This is clearly a toy I love playing around with. Please just don’t ask me what it means. I don’t know what it means to say that Henderson Alvarez almost has Felix Hernandez’s changeup. It’s just a statistical observation, like any other. This is all way too new for me to know if it has any substance. If nothing else, it adds some color, right? We are a people somewhat obsessed with player comps. We love comps for young players, because they allow us to pretend like we can see their futures. This is kind of along those lines, at least with regard to the unproven. Carlos Martinez is unproven. Let’s analyze Carlos Martinez.

The Cardinals intend for Martinez to be a starting pitcher, a role in which he’s only dabbled in the major leagues. At this point he’s the favorite to open the year as the No. 5 starter, and while the Cardinals have pursued other arms on the market, that has more to do with a potential lack of depth. Of course, there are Martinez skeptics. There are skeptics of every pitcher who has yet to start and succeed. Frequently, those skeptics come away looking smart! But we don’t know if Martinez is going to develop. All we know is his age, and the kind of arm he has.

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The default introduction: Mike Trout is among the least-troubled players in baseball. By WAR, you could split him into four or five parts and have four or five decent everyday players, at least given good enough prosthetic limbs. Trout’s coming off an MVP award he deserved, after back-to-back seasons of not winning MVP awards he probably deserved. Regarding his very well-known weakness, I’ve written about this perhaps literally countless times, so maybe you’re tired of hearing about it. And I’m about to make a post out of one quote offered at the beginning of spring training. You know what you’re getting, here. Read on, and the blame lies with you.

Trout has checked into Angels camp. Because he’s a star, people want to know what he’s thinking, and as he stood before a horde of media types, Trout said he’d like to increase his stolen bases. Good news, fantasy players! Trout also said he’d like to cut down on his strikeouts. Probably to 0%. Maybe that’s unrealistic, but Trout opened up just a little bit about what was giving him issues, and it’s not often you can get Trout to say anything of substance.

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I don’t think the Dodgers deserve that much credit for signing Brandon Beachy. It’s not like it’s a particularly innovative idea, and a whole host of teams were interested in landing him. The Dodgers beat out almost everyone in available resources, and they beat out almost everyone in immediate outlook, and they had this other advantage, as well:

Beachy said deciding on the Dodgers was easy, mostly because the surgeon of his second Tommy John, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, is also the Dodgers’ team doctor.

“It’s the best place to be,” Beachy said. “I have a lot of faith in Dr. ElAttrache and the training room’s view for bringing me along meshes well with that.”

Beachy was drawn to the Dodgers, and the Dodgers were sufficiently drawn to Beachy to get him to sign. Given everything, the Beachy pickup hardly qualifies as any kind of genius, but for one thing, the upside is readily apparent — the upside of these things is always apparent — and for another, Beachy makes for an interesting depth play. That point isn’t Beachy-specific. Beachy and pitchers like him make for interesting depth plays.

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Last Friday, I took a look at the exceptional nature of Carlos Carrasco‘s split-change. I had trouble finding any kind of decent comparison for it, and when I did a little further analysis in the comments, the best I could come up with was Masahiro Tanaka’s splitter, and Tanaka’s splitter is supposed to be one of the best in the world. So, that was neat, and fun, and people are all about Carrasco hype because of the statistics he just posted down the stretch last summer. This post is about Odrisamer Despaigne. Despaigne isn’t nearly as statistically appealing as Carrasco is, and he’s not even assured a starting spot in the majors this coming season. But, just as Carrasco has an unusual split-change, Despaigne has an unusual changeup. A very, very, very unusual changeup.

Maybe that’s not a total surprise — last July, Eno talked about his weird grip. And Eno, see, knows a lot about grips. Here’s an image:

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Part 1 is over. Part 1 was figuring out which team was going to sign Yoan Moncada, and now we know, with the Red Sox having given up more than $60 million for the right to try to make him into something. Most conspicuously, the Sox beat out the Yankees; less conspicuously, the Sox beat out everyone else. Moncada joins an organization with a silly amount of talent and resources, and he is now presumably Boston’s No. 1 prospect. Not a whole lot of prospects better than Blake Swihart, either. So that’s meaningful.

Now we move on to Part 2. What’s Part 2? Figuring out what Yoan Moncada is going to be. You can kind of deduce what teams expect him to be — based on the price, and based on all the attention, Moncada figures to be some kind of big-leaguer, with a high ceiling. But what have we seen from prospects like this before? Moncada’s going into his age-20 season. We can put some numbers to this, trying in a way to project the unfamiliar. Let’s scan some historical top-prospect lists.

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I’m back again to close out your week by talking about pitch comps. I’ve talked about pitch comps a lot lately, looking at Henderson Alvarez, and Mariano Rivera, and Cole Hamels, and so on. Pitch comps love Marcus Stroman. Not coincidentally, I also love Marcus Stroman, but this is going to be about a different guy — this is focusing on Carlos Carrasco. And while I’ve written about Carrasco already in the recent past, I want to add something to that. Carlos Carrasco throws a changeup. No one else really throws Carlos Carrasco’s changeup.

To quickly review the methodology, I use the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and look at velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. For this, I looked at right-handed starting pitchers who, last year, threw at least 50 changeups, according to the page. For each of the three categories, I calculated the z-score difference between a given number and Carrasco’s changeup’s number. Then I simply added up the three absolute values, yielding a comp rating. That’s all the boring stuff. Below is the more interesting stuff.

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An interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that he just won the 2014 American League Cy Young Award, narrowly edging out Felix Hernandez. Though it was virtually impossible to separate the two, statistically, there was no arguing with Kluber’s win — he was at least the co-best pitcher in his league. Another interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that, in the minors, he was never highly thought of. Everybody in the minor leagues has talent, but no one would argue with the statement that Kluber has basically come out of nowhere. He’s overachieved, relative to his earlier expectations.

Kluber’s not alone. I mean, at his talent level, Kluber is almost alone, but he’s not the only current pitcher to overachieve. Dallas Keuchel was never highly regarded. Neither was Tanner Roark, who I think has taken everybody by surprise. Jose Quintana wasn’t much of a prospect, and neither was Doug Fister, and neither was Tyson Ross. I could keep going. You know Matt Shoemaker? Shoemaker, for the Angels, was outstanding. His Triple-A ERA is over 5.

But we shouldn’t pretend like this is strictly a pitching phenomenon. One of the most valuable players of the last few years has been Josh Donaldson, and Donaldson is a little like a hitting version of Kluber. Donaldson just took a slightly more complicated route to astonishing stardom. Ben Zobrist has been hugely valuable, and didn’t come up as a top prospect. Jonathan Lucroy wasn’t a big-time prospect. Jose Bautista and Yan Gomes have been different sorts of surprises. Baseball players will surprise you. You’ve heard this before, in different forms.

So this brings us to one question: do we observe more surprising starting pitchers, or do we observe more surprising position players? The other day at FanGraphs, I analyzed how many good players had previously been considered good prospects. I based it on Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and the Baseball America top-100 prospect lists. To keep things simple, that was my definition: a “good prospect” was any prospect who had ever appeared in a top-100. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. Afterward, someone asked for a breakdown between hitters and pitchers. I was also curious, and this is that breakdown.

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Usually you see this the other way around — how many good prospects became good players? It’s the foundation of any worthwhile prospect analysis, and based on the research, what we indeed observe is that higher-ranking prospects have worked out better than lower-ranking prospects, thereby granting validity to the prospect rankings themselves. If we didn’t see any differences in future performance, we’d have to think, welp, someone’s doing something wrong.

But when you focus just on the future of prospects, you ignore a massive part of the player pool — those players who weren’t considered good prospects. Now, professional baseball is selective for good baseball players. The majors are even more selective. Everyone with a job in baseball has a job because he has some amount of promise, and there’s no such thing as an untalented big-leaguer. But there are the guys who had a lot of hype, and there are the guys the hype never touched. So we return to the headline question: how many good players were good prospects?

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So, look. I don’t want to write any more about Cole Hamels. You don’t want to read any more about Cole Hamels. We’ve all basically covered every possible angle of the Cole Hamels thing. It’s tired, and all anyone wants is to be able to move on. But, on the other hand, yesterday I published articles about Chris Young, Huston Street, and fan opinions of pitching coaches. So now I’m writing about Cole Hamels again.

At least this time there’s new information. Ken Rosenthal wrote this earlier:

The Padres wanted Hamels. The Padres made an aggressive offer for Hamels. The Padres are one of nine teams that can acquire Hamels without his permission.
[…]
It is not known precisely how they view the Padres’ top three prospects — righty Matt Wisler, catcher Austin Hedges and outfielder Hunter Renfroe. But a source last month said that in the Phillies’ view, the Padres might “not have enough.”

That’s pretty concrete. That’s reporting that the Padres made a bid. They’re one of apparently four teams to have made an actual bid, but now from Bob Nightengale, we get names:

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