The main good thing about reaching the World Series is that it means you won your league. When you win your league, people like you a lot, and it’s a good feeling. Builds community. Another, bigger-picture good thing about reaching the World Series is that it brings in revenue, especially if you haven’t been real good for a while. New streams of money begin to flow, and preexisting streams of money flood their banks, as more people express interest in the product and other people express more interest in the product. Basically, if you get to the World Series, it’s a good thing for more than just the day or week of.

When the Royals came out of nowhere to come within a few runs of the championship, it stood to reason they’d reap an enormous benefit. An area love affair was re-kindled, as Kauffman Stadium became one of the loudest and most popular environments in the game. Estimates varied, but there was no question the World Series appearance would mean, for the team, some additional tens of millions of dollars. How much could that money mean, if re-invested in the roster? What would Dayton Moore be able to pull off, given greater financial flexibility?

The Royals re-signed Luke Hochevar for a couple of years, which seems like a good deal even given Hochevar’s operation. But lately the Royals have spent bigger money. They committed $17 million to Kendrys Morales. They committed $11 million to Alex Rios. And, most recently, they committed $20 million to Edinson Volquez. This is what the World Series has meant, in a way. It’s rather underwhelming.

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Turner, Joe Ross to #Nationals. Myers, Hanigan, Jose Castillo to #Padres. Souza, Ott, Rivera, Smith, Bauers to #Rays (Souza, Ott from Nats).

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 17, 2014

Generally speaking, in such cases as a prospect — or any player, really — possesses a combination of power and speed, said player is regarded with some interest by what is referred to broadly as the “scouting community.” While sabermetricians have (in the past, at least) cultivated a reasonable suspicion about such players — or, at least the level of enthusiasm exhibited on their behalfs — it’s also true that those players who’ve both (a) demonstrated power and speed have also generally (b) developed into above-average major leaguers.

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The days-rumored mega deal has happened and I’m here to break down all the prospects.  FanGraphs has you covered, with David Laurila on Trea Turner, Carson Cistulli on Steven Souza, Miles Wray on Rene Rivera, Jeff Sullivan on the Padres and Dave Cameron with wild speculation on what the trade might be, then  general thoughts on the actual trade.

San Diego gets RF Wil Myers, C Ryan Hanigan, LHP Jose Castillo, RHP Gerardo Reyes (from TB)
Tampa Bay gets RF Steven Souza, LHP Travis Ott (from WSH), C Rene Rivera, RHP Burch Smith, 1B Jake Bauers (from SD)
Washington gets SS Trea Turner and RHP Joe Ross (from SD)

I also posted my Rays prospect list earlier this week and was scheduled to have the Padres list up next week, so I already had research done on most of the prospects involved.  As for how this changes their rankings, I would slot Souza third behind C Justin O’Conner and I would slot Bauers 26th between RHP Orlando Romero and C David Rodriguez.  This trade would give the Rays’ list 33 ranked players, the most of any team I’ve ranked so far.  This further underlines the point I made in the intro of the list, about how the Rays’ organizational plan props up their system depth.

I think Souza has been underrated by most and Ross has been overrated by most, which is why the reaction is so universally that Washington is a winner in this deal and Tampa Bay is a loser.  I’d still prefer Washington’s end of the Souza swap, but Tampa Bay is forced to value players differently than other clubs: getting six years of immediate impact from an everyday type is the ideal player they’re chasing.  Prospects years away for contributing (Ross and Turner) or a player that was much more hype than substance in 2014 (Myers) that will be expensive a year sooner than Souza is the kind of assets the Rays value less than most teams.

The Rays saw an opportunity to cash in on Myers’ name recognition before his inconsistency/wrist injury potentially sink his value further, in exchange for a player they’re higher on than the industry, with some lower-end prospects included to account for the tools/hype gap between Myers and Souza.  It’s unusual move in a change-averse baseball culture and risky from a PR perspective, but it makes sense given Tampa Bay’s situation.  The Padres dealing lesser and farther-from-contributing pieces for a potential star and the Nationals dealing a blocked player for two potential contributors make more obvious sense on the face of this deal, so I don’t think I need to explain the motivations for them.

I’ve listed the prospects in the deal in order of preference, though the top two prospects have the same grade, so you could flip-flop them if you prefer the instant impact of Souza over the positional scarcity of Turner.

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Neither Matt Kemp nor Wil Myers have yet been officially traded. Yet it feels like those should happen any moment now, if not while I’m in the process of writing this post, and the end result will be that the Padres will have a pair of new corner outfielders. Kemp is older and Myers is younger, but both would be under team control for several years, and one of the ideas here is to generate some actual buzz about a Padres team that wants to win in 2015.

Subjectively, the Padres have long lacked meaningful buzz, even or especially locally. They’ve had nothing since Adrian Gonzalez was dealt away, and even Gonzalez was sort of a reluctant face of the franchise. Kemp is a celebrity, particularly in California. Myers, meanwhile, is a power bat with personality. People are talking about the Padres now, and everyone likes a team trying to win sooner. No one enjoys slogging through an extended period of irrelevance. But as much as the Padres are succeeding in building some hype, at the end of the day it still looks like there’s a lot missing.

You could say the Padres are kind of trying to be the National League’s White Sox. We know that, with the second wild card, teams are incentivized more than ever to try to be at least okay. With an active offseason, the White Sox have improved from also-ran to potential contender. People are excited! It’s exciting. The White Sox saw an opportunity to put pieces around Jose Abreu, Chris Sale, Jose Quintana, and Adam Eaton. San Diego? San Diego doesn’t have an Abreu. It doesn’t have a Sale. And the players coming in don’t appear to be superstars, name value be damned.

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Even before all this recent activity, it was pretty apparent the White Sox had the makings of a good core. In fact, the existence of the core is probably in large part what drove all this recent activity. There’s an opportunity to be seized, and the White Sox had plenty of financial flexibility to play with. Clearly, Jose Abreu is a star-level player. Clearly, Chris Sale is a star-level player. Clearly, Jose Quintana is a borderline star-level player. And then there’s Adam Eaton. Eaton, unquestionably, is a part of the core. But how valuable he is depends on where you’re looking.

Looking at Baseball-Reference, last year Eaton was baseball’s fourth-most valuable center fielder, with a WAR over 5. However, looking at FanGraphs, he wound up more middle-of-the-pack, with a WAR under 3. There are a few different reasons for the disagreement, but mostly this is about defense. Here at FanGraphs, we make use of UZR. Over at Baseball-Reference, they make use of DRS. Most of the time, the metrics get along, but it’s both interesting and frustrating when they don’t, and with regard to Adam Eaton, they most certainly do not get along.

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Nick Ennis was recently promoted to Director of Baseball Operations for the San Diego Padres. He signed on with the Padres as an intern in the baseball operations department out of Columbia Business School, and has also been an advance scout since he joined the team in 2010. He agreed to talk at the Winter Meetings in San Diego, where he had a hotel room despite living five minutes from the convention center. How else are you going to finish up work at two a.m. in the morning and be available for brunch?

Eno Sarris: One of the first interviews I ever did was at the winter meetings, with John Coppolella, now an Assistant General Manager in Atlanta. I asked him about defensive stats, and where they were, and if he ever looked at stats like UZR. He said, yeah, we do have some of that stuff in our database and we have our own opinions. When it comes to the stuff that you see on FanGraphs, how far off is the research?

Nick Ennis: That’s a good question because in the realm of their information, the lens through which they view the world — a macro view, bucketing different outcomes of batted balls with the information that they have, that kind of stuff — I think they’re good. With the public information at their disposal, those metrics are good. That’s a testament to the skills and talent of the members of the public baseball analytics community.

Where the clubs might have access to information that isn’t publicly available — whether it’s information that’s proprietary to that specific club, or information that’s shared only amongst clubs — then you start to see advantages potentially. Better input, essentially. All these models are going to depend on their inputs as well as the way they weigh those inputs.

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Two years ago, the Rays traded James Shields and Wade Davis to the Kansas City Royals for a package of talent centered around outfield prospect Wil Myers. The deal was divisive to say the least, primarily due to Myers’ inclusion; teams generally just didn’t trade prospects of his stature. When you have a 22 year old Major League ready slugger who rates as the 4th best prospect in the game, and you have an opening at the position that he plays, you generally build around him instead of using him to acquire an upgrade elsewhere.

But the Royals didn’t keep Wil Myers, preferring the short-term boost of adding a frontline starting pitcher and another talented arm who would become one of the game’s most dominant relievers. So, instead, the young right fielder went to Tampa Bay, where he was quickly anointed as the next big thing; he then justified the hype by winning the 2013 American League Rookie of the Year. But after a miserable 2014 season — including a two month stint on the disabled list due to a broken wrist — the Rays are reportedly on the verge of shipping Myers to San Diego, being the second team to sell off his future in 24 months.

So what’s the deal? Why is a promising young talent like Myers about to be on his third organization before turning 25? Is there a concern about his future that has caused teams to sour on him more quickly than we’d expect, given his performance and pedigree? Let’s take a look under the hood and see if we can identify any potential red flags.

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The other day, I wrote the Chicago White Sox still don’t seem very good. Naturally, that drew something of a negative response, and that’s fine — people ought to be excited, and it was kind of a buzzkill headline. The White Sox have been active, and general manager Rick Hahn has succeeded in turning nothing into something, at least as far as 2015 is concerned. We all recognize there’s a reason they play the games. Who knows what might happen? Who knows what else Hahn might eventually do? Yet, within the comments, something caught my eye. Some people think Steamer projects too much regression with the White Sox. Which got some gears whirring: How do our current projections compare to roster projections using only last year’s stats?

Obviously, if you’re trying to predict Year X + 1, you need to look at information from more than just Year X. Different people will recommend looking at different windows, but as a rule of thumb, you want to consider at least three or four years, if the data’s there. Plus, there are still other things to take into account. But while Year X isn’t the only thing that’s important, Year X is also the freshest data set in memory. So when a projection differs from what literally just finished happening, people might be prone to thinking that something’s amiss.

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Everybody remembers the movie Inception, right? Nice visuals, convoluted premise, and that killer score – a more than sufficient popcorn delivery system. Fun fact: the main plot point of inception, that an idea can be planted in someone’s subconscious without them realizing, is real!

At some point this summer, exasperated Texas Rangers writer/blogger/fanalyst Jamey Newberg tweeted something to the effect of “Alex Rios is one of those players whose production will never line up with his numbers.” At first, I was offended. A player produces what he produces, his numbers reflect his….production. But the thought, the idea that a player is less than his final stat line, it stayed with me. I couldn’t shake it.

Then the offseason rolled around. The crop of available outfielders is charitably described as “very much ungood” and then a bunch of guys signed. One of those signees, Nick Markakis got four years and an AAV north of $11 million, to the surprise of many. And then, piling shock on top of shock, Rios himself signed a one-year deal with the Royals for $11 million.

There are plenty of reasons to scoff at the big outfielders contract. Entering his age-34 season, Rios comes off a rough season in Texas. He produced right at replacement level in 2014, displaying a worrisome lack of power (just four home runs and a career-low .118 ISO) and he missed time with injury, as older players are wont to do.

But more than most players, Rios’ problems are matters of perception. There are many reasons to not like Rios as a player or this signing in a vacuum, all factors that I believe contribute to the shrugs and disbelief when news of his Kansas City contract broke.

Most pressing, the concern expressed by the Rangers fan above: does his production lag behind his numbers?

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Well, the final 24-36 hours of the Winter Meetings sure were fun-filled. The Red Sox rebuilt their rotation, importing a slew of ground ball guys to help combat the Fenway effect. Their rotation, however, will not include Jon Lester, who was lured away by the Cubs and a nifty $30M signing bonus, among other amenities. Perhaps most notably, the baseball world got an inkling of what the Dodgers’ new braintrust is all about, as they largely re-made their club, installing a brand new middle infield, adding to their already imposing starting rotation, deploying multiple clubs’ prospects here, there and everywhere, and moving slugger Matt Kemp within the division, to the Padres. It’s all pending physicals, of course. How will moving from Dodger Stadium affect Kemp? Are the Padres getting an impact bat, or something less than that? Read the rest of this entry »