Minor League contracts with an invitation to spring training have been popping up like wildflowers this offseason and have seemingly become more common in recent years than they were in the early part of the decade. Frequently, it’s a way for teams to get a good look at an aging free agent without committing either the roster spot or any amount of money they’ll actually miss.

That doesn’t mean that players on an NRI are inherently worthless, especially in a fantasy context were you can let the team do the heavy lifting of figuring out whether a player has much left to offer. For deep-league players, especially those in two-catcher, AL- or NL-only leagues, there’s talent floating around in the minor league pool that will likely get a shot at a backup job. The most promising of the bunch: J.R. Towles.

Towles was once a shiny prospect in the Astros organization, a catcher that could hit, flashed a little bit of power, and could throw out a few runners — enough to make it possible that he’d stick behind the plate anyway. It’s hard to look at Towles’ stats and say that he had a fair chance and threw it away; he’s never had more than 175 major league PAs in a season and even his time in the minors has been fragmented. Injuries have played a role, though the exact extent to which that has been his Waterloo is hard to tell given the state of minor league injury data.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that he can play enough defense to stick behind the plate and has a minor league OPS of .859. He’ll turn 28 just before camps open, so it isn’t as though you have to hope against all odds that he’ll recapture the promise of his youth. The question is whether he’ll be able to make the team or if he’ll have to hang out in Rochester until a roster spot opens up. The Twins are rather stocked on catchers with Joe Mauer, Ryan Doumit, and Drew Butera all already on the roster, but that doesn’t mean the way is barred for Towles.

Mauer and Doumit don’t exactly have the best record of staying healthy and the Twins seem content with the idea of rotating the two between catching, first base, and DH in order to keep both bats in the lineup while lessening the catching load. What this means is that there’s a real possibility that they’ll carry a traditional backup catcher, meaning Towles need only beat out Butera and he’s on the roster. Which is doable, but might be difficult.

This time last year, Towles wouldn’t have had a prayer of beating out Butera, who the Twins like for his ability to handle the pitching staff and throw out runners. He is, in almost every way, your quintessential all-glove-no-hit backup catcher and the team believed they could live with that. What they thought they could live with was a player who hit .220 and threw out about a third of baserunners in whatever limited playing time they got. In 2011, Butera threw out just under a third of those who ran against him — a perfectly fine rate — but hit just .167/.210/.239 in over 250 PAs. Butera is still a better defensive catcher than Towles, so if the Twins want to carry a catch-and-throw catcher, it’ll be Butera and Towles will head to Triple-A. If they think there’s a chance that whoever fills the role is going to get anywhere near the 250-300 PAs that Butera got last year, Towles will get a definite chance to show he can still hit in camp.

For the vast majority of fantasy players, Towles will still be too deep to use even if he makes the roster. However, he’s worth following through camp for players in multiple-catcher leagues, as he isn’t guaranteed to be mediocre and with the respective injury histories of Mauer and Doumit, he’ll have as good a shot at concerted playing time as any third catcher in baseball.

Francisco Liriano and Jonathan Sanchez have something to prove in 2012.

Both pitchers signed one-year deals on Tuesday, avoiding arbitration with the Twins and Royals at a cost of $5.5 million and $5.6 million, respectively. Both pitchers are in their last year of arbitration and would like to be much wealthier men than they are now this time next year. In order to do that, however, both pitchers need to prove that they are more than they showed in a disappointing 2011.

The good news for fantasy owners is that if Sanchez and/or Liriano is successful in recapturing some of his previous held promise, there is value to be had on draft day. Taking both pitchers and hoping one rebounds is doable in some scenarios — namely, leagues that typically have strong candidates on the wire throughout the season — but for the vast majority of players, that plan exposes them to an unreasonable amount of risk and it virtually guarantees a failure rate no lower than 50 percent. So, which talented, but enigmatic pitcher is going to be the better bet in 2012?

Since 2008, Sanchez has never struck out fewer than 22 percent of the hitters he’s faced and never walked fewer than 11 percent. His FIP has moved less than half a run, maxing out at 4.30 and hitting a low at 3.85; his xFIP has an even smaller range, from 4.36 to 3.94. This is to say, while his ERA has swung from 3.07 to 5.01 and his WHIP has moved 1.23 to 1.45, he has been pretty much the same pitcher during that time.

In a traditional 5X5, the trade-off is pretty clear: Strikeouts for WHIP, with ERA being the factor that swings Sanchez from “survivable” to “more trouble than he’s worth”. Moving to AL isn’t going to help him tip the scales in the right direction, and I don’t see him challenging for 20 wins with this year’s Royals team — though they may be a surprisingly strong contender in a weakened AL Central. While not getting to face opposing pitchers anymore will hurt his strikeout numbers some, his upside is still there; his downside will be somewhat determined by Kansas City’s defense. Unfortunately, KC was one of the 10 worst defenses in baseball last year via plus/minus and no better than average by almost any measure. Still, while the move to KC won’t help him, Sanchez is going to be more or less they same pitcher he has been since coming into the majors.

Liriano, on the other hand, has been an absolute nightmare for owners and drafters. His seasons have been everywhere between tremendous and awful; over the last two seasons, he has been worth 7 WAR, split 6 and 1. His career xFIP is 3.57 despite the fact that he has never had a single season with an xFIP between 2.95 and 4.25. The National Library of Medicine refers to smallpox as “A Great and Terrible Scourge.”  With a little reshuffling, we get an apt description of Liriano: Great or a terrible scourge.

For Liriano, it’s not about the slider, it’s about his ability to set up the slider with his four- or two-seam fastballs. In 2010, when he was one of the 10 best pitchers in baseball, he primarily threw a low-90s two-seam fastball, which he complimented with a mid-90s four-seamer and an occasional change up, which kept hitters off balance enough to leave them susceptible to his slider, which generated a 22 percent swing-and-miss rate. In 2011, he lost 2 MPH off of both fastballs and missed fewer bats with both. While his slider remained a huge part of his arsenal, losing the element of surprise that comes with it made it less effective.

Liriano’s switch from throwing predominantly a two-seam fastball in 2010 to throwing almost exclusively four-seamers in 2011 bears further study, but the troubling thing about it is that I can’t find a compelling reason for the switch. If the switch were related to the two bouts of shoulder inflammation he had, then I would expect him to switch back to the two-seamer now that the inflammation — presumably — has gone down. If it was simply a try-it-and-see switch, I would expect that a full season of ineffectiveness would compel him to switch back to the two-seamer again. The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be a single reason for the switch, making it impossible to guess whether he’ll switch back or not.

Liriano’s WHIP and ERA have fallen mostly into the same range that Sanchez’s have fallen in, the only difference being that Liriano’s FIP and xFIP are typically match his ERA irrespective of what part of the swing it’s in. So, while Sanchez is more or less the same pitcher year-to-year, who gets undone by bad luck or general regression, Liriano appears to be a completely different pitcher, which isn’t so helpful. This isn’t really a failing of xFIP or anything like that, pitchers don’t typically change their fundamentals this way.

There is a chance that Liriano puts everything together in 2012. He has the tools, we’ve seen him do it before, but even in 2010, his WHIP was still only 1.26 and his ERA 3.62. You can get that kind of production elsewhere without exposing yourself to his downside. As to the question of who would I rather have, I just don’t see enough in Liriano that makes him better than Sanchez’s guaranteed strikeouts. Liriano may have the higher ceiling and a similar floor, but until I can discern with more clarity why he completely overhauled his pitch selection from 2010 to 2011, I’m going with Sanchez, then gritting my teeth every time he issues more than 2-3 walks. Time to stock up on mouth guards.

The migration of players from San Diego to Cincinnati continued on Monday — albeit with a stopover in Pittsburgh — as Ryan Ludwick signed a one-year deal with the Reds. Assuming some unforeseen incident doesn’t keep Ludwick from suiting up for Dusty Baker, it will be Ludwick’s fourth club — and third in the NL Central — since opening day 2010.

Since leaving St. Louis at the 2010 trade deadline, Ludwick has struggled to make a real impact for either his team or in a fantasy sense. He hit .228/.301/.358 with 17 HR in the 160 games he spent in San Diego and a slightly better .232/.341/.330 with 2 HR during his abbreviated stint with the Pirates at the end of the 2011. So, is there any hope that Ludwick will return to the kind of production he showed during his four years in St. Louis when he hit .280/.349/.507? Read the rest of this entry »

Manny Ramirez is looking for a team, the Rays were looking for a designated hitter, could the two put aside the unpleasantness that was the 2011 season and work things out? Surely the sheer amount of unsold merchandise from last year had to be an incentive to let bygones be bygones — and to let Manny be Manny — down by Tampa Bay, no?

No. It was never going to happen, and the Rays confirmed that it wouldn’t happen by signing former Oriole Luke Scott to a one-year deal on Wednesday with a club option for 2013. Scott isn’t a bad first baseman and could see time there with the Rays, but it’s fair to assume that he’ll get a large share of his starts as the DH, a role he had in Baltimore before the arrival of Vlad Guerrero. Read the rest of this entry »

This time of year, I’ll take baseball in almost any way I can find it up to and including writing up indoor whiffleball games. Perhaps a more traditional outlet for catching at least some glimpse of the boys of summer in the winter are the Dominican and Venezuelan winter leagues. There are others, the Australian and Mexican leagues feature some current major leaguers and a few interesting prospects, but the Dominican and Venezuelan leagues have been around for longer and have a great number of players worth watching.

There is a definite incentive for fantasy players to track the winter leagues and see if who is playing well. Prior to Francisco Liriano’s strong 2010 season, he dominated the DWL to the tune of a 3-1 record with a 0.49 ERA and a 0.78 WHIP over the course of 37 innings. While he didn’t exactly replicate that level of success once the MLB season began, owners who gambled on him got 14 wins, 201 strikeouts, a 1.26 WHIP and a 3.62 ERA, which is a strong payoff for a late-round grab. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into this offseason, there was some expectation that the Cubs would make a big splash. Starting back in May, when then-Cardinal Albert Pujols hugged then-GM Jim Hendry, there was a sizable group of fans who well and truly believed that the Cubs were going to sign either Pujols or Prince Fielder to push them into a bright and glorious future on the corner of Clark and Addison. Read the rest of this entry »

So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

— Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

In this season of Hall of Fame ballots and reflection on players past, it often comes up how disappointing it can be for fans to watch a favorite player whose glory days are behind them. If a player wants to keep playing even after their skills have begun to dull, that is certainly their right, but aging is seldom a pleasant process to watch from afar.

The newest Ray, Fernando Rodney, won’t have to worry about causing fans such retrospective grief, as he’s unlikely to garner much Hall of Fame support, but he the idea of staying just a little too long may have occurred him over the course of the last year. Coming off his 37 save season with the Tigers in 2009, Rodney signed a two-year deal that would pay him $11 million to finish games for the Angels. Over the course of that deal, Rodney saved a total of 17 games. In 2010, he lost the role to Brian Fuentes and in 2011 he was muscled out by Jordan Walden, so it’d be hard to blame him for feeling as though he had overstayed his welcome almost from the first day he arrived in Anaheim. Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of last night’s too-close-to-call Iowa Caucuses, today, it’s time to look at two players who seem to be going close to one another in the early mock draft returns. In the interest of fairness, one comes from the American League, the other from the National League, so no one can accuse me of favoring one party over the other. * Read the rest of this entry »

You’re supposed to have the resolutions in place when the new year starts, but, well, my family is still waiting for their Christmas cards from me…for 2010. I can hit print deadlines with no problem, but social deadlines apparently still confound me. C’est la vie.

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, New Years is still some 45 days away anyway, so consider these early rather than late. With new calendars appearing all over the world and the lessons of last season well and truly learned, here are my resolutions for the 2012 fantasy season. Feel free to post yours in the comments.

Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the offseason, Roy Oswalt told teams he was looking for a multiyear contract, which severely limited the market for the 34-year-old. Now that he has relented on that demand, and has instead said that he’s looking for a one year deal to rebuild his value after an injury plagued 2011 campaign, he has teams beating a path to his agent’s office — or at least politely calling and leaving a message stating their interest in his client.

Money will of course be a factor in Oswalt’s final decision — money is always a factor in any decision regarding player movement — but it isn’t unthinkable that he might take less to play in a park that will make him a more attractive option this time next year. That said, he’s not passing up $5 million a year from the Mets to take $1.50 and a bus pass from the Cubs, so perhaps not all things are weighted equally. Read the rest of this entry »