Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the San Diego Padres.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Padres or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Chicago AL / Miami / Minnesota / New York NL / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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Hindsight being 20/20, Cory Spangenberg was probably an overdraft. Two years ago, the San Diego Padres took the speedy second baseman 10th overall. George Springer and Jose Fernandez, among others, were still on the board.

That doesn’t mean Spangenberg won’t be a productive big-leaguer. The 22-year-old has great wheels, and his left-handed stroke shows plenty of promise. Playing at high-A Lake Elsinore and Double-A San Antonio, he hit .292/.346/.407, with nine triples and 36 stolen bases. His glove has been a question mark, but he made great strides this year working with former defensive whiz Rich Dauer.

Spangenberg further fine-tuned his game in the Arizona Fall League, with the Peoria Javelinas. The Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania product discussed his development in the final week of the AFL season. Read the rest of this entry »

The strength of the Padres system is definitely young pitching but many of the arms are still in A-ball. Luckily help will be more readily available from the likes of Matt Wisler and Casey Kelly, both of whom could contribute to the big league roster in 2014. There are also some very intriguing hitting prospects that came to the organization via the international market but they just missed being ranked within the Top 15 prospects in the system. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss moves made by the Royals, Rockies, Padres, and more.

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There was what seems like a relatively unremarkable trade today, that went down between the Braves and the Twins. The Twins sent to the Braves one Ryan Doumit, in the last year of his contract. The Braves sent to the Twins one Sean Gilmartin, 23 years old and still in the minors. Doumit is expected to fill some kind of role on Atlanta’s bench. Gilmartin might be a Twins starting rotation candidate down the road. It’s a competitive team maybe exchanging a little longer-term value for a little shorter-term value, and it’s a rebuilding team doing the opposite of that. Perfectly understandable, ordinary trade that does very little to capture the imagination.

There might be something buried here, though, beneath the immediate layers. Something nothing more than statistical, but then numbers are so much of everything. It depends on how Doumit ends up being utilized by the Braves, but there’s a chance this could mark the end of an era, beyond just the era of Doumit playing for Minnesota. On the surface, the trade is mildly interesting. Below the surface, it’s a little bit more so.

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One of the more eye-opening deals of the winter so far is Brian Wilson re-signing for eight figures with the Dodgers. It isn’t just that Wilson is coming off a year in which he barely pitched due to injury rehab. He’s good, and he looks to be healthy now. What makes it weird is that Wilson is in line to be a setup guy, behind one of the best relievers in baseball. Kenley Jansen is almost literally unhittable, so injury is the only thing that could conceivably stop him in 2014. Wilson is getting paid a lot, then, to not be a closer, even though he has a long closing background.

Wednesday, the Padres signed Joaquin Benoit for two years and $15.5 million. Benoit is a good relief pitcher, and a proven closer. The tricky part is that the Padres already had a proven closer in the perfectly adequate Huston Street. Benoit, like Wilson, is getting paid a lot to not be a closer, at least from the outset. And he’s getting paid a lot by a team that doesn’t have a budget anywhere close to the one the Dodgers do. On the face of it, the Padres make for a strange destination.

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The 2013 Winter Meetings came and went without a team reaching an agreement with Shin-Soo Choo, the best free agent outfielder available, at least after the signing of Jacoby Ellsbury. During the meetings, reports were coming in from various sources who report on such things that the Rangers, the Reds, and perhaps the Mariners were all kicking Choo’s tires. All of this makes sense. Those were three reasonable destinations for Choo at the time. But the rumors were just that, and nothing was doing on that front as the Winter Meetings came to a close. Then, as the meetings were winding down and people were boarding planes home, USA Today’s Bob Nigtengale tweeted this:

One veteran GM believes that the #Astros will wind up to be the landing spot for Shin-Soo Choo.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 12, 2013

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By now, the “Kendrys Morales is this year’s Kyle Lohse” jokes are already stale, but the point remains: Just as we saw with Lohse last year, a decent-yet-hardly-elite player is going to get weighed down by the anchor of the qualifying offer placed upon him. Not only does the offer drop the cost of a draft pick on Morales, but it sets the baseline of a $14.1 million salary, and while there’s nothing that says he can’t ultimately accept less than that, the fact that he’s a Scott Boras client makes it incredibly unlikely.

As you’d expect, the proclamations for his future are getting dire, especially now that the Mariners — the only team who wouldn’t need to surrender a pick for him, of course — went out and added Corey Hart and Logan Morrison to a roster that already had Justin Smoak (and, somewhere, Jesus Montero). One unnamed GM told Peter Gammons that he “can’t see Morales signing until after the [June] draft,” when the compensation pick would disappear, which seems a bit drastic, but Buster Olney’s suggestion of “February or March” looks absolutely reasonable.

Boras eventually found Lohse a home in Milwaukee days before the 2013 started, and he’ll do the same here eventually. So let’s play along: Where can Morales land in 2014? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, Bill Petti mentioned in his CLIFFORD work the single largest driver in a player’s wOBA collapse from one year to the next was Z-Contact%. Players that saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had a 1.68 times the odds of seeing their wOBA collapse that season than those that did not experience such a decline.

As with any correlation, nothing is a guarantee. Just because a player improves or declines with any one statistic does not guarantee that the results will behave in lockstep. The five players who saw their Z-Contact% improve the most in 2013 were Gerardo Parra, Everth Cabrera, Brandon Moss, Carlos Santana, and David Murphy. Parra, Cabrera, and Santana saw their wOBA improve by 1, 38, and 20 points respectively while Moss and Murphy’s dropped 33 and 80 points.

It was equally volatile on the other end of the scale. Raul Ibanez‘s Z-Contact% dropped 5.3%, yet his wOBA improved by 19 points. Chris Young‘s Z-Contact% dropped 6.2% from 2012 to 2013 as his wOBA dropped 36 points.  Marlon Byrd’s 6.7% decrease was the third-largest decrease in Z-Contact% in the sample size, yet his wOBA improved an amazing 148 points last season. The two largest declines in Z-Contact% from 2012 to 2013 had one thing in common – a last name.

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