It was an exciting thing that Phil Hughes pulled off — just last season, he finished with the best-ever ratio of strikeouts to walks. It sounds good. It is good. Strikeouts are good! Walks are bad. (For pitchers.) You want to have a lot of the former and few of the latter. There’s no taking away Hughes’ accomplishment, now that the season’s complete. But then, we have come to understand that strikeouts minus walks is more meaningful than strikeouts over walks. Ratios can go crazy with little denominators. By K-BB%, Hughes didn’t set any records. He did, though, finish in between Madison Bumgarner and Jon Lester. And he established a career-best for himself.

The story, really, isn’t that Hughes became one of the best pitchers ever. It’s just that he became a much better pitcher, which is plenty. Down the stretch, it came to public attention that Hughes finished one out shy of triggering a contract bonus. There was thought that the Twins should pay Hughes the bonus anyway, since he did enough to earn it. Turns out Hughes declined an opportunity to pitch out of the bullpen to make his extra money. And now it doesn’t even matter, because the Twins have given Hughes an extension. He’s getting an extra three years and $42 million, including an extra $1.2 million in each of the next two years. In a sense, the Twins just signed Hughes to a five-year, $58-million contract.

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According to Dennis Lin of the U-T San Diego, the San Diego Padres — despite rumors to the contrary — aren’t interested in flipping the recently acquired Wil Myers to the Phillies in exchange for Philadelphia left-hander Cole Hamels.

Writes Lin:

Indications from sources within the organization… are that the Padres intend on playing all three of their newest outfielders, including Myers. The early plan is for the 2013 American League Rookie of the Year to start in center field, flanked by fellow power-hitting right-handers Justin Upton and Matt Kemp.

The bold is mine and the bold is of some interest insofar as center field, with the exception of 51 innings in 2013, isn’t a position at which Wil Myers has spent much time as a major leaguer. He played it to a greater extent in the minors, making about two-thirds as many starts there as he did in right field while still a member of the Royals organization. But one also notes that minor-league defensive assignment aren’t necessarily excellent indicators of future major-league defensive prowess. Miguel Cabrera, for example — on something more intimate than just nodding terms with inertia even as a 20-year-old rookie — nevertheless made more minor-league starts at shortstop than any other position. Michael Morse made 95% of his nearly 500 minor-league starts at shortstop leading up to his 2005 major-league debut. His physique now isn’t identical to his physique then, but he’s still the same human — and that human wasn’t a good shortstop in 2005.

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It’s been a busy offseason. Don’t believe me? Dave Cameron started out a post with the words “Screw it, I can’t even keep up anymore.” Take a look at this guy’s picture from the winter meetings. That’s the face of a writer at 1 a.m. who knows he’s going to be up until 4 a.m. because of all these damn trades the Dodgers are making.

A lot has gone on. By a quick count, well over 100 players have changed teams due to trades alone since the start of the month, and that’s so many players. That many transactions can be overwhelming, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who is on which team. To keep yourself in check, an incredibly useful site is RosterResource.com, which used to go as MLBDepthCharts.com. Jason Martinez and his crew do a great job of staying on top of recent transactions, the projected lineups and 25-man rosters are interesting to see change in real-time, and there’s other nifty tools to play with on his pages.

One of those tools recently caught my eye and held my attention, due to the bevy of aforementioned trades. It’s the “How Assembled” pages. They’re hardly a new concept, and the idea is simple: each player on the 40-man roster for each team was acquired in a specific year, and in a specific way. Whether it be through the draft, free agency, trade, or some other means, this table lets you know.

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Dan Szymborski’s chat today has been interrupted by provider problems. Sorry.

After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
With regard to their field players, San Francisco doesn’t currently feature so much a stars-and-scrubs sort of configuration as they do a Buster-Posey-surrounded-by-roughly-average-players one. Posey is projected by ZiPS not only to record the highest wOBA among Giants hitters by over 20 points but also to play slightly above-average defense at a position that receives the largest positive adjustment in the calculation of WAR.

Of some note, perhaps, is ZiPS’ seeming pessimism regarding Hunter Pence. After averaging five wins per season over the last two years, Pence is forecast to produce only half that figure in 2015. In fact, there’s probably less decline projected for ZiPS than one might think at first glance. Pence, for example, has recorded nearly 1.5 wins due to baserunning alone over the last two years after having posted mostly just average seasons by that measure before that. Even just applying regression here accounts for some of Pence’s seeming decline.

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Is there a more infuriating player in the game than Colby Rasmus? Rasmus put up a 4-win age-23 season with St. Louis in 2010 and looked like a future star thanks to power, on-base skills (combining for a 130 wRC+) and adequate center field defense. By the end of 2011, though, he was a Blue Jay — pushed out of St. Louis amid reports that he (and, at times, his father) couldn’t find a way to coexist with Tony LaRussa. Rasmus would put up a career-worst 2012 but then had a smashingly successful 2013, matching his 2010 production and adding better defense for what was essentially a 5-win age-26 season. But in 2014, he saw all his progress collapse. He missed a month with a hamstring injury, and he was eventually benched in favor of Dalton Pompey and Anthony Gose in September.

Now he’s a free agent, and he’s among the only intriguing hitters remaining. If you look at the free-agent list, you’ll see that only four active unsigned outfielders are projected for even a single win: Rasmus, Nori Aoki, Chris Denorfia and Andy Dirks. Aoki is the safest bet, easily, though with little remaining upside — he’ll plug a hole, but won’t move the needle. Denorfia turns 35 next year and is coming off the worst year of his career; Dirks missed the entire season due to a back injury and was recently non-tendered.

Rasmus, 28, is the most frustrating of the bunch, with his two star-level seasons stuck amid three replacement-level campaigns. But how true is that? For all the talk that Rasmus’ offense fell apart in 2014 — and a .287 OBP obviously isn’t acceptable — he still hit for enough power to be a league-average hitter (103 wRC+), which isn’t exactly the disaster you might have expected. His batted-ball distance increased from 2012 to 2013, and then again in 2014. Last season’s 290.09 batted-ball distance was equal to or better than Carlos Santana’s, Anthony Rizzo’s, Chris Carter’s and Edwin Encarnacion’s. Rasmus also had a career-best line drive rate, and a career-best HR/FB rate. His infield fly ball rate dropped for the third year in a row.

His plate discipline and contact skills weren’t good last year, which explains a large part (as does a BABIP drop) of his lessened offensive production, but the items above all make for things to like. After all, even in a bad year, he was a league-average hitter. For his career, he’s been a league-average hitter. In 2015, Steamer projects him to be a league-average hitter. It’s rarely that simple, though, because prior to 2014 he’d gotten to “league-average” by a combination of ups and downs. Still, bear with me for a moment and ponder this: If Rasmus were a league-average hitter with an equal chance of breakout as collapse — and paired that with league-average defense in center field — that would make for a valuable player who could help many teams.

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Ben and Sam banter about John Smoltz’s Hall of Fame candidacy, then try to decipher how A.J. Preller’s Padres rebuilt in the blink of an eye.

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Last Sunday’s column included several perspectives on the strike zone. Arizona Diamondbacks’ senior vice president of baseball operations De Jon Watson wasn’t one of the people quoted, but I did address the subject with him at the winter meetings.

Watson told me his club is paying attention, and is thus aware the 2014 zone was lower than it’s been in the past. He said teams need to be cognizant of everything going on in the industry, including how umpires are calling games. As for how a lower strike zone relates to player acquisition, Watson – like others in the industry – wasn’t very forthcoming.

“With each player, we assess and evaluate what they handle best and what balls they’re putting in play on a consistent basis,” said Watson. “We do our homework to make sure we’re procuring guys who fit our ballpark, our need, and really, where the game is going. We’re always studying trends.”

What Watson said about the strike zone as it pertains to player development was far more intriguing. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 515
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the very ill guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 44 min play time.)

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A move that wasn’t a Padres move happened Friday.

Yankees send to Marlins:

• Martin Prado
• David Phelps
• $6 million

Marlins send to Yankees:

• Nathan Eovaldi
• Garrett Jones
• Domingo German

German is a prospect. Eovaldi has three more years of team control, while Jones has one. Prado has two more years of team control, and Phelps has four, although he’s a Super-Two asset. The way it’s being phrased, the Yankees are chipping in $3 million in each of the next two years to partially pay down Prado’s salary. But if you’d like, you can mentally cancel out the $6 million and German. Now, German is actually an intriguing, live-armed prospect, so his value is probably a little north of $6 million, but they’re close enough to being even. This is mostly about the major-league players, and the one who grabs your attention is Eovaldi. That’s the guy with the big, big upside.

From their end, you can see what the Marlins are doing. They didn’t need Eovaldi, and Phelps is useful enough, and Prado can play all over the place. But from the other side, the Yankees might well be ecstatic. Theirs was a roster in need of help in the rotation. It’s not often you can land an arm like Eovaldi’s without paying through the nose. It was this very player who, a few years ago, got traded for Hanley Ramirez. Eovaldi’s not even 25 years old, and he can run it up to the triple digits.

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