The biggest story of the day is probably that Jhonny Peralta is hurt. It’s his thumb — seemingly a ligament tear — and it’s an injury that threatens to keep Peralta out of action for a few months. You don’t need to do a lot of overstating to make it clear this is significant, because Peralta is an everyday shortstop, and the Cardinals are trying to go to the playoffs. Playoff teams don’t want to lose regular up-the-middle players before the season even gets started. And then, who’s to say how well Peralta performs even when he comes back?

This is a problem, to be sure. Now, however, it should be noted this ought not destroy the year. For one thing, even though Peralta is the shortstop, we give him credit for a -0.4 second-half WAR last season, and in that same second half the Cardinals went 44-29. So while the Cardinals will have to win with Peralta absent, they’ve kind of already done that. Everything is survivable.

And then there’s the matter of replacing Peralta. It’s always tempting to look around for potential external options. Trades are fun, no matter when they happen, and at first glance it’s not like the Cardinals are particularly deep. For my taste, though, I don’t think they need to hurry out to get a new player. An awful interesting player is already in camp.

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You understand this well enough you might as well have been born with it: the 2015 Red Sox were a failure, and while a number of things went wrong, nothing sunk them quite like the twin disappointments of Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez. Both big investments turned out to be negative-WAR players, and now as we turn our attention to the season ahead, there’s a lot riding on how those two players perform. Most recently, they were genuinely awful, and there’s no other way around it. This is something the Red Sox just have to deal with.

While the 2015 Red Sox were failing, the bleached equivalent was also failing, if a bit less visibly so. The White Sox accomplished less than they were hoping to, and while for them, as well, a number of things went wrong, two things that went very wrong were Adam LaRoche and Avisail Garcia. Sandoval and Ramirez, combined, were worth -3.8 WAR. LaRoche and Garcia, combined, were worth -2.5 WAR. They were less terrible, but they were terrible, and yet through the offseason they remained in place. As of a few days ago, Garcia was lined up to be a starter, and so was LaRoche. The White Sox, like the rest of the American League, intend to make a playoff run.

Given the situation, Chicago decided to sign Austin Jackson for a year and $5 million. It makes for an obvious fit. It makes for maybe the most obvious fit.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Miami / Minnesota.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Milwaukee Brewers. In this companion piece, I look at that same Milwaukee farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Brewers have the top farm system in baseball according to KATOH, largely due to their recent rebuilding efforts.

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You may not care about Marlon Byrd. Or Edwin Jackson. Or Dana Eveland. Or Josh Wilson. That’s a reasonable position to take, as none are remarkable players at this stage of their careers. And yet here we are, not one paragraph into this piece and I’ve mentioned all of them. But wait! Don’t click on that other article you saved, the one about the rise in butt implants quite yet! There’s a very real and interesting (maybe!) reason I’ve mentioned all of these players, but you have to read the next paragraph to find out. Ooo! This is like a mystery.

So what binds these guys together? Byrd may yet manage to find a team on which to dump his age-38 season, but to date he’s an old free agent with maybe one skill to offer. Eveland is a 32-year-old pitcher who has averaged 15 appearances a season over the past decade. His specialty seems to be riding the shuttle back and forth between Triple-A and the majors. Wilson is a backup middle infielder/defensive specialist, which is a nice way of saying he can’t hit, as his career OPS+ of 64 attests. And Jackson is a once-promising fireballer who seems resigned to scooping up innings wherever he can until his clock runs out. So they’re all varying degrees of bad, but “here are a bunch of lousy baseball players” is not really a driving theme for an article. There is something that holds these players’ careers together though, and that is this: each of them has played for nine different teams in their careers.

[Pause while you read your piece on butt implants.]

I know! I can’t believe they do that either. So where were we? Oh yeah. What makes this significant is that nine is the highest number of franchises for which any active player has played — and Jackson, Eveland, Wilson, and Byrd are the leaders of that list. Actually, LaTroy Hawkins has played for 11 different teams, but he’s retiring, so as soon as this season begins the aforementioned group will be the active leaders.

The second thing that makes this (hopefully!) interesting is that the record for the most teams any player has ever played for is 13. You’ll never guess who did it, so I’ll just tell you. The record is held by Octavio Dotel. Dotel played for Houston, Oakland, Detroit, the White Sox, Kansas City, the Mets, Colorado, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, St. Louis, the Dodgers, Yankees, and Toronto.

[Pause to re-read piece on butt implants.]

Humorously enough — though not as humorous as butt implants (I know!!) — Dotel was once traded in a deal that included Edwin Jackson. Because of course he was. Baseball is a closed circle and now I’m sad I’ve already reached the quota for butt-implant jokes this paragraph.

So the obvious question now: can any of these players exceed Dotel’s total of 13 teams played for?

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As you probably have heard by now, our projection systems don’t like the Royals, again. Our Playoff Odds page has them forecasted for just 77 wins, with only an 8% of reaching the postseason, the lowest of any team in the American League. ZIPS and Steamer just aren’t that high on the team’s individual players, and since the projections are context-neutral, there’s no adjustment being made for the fact that the team has won more than expected in recent years. The Royals have relied heavily on context-specific performance to reach the postseason, and projection systems assume that’s not a sustainable skill, wiping it away at the start of each season.

On Friday, I posed a question to you guys, based on the crowd’s overwhelming response that they believe the projection systems are underrating the 2016 Royals. The response to my question was also overwhelming; you guys believe that the Royals are going to significantly outperform their BaseRuns record once again. The top four answers selected in the poll were the four options that had them beating their BaseRuns record, with 78% of those voting selecting one of the options that suggested the Royals have an inherent skill that BaseRuns isn’t accounting for.

Overall, by weighting the results by the proportion of people who voted for each option, you guys project that the Royals will beat their BaseRuns expected record by 3.4 wins in 2016, accounting for about three-fourths of the difference that Jeff Sullivan found when he polled the crowd about expected record versus the projections. Given that the Royals have beaten BaseRuns by an aggregate 25 wins over the last three years, our readers believe that there’s some real skill there. You don’t expect that they’ll get the same type of bump as they have the last few years, but you’re willing to assume that, at this point, BaseRuns is just missing something about how they play, and the forecasts are low by 3.4 wins because of it.

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It’s Spring Training, and everyone is trying to improve their game. That means everyone — I mean everyone — is seeking unsolicited advice from baseball writers who have no individual experience in their line of work. Right? Rather than call this advice, because I alone am not qualified to give advice in this particular field, let’s call it a discussion.

A few months back, I wrote a post titled The Outfielders Who Threw 100, in which I used Statcast data to identify the 15 outfielders who cracked 100 mph on a throw last season, and broke down the various types of 100-mph outfielder throws. The post, of course, was full of video clips — clips of the year’s most exciting throws.

But we didn’t always see the throws. Instead, we saw the ball hit to the outfielder, and the outfielder corralling it, and we felt the palpable suspense of watching the outfielder position himself to unleash a momentous throw, except as soon as he did, we saw a quick cut to a baserunner, and then another quick cut back to the fielder receiving the throw we’d just prepared ourselves to witness — a throw that ended up being one of the most impressive of the year.

This is how they all went. All of the year’s most impressive throws weren’t witnessed in full on the live broadcast, and were instead interrupted by a distracting, one-second interjection of a baserunner scrambling toward the next bag. After seeing this a dozen times in a row, I grew frustrated.

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If aliens landed on Earth and, rather than asking about our political systems or scientific accomplishments, inquired about the last 20 years of baseball philosophy, one of the things you would highlight is the growing disdain for the intentional walk. Certainly, there are times when an intentional walk makes sense, but one of the fundamental lessons of the era is that giving the other team a free base runner is typically foolish.

As Ben Lindbergh wrote at FiveThirtyEight, managers are increasingly aware of the downside of the intentional walk, and as a result, they’re are on the decline across the league. Billy Beane didn’t wake up one morning, discover intentional walks were bad, and begin a crusade against them or anything, but intentional walks have clearly fallen out of favor as teams, writers, and fans have gotten on board with a more data-friendly approach to the game.

As such, we’ve trained ourselves to see intentional walks negatively by default and praise teams that don’t issue them. If teams are issuing fewer intentional walks, we normally see that as a positive sign, so forgive me for the investigation I’m about to undertake to explore the opposite.  In 2015, the Blue Jays both (a) possessed an exceptional offense and yet (b) were on the receiving end of a shockingly low number of intentional walks.  What was the rest of the league thinking?

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Miami.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Minnesota Twins. In this companion piece, I look at that same Minnesota farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Twins have the sixth-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 636
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the adult male friend on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 1 hr 23 min play time.)

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