Every season is a great season of baseball. It’s fair to say, however, that some seasons might be better than others; if unexpected teams succeed, records are broken, and exciting rookies debut on the biggest stage, we can witness something that transcends the customary ebb and flow of the regular season. At the All-Star break, 2015 has done exactly that.

The Twins are in the playoff hunt. A-Rod reached 3,000 hits. And, despite those unexpected and landmark events, this season’s greatest surprise might be the group of up-and-coming superstars that have broken into the big leagues. With Miguel Sano getting the call to the Twins two weeks ago, we’re now seeing many of the big-name prospects that we’ve been hearing about for the past few years: Kris Bryant, Joc Pederson, Carlos Correa, and Addison Russell (just to name a few) are all in major league starting lineups on a daily basis.

All of these players were at one time in Baseball America’s top 10 prospects list; all at one point have topped their respective team’s individual lists. It’s unusual to see so many top prospects called up in the first half of the same season, and it warrants our attention. With a chance to pause and look back on the season thus far, how have 2015’s rookies measured up against the rookie classes of the past decade?

First, we’ll look at the overall pre-All Star break production of this season’s positional rookie class compared to those of the past decade. As a cutoff, we’ll look at the combined production of the top 20 rookies for each season; that will seek to isolate only the best rookies in each season. Let’s look at the first-half production of each rookie class by Wins Above Replacement since 2005. Is 2015 actually a great year for rookie production, compared to the past decade?

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Ben and Sam banter about the All-Star Game and then discuss how the Oakland A’s should handle the next phase of their strange season.

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Television ratings for the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, like most sporting events and television shows generally, have seen a viewership decline over the last few decades. This decline is not new. After an embarrassing All-Star Game in 2002 that saw Bud Selig call the game a tie, the powers that be wanted to help prevent a further decline in ratings and interest so they came up with a plan to make the game matter. Beginning in 2003, the league that won the All-Star Game would receive home field advantage in the World Series. The move has done little to prevent ratings from a slow decline over the next few years, but over the past five seasons, the ratings have remained steady despite an increasingly fractured television landscape.

Thirty years ago, the All-Star Game was the crown jewel of MLB’s regular season. Only around 50 baseball games were broadcast nationally, ESPN had not begun to broadcast games, and the All-Star Game was a rare opportunity to see the game’s best players. That rarity, combined with limited options for television viewing in general, came through in the ratings. The graph below shows the ratings for the MLB All-Star Game from 1967 through last season.

Source: Baseball Almanac and LA Times

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The Yankees boasted one of the best offenses in baseball in the season’s first half. Heading into the All-Star break, the team ranks third in the American League wRC+ and second in runs scored. But very little of this run scoring has come from the second base position, where the team has mustered only a 64 wRC+. Stephen Drew, with his 229 plate appearances of 69 wRC+, has been the primary culprit.

The Yankees second base situation just got a bit better, however. Or at least it did on the offensive side of things. The team called up rookie second baseman Rob Refsnyder on Saturday. The Bombers faced off against two left-handed pitchers over the weekend, making it an ideal time to break in their right-handed rookie second baseman. Refsnyder accumulated two hits in his first two games, including a towering home run off of Alexi Ogando yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

With the introduction out of the way, let’s get into the list. We’ll do 10 guys per day, wrapping up with the top 10 on Friday. Today, we’ll start with the bubble guys who made the cut, but keep in mind, the gap between players in this tier is quite small, and you could reasonably argue to rearrange them in just about any order you wanted. And a good number of the guys who missed the cut are very similar in value to these 10, so don’t get too worked up over a guy appearing in this group versus another guy who was an honorable mention. These guys are all very good, but this is the part of the list where the actual ranking matters the least.

In addition to the player’s biographical information, I’ve added a summary of his contract situation, and as a new feature this year, Dan Szymborski has provided me with five year ZIPS forecasts for all of the players on the list, which I’ve listed along with their 2016 projection. Of course, not every player listed is under control for the next five years — some are locked up well beyond that time frame — but this should offer you a pretty decent view of what a player is expected to do both in the short-term and the longer-term, according to Dan’s forecasting system.

For the contract details, I’m only displaying future obligations beginning with their 2016 salary. I’ve tried to ensure that these are as accurate as can be, but they were also collected manually, so there probably will be some mistakes; there are plenty of weird clauses and options that make aggregating all this information particularly annoying. Also, we’re not including things like All-Star bonuses or incentive escalators, as this is intended to give more of a big picture view than be a precise accounting of the exact cost of a future player. A few hundred thousand here and there won’t change the rankings.

Also, keep in mind that some players have contracts that give them a guaranteed minimum, but they are also able to opt-into arbitration when they are eligible. This is pretty common now with prominent international signings, and so some of these guys will probably earn more than their contracts currently call for, but I’ve still just included the guaranteed minimum in the future salary commitment because we don’t know for sure that they’re going to opt into arbitration yet.

Finally, we’ve also included a nifty little graphic at the bottom that visualizes a lot of the information contained below, so if you want to see the projections and contract status for everyone together, you can get a summary of that at the bottom. The chart goes out five years, so some players have additional value beyond what’s displayed, but it should give you a good overview of what each player offers going forward.

Alright, on to the list.

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Episode 579
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the early returns from the international-signing period, the start of the 2016 draft season, and how agents both recruit and retain young clients.

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 45 min play time.)

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The market for starting pitching this offseason should be robust. I find starting articles with sentences that use words like “market” and “robust” is a great way to weed out readers. So, if you’re still with me, welcome to an article about Jordan Zimmermann!

The Zimmermann I’m referring to, by the way, is the Zimmermann that pitches, not the Zimmerman who hits. The Nationals are lousy with Zimmermen(n) so it’s easy to get confused. This particular Zimmermann, the subject of this here article, will be a free agent next season. After his big 2014 season, the Nationals talked to Zimmermann’s people (when you’re about to be a big money free agent you get you own people) about a contract extension to stay in DC beyond 2015 when his contract expired, but those talks didn’t get anywhere and then last off-season the Nats signed Max Scherzer. They did that because who doesn’t love a SuperRotation, but also as a replacement ace, as the club believed Zimmermann and to a lesser extent Doug Fister weren’t likely to stay in Washington after 2015. I don’t know what figures were discussed between Zimmermann’s people and the Nationals but it’s fair to say by not signing, Zimmermann passed on a lot of money.

Now, one half season into that decision and a half season from free agency, I wanted to take a look at Zimmermann to see how his decision is panning out.

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It’s the All-Star break, which means no baseball for four days. And, around here, the All-Star break means that I spend five days writing about the most valuable trade chips in the game, as it’s once again time for our annual Trade Value series. This is actually the 11th year I’ve done this list, as my first one came back in 2005, and it included immortals like Daniel Cabrera, Felipe Lopez, and Bobby Crosby. I moved the list to FanGraphs back in 2008, so this will be the eighth edition here on this site.

As always, I’d like to acknowledge that this project has been borrowed from Bill Simmons, who did his own NBA Trade Value series at Grantland, and Jonah Keri has taken up the torch over there, doing a baseball version once the regular season ends. It’s a fun project, and one I’m glad Simmons popularized.

As a quick overview for those who might be new to the series, he’s the basic concept: which players would bring the most return in trade if they were made available by their current clubs? To answer this question as best as we can, we not only look at a player’s performance — both now and in the future — but also the amount of years a team would be acquiring a player for, and how much that player would earn in salary before he could become a free agent. The most valuable assets in the game aren’t just great players, but they’re great players who aren’t getting paid like great players. Naturally, this causes this list to skew very young, as MLB’s pay scale is geared to take money from inexperienced players and give it to veterans. Given that teams also like to build around young stars, this causes many of the most valuable trade chips in the game to be guys at the beginnings of their careers.

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Given all the controversies they’ve been through this year, you’d almost want to think the Angels were having a bad season. Only a few months ago, ownership ran Josh Hamilton out of town, and while it did so figuratively, you get the sense it would’ve done it literally. Not very long after that, a team executive was dismissed after using words like “segregation” in an interview about ticket policies and attendance. And of course, the other week, the general manager packed up his office and left, his relationship with Mike Scioscia finally reaching the breaking point. From a PR perspective, for the Angels, it’s been a year to forget. Except for this recent stretch of winning, that’s moved the Angels into first place.

The baseball season will suck you in. It’s 162 games long, and it wants you to feel every single one of them. It wants you to celebrate every runner left stranded; it wants you to curse every failed call to the bullpen. The baseball season pitches itself as an election — every game matters. And it’s true, that every game does matter. But it’s terribly easy to get too wrapped up in the day-to-day trivialities. Ultimately, every team will win a bunch of games, and every team will lose a bunch of games. Baseball is best consumed every day, but it might be best understood every week or two. An ordinary standings page will include an “L10” column. You can learn a lot from one glance. Forget, for a moment, about all of the details; over their past 10 games, the Angels are 7-3. The Astros and Rangers are both 2-8. The A’s and the Mariners are a harmless 5-5. Divide a season into 10-game blocks, and over the most recent block, the Angels have made their move.

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