All winter, the focus on the Phillies has centered on Cole Hamels. He’s their best player, they’re an obvious seller, and the remainder of his contract is a bit of a discount relative to the current market price for frontline starting pitchers. Of course, those last two factors also mean that the Phillies asking price has been quite high, as they look for multiple young prospects in return, with the acquiring team also absorbing the entirety of the rest of his contract. For reasons that have been covered ad nauseum, no one has been willing to give up that kind of talent while also taking on $96 million in salary commitments, and so for now, Hamels remains in Philadelphia.

At some point sooner than later, now that spring training is beginning, pitchers are going to start getting hurt. Pitchers on contenders. Guys that win-now teams were counting on are going to report some stiffness in their elbow, and after a few days of assuming its just normal dead arm, they’ll be told they need Tommy John Surgery. And then the rumors will begin to kick up, and that team will get attached to Hamels as a potential suitor, and eventually, Hamels will have a new home. At least, as long as he isn’t one of the guys complaining about dead arm anyway.

From now through the trade deadline, the asking price for Hamels probably only goes up. The Phillies are already paying the cost in awkwardness of bringing him to spring training, so there’s no reason for them to give in and take a deal similar to what they’ve been offered at this point. Amaro is betting on injuries depleting the supply of arms on contending teams, pushing the demand for Hamels higher, allowing him to get the kind of return he’s been seeking all winter. As long as Hamels stays healthy, it will probably work.

But Cole Hamels isn’t the only interesting piece of trade-bait in Philadelphia. And in fact, if I was a team like the Red Sox or the Padres, I might actually target Cliff Lee instead.

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It’s prospect season. Over at FanGraphs, we released our Top 200 Prospects list yesterday; last week, Rob wrote about flipping through the recently released Prospect Handbook from Baseball America. It seems like everyone is currently in the process of ranking and grading minor leaguers, speculating about which ones are going to become the stars of tomorrow.

But as Rob pointed out last week, most of the guys we’re so excited about now are never going to pan out. Quoting his piece, which in turn quotes BA’s Handbook.

“In the 2011 Prospect Handbook, we detailed the depth of the Royals’ top-ranked farm system, which we also featured on the cover of the March 2011 issue of Baseball America magazine. No team had ever placed nine players in Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects before, and group – both as big leaguers and through trades – helped form the core of the Royals’ 2014 American League pennant winners.

Turning a losing franchise into a winner – that’s why prospects matter.”

Here are those nine guys who made the Top 100 list: Eric Hosmer, Wil Myers, Mike Moustakas, John Lamb, Mike Montgomery, Christian Colon, Danny Duffy, Chris Dwyer, Aaron Crow.

I will pardon you for being underwhelmed.

Rob is right; the Royals had one of the most celebrated farm systems of all time, and a majority of their prospects haven’t done jack squat in the big leagues. Some of the guys who weren’t as highly heralded have become stars, and the Royals are absolutely an example of why prospect development can help turn a franchise around, but even in boasting of a clear success story, there are examples of failure everywhere.

In fact, according to most of the research done on prospect rankings, the failure rate for players ranked within Baseball America’s Top 100 approaches 70%. Even selecting the cream of the crop, theoretically the guys we should have the best information on, seven in ten fail to become significant big league contributors.

This seems like a lousy success rate, and it’s one of the reasons why there is significant pushback against the rising valuations teams are putting on minor league players with no big league track record. For example, the Phillies have been frustrated by the market’s unwillingness to surrender the kinds of talent they believe Cole Hamels is worth, and likely the kind of return he would have brought even a few years ago. The relative values teams are placing on on big league stars and minor league prospects has shifted towards the young kids, even as most of them continue to fail.

Even JABO’s own Ken Rosenthal has argued strongly that prospects are currently being overvalued in trade negotiations, and that teams should not be so afraid to part with their best young talents. That 70% failure rate supports these suggestions; why be so attached to an asset that is more likely than not going to lose all of its value?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel released the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospects list, providing a remarkable source of information. We’re obviously biased, but Kiley’s doing great work with the prospect information provided here on the site. One of my favorite things he’s doing is working to break down the barriers of the ordinal ranked list, providing Future Value grades that allow for more reasonable tiers of prospects, so that less time is spent arguing over whether a particular player should be #23 or #28 on a particular list.

So, I wanted to see if I could come up with a piece that would complement the information he’s presenting, using the value of having additional information beyond just ordinal ranking. To that end, I took latest prospect valuation estimates from Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli, and attempted to convert their tiered valuation estimations into numbers based on the Future Value calculations Kiley attached to each prospect on his list.

As I noted when we discussed the prospect valuation work a few months ago, the data is fascinating, but also slightly problematic for this purpose. For instance, here’s the table of values for prospect tiers according to Creagh and DiMiceli.

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Here’s your chance to vote for the 2015 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• Russell Carleton, “N=1,” Baseball Prospectus 2014: The Essential Guide to the 2014 Season, January 2014.
• Jay Jaffe, “The Case of the Disappearing Slugger: Where Did MLB’s Power Go?” SI.com, September 3, 2014.
• Harry Pavlidis and Dan Brooks, “Framing and Blocking Pitches: A Regressed, Probabilistic Model,” Baseball Prospectus, March 3, 2014.
• Jon Roegele, “The Effects of Pitch Sequencing,” The Hardball Times, November 24, 2014.
• Jeff Sullivan, “Alex Gordon Barely Had a Chance,” FanGraphs, October 30, 2014.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Grant Brisbee, “Rumors, Rumors, Every Where, Nor Any Drop to Drink,” SB Nation, December 15, 2014.
• Dave Cameron, “If Someone Has A Good Way To Evaluate Managers, Let Us Know,” FoxSports.com, September 5, 2014.
• Lewie Pollis, “If You Build It: Rethinking the Market for Major League Baseball Front Office Personnel,” Brown University, senior honors thesis, Spring 2014.
• Eno Sarris, “Learning the Language of the Clubhouse,” The Hardball Times, March 13, 2014.
• Jason Turbow, “The Essence of Velocity: The Pitching Theory That Could Revolutionize Baseball, If Only The Sport Would Embrace It,” SB Nation, June 18, 2014.

Historical Analysis/Commentary

• Frank Jackson, “Shots Fired But Not Heard ‘Round the World,” The Hardball Times, October 7, 2014.
• Erik Malinowski, “Swing Away: The Untold Story of the First Home Run Derby,” FoxSports.com, July 10, 2014.
• Sam Miller, “Baseball’s Seven Wonders: Kerry Wood’s 20-K Game,” Baseball Prospectus, March 18, 2014.
• Bryan Soderholm-Difatte, “The 1914 Stallings Platoon: Assessing Execution, Impact, and Strategic Philosophy,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2014.
• Steve Treder, “The Strikeout Ascendant (and What Should Be Done About It),” The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2014.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Monday, February 16, 2015. Details and criteria for each category can be found here. Only one work per author was considered as a finalist.

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the fourth annual SABR Analytics Conference, March 12-14, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

A month ago, we put out an open call for applications for a writing position here on FanGraphs. The responses were overwhelming, which is why it took us nearly a month to sort through the hundreds of received resumes and conduct as many interviews as we could. In the end, what was intended to be one open position turned into five new people joining the team, as we simply had too many good candidates to turn away.

If you were one of those who applied, I highly encourage you to keep writing and prove that we missed the boat by not hiring you this time around. The Community Blog is a great place to get noticed, as four of the five people joining the writing staff had previously published work there, and we’ve hired a handful of others directly after noticing their contributions to the Community Blog previously. We’re really excited about the five new people joining our staff, but we know many of you would be great contributors as well, so don’t give up.

With that said, let me briefly introduce the five new writers whose work will be debuting on these pages very soon.

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Yesterday, I covered the moves of the winter that I liked the most. Today, we look at the moves that I like less, though I’ll note that this year simply doesn’t have the collection of clear mistakes that last year’s list had. While there were some transactions this winter that probably won’t work out that well, the risk associated with a lot of these moves is significantly lower than the ones we saw a year ago. No team really screwed themselves this off-season the same way the Rangers did last year with their Prince Fielder/Shin-Soo Choo acquisitions, and the free agent overpays seem to be getting smaller each year.

So, in reality, most of these moves are more suboptimal than outright disasters. Perhaps there were better alternatives each case, but the downside potential is often limited here, and a good amount of these will probably end up not having a major negative impact on their clubs.

In that spirit, no (dis)honorable mentions this time around; let’s just get straight to the moves that I didn’t particularly care for this off-season.

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With the James Shields signing bringing the off-season to something of a close, it’s time to look back at some of my favorite moves of the winter. A year ago, I was quite high on moves like the Doug Fister acquisition and the Jose Abreu signing, but also the Yankees landing Brian McCann and the Cardinals picking up Peter Bourjos, so you know, grains of salt and all that. Still, I do think there are some moves that appear to be demonstrably better than others, and look likely to push their organizations forward into the future. Below, you’ll find my top 10, plus a handful of other small moves that I liked.

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