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 Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A trait common among basically all the best baseball clubs is that they possess an ability to avoid the awful — which is to say, they exhibit enough either in the way of health or depth or general competence throughout their major-league roster to avoid allocating plate appearances to players who are something worse than average.

Last year’s ZiPS projections for Kansas City suggested that they were particularly well suited to avoiding the awful. While none of their starting batter-types received a forecast in excess of four wins, none of them received a projection below two wins, either. The club was built not to dominate the league, but to remain relevant over the course of a full season.

Per ZiPS, the 2015 iteration of the Royals has more weaknesses than that 2014 edition. No fewer than three of their starting batters — Omar Infante (558 PA, 1.0 WAR), Kendrys Morales (467 PA, 0.5 WAR), and Alex Rios (571 PA, 1.2 WAR) — feature win projections more commonly associated with strong bench players than actual major-league starters.

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I suppose I should preface this by saying I have no scouting background, and I don’t pretend to. What I know about Joc Pederson comes entirely from a.) things written by actual, paid scouts and b.) numbers. This post will be using the latter, and not the former, in an attempt to produce an MLB comparison for Pederson, the Los Angeles Dodgers rookie. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, great. If it’s not, well, thankfully you haven’t spent too much time reading this so far, and there are myriad scouts’ opinions on Pederson. For instance, here are a couple excerpts from our very own Kiley McDaniel, an actual paid scout:
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Ben and Sam preview the Royals’ season with Kansas City Star Royals beat writer Andy McCullough, and Sahadev talks to KC Star columnist Sam Mellinger (at 25:53).

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Episode 530
Mark Armour has contributed extensively to baseball’s literary canon. His most recent work, co-authored with Dan Levitt, is In Pursuit of Pennants, an examination of baseball-operations departments through time. He’s also (with Levitt) ranking the game’s best GMs.

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 49 min play time.)

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Let’s talk about release points. Are you ready to talk about release points? Of course you are — there’s no preparation necessary. If you’re on FanGraphs, there’s no becoming more ready than you already are. Good news!

Among all the things PITCHf/x keeps track of, release point is one of them. Or should I say, two of them; the system tracks both horizontal release point and vertical release point. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on the horizontal release point tracking. On this scale, which is shown in units of feet, 0 corresponds to the middle of the pitching rubber. A negative number means the ball was released more toward the third-base side, and a positive number means the ball was released more toward the first-base side.

Right-handed pitchers have negative horizontal release points. Their arms, after all, hang off from the sides of their bodies, nearer to third base than first. Left-handed pitchers are just the opposite. With side-armers, you’ll see extreme release points, three or four feet from the middle of the rubber. Occasionally you get someone even more extreme than that. A more ordinary pitcher will have a release point separated from the middle by a foot or two. This is only a little bit interesting, but let’s get into some information. Last year’s Brewers were mostly right-handed. Let’s examine those same Brewers.

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With the James Shields signing bringing the off-season to something of a close, it’s time to look back at some of my favorite moves of the winter. A year ago, I was quite high on moves like the Doug Fister acquisition and the Jose Abreu signing, but also the Yankees landing Brian McCann and the Cardinals picking up Peter Bourjos, so you know, grains of salt and all that. Still, I do think there are some moves that appear to be demonstrably better than others, and look likely to push their organizations forward into the future. Below, you’ll find my top 10, plus a handful of other small moves that I liked.

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With James Shields now firmly ensconced in San Diego, the meaningful portion of this winter’s free agency has come to a close. It seemed to me like one thing was missing from the last few months of sizzlin’ stove gossip: the New York Yankees weren’t breaking so many banks in their signature big-money championship pursuit.
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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by the dumb, dumb author himself.

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Apparently this is the week where I do whatever anyone says. Yesterday I identified some comps for various signature pitches around the league. In the subsequent comments, a request:

Well-Beered Englishman says:
As long as we’re making requests, I say hop in the time machine and compare somebody to Mariano.

So it shall be. Let’s see if we can find a decent comparison for Mariano Rivera’s cutter, which has been the most signature of signature pitches. There’s been no greater example of hitters being unable to do much despite knowing exactly what’s coming. With Rivera, there wasn’t a lot of mystery. Just precise, pinpoint location, in areas that ensured his success.

In terms of style, the best comparison for Rivera is probably Kenley Jansen. Jansen dominates with a cutter and little else, and if that sounds familiar, it’s because that was Rivera’s whole game. But this investigation is a little different: this is looking for cutters most like Rivera’s cutter. Research was performed using the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and Brooks Baseball player pages.

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