Talking to Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen last year, he mentioned something about the strategy of his brand of slider that has stuck with me. We normally think of sliders as hard curveballs, maybe. Loopy but hard pitches. Try figuring out if Craig Kimbrel throws a hard curve or a slider, and you’re down that normal path.

But Warthen said something a little different about the slider: “We don’t want to make it break, we want to think about getting our fingers to the front of the ball and spinning the baseball. Then you take another breaking ball and you separate the speeds, and it doesn’t have to be a great breaking ball, it just has to be a different speed.”

So, in effect, Warthen was talking about changing speeds with the slider. Normally that’s something you talk about with the changeup, which is obvious because of the way the pitch is named. But now we can talk about it with respect to the slider.

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After Jerry Dipoto was hired as the general manager of the Mariners late in the 2015 season, his early tenure with club became one of the most anticipated programs of the fall season. How would he remake one of the most disappointing teams in the major leagues? Would he tear it down, or would he attempt to reload on the fly and stay relevant in 2016? One thing is for certain: it didn’t take very long to find out.

The champagne was barely dry in the road locker room in Citi Field when Dipoto began his handiwork. Much like an accident scene on the highway, the Mariners’ 2015 season and roster was briefly cordoned off, the gruesome but necessary cleanup work performed, and the road re-opened as good as new. Now that the first 13-week installment of “The Jerry Dipoto Show” is in the books, let’s look back at the highs and lows, and try to make sense of what it all means for the near- to intermediate-term future of the Seattle Mariners.

Episode 1 – The Pilot
Traded SS Brad Miller, 1B Logan Morrison and RHP Danny Farquhar to Rays for RHP Nate Karns, OF Boog Powell, LHP C.J. Riefenhauser.

Dipoto hit the ground running, just a few days after the end of the World Series, with one of the two largest and perhaps most controversial deals of his first offseason. Outfield and starting depth were two prime Mariner concerns for 2016, and middle infield one of their few areas of depth. Exit Miller, who was supplanted late last season by Ketel Marte at shortstop, only to struggle in a multi-positional role afterward.

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The San Francisco Giants have made a decent amount of noise this offseason, signing two of the five biggest starting-pitching contracts in free agency this year. Bringing in Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija certainly solidifies a rotation that needed help. Last season, Madison Bumgarner, Chris Heston, and Jake Peavy made just over half (82) of the Giants’ starts and were worth about eight wins above replacement, most of that from Bumgarner. The other 80 starts came primarily from Ryan Vogelsong, Tim Hudson, Matt Cain, and Tim Lincecum, and that group was below replacement level. Bolstering the rotation makes a lot of sense for the Giants, but the team now appears unlikely to pursue a major signing for the outfield, leaving it as the team’s primary weakness.

Having just one weakness instead of two is a positive development for the Giants, but perhaps the brightest spot for the club heading into next season is not their newfound rotation depth, but the return of an emergent infield after some breakout seasons last year from Brandon Crawford, Matt Duffy, and Joe Panik. Add in Brandon Belt, and that quartet in the field more than tripled their production, going from 5.7 WAR in 2014 to 18.1 WAR this past season. The lack of pitching depth and the issues in the outfield kept the Giants out of the playoffs, along with an unusually high bar for entry — if they had won 84 games in 2014, they still would have qualified for the postseason — but their infield was amazing and should be again next year.

The graph below shows the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections for every infield in Major League Baseball (catchers included). As we might expect, the Giants rate very highly.

The Chicago Cubs, with Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, and newly signed Ben Zobrist, look to be the class of MLB when it comes to the infield, but the Giants are not that far behind. There is a decent gap between the Giants and the Josh Donaldson-led Blue Jays. Unfortunately, the outfield is not quite as promising.

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On Monday, the San Francisco Giants reportedly agreed to terms with free agent starter Johnny Cueto on a six-year contract that will guarantee him $130 million, a pretty nice haul for a pitcher who struggled significantly in the second half of the year. And when you factor in that Cueto also obtained an opt-out after the second year, which could allow him to re-enter the market after the 2017 season and land a significant raise if he pitches well over his next 400 innings, this deal offers a lot of reasons for Cueto and his representatives to be happy with how the market has developed.

However, it’s interesting to see Cueto sign with the Giants for $130 million, when just a few weeks prior, his agent had publicly stated that a reported six year, $120 million offer from the Diamondbacks was a “low offer for the market”. In fact, his agent made it sound like they were going to be aiming quite a bit higher.

“It was a low offer for the market,” Dixon said. “We didn’t have to think hard to reject that offer. Arizona wanted to do something fast, but we didn’t want to take something below market value for a No. 1 starter, and with the recent events, I think that time gave us the reason.”

Agents are known for public comments that may not be reflective of reality, since their job is to get as much money for their clients as possible, not be objective sources of information. But in light of Dixon’s comments, it’s worth noting that Cueto actually took a smaller guaranteed income by accepting the Giants’ offer than he would have received if he had taken the Diamondbacks’ offer, due to the very different tax climates in California and Arizona.

For high-earners like Cueto, California has the highest marginal tax rate of any state in the country, coming in at 13.3% of all income over $1 million. Meanwhile, Arizona has one of the lowest tax rates in the country, with their highest marginal rate topping out at 4.5%. Of course, the tax code is complex, and it’s never just as simple as looking at the top marginal rate to figure out equivalent offers between teams in different states.

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It’s my belief that, right now, the Cubs are the best team in baseball. Don’t worry, you’ll have a chance to express your own belief at the end. I know that we’ve been a little heavy on Cubs posts. It’s not entirely our fault — they’ve been active. I also know it’s not super important who looks like the best team in baseball in the middle of December. There’s offseason left, and there’s spring training to go, and countless things could change. It also happens to be my belief the Cubs will remain the best team in baseball as we reach Opening Day, but this is about things as they are. Right now, literally as you read this, provided you read this somewhere close to the publishing date.

I’m going to lay out why I think the Cubs are the best. I’m also going to try to lay out why they might not be, despite all the stuff in the first part. It’s not about being contradictory — it’s about trying to cover everything. At the bottom of the post, you’ll respond to a very simple question. We’ll see which argument you find most convincing.

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There’s a pitcher you might not have ever heard of. Or maybe you have heard of him, but you haven’t thought about him much. He did spend a chunk of last year in the major leagues, and now, let me explain him to you, using a series of facts.

The pitcher threw his fastball about as hard as Andrew Miller, and he also threw strikes about as often as Andrew Miller. He worked in the zone about as much as David Price, yet hitters didn’t like to swing at those pitches. He walked batters around the same rate as Corey Kluber, but he struck batters out around the same rate as Jake McGee, because he had a lower contact rate than Jose Fernandez, and a comparable swinging-strike rate to Noah Syndergaard. That’s how you wind up with a K-BB% like Dellin Betances, an ERA- like Zack Greinke, an FIP- better than Aroldis Chapman, and an xFIP- like Kenley Jansen. Last year, 476 pitchers threw at least 25 innings. The mystery pitcher performed as one of the very, very best.

He yielded the 18th-lowest batting average. Also the ninth-lowest OBP, and the 44th-lowest slugging percentage, despite working in the American League and in a hitter-friendly environment. So he gave up the 17th-lowest OPS. All these numbers are based on a pretty small sample. Yet all these numbers are impossibly encouraging.

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There’s not a single thing the Cubs need to do. They’re outstanding right now, and at a time when people can still buy Christmas presents without expedited shipping, the roster could be considered complete. Probably, the Cubs will come out of this offseason as NL Central favorites. From there, they could remain favorites, but I don’t want to spook any fans who might’ve become increasingly superstitious.

The Cubs could be considered complete, and in right field, they line up to have a 24-year-old Jorge Soler, a player they control through 2020, a player who, in 2014, was one of the three best hitters in the minor leagues, alongside two current teammates. Soler is dynamic and exciting and the sort of player any team would love to have in the system. Yet these rumors persist, trying to send Soler elsewhere. There’s enough smoke you sense there might be a flame: Soler might be on the move any day now. The Cubs would probably prefer a bit more certainty. Which means there are the potential makings here of a major trade.

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Two weeks ago, the San Francisco Giants were in the midst of a push to try and steal Zack Greinke away from the Los Angeles Dodgers. With a strong offensive core in place, upgrading the pitching staff was the obvious move for the team this winter, and pairing Greinke with Madison Bumgarner at the top of the rotation would have given the team one of the best pitching duos in baseball. However, their dreams of landing Greinke were dashed when the Arizona Diamondbacks came in and blew away the competition, offering a six year and guaranteeing $206 million in salary; neither the Dodgers nor the Giants were reportedly anywhere close to that number.

Over the last couple of weeks, their backup plan has come into focus; sign two good pitchers instead of one great one. First, it was Jeff Samardzija, and then yesterday, it was Johnny Cueto, with the team agreeing to guarantee $220 million to the pair over the next six years; significantly more than they were willing to spend on Greinke by himself, in fact. And this brings up an interesting question: since the Giants apparently had $220 million to spend on starting pitching this winter, would they have been better off just outbidding the Diamondbacks to land the ace they wanted, or is spreading the wealth around a better plan?

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Recently here, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Baltimore Orioles. In this companion piece, I look at that same Baltimore farm system through the lens of my KATOH projection system. 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 age-28 seasons, those who receive a projection of at between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their age-28 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.

1. Chance Sisco, C (Profile)
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 9.7 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 7.1 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 45 FV

Cisco demolished High-A pitching last year to the tune of .308/.387/.422. He ran nearly-equal strikeout and walk rates, and complimented them with modest power and a high BABIP. That performance earned him a late-season cameo at Double-A, where he also excelled in many of the same categories. A season like that would be impressive from any 20-year-old, but Cisco’s is especially encouraging since he’s a catcher. Few catchers hit as well as Cisco has, making him one of the most compelling prospects in the game.

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When Yoenis Cespedes suits up in April, he will very likely be playing for his fifth team in just over a 20-month period. His last 211 games have been split between four clubs. Some might try to use this as a reason to undervalue Cespedes in free agency and argue that three, perhaps four, teams have given up on him of late. Those arguments tend to miss the point, as the Oakland Athletics are prone to trade anyone, the Boston Red Sox desperately needed pitching last season while also possessing a surplus of outfielders, the Detroit Tigers fell out of the playoff race, and the New York Mets are merely prone to some unusual spending limits. The market for outfielders has been slow to develop, but with Jason Heyward off the board, we should begin to see Cespedes’ market gain some clarity.

Cespedes has certainly had an unusual couple of years, although his career as a whole has hardly been typical. Most recently with the Mets, Cespedes came to the United States from Cuba and signed a four year, $36 million contract with Oakland that would make him a free agent at the end of those four seasons. Cespedes hit well almost immediately, putting up a .292/.356/.505 line along with a 136 wRC+ in his first 540 plate appearances.

In the following two seasons, Cespedes could not reproduce the 8% walk rate of his initial season, his BABIP dropped a bit, and he settled in for two seasons of slightly above-average offense with above-average defense in left field, totaling 5.7 WAR over two seasons — with the A’s for a year and a half and then half a season with the Red Sox. Last season was Cespedes’ best season since 2012: he hit .291/.328/.542 for a 135 wRC+ that included 17 home runs in just 51 games following his trade from the Tigers to the Mets. That production led, in no small way, to the Mets’ appearance in the postseason.

In trying to determine what Cespedes will look like over the next five to seven years of a new contract, finding comps using career numbers is unlikely to yield great results. Based on how Cespedes performed at age 26 with the A’s, he was clearly ready for major league baseball. Due to the constraints of Cuba’s emigration laws, however, he was denied the opportunity to play against the game’s best players. As a result, his career numbers are unique. Focusing specifically on the most recent three years, however, we can find some interesting comparable players.

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