Early in the off-season, Ricky Nolasco signed with the Minnesota Twins for $49 million over four years. Over the weekend, Matt Garza signed with the Milwaukee Brewers for $50 million over four years. While these contracts are nearly identical, the two pitchers could hardly be more different.

Over the last three seasons, Nolasco has averaged 199 innings per year, while Garza’s averaged just 152 innings per year. Nolasco has been reliably durable, avoiding the disabled list entirely for each of the last three seasons, while Garza has had three separate stints on the DL since the start of the 2011 season. Nolasco’s strongest selling point is his health track record; health is Garza’s weak point.

Nolasco has his own weak points, however. He’s consistently underperformed his FIP for nearly his entire career, as his 108 ERA-/92 FIP- is the largest spread of any active starting pitcher in baseball at the moment. While Nolasco’s BB/K/HR rates are all solid, he has a long history of giving up hits on balls in play and failing to strand runners, so his run prevention has never matched up with the estimators. Garza, on the other hand, has a below average BABIP for his career, and has a slightly positive ERA/FIP differential, though that hasn’t held true over the last three years.

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Mike Trout is a dude. The total package. He combines the abilities to hit for average and power and play impact defense at a premium position, with top of the charts speed that he uses both prolifically and efficiently. While metrics now exist to measure the effect of speed on player defense and baserunning, it is less simple to measure how speed contributes to one’s batting line. Let’s attempt to separate the impact of Trout’s speed on his slash line, and then do the same with a very different player with whom Trout is often compared, for MVP reasons.

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A part of the allure of Greg Maddux was how he was able to post an above-league average K/9 during the prime years of his career despite not having the velocity of many of his peers. He was the epitome of sacrificing velocity for movement and location in a time when pitchers were observed peeking over their shoulder to the scoreboard to see what they hit on the in-park radar gun.

Thomas Boswell encapsulated Maddux rather well in repeating an anecdote from a time the two spent together in the early 90’s:

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Colorado Rockies.

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 Rockies 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 / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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If you’re the sort of person who likes to look around minor league statistical leaderboards for under-the-radar performance prospects, the name Francisco Sosa may have emerged on your radar in 2013. Sosa’s 2013 statline has several intriguing numbers: his triple-slash was .315/.397/.529, he clubbed 20 homers and ripped 35 doubles, and he also swiped 30 bases. No other player in the minor leagues attained that combination of doubles, homers, and steals.

Sosa doesn’t really show up on prospect lists, though, for a few reasons. For one, he was a 23-year-old left fielder in Low-A, on the wrong side of the defensive spectrum and well older than most legitimate prospects who have yet to sniff the upper minors. Second, 2013 was the first time in his six-year career that he posted remotely interesting numbers–only twice before had he managed an on-base percentage over .310, and only once had he slugged over .400. Finally, he played in the silliest home park in organized baseball.

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Wins Above Replacement isn’t a household statistic, and it never will be. It’s too complicated, too theoretical, too unnecessary for most baseball fans. With that said, today more people know about WAR than ever, with the metric routinely coming up on websites and on television. It is, rather understandably, controversial, and plenty of people out there dismiss it without a second thought. While it’s been around for years, I think what really launched WAR to the greater public was the first go-round of the Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera MVP debate. That’s when WAR started getting a lot of play at places like ESPN, and more people were introduced to the framework and to some of its declarations.

Most of the ways WAR gets used are for comparative purposes. People love to see rankings, and people love to know which players are better than others. It also gets used in contract analysis, especially around these parts, and it’s hard to remember how we used to write those posts before we had the numbers we have today. With WAR, it’s really easy to get wrapped up in the details, because the metric allows for such detailed interpretation. But the one most important thing I’ve personally learned from WAR is probably the most general of its points. That is, WAR has provided me with an idea of what baseball players are worth to a team.

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The Rockies’ Top 10 list includes two young pitchers with the potential to develop into No. 1 or 2 starters, as well as an outfielder with five-tool talent. So, in other words, there is some high-ceiling talent in this system but the overall depth in the organization is not overly compelling. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam talk to Dan Brooks about why the expanded replay review system should motivate managers to challenge early and often.

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Episode 418
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — which edition marks his return from a week-long pleasure vacation.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 40 min play time.)

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