Dexter Fowler played 959 innings in center field for the Astros in 2014, which is noteworthy mostly because he was traded to the Cubs on Monday, but also because of how poorly the defensive metrics rated him for those 959 innings. By Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) he was 20 runs below average and by Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) he was slightly worse.

Both metrics dinged Fowler for a poor arm, something that’s followed him for his entire career, but for the third time in his career, UZR gave his range horrible marks relative to other center fielders. DRS had previously been friendlier, but didn’t hold back in 2014 with respect to his range.

Fowler’s defense rates poorly by the leading defensive metrics with his career DRS and UZR per 1,000 innings sitting somewhere between -7 runs and -11 runs. Now this is almost exclusively in center field so Fowler gets a few of those runs back on the positional adjustment, but we’re basically talking about a bad center fielder who might be an average guy in a corner. This is all according to the metrics which, as plenty of people will remind you, are imperfect.

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Yesterday afternoon, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Baltimore Orioles. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Baltimore’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Orioles 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 Orioles 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.

t3. Christian Walker, 1B (Profile)

Last year, Walker hit 26 home runs in 599 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A, recording a rate of 29 homers per 600 plate appearances at a ballpark that inflates that sort of batted ball by about 25% and then a rate of about 19 per 600 plate appearances a park that deflates home runs by roughly the same factor. This hardly leads to any strong conclusions about Walker’s power. That said, as a first baseman who lacks a decidedly above-average hit tool or walk rate, Walker’s success at the majors is probably contingent on hitting home runs. He’s projected to hit 19 per 600 plate appearances at the majors in 2015.

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On Monday, while the world was reacting to the news of Max Scherzer’s signing, the Texas Rangers made a nifty little trade, acquiring Yovani Gallardo from the Milwaukee Brewers for three so-so prospects that they probably won’t miss too much. Gallardo immediately slides in behind Yu Darvish and Derek Holland as the team’s #3 starter, giving them some much needed pitching depth in their quest to avoid a repeat of their disastrous 2014 season.

The Rangers clearly needed at least one more reliable starting pitcher, and Gallardo has made 30 or more starts in six consecutive years, proving to be a durable innings eater at worst, while occasionally flashing some front-of-the-rotation stuff. But there’s a reason the Brewers traded him, and it wasn’t just to open up a rotation spot for young hurler Jimmy Nelson; Gallardo’s slowly becoming a different kind of pitcher than he was earlier in his career.

The graph below is the easiest way to see Gallardo’s evolution as a pitcher:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Here’s what we know about what’s left on the free agent market: If you wanted a bat, you should have acted months ago. Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Michael Cuddyer, Russell Martin and others came off the board pretty quickly. With Nori Aoki in San Francisco and Colby Rasmus in Houston, the best remaining bat might be… who? Geovany Soto? Rickie Weeks? It’s similar for starting pitchers, because while James Shields is still out there, after him, it’s something like Kyle Kendrick and the remains of Chad Billingsley.

But relievers… well, relievers are another story. The big fish like Andrew Miller and David Robertson are long gone, and guys like Zach Duke and Luke Gregerson got paid too, but you could still put together an entire big league bullpen, at reasonable cost and decent productivity, with what’s still left out there.

In fact, let’s play a quick game. “Free agents” are listed as though they’re baseball’s 31st team on our Depth Charts, mostly so that players without a home have a place to be listed so that we can see their projections. With the caveat that WAR isn’t exactly the best way to rate a reliever and that this is for entertainment purposes only, look at where the Free Agent team ranks on the per-positional projection pages:

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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 Cleveland Baseball Club. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

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

Batters
Cleveland finished tied with Houston in 2014 for last place among all clubs in defensive runs. That’s not ever really a “positive” distinction. That said, were one in the business of identifying silver linings, a legitimate one in this case might concern how defensive metrics are prone to greater regression than most offensive stats — and thus projection systems such as ZiPS are unlikely to weight seasons like Cleveland’s 2014 campaign as heavily.

By the projections, the 2015 iteration of Cleveland’s baseball team doesn’t actually profile as a particularly bad defensive club. Lonnie Chisenhall, Jason Kipnis, and Carlos Santana are all forecast to finish on the negative side of the defensive ledger relative to their position, but Michael Brantley and Yan Gomes and Jose Ramirez are all projected to save more runs than average at their respective positions. The result, it would appear, is a roughly league-average group of hitters.

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I don’t think one should require much convincing that the Houston Astros are taking a worthwhile shot in signing Colby Rasmus. Most simply, it’s a one-year contract for a 28-year-old, and it’s worth just $8 million. Rasmus has had a volatile career — last year he finished with a .287 OBP — but he was still overall an average hitter. The season before, he was a lot better than that. The Astros had a role for Rasmus, after dealing Dexter Fowler. If he’s good, he’ll help. If he’s really good, he’ll be worth a qualifying offer. If he’s bad, well, lots of Astros have been bad, and Rasmus alone won’t stop the Astros from getting where they’re trying to go. At the end of the day, 2015 is just a season the Astros have to play out before the seasons they want to play out.

So I don’t think the contract is necessarily that interesting. Rasmus is talented, and he’s trying to bounce back. The Astros, as a team, aren’t as good as the Mariners, Angels or A’s, so it seems like they’ll be fighting the Rangers for fourth in the American League West. A year from now, I doubt we’ll be thinking much about this. But there is one interesting note we can discuss in more detail: Rasmus strikes out a lot. Several Astros strike out a lot. It seems like the Astros are going to strike out a lot.

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Ben and Sam banter about their favorite regular-season games, then answer listener emails about player relocation, bidding for top prospects, transaction crowdsourcing, and more.

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This offseason has been so full of thrills and spills it’s been easy to forget that two of the FanGraphs Crowd’s four most-valued free agents went unsigned well into 2015, with Max Scherzer waiting to become a Washington National until January 19. We don’t yet know why Scherzer waited so long to sign, or why the almost-as-valuable James Shields has waited even longer. Perhaps they have been sitting with fingers crossed in hopes that they would receive a substantial offer from a team other than the Houston Astros. Maybe they just want to take their time making such a big life decision.

Regardless of their reasons for remaining on the free agent market for so long, we’re just about reaching that point in the offseason when Pitchers & Catchers Reporting is visible on the horizon’s crest. One of the perks of being a phenomenal major league player on the level of Scherzer and Shields is that you are afforded comparatively ironclad job security, especially compared to their journeymen peers, many of whom have to annually shuttle their families to new locales across the nation.

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