Other clubs: Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Orioles, Red Sox.

The White Sox have seen their lowly regarded farm system weakened by the Todd Frazier deal, but they still have a few guys at the top who could be impact players. This system’s biggest strength is in its depth of depth pieces, including a lot of bullpen arms and bench players that still have some upside if things break right. Perhaps the most interesting quality is how unique some of their prospects are. Many are gifted athletes who seem to have atypical looks on the field, or just unique stories. Watch Tyler Danish on the mound and how his delivery works, with possibly surprising success, depending on who you ask. Or take Eddy Alvarez, who previously won a silver medal in speed skating before coming back to baseball.

Though I don’t think this system will churn out a bunch of surprise superstars, the scouting department has done a good job bringing in gifted yet undeveloped players in at the lower levels. Give their Rookie-level players a year to develop and we may have three or four of them high on this list next year.

I think you’ll find the top three players here to be the same three as most evaluators would say, though my order is a little different. As fun as Carson Fulmer is to watch, his delivery makes it harder to project the necessary improvements to reach his upside, so I actually think Spencer Adams and Tim Anderson have a brighter future. Adams is more potential than reality in some ways, but his athleticism and easy actions are too good not to see him fully progressing. It may be a year early for most to feel comfortable with Adams’ grades, but I’m going to trust the potential.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Yoenis Cespedes’s contract, relievers winning awards, how much it costs to buy a World Series, prospect comparisons, and more.

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Marlins Park opened to much fanfare four years ago, and while the team quickly abandoned what it had taken on as its new operational identity, there’s no abandoning a ballpark that fast. Not that the Marlins want to leave, anyway, but — love it or hate it — Marlins Park will be around for a while yet. One of the funny things about the stadium is that it took exactly one game for people to be left with a certain impression. That impression: it’s enormous. In the opener, Giancarlo Stanton hit into a couple warning-track outs, and Lance Berkman was one of many players to talk about the park to the media. Said Berkman:

“If they don’t move the fences in after this year, I’d be surprised,” Berkman said. “And I’m going two years as the over-under on that.”

He continued:

“It’s the biggest ballpark in the game,” Berkman said. “And people have tried that big-ballpark deal, and it never works. Detroit moved the fences in. New York (i.e., the Mets) moved the fences in. I mean, there’s a reason why it’s 330-375-400 (in most parks). That’s a fair baseball game. You try to get too outrageous, and you end up with something that I think is going to be detrimental to their ballclub. I mean, Stanton hit two balls that probably were two home runs. And they were both outs. And we won the game.”

To further Berkman’s point, Seattle and San Diego also later moved in their fences. In the end, Berkman was wrong about his estimate — the Marlins didn’t move in the fences after a year, or after two years. But they are now making changes after four years. Pretty much all the fences are being lowered, and maybe more importantly, they’re doing something about the vast center field. It’s taken this long, but like so many other newer ballparks, Marlins Park is taking a step toward neutrality.

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A couple months ago, we featured an annual article that detailed the most extreme home runs of 2015. It’s always a fun post to write, and this year, I had the honor of putting it together. We always include hardest-hit, longest, shortest, highest, lowest, you name it — it’s a veritable smorgasbord of dingers, and everybody likes dingers. Now that we’re a couple months removed from it, though, I realized it’s missing something: a thorough consideration of the players who hit those home runs.

Of course we expect and know that Giancarlo Stanton is probably going to hit the longest home run of the season. He tied himself in the category this year, even though he didn’t play in any games past June 26th — such is his domination of hitting baseballs long distances. But what if Erick Aybar – he of the .069 isolated-power mark — hit a massive home run to right field at AT&T Park, 2015’s hardest park to homer in for a left-hander? (Spoiler: he did not do this.) What if David Ortiz – he of the lowest speed score in baseball during 2015 – hit a triple in Anaheim, a very difficult park in which to triple for lefties? (Again, no, but you get the idea.)

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In the offseason, teams are frequently characterized as “winners” and “losers” based on the players they’ve acquired relative to the players who have left. Often, the so-called winners are simply the clubs who’ve been most active, bringing in the most players — regardless of cost — while the losers often are those clubs which have been more idle, making smaller moves to improve their rosters. These characterizations do not always translate to the field, as the case of the San Diego Padres illustrates. The Padres followed an active 2014-15 offseason with a poor 2015 campaign.

With that caveat having been made, many have declared the Washington Nationals losers this offseason not simply because Ian Desmond, Drew Storen, and Jordan Zimmermann are gone — replaced by a relatively modest group including Shawn Kelley, Daniel Murphy, Ben Revere — but mainly because they failed to land Yoenis Cespedes, Jason Heyward, or Ben Zobrist in free agency. While the team might be hidden winners of the winter, the Nationals are claiming their failure is due to a tightened budget caused by the Baltimore Orioles’ refusal to pay market value for their television rights.

For those who might not be aware, the Orioles — principally Peter Angelos, through regional sports networks MASN and MASN2 — air the Nationals broadcasts. The Orioles control the Nationals broadcasts as a result of negotiations with the team when the Nationals moved to Washington, D.C., thus encroaching on the Orioles’ television territory. Nathaniel Grow characterized the situation like this after the last major decision in the legal dispute between the teams:

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

The Orioles believed they should pay the Nationals roughly half the amount the arbitrators awarded and appealed, getting the decision thrown out due to conflicts with the Nationals’ counsel. (For more on the decision, read Grow’s full piece linked above.) The case is still ongoing without a resolution and the Nationals are pushing the Orioles to head back to arbitration. The Nationals retained new counsel, and have filed a motion to compel the parties to arbitrate the case and set a value for the television rights. In their recent motion, the Nationals indicated that the Orioles’ failure to pay fair-market value for television rights has hamstrung the team in signing free agents to multi-year contracts.

“MASN’s underpayment of rights fees has already required the Nationals to fund payroll and other expenses from its own reserves, and further delay could require the Nationals to seek new financing,” says the team’s memorandum. “This is not only burdensome in its own right, but it places the Nationals at a competitive disadvantage to other baseball clubs, which typically receive fair market value from their regional sports networks for their telecast rights. Without this added income, the Nationals are handicapped in their ability to invest in efforts to improve the team. For instance, without this added and steady income, the Nationals cannot bring full economic confidence to investments in multi-year player contracts to keep up with the fierce competition for top players — especially when such control over finances is in the hands of a neighboring club.”

This might sound a bit like whining coming from a billionaire owner who just one year ago signed Max Scherzer to a seven year, $210 million contract, and reportedly made offers to Jason Heyward for roughly $200 million and Yoenis Cespedes $100 million, but those claims do have some merit.

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Jordan Zimmermann woke up Tuesday morning, read the report from the Associated Press that MLB appears to be considering a raising of the strike zone, yawned, took another sip of coffee, and quietly went back to working on the day’s crossword puzzle from The New York Times.

According to the AP’s interview with commissioner Rob Manfred, MLB is “studying whether to raise the bottom of the strike zone from the hollow beneath the kneecap back to the top of the kneecap.” We know that offense is as low as it’s been in 25 years with strikeouts at an all-time high, and while that’s partially due to ever-increasing velocity and changes in approach, it’s also got plenty to do with a strike zone that’s larger than any we’ve got on record, with the brunt of the expansion found in the lowest sliver of the zone. MLB can’t change how hard pitchers throw or where they put it, so the logical step, if they’d like to inject some offense back into the game (though it did come back up for the first time in six years last season), would be to rein in the strike zone a bit. If a change is made, it likely wouldn’t come until the 2017 season at the earliest, as it’s a matter to be discussed in collective bargaining negotiations, the results of which wouldn’t impact the league until the current CBA expires on December 1, 2016.

Raising the floor of the strike zone wouldn’t much affect Zimmermann, who pitched above the waist more than any pitcher in baseball last year. But certain guys make their living down in the zone, around the very sliver that’s being discussed as turning from a called strike to a called ball.

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Last September, at one point, the Astros staged an improbable ninth-inning comeback against the Angels. I don’t remember a whole lot of the details anymore, but there is still one play that sticks out in my mind, because it stuck out in my mind back then. George Springer neither started the rally nor ended it, but he did keep it alive with the bases empty and the Astros down to their last strike. Behold Springer in a 1-and-2 count against Huston Street:

All right, it’s one ball in play, and it was very nearly caught. So perhaps it was very nearly forgettable, but look at how Springer stayed with an attempted strikeout slider and made good contact the other way. It works well here as a representation of what George Springer got up to. It happened quietly — the Astros themselves were a bigger story than Springer as an individual, and theirs was a roster with Carlos Correa and Dallas Keuchel. Springer, for his part, missed time with injuries, which I’m sure he’d love to knock off. But there in the shadows, Springer turned himself into something less extreme. There was one big question mark hovering over his career, and now it’s been at least partially addressed.

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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 Chicago White Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
White Sox batters produced the lowest collective WAR among all 30 teams in 2015, combining the worst park-adjusted offense in the majors (-108.1 runs below average overall) with also the worst defense (-60.3 runs below average). The result: a mere three wins above replacement level as a group.

That’s not to say there weren’t encouraging invidual contributions. Jose Abreu and Adam Eaton, for example, produced nearly eight wins between them. On the one hand, that’s a positive. On the other hand, what it reveals is that the rest of the roster provided less value than freely available talent might, in theory, supply. Gordon Beckham, Conor Gillaspie, and Mike Olt — who accounted for roughly two-thirds of the club’s third-base starts — recorded a -1.5 WAR between them. Emilio Bonifacio, Micah Johnson, and Carlos Sanchez — who made all but seven starts at second base — posted a collective -1.3 WAR. Those outputs quite possibly don’t represent the true talents of all those players, but they certainly had an adverse effect on Chicago’s win-loss record.

The advantage for a club which possesses glaring holes is that addressing those holes with merely serviceable replacements represents a considerable upgrade. If the newly acquired tandem of Todd Frazier (624 PA, 3.7 zWAR) and Brett Lawrie (509 PA, 1.8 zWAR) approximate their projections in 2016, they’ll conspire to produce a roughly eight-win improvement by themselves.

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