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Power is still king when it comes to getting paid. On the pitching side, power pitchers anchoring staffs are paid well. On the hitting side, power hitters are among the highest paid players in Major League Baseball. The defensive positions like catcher, shortstop, and center field are highly spoken of, but nobody gets paid like first basemen and corner outfielders. The defensive spectrum as well as the WAR positional adjustment tends to go, from most difficult to least difficult, C-SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B. However, when it comes to getting paid, the opposite is true.

Using the FanGraphs Depth Charts, and the salary information from Cots at Baseball Prospectus, I took a look at every projected starter in the majors and their salaries. I added designated hitters in the American League as well as closers and the highest paid pitcher for all teams. While the highest paid pitcher is not necessarily a team’s best pitcher, it is an easy proxy in this case. Where a team received money from another to help pay for a player’s salary, only the salary paid by the team employing the player was counted. The money paid by the other team is not included in their own figures.

Top starting pitchers lead the way by a decent margin followed by first basemen.

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Last year, Cincinnati’s two middle of the order bats both had back leg injuries that robbed them of much of their power. Because of the complicated nature of swing mechanics, maybe it’s not surprising that both sluggers were affected differently by left leg injuries. But they did suffer.

“I saw a lot of ground balls to the right side of the infield results last year and I had a difficult time hitting within my typical profile — power to left field,” said Joey Votto this week in Arizona. “The pain was a limiting factor.”

When pushed to describe exactly how his left quad strain affected his swing, Votto spoke of a lean in his stance. “Being able to lean heavily on my back leg and be able to rotate the knee through and also lean at an angle” was important to the slugger — “I think that I buy myself a little extra space on the back side of the strike zone by being able to lean.”

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Read an article about Yasmany Tomas from before he signed with the Diamondbacks, and most of them will say something along the same lines about his profile. The power was thought to be real, maybe a 70 on the 20-80 scale; the contact skills might be uncertain; and while the arm could potentially be a plus, it was far from certain where he he’d fit on the defensive map.

That’s evident, really, in just how those reports described his position. In September, Kiley McDaniel listed him as a left fielder. In October, Baseball America’s Ben Badler said that he “had the defensive attributes to fit in either corner spot.” After Tomas signed with Arizona, Keith Law also talked about him as a corner outfielder. Dave Cameron even noted that “some teams felt that he profiled more as a DH.” Other than a few tossed-off occasional mentions that he’d played some small amount of first and third earlier in his youth — 30 games at third in 2008, primarily —  just about no one expected him to be an infielder.

Except for the Diamondbacks, that is. Due in part to their own evaluations of him, in part due to a crowded outfield, and in part due to a third base situation unstable enough that longtime second baseman Aaron Hill played his first games since 2005 at the position last year, Arizona almost immediately announced that they’d like Tomas to play third base.

It’s March 11, so we’re not going to pretend that we’ve seen enough of Tomas to make a determination as to whether he can handle the position or not. But we haven’t seen nothing, either, and considering where he came from, it’s the first time most of us are able to see real actual game video of him. Considering how the Diamondbacks are set up, where he ends up is going to have a ripple effect on the rest of the lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

This is something I’ve already shown you before. I mean, this, specifically, is not, but this is a slightly sharper version of the same graph. Team wins vs. projected team wins from the past decade:

Right, so: the Angels exceeded their preseason projections by the most. The Cubs undershot their preseason projections by the most. By the projections, over the decade, the Angels should’ve won 48 more games than the Cubs. What actually happened was that the Angels won 150 more games than the Cubs. That’s pretty wild. We can also take this a little deeper.

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This time, at least, it’s a little different. Yu Darvish sustained an injury while pitching. Cliff Lee sustained an injury while pitching. Gavin Floyd, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, so many of the others — they sustained their injuries while pitching. Marcus Stroman sustained an injury while fielding. His throwing arm is completely fine. His throwing arm, also, is completely useless to him at the moment, because you can’t pitch through a torn ACL. The freak injury will knock Stroman out for the duration of 2015, and though he should be good to go after that, the calendar says “2015” right now, and we’ll be without something we all thought we’d have. Stroman, like the others, has been taken from his team, and he’s been taken from the game.

There’s also that other twist. Darvish is a devastating loss, but then, the Rangers didn’t seem particularly poised to challenge for the playoffs. Lee would be another devastating loss, but even with him healthy, the Phillies looked like a mess. Floyd was just re-injured, and the Indians could win the AL Central, but the Indians also have a ton of pitching depth, and they knew Floyd was a risk. The Blue Jays had dreams of winning the World Series. Stroman figured to be the No. 1, and the team didn’t look deep with him. This is a massive blow, and it’s a massive blow to a team right on that win-curve position where a massive blow can be the most massive. People are mourning this. It’s not that much of an overreaction.

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The Cincinnati Reds face an uphill battle in 2015. The St. Louis Cardinals are heavy favorites. The Pittsburgh Pirates brought back most of its playoff team and could see improvement with a young roster. The Cubs have made improvements, and even the Brewers bring back many players who put them in first place for most of 2014. The odds of the Reds winning the division are not very good. The FanGraphs Playoff Odds are up, and the Reds have just a 3.0% chance of winning the division. That means out of 10,000 simulations, the Reds won the division around 300 times. Focusing in on the 3% chance side, it is possible to create scenarios where the Reds can win the division.

FanGraphs Playoff Odds are based on ZiPS, Steamer, and the Depth Chart Projections. Those projections are not very kind to the Reds. The projections currently have the Reds at 75 wins, last in the National League Central. For a frame of reference, here are the top five teams per WAR according to those projections.

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Yu Darvish is probably going to require Tommy John surgery. As Jeff noted yesterday, this is a blow to the Rangers already slim playoff odds, and now our projections have them as perhaps the worst team in the American League. After last year’s debacle, the team was hoping for a big bounce back, but that seems particularly unlikely now, and it’s a legitimate question whether this move should cause the front office to start really playing for the future.

So, yeah, this is bad news. The 2015 Rangers just became potentially unwatchable, especially if they perform poorly, eventually trading away Yovani Gallardo and maybe even Derek Holland; the remnants of the rotation would be the worst in baseball. But because of a series of triggers in Darvish’s contract, it’s actually possible to see this as not entirely awful news, with even some long-term upside for the Rangers

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Hisashi Iwakuma is perhaps the most underrated pitcher in baseball. Since his debut in 2012, he has posted an xFIP of 3.24: good for 12th-best among qualified starters, and bracketed on either side by Max Scherzer and Madison Bumgarner. The former of that duo just signed a well-publicized seven-year, $210 million dollar contract; Iwakuma is on the last year of a three-year deal worth a total of $20 million.

Iwakuma won’t make Scherzer money in free agency next year, mostly due to the fact that he is four years older than the new Nationals right-hander, but it gives us an idea of the company he’s kept for the past three years. Always the groomsman, never the groom, Iwakuma lives with his near elite-level production in the shadow of perennial Cy Young candidate Felix Hernandez: while he finished third in Cy Young voting in 2013, he is usually forgotten when the final lists of best pitchers are made — left instead to plan the year-end parties for the King.

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The best thing about having ZiPS on the site is having ZiPS on the site. The second-best thing about having ZiPS on the site is it gives people like me an opportunity to recycle blog posts like this. Already, I repeated a polling project, asking you guys how you feel about the various team projections. Now I’m repeating a post from January, where I examined team depth based just on Steamer projections. Now we’ve got the full blended Steamer and ZiPS projections, and we have the newest depth charts possible, so it only makes sense to do this again. I can’t afford to not do this again.

Do I need to explain to you the importance of depth? Probably not, and probably especially not since I’ve already written this. But, I mean, you have your starters, and then you have your other guys. Ideally, the starters all work out, and nothing goes wrong. Ideally, it’s nothing but eight or nine position players and one five-man rotation, and you sweep your way to the World Series. But the thing that usually happens is misfortune. It happens in different amounts to different organizations, but you can expect every team to need reinforcements. Right now, it might not be clear what will go wrong, but something or some things will go wrong, and the strong teams are prepared for adversity.

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