Justin Upton is probably going to get traded. If you believe Joel Sherman’s source, there’s no probably about it; Upton is the next Brave out of town. And it makes sense; the team is clearly retooling for the future, while Upton is entering the final year of his contract. If the Braves don’t think they’re going to sign him long-term, better to trade him now than settle a compensation pick next year.

The question will be the price. Sherman reports that the asking price for Upton is going to be higher than the return they got for Jason Heyward, and that was already a pretty solid package. As I noted this morning, teams are paying through the moon for right-handed power right now, and so Upton will be an attractive option for teams looking to balance out their line-ups.

But even with the advantage of his handedness, I’d like to suggest that the price for Upton should be less than what St. Louis gave up for Heyward. And I promise, this isn’t another discussion of Heyward’s defensive metrics. I can make the point without even needing to cite UZR or DRS, because the offensive gap just isn’t as large as people think. Here are their respective lines over the past three seasons.

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There aren’t any Mike Trouts on the free-agent market. And actually, at this rate, there might never be any Mike Trouts on the free-agent market.

There are plenty of talented position players available, but they all bring their own individual question marks. People wonder how Pablo Sandoval’s body is going to age. People wonder how Yasmany Tomas is going to translate his skills from Cuba. People wonder if Victor Martinez is going to sustain last year’s power spike, and no one’s really clear on whether Nelson Cruz can repeat his massive 2014.

Perhaps top among all of them, in desirability, is Hanley Ramirez, but he, too, has a question people ask. Actually, there are a few questions, but maybe most pressingly, there are questions about his defense.

He’s never been a great defender at shortstop, and now he’s almost 31 years old, having gotten through a countless number of aches and pains. I’ll quote writer and frequent Dodgers observer Mike Petriello, from the beginning of October:

[…] that defense took a bigger step back, to the point that it’s hard to see him sticking at shortstop rather than moving to third, and the injuries continued to pile up. In 2014 alone, he missed time with minor injuries to his left hand, left calf, right shoulder, right calf, and left oblique, and those are just the ones we know about.

It’s pretty well known that current defensive statistics aren’t as reliable as current offensive statistics, but it’s also pretty well known that current defensive statistics aren’t measuring nothing, and by the numbers, Ramirez looks bad. Over the last few years, he’s been one of the very worst defensive shortstops. When he spent a chunk of time playing third base, he was statistically bad there, too. You have to allow him an adjustment period there, but still, it’s evidence that points to Ramirez being a defensive liability. Not coincidentally, though he just played short for a contender, there’s talk that Ramirez is willing to move just about anywhere.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

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Ten years ago, everyone wanted young pitching. It was the considered the currency of baseball, the thing you could always trade if you needed to acquire something else. But these days, random kids on the street can throw 100 mph, the strike zone is gigantic, and preventing runs is now the easy part of the game. What everyone wants now is offense, and seemingly, offense in the form of good right-handed hitters.

This seems a reaction to the fact that the league’s platoon splits have gotten larger over the last few years; specifically, left-handed hitters have been exploited more often by left-handed pitching. Here is the league average wRC+ for LHP vs LHB match-ups in each year since 2002:

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Kevin Ziomek carved up Midwest League hitters in his first full professional season. In 123 innings at West Michigan, the 22-year-old left-hander logged a 2.27 ERA and an 11.1 K/9. His top-flight numbers notwithstanding, he created surprisingly little buzz.

The Detroit Tigers took Ziomek in the second round of the 2013 draft out of Vanderbilt University, which helps explain the paucity of plaudits. When a high-round pick from a high-profile college program excels in Low-A, the reaction is typically “That’s what he was expected to do. Let’s see what he does at the next level.”

Despite his dominance, Ziomek’s chance to pass that next test won’t come until next season. (Tigers farm director Reid Nichols gave a non-specific answer when I asked why Ziomek wasn’t promoted.) One possible reason was an opportunity to spent the entire summer working under the tutelage of Whitecaps pitching coach Mike Henneman.

Ziomek, whom Baseball America ranks as Detroit’s second-best pitching prospect, discussed his under-the-radar 2014 performance at the end of the season.

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Ziomek on his high strikeout rate: “Making pitches early in the count can put you in position to strike people out. What (the Tigers) want is for us to try to get people out early in the count. Then, if we get to that two-strike count, we can try to get that strikeout. Every pitcher – I don’t care who you are – likes to get strikeouts.

“Guys coming out of the college game have a tendency to throw a lot of pitches that are unnecessary. Keeping my pitch count down is something I improved on over the course of the year. I threw first-pitch strikes and got ahead, and as a result my strikeout numbers went up. In a way, I got more strikeouts because I wasn’t trying to strike people out.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about Jose Molina, Pat Venditte, and non-revelatory rumors, then draft free agents whose contracts they expect to be above or below published estimates.

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A month and a half ago, Yasiel Puig was struggling. In the playoff series against the Cardinals, Puig struck out seven times in a row at one point, and there was a pretty clear book on him: try to beat him with heat, away. He was having trouble catching up, so the Cardinals were having less trouble putting him away, and that’s among the reasons the Dodgers were unable to advance. Anyway, nevermind the bigger context. Nevermind the Dodgers. It’s interesting how Puig was being pitched.

Because the book on Puig late in 2014 was sort of the opposite of the book on Puig late in 2013. A year ago, it seemed like pitchers solved Puig by busting him with fastballs inside. That was the scouting report at the time, and there’s no reason to think it wasn’t valid. It’s just, accurate scouting reports can be temporary scouting reports, sometimes. Over the course of 12 months, Yasiel Puig changed his own book.

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Of course it would take a sample size of so many decades of FanGraphs Contract Crowdsourcing before The Crowd could be properly evaluated for their salary-creating acumen. I will not hesitate, however, to deliver swift and mighty judgement upon The Crowd based on just their (your) inaugural year of estimations.

A few weeks ago, one Carson Cistulli shared an exhaustive chart showing how The Crowd’s aggregate contracts compared against the actual salaries that 2013’s free agents actually received. This is only one dimension with which The Crowd’s collective wisdom can be judged. Now that the free agents of 2013 have played the 2014 season, we can also begin to make strong guesses (and/or swift and mighty judgements) as to whether The Crowd or The Real-Live GM proposed a contract that more accurately reflects a given player’s competitive value.

Tomorrow, a look at The Crowd’s successes: five contracts that are perhaps even more discerning than the contracts proffered by The Real-Live GMs. But today, a look at The Crowd’s collective failures — five contracts that, were they executed by The Real-Live GMs, would be cause for those Real-Live GMs to question (and/or have already lost) their job security.

These five contracts have been selected not out of a set of rigorous objective criteria. However, their short length (all five players were signed by Real-Live GMs to one-year contracts) invites the arrival at conclusions. None of these five players had what one would call a “good” or even a “mediocre” season in 2014. While The Real-Live GMs who designed these contracts no doubt regret their decisions, in each case The Crowd proposed a much larger commitment, in terms of both years and dollars, for these players. In the financial tables below, one can see The Crowd’s aggregate proposals for the number of years (cYRS), average annual value (cAAV), and cumulative contract totals (cTOT) offered to these players, compared to the contracts that they would agree to with The Real-Live GMs (aYRS/aAAV/aTOT).

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Yesterday in these pages, the author — standing on the shoulders of the giant that is the Steamer projection system — attempted to identify the player most likely to serve as 2015’s edition of Yangervis Solarte. Surely, that post has already made household names of Buck Britton and Jose Martinez and Deibinson Romero.

For some people, identifying the next Yangervis Solarte is probably a less compelling endeavor than finding 2015’s edition of Mike Trout (which is to say, the best player in all of baseball), for example, or even 2015’s edition of Michael Brantley (which is to say, a player who unexpectedly produced among the league’s highest WAR figures).

The problem in each of those cases, however, is that 2015’s edition of Mike Trout is most likely just Mike Trout. And, while Michael Brantley was a more ordinary player before the 2014 season, he also wasn’t a freely available one.

No, the pleasure of contemplating Yangervis Solarte is that he began the 2014 season as little more than a $500 thousand investment by the Yankees and transformed into approximately a $10 million profit.

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The Arizona Fall League championship game (domestic professional baseball’s de facto funeral for the year) featured superlative performances from a number of prospects that may have piqued your curiosity. Here’s a look at how, after nearly two months of evaluating these players, I feel things will play out moving forward.

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