Alan Trammell is about to fall off the Hall of Fame ballot. In his 15th and final year of eligibility, the long-time Detroit Tigers shortstop will once again fail to garner sufficient support from the BBWAA electorate. His Cooperstown chances will now rest in the hands of the Veterans Committee.

The following conversation with Trammell doesn’t address his Hall of Fame worthiness. I considered broaching the subject when I spoke to him this past summer, but ultimately opted against it. After all, what could he have offered besides humble platitudes?

I talked to Trammell about defense. More specifically, we discussed positioning and the proliferation of shifting. He knows the subject(s) well. A prolific defender in his day, Trammell — now a special assistant to the general manager — spends much of his summers tutoring infielders in the Tigers’ minor-league system.

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Trammell on defensive positioning in his era (1977-1996): “We were positioned very little. Our coaches gave us some direction, but it was more of us making those decisions. They wanted it that way. In the first half of my career, we didn’t have any video — our primary scouting report was watching our opponent. That’s how we did it. The video and all that is great — they’re great tools — but you need a combination. You should never lose sight of how important it is to watch the game.

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The list of athletes who are simultaneously good at their sport and social media is a short one. I don’t know much about the other sports, but in baseball, it’s pretty much limited to Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, Glen Perkins and the recently-retired Dan Haren.

In Haren’s case, it starts with the handle, @ithrow88, a reference to the 13-year veteran’s diminished late-career velocity. Haren was never a hard-thrower, but by age 27 the decline had already begun, dropping from 92 mph to 91. By his age-30 season, Haren no longer averaged 90 mph on his fastball. The following year, the reality of throwing 88 was realized, and by his final season, last year, Haren’s fastball averaged just 86 mph, the second-slowest by a qualified non-knuckleballing starter.

The self-deprecating moniker serves as a refreshing departure from the false bravado we expect so many of our athletes to project. Coming to terms with our own physical decline is a near-unanimous realization among non-athletes at various ages, and so Haren’s ability to take his own deterioration in stride is something that resonates with the general public.

We like to be able to resonate with our favorite athletes, but we also enjoy being granted the opportunity to peek behind the curtain a bit. On Monday, an early afternoon session on the exercise bike led to an entertaining string of brutally honest tweets from Haren about his career. The topics range from plane crashes to Coors Field dread to pitcher-batter matchups and pitcher-pitcher matchups to the absurdity of the pitcher win to wine-drinking habits to poop, the latter of which is almost always funny if you’re a man-child like myself. It’s a fun stream-of-consciousness that’s worth a minute of your day. At the very least, you’ll get a chuckle out of it.

But one tweet struck me in particular, and I wasn’t the only one; it was the most popular tweet from the 14-message long rant. As soon as I read the tweet in question, I knew it required a follow up, and also that it would provide me an excuse to write a sendoff post to Haren, who had a remarkable career that hopefully won’t be overshadowed by it’s underwhelming conclusion.

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Over the holidays, Al Jazeera America released an explosive, undercover report on doping in professional sports. Included in the story were secretly recorded interviews with Charlie Sly, a pharmacist who boasted of having provided illegal performance enhancing drugs to numerous professional athletes.

Among the many athletes that Sly claimed to have supplied with PEDs were several baseball players, including Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman. According to Sly, both players bought and used the drug Delta-2, a banned hormone supplement.

Initially, both Howard and Zimmerman issued a joint statement staunchly denying the allegations. The two have now gone one step further, each filing suit against Al Jazeera on Tuesday evening for defamation.

However, while filing suit may provide a boost to Howard and Zimmerman in the short-term in their public relations battle against the network, the players are incurring some degree of risk by initiating legal action, and ultimately appear unlikely to prevail in their respective cases.

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Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Boston Red Sox. In this companion piece, I look at that same Boston farm system through the lens of my KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their age-28 seasons, those who receive a projection of at between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their age-28 seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Rafael Devers, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 9.6 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 2.3 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Devers destroyed two levels of Rookie Ball in 2014, which prompted the Red Sox to send him to the Sally league as an 18-year-old. He didn’t disappoint. While his numbers weren’t flashy, his power and strikeout rate were both better than the league’s average. That’s remarkable for a guy facing pitchers three or four years his senior. He could stand to walk a bit more, but that’s a minor concern considering how little walk rate tells us about players at Devers’ level. All in all, there’s a lot to be excited about with Devers. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / New York AL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Given the moves made by general manager Dave Stewart et al. this offseason — the signing of Zack Greinke, the exchange with Atlanta of three promising and cost-controlled pieces for Shelby Miller — it’s pretty clear that the club’s ambition is to win now. Of great assistance to that particular cause are Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock, both of whom had great seasons in 2015 and are projected by ZiPS to produce just over nine wins in 2016. They form a strong nucleus for the club.

Less strong are the parts surrounding that nucleus — the club’s figurative cytoplasm, to extend the metaphor clumsily. With the exception of indy league success story David Peralta, no other position player receives a forecast from ZiPS of two wins or more. The departure of Ender Inciarte appears to have created no little difficulty. The author of consecutive three-win seasons for Arizona, his absence compels the team to rely heavily on Yasmany Tomas, the author of one negative-wins season, to rebound from his difficult rookie campaign. ZiPS is pessimistic about Tomas offering anything much better than a replacement-level performance.

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There’s no perfect way to do this, because surprises are always relative to expectations, and I can’t speak to general, across-the-board expectations. You might personally expect more from Player X than the next guy, and I can’t quantify that. Given this caveat, it should be obvious the best thing to do is consider the preseason projections. Projections should always be around the center of the expectations, because we’re always projecting, even when we don’t think of it like that, and we all project in similar ways. We think about the track records, and we think about age. Your brain is but an endless series of spreadsheets.

To identify the most surprising hitter of the season, then, we compare actual numbers to forecasted numbers. Who beat the projections the most, basically. And now, try to think about this off the top of your head. The answer’s going to follow, of course, but what players are coming to mind? You’re thinking about Bryce Harper. Maybe, say, Kyle Schwarber, but mostly Harper. It’s not really surprising that Harper got to this level, but the suddenness of the transition was stunning. Harper made the leap, and I can tell you, yes, he’s near the top of the list. By this method he’s actually the runner-up. The winner? He’s so surprising that almost no one even noticed in the process.

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Welcome to the new year. The Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the monkey, the baseball calendar says it can’t possibly be the Royals year again, but most importantly, it’s the year you’ll finally do that thing you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that you’re going to do. “I’m going to do that thing,” you say to yourself. Go you! And what is that you’re talking about? It’s hard to tell with your mouthful of Cheetos-brand corn puffs so I’ll say it for you: you’re finally going to go to spring training!

Yay! Who cares about the kids? The husband and/or wife will be there when you get back, no matter what they say, probably. As for the job? You won’t have that for long anyway. Abuse it while you can! What’s more, you have vacation days for a reason, and nobody, not some highfalutin “boss,” is going to tell you when you can use ‘em!

So this is happening, dammit. The first step is go figure out who is coming. Call up your buddies! Email ‘em. Text ‘em. Record a message on a wax cylinder and strap it to a carrier pigeon. Round ‘em up! Figure out who you can goad into joining you, because this will be important information for the next step. You may want to start with a nice email. Something like this:

Hey jerks,

Hope you’re not dead yet. I’m going to spring training and you should come with me to help defray the cost. Also, because we’re friends! We’re going to see my favorite teams because I thought of this first. Baseball is baseball though so you should be happy, but even if it wasn’t I’m not interested in your opinion. Can’t wait to go! Send me a check ASAP.

Love,
You

The point is, get in touch with your peeps. You’ll need someone with intelligence, someone with money, and someone with the ability to behave like an adult occasionally. And it would be nice if all those attributes were found in one person so as to open up more spots for your actual friends.

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Ben and Sam banter about dress codes and the recent lack of rumors, then discuss Dan Haren’s revelatory tweets.

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