Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Boston Red Sox.

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 Sox 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 / Atlanta / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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It was only a matter of time. The team turned out to the Phillies, but it could have been anyone, and the player turned to be Oregon State LHP Ben Wetzler, though it too could have been anyone. The disconnect between the NCAA rules and the reality governing the mating ritual between major league clubs and amateur prospects ensured that it would eventually come to this, with a player’s eligibility being compromised for doing what the vast majority of players in his position have done without incident, in the simple course of doing business. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Gunkel is probably the top under-the-radar prospect in the Red Sox system. Baseball America indirectly said as much when they including him in the bonus supplement of this year’s Prospect Handbook. Their write-up of the 22-year-old right-hander suggested he “may be the first player to the majors from Boston’s 2013 draft.”

Gunkel didn’t come out of nowhere. The Red Sox took him in the 18th round out of West Chester University, in Pennsylvania. A standout starter for the Division-II Golden Rams, Gunkel began his professional career in short-season Lowell. Working out of the bullpen he allowed 11 base runners and punched out 32 batters in 20 innings.

Gunkel talked about his game this past weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox system is loaded with talent. A lot of the players in the 11-15 range would be on most other clubs’ Top 10 lists. If there is one area of weakness in the organization, it’s pitching — due to a lack of high-ceiling talent. Many of the arms project as mid-rotation arms or are in the lowest levels of the system. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam preview the Royals’ season with Craig Brown, and Nick talks to Kansas City Star Royals beat writer Andy McCullough (at 25:35).

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Episode 427
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he mostly considers the, like, thousand extensions recently offered by clubs.

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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A short while ago, I wrote a post comparing and contrasting the Steamer projections and the FAN projections. It can be potentially really interesting to see where different projections diverge, but that particular exercise faced two problems: fan bias, and fan-projection sample size. It wasn’t as satisfying an exercise as it could’ve been, and I’m okay with that, but now we have ZiPS all nice and uploaded, and we can try this kind of thing again. On which players do Steamer and ZiPS most disagree? Is there anything to be learned?

This’ll be broken down into two posts — looking at position players today, and looking at pitchers tomorrow. And it’s worth noting this is a slightly different exercise from the one involving the fans. Fans might be informed by observations, or by gut feelings, or whatever. Steamer and ZiPS will arrive at their conclusions based more or less on the same data. So, you’d expect them to be very similar, and of course they are. It’s interesting, then, where they are not.

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How you view the near-unprecedented teardown of the Houston Astros depends largely on how you view the sport of baseball as a whole. If you’re in it for the long haul, for the joy of seeing teams attempting to build dynasties from within and using their resources effectively, you probably appreciate the commitment to the vision. If you’re a fan who doesn’t enjoy spending your hard-earned dollars to go watch a bunch of players you’ve never heard of (“Look, kids, Marwin Gonzalez!”) lose over 100 games for the third season in a row, then you probably find it to be an abomination.

It’s safe to say that the majority of FanGraphs readers fall under the first category, though there’s a certain validity to both sides. But all that really matters is how ownership feels about it, because while Jim Crane’s commitment to letting Jeff Luhnow blow things up and start from scratch has been admirable so far, there’s only so many 0.0 television ratings a businessman can suffer. That’s especially true as attendance has continued to shrink — down from just over three million in 2007 to half that in 2013, ahead of only three other clubs — and as reports surfaced in December that MLBPA head Tony Clark was “monitoring” the Houston situation, given that the club’s $549,603 average per player was the lowest the sport had seen since the 1999 Royals, who paid out $534,460 per player while losing 97 games. (Luhnow disputes the accuracy of that report, but the fact that Houston’s payroll was particularly low is unavoidable.) Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Yankees gave Brett Gardner $52 million to not exercise his right to become a free agent next winter. Instead, he’ll now stay in New York and play left field alongside Jacoby Ellsbury, rather than testing free agency to see if he could land a bigger deal as the best center fielder on the market. And that means Gardner has just signed up for four more years of criticism from those who think a left fielder should be “a run producer”, a guy who knocks the ball out of the ballpark and hits in the middle of the line-up.

Gardner is not that guy. He has more career triples than home runs, and a large part of his value comes from running down balls in the outfield. He’s a speed-and-defense guy, and traditionally, speed-and-defense guys have not been paid the same level of wages as similarly valuable sluggers. But while these kinds of labels help us describe the ways in which a player creates value, there’s also a trap to using these kinds of generalities, and we shouldn’t be so confined by player types that we miss the fact that Brett Gardner is actually a pretty good offensive player.

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The 2014 ZiPS projections are now available in the player pages and on the sortable projection pages. Much thanks to Dan Szymborski for once again providing his projections!

With the arrival of the ZiPS projections, we’ve updated our depth charts and projected standings to be a combination of both ZiPS and Steamer projections. Additionally, our playoff odds are now computed using a combination of both ZiPS and Steamer.