It came as a bit of a surprise to see that the Angels sent teenage lefty Ricardo Sanchez to Atlanta in exchange for Kyle Kubitza (whom Kiley will write up shortly) and Nate Hyatt. Not that Sanchez is so talented that he should be deemed untouchable, it’s simply rare to see someone so young (Sanchez doesn’t turn 18 until April) be moved. While Sanchez lacks the upside of your typical on-the-radar teenager, he’s a fine prospect nonetheless and one whose polish could have him moving quickly. In combination with the other deals this offseason where the Braves have added prospects, their farm is quickly moving into the top half of baseball and maybe into the top 10. Let’s get more acquainted with both Sanchez and Hyatt.

Ricardo Sanchez, LHP, Atlanta Braves

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Perhaps all of the wheeling and dealing is not over just yet, but seeing as it’s been a few weeks since the Oakland A’s have made a trade, perhaps Billy Beane’s manic winter has wound down to something like a conclusion. Here’s more or less what’s happened so far:

I’ve been a big fan of what Beane has been doing this offseason because, heck, it’s entertaining! Things have been so unpredictable in Oakland that no move would surprise us next. Sometimes proponents of different schools of thought are split when it comes to grading transactions, but this is a rare case of universal bewilderment.

It feels like we’ll only truly understand these moves in hindsight, once some actual games have been played. Will Oakland be positioned as a buyer or as a seller during next July’s trade deadline? Either option seems a viable possibility.

While I could be proven wrong if Oakland rolls out a 70-win season, here’s my best guess as to what it all means: Beane is trying to fill up his roster with as many players who are league average or better (2+ WAR) as he can. That is, Beane would be willing to trade away one star-level player (i.e., Jeff Samardzija) in exchange for two players who project as about league-average (i.e., Marcus Semien and Josh Phegley). As Dave has written about recently, the difference in value between a star player and an average one just might be a lot smaller than we think. Perhaps Oakland is operating under the assumption that a lineup without weak spots totally makes up that gap between star and mere starter.

Let’s look at the 2015 Steamer600 projections for all the players who ended the 2014 season with the A’s, and then all the players who are currently on the Oakland roster. I included everybody who was projected for at least 100 PAs or 30 innings pitched in the majors:

So if the A’s returned their exact same lineup for 2015, they would have 13 players who are projected to produce at least 2 WAR over the course of a full season of playoff time. With the lineup the A’s actually have, they now have 10 such players.

Obviously 13 is a larger number than 10. But consider: the A’s end-season roster from last year was the result of some very expensive trade-deadline moves. Lester, Samardzija, and Hammel were purchased at a high price, with both Lester and Hammel due to become free agents at the end of last season. For all of the big names they’ve traded away this offseason, it’s remarkable, then, that the A’s have ended up with almost the same number of average-or-better players they had before their trade deadline action. (Yoenis Cespedes, traded for Lester, was another projected average-or-better player on Oakland’s roster last year.)

This is actually a pretty unique piece of roster construction. The Seattle Mariners, which FanGraphs currently projects as having the second-best record in 2015, only have eight average-or-better players (Robinson Cano, Kyle Seager, Brad Miller, Mike Zunino, Chris Taylor, Austin Jackson, Felix Hernandez, Hisashi Iwakuma). The Angels, projected to finish two games better than the A’s, also have eight (Mike Trout, Erick Aybar, Albert Pujols, Kole Calhoun, Chris Iannetta, David Freese, Garrett Richards, Tyler Skaggs). After pushing so many chips in the middle of the table this winter, the White Sox have all of six (Jose Abreu, Alexei Ramirez, Adam Eaton, Chris Sale, Samardzija, Jose Quintana).

Projected to have the league’s best record, the Dodgers have an impressive 13 of these players (Yasiel Puig, Adrian Gonzalez, Juan Uribe, Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins, Yasmani Grandal, Joc Pederson, Carl Crawford, A.J. Ellis, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, Brandon McCarthy, Hyun-Jin Ryu). The main difference being that the Dodgers will spend about four times as much on their team in 2015 as the A’s will.

By acquiring league-average players in addition to intriguing prospects, Beane just might be giving himself his best possible chance at fulfilling the intrinsically opposite goals of (1) cutting payroll and (2) remaining in contention. On Opening Day last year, the A’s had a payroll that was about 130% the size of their payroll a year previous, and about 160% the size of the payroll the year before that. If reducing payroll was the A’s top priority heading into the winter, well, Beane has definitely made lemonade out of lemons here.

Or, shoot, maybe he’s just rebuilding.

Ben and Sam attempt to solve the mystery of why losing teams have uncharacteristically snapped up so many free agents this winter.

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Earlier, I asked you to participate in an exercise projecting both next year’s Mookie Betts and next year’s Javier Baez. The idea is that Betts seems representative of a particularly safe prospect, while Baez represents something of a more volatile asset. I promised that I would analyze the results given a sufficient sample size of votes, and, such a sample size has already been achieved. Interestingly, as of right now, there have been three more votes in the Baez poll than in the identical Betts poll. The best possible conclusion is that three FanGraphs readers had their browsers lock up at a most unfortunate time. The worst possible conclusion is chilling indeed.

So I think it’s safe to move forward with a little analysis. Before getting there, I hope you understand that *I* understand that I didn’t conduct this exercise perfectly. Nevermind the wisdom of the exercise in the first place; all my words might’ve biased the voters to some degree. I could’ve written nothing, or I could’ve at least put the polls before the words. But, what’s done is done. Also understand that, while you’re going to see a measure of uncertainty, this is perceived uncertainty, and not actual uncertainty. We can’t know actual uncertainty. We’re just going to go ahead and pretend like what we think is a decent proxy for what actually is. Let’s see how the community feels about Mookie Betts and Javier Baez, for 2015.

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There is one pitcher out there that throws his changeup over 30% of the time and calls it a ‘heavy sinker.’ Alex Cobb aside, though, we traditionally lump the changeup in with the slider, the curve, the splitter — it’s not a fastball.

And yet, in some really important ways that go beyond movement and leak into usage, the change works like a sinker. In a league where strikeouts rule, the change actually has a strikeout problem.

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Just before the start of the new year, Chris Mitchell published at The Hardball Times some expanded results from his work on KATOH, the name he’s given to a methodology for estimating not only the probability of a particular minor-league prospect graduating to the majors, but also — in this expanded version — for estimating actual WAR thresholds prospects are likely to cross given their minor-league resumes.

Mitchell’s work advances our understanding of which metrics at the minor-league level correlate most highly with major-league success. Below are five questions I asked regarding these most recent findings, and Mitchell’s answers concerning same.

Because you’ll do a better job of it than I would, could you provide a brief explanation of KATOH — in particular, of the variables that most directly inform it?

KATOH aims to answer a series of questions about a minor-league baseball player: “How likely is this player to play at least one game in the majors through age 28?” and “How likely is it that he’ll reach certain performance benchmarks — 4, 6, 8, 12, and 16 WAR — through age 28?” I arrived at these probabilities by running probit regression analyses, which tell us how a variety of inputs influence an outcome that has two possible outcomes. In this case, the variables in question include a player’s age and some of his offensive stats relative to league average: strikeout percentage, walk percentage, isolated slugging, batting average on balls in play, and frequency of stolen base attempts.

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A number of people who are actually good at math have asked before why we don’t present measures of uncertainty, like error bars, when talking about WAR or projections. I’m not in charge of those things, myself, so I can’t give you the official answer, but, they’re difficult numbers to calculate, if they’re possible at all, and many people wouldn’t know how to understand them, and it’s unclear how much those measures would add to the picture anyway. Sometimes you’ll see projections presented in percentiles, like PECOTA, but generally speaking the percentiles can include almost any and all outcomes, so that doesn’t help much. There’s interest in seeing uncertainty, quantitated. It’s challenging, to do it in a meaningful way.

But I want to try something, again with your help. Last week, I ran a bunch of polls, and a few days ago I analyzed the information generated. Here I’d like to take a similar approach. Now, the post was inspired by the transcript of Dave’s Wednesday chat:

12:40
Comment From Curtis
Of all the prospects yet to debut in MLB, who has the highest bust probability in your eyes? Best chance to succeed?
12:41
Dave Cameron: Baez seems to have a very high chance of being nothing. Mookie Betts will be a solid player unless he dies.

Let’s think about Javier Baez and Mookie Betts. Let’s see what we can do to effectively crowdsource their uncertainties.

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Well, the 2015 Hall of Fame voting results rolled in Tuesday, and just about every member of the baseball media has already checked in with his or her opinion. With any luck, I’ll have the last word — at least chronologically. What are we to make of the election of Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz and Craig Biggio, and its resulting future impact upon the holdovers? Let’s take a look at some trends, and hone in on a couple of players most significantly impacted by this week’s proceedings. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Zachary answer emails about Hall of Fame voting, stats in other sports, baseball with no projections, and more (plus a Play Index about plunkings).

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