Just when you thought A.J. Preller was done making moves, he goes and swings yet another blockbuster trade. Once more, the Padres traded away minor league talent in an effort to help the Padres win in 2015. In exchange for Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton, the Padres sent big league outfielders Cameron Maybin and Carlos Quentin to the Braves, along with prospects Matt Wisler and Jordan Paroubeck.

Of the pieces headed to Atlanta, Wisler is easily the centerpiece. Kiley McDaniel ranked the 22-year-old righty 41st in his top 200 list last winter, and second in the Padres system, right behind Hunter Renfroe. Kiley gave Wisler a FV of 55, which equates to a #3/#4 starter or a closer.

Wisler’s been one of the game’s more intriguing pitching prospects for a couple of years now. A 7th round pick out of high school in 2011, Wisler wasted no time putting his name on the prospect map. In his first full season as a pro, he posted a 2.36 FIP as a 19-year-old in full-season ball. Wisler followed up his excellent debut with an equally strong 2013 campaign. Split between High-A and Double-A (but mostly Double-A), he struck out an impressive 24% of opposing batters, while walking just 7%.

Read the rest of this entry »

And now the final division preview, just in time for Opening Day. If you missed them, here are the first five:

NL West
AL West
NL Central
AL Central
NL East

Now, wrapping things up with the AL East.

The Projected Standings

The only division in baseball where all five teams have a legitimate shot at winning; the projected spread between first and last place in the AL East is smaller than the gap between first and second place in the NL East. The forecasts have a favorite, but this division is wide open, and nearly any order of finish could be reasonable. On to the teams themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before you understand Jeff Locke, you should know that you probably won’t understand Jeff Locke. This will be a post without a real conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be interesting!

A couple things we know to be true about Locke: Over the last two seasons, he’s made 51 starts, and has logged 292 innings. In that time, he’s posted a very respectable ERA of 3.69, which puts him in the same company as guys like Jeff Samardzija and Dallas Keuchel. Over that same time period, however, he’s also posted a less-respectable FIP of 4.18, which puts him in the same company as guys like Travis Wood and Edinson Volquez. Put another way: Locke has outperformed his peripherals like few others in baseball.

Now, some things we know to be true about the Pirates: They have, arguably, baseball’s most distinct organizational pitching philosophies, which include both pitching inside and pitching low at extreme rates. As a team, they’ve outperformed their peripherals like few others in baseball, and that’s likely at least partially a result of their organizational pitching philosophies. The last thing we know is that they recently chose Locke over Vance Worley for the final spot in the rotation, which came as a bit of a surprise considering Worley’s dominant comeback last season.

Worley still made the rotation, on account of Charlie Morton’s injury, but that’s beside the point. The Pirates chose Locke over Worley, and, to an extent, that’s telling. For these facts alone, we have reason to be interested in Locke. It’s not often one finds oneself saying that, so the time is now. Let’s investigate Jeff Locke.
Read the rest of this entry »

Opening Day is here! Can you feel it? Like we always do about this time, it’s time for some predictions. We already laid out our predictions for postseason teams and awards, but I thought we could take it a little further this year. We have lots of unique voices here in the FanGraphs family of blogs, and so we thought we’d ask them a few more questions and see what they had to say.

There were nine questions in all, symbolic of baseball’s usual nine innings of play. We asked some questions that called for some explanation, and some that didn’t. We’ll start with the ones that didn’t. In total, 31 people took the survey, though not everyone answered all of the questions, and some people provided more than one answer for some questions, because not everyone can be decisive and/or has multiple hot takes to give.

Read the rest of this entry »

Right at the deadline, A.J. Preller managed to squeeze in one more major transaction before the dawn of the regular season. We can say that, now, the Padres’ 2014-2015 offseason is complete; we can say that, now, the Padres’ 2014-2015 offseason also includes Craig Kimbrel. He will, presumably, be available to the team for Opening Day. It’s a little different from the usual roster additions made around this time.

The whole of the deal:

Padres get

• Craig Kimbrel
• Melvin Upton

Braves get

• Carlos Quentin
• Cameron Maybin
• Matt Wisler
• Jordan Paroubeck
• Draft pick No. 41

For the Braves, it’s a totally understandable and justifiable move — not only do they get to shed the rest of the Upton contract, but Kimbrel meant relatively little to them as an elite-level closer on a basement-level team. The cost savings here are significant, and they can shortly be put toward assets that might be of greater help in the window in which the Braves plan to be good again. Also, Wisler! Wisler could be of help in said window.

For the Padres, it fits with a lot of the rest of the offseason. Kimbrel isn’t exactly a one-year player, since he could be under contract through 2018, but the team’s paying a high price again, borrowing from future talent and future flexibility to make the 2015 roster stronger. That goal has been met — without question, the Padres have taken another step forward. Now we all just get to find out whether this collection of talent can come together and push for something beyond a 162nd game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Randal Grichuk demurred slightly when I asked if he identifies as a power hitter. The St. Louis outfielder hesitated, then said “I’m a guy who is gap-to-gap and can also drive the ball out of the yard.”

In the opinion of a teammate and his hitting coach, Grichuk was guilty of underselling his greatest strength. Infielder Mark Reynolds told me Grichuk “hits balls 500 feet, and at the end of the day, that’s who he is.” John Mabry said, “He’s a power hitter. There are plenty of things he does right, and that’s one of them.”

The 23-year-old former first-round pick did enough right in the Grapefruit circuit to earn a spot on the Cardinals’ opening day roster. His strong spring followed a season in which he catapulted 25 home runs in Triple-A and five more in the big-leagues. Two of the latter came in post-season action.

The Cardinals knew they were getting a potential impact bat when they acquired Grichuk (and Peter Bourjos) from the Angels in exchange for David Freese and Fernando Salas in November 2013. They also knew the player drafted directly in front of Mike Trout was a work-in-progress. Despite being on the doorstep of a breakout, he remains in search of an identity. Read the rest of this entry »

The first-level explanation for Billy Burns‘ impressive numbers last month? Spring-training statistics are irrelevant at best, misleading at worst. You know this part. However much there might be a little signal in the stats, it tends to be overwhelmed by noise, so it’s best to just ignore the numbers entirely. But for weeks we’re given numbers, and they’re the only numbers we have. We can’t help but look at them. Which brings us to the second-level explanation: spring-training statistics provide leads. Excuses to talk about certain players, based on something particularly positive or negative. So how about that Billy Burns?

Last I checked, Burns was tied for the big-league lead in spring-training hits. He was seventh in batting average and tenth in OBP, and while some players like Pete Kozma have also hit the ball well, other, actually good players have hit the ball well, too, so there’s that. The point is that Burns has drawn himself attention. He’s already made his big-league debut, he’s not yet old, and now Coco Crisp will be sidelined for some time. For Billy Burns, opportunity knocks. He’s an unusual player, so what can we make of him?

If there’s one thing you know about Burns — and many of you might not know anything — it’s that he’s fast. Remember Terrance Gore? Billy Burns has Terrance Gore footspeed. In scouting-speak, Billy Burns has 80 footspeed, meaning he’s as fast as anyone else. Like Gore, Burns has been used as a pinch-runner. We all got obsessed with the running game in last year’s playoffs, but we usually dismiss it somewhat casually, so, it’s worth wondering whether Burns might become something more than a novelty.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

The Braves have acquired Trevor Cahill and cash for their Josh Elander, a 24-year-old former catcher that was playing outfield in High-A Lynchburg for the second time last year. So mostly this transaction is about the Braves getting a cheap starter on the cheap. The quality of that incoming pitcher, and the fit on a rebuilding team — these are the things that are most debatable about the deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every team starts the season with five starters, but the chances a team makes it through the season unscathed is minimal. From research performed by Jeff Zimmerman, starting pitchers who made 20 starts and pitched 120 innings the previous season have roughly a 40% chance of hitting the disabled list during the season. Eno Sarris added to Zimmerman’s work before the start of last season and found that teams have been averaging around 10 starters per season since 2011. That average did not change last season as teams averaged 9.6 starters per team. Even if the bar is raised to a minimum of five starts, teams averaged 7.4 starters per team in 2014, consistent with five-year average of 7.5 starters per team per season.

Attempting to measure pitching depth can be difficult. Jeff Sullivan took a look at overall depth last month, showing how many players were projected for at least one win according projections. Focusing on rotation depth the same way is a good way to look strictly at depth, but with the season upon us, we can see the potential impact of that depth by examining the dropoff from starters to their replacements. FanGraphs completed the Positional Power Rankings with the pitching split into two posts, one for the bottom half, and one for the top half. Without rehashing the entirety of both posts, here is the graph from those posts which should provide a base of expectations for a team’s rotation.
Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season’s soft opening on Sunday night and grand opening on Monday, we are compelled to to offer you our staff predictions. We attempted to pull in as many of our authors as possible from across our family of blogs, because the only thing better than predictions is predictions by a ton of people!

We’re usually not so good at this sort of thing. Or, more to the point, we’re not any better at it than anyone else. But we enjoy doing it, because it marks the start of a new season. Last season was no different. Boston and Oakland were pegged as division winners, and Tampa Bay was pegged as a Wild Card. Prince Fielder and Jason Kipnis got MVP nods, and Xander Bogaerts got plenty of Rookie of the Year love. Only Boston as a division winner really sticks out as hilarious, but all of these missed the mark by a great deal. Nevertheless, we press on! We also conducted a more in-depth staff survey, and we’ll dig into that on Monday morning.

American League Postseason Teams
East: Boston (20), Baltimore (7), Toronto (7), New York (2), Tampa Bay (2)
Central: Cleveland (24), Detroit (14), Chicago (0), Kansas City (0), Minnesota (0)
West: Los Angeles (22), Seattle (14), Oakland (2), Houston (0), Texas (0)
Wild Card: Seattle (12), Toronto (10), Detroit (9), Chicago (6), Oakland (4), New York (1), Tampa Bay (1), Boston (14), Cleveland (11), Los Angeles (7)

The AL East is wide open enough that every team got a vote, something that didn’t happen in either the 2013 or 2014 editions of our staff predictions, in any division. Outside of that, the divisions are fairly unininteresting aside from the two votes for Oakland. Note that the three consensus division winners are listed at the end of the Wild Card votes, since it would be confusing if they won multiple things.

Even though you’re good enough at math to add up totals from division and wild card winners, let’s total up and check out who the overall postseason favorites are.

Read the rest of this entry »