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Defensive statistics have been open to debate since they were first created. This back and forth probably will continue on for years to come, even with some new technologies offering the promise of better data.  One limitation with giving individual players values for their defensive metrics is positioning. The player’s coaches may have them completely out of position for a seemingly routine play and zone based metrics are going to downgrade the player because they didn’t make the play. While it may be impossible to know the correct player position before each play, the chances of a defender making a play knowing their initial position can be estimated with Inside Edge’s fielding data. By using their Plays Made information, I will add another stat to the defensive mix: Plays Made Ratio.

The concept is fairly simple. Inside Edge provides FanGraphs with the number of plays a defender should make given a range of possible chances. Inside Edge watches each play multiple times and grades the difficulty of the play. Here is their explanation for how they collect the data.

Inside Edge’s baseball experts include many former professional and college players. Every play is carefully reviewed, often more than once. It is not uncommon for IE scouts to review certain plays together in order to reach a consensus on the defensive play rating. IE also performs a thorough post game scrubbing process before the data is made official.

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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 Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
It isn’t sound practice merely to find the sum of all the WAR projections in the depth-chart image below, add those to the 48 or so wins which constitute a replacement-level team, and then regard the result as the club’s ZiPS win projection. That said, examining the forecasts for those players expected to begin the season on Minnesota’s opening-day roster, it’s difficult to conclude that this club is destined to win much more than 70 games.

Moderately heartbreaking is Joe Mauer’s very regular two-win projection. If it seems low, that’s not necessarily a novel sentiment. Multiple readers suggested last year, when ZiPS produced a 2.8 WAR figure for Mauer, that they’d take the over. It would have been a losing bet, that: even with a .342 BABIP, he recorded only a 106 wRC+. In the context of the first-base positional adjustment, that’s too little offense.

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Let’s begin with what I hope will be uncontroversial statements. The Phillies, at present, are a bad baseball team. Arguably the worst baseball team, as long as we’re only talking about 2015. The farm system’s improving, but the big-league roster’s declining, and while every year there are teams that surprise, I’d be surprised if the Phillies won 75 games. It’s not going to be pretty, and even the most optimistic fans are wondering if contention might be feasible three years from now. Rebuilds suck. Just how they are.

And the Phillies have Cole Hamels, who is good. He’s actually been very good, for a very long time, and he’s not old. His remaining contract terms are reasonable, in that, if Hamels were available for just his contract, every team that could afford him would place a call. A trade market for Cole Hamels does exist. Just because nothing has happened doesn’t mean there aren’t teams who would like for something to happen.

Yet, increasingly, it looks like the Phillies won’t be moving Hamels this winter. One point of evidence: the Phillies haven’t yet moved Hamels this winter. Another point of evidence: the Phillies, reportedly, are sticking to their high demands, leading to this quote in a post by Rob Bradford:

According to a source familiar with the Phillies’ thinking on the matter, Philadelphia GM Ruben Amaro and his club have been “unrealistic in their expectations” in regard to a return on Hamels.

As they say, situations are fluid. Hamels could, in theory, get dealt any minute. Some team might become unusually desperate. Maybe a team that feels like it’s on the outside with Max Scherzer and James Shields. Amaro, certainly, is selling Hamels as a rare ace you could get today. But, there would be a lot of ground to make up if Hamels were to get traded before spring training. Negotiations with different teams have been described as a staredown. It’s becoming increasingly likely that the Phillies will hang on to Hamels, putting him back on the market in July. After all, there’s no deadline by which the Phillies have to bid Hamels farewell. They could even potentially keep him through the end of his career, given his status, talent, and popularity. The Phillies never have to trade Cole Hamels, which is allowing them to be patient.

That patience has upsides and downsides. For the sake of this article, I would like to set aside matters of marketing and fan morale. I simply want to talk about Cole Hamels’ trade value. The Phillies have determined, so far, no one has offered enough for their ace. So they disagree with where Hamels’ trade value has been in the offseason. But what would happen to Hamels’ value if he were to be available in July? Might the Phillies then be better able to recover the haul they’ve been seeking?

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Ben and Sam banter about Gabe Kapler and Chris Tillman, then discuss the Orioles’ dilemma about whether to let GM Dan Duquette leave (with help from The Good Wife).

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Earlier, the Cardinals signed Lance Lynn to a three-year contract, buying out his three years of arbitration eligibility. There’s nothing too remarkable about the deal — it’s good for the team and it’s good for the player, and Lynn’s still all lined up for free agency at the same time if that’s what he wants. Over the past three years, Lynn has been about a nine-win pitcher by actual runs allowed, and he’s been about a nine-win pitcher by his peripherals. He’s thrown more than 600 innings if you include his work in the playoffs. He’s been pretty good, basically, so the Cardinals figure he’ll remain pretty good, and that’s as much as there is to say about that.

The interesting thing about Lynn isn’t his newest contract, or any of his previous contracts. Rather, it’s about his pitching style, and, beyond that, how his pitching style lets him fit in his own particular situation. The stars have aligned for Lynn in the recent past, and based on current indications, 2015 is also going to be favorable. There might not be a better place for Lynn to be pitching than St. Louis.

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Washington Nationals. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Washington’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Nationals system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Nationals system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Austin Voth, RHP (Profile)

Even though he features just a fringe-average fastball, Voth has had considerable success in his two seasons of affiliated baseball, producing strikeout and walk rates of 27.9% and 6.5% over 173.0 innings. And while he pitched in college, he’s also generally skewed towards the young side of average relative to his levels, so it’s not as though he’s merely preying on less experiences competition. He ended the 2014 season with Double-A Harrisburg and profiles as something better than a replacement-level starter entering 2015.

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The teams who are engaged in the most prolific and dynamic offseasons — namely, the Chicago White Sox, Oakland A’s, San Diego Padres, and Tampa Bay Rays — still remain somewhere in the middle of FanGraphs’ projected 2015 standings. As Dave noted early last month at Just a Bit Outside, it appears that teams’ response to the new second wild-card spot is to push towards the middle and hope to catch lightning in their bottle, a la the 2014 Kansas City Royals.

The entire standings are getting compressed: as Dave notes in his article, there are only a small handful of teams who are going through a rebuilding cycle (whether aimless or not) and thus can be considered out of the running for the 2015 World Series. What I find most interesting about the current state of the league is that the standings are being compressed from the top as well. Or, as Dave wrote:

This is essentially baseball teams adopting the old adage of not putting all their eggs in one basket. And as more teams adopt this strategy, the less it makes sense for any one team to try and pull away from the pack. After all, if you have to beat 10 or 11 other decent teams for a playoff spot, your margin of error is going to be lower than if half the teams in the league are conceding defeat on opening day.

That explanation makes enough sense. But, also, this article was written back when the Padres’ most significant acquisition was Clint Barmes, and I think A.J. Preller’s subsequent transactions have helped define a new standard as to what is and isn’t possible within the span of an offseason.

Maybe you don’t like the Matt Kemp deal. I still don’t totally know what to make of it myself. That’s fine. We’ll leave it aside for now. Let’s look at it this way: Preller acquired Justin Upton, Wil Myers, and Derek Norris in exchange for their starting catcher (Rene Rivera — from whom I have developed a mighty crush), their fourth starter (Jesse Hahn — or fifth starter, depending on your view of Odrisamer Despaigne), and a big bundle of the Padres’ middle class of prospects.

The Padres received value in these three trades by offering sheer quantity as their own value for offer: Preller shipped out 12 players (and two international bonus slots) while receiving 8. (Those numbers jump to 15 players out and 10 players in if you include the Kemp deal.) And, all the while, the Padres’ projected 2015 payroll ($88.9M) is actually a touch under their 2014 Opening Day payroll ($90.6M).

Preller has retained, by Kiley’s rankings, three of the organization’s top four prospects. He traded away the middle class — not the upper class — of his inherited farm system in exchange for significant Major League experience, all the while assuming no financial burdens. Okay, so the Padres don’t look, even now, like a playoff team next year. But it’s hard to find a downside to Preller’s approach — unless the middle class of any team’s farm system at any given time is actually incredibly, incredibly valuable to an organization’s long-term health.

Judging by the behavior of other Major League teams, especially those who are already projected to do well, that middle-class of prospects is just that valuable. Preller is not the only General Manager who was just hired from outside the organization in the last few months. Meaning, he was not the only GM who has just inherited a farm system that was put together by a GM who was ultimately fired. Dave Stewart of the Arizona Diamondbacks has mostly sat on his hands, trade-wise, actually giving up established major league value in Miguel Montero. In Atlanta, John Hart started the offseason from essentially the same position as Preller, but decided to move in the opposite direction, sending away players valuable in the present-tense (Jason Heyward, Upton) for future-tense potential.

Teams with contending-ready cores have also effectively sat on their hands this offseason in the trade market. The Seattle Mariners have only used their organizational depth to acquire Justin Ruggiano (in exchange for Matt Brazis). The Washington Nationals have only received minor leaguers (Joe Ross, presumably Trea Turner) in exchange for their minor leaguers (Steven Souza, Travis Ott). The Pittsburgh Pirates have traded for Antonio Bastardo and Francisco Cervelli.

These right here are the teams that would have taken significant steps closer to the World Series had they engineered the types of trades that Preller made this offseason. But these teams have decided, in effect, that their middle class of minor leaguers is more valuable than the likes of Myers, Norris, Upton.

And, shoot, maybe these already-contending teams are right. The available population of even replacement-level major leaguers is certainly finite, and maybe Preller’s offseason will ultimately make it very difficult for the Padres to fill out their whole roster from 2017-2021.

The thought I keep coming back to, though, is how much prices on the trade market inflate at the Trade Deadline. Any combination of the Mariners, Nationals, and Pirates will be positioned as buyers late next July. If they make a move then, unlike now, they are doing so because they know for sure that they are well-positioned for a postseason run. But if they make a move now, unlike then, the price tag is significantly lower. Like: what if Preller traded for Upton this winter purely in anticipation of flipping him at the Deadline? The package that Preller would receive for a half-season of Upton would no doubt exceed in perceived value the package that he gave up for a full season of Upton. (Not to mention it would be a pretty slick new way to rebuild a team.)

Basically, what I’m saying is: I really like the mindset behind the offseason that Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi, and company have put together for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Currently the Dodgers are projected by FanGraphs as the best team in baseball, a 91-win team over the Mariners’ 89. I very much admire their “double-trade” tactic to separate the wheat from the chaff of their roster. For instance: with Dee Gordon’s trade value no doubt at its highest, the Dodgers trade him, Dan Haren, and Miguel Rojas to the Miami Marlins for a package that includes Andrew Heaney. Heaney is then traded, straight-up, to the Angels for Howie Kendrick. While there are other players moving around in this trade, the effect is that Gordon is swapped for Kendrick at second base, a cunning way of improving major-league talent without significant effects to minor-league depth. The same double-trade maneuver was triggered by the Kemp deal: the Dodgers acquired Zach Eflin for Kemp, and then sent Eflin to Philadelphia (with Thomas Windle) for Jimmy Rollins. The Dodgers turned their outfield logjam into a veteran starting shortstop and netted Yasmani Grandal in the process.

Maybe, across the majors, teams are scared of pushing their chips to the middle because the 2014-15 Oakland A’s loom like a cautionary tale — an organization depleted after they pushed in their own chips. But there’s more than one way to interpret the last 12 months in Oakland, and one interpretation is: their error was not pushing all of their chips in, but rather waiting until July to do so.

Whether or not it earns the Dodgers the World Series, I commend them for proactively attempting to separate their team from the pack.

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Earlier this week, we took a look at AL pitcher ball-in-play leaders and laggards. Today it’s time for the AL pitchers as we complete our offseason look at 2014 hitter and pitcher BIP data.

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