Randal Grichuk demurred slightly when I asked if he identifies as a power hitter. The St. Louis outfielder hesitated, then said “I’m a guy who is gap-to-gap and can also drive the ball out of the yard.”

In the opinion of a teammate and his hitting coach, Grichuk was guilty of underselling his greatest strength. Infielder Mark Reynolds told me Grichuk “hits balls 500 feet, and at the end of the day, that’s who he is.” John Mabry said, “He’s a power hitter. There are plenty of things he does right, and that’s one of them.”

The 23-year-old former first-round pick did enough right in the Grapefruit circuit to earn a spot on the Cardinals’ opening day roster. His strong spring followed a season in which he catapulted 25 home runs in Triple-A and five more in the big-leagues. Two of the latter came in post-season action.

The Cardinals knew they were getting a potential impact bat when they acquired Grichuk (and Peter Bourjos) from the Angels in exchange for David Freese and Fernando Salas in November 2013. They also knew the player drafted directly in front of Mike Trout was a work-in-progress. Despite being on the doorstep of a breakout, he remains in search of an identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Cardinals, Brewers, Indians, Mariners, Pirates, Royals & Giants

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Draft Rankings: 2015, 2016 & 2017

International Coverage: 2015 July 2nd Parts One, Two & Three, 2016 July 2nd

The Royals have done very well with their recent high picks, snagging prospects 2, 7, 8, 11 and 16 in the top three rounds of last summer’s draft, prospects 1 and 6 in the first round in 2013, and prospects 4, 23 and 27 with their first three picks in 2012. To have 10 of 12 picks in the top three rounds over a three-year period appear on the list is and have 7 of those be 45 FV of higher prospects is an accomplishment. Even though all those prospects won’t return significant big league value, retaining some trade value is important and draft picks often flop quickly, so GM Dayton Moore has to appreciate having trade chips accruing this quickly.

Raul Mondesi was a real find for the international group, as he wasn’t the consensus prospect his bonus suggest when he signed. Miguel Almonte and Jorge Bonifaco are great international finds for lower bonuses and there’s depth to the international prospects in the system. While some of this amateur procurement is due to a larger amateur budget in some years, there have been more stringent league-wide controls in recent years and the Royals have continued to produce at an above average rate.

This is a big year for many bats in the system, with Orlando Calixte, Cheslor Cuthbert, Hunter Dozier, Jorge Bonifacio, Christian Colon, Raul Mondesi and Bubba Starling all having big ceiling and need to improve at turning their tools into production to keep their prospect status/trade value. The performance of these hitters in 2015 will likely decide if the system will be seen as better or worse at this time next year; they’re in the middle third of teams at this point.

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Episode 545
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 58 min play time.)

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The first-level explanation for Billy Burns‘ impressive numbers last month? Spring-training statistics are irrelevant at best, misleading at worst. You know this part. However much there might be a little signal in the stats, it tends to be overwhelmed by noise, so it’s best to just ignore the numbers entirely. But for weeks we’re given numbers, and they’re the only numbers we have. We can’t help but look at them. Which brings us to the second-level explanation: spring-training statistics provide leads. Excuses to talk about certain players, based on something particularly positive or negative. So how about that Billy Burns?

Last I checked, Burns was tied for the big-league lead in spring-training hits. He was seventh in batting average and tenth in OBP, and while some players like Pete Kozma have also hit the ball well, other, actually good players have hit the ball well, too, so there’s that. The point is that Burns has drawn himself attention. He’s already made his big-league debut, he’s not yet old, and now Coco Crisp will be sidelined for some time. For Billy Burns, opportunity knocks. He’s an unusual player, so what can we make of him?

If there’s one thing you know about Burns — and many of you might not know anything — it’s that he’s fast. Remember Terrance Gore? Billy Burns has Terrance Gore footspeed. In scouting-speak, Billy Burns has 80 footspeed, meaning he’s as fast as anyone else. Like Gore, Burns has been used as a pinch-runner. We all got obsessed with the running game in last year’s playoffs, but we usually dismiss it somewhat casually, so, it’s worth wondering whether Burns might become something more than a novelty.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

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

t5. Elias Diaz, C (Profile)

As McDaniel notes, Diaz was signed as an 18-year-old out of Venezuela for just $20 thousand. Age and bonus amount are pretty strong indicators of a Latin American player’s prospect status — and Diaz’s indicators suggest that his status as a prospect wasn’t “very highly sought after.” Statistically, though — with the exception of a couple low-BABIP seasons — he’s demonstrated a promising and constantly improving offensive profile, never striking out in more than 20% of his plate appearances and always exhibiting something better than negligible power. Moreover, his defensive skills at catcher appear to be his actual strength. Considered altogether, that’s a promising collection of qualities — one that renders him probably somewhere above replacement level.

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The Braves have acquired Trevor Cahill and cash for their Josh Elander, a 24-year-old former catcher that was playing outfield in High-A Lynchburg for the second time last year. So mostly this transaction is about the Braves getting a cheap starter on the cheap. The quality of that incoming pitcher, and the fit on a rebuilding team — these are the things that are most debatable about the deal.

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Every team starts the season with five starters, but the chances a team makes it through the season unscathed is minimal. From research performed by Jeff Zimmerman, starting pitchers who made 20 starts and pitched 120 innings the previous season have roughly a 40% chance of hitting the disabled list during the season. Eno Sarris added to Zimmerman’s work before the start of last season and found that teams have been averaging around 10 starters per season since 2011. That average did not change last season as teams averaged 9.6 starters per team. Even if the bar is raised to a minimum of five starts, teams averaged 7.4 starters per team in 2014, consistent with five-year average of 7.5 starters per team per season.

Attempting to measure pitching depth can be difficult. Jeff Sullivan took a look at overall depth last month, showing how many players were projected for at least one win according projections. Focusing on rotation depth the same way is a good way to look strictly at depth, but with the season upon us, we can see the potential impact of that depth by examining the dropoff from starters to their replacements. FanGraphs completed the Positional Power Rankings with the pitching split into two posts, one for the bottom half, and one for the top half. Without rehashing the entirety of both posts, here is the graph from those posts which should provide a base of expectations for a team’s rotation.
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Before the season’s soft opening on Sunday night and grand opening on Monday, we are compelled to to offer you our staff predictions. We attempted to pull in as many of our authors as possible from across our family of blogs, because the only thing better than predictions is predictions by a ton of people!

We’re usually not so good at this sort of thing. Or, more to the point, we’re not any better at it than anyone else. But we enjoy doing it, because it marks the start of a new season. Last season was no different. Boston and Oakland were pegged as division winners, and Tampa Bay was pegged as a Wild Card. Prince Fielder and Jason Kipnis got MVP nods, and Xander Bogaerts got plenty of Rookie of the Year love. Only Boston as a division winner really sticks out as hilarious, but all of these missed the mark by a great deal. Nevertheless, we press on! We also conducted a more in-depth staff survey, and we’ll dig into that on Monday morning.

American League Postseason Teams
East: Boston (20), Baltimore (7), Toronto (7), New York (2), Tampa Bay (2)
Central: Cleveland (24), Detroit (14), Chicago (0), Kansas City (0), Minnesota (0)
West: Los Angeles (22), Seattle (14), Oakland (2), Houston (0), Texas (0)
Wild Card: Seattle (12), Toronto (10), Detroit (9), Chicago (6), Oakland (4), New York (1), Tampa Bay (1), Boston (14), Cleveland (11), Los Angeles (7)

The AL East is wide open enough that every team got a vote, something that didn’t happen in either the 2013 or 2014 editions of our staff predictions, in any division. Outside of that, the divisions are fairly unininteresting aside from the two votes for Oakland. Note that the three consensus division winners are listed at the end of the Wild Card votes, since it would be confusing if they won multiple things.

Even though you’re good enough at math to add up totals from division and wild card winners, let’s total up and check out who the overall postseason favorites are.

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We’ve moved our from the west — both NL and the AL — and covered both the NL and AL Wests the last two days. Today, we’ll do both eastern divisions, starting with the National League.

The Projected Standings

The easiest division in baseball to handicap. The favorites just have to avoid implosion to punch their ticket to the postseason, with only two teams even pretending to put up a fight, and neither one looking quite ready for the postseason yet. The fight for second place could be a Wild Card battle, but more likely, there is only one playoff team here, and it’s probably going to be the one we’d all expect.

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