deep into counts and fighting for whiffs. He was lucky to be facing a bad Cubs team, who couldn’t really take advantage. After throwing five first-pitch strikes to six first-inning batters, he threw just one to the next 15 hitters he faced, a brutal approach even for he, who has always pitched that way to some extent.
• Yovani Gallardo – Gallardo has a history not unlike Burnett’s, in terms of the mental side of the duel. He has always had a radically different appraoch than anyone else out there, going straight at hitters but being wholly unafraid to spend all day getting one out. He ended up in the most full counts of any pitcher in baseball last season, and it was not especially close. With the defense behind him, who were responsible for at least a couple of the 10 hits he surrendered Monday, it makes a modicum of sense, but at some point, you have to just aim for the bottom of the zone and put the at-bat to an end. Gallardo fought that Monday.
• C.C. Sabathia – The craziest thing about the Yankees’ spring is not that Mark Teixeira and Curtis Granderson are hurt; it’s that Sabathia is at least quasi-healthy. He’s got a ton of mileage on his arm; went to the DL last year with elbow trouble; and now lacked just about everything that once made him great, from velocity (excusable in early starts, not a major concern) to command and depth on his secondary stuff (a real issue). The Red Sox were meticulous to the point of trifling on Monday, but Sabathia played right into that approach. He looked pretty discouraging.
• Edinson Volquez – BOOM! CRASH! He’s so bad. He can be good, occasionally, but he’s so, so bad. He reminds me of Carlos Zambrano, a bull in a china shop on the mound who never figured out what pitching after the dying of the light (or lights, specifically the ones differentiating 98 miles per hour from 93) would look like. He just doesn’t seem to like baseball well enough, or consider it carefully enough, to remake himself as a more subtle but solid pitcher. He doesn’t quite have Zambrano’s fury going, but Chicago drove Zambrano crazy, not the other way around. Volquez is what Zambrano would have been playing in the same markets: a merely disappointing starter who will chew innings like cud until he totally loses it in his early 30s, and the market puts him out to pasture.
• Stephen Strasburg looked like Maddux yesterday. So did Clayton Kershaw. For that matter, Jeff Samardzija and Matt Cain did, too. Here’s the thing to remember, even though all of these are genuinely very good pitchers: It’s really easy to look like Greg Maddux in April. Strikeout rates are as low as they will be all year in April, but so are BABIP, home-run rate on flies and the frequency of those flies. Ground-ball pitching happens naturally in April. We can safely say absolutely nothing about any of these guys based on Opening Day starts, because they just aren’t a good model for how baseball goes the rest of the season, at least not for arms like these.

 

2013 Team Previews: Arizona Diamondbacks

The narrative history of Kevin Towers’ first three years as GM of the Arizona Diamondbacks is going to be fascinating, one way or another. Since the moment he arrived in the desert, he has put himself out there in ways few other front-office executives in the modern game would ever do. In an era of seemingly ever-converging front-office strategies and plentiful consensus on how to evaluate and project player performance, Towers is zagging against an industry-wide set of zigs.

He turned a last-place 2010 team into a first-place 2011 team, albeit with no small amount of help from forces far beyond his control—forces like the second breakout of Justin Upton; all the right breaks from a reconstructed bullpen; and 8.5 WARP (in 656 innings!) from three starting pitchers acquired prior to Towers’ arrival. Along the way, he raised a few eyebrows. He dealt Mark Reynolds for a relief pitcher during the offseason of 2010-11, a nod to his stated goal of making the team less strikeout-prone, but thereby handed both third base (Ryan Roberts) and first base (Juan Miranda) to untested players with spotty minor-league track records and zero prospect pizzazz. After shortstop Stephen Drew went down for the year in mid-July, Towers stood pat at the position and allowed Willie Bloomquist to take over—but then engaged in a challenge trade in August to acquire second baseman Aaron Hill. He also allowed manager Kirk Gibson to turn first base over to relatively low-level prospect Paul Goldschmidt in August, in the heat of the pennant race.

It all worked out for the best, of course, and the team soared into the playoffs when an 88-win Pythagorean projection (the number of games they might normally have won, given the number of runs they scored and allowed) turned into 94 actual wins. Towers set out after the season to solidify the group that won him so many games, locking up Bloomquist, Hill and John McDonald to two-year deals, and Joe Saunders for a single season. He also left third base unchanged, so Ryan Roberts got a chance to implode (and he did, in 2012) as a starter.

The starting rotation demanded more depth, so rather than rely on prospects and health, Towers traded his team’s top pitching prospect—a big-league ready one, at that, in Jarrod Parker—for Oakland sinker specialist Trevor Cahill. He also didn’t like Gerardo Parra as a starting outfielder (though many in the industry certainly did), so he signed the powerful but one-dimensional Jason Kubel. I openly derided the Cahill-Parker deal at the time, on the premise that Towers had paid an undue transaction cost for what looked like a larger difference in past performance than in future performance, and indeed, Parker pitched better than Cahill did in 2012, though the difference was small and Cahill did pitch 10 percent more in the big leagues due to Parker opening the season in Triple-A. Kubel was a peculiar addition, too, but a less intrusively short-sighted one.

Although they lost 13 wins and weren’t even in contention in 2012, the Diamondbacks were a fundamentally similar team. Based on runs scored and surrendered, they should have won 86 games. They scored three more runs, but allowed 26 more, through a blend of failing health (Daniel Hudson, one of those non-Towers stud starters, shredded his elbow early on; Chris Young played only 101 games; and Stephen Drew played just 40 before being traded in August) and failures to repeat unsustainable performance (I’m looking at you, Saunders, Roberts and Josh Collmenter). So this past winter, despite a team not fundamentally dissimilar or significantly less talented than the one that won the division, Towers undertook a fairly major roster renovation.

We should probably talk about how, and why, and with whose input, Towers did all of that.

A popular topic in stathead circles these days is the level of “buy-in” between various managers and their front offices. Joe Maddon buys in to what the Rays’ brain trust is doing, and it helps them maximize the talent on their roster. Ron Washington routinely ruins games for which the Rangers are prepared perfectly, because he does not understand how to deploy the roster Jon Daniels and company built for him.

The Diamondbacks are way past “buy-in.” They have moved on to something more intimate, more complete. It’s symbiosis, or maybe synergy. Manager Gibson has a vision for running his ballclub; he has certain preferences about style and attitude. Bizarrely, he seems to disdain playing the game with easy athleticism, even though that’s exactly the kind of player he once was.

Instead of asking Gibson to acclimate or acculturate to Towers’ vision for team-building, it seems that the Diamondbacks have simply chosen to accommodate their grizzled manager. It’s trickle-up decision-making, the polar opposite of the trend in baseball today. Whereas football and basketball coaches often share in personnel decisions, or make them themselves, managers have become firmly middle management over the last decade. Except, apparently, in Arizona.

It’s possible Towers simply hews that closely to Gibson in terms of personnel preferences. It’s doubtful, though, and I just can’t endorse the possibility that Towers would rather construct a roster suited to the tastes of a man who can’t possibly help the team win games consistently, rather than bring in a manager who will find a way to coexist with high-upside players. In baseball, you have to build around the talent on the field, and let the other pieces fall into place. This isn’t college football.

That’s competitively and objectively, though. Sometimes, we number-lovers can lose sight of the fact that there are other things that do, really and truly do matter, besides maximizing likely wins. It matters, for instance, how much a fan base feels it can attach itself to a team, whether because of security (they’re going to be here a while) or because of identity (they’re good guys, they get very involved, they show emotion, they fit the fan base’s collective mentality). It matters, too, whether it’s pleasant for people to come to work each day in your organization, and that’s a function of the players, the manager and the atmosphere they co-create. I’m all for talent over chemistry in terms of translating into wins, but wins are not the only goal of professional ball clubs or ball players. That’s something fans might struggle to accept, but it’s true.

One walks a finer and blurrier line when trying to build such a team, of course. How any given group of individuals, especially any group of wealthy young men, will enmesh is a tricky thing to predict, and an impossible thing to control. Chemistry is serendipity. It probably doesn’t pay to chase it too much. What the Diamondbacks have done, at least, runs a bit deeper. It’s about not only chemistry (or conformity, anyway; there has been little patience for any dynamic not directly in line with Gibson’s style and approach), but also stability, security and comfort. The Diamondbacks are as locked in for 2014 as they are for 2013. They’re banking on guys who know they will need to coexist for multiple years.

Towers dealt three key pieces of the Diamondbacks’ projected roster over the winter, all in separate moves, all in an effort to remake the team in its skipper’s image. All three trades brought back, among other things, a shortstop of marginal but measurable value. That’s the kind of team Towers is building.

They have two solid third basemen and a prospect nearly ready at the position. Cody Ross was a preemptive replacement for Upton. He traded Trevor Bauer, a starting pitcher, but two starters are now ready for big-league roles, and for good measure, Towers brought in two more—he signed Brandon McCarthy as a free agent and dealt for Randall Delgado in the Upton trade.

One could easily argue that Towers is running scared, patching holes in the dam instead of building one of a more uniform material and a coherent shape downstream. He added contact hitters heading into 2011 because the 2010 team struck out too much. He added Cahill because the 2011 team had to split 39 starts among the likes of Micah Owings, Barry Enright, Jason Marquis, Zach Duke and Armando Galarraga. He’s reacting, to be sure, to what just happened, and that can be disastrous in baseball. In this case, though, we have t0 at least allow thst he is going about the patching with enthusiasm, and not skimping on the mortar.

The modern bullpen is all about specialization. Teams better put their relief pitchers in position to succeed than they ever have before. It’s actually neat, what it implies about current GMs and managers: Pitchers today can define themselves by what they do well, rather than what they do poorly. As sports fans, we want that. We should want games to be decided by the superior strength of one combatant, not an ill-timed mistake or an overmatched role player being exposed.

For position players, though, the same opportunity—to do most often that which one does best, and to make a meaningful contribution to a team despite a limited skill set—is going the way of the fake-to-third-throw-to-first pickoff move. Because rosters are so much more bound up with pitchers today (five-man rotations, pitch counts and single-inning firemen the main reasons), and because specialists dot every pitching staff, batters and fielders have had to become generalists. Platoons are difficult to sustain. The pinch-runner is all but extinct. The pinch-hit specialist/backup first baseman drew its last rattling breath when Jason Giambi departed the Rockies.

In Arizona, though, Towers seems determined to find roles for a handful of guys who would be fringy anywhere else. Eric Hinske signing a big-league deal helps paint that picture. Trading for Tony Campana, already DFA for calling the wrong segment of baseball history home, frames it.

Willie Bloomquist is on Team USA for the World Baseball Classic, in huge part because of his versatility. For just that reason, he would make almost any team in baseball, as a guy who softens the roster crunch. I still have him on my projected roster below, but if any team needs to trade the skills of a John McDonald (now in Pittsburgh, as Towers chose Bloomquist) or a Tony Campana for the flexibility and tepid production Bloomquist offers less than Towers’ troupe, I can’t find them. The depth of this roster, its well-roundedness, but especially the volume of available help if someone gets hurt or craters, allows Gibson to manage to the strengths of his team. Towers has invested all sorts of tactical responsibility in Gibson in the way he has built this team, another manifestation of the symbiosis to which I refer above.

There’s another way in which this roster’s grain runs perpedicular to that of the rest of the league. See, for virtually every other team in the league, power is at a premium these days, and strikeouts are the cost of doing the business of trying to score runs. For Towers and Gibson, that model must have been undesireable, because they’re bucking that trend.

Although only Cody Ross and Jason Kubel strike out especially often relative to the league average, this lineup isn’t magically immune to the trend of decreasing contact league-wide. They’ll get a few extra runs out of being a good contact-oriented offense in a good BABIP park. But they’ll also ground into a few more double plays than the average team, and without the 40-homer upside Justin Upton added, some of the short-sequence dynamism they might have had is gone. There’s not a ton of power here, and power is the preferred path to scoring in a time when the league’s OBP is .318 and one in five plate appearances (22.1 percent after the sixth inning) end with the bat still in the hands of the batter.

I do think you’ll find yourself rooting for the Diamondbacks’ offense. Aesthetically, it’s more fun to watch talented hitters who put the ball in play. There’s more drama. There’s more variety. There’s more of that feeling of energy being concentrated, then dispersed, then refocused somewhere new. It’s a race, but a nonlinear one; that’s exciting. When Arizona scores, it will be disproportionately due to timely hitting, and it will come disproportionately often on doubles, not homers. As is true of building a roster based on intangibles or chemistry, this is a suboptimal strategy, but it’s a noble inefficiency.

I think I’ve now spoken enough about the virtues of various soft factors when it comes to team-building. It’s more pleasant to watch a team that makes a lot of contact, doesn’t walk very many opponents, gets the uniforms dirty and smiles a lot. It’s more fun when the team is clearly a close-knit group, and more fun when they have special handshakes with one another and throw shaving cream in one another’s faces. That’s all well and good.

You know what makes it the most fun to be a fan of a given team, though? Winning. Winning does that. Winning is the absolute best way to make your team fun to watch, and to make the fans like your team.

Right now, this roster just is not good enough to win the NL West. The group is talented and balanced, but the Giants have a similar lineup and better run-prevention corps, and the Dodgers are stronger where they’re strong than the Diamondbacks are. This is an 82-86-win team, considering all risk and reward possibilities—fundamentally, that is, pretty much as good as they have been each of the last two years—and to get higher than that (i.e., to reach the playoffs, since the NL West is much stronger now than it was when they won it with this base talent level) they will need either a breakout performer or a big addition.

Trevor Cahill, Tyler Skaggs and Paul Goldschmidt have some chance of being the former, but honestly, I’m not betting on any of them. Justin Upton and Trevor Bauer had the best such potential, and Towers dealt them both away. The 13-game difference in results the past two seasons came entirely from variance: With high-ceiling young players, the 2011 team got a bit lucky and rose to the top of the standings on the shoulders of sudden stars, while the 2012 team felt some natural growing pains when guys still just as talented (Ian Kennedy and Upton, mostly) saw their numbers turn downward for a year.

In some ways, with pitchers who will not miss a ton of bats and batters who will put the ball in play, this 2013 team promises even greater potential variance. Batted balls are far less predictable in their outcomes than strikeouts and walks, of which both Upton and Bauer provided plenty. That’s the kind of variance that tends to come out in the wash, the breaks that really do even out (injuries and player risk profiles aren’t that way).

On the other hand, though, Towers targeted players at flatter points of the age curve (which is steepest prior to 25 and after 32 or so) and with less prodigious potential (a few extra home runs, as Justin Upton will almost surely hit in 2013, are obviously far more valuable than a few extra outs on ground balls, as Towers has strived to earn by shoring up the left side of the infield defense) than the ones with whom he parted, leaving less in the way of raw upside, and less in the way of opportunity to capture that upside—because it’s a lot easier to spot and fully avail oneself of a breakout individual performance than it is to get full advantage from improved depth and more fluidity in lineup construction. It seems like Towers chose sheer chaos, the equivalent of day trading, over a systematic portfolio of risk and reward that emphasized the chances of wild returns.

Thanks to having so much depth, of course, the Diamondbacks can feel fairly free to try and pry a star more suited to Gibson’s tastes than was Upton from some team who falls out of contention by midsummer. Maybe the Rockies would let go of Carlos Gonzalez at the right price. Maybe the Rays will falter early and accept the bizarre industry consensus that they need to trade David Price, for some reason. Maybe the White Sox would give up Paul Konerko if Goldschmidt regresses. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

It’s much easier, though, to trade for depth in-season, to add the Cliff Pennington/Tony Sipp/Cody Ross types that Towers gathered this winter instead, than it is to coax away a star of that caliber. Besides, they had that guy, in Upton, and traded him. To do another deal to get a facsimile Upton at this point would have them once again paying transaction costs to add something they already had, like they did with Cahill in the Parker trade. I think Towers and Gibson have embarked on the building of a new Kenny Williams-Ozzie Guillen-style White Sox non-dynasty, whereby the team never collapses, but gradually overharvests a stout farm system and eventually settles into an unhappy medium of winning 79-84 games almost annually.

Below are my thoughts, at times rambling, on the key cogs in what looks like a solid but unspectacular season to come.

Lineup:

1. Adam Eaton – CF - Classic leadoff man, limited home-run power but can shoot the gaps. Career .355 hitter in nearly 1,500 minor-league plate appearances, with 166 walks and 196 strikeouts. Good speed. Good center fielder. He’s a quiet Rookie of the Year candidate.

Of course, if it were all that simple, there would be nothing quiet about his candidacy. Guys who hit .355 in that much professional time usually don’t have as much to prove as Eaton. He was a 19th-round pick as a senior out of college. He’s 24 years old. If he turns into the next Wade Boggs, that will just be part of his legend, but for now, it stands as a bit of a red flag: Why did a pure hitter this good fly so far under the radar?

(One reason: He stands five-foot-eight. That obviously caps his power potential a fair bit, and very often, scouts seeing a guy that small also downgrade his hit tool. Pitchers just aren’t going to nibble with that guy. Walks will be tough to get. Generating the bat speed to match a good big-league fastball will be tough because of the physical profile. Again, there are exceptions, but they’re few and far between.)

Note: Listening to the Baseball America podcast episode in which J.J. Cooper and Matt Eddy discussed NL West prospects, I was struck by Eddy’s first comment when Eaton came up: “He’s got 2 power,” he said. (That’s the lowest scouting grade allowed.)

It’s possible that Eaton really does lack power completely, but the statistics don’t really bear Eddy out. In 716 plate appearances between Double and Triple-A and the Majors last year, Eaton socked 50 doubles, seven triples and nine homers. Now, park and league factors have been on Eaton’s side all the way up the chain, but he doesn’t seem like Tony Campana out there. He seems like Otis Nixon.

Eaton got hurt during Spring Training, a stinging loss given the way he was hitting and the role her was expected to play, but this is the virtue of the depth of this team. Gerardo Parra, Tony Campana and A.J. Pollock just move up the depth chart a rung for a month or so. That said, it should be noted that when the team chose long-sequence, OBP-centered offense over the home runs they had in-house, they made themselves more vulnerable to this kind of injury. Any offense based on chaining together two or three hits to score feels the loss of a table-setter harder than one where every lineup spot is 20 potential home runs.

2. Martin Prado- 3B - My favorite kind of ball player, a multi-positional talent whose glove helps nearly everywhere, a guy who walks a fair amount and doesn’t strike out, a guy with average power who still hits .300. I disliked the Justin Upton trade for Arizona, but Prado is not why.

I want to especially take issue with the notion that Justin Upton has abundantly more talent than Martin Prado. In some bizarre way, for all the honest efforts of sabermetrics to tap into all the elements and dimensions of value that a player can add to their team, power has nonetheless become (or remained) a fetish for even those with analytical bents. Specifically, I should say, young power-hitting outfielders have found themselves at the center of an enormous stat-lover worship circle. Upton has otherworldly talent, because Upton has big tools—a strong arm, good speed, and especially, power. This is exactly the sort of logic that statheads 10 years ago would have wisely rebuffed.

Upton does have wild amounts of talent, of course, but it’s not evident solely, or even mostly, in the fact that he can hit the ball a long, long way. No, Upton’s talent and athleticism are most on display in the same way that Prado’s is: He has great hand-eye coordination, and great body control.

When you were growing up, you probably had that friend to whom very movement through the world seemed easier than it was for you. They may have been physically built in any number of different ways, and they may have been a poor athlete, or they may have been fat, but they had that “uniquely American resourcefulness of motion” that Nick Carraway revered in Jay Gatsby. They might not have run fast, but they could stop on a dime, or turn without effort, wasted motion or an obvious cut. They were a great driver the moment they sat down behind the wheel. Every now and then, they would drop something, but miraculously, catch it with the same hand before it hit the ground, and undisturbed from its original position.

That friend would be Martin Prado, if they were also exceptionally quick and light on their feet. Talent comes in may forms in baseball, but making consistent contact and still hitting for a high BABIP strikes me as maybe the most remarkable manifestation of talent that ever occurs on the diamond, and Prado does it.

I saw a tweet from Matthew Leach that seemed to mock the notion that a player with Prado’s (admittedly limited) resume and of his (admittedly advancing) age was really worth the contract extension to which the Diamondbacks signed him. It’s worth $40 million over the next four seasons.

Leach is entitled to his opinion, but I disagree. Just look at the free-agent market this winter. Angel Pagan, despite being older than Prado and having fewer productive full seasons to his credit, got four years and $40 million. Shane Victorino, who has been somewhat better at his peak but is older and had a poorer 2012, got three years and $39 million. Nick Swisher is maybe the closest comp to what Prado had a chance to be on next year’s market, a 30-year-old with a lot of three-to-four-win seasons but not a true star, and Swisher got a four-year, $56-million deal. This is the new baseball economy. Prado is not overpaid.

3. Paul Goldschmidt- 1B - For a right-hitting first baseman, he’s shockingly athletic. Goldschmidt stole 18 bases in 21 tries last year, and was a plus defender. He clubbed 43 doubles. All good.

The bad: He’s vulnerable against right-handed pitching, and the league rarely has a shortage of right-handed pitching. He only hit 20 home runs in 2012, which reflects not very much power from a player who calls Chase Field home. He’s had just a shade over a season’s worth of playing time in the big leagues, so it’s too early to tell about his .337 career BABIP, but let’s say this much for now: That had better be real, or Goldschmidt falls a bit short of the offensive standard at first base.

On the eve of Opening Day, Arizona locked up Goldschmidt on a five-year deal with a club option for a sixth, beginning in 2014, worth no less than $32.5 million, potentially as much as $47 million, if the option is picked up. Contract extensions are exceptionally tough to evaluate these days, and I doubt this really constrains them much, but for me, you can keep that deal. A first baseman who can only kind of hit right-handed pitching is not worth a six-year commitment. It’s part of a larger problem for Arizona: They’re actively locking up a positional core that just does not have me excited, and on which I would rather see them attempt to improve than to wager their future.

4. Jason Kubel- LF - Kubel has never played first base in the big leagues, but if I were Kirk Gibson, I’d have him work hard there this spring and consider sliding him to first and benching Goldschmidt against right-handed pitching. Kubel bats left-handed, which is nice, and he socked 30 homers last year, which will play. He’s a miserable defensive outfielder, though, and strikes out over a quarter of the time.

At least he works deep counts, though. Kubel draws a fair number of walks, in addition to the power, so even when he hits just .250, he wears it well. He’s a profile DH, if Gibson refuses to use him at first, but when Arizona does need a DH, I would think Eric Chavez will get the first look at the job. The exception should be when the Diamondbacks visit Tampa Bay, and the outfield defense has to be at its best. For those games, I would think you DH Kubel, and align the outfield Parra-Eaton-Ross.

5. Cody Ross- RF - Ross has been basically the same player since 2008 or so, but his numbers have swung wildly because of park effects. He played in Miami (with a friendly left-field corner for his pull power tendencies) for half that time, averaging a home run in 3.6 percent of his plate appearances and slugging .456. He then played a year and a half in San Francisco—where he hit just 17 homers in 543 total plate appearances and his slugging slumped to .414.

Boston was a salve for him, an exaggerated version of Miami, and he slugged .481 there with 22 homers in 528 plate appearances. Now he comes to Arizona, which is as all-around hitter-friendly as any in which Ross has played. Park factors influence statistics, not true value, but in Ross’s case, whether a handful of those flies leave the park seems to make a big difference in what kind of hitter he can be. At Chase Field, they should go. He fits fairly well.

With Eaton injured, Ross might see some time in center field in the early going. I mean, one hopes Gibson has better sense than that, but maybe not. What you need to know about Cody Ross as a defensive center fielder is that Cody Ross, defensively, is not a center fielder. Kubel should have to go down, too, forcing Parra to left, before Ross should slide over, and even then, I might rather have Prado play left and Chavez start at third, or Tony Campana simply take over center.

That he so fails the test of defensive competence up the middle hurts his value, but Ross is an underrated player, honestly. He’s going to be brutal in the last year of this three-year deal, but here in Year One, he’s not that bad. His platoon vulnerability is overstated:

Cody Ross, Platoon Splits, Career and 2012

	PA	BB%	K%	BABIP	ISO
v. RHP, Career	2302	6.7	23.5	.310	.162
v. LHP, Career	909	9.1	17.5	.289	.291
v. RHP, 2012	378	6.9	27.5	.332	.166
v. LHP, 2012	150	10.7	16.7	.281	.341

Now, the 2012 numbers against righties obviously raise a bit of a red flag. That strikeout rate is a bad omen, and by not showing you his standard stats, I avoided demonstrating that the BABIP bump propped up what could have been a very ugly line. In general, though, I find that people talk a lot about Ross’s deficiencies against righties, and not enough about his sparkling skills against southpaws. Again, the profile doesn’t suggest that he will age well, but he should be solid in 2013. If Matt Davidson muscles his way to the parent club at third base, Martin Prado could take over left field, and the resulting Kubel-Ross platoon in right field could post a .950 OPS.

Ross, like Eaton, starts the season on the DL. The configuration of both the lineup and the defense in his absence will be interesting. It opens a door for A.J. Pollock, which is nice. Again, the Diamondbacks can weather this. Still, Ross’s loss puts a lot of pressure on Kubel, Goldschmidt and Montero to hit for power.

6. Miguel Montero- C - I’ve loved Montero for years, but found a new reason to do so this fall. That’s when I realized that he had essentially the same overall season—139 hits and 65 runs (both identical to his 2011 totals); a 120 OPS+ (121 in 2011); 3.7 WAR (3.8 in 2011)—despite completely changing as a hitter from one season to the next. He walked 36 more times and struck out 33 more times in 2012 than in 2011, despite coming to bat just 20 more times.

He traded some power for that strike-zone control, with 42 extra-base hits, down from 55 in 2011. For the extra 40 points of OBP, though, it was well worth it.

Montero presents just one major warning sign for me: Fatigue and injury risk are there. Montero caught more games behind the plate in 2012 than any other NL catcher, and third-most in 2011. He reminds me a bit, entering 2013, of Alex Avila entering 2012. Ridden hard the previous year, he presents some risk, however small, of either missing time, or playing a bit below their true ability.

It was interesting to hear Montero become so vocal in his criticism of Trevor Bauer after Bauer went to Cleveland. A big part of their beef seemed to be the fact that Bauer simply wanted a backstop, whereas Montero envisions himself as an equal partner to his pitcher in plotting ways to get hitters out. He’s as much a leader as the team has, the one who blends veteran status and seniority with the team better than anyone else in the clubhouse. I haven’t yet decided how much I buy into catcher framing or other data about the value of a good defender there, but it’s clear that the Diamondbacks really invest in the team concept of pitching. That helps explain why Bauer didn’t fit in.

I will say this: I don’t like any approach that makes a pitching staff somewhat dependent upon a catcher, because that guy then has to catch every day, as Montero just did, or else one game in every four or five feels disjointed and might turn into a 6-run outburst for the opponent. If a team is going to let the catcher work as closely with the pitchers as Montero likes to work, the personal catcher feels like the way to go. Maybe Randall Delgado (or whoever wins the fifth starter’s job) could work exclusively with the backup, and Montero could get some rest while still helping the pitchers with whom he does work.

7. Aaron Hill- 2B - I’m not sure most people know just how good Aaron Hill was in 2012. He’s had one of those careers that lends itself to obscurity. His name is plain. He’s been oft-injured, mostly and especially a year and a half of concussion-related problems. He hit 36 homers in 2009, and had a chance to emerge as a star—then hit .205 with a .271 OBP in 2010. He played like Darwin Barney in 2011.

Midway through that season, Toronto traded him to Arizona. Everything changed. Since then, Hill has 92 extra-base hits in 810 plate appearances. He’s hitting .304/.364/.517, with only 105 strikeouts and 64 walks. He finally caught some people’s eyes when he hit for the cycle twice in 2012, but remains an underappreciated asset. You want that guy on your infield. That he figures to bat seventh in this lineup underscores Arizona’s depth. He has an unusual but valuable form of plate discipline, with slightly below-average walk rates and substantially above-average strikeout rates (meaning fewer whiffs than an average hitter), yet plus power upside. He’s also a good defensive second baseman. Because his OBP skills are sound despite the relatively few walks, he could easily move to the top of the order until Eaton returns, if that’s the direction Gibson wants to go.

Towers gave Hill a three-year contract extension through 2016 last week, one that will pay him $35 million. It’s hard to evaluate that deal, because (and this is a compliment) it pays for skills and scouting insights, not performance. Hill has had just two seasons that support a contract of that size and shape in an eight-year career, but injuries marred his performance for at least a year or two in there. When healthy, Hill is a very good overall player—if one assumes he was never fully healthy during 2010 or into 2011 because of the concussion problems that began in 2008 and nagging thigh injuries throughout the two years.

There’s reason enough to assume the opposite, though, and that does pose something of a red flag. Yes, Hill occasionally complained of some general issues related to his 2008 concussion throughout the following three seasons, and he did have thigh problems in 2010, but I don’t think those were the major problems. I think the problem was that Aaron Hill smelled blood after hitting 36 home runs in 2009, and started swinging up at the ball in a desperate effort to keep up that pace.

Hill set career highs in fly-ball rate and swing rate on pitches outside the strike zone in 2010, and career lows in ground-ball rate, line-drive rate and BABIP. Pitchers and managers radically changed their approach to Hill, and he did not respond well to those adjustments.

Gifted contact hitters need to cultivate that gift carefully, because making consistently weak contact is not preferable to swinging and missing. Hill is a naturally neutral hitter from a batted-ball perspective, and does best when he lets his power come organically. In 2012, he swung and missed less often than he had since 2006, and walked more than he had since his rookie campaign in 2005. He can best sustain that success by resisting the temptation to start yanking and tilting up at the ball.

The closest recent comp to Hill might be Martin Prado, who will make just a shade less than Hill over the next four years, and is probably slightly better—but Prado also signed with Arizona, so that’s not of much use to us in evaluating the Hill deal. Dan Uggla got more, and is a God-awful defensive second baseman, but then again, Uggla had a much longer track record of offensive performance prior to signing than did Hill. The Braves paid, as most MLB teams do, for what Uggla had done. Arizona paid for what they believe Hill will do. It’s a gutty approach, and high-risk, but I can’t argue too ardently with the philosophy.

8. Cliff Pennington- SS - Pennington was actually worth 4.1 WAR in 2010, according to Baseball-Reference. He’s a nice little player, a plus defensive shortstop who can run a little. He’s never hit a ton, but thanks to a .310 career BABIP through 2011, he was close to league average his first two full seasons.

He collapsed in 2012, losing his job for a stretch and hitting an awful .215/.278/.311. The culprit? Some 80 percent of it was a BABIP issue, as he slumped to .259 in that category. He also lost some power, and with guys whose offensive skills were always marginal, you wonder if those skills are coming back at age 29.

Still, there’s some obvious upside here. Get Pennington out of Oakland, let him hit a bit if he can. and he could well be on the bench by mid-season anyway. I didn’t hate acquiring him back in October, though it was a bizarre trade. It was hard to see why Arizona did it at the time. Although they got Pennington and Heath Bell out of it, it seems to me, in retrospect, that that trade (like Kevin Towers’ two other big ones of the winter) was more about who left (outfielder Chris Young) than about who came back. Those trades rarely end well, or at least without regret.

By the way, Pennington signed a two-year deal this spring, too, avoiding arbitration for 2013 and locking him in for 2014. It’s a peculiar move for Towers, who just traded for Didi Gregorius and presumably envisions him as the Diamondbacks’ shortstop of the future, but it makes much more sense than the two-year deals he gave to two similar (but older) players just last winter.

Bench:

1. Gerardo Parra- OF - When learned baseball people decried Arizona’s signing of Kubel last winter, I could see their point. Parra had just put up a very fine season offensively, and he’s in a class with Brett Gardner and whomever Oakland eventually stashes in left, guys who could play center field but get pushed off the job and just dominate defensively in that corner.

A year later, though, I have a hard time finding the same passion in defending Parra. There are those (including some people I respect deeply, like Joe Sheehan and Keith Law) who support a trade of Kubel even now that Justin Upton is gone, allowing Parra to play every day, or close to it. I can’t defend that position this time around, and I’m not excited by the proposition of seeing him take on full-time center field duty with Eaton down.

In 2012, Parra showed his true colors a bit. It’s clear the Diamondbacks view him as a fourth outfielder, and he played like one last year. He’s still third among left fielders over the last three years in Plus/Minus, according to The Bill James Handbook 2013, but the offensive value he seemed capable of providing evaporated when he got a long look at a full-time role.

Moved out of the eighth spot in an NL batting order, Parra drew just four intentional walks in 2012, down from 16 in 2011. The 12 walks teams decided not to simply award him made up 86 percent of the 14 walks that disappeared from his totals in 2012. Robbed of that cushion, his OBP suddenly looked much thinner.

Of course, intentional walks are something a manager does. Pitchers ought not be punished for them, nor batters credited, in stats. In Parra’s case, though, one could at least argue that his speed made those walks more problematic for opponents in 2011. He stole 15 bases that year, and opposing catchers nabbed him just once. He doesn’t have elite speed, but when teams put him on base, he could make them pay for that.

It wasn’t so in 2012. Parra stole 15 bases again, but in 24 tries, not 16. He was on base less often, but ran more, and was thrown out too much to help anyone. There’s a lot of randomness in year-to-year stolen base success rate, and I think too much is made of it at times. Still, the fact is that that had been a disproportionately large part of Parra’s value equation in the past, and it suddenly got much worse for him. He also lost some power, and Parra doesn’t really have power to lose.

He doesn’t hit left-handed pitching. He doesn’t project very well at the plate. He doesn’t profile well in center field, and even if he did, Eaton would profile better, when healthy. Parra’s a fine fourth outfielder, but I don’t think he’s a good candidate to be a regular again, and I support Arizona’s decision to keep him in a limited role when possible in 2013. Of course, if their primary outfielders can’t stay healthy, he might end up with 700 plate appearances, anyway.

2. Eric Chavez- 3B - In 2012, Chavez faced right-handed pitchers in 88 percent of his plate appearances. That’s a phenomenal platoon ratio, even for a left-handed hitter. The Yankees protected him well.

Still, in 313 plate appearances, he hit 16 home runs (nine of them on the road, so it wasn’t a Yankee Stadium lefty thing) and struck out only 59 times. He hit .281/.348/.496. For the first time since 2006, he was healthy, and although the fragility that created that chasm between productive years ensured he will never be signed as a starter again, he seems to be an average or better player in the role he will have in Arizona. I’m stunned he got so little as a free agent, and given Arizona’s depth at his position, Chavez might be the rare veteran trade chip on a contending team.

I don’t mean to suggest everyone on the team as platoon partners for Goldschmidt, but Chavez did start six games for New York at first last year, and he does to right-handed pitching what Goldschmidt does to southpaws. Both corners are open to him, in other words.

3. Eric Hinske- LF/1B - This is where Arizona’s roster construction grates with me. Depth and redundancy run on either side of a thin line, and by adding Hinske, Towers crossed it. (Actually, he crossed it earlier, but more on that later.)

Hinske isn’t a better fielder than Kubel. His offensive skills were never the equal of Kubel’s, and have eroded considerably. Hinske isn’t even on par with Chavez as a pinch-hit specialist. He’s signed for $1.075 million on a big-league deal, though, so it’d be odd at this point if he didn’t make the team.

One quick thing about Hinske, which might sound snide or snarky but is meant only as a fascinated observation: It looks for all the world as though Hinske is going to play a 12th season in MLB this year. He needs to hang on just a bit longer in order to reach 1,000 career hits. All this despite the fact that his only average season as a regular player was his rookie year, 2002. Most guys who hang around that long without having a few good seasons playing every day are backup catchers or glove-first middle infielders, but Hinske keeps going past age 35 despite his limited skill set. It’s certainly possible that the signing reflected whatever intangible contribution has kept him around for so long, perhaps a chemistry or leadership element. I wouldn’t defend a $6-million investment on those grounds, but if that’s why Towers wanted Hinske, it might be worth the roster spot and the relative pittance they will pay.

4. Willie Bloomquist- UTIL - This will be the second year of the two-year, $3.8-million deal Bloomquist signed before 2012, and the obligation there is the only reason I foresee him coming back. He’s a poor defensive shortstop, but shortstop is the only position left at which Arizona really needs the depth.

Lower-back problems (red flag!) kept Bloomquist out of all but three games after the trade deadline last year. He hit .302 in the 338 plate appearances he did get, but it was as empty a .302 as the game has seen in years: 12 walks, zero homers, .096 isolated power. He’s 35 years old. If you ask me, Towers traded the wrong utility infielder when he sent John McDonald packing, because if nothing else, McDonald can defend well at all three throwing infield positions. Bloomquist is useless on the dirt. Lo and behold, not a week after the deal, Bloomquist strained an oblique, and he begins this season on the crowded Diamondback DL.

5. Wil Nieves- C - I’ll save your intelligence the insult of pretending to know what Wil Nieves will do in 2013. It’s Jazayerli’s Law of Backup Catchers: anyone can hit anything in 160 randomly distributed, yet carefully selected, at bats.

He’s a good receiver, though, and Arizona probably won’t care if he hits .100. Nieves is a defensive addition, and given how hard Gibson rode Montero last year, it’s important that Towers have a defensively sound replacement on hand at the opening of the season.

Rotation:

1. Ian Kennedy - After getting serious Cy Young consideration in 2011, Kennedy saw his ERA rise by 40 percent or so in 2012. He did miss a few fewer bats, but the bulk of that apparent backslide was really just course correction, or bad luck, however you read the tea leaves. His BABIP was well below league norms in 2011; it was higher than average in 2012. He avoided home runs really, really well in 2011, especially for a pitcher who called Chase Field home. In 2012, he was still no worse than average in that regard, but in facing virtually the same number of batters, he did allow nine more homers, six more doubles and five more triples. (Was some of the difference due to Kubel playing left field? I leave it to the reader to decide. But yes.)

He has a great command ratio. He has pretty good stuff. It became clear in 2012 that batters will occasionally square up Kennedy and drive the ball against him, but he limits walks really well and that helps minimize the damage when they do so. More than anything, Kennedy suffered from a Diamondbacks defense that fell from fourth in the NL in Defensive Efficiency in 2011 to 12th last year. With miles better defenders at shortstop and third base entering 2013, Kennedy should move back toward the dominant numbers he had in 2011, though probably not all the way back.

2. Trevor Cahill - Moving to the National League gave a nice bump to Cahill’s strikeout rate last season. He reached a career high by whiffing 18.6 percent of all opponents. That figure is still slightly off the average for starting pitchers today, but it’s awfully good for a guy who pounds the bottom of the strike zone and induces ground balls as consistently as Cahill does. He’s the best ground-ball pitcher in baseball, and while sabermetrically that can sometimes be damnation with faint praise, in Cahill’s case, there’s Tim Hudson-level upside there.

If you think Prado and Pennington replacing Ryan Roberts and Bloomquist on the left side of the infield will help Kennedy, imagine how much they will help Cahill. Despite facing 60 fewer batters in 2012, Cahill induced 120 more ground balls than Kennedy did. He had a higher ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio than any other starting pitcher in baseball last year, according to Baseball-Reference.

Hey, speaking of the 839 batters Cahill faced in 2012, let’s talk about his workload, and young arms. Cahill turns 25 on March 1. He’s been a full-time Major-League pitcher for four years already, and has averaged 824 batters faced per season. That’s the 27th-highest figure in baseball, and among pitchers who threw at least three of those seasons at or under age 25, only Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw faced more. The A’s showed a lot of faith in the durability of Cahill’s stuff and his arm by pitching him that much that young, and Arizona showed even more by trading for him and working him as hard as ever.

Sinker-ball pitchers, ground-ball guys, are a peculiar breed. Unlike sidearmers, lefty specialists and knuckleballers, guys like Cahill, Derek Lowe and Brandon Webb don’t get sorted into their own category with much frequency. They’re not treated as being as different from other hurlers as maybe they ought to be.

Ground-ball guys don’t miss all that many bats. The reasons are many, and different for all, but not fundamentally difficult to understand. A sinker travels on the closest thing to the average plane of a batter’s swing as any pitch in baseball. The pitches that generate the most swings and misses tend to be sliders and very good fastballs. Two-plane break, changing the batter’s eye level. Ground balls are not damaging contact. Pitchers who emphasize them don’t try especially hard to avoid contact, for just that reason.

Because they don’t try to strike batters out, ground-ball guys ate generally very efficient in terms of total pitch count. Tim Hudson, A.J. Burnett, Scott Diamond and Jake Westbrook are great examples, elite in terms of both ground-ball rate and per-plate appearance pitch efficiency.

Because this is true, though, those pitchers sometimes get ridden too hard. If I had to compare Cahill to one pitcher of the last decade, I might choose Carlos Zambrano. Like Cahill, Zambrano got his first starting gig at age 21. Like Cahill, Zambrano could reach the mid-90s with his heat, but like Cahill, he pitched better when he didn’t. Like Cahill, Zambrano threw many pitches but relied heavily on his sinker itself. Like Cahill, Zambrano aimed for the bottom of the strike zone at all times, and was unafraid to walk a batter when unable to hit that artificially small target.

Zambrano had his best season at 24, was less than a full-time starter before age 30, and may not pitch at all beyond his 32nd birthday. Cahill, though, has a crucial advantage, something that sets him apart from Zambrano:

Trevor Cahill, Ages 22-24 (2,623 batters faced)

	Pitches Per PA	Pitches Per GS	GS, Pitches > 100
Age 22	3.88	101	19
Age 23	3.74	100	21
Age 24	3.77	99	15

Carlos Zambrano, Ages 22-24 (2,703 batters faced)

	Pitches Per PA	Pitches Per GS	GS, Pitches > 100
Age 22	3.76	107	23
Age 23	3.91	112	27
Age 24	3.90	108	25

The difference in their absolute workloads is small, but Zambrano was arguably the last really, truly abused young starting pitcher baseball ever saw. Cahill has been handled much more carefully, and on top of that, is more pitch-efficient, so his arm has much less mileage on it than did Zambrano’s at the same stage.

Don’t worry too much about Cahill’s big innings totals prior to 25, is what I’m saying. In this day and age, teams monitor guys carefully, manage their workloads meticulously and design plans specifically to suit every arm. Cahill is big, has visited the DL just once, at the very start of 2010, and has not missed starts or had starts pushed back since. He walks a lot of batters, as sinker-oriented guys are wont to do, and he doesn’t miss a ton of bats, but he should be a steady presence capable of adding two or three wins to the ledger with his work over the course of the season.

3. Brandon McCarthy - McCarthy has leaned slightly toward fly balls during his career. He pounds the strike zone, missing out on some strikeouts by going after hitters so directly. Neither of those things bode particularly well for him as he makes the tenuous transition from Oakland to Arizona, environmentally.

A couple things bode better, though. For one, over the past few years, McCarthy has transitioned from a classic four-seam fastball and curveball-changeup mix to use of a cutter, a sinker and the curve, with other things tossed in just to keep batters honest. These are pitches that generally limit the damage done on flies fairly well. In 2012, he threw the cutter about 30 percent more often than he threw the sinker, but the pitches are about equally effective, and McCarthy could easily make the adjustment and use the sinker more in a more homer-friendly new home.

The other thing that augurs well for him is somewhat related: McCarthy is a smart guy, famously so, and should be adaptable enough to succeed even in a tougher pitching environment. He’s still going to throw strikes, but maybe he’ll be a bit more willing to work the edges of the plate in order to avoid giving up some hard-hit balls that, while they may have been outs in Oakland, might go out at Chase Field. He’ll probably use his change and sinker slightly more, his cutter and curve slightly less. He’ll find ways to get batters out, so long as he stays healthy.

That last qualifier, of course, is no throwaway with McCarthy. He has pitched 100 or more innings in the big leagues only three times in eight seasons, and qualified for the ERA title just once. So pervasive and disruptive were his injury problems (shoulder, mostly) that he got somewhat stuck in the transition from prospect to big-leaguer, and didn’t fully establish himself until 2011. Given that his injury history is primarily shoulder-related, it’s encouraging that he has maintained average – even slightly better than average – velocity on that sinker-cutter combo. (Shoulder injuries usually dampen velocity, but McCarthy averaged close to 92 miles per hour with his sinker.) On the other hand, though, shoulder injuries tend to be more chronic, and can eventually derail a career more thoroughly, than injuries to any other part of a pitcher’s body.

Arizona quietly has as much starting pitching depth as any team in baseball, so they were uniquely well-positioned to invest in McCarthy, despite the risk he presents. To draw a fairly organic comparison, Joe Blanton balances health (more) and skills (less) about as well as McCarthy does, and got $15 million over two years from that Angels, a shade less than McCarthy got. A lot of people underrate Blanton, and in sabermetric circles, a fair few overrate McCarthy. They’re similar in overall value. On balance, though, you had to like the McCarthy deal better, because the Angels have much less reinforcement in the (less likely, admittedly) event of a Blanton injury than that Diamondbacks have in case McCarthy goes down.

4. Wade Miley - Miley doesn’t have big strikeout, swing-and-miss stuff. Batters missed on just over eight percent of all swings last year, a below-average figure. He’s aggressive within the strike zone, though, which absolutely stifled hitters’ chances for walks. He issued just 37 bases on balls in 2012, facing over 800 batters. Bryce Harper was the right choice for NL Rookie of the Year, but Miley’s season meets or exceeds the historical standard of the award.

A left-hander, Miley pounds lefties with his average (a little better, maybe) four-seam heat, and because he’s deceptive with it, it’s fairly effective. He also mixes in a two-seamer or sinker, but tends to use it more against righties. He’s got a changeup left-handers never see, and a slider he throws when he gets ahead no matter who’s up. It’s actually a really good pitch, which is weird, because Miley isn’t the kind of guy, and it’s not the kind of out-of-his-hand, before-your-eyes pitch, that appears especially devastating. He spots is well, chooses when to use it well. Righties swing at it over half the time, and miss a third of the times they swing. (Lefties are no better, obviously.)

Again, you’re not going to watch Miley and his 90-91-mph fastball and think about a wipeout slider, but that’s how he avoids hard contact. Righties square up all of his hard stuff. They had 38 doubles, six triples and 13 homers off him last season. He has to get ahead of them, which means inducing some looking strikes, and get them into slider counts in order to get them out consistently. Given everything Arizona has coming in terms of young starting pitching, Miley might take a Josh Collmenter turn within the next year or two, and help flesh out a deep bullpen by pitching to his instead of pitching around his deficiencies in the rotation. Like Collmenter, though, Miley is a valuable enough arm in the right role to project for a long career.

5. Randall Delgado - I did an in-depth look at Delgado through a couple of prisms a couple months ago. I will strive not to rehash it here. The short story: While his profile might sound good, finding pitchers with comparable skill sets and tendencies through the same age doesn’t inspire much confidence. Delgado looks like another guy cut from the cloth Kevin Towers likes best. He mixes a four-seamer and sinker for hard stuff, and a curve and change to change speeds. He emphasizes ground balls, at least so far. He has better control than command.

Patrick Corbin actually won this job. His fastball ticked up in the spring, and he beat Delgado despite a solid Cactus League from Delgado, too. Tyler Skaggs, like Delgado, will start the season in Triple-A. Skaggs and Corbin have the advantages of being left-handed (which probably shouldn’t be a concern, or an advantage anyway, but seems to be), and of being in-house guys with whom the coaches and instructors are more familiar. Both have less service time than Delgado, though. and an extra year in which they are eligible to be on optional assignment to the minors, which might have weighed more heavily in the equation for me. Delgado has more experience starting in the Majors than either, which is a small concern, but probably another pinky on the scale. I think Delgado still makes the most starts in this slot this season.

Bullpen:

1. J.J. Putz - Towers loves bullpen-building, and Putz was perhaps the signature addition Towers made prior to the surprise division-winning season of 2011. He’ll never shake the perception of fragility after injuries derailed what looked like a journey to stardom in the Mariners’ bullpen five years ago, and he has missed some time (with stiffness in his back and neck, mostly, but also a balky elbow) during his two years in Arizona, but he’s topped 218 batters faced three straight seasons, and he’s always good when healthy.

Putz signed an extension for 2014 this spring. Are you tired of hearing that yet? Think about this: Aaron Hill, Martin Prado, Miguel Montero, Cliff Pennington, Cody Ross, Trevor Cahill, David Hernandez, Brandon McCarthy, Heath Bell, Paul Goldschmidt and Putz all are officially signed for 2014. Even Jason Kubel is on the payroll, with a mutual option in place. Basically, that’s the whole team except guys who aren’t yet arbitration-eligible, or are, but are still under team control, like Ian Kennedy, Daniel Hudson, Gerardo Parra and Adam Eaton. Towers has bet on himself (and Kirk Gibson) as boldly as a GM can; there’s no safety net. The talent within the organization now is likely to be the talent within the organization next year. Putz was the first stone Towers laid in the process of rebuilding the team in his image, and Putz will be around to watch the capstone be placed, or to watch the whole thing collapse.

2. David Hernandez - Only six relief pitchers outstripped Hernandez’s 35.3-percent strikeout rate in a meaningful sample last season, and among them, the only guy with a better walk rate was Craig Kimbrel. Baseball’s most underrated pitcher is almost always a right-handed setup man, and in 2012, it was probably David Hernandez.

Towers’ reputation for building great bullpens always came with a caveat in San Diego: It was San Diego. The feeling was that, while Trevor Hoffman may have been truly great, a lot of the key cogs of Towers’ later renditions of the Padres’ pen were products of Petco Park. (The charge isn’t totally baseless: Kevin Cameron and Justin Hampson combined for a 2.75 ERA in 111.1 innings in 2007, for instance, despite a composite strikeout-to-walk ratio (ignoring intentional passes) of 84:43.) With Putz and Hernandez (a diamond in the rough after a rough turn as a swingman in Baltimore in 2010) in one of the league’s best hitters’ parks, he has made big strides toward ending that doubt-riddled conversation.

I want to hone back in on Hernandez for a moment. In an era inundated with slider specialists in the bullpen, he’s fairly offbeat, using (more or less) a two-pitch mix with a yakker of a curve instead as the breaking offering. Hernandez got whiffs on essentially 56 percent of all swings against that pitch in 2012. It’s vicious. Unlike most curves, it shows a meaningful positive platoon split, but still, Hernandez is the foremost practitioner of an all but lost martial art, the relief curve, and it’s a joy to watch him toy with hitters who have trained so hard for something harder and more tilted. That the curve bends away from right-handed batters while his fastball has terrific arm-side run in on those same batters makes his attack almost unfair.

3. Brad Ziegler - Everything the man throws finds the bottom of the zone. It helps, of course, if one releases the ball just north of that point. Ziegler, too, throws what goes as a curve, although if his every pitch didn’t dive as though hitting an invisible ceiling halfway to home plate, it might go as a slider. He certainly slings it like a slider to right-handers, releasing later and more out in front of his body, letting the thing cross the opponent’s whole field of vision before landing in the catcher’s mitt eight inches off the outside corner. If you think batters are merely being foolish by continuing to swing (they chased over half the time last year, coming up empty on 36 percent of those), you’ve never faced a soft-tossing sidearmer.

Using the same arm angle and action, Ziegler will simply switch to a changeup grip when facing lefties, and let the ball fade to the outside corner as his arm sells it. It’s not nearly as effective – no righty sidearmer is ever going to mow down good lefty batters – but it keeps them honest, at least.

Ziegler is, and it should be no great surprise, baseball’s very best at inducing ground balls. He’s five full seasons of Major League relief in, and has a 2.44 career ERA. David Hernandez was the mist underrated pitcher in baseball last season, but headed into 2013, he might not be as underrated as Ziegler as a projectable asset.

4. Tony Sipp - Sipp had pretty close to the same season in 2012 that he had had in 2011, but his ERA spiked and he fell out of favor. He’s not great at anything. He profiles like a lefty specialist, with almost solely a fastball and a slider in his repertoire, but the slider actually does better diving at the back feet of overanxious righties than it does against lefties, and his career platoon split is basically null.

Sipp neither misses a ton of bats, nor pounds the strike zone. All that said, he’s not a bad fourth option in a bullpen.

5. Heath Bell - Why it’s important to consider all trades within the broader context of the rosters involved, and to evaluate transaction groups, not transactions: The Diamondbacks had some sort of vision for their winter. They wanted to create depth, depth everywhere, and to do it, they were willing to trade a quarter for two dimes at times. That was the case in the deal that brought Bell to the club, involving Pennington and Chris Young. Never should Towers have had to take on Bell’s bad deal in order to get Pennington for Young, but (however perversely) Towers wanted Bell. He was part of the plan.

I’m not necessarily defending that desire, that plan. I think Towers has really overloaded his 40-man roster with onerous obligations to middling players, like Bell, Bloomquist, McDonald and Hinske. It’s often crucial, if one hopes to improve one’s club in-season, to have an open spot or two on the 40-man roster, or at least to have some path to putting an important potential call-up on said roster. Flexibility is a virtue in managing the roster rules that govern MLB, and Towers has headed himself off at every pass. Maybe he’s so confident that he will gleefully eat $1 million here, $4 million there and cut bait with these guys when they stand between him and an important move. Even if so, though, he’s needlessly hemmed himself in. Still, that mindset has to color the perception of the Bell-Pennington/Young deal. Towers didn’t view this as Young for Pennington, less the value of having to take on a bloated contract for a reliever who seemingly collapsed last season. He saw both players he got back as assets.

One more thing about Bell, regarding his 2012 regression. It’s important we not conflate ERA (his shot from 2.53 over five seasons in San Diego to 5.09 in Miami) with value for relief pitchers. That statistic doesn’t measure anything useful for relief pitchers. You mostly want to look at skills, and Bell’s skills didn’t degrade all that much last season. His strikeout rate had cratered in 2011, actually, and rebounded a bit in 2012. His walk rate rose but was manageable, and his ground-ball rate actually increased. He surrendered just five home runs. Most of the problem was a leap from a .269 batting average against on balls in play to a .346 figure.

I’m not defending Bell. He’s a fifth arm in a good bullpen, and that guy should make the league-minimum salary. Towers drafted Chicago Cubs prospect Starling Peralta in the Rule 5 Draft, and while Peralta spent last season in the Midwest League and is a real stretch as an MLB reliever right now, I’d have rather gone with him at $485,000 than Bell for two seasons at (even after the Marlins pay their share) $14 million. It’s just important to note that relievers’ stats are sometimes fickle and hard to evaluate, and that Bell was a little bit better than you probably thought last year.

6. Matt Reynolds – Reynolds is a useful lefty reliever, but Colorado was a terrible place for him. He faced 451 batters over the last two seasons with the Rockies, struck out 101, walked 26 and allowed 21 home runs. (all of those figures ignore intentional walks, which again, are a managerial action, not a pitcher’s.) That high home-run and pedestrian (for a one-inning reliever) strikeout rate didn’t mix well in the BABIP haven in the mountains.

Arizona is hitter-friendly, too, but not so much as to blow up guys who pitch to contact a bit, like Reynolds. That walk rate, just 5.8 percent of all opponents since 2011, is a really nice skill for a lefty specialist. You don’t want your LOOGY to come in, walk a batter and leave a mess for the righty you bring in next. For that matter, though certainly better facing lefty batters, Reynolds has a smaller-than-average platoon split, so he can be used a bit more flexibly than a pure specialist.

To get him, the Diamondbacks traded Ryan Wheeler. Wheeler, 24, was definitely expendable, with Davidson in the fold. That made this a no-sweat deal, and arguably the best of the winter for Arizona.

7. Josh Collmenter – Collmenter doesn’t have great stuff. He doesn’t even have good stuff. he makes Wade Miley look like Nolan Ryan. Collmenter relies exclusively on deception to get outs, mixing pitches and keeping opponents guessing with a wild, tilted, straight over-the-top delivery. It’s unsustainable; everyone knows it. As soon as chinks appeared in Collmenter’s armor last season, the club stripped him of starting duties, and he spent the rest of the season pitching low-leverage relief.

There’s one problem with this narrative: Collmenter hasn’t actually evaporated yet. In nearly 250 big-league innings and having faced just shy of 1,000 batters, he has a career strikeout-to-unintentional-walk ratio of 180:46. (That’s really good.)

I don’t necessarily buy into Collmenter, but the track record he offers is a whole lot better than those of the last guy in any other bullpen in the league. Arizona’s depth continues to astonish. They could lose their entire starting rotation to food poisoning in late July, and they could just replace them, with Daniel Hudson, Tyler Skaggs, Pat Corbin, Collmenter and Zeke Spruill. It’d be a worse rotation, but still better than three or four first rotations in the National League (Marlins, Rockies, Padres, maybe Brewers).

Other Guys

Tony Campana – OF: If you’re as fast as Tony Campana is, all you have to do in order to succeed in MLB is make consistent contact. Campana has a terrible arm and subpar instincts in center field, but remains an elite defender because he’s that damn fast. For his career, Campana has a stupid-good .266 BABIP on ground balls, and 18 percent of his career grounders have turned into infield hits. (Not 18 percent of those that stayed on the infield; 18 percent of them all.)

Unfortunately, Campana does not make consistent contact. He’s walked in just 5.5 percent of his career plate appearances, and has fanned in 21 percwent. A guy with so little power can’t sustain that. There’s just no power there. You can see it in the fact that his only MLB home run was a flare into the left-field corner. You can see it in the fact that 42 of his 83 career hits were either slow grounders or bunts, and that only two came on fly balls. He has to put the bat to the ball all the time, and he can’t do it.

Patrick Corbin – LHP: Although I’d rather bet on a right-handed hurler and would rather have the upside of Randall Delgado than the reliability of Corbin, there’s no question Corbin is impressively reliable. He fanned 86 and issued only 23 unintentional walks after reaching the big leagues in 2012. His command is great, and it’s great right now. No waiting necessary. He’s developed smoothly, never taking a step back in terms of level and posting innings totals (minors and Majors combined) of 144 2/3, 160 1/3 and 184 1/3 the past three years, at ages 20-22. He’s never been hurt and he’s never been bad. Okay, I’m talking myself into Patrick Corbin now. Still, Delgado offers better upside, but the competition is fascinating, and personally, I don’t think the Diamondbacks can lose either way.

Matt Davidson – 3B: He’s not a special third baseman, but he’s fine there. He’ll stick, which many once thought he would not, and that makes all the difference. With Prado locked up, there’s no rush, but Davidson had an .836 OPS in the pitcher-friendly Southern League last year (Double-A). He will not be that good in the big leagues, with less than stellar pure hitting skills, but his approach and power are MLB-caliber.

If the Diamondbacks stay into contention into September, this is how they become dangerous. They can call up Davidson, and play him at third against left-handed pitchers. Martin Prado can play every day, drifting between third base, first base and left field. Eric Chavez can play some first and third. They can create effective platoons of Gerardo Parra and Prado, and of Jason Kubel and Cody Ross. I don’t know whether they’re smart enough to do it, but it could be done, and the sheer personnel to make such improvements during the stretch run isn’t there in San Francisco or Los Angeles.

Didi Gregorius – SS: The centerpiece of the Trevor Bauer deal for Arizona was the glove and throwing arm of Gregorius. Everything else, from Tony Sipp and Lars Anderson to Gregorius’s offensive skill set, was a throw-in. If Gregorius develops an impressive contact skill, he could have almost exactly the unexpected breakout Andrelton Simmons had in 2012. That’s the comp. Simmons was a whiz at the most critical defensive position on the diamond, but there were questions about whether he would hit. He hit, so he became a minor star even as a rookie. Gregorius’s scouting reports are less friendly, offensively, but not wildly so, and the glove is just as good. We’ll see, though. Campana is a poignant reminder that not all the guys you think would be great if they just stopped striking out, actually can stop striking out.

David Holmberg – LHP: This is where it starts to get stupid in terms of organizational pitching depth. Holmberg registered 95 solid innings at Double-A last year, after mastering the California League in the first half (as well as any pitcher can; it’s a league for mashers). A tall lefty, he has everything a tall lefty needs: a fastball that sits at at least 90 miles per hour; a changeup with both deception and movement; and very good command.

He should be big-league ready by August. It’s possible he won’t be. Either way, though, he has basically no shot at the rotation, and only a modest opportunity to wedge his way into the bullpen. He might not be a top-10 candidate for a starting role. With Miley, Skaggs and Corbin around, he’s not even a top-three lefty candidate. Say Tony Sipp and/or Matt Reynolds get hurt. I’m not even sure the team grabs Holmberg to fill the bullpen vacancy, with Andrew Chafin lurking level behind but with higher-end stuff for short bursts. A trade almost has to happen at some point; the first two months of the season could decide the shape thereof.

Daniel Hudson – RHP: Scott Baker is over in Chicago reminding everyone not to take full recovery from Tommy John surgery for granted, but obviously, it’s no death knell. Hudson had good stuff prior to getting hurt, and hit his spots really well. If he gets back to full health, he should remain very effective.

It will be interesting to see whether Hudson makes mechanical adjustments when he does return. He presented an injury risk all along, with a very long arm action that had some people concerned in much the same way they’re now concerned about Chris Sale. If he finds a way to improve the economy of his motion without giving away stuff, awesome. If he keeps throwing the same way, he might not be a factor at all.

A.J. Pollock – OF: Colin Cowgill. Gerardo Parra. Which third player completes their set? It’s Pollock.

Arizona is a fourth-outfielder factory, or so it seems lately. Pollock is the next in line. Like Parra, he has average hitting ability, an average arm, average speed and average defensive actions. Unfortunately, unlike Parra, he bats right-handed, so he’s much easier to exploit as a would-be regular.

If he were a true center fielder with the glove, maybe it wouldn’t matter, but he’s not. It’s possible Arizona will have five really solid outfielders, with Parra and Pollock providing depth and platoon proofing off the bench, but they will not and should not rely on either player too heavily.

Tyler Skaggs – LHP: Briefly in contention for the fifth starter’s role, Sakggs had a crummy Spring and will open the year in Triple-A. The most interesting thing about him, to me, is how he has ascended so far on prospect lists. His numbers don’t jump off the page. Neither does his fastball velocity. He has a really, really good curve, and supposedly commands it supernally, but he kind of has to, right? He ranked 17th in Baseball Prospectus’s Top 101 prospects list, and 12th on Baseball America’s.

Here’s one issue, something that keeps me off-balance in trying to figure him out.

First, from Jason Parks, in ranking Skaggs as the organization’s top prospect:

clean delivery; maintains a good line to the plate

Now, read Doug Thorburn’s words in an article from December on mechanics:

Skaggs has some extreme spine-tilt that costs him considerable distance at release point, sacrificing depth in exchange for some extra height on his pitches. His momentum is average, but the greatest antagonist to his functional distance to the plate is that Skaggs strides at an extremely closed angle, directing his momentum in an inefficient pattern toward the left-hand batter’s box, a strategy which takes him further from the target. Mix in a sloppy glove-side and some inconsistent timing, and you have a pitcher who must overcome the challenge of pitching from a greater distance away from the plate than his competition.

Um. Uh-oh.

Personally, I lean toward Thorburn’s assessment. Obviously, the line from Parks’s piece is almost a throwaway, and he may not even care to defend it that ardently. It’s strange, though, that Parks (or his source of choice on Skaggs) so liked what Skaggs offers in terms of his line to the plate, whereas that’s Thorburn’s biggest beef with him. Thorburn has discussed this elsewhere, basically saying that lefty hurlers often get bad instruction from coaches obsessed with creating angles batters might find confusing, instead of simply going with the most natural and efficient delivery the pitcher’s body has in it. I find that the most compelling argument on either side, since it sure seems like a bad idea to sacrifice stuff or ease of delivery for deception that might not even materialize.

That said, his curve can be devastating, and having a second off-speed pitch to use against right-handed batters (an average changeup) is huge for Skaggs. I do think he will develop into a solid starter. It’s just hard to see him reaching the heights suggested by his recent prospect hype.

Zeke Spruill – RHP: Spruill lacks prodigious talent, but fills up the strike zone and had a 52 percent ground-ball rate in Double-A last year. He’s exactly the kind of pitcher Towers seems to love, and that’s kind of the problem. There are more talented pitchers over whom I fear Spruill might get an opportunity. It’s not that he’s bad, but barring massive injury problems, he shouldn’t be in their rotation, or even their bullpen, except in September.

Prediction

I have the Diamondbacks at 85-77, finishing third in the NL West. They might be a bit better than that in terms of true talent, but the Rockies are the only cupcake in their division, and for some preposterous reason, their new natural interleague rival is the Texas Rangers. Their depth will serve them well, but the star power in LA and San Francisco is going to overwhelm them.

Yeah, yeah, publish your team previews BEFORE the season, Trueblood. Well, I didn’t. I hope you’ll enjoy them anyway. As you can see, I put a lot of work into them. Hey, follow me on Twitter.

Hitting the Corners: Opening Night

A few scattered thoughts now that baseball is back:

• What a tour de force by Bo Porter. In his debut as an MLB manager, he did two good things that maybe three or four other managers anywhere in baseball would do.

  First, he brought in Erik Bedard to get a critical lefty out in the top of the sixth, but then let Bedard take it the rest of the way. Now, the game was blown open while Bedard was in the dugout having gotten just one out, and we don’t know whether Porter would have stuck with him had the margin remained thin. Still, it’s refreshing to see a 10-out relief effort, even from a starter-in-waiting.

  Second, he pinch-hit for Brandon Barnes in the bottom of the sixth, recognizing a high-leverage situation. Rick Ankiel made the decision look even better than it was by hitting a three-run pinch-hit homer, but the process is what captivated me, not the outcome.

• I very much doubt the Astros are planning a long-term pitching overhaul, something radically different from the current model of arm usage. I will say, though, that if that were their intent, it’s not like we would have heard about it. You would want to ambush your competition with any major zag from the industry’s zig.

  It’s possible they will continue to use relievers for very long outings, maybe even piggy-back them with certain starters, as they are doing in the high minor leagues. We wouldn’t know until it had already happened.

• The news of an imminent Elvis Andrus extension has me scratching my head. If the next piece of news is that Jurickson Profar has been dealt, or that Ian Kinsler has been, okay, great. Otherwise, though, it confuses me. Both Profar and Andrus are tremendous defensive shortstops, top-10 defenders at the most important position on the diamond. Yes, each has a good enough stick to have value at second base, too, or perhaps even in center field, but obviously, their positional/defensive contribution is diluted in either case.

  I would have expected Texas to choose Profar, since Kinsler is signed long-term already and Andrus could fetch a nice return, plus they would have more financial flexibility. Instead, it looks like they either prefer Andrus, or want to keep both. The former position is fine; the latter seems an untenable strategy.

• Some position battle winners who surprised me:

  Patrick Corbin of the Diamondbacks won the fifth starter job. I would have taken Randall Delgado myself. Part of that is my default preference for right-handed starters, but Delgado also seems to have the higher upside, from what I know and have seen. Corbin joins Wade Miley as a second lefty in the Arizona rotation.

  Jackie Bradley, Jr. and Jose Fernandez got Opening-Day roster spots, which underscores what I see becoming the trend all over baseball very, very soon: Teams are going to stop caring at all when players would theoretically become free agents, or even whether they achieve Super Two arbitration status. It just doesn’t make any sense to hold back players who can help the team in the name of theoretically saving a year of team control. If a guy is really good, if he blossoms in a really important way, you’re going to sign him to an extension, anyway. It’s no longer worth gaming the system and pissing off player agents just to kick that can down the road. The extensions that are killing free agency should also be killing the hand-wringing over this issue.

  Luis Mendoza got the fifth starter’s gig in Kansas City, beating out Luke Hochevar and Bruce Chen. I never would have thought he could blow past both of them. There’s a really good chance I’m the only person who feels this way, but I think Mendoza has some real and measurable upside, so to me, that’s a fairly big win for the Royals. I think he’s two wins better than either competitor. Maybe more.

I will consume my first live baseball of 2013 when I tune the radio in and listen to the first few innings of the Twins and Tigers today. It’s frigid here in Minnesota. Still excited.

Hitting the Corners: Michael Bourn, Other Stuff

Sometimes, I really want to float an idle thought or 12 about baseball as they occur to me, but don’t want to hack the idea into pieces for Twitter consumption. So I’m just going to start tossing some of those out in bunches, in posts like these.

-It’s February, which is one-year deal season. Last winter, the only multi-year free-agent deal handed out after February 1 went to Yoenis Cespedes—something of a special case. Ryan Ludwick, Edwin Jackson, Eric Chavez and Raul Ibanez were the biggest free agents to sign during the month. All got single years, although Ludwick and Jackson secured longer contracts this time around.

So Michael Bourn and Kyle Lohse are really on the wire here. Lohse might sign a one-year pact. But not Bourn. I think Scott Boras will do virtually anything to get Bourn a longer deal, because fellow Boras client Jacoby Ellsbury is due to hit the market next winter. Boras has watched the bevy of available center fielders this winter kill his guy’s value, and he’s unlikely to let the same thing happen to either of his clients next winter.

-There are a handful of units around the league so loaded as to almost demand a Spring Training trade. There’s just no sense in these clubs carrying as much depth in certain areas as they have right now. Those groups are:

1. The Athletics’ outfield: They can easily start four of Yoenis Cespedes, Coco Crisp, Chris Young, Josh Reddick and Seth Smith, because they don’t have any especially compelling DH candidates to steal at-bats. Still, given the team’s other weaknesses, someone there has less utility than the return they would likely generate.
2. The Cardinals’ starting rotation: Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter have each missed one of the last two years, but they both enter Spring Training healthy this year. In addition to them, the Cards have Jake Westbrook, Lance Lynn, Jaime Garcia (health is a question mark there), Joe Kelly, Trevor Rosenthal and Shelby Miller in place. Given their weakness at shortstop, it’d be sort of a shame if they didn’t turn some of that depth into reinforcements before Opening Day.
3. The Dodgers’ rotation: A year ago, all they had was Clayton Kershaw, Ted Lilly, Chad Billingsley, Aaron Harang and Chris Capuano. In August, they added Josh Beckett to that mix. When Billingsley’s elbow got balky down the stretch, they apparently decided they still were not safe. They added Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu to that corps this winter. Since they have a gaping hole on their infield, though, they might want to explore a watered-down version of the trade I envision the Cardinals making. Maybe only St. Louis could land Asdrubal Cabrera, but Los Angeles should be able to pry loose Jed Lowrie, somehow.
4. The Cubs’ rotation: The Athletics, Cardinals and Dodgers are contenders with tremendous depth, which is a great position to be in but a poor one from which to trade. The Cubs’ rotational depth on a poor team is not necessarily the envy of the league, but they have multiple potential trade chips and can get flexible. It’s a talent grab they’re after, so they can make literally any of Jeff Samardzija, Matt Garza, Edwin Jackson, Scott Baker, Scott Feldman, Travis Wood or Carlos Villanueva available and accept the best offer.
5. The Mariners’ first basemen and DHs: Of course, since half of their depth here came from moves this winter, it would seem incongruous for Seattle to flip one of them away. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how any team can carry Raul Ibanez, Michael Morse, Kendrys Morales, Jason Bay, Justin Smoak and Jesus Montero without feeling some redundancy. Montero apparently will get one last shot at catching (it won’t work), and Morse, Ibanez and Bay all stand to see some time in the outfield (yikes), but by the middle of March, one or two of them ought to have become so obviously unprepared to play those alternate positions as to move firmly into the expendable column. The flurry of acqusitions signals not much faith at all in Smoak; he might be the one to go.

-Speaking of Spring Training trades, expect one or two more than in previous years this season, now that everyone is keenly aware that the right to make a qualifying offer to a player has pretty substantial value. Matt Garza is the big name to watch, but Ricky Nolasco and Justin Morneau are on the bubble, too.

 

On Alex Rodriguez, PEDs, Jeff Passan’s Cat and Jon Heyman’s Oedipal Conplex

I’m so sick and tired of PEDs, Alex Rodriguez, national baseball columnists and Twitter snark, I’m ready to kill a cat, stuff it in a box and nail the damn thing shut. Or stab my eyes out.

The metaphor isn’t an accident, of course, and I apologize for the cliché. Seems like everyone and their brother is using Schrödinger’s Cat for something lately. Hate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe Pandora’s Box is less trendy, but it’s just as tired, and fits less neatly the central dilemma of the steroid era.

See, we had the box. Or not so much we, way back in the 1990s, but the national sports media. They had the box. And the truth is, they had a pretty good idea that something was going on. I don’t know how many beat writers and columnists from back then knew specific players who used performance-enhancing drugs, or how many players most guys imagined used, or with what certainty they believed there was something amiss there. But they were around all the time, and the drug culture in clubhouses was a pretty loosely-held secret, so they had some sort of inkling what would happen if they opened the box. That cat was dead, or at least, they were 64 percent sure it was dead, or it was 37 percent dead, if and when they chose to open the lid.

This is one thing people tend not to discuss when they talk about Schrödinger. They say, as he did, that until you open that box, the cat is either dead or alive, and in a sense, it is therefore both dead and alive.

So it’s 50/50. Even if you’re 80 percent sure, even if you’re 99 percent sure, one way or the other, it’s 50/50. You’re not committed to any truth, or any eventuality, until the lid comes off.

I will propose a less hipsterish analogy, and maybe one more apropos. Consider Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles. By the time the chorus finishes chanting you into the first scene, you know that Oedipus, without realizing it, killed his father and usurped him by claiming his throne and bedding his wife (Oedipus’s mother). But Oedipus doesn’t know. All he knows is that the kingdom is afflicted by a horrible famine (plague? It’s been a while. Not easy to read lightly, the Ancient Greek tragedies. But you get the gist.) and that, as a benevolent king, gee, he really wants to unburden his people.

So he seeks out Teiresias, the blind seer. He demands, all but tortures the truth out of the guy. But the truth, of course, is horrible. It’s Oedipus’s fault his people are suffering. Oedipus has slept with his mother; she has borne him children. (The English royal family says, “So… ?”) The plague is the gods’ punishment.

Oedipus can’t take it. Who could take it, honestly? He stabs his eyes out with broaches. Can’t remember if he dies. Doesn’t matter. There’s no happy ending there.

The media, that boys’ club that grew up in the 1970s and got beat jobs in the late 1980s and now have national columnist positions in the 2000s, is like Oedipus. They unwittingly created the plague of PED use, by so effusively praising big home run hitters, lionizing them. (The league had a hand in that, too, but don’t kid yourself. MLB.com was a one-page back then. They didn’t have all the platforms and the reach they have now. The independent media steered public opinion much more forcibly than the league.) They presided in peace over a thrilling era, post-strike, and while they had every chance to make those years about Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez, they always chose the muscle-bound sluggers.

Then the dam broke, and when it did, these guys – who had to have known about this on some level years and years prior – suddenly lunged after anyone who couldn’t run fast enough and held them by their lapels, shouting for answers. Jose Canseco somehow got cast as Teiresias.

Now that the big secret is out, though, the writers lack the proper Oedipal remorse. They still want to blame the players (those cheating bastards), and they still want to share in whatever public indignation remains (is it not all gone yet? Am I the only one numb?). They want us to join them in feeling lied-to and betrayed. Jeff Passan seems not to even care too much about us; he just feels lied-to and betrayed, and wants us all to know.

It doesn’t work that way. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t feel personally wounded that Nixon officials lied to them; they felt a very righteous fury at the lies Nixon officials told the public. Somewhere along the way, sports journalists decided not to care if they seemed hypocritical, or even petty, and many of them abdicated their responsibility to report the news fairly, with measured gravitas and intellect.

Anyway, back to Oedipus and Schrödinger. It’s not about the reaction once the truth is known. It’s about whether the truth is a desirable thing to have in the first place. Sometimes, it really is better not to open the box. It really is better not to know.

Obviously, there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Cheating is one thing; cheating is inevitable and virtually impossible to even curb in sports. Cheating becomes something we should hear about and deal with on an ongoing basis only when it threatens the health or safety of those cheating or being cheated. Yes, players should be discouraged from using these substances. They can be destructive, especially in the long term. Sometimes (more in football than baseball, but still) they create an unsafe field of play. These are serious, grave issues. They should be dealt with directly and firmly. That was what drew Ken Caminiti out and blew the lid off the situation 11 years ago.

I’m not sure the leagues should be part of that, though. Making these substances against the rules is fine, but making preventing their use a priority on a league level not only leads to players being occasionally slandered and constantly hectored, but also implies that the rules are there for competitive, rather than safety reasons. That shouldn’t be the case.

Players’ unions could do all this more effectively. A well-run union should always have an active role in maintaining a safe work environment and ensuring that membership in that union provides near- and long-term value. The union is on the player’s side, and can more effectively convince him that they’re discouraging use of PEDs in his best interest, not someone else’s. The union can be trusted, at least as much as the league can be trusted. We need to remove the stigma from steroid use, because it clearly is not a deterrent, and because the threat it poses to competitive integrity in baseball is probably none, and is definitely dwarfed by the threat it poses to players’ health.

I am tired. It’s sucking the fun out of baseball to have to talk about this once a fortnight, for two days straight. It has to stop. National writers aren’t going to change that conversation, because they really like having something so easy about which to write, and maybe even moralize. But the rest of us should just agree to move on, and talk about this stuff only in more human terms. It’s a nice alternative to self-mutilation or felinicide. Please?

Justin Upton: Not Remotely to Be Affected by Turner Field

Justin Upton has some of baseball’s most dramatic home/away splits over the past several seasons, so when the Arizona Diamondbacks dealt him to the Atlanta Braves last week, some analysts raised concerns about how Upton would translate to a new home park. It was a fair observation: Turner Field is neutral, maybe pitcher-friendly, whereas Chase Field in Arizona is one of the best hitters’ parks around.

It’s fair in general, but for Upton specifically, it’s just not an issue. Consider the info you’ll find at the link below:

http://www.hittrackeronline.com/detail2.php?id=2012_448&type=hitter

Whoa. Upton simply does not hit cheap home runs. In 2012, only one of his 17 bombs fell under the category “Just Enough,” according to the hit tracker – and that was a screaming line drive, one of his hardest off the bat, never rising more than 55 feet off the ground.

*Note: One other homer was probably lucky, as it was an in-the-park shot to the deepest part of Chase Field. But even that one went 407 feet in the air, and according to the site, would have left 13 MLB parks.

Now, obviously, ball parks often impact more than just the home-run rate. The fact that Upton’s power is park-proof doesn’t mean, without looking further, that we can dismiss his home/away splits as a non-factor. You should never assume all players will feel the same magnitude, or even the same type, of impact when changing environments. This is because parks aren’t just big or small, but are unique and often have multiple quirks. Moreover, players are people, and shouldn’t be expected to handle transitions as if they were robots.

All that said, in this case, the difference between the direct, quantifiable impact on right-handed batters of Upton’s old home park and his new one lives almost exclusively in home-run rates.

Park Factors for Right-Handed Batters, 2012, Chase Field and Turner Field

Home Runs: Chase 114 – Turner 85
Doubles and Triples: Chase 110 – Turner 109
Hits on Ground Balls: Chase 102 – Turner 100
Hits on Fly Balls: Chase 104 – Turner 107

Barring some unforeseen effect, then, Upton is not going to suddenly lose all offensive value because his new playing environment will be much more humid. This is not Earth-shattering news, but for whoever was wondering, it’s nice to know. Upton has been inconsistent over his career, so projecting his 2013 is still tricky, but the park should take no blame nor credit if his performance changes drastically.

On Justin Upton, B.J. Upton, Baseball Brothers and Bill James

The following is from p. 449-450 of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract:

Lee May had a younger brother, Carlos, who also played in the majors. Carlos got 80% of the talent in the family; he was as strong as Lee, which was very strong indeed, but he could also run, and he could throw a little bit. He was a natural hitter, a lefty, and he knew the strike zone. when he was 21 years old, he looked like the second coming of willie Mays.

Carlos blew his thumb off in a military training accident, which cost him a lot, but there was another problem. Whereas Lee May was a hard-working, hustling player within the limits of his ability, a respected clubhouse leader in the early days of the Big Red Machine, Carlos played baseball as if he didn’t really give a shit, pardon my French. I have noticed this same syndrome other times, that when you have brothers who are baseball players, very often the youngest brother has or is credited with having the most talent in the family, but turns out to be the one who does the least with it.

…

As the Alous brothers were emerging, Jesus Alou was the one who was always thought to have real, big-time talent, but he never did very much with it. I think that the reason this happens, perhaps, is that when a boy has several older brothers who play ball, he may play a lot of baseball at a very early age. Because the kid has played way more baseball than the other kids his age, he may be years ahead of them in the development of his skills—and it will look, to those around him, like he has just world of talent.

But in reality, the younger sibling is being pulled along by his brothers’ interest in the game, while his own interests and his own focus, once it develops, may be somewhere else. Of course, once in a while you get the younger brother who does have the focus and the desire to excel, and then you get Joe DiMaggio or George Brett. But there aren’t very many Joe DiMaggios or George Bretts. Most of the time, you get Hector Cruz or Jesus Martinez.

I would love to add my own piercing personal insight to those thoughts, but I have no brother, and don’t always understand the nuances of that relationship. People often say having a true best friend is akin to having a brother, and in one way they’re right, but in another way, that’s stupid and not at all useful, and this situation is more like the second way.

Justin Upton and B.J. Upton are teammates on the Atlanta Braves right now. One of them arrived as a free agent, one whose effort and intensity has been questioned by teammates in the past. One arrived by trade, after basically two and a half years of his team’s ownership, front office and coaching staff intimating without much evidence, but also without much equivocation, that he is lazy, unfocused, mentally fragile, physically fragile, or some mixture of them all. Both are wildly talented, and both have been superstars for full seasons (B.J. in 2007-08, Justin in 2009 and 2011). Both have also had solid, but unspectacular seasons (B.J. 2009-12, Justin 2010 and 2012). Both played more than most people play before their 22nd birthdays, but neither was especially good before their 22nd birthdays. Neither has been less than a solid-average player for a full season since then.

Yet, both are treated as having imperfect makeup; both are treated as if they have tremendous potential into which they have not yet tapped. Both are considered, if not disappointing, at least enigmatic.

Justin certainly has gotten the worst of it all, mostly because he played for so long in the shadow of bizarre trade rumors. He plays right field, so it’s more alarming when he doesn’t hit well. He is younger, so he has less of a track record of success. He has much more prodigious power, which always lends itself to overstatement of a player’s overall potential. He had the best single season either player has ever had in 2011, raising expectations to a different level.

I don’t sense that Justin feels pulled along, or that he does not, as James wrote of Carlos May, “give a shit, pardon my French.” To the contrary, he seems to have fun playing the game. He watches his home runs, but not in an insufferable way, just in a loving way. He hustles on the bases, hustles in the field, seems very thoughtful in interviews in terms of how he approaches the game. I don’t think he resents or dislikes baseball.

I will say, though, that something seems to be missing for the younger Upton. He seems almost too unfazed by outside problems. An ESPN: The Magazine feature on him from this summer left me with the impression that the man could not care less what the media, fans or even his ownership thinks of him. That’s great for him as a person, but a little bit of a problem for him as a player.

The optimal psychological frame for any athlete will be slightly different from the same for all others, but there are a few things I have come to believe are nearly universally true in this area:

1. Baseball requires a certain obsession. Single-mindedness makes you great, or at least allows you to tap fully into your potential. 
2. An especially centered, settled life can leave one too willing to allow the comforts of home to break tension created during a hard day at the park.
3. Without external pressure and scrutiny from which to try hard to get away, one rarely has the necessary impetus to really get inside oneself, drill on swing mechanics, be willing to stay out of the clubhouse for an extra hour to work on something.

I think Justin will be much better off in Atlanta. When he said of playing with B.J., “we’re going to butt heads a little bit. That’s going to be the fun part,” I took notice. That’s exactly the idea. let your teammates push you, let your family push you, and allow the external stuff to keep you going a few minutes longer, dwelling a little bit deeper in the game, than you would otherwise.

I think Justin is likely to be happier in Atlanta, and that’s great. I’m not advocating horrible home environments, excessive drinking or the like just so players can perform better. With more motivation and maybe a touch of testiness, Justin might be able to shake the little-brother syndrome and reach his full potential in Atlanta.