Throughout the early stages of the calendar year, I’ve been taking a pre-spring training look at each of the six MLB divisions from a slightly different perspective. Utilizing batted ball data, we’re going back over the 2014 season, attempting to calculate each club’s true talent level. Making adjustments for teams’ offensive and defensive K and BB rates and team defense, each team’s true talent 2014 won-lost record is calculated. Then, we’ll take a look at the current Steamer projections for 2015, evaluate key player comings and goings, and determine whether clubs are constructed to be able to handle the inevitable pitfalls along the way that could render such projections irrelevant. Today’s last installment of this series features the AL Central.

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Ben and Sam preview the Brewers’ season with J.P. Breen, and Sahadev talks to Brewers play-by-play broadcaster Joe Block (at 24:16).

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Over the last few years it’s become pretty well accepted that a strikeout isn’t dramatically worse than any other kind of out for hitters. But that being said, making contact is still almost always better than not making contact. There might be a rare instance in which you’d prefer to swing through a pitch because the next one is going to be right in your wheelhouse, but on balance, making contact when you swing is the goal. As such, a high contact percentage is a valuable trait.

Of course, not all contact is created equal and you don’t necessarily want to maximize your contact rate at all costs if it means you won’t be hitting with the same authority. If you can make contact without it turning into weak contact, that’s probably what you want to do.

Every year, I like to look at the biggest gains and losses in particular statistics and contact rate is always one that’s pretty interesting. You can luck into a nice BABIP or wind up with a few extra home runs without changing your game, but a significant change in a plate discipline stat is usually not occurring at random. The change might not always help you predict the future, but it’s unlikely a big spike in contact rate is simply noise.

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The fantasy baseball industry is more popular every day, but it sometimes seems rooted in yesterday. The statistics have moved on since it was invented in the seventies, at least. Is today’s fantasy baseball too far removed from real baseball? Is it just fake?

Fantasy’s traditional scoring system does seem arcane. That old 5×5 fantasy rotisserie game uses runs, RBI, batting average, home runs, and stolen bases as the key batting statistics, and many of those stats have fallen by the wayside as we attempt to better evaluate players. Runs and RBI, in particular, are not consulted at all when it comes to the modern stats of the day. They are just too context-dependent, since your teammates are heavily involved in both.

On the pitching side, the story is the same. Wins are one of the five categories, and a prominent numbers-savvy analyst has declared war on that statistic. Strikeouts, like home runs, are remarkably clean in that they require two participants and no judging from a scorer. But WHIP (Walks plus Hits over Innings Pitched) is full of noise — each hit is not only declared as such by a scorer, but it’s made into a hit through some nebulous combination of pitching and fielding as well.

But if that makes you want to pet fantasy baseball on the head, you might be surprised by how well those ten “old” statistics track with the more modern versions we have today.

Over at FanGraphs, we’re debuting a fantasy auction calculator and ranking tool today. The basic mechanism that powers the calculator is an attempt to look at the spread of certain statistics over a common baseline, look at a player’s production in each stat compared to that spread, and then adjust for position. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it generally follows the roadmap for Wins Above Replacement, one of today’s more sophisticated and complicated advanced summary stats.

If you compare the results of that auction calculator using 5×5 roto stats — batting average, home runs, RBI, runs, stolen bases, wins, ERA, WHIP, strikeouts, and saves — to the current WAR projections for next year, the two valuations are actually fairly close. In laymen’s terms, the ‘old’ 5×5 stats predict over three-quarters of the variance in WAR projections. That’s a strong relationship.

Here are the relevant correlations for a few different sets of scoring systems. (All p-values less than .0001, r value shown.)

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Oakland Athletics. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Oakland’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the A’s 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 Oakland 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. Raul Alcantara, RHP (Profile)

The right-handed Alcantara produced a strikeout- and walk-rate differential just above 15% in 2013, placing him at approximately the 90th percentile among all minor-league pitchers by that measure who recorded at least 100 innings or more. That he did it as just a 20-year-old facing older competition in the Midwest and then California Leagues (between which he split his season almost precisely) is more impressive. Owing to elbow trouble followed by a Tommy John procedure, Alcantara made only three starts in all of 2014 — and the earliest likely return is the middle of 2015. Despite the lack of current data, however, the Steamer forecast still calls for run prevention at something slightly better than replacement level — best among Oakland’s rookie-eligible pitchers.

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Following the departures of free agents Melky Cabrera and Colby Rasmus, the Toronto Blue Jays were down two-thirds of last year’s opening day outfield. They filled one of these holes when they traded for Michael Saunders, but have opted to go the internal route in filling the other, turning to the inexperienced duo of Dalton Pompey and Kevin Pillar to handle center field duties.

Pompey easily has the brighter future of the two. Kiley McDaniel ranked the 22-year-old 80^th in our top 200 list, giving him a Future Value of 50, which equates to an average everyday player. Pillar, on the other hand, hasn’t done much of anything in parts of two seasons with the Blue Jays, and at 26, he’s unlikely to get much better than he currently is. Non-roster veterans Chris Dickerson, Ezequiel Carrera and Caleb Gindl are also theoretically in the center field mix, but are likely in camp to provide depth more than anything. Given his competition, the starting center field job is Pompey’s to lose this spring.

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Last Friday, I took a look at the exceptional nature of Carlos Carrasco‘s split-change. I had trouble finding any kind of decent comparison for it, and when I did a little further analysis in the comments, the best I could come up with was Masahiro Tanaka’s splitter, and Tanaka’s splitter is supposed to be one of the best in the world. So, that was neat, and fun, and people are all about Carrasco hype because of the statistics he just posted down the stretch last summer. This post is about Odrisamer Despaigne. Despaigne isn’t nearly as statistically appealing as Carrasco is, and he’s not even assured a starting spot in the majors this coming season. But, just as Carrasco has an unusual split-change, Despaigne has an unusual changeup. A very, very, very unusual changeup.

Maybe that’s not a total surprise — last July, Eno talked about his weird grip. And Eno, see, knows a lot about grips. Here’s an image:

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If you watch the Athletics, you may have noticed something about their pitching staffs over the last few years. They’re… shorter than average. Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir, and Jarrod Parker are all six foot one or shorter, and none of the A’s pitchers are taller than six foot six.

Look across the country at the Phillies, and the difference becomes more stark.

@enosarris Phillies have 4 guys 6'6" or taller to the Athletics 0, it would be interesting to see if it is an org philosophy or just random

— Matt Winkelman (@Matt_Winkelman) February 20, 2015

Turns out, these two staffs define the range between the tallest and shortest pitchers in the majors.

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When the New York Yankees make a signing, it is big news in baseball. When the Yankees fail to make to a big signing, it is even bigger news. The Yankees targeted Yoan Moncada. They worked him out multiple times. They offered the potential star $25 million, willing to commit $50 million with penalties, showing they believed in his talent. Yet they let the rival Boston Red Sox outbid them by $13 million.

The Yankees are rich and they spend like it. In 2015, their payroll will grow past $200 million for the sixth time in seven years. One offseason ago, the Yankees made $483 million in salary commitments to free agents. Just last summer, the Yankees blew past the international spending limits to sign the biggest international free agent class in Major League Baseball. The high level of spending is confusing when the difference in offers to Moncada is less than the amount they committed to pay a 39-year old Carlos Beltran in 2016 and the total cost is roughly one-third of the commitment they made to obtain Masahiro Tanaka.

As Miles Wray pointed out earlier this month, with the exception of last offseason, the Yankees have used considerable restraint in free agency since winning their last World Series in 2009. The first few sensible years made sense. They went on a spree after 2008, signing Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia, and A.J. Burnett to big contracts that helped them to the World Series. They continued winning, putting up 95 wins in 2010 and followed that season up with 97 wins and 95 wins the next two years. Even before the 95-win 2012 season, Yankees ownership put a plan in place to save the team millions of dollars.
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