From what any of us can tell, the American League is going to be close, and maybe closer than ever. It wouldn’t appear that there are any great teams, and it wouldn’t appear that there are any bad teams, and my favorite thing about this kind of landscape is it means a whole season could conceivably be determined by the fate of one single player. One player greatly under-achieving could knock a given team out of the hunt. On the other side of things, one player greatly improving could push a given team into first place. The closer the pack, the less it could take to emerge. That’s the theory, anyhow.

The White Sox are one of those teams you can look at and imagine 90 wins or 90 losses. Last year’s version almost got to 90 losses, but then this year’s version promises to be better and deeper. And as you get to thinking about the White Sox’s upside, you get to thinking about Carlos Rodon, who’s going to slide into the rotation behind Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. It wouldn’t be a total shock if Rodon were to struggle. But then, if Rodon were to put his skills together, that could send Chicago to the playoffs. So Rodon should be what people like to call an “x-factor,” and in thinking about Rodon, I’ve come up with two other names. One name you can link to Rodon’s signature pitch, and one name you could maybe consider as Rodon’s future.

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You can give it this — the Orioles’ signing of Yovani Gallardo seemed like it was going to be pretty dull all-around, but now it’s becoming fascinating, thanks to a recent and familiar little twist. See, Gallardo still isn’t officially signed, and word is it’s because the Orioles aren’t comfortable with what they’ve seen so far in his medicals. I believe they’re waiting on results from more tests; I believe the issue is the health of his shoulder. So for the time being, the Orioles don’t yet have a starting pitcher they want, and that same starting pitcher is having to worry about an even further depressed market for his services. Nobody roots for these things.

It feels familiar because it’s the Orioles, and this is far from the first time the organization has wound up in a place like this. This further cements the team’s reputation for having an almost impossibly rigorous physical, and it can be rough, on Orioles players and fans alike. No one likes having the rug taken out from under them, and that’s exactly how it feels when these issues come up. It seems like it reflects poorly on ownership, and Peter Angelos has certainly taken a large amount of crap over the years. I’m not here to broadly attack or defend Peter Angelos. It just feels like it’s time to talk about the Orioles’ reputation, how true it is, and what it could mean.

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You can probably be forgiven if you heard about a possible Blake Snell contract extension and your first reaction was to wonder, “Who?” Snell has never pitched in a major-league baseball game. He is not one of the top-ten prospects in baseball. Rather, he’s made just 21 starts above Class-A, has produced a walk rate above 10% in every year of the minors, and (perhaps as a result of playing in the Tampa Bay Rays organization) is generally unknown to the masses. However, Snell is one of the top-20 prospects in baseball, his walk rate has moved down as he’s moved up the minor-league ladder, he struck out more than 30% of batters last season, and he allowed just 21 runs in 134 innings last season (1.41 ERA). He’s also likely to see the majors this season, and the Rays have had talks with Snell about a contract extension.

Contract extensions for players with no service time are incredibly rare. The last one was Jon Singleton in June 2014, and prior to Singleton, Evan Longoria’s contract extension in April 2008 — which was not announced until after a week in the majors — was the closest comparison. The Rays are not strangers to similar deals. Matt Moore is in the final guaranteed year of his contract that he signed after pitching just 9.1 innings back in the 2011 regular season. They also approached Melvin Upton as a teenager, but were unsuccessful in reaching an agreement. Since 2010, there have only been four contract extensions for players with under one year of service time and the Rays are responsible for two of them in Moore and Chris Archer. (Singleton and Salvador Perez are the others.)

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Ben and Sam banter about Angels at the airport, Ryan Webb, and a home-run-hitting contest, then answer listener emails about winning three-game series, the best radio broadcasts, the baseball equivalent of the San Antonio Spurs, and more.

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When news reports broke in November that Jose Reyes had been arrested in Hawaii for an alleged incident of domestic violence, many assumed that he would be the first test case under Major League Baseball’s new domestic violence policy. As I noted at the time the agreement was announced last August, both MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association have agreed to a new set of rules to govern cases in which a player has been accused of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse.

Among the provisions in the new policy was one giving Commissioner Manfred the power to place any player accused of domestic violence on paid administrative leave for up to seven days. This provision was intended to give the league sufficient time to investigate the alleged incident before deciding on an appropriate level of punishment, while at the same time preventing a player involved in a domestic incident from appearing on the playing field.

Given the seven-day time limit of any such interim suspension, MLB’s announcement on Tuesday that the league was indefinitely placing Reyes on paid leave until after his pending criminal proceedings in Hawaii have been resolved initially took some by surprise. Indeed, considering that Reyes’s criminal trial in Hawaii isn’t scheduled to begin until April 4th, the leave that MLB announced on Tuesday will undoubtedly extend well beyond the time limit seemingly authorized under the new domestic violence policy.

In reality, however, although many observers – including me – missed this detail when MLB first announced its new domestic violence policy in August, the new policy agreed to by the league and union did in fact include an additional provision that applies to Reyes’ case.

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Mike Scioscia has a reputation as an old-school manager who has little interest in analytics. He doesn’t want you to believe that. The extent to which you should is subjective. Scioscia certainly isn’t cutting edge — at least not by today’s standards — but he’s by no means a dinosaur. His finger is on the pulse of what’s going on in today’s game, even if he isn’t always pushing the same buttons as his more progressive contemporaries.

On Monday, I had an opportunity to ask the Angels manager for his thoughts on analytics. Here is what Scioscia had to say:

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Scioscia on analytics: “Analytics have been around forever in the game of baseball, from when Connie Mack would use spray charts and move guys around from the dugout, to now. Analytics for projecting player performance have mushroomed over the last five years. Analytics in dugout probabilities have increased. We’ve had data, we’ve had analytics, since I’ve been in the game. And they’ve evolved.

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A couple weeks back, Dave Cameron wrote about how Dexter Fowler would be a good fit for the Orioles in the wake of the presumed Yovani Gallardo signing — and when he did so, the post began like this:

“While nothing is officially done yet, it seems reasonable to assume the Orioles are going to sign Yovani Gallardo, with reports that a deal just needs some tweaks before it is finalized.”

Dave had no reason to believe the Gallardo signing wouldn’t work out, but now it hasn’t, as the Orioles seemingly have a higher expectation than most when it comes to physicals, and so you understand that I’m cautious to say anything is set in stone between Fowler and Baltimore.

That being said, it sure looks like Dexter Fowler’s going to be playing in Baltimore next year! Just need to see that physical! Operating under the assumption Fowler does indeed pass his physical, it sounds like the Orioles will pay him $33 million over three years. That’s a year and some AAV fewer than the crowd’s estimation of four years and $56 million back in November. The qualifying offer strikes again.

If the Gallardo deal falls through, and it looks like it could, then the Orioles will surrender the 14th-overall pick in next year’s draft for Fowler. With Gallardo in the mix, it would be 14 and 28. Doesn’t much matter who’s responsible for the loss of which pick — 14 is gone either way. The 14th pick is worth something like $15 to $20 million, and so you can factor that into Fowler’s cost, if you’d like. Even with an extra $20 million tacked on for the pick, Fowler’s total guaranteed money falls short of the crowd, and so it’s easy to think of this as something of a bargain price for a quality outfielder who’s still on the right side of 30 for another 27 days.

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I’ve never been much for this time of year, myself. I haven’t really cared about truck day, because that’s just a day there’s a lot of shit in a truck. And I haven’t really cared about pitchers and catchers, because I don’t need to know when players are being checked for disease. I don’t celebrate spring-training events like they’re holidays, but that even being said, I do understand the symbolism. And I’m aware of a shift within myself — spring training confirms that the season is really going to happen. When the offseason drags along, like it always does, it can be easy to forget there’s an onseason. It’s the stuff that’s coming that we all really care about, and now 2016 feels the most real it ever has.

It’s not that we ever stop looking ahead when we talk about baseball, and offseason analysis always folds in projections or expectations, but this is the time of year you start seeing pictures of teams all together. They stop being teams that exist only on paper, and they start being teams with talent, and health, and confidence, and whatever other qualities you choose to observe. You kind of stop thinking about roster modification, and you start thinking about roster optimization. About how a given team can be the best it can be, with the players in house. I don’t think hope ever dies, but this is when, even for the worst teams, it can awaken from its slumber.

The headline here might be kind of obnoxious. It reads a little like a teacher talking to children before a field trip. I’m sorry about that, but I’m terrible at headlines and I’m not getting any better. As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, this is another poll post. And this is another poll post where I’m going to be really interested in the results, because I think they could teach us a little about baseball fan psychology. We’re all now aware that games — meaningful games — are going to start taking place in an amount of time we can reasonably say to be weeks. Every team is going to be playing, and every team is going to be playing for something. The season is around the corner. So, how excited are you about it? What is the feeling that you feel in your heart?

When I first constructed this post in my head, it was going to ask only about a few teams. Mostly the bad ones. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it makes the most sense to ask about everyone, so we can examine the entire landscape. We know the Cubs are supposed to be a hell of a lot better than the Phillies. Cubs fans know that, and Phillies fans know that. Okay. How do Cubs fans feel? How do Phillies fans feel? How much of a difference does that make, if it even makes any difference at all?

I like these polls because there isn’t a wrong answer. You might not even need to think for more than half a second. You should already know how you feel, even before reading this post, so now that you’re here, kindly select the answer that most matches your position. Baseball is ahead. Daily baseball. Overwhelming baseball. Both major- and minor-league baseball. Baseball you have to plan around, and baseball you don’t have to plan around because it’ll be there again tomorrow. How excited do you feel now for 2016? Thank you in advance to everyone who participates and therefore allows me to run little projects like these. They are very obviously nothing without you. (<3)

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Kansas City Royals. In this companion piece, I look at that same Kansas City farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Royals have the 20th-best farm system according to KATOH.

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 first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six 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. Cheslor Cuthbert, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 4.1 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 40+ FV

Cuthbert hit .277/.339/.429 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A last year, which earned him a late-season cameo with Kansas City. Cuthbert likely won’t be a star, but he makes a lot of contact, plays a semi-premium defensive position and is young enough that he still has time to improve. Statistically, he looks like a future everyday player, and those don’t grow on trees.

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