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Way back in November, before I had finished tweaking my KATOH model, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Arizona Diamondbacks. In this companion piece, I finally get around to looking at that same Arizona farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Diamondbacks have the 21st best farm system according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to find a flaw within Francisco Lindor’s 2015 rookie season. The numbers say he was a top-five defensive shortstop in baseball; the eye test agrees. He had one of the best offensive debuts by a shortstop on record, combining plus on-base skills with surprising power. He even patched up his weak link from the minor leagues — baserunning efficiency — by stealing 12 bases in 14 attempts at the major league level. Adjusting for playing time, Lindor was one of the 10 most valuable players in baseball last season, using our WAR figure here on the site.

Lindor was excellent across the board, but he wasn’t the best at anything. He wasn’t the very best defender, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best hitting rookie shortstop of all time, but he was close. He wasn’t the very best baserunner, or the number one most valuable player on a per-plate appearance basis, but he was close. There was one leaderboard though, where you can find Lindor at the top, and, coincidentally, it’s also where you can find Lindor’s only real blemish.

Francisco Lindor, in the midst of one of the greatest offensive seasons by a rookie shortstop in history, led all of baseball in sacrifice bunts, with 13, despite playing in fewer than 100 games.

By this point, I don’t think anyone needs too big a primer on sacrifice bunting. It’s certainly got its place as a valuable tool — late-inning, need one run, man on first, no outs, weak and/or slow hitter at the plate, move him over. But there’s a reason sacrifice bunts are on a 90-year decline — because they’re very rarely a wise play, and the more information teams have gained over time, the more that’s become obvious.

Let Indians manager Terry Francona explain:

Outs are valuable, they’re finite, and sacrifice bunts give them away with limited reward. Got it. Everyone understands this. Lindor’s manager understands this. So then, what was going on?

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We were talking about something unrelated, so when Joey Votto slipped this quote in, I laughed out loud. You?! Joey Votto? You did what? Listening back to it even made me giggle again.

“I tried to do a lot of pull hitting early in the season and it was an error,” he said, but my mind could barely comprehend in real time. “It was a mistake,” he admitted before I could point out that it was completely out of character.

So why did he try it? “It was me trying to hit more homers. I thought I’d get easy homers.” After the laughter came a sort of stunned silence. The idea that Votto, who has preached going up the middle to himself and the games’ biggest stars for as long as he’s been great, tried to pull a few cheapies into the seats last year was a bit stunning.

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I can’t tell you whether Trevor Story is going to be a good major-league ballplayer. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty he’s going to be some kind of major-league ballplayer, but as for how he fares, well, that’s more unknown. He has the skills to make All-Star Games, but the same could be said of plenty of non-All-Stars, and this’ll be a big year for Story’s career. He might build upon last year’s gains, and become a part of a core. Alternatively, he wouldn’t be the first young player to stagnate or regress.

Story has become a something on account of his spring, and on account of what’s going on with Jose Reyes. Reyes might never play for the Rockies again, so there’s a vacancy at short, and Story might seize it. Some want for Story to be named the opening-day starter, and there are the usual arguments in favor of waiting at least a couple weeks. No matter — by May or June, it seems like Story is going to be the guy. I can’t tell you if he’s going to be productive. I can tell you only how he’s interesting.

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Kyle Schwarber is a student of hitting. Even so, there are limits to how much he wants to learn. The Chicago Cubs slugger crunches video, but he draws the line at spin rates.

Schwarber understands the concept. He knows that four-seam fastballs with a high spin rate have carry as opposed to sink. He knows they are an invitation to pop up when located up and over the zone. Well and fine. An individual pitcher’s ability to defy gravitational pull isn’t something he wants to delve into from a StatCast perspective. Once he’s in the batter’s box, it’s all about seeing the ball and reacting accordingly.

On a recent visit to the Cubs spring training facility, I asked Schwarber the following question: As a hitter, how aware are you of an opposing pitcher’s spin rate?

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Schwarber on spin rate and high fastballs: “Hitting-wise, knowing a guy’s spin rate would just be adding extra information to what I already have. It would probably be kind of a mind-crunch for me.

“When you’re in the box, you only have a split second. You don’t have time to think, ‘This guy’s ball is going to move four inches, because his average spin rate is this.’ There might be hitters who would disagree, but my personal philosophy is to crunch video and go from there. Read the rest of this entry »

There were 13 pitchers who appeared in a Monday afternoon spring-training contest between the White Sox and the Royals. The game took place in one of the few ST venues equipped with PITCHf/x, and to no one’s surprise, the fastest average fastball on the day was thrown by Yordano Ventura. Showing up in second place was one Brandon Brennan, and then in third place, you find Chien-Ming Wang. Just in case you’re wondering, no, there is not a second Chien-Ming Wang. This is not, like, the son of the original Chien-Ming Wang. This is the original Chien-Ming Wang, throwing harder than Daniel Webb. He threw harder than Joakim Soria. He threw harder than Carson Fulmer.

It’s one appearance, and it’s March. Wang worked out of the bullpen, as opposed to being a starter. It’s not like we get to just turn the clock back 10 years, but here’s something Wang said after the game:

Chien-Ming Wang said his velo was 88-89 last year. Now 94-95 thanks to pitching guru Ron Wolforth. #Royals

— Jeffrey Flanagan (@FlannyMLB) March 15, 2016

If we wanted to turn the clock back 10 years, we’d insist on Wang re-discovering old velocity levels. Now he has. Now we have proof. Chien-Ming Wang was once a hell of a Yankee, and though you might’ve forgotten about him, he never forgot about his success.

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A week ago, the St. Louis Cardinals learned they were going to be without Jhonny Peralta for the first couple of months of the season, after he required surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. Because the Cardinals have been participating in a multi-year experiment to see if you can win games without a viable backup shortstop on the roster, speculation immediately turned to outside acquisitions, since no one thinks running Jedd Gyorko out there on an everyday basis is a good idea. While Erick Aybar was floated as a natural fit, given that he’s in a walk year on a rebuilding team, the Braves quickly hung a high price tag on him, making a deal between the teams unlikely.

Instead, the Cardinals seem likely to make a more minor move, not wanting to create a mid-season playing time problem when Peralta does return. And on the minor acquisition spectrum, there was always one name who made a decent amount of sense: Ruben Tejada.

The signing of Asdrubal Cabrera made Tejada superfluous for the Mets, pushing him into a third-string shortstop role that probably wouldn’t have resulted in a lot of playing time. Even with Cabrera having his own health problems, the Mets still seemed perfectly content to let someone else have Tejada if they wanted him, and his availability was no secret around the league. And then today, the Mets made the speculation official, putting Tejada on waivers, and giving any team the chance to take him if they so desire. While Tejada doesn’t yet have a new uniform, his days as a Met are over, and now we simply wait for the seemingly inevitable announcement that he’ll be signing with the Cardinals.

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There is an inherent optimism when contracts are signed. The Cleveland Indians believed they were putting themselves over the top three years ago when they signed Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn to four-year deals. The team did not get the production they were hoping for, and after making the Wild Card their first year with the team in 2013, the team has won fewer games the last two seasons, and the Indians agreed to pay money to the Atlanta Braves to get rid of Bourn and Swisher while taking on the contract of Chris Johnson, who they have also jettisoned. As a result, the Indians have a larger percentage of their payroll going to players not playing for them in 2016 than any other Major League Baseball team.

The Indians might have the largest percentage of their payroll devoted to dead money, but they do not have the largest amount in total. The two franchises from Los Angeles both best the Indians. Thirteen of the 30 MLB teams have money going to players not currently on their 40-man roster. The graph below shows those 13 teams, with data collected from Cot’s Contracts.

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With the Ides Of March upon us, let’s complete our position-by-position look back at the ball-in-play (BIP) profiles of 2015 semi-regulars and regulars to see if we can find any clues as to their projected performance moving forward. We’ll wrap it up with a look at catchers.

First, some ground rules. To come up with an overall player population roughly equal to one player per team per position, the minimum number of batted balls with Statcast readings was set at 164. Players were listed at the position at which they played the most games. There is more than one player per team at some positions and less at others, like catcher and DH. Players are listed in descending OPS+ order. Fewer catchers qualify because of the physical demands of the position; players at other positions generally miss time only due to injury and platooning. Even the best non-Salvador Perez catchers need at least a day off per week to remain fresh.

Also, bear in mind that catchers earn playing time primarily for reasons not covered here today, i.e., defensive skills such as receiving/framing, handling the running game and the pitching staff. What the player brings to the table in those categories determines just how much a club is willing to sacrifice at bat. Today, we’ll look at the building blocks of their offensive games, to see what direction they might be headed in the near term. Let’s begin with a truncated AL field of qualifiers:

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History is amazing in that it matters tremendously and it matters not at all. This is an article about the Cubs so you know that history is a thing for them. On one hand they are the Cubs, baseball’s current definition of mediocrity and failure. Since 1946, the Cubs have no World Series appearances and in fact they’ve only finished in first place five times in that span. That’s five times in 70 years. And that’s only first place in their division. They are historical ineptitude. That’s the backdrop to the 2016 season. It’s also why 2016 could be so important, because, according to our projections, the Cubs have a mean expected win total of 96 games.

Only one other team in baseball is projected to win even 90 games (the Dodgers, at 93 wins). The Cubs are projected by 11 games better than the Cardinals and 12 games better the Pirates, their nearest division rivals. Should these projections pan out, the Cubs would be the best team in baseball by a good amount and the favorite to get to and win the World Series. To sum up, we think Cubs will be very very good and, to bring it back to history, that’s quite weird.

Perhaps the best team of my childhood is the 1984 Detroit Tigers. The Tigers won 104 games during the regular season, then went 7-1 in the playoffs en route to winning the World Series. According to Baseball Reference, the Tigers also lost 58 times that season, but I don’t remember them losing even once so I assume that’s a misprint. The Tigers had the best record in baseball in 1984 season and won the World Series, but that’s not why they are interesting. Every season a team has the best record in baseball and every season a team wins the World Series. Neither is unique. What is unique and interesting though is what the Tigers did at the beginning of the 1984 season. They began the season by going 35-5 in their first 40 games. Their start was so good that second place Toronto went 27-14 during the same span and found themselves 8.5 games back before May had ended. The start wasn’t just good though. It was the best start to any season by any team ever (as long as ever means since 1885).

No team in the last 130 seasons has been better through 40 games than the 1984 Tigers. That’s something. But the Cubs are supposed to be really good. And truthfully, gun to my head, I wouldn’t be shocked if they won more than 96. Projections are often and wisely conservative. There are often outliers. The Cubs have the look of one, at least from where I sit now.

If you haven’t guessed the focus of this article yet, I’m sorry. I probably should have mentioned it earlier but until someone invents a backspace button we’ll all just have to live with overly long opening paragraphs. The question I’m curious about is are the Cubs as good as the Tigers? More specifically, can the Cubs equal or even beat Detroit’s three-decades-plus old record?

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