A move that wasn’t a Padres move happened Friday.

Yankees send to Marlins:

• Martin Prado
• David Phelps
• $6 million

Marlins send to Yankees:

• Nathan Eovaldi
• Garrett Jones
• Domingo German

German is a prospect. Eovaldi has three more years of team control, while Jones has one. Prado has two more years of team control, and Phelps has four, although he’s a Super-Two asset. The way it’s being phrased, the Yankees are chipping in $3 million in each of the next two years to partially pay down Prado’s salary. But if you’d like, you can mentally cancel out the $6 million and German. Now, German is actually an intriguing, live-armed prospect, so his value is probably a little north of $6 million, but they’re close enough to being even. This is mostly about the major-league players, and the one who grabs your attention is Eovaldi. That’s the guy with the big, big upside.

From their end, you can see what the Marlins are doing. They didn’t need Eovaldi, and Phelps is useful enough, and Prado can play all over the place. But from the other side, the Yankees might well be ecstatic. Theirs was a roster in need of help in the rotation. It’s not often you can land an arm like Eovaldi’s without paying through the nose. It was this very player who, a few years ago, got traded for Hanley Ramirez. Eovaldi’s not even 25 years old, and he can run it up to the triple digits.

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For the first time since perhaps lovable Tony Gwynn Sr. was swattin’ singles around the yard, the San Diego Padres have commanded the full attentions of the baseball world. The architect of these numerous wheelings and dealings, first-year General Manager A.J. Preller, would be hard for even dedicated fans to pick out of a crowd simply because he has been on the job for slightly over four months (and one of those months was the thrilling playoffs, when nobody was too concerned about the Padres).

Today, let’s get to know Preller a little bit via the stray scraps of video interviews that have been released since his hire. Personally, count me a fan of his simultaneously methodical and relaxed demeanor. More importantly, let’s comb through this unofficial archive in search for any clues that the Padres would dramatically reshape their team this offseason. Presented in chronological order:

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There are plenty of ways to poo-poo Nathan Eovaldi. Dude has thrown 300 changeups and they’ve been bad, for the most part. Dude has gas, but his four-seamer gets only gets average whiffs. Dude’s thrown almost 500 innings and been league average. Dude’s done this in pitcher-friendly parks and leagues and now is headed to Yankee Stadium. Dude.

There’s at least one way to get excited about Eovaldi. By arsenal shape, speed, and peripheral results, he’s pretty much Garrett Richards.

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What if I told you there’s a shortstop in his 20s, available for presumably less than Ervin Santana money, coming off a year in which he hit 40 dingers with a four-digit OPS? It’s true — all of those things are true. The shortstop’s name is Jung-Ho Kang, and he really did have such a season. It just didn’t take place where you were looking.

It did take place where several different major-league organizations were looking. Maybe you can try to think of Kang as the Troy Tulowitzki of Korea, and while that’s a stretch, it’s pretty damn promising, at least until the “of Korea” part. There’s no debating Kang’s record; the 27-year-old just batted .356 while slugging .739 for Nexen in the KBO. He owns a career OPS of .886. In 2012, he finished second in the league in OPS. In 2013, he finished ninth. In 2014, he finished first, by dozens of points. The real concern is simple: Kang is trying to become the first KBO position player to reach the major leagues. So such a transition would be unprecedented.

It’s true, we have Hyun-Jin Ryu, but then Ryu was (and is) a starting pitcher. As far as Korean hitters are concerned, Shin-Soo Choo and Hee Seop Choi have each had success, but then they were raised within big-league organizations, so they didn’t come over from the KBO as vets. That’s why so many people wonder about Kang’s potential. This is why he could be a bargain, and this is why he could be a bust.

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This week, the Padres have acquired Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, and Wil Myers. There is a chance that they keep all three and play them side by side as their 2015 outfield. It would be an experiment in testing the limits of the offense/defense balance, essentially betting that fielding matters very little in relation to hitting the ball over the wall yourself. If the Padres keep all three in the outfield, they’re likely to have one of the best offensive and worst defensive outfields in baseball next year.

They wouldn’t the first team to try this, however. For fun, I decided to look back through the years for which we have UZR data and find teams that have punted outfield defense to maximize their own HR totals. To do this, I took all the team seasons since 2002, and looked for teams who ranked at the top and bottom of the league in home runs and UZR in the same season. Here are three examples of teams that have tried this same strategy in the last 13 years.

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If I had to sum up the offseason for the Oakland Athletics and San Diego Padres, it would be thusly:

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I think it’s safe to say we lean pretty heavily on projections here. Now, it’s important to understand we’re all always kind of making projections. The Padres acquired Wil Myers on the basis of a positive internal player projection. When we think about our favorite teams adding, say, Dee Gordon or Nelson Cruz, we’re considering what we expect them to do in the season or seasons ahead. Our enthusiasm for the coming year is based in part on a mental projection of the quality of our team. We all project, and the only real difference is that, around here, we lean on the projections by Steamer and ZiPS, instead of doing things in our heads. FanGraphs makes things really easy. What do the projections think about next year? There’s a tab you can click on. It’s a starting point.

But while projections are handy, it’s only natural to wonder: do they matter? How important are they, actually, with regard to predicting the short-term future? Tons of people have tested individual player projections, but here we also include team projections, based on manually-updated depth charts, and if there’s error in each given player projection, how much error might we see with team projections as a whole? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. It can’t even be answered conclusively, yet. There’s not enough data in the FanGraphs post archive. But I can give you at least a little bit.

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The Baltimore Orioles are good at many things. Their greatest skill is probably confounding expectations. The rest of the league zigs and then the O’s zag their way into the playoffs, twice in the last three seasons.

While the rest of their division — the rest of baseball, really — gears up for a run at the playoffs, the Orioles sat back. Their off-season to date can best be described as “somnambulant”, They lost Andrew Miller, Nick Markakis, and Nelson Cruz to free agency, declined some options and added, um, Wesley Wright? That’s it.

Considering the state of their disabled list at the end of the season, returning Matt Wieters and Manny Machado from injury (and Chris Davis from suspension) will go a long way to improving their club. But there’s another reason the Orioles haven’t rushed out to apply quick fixes to their club – the unlikely emergence of Steve Pearce.

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The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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Last month, not only did the Tampa Bay Rays cut Jose Molina, but, as Jeff detailed, no other Major League team was or has been interested in picking Molina up, even for the smallest of prices. As somebody who has always had their interests piqued by pitch-framing, this tiny morsel of a transaction nonetheless triggered a miniature existential crisis on the significance and value of pitch-framing. Have the estimates of framing value been, in fact, comically optimistic? Have savvier umpires begun to render this skill a moot point? Is there some other factor about the nature of the catcher position that we, on the outside, simply don’t know?

Some of those things may very well be true, maybe even all of them. But before we use the Rays dumping Molina as an example of the preacher turning pagan, let us consider yesterday’s big trade between the Rays, Nationals, and Padres. Somewhere amidst this flurry of new forwarding addresses, defensive-minded catcher Ryan Hanigan went from Tampa Bay to San Diego, while defensive-minded catcher Rene Rivera went from San Diego to Tampa Bay. The catcher swap was the minor part of the deal for the public, but perhaps the Rays don’t see it that way. In fact, if they still believe strongly in the value of catcher defense, perhaps the Rays didn’t even consider themselves as selling low on Wil Myers, given the potential value that Rivera might provide.

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