The Braves are not the best team in their division, and their best bet for a playoff berth in 2010 is to steal the Wild Card from the NL West runner-up. But their future is so bright that you need sunglasses to look directly at it, and given the core they have to build around, they may be preparing for another long run of division titles.

Most organizations would kill to have one of Jason Heyward, Brian McCann, Tommy Hanson, or Yunel Escobar. The Braves, of course, have all four, and the talent doesn’t end there. Jair Jurrjens isn’t as good as his ERA would suggest, but he’s still a quality young arm. Even the young-ish role players, such as Martin Prado and Melky Cabrera, can play. And, of course, there’s still the old guard hanging around providing value for the next few years – Chipper Jones, Tim Hudson, Derek Lowe, Troy Glaus, and Billy Wagner still have something left in the tank.

The result is a roster that is a blend of premium young talent and enough of a supporting cast to play winning baseball right now. The team can hit, the rotation is deep, and they don’t have a single obvious hole on the roster. The only real question is whether the kids can develop fast enough to still make a run at a World Series before the veterans decline beyond the point of usefulness.

As Eno covered over on ESPN yesterday, expectations for Heyward’s value in 2010 have to be somewhat muted. Very few players are above average at age 20, even the phenoms. By the time he comes into his own, and top prospects such as Julio Teheren, Freddie Freeman, and Arodys Vizcaino arrive in Atlanta, the sun will likely be setting on the careers of Jones, Hudson, Lowe, and Wagner. Not every team is able to handle the transition well, as there is a natural pull to go for it all while the guys you have can still produce, but the Braves have enough depth of prospects that they may be able to have their cake and eat it too – making sure the big league team can win while still breaking in the best of the young players from the farm.

Put simply, the Braves are a player development machine, and with the pipeline of talent they’ve established, they should be good for a long time. It might not result in October baseball this year, but if you’re an Atlanta fan, there is a lot to be excited about.

Once a powerhouse in developing young talent – especially pitchers – the organization slipped a bit in the player development game in the early-to-mid-2000s. You can now argue that the organization is back on track, and focusing on quality, rather than quantity – and that it’s diversified its portfolio.

Tommy Hanson, currently in the Braves starting rotation, is just 23 and entering his sophomore season in the big leaguers. The right-hander burst onto the scene in ’09 by posting a 3.50 FIP and allowing just 105 hits in 127.2 innings of work. The club will also feature an early Rookie of the Year favorite in right-fielder Jason Heyward. The prospect put on an epic display this spring and his size, tools, and statistics suggest he could become a massive star in a hurry. I’m tempted to invoke the name of Albert Pujols… but I won’t.

The club has some other young players helping out at the MLB level, too, including second baseman Martin Prado, catcher Brian McCann, shortstop Yunel Escobar, outfielder Melky Cabrera and pitcher Jair Jurrjens. It’s a good, young core to build around. The organization’s Top 10 prospect list also includes promising names like first baseman Freddie Freeman, catcher Christian Bethancourt, and pitchers Julio Teheran, Arodys Vizcaino, and Craig Kimbrel.

The club’s mid-2000s stumble was partially due to poor drafting choices with the likes of Macay McBride, Jeff Francoeur, Luis Atilano, Eric Campbell, Joey Devine, and Cody Johnson. Top international prospects like Wilson Betemit and Andy Marte also failed to develop. Pitcher Adam Wainwright was in Cy Young consideration last year, but he did not blossom until entering the St. Louis Cardinals organization.

While employing a win-now attitude, the club has sacrificed a lot of young talent over the past few seasons, including pitcher Neftali Feliz, shortstop Elvis Andrus, as well as catchers Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Tyler Flowers.

There was a small shift in draft philosophy in 2009 as the club took two college players with its only two selections in the first three rounds, including first rounder Mike Minor. Those were the first four-year college selections that the club had made in the first three rounds of the amateur draft in three years – unless you count reliever Joshua Fields in ’07, whom the club failed to sign.

After 10 years, scouting director Roy Clark has been replaced by Tony DeMacio. It will be interesting to see what direction the club takes with the 2010 amateur draft. The organization punted its first-round selection for veteran reliever Billy Wagner, but it has a supplemental first round pick and an extra second rounder for the loss of Mike Gonzalez. Whoever ends up getting selected will be overseen by Kurt Kemp, who enters his third season as director of player development.

It’s actually kind of scary to think about what this club would be capable of in three to five years if it had a lineup including Flowers, McCann, Freeman, Escobar, Andrus, and Heyward, as well as a staff led by Hanson and Feliz. Even without that day dreaming, the organization still has a pretty promising future, especially if it can re-focus its efforts in the amateur market.

The Atlanta Braves are back: they’re a pretty good team that has enough talent to make the playoffs, but not to go very far. They led the majors in starters’ ERA last year, they have a top-5 farm system and some of the best frontline talent in the majors. They’ve missed the playoffs for four straight years, averaging just 80 wins a season, but this could be the year they finally make it back. (CHONE and the Fangraphs Fans think the Braves will win the division in 2010.) The trouble is, they’re in the same division as the back-to-back NL champs, and they have some of the same weaknesses they’ve always had.

The team has some exceptional young stars: C Brian McCann, SS Yunel Escobar, P Jair Jurrjens, and P Tommy Hanson are all under team control through at least 2013, not to mention rookie super-prospect Jason Heyward. But they’ve been surrounded by below-replacement-level talent in recent years, the sort of aging veterans that 68-year old manager Bobby Cox can’t lay off but GM Frank Wren really ought to know better, like Garret Anderson, Corky Miller, and Chris Woodward. Cox is retiring after 2010, and probably will move into the front office brain trust, as John Schuerholz did after he retired. Wren will finally get to hire his personal manager, but he won’t necessarily have a much freer hand in personnel decisions: Cox and Schuerholz will continue vetting every move.

Wren’s showed some ability to fill the team’s holes through trades, but he still often leaves dead weight on the roster. Throughout his tenure, the team has strangely been strongest up the middle and weakest at the corners, as it likely will remain in 2010, unless the team gets exceptionally lucky with injury risks Troy Glaus and Chipper Jones, and Kaline-like production out of Heyward. As a result, they’re significantly underpowered. No regular in 2009 slugged .500, and there’s a good chance no one will in 2010 either. The team’s power shortage is one of its biggest offensive weaknesses: this team has long had trouble in one-run games, hitting more poorly in later innings and stranding runners on base. The power outage meant that despite being 11th in OBP in 2009, the Braves were 17th in runs: they could get them on, but couldn’t get them in.

Beyond Heyward, OF Jordan Schafer and 1B Freddie Freeman are the only impact position prospects in the high minors; once Heyward graduates, the Braves’ farm strength will be almost entirely in pitching. And as it was at their height, the Braves will be led by a terrific young pitching staff and a more-or-less average offense. (In 2009, the Braves had the 17th-highest OPS in baseball and the lowest starters’ ERA in baseball, exactly as they had in 2000.) That’s a formula that works for them, though it’s also a formula that led to five NLDS losses in six years.

The Phillies are the team to beat, but their payroll is ballooning, and they’ll have much less money to work with if they happen to miss the playoffs. Because of their farm system and young team-controlled stars, the Braves are the team best positioned to pick up the slack. They’re one of the best teams in the National League. But these days that’s almost a backhanded compliment. There’s a reason that the first six teams on the Organizational Rankings are all in the Junior Circuit.

Last Monday, I called for your expectations for Reds top prospect Aroldis Chapman this season. The Cuban southpaw was pitching on the MLB Network, and I thought it would be a nice opportunity for some of us that hadn’t seen him throw to do a little tele-scouting. As luck would have it, I jinxed Chapman, whose velocity fell hard in his second inning of work — a product of a sore back he may have withheld from the team.

So, rather than report the results on another Chapman throw day, I’ve opted to save the lefty from my jinxes. He recovered quickly enough to work an inning from the bullpen on Sunday, reportedly touching 97 mph with his fastball. His slider, which looked well behind his change-up last week, was apparently back to its nasty former self.

However, this setback will probably be enough to move Chapman’s opening day assignment to the minor leagues. While I suspect this extra week of information might have altered your expectations a bit, we did keep the polls open through Sunday night. The turnout was very good, I thought: 504 entries that filled out the first four questions.

The fifth question, which I borrowed from Tango at the Book Blog, was a bit of a gaffe on my part. I didn’t explain the question well, and to top it off, didn’t give enough options in the poll. The results were enough to tell me the question should be tossed from the survey.

What we’re still left with, however, are your forecasts for his playing time and performance level this season. Here are the results in the four components of FIP:

InnPit    K/9    BB/9    HR/9
116.55   8.36    3.88    1.11

Interesting to note is that eight people had the nearest options in the poll (120, 8.5, 4, 1.1) as their answer, making it one of the most popular responses in our survey.

In converting those peripheral statistics into raw numbers, and then calculating FIP (using just an unadjusted +3.2), we get a Fan Projection of 4.36 FIP for Aroldis Chapman in 2010. This would obviously be fantastic for a rookie of Chapman’s pedigree in Cincinnati’s park, but I don’t think it’s out of the question.

We’ll certainly be checking in on Chapman’s progress throughout this season, as he promises to provide a great test for the wisdom of crowds approach to projection.

A few weeks ago, Alex Remington published an article covering a Harvard study overweight baseball players. Had Harvard expanded their study to Japan, they could have included Ryoji Nakata, Japan’s portly rookie.

When Nagoya’s Chunichi Dragons drafted Nakata out of Asia University in the third round of last year’s NPB draft, he immediately took over as Japan’s roundest player. At a Fielder-esque 5’6 (171 cm), 260 lbs (118kg), Nakata inherited the distinction from Japan’s previous reigning heavyweight, Seibu’s Takeya Nakamura, who is comparatively svelte at 5’9 (175cm) and 224 lbs (102kg). Nakamura’s game matches his size: he’s a third baseman was a good first step, who has led Japan in home runs each of the last two seasons (46 and 48 respectively).

Nakata is different. He’s a first baseman, and lefthanded-hitter who relies on contact skills and strike zone control. In college, he was a gap hitter with a career slash line of .278/.355/.438, though this was dragged down by a horrible .102/.185/.184 Autumn 2008 season. You can get a sense of what he looks like at the plate in this spring training at bat against Orix reliever Daisuke Kato. Like many Japanese contact hitters, Nakata kind of turns himself towards first base on his follow through, which I think will make him vulnerable to NPB-level fastballs over the outside part of the plate. On the plus side though, he motors to second on the left fielder’s misplay, and advances to third on a sacrifice fly.

Skills aside, conditioning and stamina are the obvious concerns here. While Nakata appears to cover short distances surprisingly well enough, I doubt he’ll hold up over of the course of even a professional farm team season. He was visibly winded after running a sprint in a video I saw, and was finished a 4k run three laps behind his rookie teammates. And it will remain to be seen how the duration of the season affects his physique, and how that in turn affects his game.

So for me, putting it all together, Nakata has “pinch hitter” written all over him. He’s an unconventional player and it’ll be interesting to see how he develops with Chunichi’s farm team this season.

It’s been a busy weekend for the Giants front office. I think they’re currently trying to extend Christy Mathewson as well, but nobody has the heart ot tell Brian Sabaen that Bix Six has been dead for 85 years. The latest victim to the extension craze sweeping through the Bay Area is Matt Cain.

The Giants already held a club option on what was to be Cain’s last club-controlled season, 2011, for $6.25 million (with some possible escalators), but reportedly his new deal guarantees that year and the one after that, what was to be his first free agent season. Early leaks of the money have Cain’s 2010 salary remaining fixed ($4.5 million) with his 2011 salary rising to around $8 million and something above $15 million for 2012.

I’m not sure exactly how to value this deal since it replaces one year of a remaining contract but leaves another intact. It’s compllicated by the fact that Cain’s 2010 salary relative to his arbitration status (second year) values him around $7.5 million on the open market, while the 2011 and 2012 years value him much higher. Were the Giants willing to offer him so much later in the deal because they were getting him cheaply in the first? I don’t like to arbitrate motives so I will analyze both with and without 2010 factored in.

With 2010, this acts like a three year deal that places Cain at about $11.5 million in free market dollars. Without 2010 involved, that goes up to about $13 million. It’s not a huge difference but it is a meaningful one, somewhere around one-third to half a win’s worth of outlay. Lucky for me, no matter which you choose the end result is the same, this is a good deal for the Giants. Matt Cain has been worth over $16 million a year for the past three seasons.

Cain is unlikely to repeat his low 2009 ERA, but he doesn’t need to. All of his core stats and his resulting FIP have been stable and above average for some time now. For this to stay good for the Giants, all Matt Cain has to do is keep being the pitcher he has been since 2005. There’s even some encouraging signs for future success as he has been slowly getting hitters to swing at more and more pitches outside the strike zone. If that continues, he may see some bumps upward in his strikeout rate.

This one is pretty easy. Chad Gaudin kills righties and makes perfect sense coming out of any team’s bullpen. The Oakland Athletics need relievers, well, healthy relievers. Gaudin comes cheaply since he’ll be cashing two paychecks (roughly $700k from both, Oakland and the Yankees), and his performance speaks for itself.

Through nearly 600 career innings in the Majors and with 75 starts, somehow Gaudin has maintained a decent FIP at 4.5.What makes that career FIP interesting is that, as mentioned, he is a righty killer, but lefties punish him. As a starter, Gaudin would face lineups loaded with southpaws. His career totals for batters faced are 1,267 lefties and 1,389 righties, which only makes sense, given that Gaudin has a career 5.16 FIP versus lefties and 3.97 versus righties.

If used in a strict role where Gaudin only faces batters of the same hand, it would be easy to see him performing better than his FIP projections of 4.58 (CHONE) and 4.42 (ZiPS). Also worth noting: Those projections include a combined 52 starts. Expectations for his performance would alter by something like an entire run per nine innings if he became a full-time reliever.

The move represents a return to Gaudin’s old stomping grounds. Oakland is actually the organization in which Gaudin has pitched in the most games for as he did so during a three-year stint that stretched between 2006 and 2008. With the collective health of Andrew Bailey and Michael Wuertz questionable and opening day a week away, Billy Beane recently added Edwar Ramirez to the bullpen mixture as well.

One more time for redundancy’s sake: This move just makes sense.

I am not a fantasy expert. In fact, I’m pretty lousy at fantasy (as my various league-mates can attest), and the more I learn about “real” baseball the worse I get at fantasy. I’m not here to give fantasy advice (ahem), or tell people how it should be played (I participate and enjoy different kinds of leagues). I’m not even here to defend fantasy baseball (Carson already did). This isn’t even really a “fantasy” column. I simply want to suggest that traditional 5×5 (W, K, ERA, WHIP, S; BA, R, RBI, HR, SB) fantasy categories aren’t as retrograde as one might think, and in fact, may be in one sense more “realistic” than more recent fantasy scoring methods.

How can a writer for FanGraphs, of all places, be serious about traditional fantasy categories being more “realistic” than, say, ERA? This site doesn’t even use that to value pitchers! Steals on the same scale as home runs? Runs and RBI? Batting Average? Pitcher Wins? Even [terrible GM du jour] doesn’t care about those! Well, get ready to squeeze those mind grapes.

What I’m calling the “realism” of traditional categories isn’t come based their being “analytically correct.” In fact, I think it comes from the exact opposite, from their relative arbitrariness (for lack of a better word). While here at FanGraphs we talk about teams “buying wins” on the market, the teams, of course, aren’t literally buying wins, but players who can help them win [insert Royals/Astros/Mets joke here]. This is best done not by looking at how many “runs” a hitter might score or drive in, or projecting how many “wins” a pitcher will get, of course. Smart front offices will look at projected linear weights runs above/below average, or runs saved above/below average using some sort of defense-independent stat like FIP, tRA, or some kind of component ERA.

While these are superior methods ways to judge how many runs a team will likely score and allow and thus how many games they will probably win, we also know that they aren’t a “perfect fit” to actual baseball games. We know, that the team runs scored column is (almost) never identical to their wRC, or (non-calibrated) BaseRuns. Sometimes terrible hitters like Jose Guillen and Tony Batista rack up lots of RBI. Sometimes Scott Feldman wins more games than Zack Greinke. That doesn’t mean that teams should be going after Jose Guillen,* or trading Zack Greinke for Scott Feldman. This is the reality of the “looseness of fit” between our analysis of the game and the way actual games turn out.

* Wait, I’m a Royals fan. I meant to say, “Jose Guillen is due for a classic age-34 ‘breakout,’ and teams would be foolish not to look into taking on half his salary off of the Royals’ hands.”

Yes, part of this is adjusting projections for a fantasy context, e.g., how many runs will this high-OBP guy get score now that he’s in a better lineup, or how many games will Roy Halladay win now that he’s in the best team in an easier division. But I’m primarily (and obliquely) addressing something different — a conceptual gap. In real baseball, there’s a gap between how many runs a team “should” score and allow according to linear weights (or whatever), and how many they do. In more advanced fantasy leagues using say, linear weights, that gap isn’t present. I’m sure baseball GMs (the smart ones with good teams, anyway) would love baseball to be that way, so they wouldn’t be subject to those random variations. But reality has a way of evading our conceptual grasp. In this way, the experience of traditional (rather than “sabermetric”) fantasy more realistically reflects the experience of baseball reality.

Let me get this out of the way and save you the troube: “You ranked the two time defending NL champions ninth, behind teams that haven’t won anything in years – you are a biased moron!”

First, thanks for reading. Second – if it’s not obvious by now, a team’s record in the past means nothing in this series. This is not a backwards-looking reward for best recent performance, in either the regular season or the playoffs. This series is not designed to identify teams who have dominated baseball over the last few years. If it were, the Phillies (and Angels) would rank significantly higher.

That the Phillies rank just ninth here is not any kind of knock on what they have accomplished the last two years. It is simply a reflection of the questions that surround their ability to play at that level going forward. And there are legitimate questions surrounding this team.

Here are the core players on this team are under 27: Cole Hamels. That’s it. Last year’s Phillies team was the second oldest in baseball, barely behind the Astros, and after a series of trades that ripped apart the farm system, they have one impact prospect left (Domonic Brown). This team is straight up old.

They’re good, certainly. They should be the favorites to win the NL East, though the Braves are catching up very quickly. But as the Yankees learned the hard way, the combination of having a lot of high salaried older players without much of a farm system to support them is not the best way to build a team. And that’s exactly the situation the Phillies face going forward.

It can work. There’s enough star power on the roster that they’re a championship team if everyone stays healthy and plays as expected. But they’ve opened themselves up to problems if injuries arise or players age earlier than they’re hoping. They’ve tied themselves to Raul Ibanez for the next two years, but may not be able to afford to keep Jayson Werth beyond 2010.

The rotation after the big three is not good, and they can’t afford to have any of Halladay, Hamels, or Blanton hit the disabled list for a long period of time. Utley and Rollins are backed up by Juan Castro. Ryan Howard’s replacement, should he get injured, is Ross Gload or Greg Dobbs.

There is a significant lack of depth here, and combined with the age of the players they’re relying on, the Phillies have taken on quite a bit of risk. Risk isn’t inherently bad, but given the amount of vulnerability here, they need to win this year to make it worthwhile, or they could end up looking more like the current Mets team than they would want.

The Philadelphia Phillies organization has done a nice job of developing its own players, as witnessed by the likes of Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, and Jimmy Rollins. That pipeline, though, has been slowed in recent years. The club lacks the can’t miss prospect at the top of the system, although outfielder Domonic Brown is a very talented player and could develop into an above-average player.

Trades for the likes of Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay have weakened the system. The re-trade of Lee for a collection of prospects including Juan Ramirez, Phillippe Aumont, and Tyson Gillies does not come close to replacing the likes of Kyle Drabek, Michael Taylor, and Travis d’Arnaud.

With all that said, there are some interesting names in the minor league system, including pitchers Trevor May, Scott Mathieson, and Brody Colvin, as well as catcher Sebastian Valle, first baseman Jonathan Singleton, and outfielder Anthony Gose. Many of those players, though, are very raw.

The club is definitely veteran-heavy at the MLB level. Starting pitcher J.A. Happ is one of the few players 27 years of age or younger. The youngest hitter on the 40-man roster is shortstop Brian Bocock (age 25), a fringe big leaguer who was claimed off waivers during the off-season.

Although not a major player in the world market, the club has nine international prospects on its Top 30 prospect list, according to Baseball America. The organization’s draft results have been modest over the past three seasons but the club remains loyal to scouting director Marti Wolever, who is in his ninth season as scouting director. First round picks Joe Savery (2007) and Anthony Hewitt (2008) have been disappointments, while the club lacked a first-round selection in 2009. It’s no secret that the club likes to gamble with prep picks. Over the last three drafts, the club has selected just three four-year college players in the Top 3 rounds and with its over-slot deals (20 picks in total). That puts a heavy burden on the player development system, and the jury is still out on that.

Once the main core of star players start to fade out or become too expensive, Philadelphia could be in trouble. The minor league depth is certainly showing signs of wear and tear. The organization has also had trouble developing impact pitching with the likes of Cole Hamels, Brett Myers (now with Houston), and Carlos Carrasco (Cleveland) failing to reach their potentials. Former prep phenom Gavin Floyd did not start pitching well until he reached the Chicago White Sox organization.

The Phillies’ Major League roster is a World Series threat entering 2010, but cracks are starting to show on the foundation.