The Cincinnati Reds face an uphill battle in 2015. The St. Louis Cardinals are heavy favorites. The Pittsburgh Pirates brought back most of its playoff team and could see improvement with a young roster. The Cubs have made improvements, and even the Brewers bring back many players who put them in first place for most of 2014. The odds of the Reds winning the division are not very good. The FanGraphs Playoff Odds are up, and the Reds have just a 3.0% chance of winning the division. That means out of 10,000 simulations, the Reds won the division around 300 times. Focusing in on the 3% chance side, it is possible to create scenarios where the Reds can win the division.

FanGraphs Playoff Odds are based on ZiPS, Steamer, and the Depth Chart Projections. Those projections are not very kind to the Reds. The projections currently have the Reds at 75 wins, last in the National League Central. For a frame of reference, here are the top five teams per WAR according to those projections.

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What follows represents the third in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. Last Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. On Friday, I examined good players by draft round. In this installment, I look at good players by the conferences in which they played as collegiate athletes (which obviously excludes international, prep, and junior-college players).

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Yu Darvish is probably going to require Tommy John surgery. As Jeff noted yesterday, this is a blow to the Rangers already slim playoff odds, and now our projections have them as perhaps the worst team in the American League. After last year’s debacle, the team was hoping for a big bounce back, but that seems particularly unlikely now, and it’s a legitimate question whether this move should cause the front office to start really playing for the future.

So, yeah, this is bad news. The 2015 Rangers just became potentially unwatchable, especially if they perform poorly, eventually trading away Yovani Gallardo and maybe even Derek Holland; the remnants of the rotation would be the worst in baseball. But because of a series of triggers in Darvish’s contract, it’s actually possible to see this as not entirely awful news, with even some long-term upside for the Rangers

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Hisashi Iwakuma is perhaps the most underrated pitcher in baseball. Since his debut in 2012, he has posted an xFIP of 3.24: good for 12th-best among qualified starters, and bracketed on either side by Max Scherzer and Madison Bumgarner. The former of that duo just signed a well-publicized seven-year, $210 million dollar contract; Iwakuma is on the last year of a three-year deal worth a total of $20 million.

Iwakuma won’t make Scherzer money in free agency next year, mostly due to the fact that he is four years older than the new Nationals right-hander, but it gives us an idea of the company he’s kept for the past three years. Always the groomsman, never the groom, Iwakuma lives with his near elite-level production in the shadow of perennial Cy Young candidate Felix Hernandez: while he finished third in Cy Young voting in 2013, he is usually forgotten when the final lists of best pitchers are made — left instead to plan the year-end parties for the King.

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The best thing about having ZiPS on the site is having ZiPS on the site. The second-best thing about having ZiPS on the site is it gives people like me an opportunity to recycle blog posts like this. Already, I repeated a polling project, asking you guys how you feel about the various team projections. Now I’m repeating a post from January, where I examined team depth based just on Steamer projections. Now we’ve got the full blended Steamer and ZiPS projections, and we have the newest depth charts possible, so it only makes sense to do this again. I can’t afford to not do this again.

Do I need to explain to you the importance of depth? Probably not, and probably especially not since I’ve already written this. But, I mean, you have your starters, and then you have your other guys. Ideally, the starters all work out, and nothing goes wrong. Ideally, it’s nothing but eight or nine position players and one five-man rotation, and you sweep your way to the World Series. But the thing that usually happens is misfortune. It happens in different amounts to different organizations, but you can expect every team to need reinforcements. Right now, it might not be clear what will go wrong, but something or some things will go wrong, and the strong teams are prepared for adversity.

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Among the many significant trades that went down at last July’s trading deadline, the three-way deal among the Tigers, Rays and Mariners that centered around David Price was particularly unique. The Tigers and Rays’ respective goals were pretty clear; the Tigers wanted Price to bolster their rotation for what they hoped would be a World Series run, and the Rays were bailing on the race and restocking for the future with the acquisition of Drew Smyly, Nick Franklin and minor leaguer Willy Adames. The Mariners’ role in the deal was a little more understated but just as intriguing. In exchange for Franklin, they acquired center fielder Austin Jackson, filling an organizational void in the hopes of making a playoff charge of their own. They fell a game short of a wild card berth, and Jackson’s ineffectiveness played a role. Still, some interesting batted-ball data suggests that the M’s may get their money’s worth in 2015, if some targeted adjustments are made. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam preview the prospect side of the Cubs’ season with Chris Crawford, and Sahadev talks to Daily Herald Cubs beat writer Bruce Miles about the big league club (at 31:43).

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Episode 538
Kiley McDaniel is the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and Eric Longenhagen is a different prospect analyst for FanGraphs. They’re the surprisingly reasonable guests on this edition of FanGraphs, recorded live and outdoors in Phoenix following a weekend game between Arizona State and Long Beach State.

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 44 min play time.)

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Maybe the problem is on our end. Maybe the problem is the increasingly unrealistic expectation of health, establishing a psychological baseline no longer supported by the modern game. In this game, pitchers get hurt, and while pitchers have always gotten hurt, because pitching is a dangerous thing, the sense is things are getting worse, and we have to adjust to what that means. Maybe we just need to mentally brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable blows. Last season, the elbow robbed us of Matt Harvey and Jose Fernandez, among so many others. Already this season, we came in nervous about Masahiro Tanaka, and now the elbow might have claimed Yu Darvish and Cliff Lee.

The two have different injuries. Darvish has a slight tear of the UCL, and the overwhelming likelihood is Tommy John surgery that’ll knock him out until into next season. Lee doesn’t seem to have a UCL problem, but he still might have a UCL problem, and even if he doesn’t, he’s dealing with the same discomfort that forced him to be shut down last summer, and if Lee requires a surgical fix, the estimate is a recovery of 6-8 months. Darvish might try to pitch through, but we know how that usually goes. Lee might try to pitch through, but in the best-case scenario, that means pitching through pain. We might not see Darvish until the middle of 2016. We might not see Lee ever again on a major-league mound. It’s too early to know anything for sure, except that the news of the last few days has changed the baseball landscape.

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