Over the winter, the Reds remade their starting rotation, trading away both Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon, getting younger and cheaper players back in return for a pair of arms headed into their walk years. However, they declined to go into a full rebuild, keeping both Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake despite the fact that they’re also pending free agents; the Reds wanted to take one more shot at winning with their current core, especially given that they’re hosting the All-Star Game this year.

Now, the Reds actually pulling off this contend-while-kinda-rebuilding plan seems like a bit of a longshot. We currently have them projected for 75 wins, last in the NL Central, with just a 2.7% chance of winning the division and a 5.9% chance of capturing one of the two Wild Card spots. And it’s not like we’re out on a limb here; Bovada has the Reds over/under at 77.5. Baseball Prospectus is slightly more optimistic, pegging them at 79 wins, matching Clay Davenport’s projected win total.

So, in general, the pre-season forecasts peg the Reds as something like a 75 to 80 win team, meaning they need to find an extra dozen or so wins in either surprisingly strong performances or sequencing luck in order to sneak into a playoff spot. It definitely is possible, especially if the team gets strong bounce back performances from Jay Bruce and Joey Votto, but the Reds are going to need to get a few breakthrough performances from unexpected sources. When you’re starting from this position and trying to win, you need to take some gambles and have them pay off.

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Cubs third-base prospect Kris Bryant produced one of the top minor-league seasons in recent history last year, recording a weighted batting line approximately 90% better than league average over 594 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A while also playing a seemingly competent third base. Were minor-league WAR a thing, Bryant would have recorded the best one of those in all of affiliated baseball — roughly the equivalent of nine wins.

Largely as a result of that wildly successful 2014 season, Bryant enters 2015 featuring the top WAR projection among all rookie-eligible players — and one of the top WAR projections realistically possible for a player who’s made zero major-league appearances. His performance over the first couple weeks of spring training indicates — to the degree that spring-training performance can indicate such things — that he’s, at the very least, unlikely to be overwhelmed by major-league pitching.

Before Kris Bryant led all the minors in home runs, he led all the NCAA in home runs, too. In 2013, as a junior at the University of San Diego, Bryant hit 31 homers. That June, he was selected second overall in the draft by the Cubs. The next month, he was presented with the Golden Spikes Award.

Technically, the Golden Spikes Award is presented each year to the best amateur player in the country. In practice, however, the award has been given to a college player (either the four-year or junior-college variety) every year since its inception in 1978. Bob Horner was the Golden Spikes recipient that year following his junior campaign at Arizona State — a performance which convinced Atlanta not only to select him first overall in the draft that year, but also to send him directly to the majors, where he produced a 2.3 WAR in 359 plate appearances.

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Last season was a banner year for the Baltimore Orioles. The team won 96 games in the regular season and advanced to the ALCS despite a whirlwind of adversity: significant injuries to Matt Wieters and Manny Machado, and huge power declines from Chris Davis and J.J. Hardy. Hardy’s 2014 was quite interesting. He was hampered by back issues throughout the season, hitting only nine homers after clubbing a total of 87 his first three years in Baltimore, but it ended well, as he quickly signed a three-year, $40 million extension after the season ended. The scary thing is, Hardy’s offensive performance last season was quite a bit worse than his .268/.309/.372 line indicated.

Hardy was the Brewers’ second-round draft pick in 2001 out of Sabino High School in Tucson, Ariz., and quickly advanced through the minor leagues. He was given a challenging assignment in his first full pro season in 2002, opening at High-A and receiving a promotion to Double-A by season’s end. Each year, I compile an ordered list of minor-league position player prospects based on their OBP and SLG, relative to their league and level, adjusted for age. Traditional scouting techniques are then used to tweak the order. Hardy’s minor-league performances resulted in three top 100 rankings, quite unusual for a shortstop. His peak ranking was No. 20 after the 2003 season, when he hit 12 homers as a 20-year-old in the pitcher-friendly Southern League. Such rankings and performances projected a long major league career, with some offensive upside.

Hardy indeed has had a long run as a regular MLB shortstop, arriving in 2005 with only a couple of injury interruptions since. After hitting all of 29 minor-league homers — with that single-season high of 12 — Hardy has gone on to hit 167 as a big leaguer, clearing the 20-homer mark five times. In many ways, Hardy has tracked the performance of Jimmy Rollins, who hit 36 minor league homers — also with a single-season high of 12 — before hitting 215 in the majors through his age-35 season. Rollins also was a second-round high school draftee, and earned a ranking on my minor league position player prospect list four times, including two top 100 slots, with a peak at No. 44 in 2000.

They’re very similar defenders, as well: solid but unspectacular range, great hands and extremely accurate throwing arms. Both like to swing the bat, causing their respective OBPs to suffer as a result; but they grew into some power, and have extremely respectable 97 (Rollins) and 96 (Hardy) career OPS+ marks for shortstops. The big difference between them, of course, is Rollins’ speed, which separates the two into different tiers as players.

Enough about Rollins. Let’s get back to J.J. It’s tempting to chalk up the entirety of Hardy’s 2014 offensive struggles to his back injury, which primarily affected him in the early stages of the season. After all, he didn’t hit his first homer until June 21, and then managed eight more the rest of the way. That’s way down from his 2013 total of 25, but one can easily make the case that a healthy Hardy would have hit 15 or so. Once you dig a little deeper into the numbers, however, other disturbing items emerge. To get to the bottom of Hardy’s 2014 campaign, let’s examine his plate appearance frequency and production by BIP type data. First, the frequency info:
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We know Anthony Rendon has a diverse skill set. You could say, in fact, that he has the prototypical diverse skill set: he hits for contact and power, fields well, and as of 2014, steals bases. Even though he usually plays a position in which you don’t have to throw the ball very far, he also has a good enough arm to play third, so you could say he has all the tools in the five-sided shed. Rendon certainly doesn’t scream “five-tool guy,” but that’s mostly because he doesn’t look like the usual four or five-tool guy, not because he doesn’t put up the necessary numbers.

Rendon showed us he was really good at baseball in 2014, improving all aspects of his game. Most important to our discussion today, however, was the fact that he stole 17 bases in 2014 after stealing just one in 2013 and seven total in the minors. Anthony Rendon went from a guy who basically never stole in his professional career to the ninth-best base runner by BsR in the majors during 2014. Yes, he didn’t spend long in the minors, but that’s still a pretty unusual change.

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Today, Joe Kelly took the mound in Ft. Myers, and it didn’t go well; he gave up seven hits in 2 2/3 innings before leaving with an injury currently being called biceps tightness

Kelly said he had biceps tightness that limited him to fastballs; 'not concerned.' Says he's had it before. 'Usually doesn't last too long'

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) March 16, 2015

Today’s performance continued a trend from his two previous spring training starts, as he’s now allowed 17 hits in 7 2/3 innings this spring; his spring training ERA currently stands at 11.05. On their own, the results aren’t a big deal, but when you combine it with a potential injury, it might be fair to say that Kelly’s spot could be up for grabs at this point.

Of course, any time the Red Sox rotation is mentioned, people will invariably bring up Cole Hamels, but Boston continues to seem uninterested in meeting the Phillies price, and they do have some interesting alternatives in-house. While youngsters Henry Owens and Eduardo Rodriguez are the two best long-term prospects and might be ready for an audition, John Farrell has made sure the beat writers keep Steven Wright’s name in the picture as well. Per Alex Speier, from this morning:

The Sox would not be opposed to adding a veteran starter to their Triple A rotation. But Farrell again expressed confidence in Steven Wright as a depth starter. “He gives us a lot of comfort. As that knuckleball has come along, he’s throwing a lot more strikes,” Farrell said. “He’s got the ability to give a contrast of style.”

Projecting the performance of knuckleballers is not quite impossible, but is something kind of close to it. Wright could be very good — as he was in a September trial last year — or he could be terrible, with pretty much any result in between seemingly equally likely. Knuckleballers are lottery tickets, especially ones with spotty track records and iffy command. Dickey’s success came after he cut his walk rate in half, which Wright appears to have done in Triple-A last year, but we essentially have half a minor league season and a month of big league action where Wright showed a consistent ability to throw strikes. If he’s not throwing strikes, he’s not any good, and it’s not a big surprise that the Red Sox wouldn’t want to count on his 2014 command improvement carrying over when trying to win in 2015.

But there are a couple of reasons why I think it might make sense for the Red Sox to give Wright a shot, especially if Kelly needs replacing on the Opening Day roster: his Z-Contact% and the knuckleball carryover effect.

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Last time, I looked at 2014’s five best pitching performances, by WPA, in a losing effort. This time we take a gander at the five best offensive performances that came in a loss. Just like the pitching performances we looked at earlier, there is one very specific way to appear on this list: have a career day during a close game, and then watch your bullpen mess the whole thing up.

It should be noted that the single greatest individual game in baseball history — which would be a whopping 1.503 WPA, or more than Ben Zobrist, Salvador Perez, or Yan Gomes provided all of last season — came from a hitter in a loss. The date was August 12, 1966, and the man was Art Shamsky, who would ultimately contribute 6.8 WAR during his eight seasons as a utility outfielder. On August 12, 1966, Shamsky did not even receive the start, but was allowed to chill in the dugout for the first seven innings before being brought in on a double-switch as a defensive substitution in the top of the eighth.

In the bottom of the eighth, Shamsky cranked a two-run homer to give his Cincinnati Reds a one-run lead over the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates would tie the game in the top of the ninth, sending the contest to extra innings. The Pirates scored one run in the top of the tenth, which Shamsky answered with a solo homer. The Pirates then scored two runs in the top of the eleventh, which Shamsky answered with — duh — a two-run homer. In the top of the thirteenth, the Pirates scored three runs off of the impeccably named Billy McCool, and the other hapless Reds went down in order in the bottom of the 13th, leaving Shamsky in the hole on the game’s concluding pitch. We recognize you and mourn with you, Art Shamsky.

On to 2014:

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

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The Toronto Blue Jays suffered a crippling blow when 23-year-old Marcus Stroman ruptured his ACL during fielding drills last week. Prior to Stroman’s injury, Toronto’s final rotation spot was slated to go to the winner of a competition featuring Daniel Norris, Aaron Sanchez and Marco Estrada. Presumably, at least one of the losers would help fill out the Jays’ bullpen. But sans Stroman, Toronto now needs to use two-thirds of that trio in its rotation, which only weakens a bullpen that was already looking pretty thin. The Blue Jays are scrambling to fill the void.

At this point, it only makes sense to talk about Rafael Soriano. That’s not something you hear every day, but it makes sense to talk about Rafael Soriano because these are the remaining names that currently populate our free agent depth charts:

• Ryan Doumit
• Brett Hayes
• Lyle Overbay
• Rafael Furcal
• Scott Hairston
• Jason Kubel
• Andrew Brown
• Tony Campana
• Sean Burnett
• Brian Wilson
• Rafael Soriano

We used to have something like 100 names on our free agent depth charts, and now we’re down to 11. More specifically, those 11. If you weren’t keeping track at home, that’s two catchers who combined for -1.3 WAR last year, a first baseman who’s retiring, a 37-year-old second baseman who’s played nine games since 2012, a group of three outfielders who are projected for a combined -0.6 WAR, another outfielder who’s out for the season, a reliever coming off three consecutive years of elbow surgeries, a pitcher who no longer amounts to much more than a beard, and a closer who’s saved 117 games the last three years.

That’s the long-winded way of saying, Rafael Soriano is the Last Man Standing in this year’s free agent class, and at this point, he sticks out like a sore thumb.
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