Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my FanGraphs chat. I’ve got my head buried in Positional Power Rankings assignments but came up for air to write about Noelvi Marte’s PED suspension yesterday https://blogs.fangraphs.com/noelvi-martes-ped-suspension-simplifies-re…, and last Friday wrote about Brayan Bello’s extension https://blogs.fangraphs.com/red-sox-hope-brayan-bello-deal-is-the-star…

Jay Jaffe: With that, let’s get going.

wheelhouse: I’m trying to rebalance here, but if Cole is out for the season, do you think the Yankees are:
A) a threat for the third wild card
B) 100% dead in the water, stick a fork in them

Jay Jaffe: To borrow from Monty Python for a line that’s often quoted in our household, “A fair question and one that in recent weeks ‘as been much on my mind.”

Jay Jaffe: I think the answer to that depends upon how close to the best versions of themselves other starters such as Cortes, Rodón and Stroman are in 2024. If the two holdovers pitch as they did last year, the Yankees will be toast

Jay Jaffe: if the three of them pitch up to their capabilities and if they get a decent fill-in, all isn’t lost, but it may very well cost them down the road — either via a trade or a necessary payroll cut if they were to add a big salary to this year

Dan Szymborski: Ack, I’m here!

Dan Szymborski: Got lost fuming on Twitter

Placido Polanco fan club president: Just read Ben Clemens’ article about team depth. Don’t the ZiPS projected standings account for depth? Does ZiPS handle depth differently than the way proposed in Ben’s article?

Dan Szymborski: Sort of. ZiPS always has a generalized model that varies the playing time availability of top players so sometimes those Plan Bs or Cs or Ds get a lot more playing time than you expect

Dan Szymborski: For example, in that one run in the AL projections that I alluded to for the O’s, the O’s mostly ended up with David Banuelos and Michael Perez catching

Harry Lime: Can you suggest any articles that talk on late round players for deep drafts? thx

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chats. I have a piece up today illustrating the weakest positions on NL contenders — sort of a preseason Replacement Level Killers list — with a companion AL piece to follow soon. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-weakest-positions-on-national-league-c…

Jay Jaffe: On Sunday I covered the Cody Bellinger signing https://blogs.fangraphs.com/options-options-cody-bellinger-returns-to-…

Jay Jaffe: and last Friday i took a look at the Mets’ rotation in light of the Kodai Senga injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-kodai-senga-injury-mets-rotation-alre…

Jay Jaffe: With the caveat that I may have to duck out for a few minutes soon when our painter arrives, let’s get on with it.

Jay Jaffe: (We had our living room, dining room, and kitchen painted yesterday! Facelift for the whole first floor!)

Idiotic Failson: Regarding the Yankees still being potentially interested in Snell – I want owners to spend money as much as the average fan and feel that owners too often hoard their team revenue. That said, let’s say that the Yankees spend $25mm/year on Snell. That brings their commitment this year to him to close to $60mm and their payroll to close to $400mm. Can they really afford to run $400mm payrolls (necessary or not) regularly? Am I wrong in thinking that signing Snell might actually be unreasonable?

Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning from Tempe! Thank you for checking out all of our Prospect Week work for the site, including this chat.

Eric A Longenhagen: Let’s get right into it.

Andrew: You’re a bit lower on Colt Emerson than a lot of the industry it seems. What does he need to show to get up into that ~50 range? And thoughts on Jeter Martinez?

Eric A Longenhagen: I like Emerson a lot, ideally he performs a little better versus belt-high fastballs going forward. Jeter is an 18-year-old Mexican DSL arm sitting 92-93 touching better than that, slider will flash. Long-term dev project, last I saw arm action was super long

Jesse: Do the Mets have a top farm system after eating all that money for prospects during the trade deadline last year?

Eric A Longenhagen: More like tier 2 behind Cubs, BoSox

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and thanks for stopping by today’s chat. It’s a snow day here in Brooklyn, with about 8″ of total snowfall in the city but a lot of it already melting. I’m fresh off having built our first backyard snowman with my daughter.

Jay Jaffe:

Jay Jaffe: About an hour ago, my piece on Jurickson Profar’s return to San Diego went live (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jurickson-profar-rejoins-the-padres-not-so…). If you’re reading this, you have a pretty good chance of getting playing time in the Padres’ outfield this season because there’s not a lot of experienced competition.

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, it’s been a few weeks since I did one of these, so on with the show…

Not a huge fan: Hi Jay, I’m generally not a huge fan of your stuff, but just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to chat!

Jay Jaffe: Gosh, thanks for that. I’m generally not a huge fan of people who take the time to say that they’re not huge fans of me (or any of my colleagues), so, uh, have a nice day I guess.

Dan Szymborski: If you can’t do the chat time, don’t do the chat crime

Dan Szymborski: I don’t know what that means either, like most things out of my mouth

the person who asks the lunch question: what’s for lunch?

Dan Szymborski: Nothing, this isn’t an eating Thursday

Andy Dufresne: Are you bullish on Correa exceeding his projections now that the foot (and septum) are fixed?

Dan Szymborski: Mildly so? I tend to be skeptical over “OK, this fixes the injury thing for good” things