As the author has apparently had cause to mention here before, Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is the method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to that latter category than the former.

Applied to something less substantial than an all-seeing and -knowing deity, however — like a human man, for example — apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] naturally becomes a more time-consuming endeavor, on account of how human men are little more than walking husks of carbon consumed by vanity. Applied to the sort of very flawed human man who’s also the one composing this document, the process would become nearly infinite.

Which, what I mean to say is: among the many things I’m not, one of them is an expert in the field of college baseball. Accordingly, what follows ought not to be regarded as an attempt to analyze all collegiate baseball prospects. Instead, what I’ve done is merely to assemble — after having consumed the broadcasts of several games this weekend, read reports concerning others, and manipulated data from some of the top conferences — what I’ve done is to assemble a collection of five players whose performances this weekend were notable for one reason or another.

Here are some qualities which might contribute to a prospect’s notability for the purposes of this post:

• He appeared within Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft rankings; or
• He played well relative to his age/level of competition; or
• Video is available for him from this weekend; or
• He possesses some other compelling feature.

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Episode 531
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses his recent trip to the Dominican Republic and also his forthcoming top-100 prospect list.

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 56 min play time.)

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed, once again, by FG+ editor Eno Sarris.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A trait common among basically all the best baseball clubs is that they possess an ability to avoid the awful — which is to say, they exhibit enough either in the way of health or depth or general competence throughout their major-league roster to avoid allocating plate appearances to players who are something worse than average.

Last year’s ZiPS projections for Kansas City suggested that they were particularly well suited to avoiding the awful. While none of their starting batter-types received a forecast in excess of four wins, none of them received a projection below two wins, either. The club was built not to dominate the league, but to remain relevant over the course of a full season.

Per ZiPS, the 2015 iteration of the Royals has more weaknesses than that 2014 edition. No fewer than three of their starting batters — Omar Infante (558 PA, 1.0 WAR), Kendrys Morales (467 PA, 0.5 WAR), and Alex Rios (571 PA, 1.2 WAR) — feature win projections more commonly associated with strong bench players than actual major-league starters.

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Episode 530
Mark Armour has contributed extensively to baseball’s literary canon. His most recent work, co-authored with Dan Levitt, is In Pursuit of Pennants, an examination of baseball-operations departments through time. He’s also (with Levitt) ranking the game’s best GMs.

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 49 min play time.)

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by the dumb, dumb author himself.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Toronto Blue Jays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Washington.

Batters
It’s likely promising for the 2015 edition of the Blue Jays — a club that finished second in the AL East last season by Base Runs — it’s likely promising that five of the ten best WAR projections per ZiPS this year belong to players who’ve been acquired over the offseason. Ezequiel Carrera (548 PA, 1.1 WAR), Josh Donaldson (634 PA, 5.1 WAR), Russell Martin (453 PA, 3.6 WAR), Michael Saunders (442 PA, 2.1 WAR), and Devon Travis (505 PA, 0.9 WAR) all profile at least as competent bench players or, in the case of Donaldson, potential MVP candidates*.

*At least, that is, in a world without Mike Trout.

Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion, for their part, remain the club’s best hitters and also curiously similar in terms of approach. Both are projected to produce something better than a .240 ISO. Neither, meanwhile, is forecast to produce a strikeout rate more than three percentage greater than his walk rate. And, finally, neither is expected to record anything greater than a .270 BABIP.

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At the end of January, the author published a post here featuring roughly calculated WAR figures for every minor leaguer from 2014. Despite the conspicuously haphazard computation, the results of that effort were ultimately (and strangely) credible. The four players atop the relevant leaderboard from 2014, for example — Kris Bryant, Joey Gallo, Joc Pederson, and Corey Seager — are also the sort who will populate the upper regions of this spring’s top-prospect lists.

Over the course of a subsequent television appearance during which I (notably) cried zero times, I endeavored to explain why — even while batting leaderboards in the high minors, especially, are often crowded with the names of immobile, Quad-A sluggers — why minor-league WAR (or mWAR, for short) might favor actual prospects. One reason, it would appear, is this: while those older sluggers are typically relegated to first base or a corner-outfield spot, organizations will typically deploy their younger and more promising talents at the most challenging positions they can reasonably handle. As a result, those players benefit from a greater positional adjustment and, in turn, better mWAR figures.

Given the relative success of that first post, what I’ve attempted to provide here — made possible largely by my colleagues Jonah Pemstein and Jeff Zimmerman — is a leaderboard featuring the top-35 players by mWAR since 2006. Below that is a link to a spreadsheet containing mWAR figures for over 30-thousand player-seasons, also since 2006.

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by Patrick Dubuque and actually appeared in last year’s edition of FG+, but is of such considerable merit that it deserves to be revisited.

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:00am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced yesterday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry, of above-average difficulty, was written by hirsute adventurer Bradley Woodrum.

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