Unless you’re a dedicated baseball fan or follow Ken Rosenthal on Twitter, you may not know the name Rusney Castillo. That is probably going to change soon, as he is expected to sign a free-agent contract in the not-too-distant future, becoming the latest international import to incite a bidding war among MLB teams. If rumors are to be believed, his contract might even end up north of $50 million. And recent history suggests that even that might be a bargain.

The sport seems to be pretty far removed from the days of Hideki Irabu and Kei Igawa. Certainly, there was a time when major-league teams — okay, most often the Yankees — threw significant money to bring over international players who turned out to be duds. But lately, there have been few better ways to spend money than on the international free agent market. Especially if you’ve been buying a hitter from Cuba.

Since the start of the 2010 season, seven hitters have defected from Cuba, signed major-league contracts worth at least $10 million in guaranteed money and played in the majors this season. Here are those seven players:

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For most of the last few years, if you clicked on the Leaderboards tab here on FanGraphs, you’d find Mike Trout’s name at the very top. Today, that is not the case, as Trout has been surpassed in 2014-to-date WAR, slipping to #2 for the first time since late April. That isn’t necessarily controversial in and of itself, as it’s not that unusual for the best overall player in the game to not rate at the top of the WAR leaderboards every season, but what is somewhat controversial is the name of the player who has usurped Trout at the top of the list at this moment.

Alex Gordon, you see, is not exactly what most people think of as a superstar. He’s a corner outfielder who is hitting .286 with 13 home runs. Among 153 qualified Major League hitters this season, he’s ranked 36th in batting average, 32nd in on-base percentage, and 53rd in slugging percentage. Even using wOBA as a better evaluator of overall offensive performance, his .357 wOBA puts him in a tie for 33rd with Neil Walker and Jayson Werth. Add in park effects, and his wRC+ of 128 falls to 39th. As a hitter, he’s basically having the same season as Matt Kemp. This is the batting profile of the guy who currently leads all position players in WAR, and for many, that simply highlights the limitations of the model.

Even sabermetrically-inclined writers who live in Kanas City think this is weird.

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We spend a lot of our time writing about outliers on these pages. Performance outliers, such as Miguel Cabrera and Mike Trout on the offensive side, and Clayton Kershaw and Felix Hernandez on the pitching side. We focus on those who took outlier paths to the big leagues, such as Cuban imports like Aroldis Chapman and Yoenis Cespedes, or even late-career conversions like Jason Lane. As far as outliers go, Hall of Fame pitcher Dazzy Vance has them all beat. Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere along the line in their development, pitchers are instructed to try to control the running game. At younger ages, pitchers are more able to stop runners than catchers are, since the catchers aren’t very good and the runners aren’t very good. At upper levels, catchers tend to get most of the credit, and indeed catchers bear a lot of responsibility, but for the most part it’s still pitchers on whom the fate of a running game depends the most. Controlling the running game is one of the ways in which Mark Buehrle excels. It’s one of the ways in which Johnny Cueto excels. For Tim Lincecum, it’s a weakness. Nothing’s more critical for pitchers than pitching, but how you manage baserunners can grant an extra advantage or disadvantage, depending. Every little run’s important, if any run is important.

It’s a weird thing, trying to control runners on base. You don’t want to allow steals, but you do want to allow steal attempts, so that you might be able to get baserunners erased. Better for a pitcher to have one stolen base and one caught steal on his record than zero of both, because the value of a caught steal is considerably higher than the value of a successful steal. If you’re too good at controlling runners, you won’t really throw runners out. Now take a glance at this year’s leaderboard. Leading the majors in caught steals is Madison Bumgarner, with nine. Just six steals against him have been successful. Three pitchers are tied at eight caught steals. Against Drew Smyly, runners are 14-for-22. Against Max Scherzer, they’re 11-for-19. Against Hisashi Iwakuma, they’re 0-for-8.

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Javier Baez is a player who transcends ordinary prospect-dom. Not just because he possesses extraordinary skills — also because he’s a prospect in whom fans of every team might be interested. Usually, a guy on the farm or a guy just on the roster will captivate locally, but Baez is able to captivate nationally, in a way that few young players are able. He’s not quite on the level of rookie Stephen Strasburg, for whose debut the whole country turned on TV, but people want to know what Baez is going to become. And they want to know how quickly he’s going to become it. His big swings are the hitter equivalent of Strasburg’s big fastballs.

People who are interested in baseball are interested in Javier Baez. They know more about him than they know about the average young prospect. Keeping with the theme, other teams, too, seem to know more about Baez than they know about the average young prospect. Other teams have prepared for Javier Baez, just as we have as fans, and in the early going it turns out Javier Baez has been pitched pretty much exactly as you’d expect that Javier Baez would be pitched.

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Every pitcher in baseball has a primary pitch, and for almost every pitcher in baseball, that’s going to be some variety of a fastball. After the primary pitch, there will be an assortment of secondary pitches, numbering from one to a lot more than one. But not all secondary stuff is created or treated the same; there can be a trusted secondary pitch, or a decent secondary pitch, or a rare occasional secondary pitch. Clayton Kershaw‘s slider is a trusted secondary pitch. Tony Cingrani’s slider is a decent secondary pitch. You have to keep your eyes peeled for the occasionals.

Plenty of guys throw them. Let’s look at some examples! Here’s Danny Salazar throwing a terrible curveball:

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Several unusual things happened in Sunday afternoon’s game in Arlington between the Rangers and Angels. Firstly, Huston Street blew a save, his first as an Angel. Second, Mike Trout got a hit, his first in 18 at bats as he suffers through the second prolonged slump of his otherwise Troutishly MVP-calibre season. Thirdly, Trout was caught stealing for the first time in 2014.

Given Trout’s recent inexperience in reaching base safely, one might understand his urgency to make something happen for the first time in a week. Which also explains why Rangers starter Nick Tepesch had an eye on the Angels’ centerfielder, promptly picking him off first base.

Though it wasn’t a straight steal of second base, it counts as just his 13th stolen base attempt and first unsuccessful try – that’s ten fewer than noted speedster and fellow New Jersey native Todd Frazier. A number difficult to believe for a player who gets on base 40% of the time and also successfully swiped 82 bases over the two previous seasons.

The lack of stolen bases highlights a soft spot in Trout’s game this year – he hasn’t been a particularly valuable base runner. One of the fastest players (and hardest runners) in the league, Trout’s work with his feet rates as a single run above average this season, a far cry from the two Wins he added on the base paths between 2012 and 2013. In each of those years, Trout added five runs by advancing extra bases when the ball was in play while the weighted stolen base metric values and reflects his efficient theft accordingly. This season, his UBR is essentially zero.

Given his speed, reputation, and the sheer volume of his opportunities (only four players reached base safely more than Trout this season), this result is somewhat shocking. Why is Trout suddenly less effective on the bases? Or, is Trout actually less effective on the bases, or is this just expected and normal variance?

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The August waiver period can be an interesting time, because it gives you a little bit of insight into how teams around the bigs value certain players. For example, it came as absolutely no surprise that the overpriced and under-performing Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier made it through waivers, or that Cole Hamels, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg did not. It came as a bit of a surprise that Jon Niese did get through, which maybe tells you something about how other teams view his shoulder and that he’s perhaps not as valuable as Mets fans seemed to think; if the worst-case scenario is that the Mets stick you with the $16 million he has left after this year and still nobody was interested, that’s not a great sign.

For guys like Crawford, Ethier and others, their contracts were signed years ago, and obviously much has changed since then, so it’s most interesting to see how the industry reacts to players who were popular free agents just last winter, a mere eight months or so ago. While obviously not every roster move or claim is public, we know of at least one: Curtis Granderson, who signed for four years and $60 million with the Mets. Even with the desperate need for offense around the majors, Granderson, on pace for only a two-win season despite a rebound from a slow start, went unclaimed. At 33, two years off his last good season and three years away from his last great one, the risk wasn’t worth it.

This isn’t about Granderson, though; it’s about one of the other major New York signings from last winter who is off to an atrocious start in his new home and has a considerable amount of money still coming: Brian McCann, who returned from a stay on the concussion list yesterday. We don’t know if McCann has been put on waivers or if anyone would put in a claim — you imagine a rich team with catching issues like the Dodgers would at least think about it, though not necessarily do it — but isn’t it fascinating to think that if someone did claim him, the Yankees might be best off just letting him go?

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Evaluating The Prospects: Texas Rangers, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks & Minnesota Twins

The Scouting Explained Series: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5

My goal with the presentation style of these org prospect lists is to give you all the information you want and some things I think you’d want if you knew to ask for it. When the Rangers list goes up first tomorrow, there will also be select pieces of information from each report that will go at the top of the player pages, which we’ll explain in more detail tomorrow. I know when I’m researching players, I always want to have one site that has all the information I need in one place and this is a big step in making FanGraphs that destination for minor league players.

Basic Information

I’m going to do these org prospect lists for FanGraphs similar to how I did them for Scout so check out that link if you’re curious about the format and don’t like reading words.

I’ll embed a video for the prospects projected as 50 Future Value (#4 starter, closer or low-end everyday player) or better. Along with that video, I’ll give full biographical information, tool grades, a couple paragraphs of a scouting report and a summary to put their skills into context. For those 50+ FV hitters, I’ll project their upside in the form of a triple slash line with a risk grade and year-by-year projected path to the majors. It’s more difficult to project a stat line for pitchers, but I’ll project a rotation or bullpen role (i.e. #3 starter or setup guy, etc.).

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Now that he’s nearing 35, Adam Dunn may not be the same fearsome offensive force he was earlier in his career. So he’s experimented with a few tweaks to his game over the last couple of years. Mostly, they didn’t work. But he did retain a few aspects of those experiments that benefit the veteran to this day.

The first idea might have been the worst idea. In Spring Training last year, Adam Dunn decided to be more aggressive on the first pitch. The result was disastrous, as he got 50% worse at getting into counts that were in his favor.

“That didn’t work for me,” the slugger admitted before a game with the Giants in August. “I get myself into a lot of bad counts anyway, that was not good for me.” 2013 was the second-worst year of his career by most offensive stats.

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