You know about the Indians’ embarrassment of riches. Even if you’re not a huge fan of Trevor Bauer, Corey Kluber is fantastic, Carlos Carrasco is sometimes more fantastic and Danny Salazar manages to be fantastic when you’re not paying attention. The Indians are loaded with ace-level talent, and, by the way, now there’s a new one. I didn’t see it coming, either.

Excerpting from David Laurila, just this past Sunday:

Cody Anderson has a pretty good changeup, but it’s not the pitch that is opening eyes in Indians camp. According to Cleveland pitching coach Mickey Callaway, the 25-year-old righty is throwing 95-97 mph with ease. His fastball has been, in a word, “Wham!”

In 15 starts last year — his first in the big leagues — Anderson averaged 92.1 with his heater.

We talk a lot about velocity during spring training. We’ve seen pitchers add velocity in the past, but with all due respect, this case feels exceptional. Cody Anderson might not actually make the Indians’ rotation out of camp, but he might’ve added something like three or four ticks. All of a sudden, Anderson’s repertoire looks a lot like Matt Harvey’s.

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Episode 640
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he examines the significance of the date on which shortstop Ruben Tejada was placed on waivers by the Mets, what would have happened if the Mets had rostered him for even one more day, and (finally) the Mets’ organizational shortstop depth and Cardinals’ relative lack of same.

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 41 min play time.)

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You know the drill by now. If you don’t know, now you know. We’ll now look at a graph of projected team WAR at first base, reflect briefly, then reflect verbosely.

Graph:

To reflect briefly: It will all be over soon, Phillies fans. You’ve been great.

We’ve got four distinct tiers here. The “no worries here” tier, which features six star first baseman and a seventh star pairing, the “average-or-better” tier, which features eight solid regulars and a possibly questionable projection, the “meh” tier, which features plenty of platoons and sadness, and the “Ryan Howard” tier, which features only sadness.

To reflect verbosely:

#1 Diamondbacks

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Name	PA	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	Bat	BsR	Fld	WAR
Paul Goldschmidt	672	.289	.399	.527	.388	34.3	1.3	7.3	5.5
Yasmany Tomas	28	.262	.298	.422	.311	-0.3	0.0	-0.3	0.0
Total	700	.288	.395	.522	.385	34.0	1.3	7.0	5.5

So you wanna build the perfect first baseman? Well of course, we start with the bat. If first basemen have one job, it’s to slug, and so our perfect first baseman’s gotta slug. Paul Goldschmidt just led all first baseman in slugging, so our first selection will be his power. But we don’t just want power, we want a keen eye and the willingness to take a walk — the kind of skills that perpetuate a high on-base percentage and feel like they’ll age well. We might be inclined to take Joey Votto’s discipline, but Goldschmidt’s actually got the exact same approach, so we’ll make it easy and take his eye, too. But we want a first baseman, not a designated hitter, and we want a first baseman who will last, so we’re gonna need some defense. Last year, Goldschmidt’s tDEF (my simple man’s go-to runs saved metric — just an average of UZR, DRS and FRAA) was +12, four runs better than any of his peers. He actually beat the first-base positional adjustment. So let’s take Goldschmidt’s glove. And because we’re greedy, we want a first baseman who can run, too, and no first baseman even come close to running like Goldschmidt.

What’s the perfect first basemen look like? Paul Goldschmidt’s bat, Paul Goldschmidt’s eye, Paul Goldschmidt’s glove and Paul Goldschmidt’s legs. Diamondbacks are doing alright here.

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Ben and Sam preview the Giants’ season with Erik Malinowski, and Jeff talks to Grant Brisbee of McCovey Chronicles (at 24:10).

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Let’s start with the video. And then the words. Because you might not spot everything in the video the first time through. It sorta looks like an everyday foul ball, maybe with some sort of inside joke at the end. Trust me, though, this moment is fairly epic.

Paul Konerko‘s reaction provides our first clue that something was a bit different about this swing. He’s animated, talking to the third base coach about something. Zack Greinke’s doing a bit of stomping around after he watches it go.

“There are guys that take so quickly that it almost forces you to throw strikes,” Greinke told me at Spring Training earlier this month. “Paul Konerko, he would change his stances all the time, but there was this one time where he had this new stance where it looked like he wasn’t even getting ready and then all of a sudden you go and he’d swing.”

I laughed out loud. He was quick-pitching you! “Yeah,” Greinke agreed. “Before release, I think, oh, he’s taking, and you’d get overconfident. He only did that for a month or so.”

Go back and look at the video. It’s not quite a bat on the shoulder, but there is something about Konerko’s setup that seems lackadaisical. Given the 1-0 count, it looks like he’s waiting for Greinke to get himself in a deeper hole. “A guy like that, you think most pitchers would be coming with the fastball, but he’s liable to give you another slider out of the zone,” agreed Konerko when contacted by phone about the at-bat. “And then sometimes, he’d even take something off when he was supposed to come at you.”

So maybe Konerko was just taking, and that’s why it took him so long to get ready? Not quite. It did take him a long time to get ready back then. On purpose. “I used to be too tense too early before the pitch came,” Konerko remembered, “so sometimes I would wait to see how long I could wait. I was so ready to hit that it didn’t help me.” So, in the footage here, Konerko actually is attempting to chill out as long as possible, but not so much to mislead Greinke as to prepare himself optimally.

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I think I’ve written almost this exact thing before, but to kick off this annual series in earnest, let’s begin with the position we arguably know the least about! Here’s a link to Dave’s introduction to the series, if you need a bit of a refresher. Probably, though, it’s all self-explanatory, and now here’s a plot of all the projected team values behind the plate, with what at least I consider an unsurprising arrangement. In fairness, maybe it’s unsurprising because I’ve been looking at these numbers now for several, several hours. OK.

Did you know that the Giants have a good catcher? What I love about this isn’t just that the Giants are in the lead — it’s that they’re in the lead by 1.3 wins. That’s the same as the difference between the Dodgers in second place and the Reds in 15th. The tricky bit is that catchers can sometimes have all that perceived intangible value, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do with leadership from a statistical perspective, but, you know, no analysis is perfect. Read on for paragraphs about catchers! (The Braves get the last paragraph.)

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EVALUATING THE PROSPECTS 2016 Angels Astros Athletics Blue Jays Braves Brewers Cardinals Cubs Diamondbacks Dodgers Giants Indians Mariners Marlins Mets Nationals Orioles Padres Phillies Pirates Rangers Rays Red Sox Reds Rockies Royals Tigers Twins White Sox Yankees

Since having committed to a full-scale rebuild, the Phillies have prepared themselves nicely for a more sustainable future. Right to the top of their prospect ranks went trade acquisitions Nick Williams, Mark Appel and Jake Thompson. Additionally, a number of second-tier players have given the organization the depth and upside it desperately needed after a few stagnant years with aging veterans. The main weakness of the minor-league group is its lack of immediate help for the rotation, with questions surrounding both Appel’s and Thompson’s viability as starters preventing them from being sure things. After that, there’s a lack of options until you get to the lower levels, where exciting younger pitchers like Franklyn Kilome look to take a step forward and challenge for upper-minors rotation spots.

There shouldn’t be a ton of surprises on this list. It looks like I’m a half-grade higher or lower on few guys than the consensus, but most of the guys after the 50+ group are fairly interchangeable. Medium-upside players at the lower levels of the system are plentiful, making the relative grades more a preference than anything.

Mark Appel’s ranking may stir some discussion, as I make the case here why I don’t think we have a Gerrit Cole-esque breakout to which we can to look forward. It’s not so dire that I don’t think he’s a major league starter, but his ceiling grade is lower here than most are ready to admit.

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The San Diego Padres were the most active team in baseball last winter, as newly-minted general manager A.J. Preller put his mark on the franchise with a mind-numbing mass of moves that aimed to quickly turn the Padres into a contender, mostly by injecting a bevy of ever-coveted right-handed power bats into a previously punchless lineup.

The plan didn’t work, for a host of reasons neither here nor there, and now a new plan has emerged. Justin Upton walked to free agency, Craig Kimbrel was shipped off to Boston, Wil Myers got out of center field, and Preller might not be done jettisoning the very players he acquired last year, the ones who were supposed to form The Next Good Padres Team.

Last week, Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Rangers continue to covet an upgrade at catcher, though their top target may not be Milwaukee’s Jonathan Lucroy, as previously expected, but rather Padres’ backstop Derek Norris. The Rangers like Norris because he’s cheaper than Lucroy, he’s got an extra year on his contract, and the Padres have more pieces that could be packaged together with Norris to make for a potential blockbuster deal.

While Norris may not be the same caliber player as a healthy Lucroy, he would presumably offer an upgrade over Texas incumbent Robinson Chirinos, both behind the plate and with the bat, while also providing much-needed depth. But the glove has only been a plus for one year — Norris graded as a well below-average pitch-framer before last season — and the deeper you look into the bat, the less promising it becomes. And evidently, pitchers around the league agree.

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We’re now officially two weeks from Opening Day, which means you’re about to be inundated with season previews. Some places will go team by team, others will group by divisions, but basically every outlet that covers baseball will roll out overviews of the 2016 season. In an attempt to provide something a little bit different here at FanGraphs, we do our season previews on a positional basis, and we call them the Positional Power Rankings. This is now our fifth crack at these things — you can see the archived versions of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 by clicking on those links — and we hope that they’re getting better each time we do them.

From my perspective, one of the primary benefits of previewing the season from a positional perspective is that we can spend a bit more time discussing a team’s overall depth. Most team-based previews aren’t going to spend a lot of time on the bench pieces or the minor leaguers who will get first crack at playing time should an injury occur, especially on a contender; no one clicks on a story about the Nationals 2016 season to read about Jose Lobaton, for instance. But depth matters, and often times, the difference between making the postseason or watching October baseball from home is the performance of a team’s role players, and with many teams moving towards a balanced roster approach over betting on a few big-name stars, we think breaking down every team’s projections at each position on the field gives you guys a better understanding of where the various strengths and weaknesses lie.

How does a platoon stack up against having one regular everyday guy? What is the magnitude of the improvement a team will get from swapping out a veteran placeholder with a top prospect in May or June? These are the kinds of things we think the Positional Power Rankings are helpful at identifying, and because our previews are based on strength at a certain spot, non-contenders get a chance to shine if they have a particularly strength as well. So we know it’s different than most places, but hopefully it’s different in a good way, providing you with information you won’t get elsewhere, or at least provides information in a format that makes you see a team’s pros and cons in a different light.

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