Yesterday, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon made some headlines by claiming he was considering making Kyle Schwarber his leadoff hitter this season. Mostly, that this was a big headline reflects the fact that this is one of the slowest times in the baseball calendar — players have been at camp for awhile now, yet games are just beginning, and in many cases the best players haven’t suited up yet. It’s a slow time. Still, it’s an interesting idea. The first thought that came to my mind was, would Kyle Schwarber be the heaviest leadoff hitter of all-time?
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When I was researching a piece about the Cubs’ clubhouse culture last month and the similarities it shared with the Clemson football program (i.e. it’s OK to have fun), I stumbled upon an interesting detail about the Cubs’ new clubhouse.

I knew the Cubs had the celebration room, regarded by some as a superfluous addition to the clubhouse. There’s also an impressive new strength-and-conditioning component. The old clubhouse, something of an subterranean alley way, was converted into a batting cage. There are a number of other amenities, as well, as one might expect of a new facility like this. The new clubhouse’s footprint of 30,000 square feet is about a quarter of the size of the Wrigley Field playing surface.

But it’s one of the smaller departments of the new clubhouse that I find interesting – the actual locker room space within the clubhouse. From an Associated Press story:

The Cubs decided to go with a circular shape — 60 feet, 6 inches in diameter, matching the distance on a baseball field between the mound and home plate — rather than the more conventional rectangle to encourage more unity and equality. There are no preferred corner lockers. Everyone can see one another.

Almost every other major-league home clubhouse I have entered is rectangular in shape. Certain locker spaces, like those with no neighboring locker on one side, are reserved for the most senior and/or most talented players. It’s not unlike the corner offices in your work place, which you might be hesitant to enter unannounced. There’s a sort of hierarchy of locker space, with certain players benefiting from a location next to unused locker space, which they use to store their spill-over belongings. The middle relievers, the bench players: they typically have no such luxuries.

While I’m not an expert in clubhouse design — nor the social manners and customs within those spaces — and while I’m only permitted clubhouse access along with other media for specific periods before and after games, I suspect the traditional clubhouse shape and layout does not always foster optimum discussion and collaboration opportunities.

And, to continue a theme from last week here at FanGraphs, one the great inefficiencies in today’s game is communication. Every club has the access to the same information, or similar information, but clubs ask different questions of the information and share information differently. I presume that there are different levels of collaboration in every organization.

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Largely overlooked amidst the hoopla surrounding last weekend’s Super Bowl, DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the National Football League Players Association, weighed in on an obscure bill currently working its way through the Illinois state legislature. If enacted into law, the proposed legislation — presently dubbed Illinois Senate Bill 12 — would amend the state’s workers’ compensation laws to decrease the benefits provided to professional athletes who sustain career-ending injuries on the playing field.

This possibility led Smith to threaten that, if Senate Bill 12 were to be signed into law, the NFLPA would officially encourage players to steer clear of signing with the Chicago Bears. As Smith stated over the weekend, “If you’re a free-agent player and you have an opportunity to go play somewhere else… isn’t a smarter financial decision to go to a team where a bill like this hasn’t passed?”

The fact that the NFLPA would take such a public stance against the proposed Illinois legislation raises the question of what potential impact Senate Bill 12 would have on Major League Baseball players, and, more generally, how workers’ compensation laws affect MLB in the first place.

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Yesterday, the Colorado Rockies traded right-hander Eddie Butler to the Chicago Cubs in exchange for a modestly promising relief prospect (James Farris) and the 28th international bonus slot.

Even as recently as last year, the notion of such a move would have seemed improbable. Butler appeared twice — as recently as 2015 — on Baseball America’s top-100 prospects list. The Rockies’ rotation, meanwhile, has been quite poor, producing the second-lowest collective WAR in the majors over the last five years. They haven’t been a club, in other words, that had the luxury of giving up on a promising young pitcher.

But Colorado’s rotation has improved rapidly, while Butler’s stock has declined just as quickly. In the end, general manager Jeff Bridich concluded there wasn’t space on the roster for Eddie Butler. He made a deal.

But this isn’t just a late-January transaction that ought to be forgotten. Because Butler has shown promise. Let’s instead follow his story up to this point. He deserves it after toiling in Coors for so long, and it might provide us a glimpse of his future.

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The easiest yes you’ll get in sports is by asking anyone on the field if spring training should be shorter. They agree almost unanimously. The players especially think so, since they’ve been working all offseason, too. The days of coming into town 15 pounds overweight and stepping on the mound or to the plate for the first time in months — those are long gone. Players have been working since after Thanksgiving, and maybe even earlier in some cases.

Players like Jason Heyward, who just came off the worst year of his career with the bat, might have been working even harder. There’s so much to prove. At least in Heyward’s case, the problem might be obvious and the solution seems to be in hand. At least theoretically.

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What happened to Clayton Kershaw in Game 6 of the NLCS? According to a new study by Northwestern University, maybe it was jet lag.

Looking at 20 major-league seasons and 40,000 games’ worth of data, researchers found that jet lag perceptibly “impairs” player and team performance. The study is likely to be passed around many major-league front offices and strength-and-training departments. In a sport where every team is looking for hidden value at the margins, the value of better rest and recovery is just beginning to be explored, understood and focused upon — and is perhaps a considerable inefficiency in the game.

Dr. Ravi Allada, a circadian-rhythms expert, led the study:

“The negative effects of jet lag we found are subtle, but they are detectable and significant. And they happen on both offense and defense and for both home and away teams, often in surprising ways….

“For Game 6, the teams had returned to Chicago from LA, and this time the Cubs scored five runs off of Kershaw, including two home runs. While it’s speculation, our research would suggest that jet lag was a contributing factor in Kershaw’s performance.”

One of the homers in question:

Of course, Kershaw did pitch on extra rest that start, and Kyle Hendricks himself did just fine after traveling back east, but perhaps the rest could not save Kershaw from the clutches of jet lag.

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Over 450 innings into his major-league career, Kyle Hendricks possesses both an ERA under 3.00 and a third-place finish in Cy Young voting. That’s impressive. Even after accounting for the regression he’s likely to experience in the future, he’s nevertheless proven himself to be an apt pitcher at the major-league level, something that we didn’t see coming as he ascended the ranks as a prospect. He’s done enough to wonder why we missed on him, and what he can teach us about other young pitchers out there.

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The Chicago Cubs are almost perfect.

Coming off a World Series title, FanGraphs’ expected wins totals placed the Cubs at 99 victories back in November.

The young, enviable core remains. The top four starters return from the most effective rotation in baseball last season. While Aroldis Chapman departed, Wade Davis entered. Even David Ross is still around, though he’s moving upstairs to the front office. OK, not everything has gone the Cubs’ way in recent times. Quipped Cubs president Theo Epstein in regard to Tyson Ross‘ decision to sign with the Rangers: “We went 1-for-2 in Ross signings.”

Ross’ choice didn’t seem like a big deal, but maybe it will be a big deal.

As dominant as they were a year ago, the Cubs also benefited from a tremendous amount of good fortune in 2016: their starting rotation remained remarkably healthy.

Consider that, en route to a 103 wins in the regular season, five Cubs starting pitchers – Jake Arrieta, Jason Hammel, Kyle Hendricks, John Lackey, and Jon Lester – made at least 29 starts. It’s an extremely rare feat.

The Cubs are unlikely to be as fortunate this season, and the their rotation depth appeared thin entering the fourth week of January. Regression to the injury-fortune mean, combined with a lack of quality rotation depth, appeared to be the one glaring weakness facing the Cubs. (There are perhaps some bullpen issues, too.)

A Jeff Sullivan study in 2014 found teams can expect to cobble together 32 starts by pitchers outside their top-five rotation options in a given season.

A Jeff Zimmerman study found all pitchers have at least a 40% chance of landing on the disabled list in a season, risk that increases with age.

Andrew Simon of MLB.com wrote last spring that, since 1998, teams have averaged 10.3 starting pitchers used per season. Wrote Simon:

“Just 14 teams — or not even one per year — needed six starters or fewer. The last to do so was the 2013 Tigers.”

Lackey is 38. Lester is 33. Hendricks is coming off a career-high workload. There’s also Arrieta’s second half, including only a 10.6-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%), that has some in Cubs Nation uneasy. Beyond those four reside questionable depth and the unknown.

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Imagine how Jason Heyward would feel if the Cubs didn’t win the World Series. On one side of the coin, any non-championship season falls short because of countless different reasons, and on the other side of the coin, Heyward still has to care the most about his own performance. But for as bad as he was, at least the title took the edge off. He remained an outstanding defender. And the team around him literally won everything you could win. Bad, though. Jason Heyward’s hitting was bad. Maybe worse than you thought. Maybe exactly as bad as you thought.

Here are three numbers:

• BA: .255
• OBP: .306
• SLG: .336

Pretty bad performance from Jason Heyward, you’d say. You’d be right! But you’d also be wrong, because those three numbers were posted by Jose Iglesias. Heyward’s hitting was even worse. He wasn’t supposed to become an outfield version of the no-hit shortstoppy whiz.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Chicago Cubs farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Recorded .204 ISO in full-season ball at age 19.

Scouting Report
Jimenez has perhaps the most explosive raw power projection in the minors. When he debuted in the states it was clear his broad-shouldered, 6-foot-4 frame would one day fill out and yield all kinds of crazy power. (He already had at least 55 raw at age 18.) That said, I didn’t expect so much of it to come before Jimenez turned 20. Even when he took batting practice alongside some of the other more prodigious power prospects in the game (Dylan Cozens and Christin Stewart, to name two) at the Futures Game and at Fall Stars, Eloy’s power stood head and shoulders above everyone else’s. Not only does he hit blasts in BP that threaten to enter geocentric orbit but low-lying line drives that, if they don’t clear the wall, seem likely to blast through it.

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