This year’s Rule 5 draft came and went yesterday, with 18 players selected in the major-league phase of the draft. All the players selected will need to spend the entire 2018 season on their new team’s active roster (or disabled list). Otherwise, they have to be offered back to their original team.

Since most of these players do not have any sort of prospect pedigree anyway, I utilized the stats-only version of KATOH. WAR figures represent projections for the first six years of a player’s major-league career. For a scouting companion to this post, read Eric Longenhagen’s analysis from earlier this afternoon.

Players listed in order of draft selection.

*****

1. Detroit Tigers
Victor Reyes, OF, 1.9 WAR (from D-backs)

Reyes has long been a KATOH darling. Look no further than his player page to see the articles in which he has been tagged.

KATOH has always believed in Reyes’s blend of youth, contact, and speed — a skill set he carried into Double-A last year. Reyes showed everything except for power as 22-year-old in Double-A last year. Given his 6-foot-3 frame, I wouldn’t be surprised if more power eventually shows up.

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The major-league phase of Thursday’s Rule 5 draft began with its annual roll call of club confirming the number of players currently on their 40-man rosters and ended with a total of 18 players added to new big-league clubs. Below are brief scouting reports on the players selected. I also encourage you to read Chris Mitchell’s stat-focused preview of the group, overall.

But, first: a refresher on the Rule 5 Draft’s complex rules. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger are eligible for selection after five years of minor-league service if their parent club has not yet added them to the team’s 40-man roster. For players who signed at age 19 or older, the timeline is four years. Teams with the worst win/loss record from the previous season pick first, and those which select a player must not only (a) pay said player’s former club $100,000, but also (b) keep the player on their 25-man active roster throughout the entirety of the following season (with a couple of exceptions, mostly involving the disabled list). If a selected player doesn’t make his new team’s active roster, he is offered back to his former team for half of the initial fee. After the player’s first year on the roster, he can be optioned back to the minor leagues.

These rules typically limit the talent pool to middle-relief prospects or position players with one-dimensional skillsets or sometimes more talented prospects who aren’t remotely ready for the majors. This creates an environment where selections are made more based on fit and team need than just talent, but teams find solid big-league role players in the Rule 5 every year and occasionally scoop up an eventual star. Let’s dive into the scouting reports on this year’s group.

First Round

1. Detroit Tigers
Victor Reyes, OF (from Arizona)

Reyes is a 23-year-old, switch-hitting outfielder who slashed .292/.332/.399 at Double-A Jackson during the 2017 regular season and then hit .316 and stole 12 bases in 20 Arizona Fall League games. He’s a plus runner with good hand-eye coordination and feel for contact as a left-handed hitter. He also lacks any modicum of in-game power and his right-handed swing is a mess. Scouts are not in unanimous agreement about his defensive ability in center field, though the ones who think he can play there every day believe he could make up the larger half of a platoon in center. Others see him as a bench outfielder.

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Yes, the offseason is just starting, and because of that, it might seem premature to begin considering which team has most improved its roster for 2018. Merely by winning the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes, though, the Angels have probably already done enough to emerge victorious from winter. And more than that, the Angels remain active.

Over the last few days, they’ve added enough wins to make themselves favorites for a Wild Card berth, at the very least.

The Angels doesn’t necessarily deserve all the credit. Signing Ohtani is kind of like handing over $20 at a local convenience store and winning a Powerball jackpot. While the team’s front office no doubt made a compelling pitch, Ohtani’s decision seemed to be tied to geography and factors beyond many clubs’ control.

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Carlos Santana is trading Polish Boys for cheesesteaks, looks like, agreeing this afternoon on a three-year, $60 million deal (with an option for a fourth, at $17.5 million) to join the Phillies. The deal probably makes sense from a money standpoint, and Santana is a really good switch-hitting slugger with power and patience, but… does it make sense from the Phillies’ perspective?

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One player whom the baseball industry and vacationing families might not have expected to see this week at Disney’s sprawling Swan and Dolphin Resort, the site of this year’s Winter Meetings, was Melvin Upton Jr. You might have — particularly if you’re a Braves fans — erased Upton from your memory. But Upton was there to sell himself to interested clubs. He was ultimately successful.

More on that in a moment. First: a brief tour of Upton’s career, which has followed an unusual trajectory.

The former No. 2 overall pick and elite prospect was moved to the outfield early in his major-league career by the Rays due to his shortcomings at shortstop. And it was in Tampa’s center field where he emerged as a star-level player, averaging 3.6 WAR per season from 2007 to -12. Upton possessed a rare blend of plate discipline, power, and speed. He then signed a lucrative free-agent deal with the Braves. Things didn’t go well. He posted a -0.6 WAR in 2013 and a 0.3 mark in 2014. To rid themselves of the three years and $57 million remaining on Upton’s contract, the Braves included him with Craig Kimbrel in a package that sent both players to San Diego before the 2015 season.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadelphia Phillies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Last year at this time, corner type Rhys Hoskins (641 PA, 3.6 zWAR) was assessed a 45 FV (the future-value grade of a platoon or utility type) in Eric Longenhagen’s audit of the organization and was omitted entirely from the top-10 lists published by Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus. Following impressive performances at both Triple-A and in the majors, however, he now receives the top WAR projection among position players in the organization.

Hoskins is the only hitter forecast to record an above-average batting line (125 wRC+) for Philadelphia in 2018. That said, ZiPS calls for Maikel Franco (615 PA, 1.9 zWAR), Freddy Galvis (621, 2.0), Cesar Hernandez (579, 1.7), and Odubel Herrera (612, 2.9) all to produce a sufficient combination of offensive and defensive value to record wins at a roughly average rate.

The club’s greatest weakness appears to be at catcher, where Andrew Knapp (380, 0.7) and Cameron Rupp (340, 0.8) both fail to clear the one-win threshold. Prospect Jorge Alfaro (448, 0.1) was productive in 100-plus plate appearances and has no options remaining, both of which make him a candidate for the 25-man roster. His total lack of plate discipline, however — he’s projected for walk and strikeout rates of 3.8% and 34.2%, respectively — puts a lot of pressure on the other aspects of his game.

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Last year, seven former players received at least 45% of the Hall of Fame vote while also earning less than the 75% necessary to actually get elected to the Hall. Seven former players, in other words, possessed sufficiently impressive credentials to merit serious consideration and were then all pushed to this year’s ballot for further review. Notably, this was one year after eight players returned to the ballot having received at least 40% of the previous season’s vote. The consequence of these developments? A very crowded ballot in 2018 — and that’s without even accounting for the newly eligible candidates.

It’s a state of affairs that’s rarely been duplicated in history. Back in the late 40s and early 50s, there was a considerable logjam of deserving candidates. Writers responded by including an average of nine-plus players per ballot, inducting 13 different players between 1951 and -55.

There was a similar issue in 1981, a year in which 10 players received at least 40% of Hall of Fame votes but only Bob Gibson was elected. The writers eventually elected Don Drysdale, Harmon Killebrew, Juan Marichal, and Hoyt Wilhelm, leaving the Veterans’ Committee to decide the rest. Jim Bunning, Nellie Fox, and Red Schoendienst, eventually earned a place in the Hall, while Gil Hodges and Maury Wills remain on the outside looking in.

It was shortly after that 1981 election that writers began to significantly downsize their ballots. Consider: from 1936 to 1986, the average number of players per ballot was at least seven for every season but 1946. From 1987 through 2013, however, the average decreased significantly, never once reaching the seven-per-ballot mark. The trend was particularly pronounced from 2006 to -12, when the average was just 5.7 players per ballot.

The last four cycles have seen an average of roughly eight votes per ballot, but with eight of the 12 Hall of Famers elected coming on the first try, ballots remain congested.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have had a busy couple of days. One outfielder came in, another left. The latter move sent Stephen Piscotty to the Oakland A’s in exchange for two middle-infield prospects, Yairo Munoz and Max Schrock. The trade was made partly to accommodate Piscotty, whose mother has ALS, but the deal does help St. Louis. Likewise, it fills a need for Oakland.

Let’s start with Piscotty. Coming off a 2.8 WAR season in 2016, Piscotty looked to be building a solid profile in St. Louis. Clearly the Cardinals thought so, as they signed him to a six-year, $33.5 million contract that included a $2 million bonus. By the second week of the 2017 season, he was hitting cleanup.

Things didn’t go that smoothly all year though. Piscotty missed 15 days in May due to a strained hamstring. In mid-July, he landed back on the DL with a strained right groin. They recalled him on Aug. 1 from that injury but then optioned him to the minors on Aug. 7, only to reverse course and bring him back to the majors on Aug. 20. In his stint in the minors after he was demoted, he hit .313/.421/.781 in Triple-A, suggesting that he didn’t really need to be demoted in the first place. We’ll chalk that up to a bit of Mike Matheny Logic. Expecting a player fresh off the DL to hit like normal is shortsighted at best. Amusingly, in his last plate appearance before he was demoted, Piscotty hit a pinch-hit double.

Here’s his lines, split around his DL stints.

The biggest takeaway here is that he never really had a big sample to his season. The second takeaway, for me, is that he was doing just fine before he hurt his hamstring. It looks as though injuries more or less ruined his season, with a dash of Matheny Logic costing him two weeks in August.

One thing that we can say for sure is that he was pressing in the middle of his three big stints. Let’s take a look at another table:

As you can see in this table, Piscotty was swinging at a much higher rate when he came back from his hamstring injury, but he wasn’t making contact at a higher rate. When he finally got healthy toward the end of the season, though, he was able to go back to swinging less, and he made slightly more contact. He also swung at far fewer pitches out of the zone. That’s a promising development.

Whether he can repeat the swing improvements is a matter that will play out in Oakland. On the left coast, he’ll switch from right field to left field but become a valuable cog in their outfield no matter the corner in which he plays.

Of the four players we see getting significant time in an Oakland outfield corner, Piscotty projects to be the second-best hitter (by wOBA) and the best player overall. And this projection is probably a little conservative. If healthy, Piscotty could easily it. Given the way his 2017 season unfolded, I’m willing to throw out his replacement-level performance and be a little optimistic.

Over in St. Louis, Munoz and Schrock have their fans. Both were among Eric’s top 24 A’s prospects last spring. Munoz made Chris’s midseason KATOH top-100 list this past year. And Schrock was a fixture on Carson’s Fringe Five list last season. At the time of his last Fringe Five appearance in August, he was the yearly leader, and he would eventually finish the season third on the Fringe Five leaderboard.

All of this is to say that Munoz, a shortstop, and Schrock, a second baseman, weren’t throw-ins. They could potentially be valuable players. That is furthered by the dearth of middle-infield talent in the St. Louis farm system. Eric selected the Cardinals for one of his first top-prospects pieces this offseason. Here’s how the talent broke down:

There are two shortstops but no second basemen, and one of the shortstops is a 40 future value (FV) player who hasn’t yet reached A-ball. Munoz, meanwhile, ascended to Triple-A last season, and Schrock should be ready for Triple-A this season. Schrock actually projects to post a 87 wRC+ in the majors this year, which puts him in league with utility infielder Greg Garcia. Neither Munoz nor Schrock is likely to crack the Opening Day roster, but they should provide good depth for the Cardinals, who always seem to manage to turn average prospects into solid major leaguers. Oakland, meanwhile, still has plenty of middle infielders on the farm and in the Show. Top prospect Franklin Barreto is ready for major-league duty but may not actually get it to start the season, for instance.

This is a win-win deal. The Cardinals had too many good outfielders and too few good middle infielders. The A’s had too many good middle infielders and too few good outfielders. And as an added bonus, Stephen Piscotty — who will probably be fine if he can he avoid last season’s leg injuries — gets to be closer to his ailing mother. It’s hard not to like this trade from all angles.

To say this year’s Winter Meetings were a relatively quiet affair would be accurate. While there were some moments of excitement (the trade of Marcell Ozuna to St. Louis, the Angels’ acquisition of Ian Kinsler), this offseason meetup in Orlando mostly produced rumors and reliever signings.

While the best free-agent reliever, Wade Davis, remains unsigned, he’s one of the few high-leverage arms left standing. Greg Holland, Brandon Kintzler, Jake McGee, Mike Minor, Juan Nicasio, and Joe Smith were all taken off the board in short order.

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