Two seasons ago, Kris Bryant was regarded by many as the top prospect in all of baseball. After having dominated all levels of the minors, he appeared to be a candidate to begin the season on the Cubs’ 25-man roster. The conditions were nearly ideal. Not only had Bryant proven himself in the minors, but the club possessed no one of consequence to start at third. Furthermore, the Cubs intended to contend in the NL Central.

Despite all the arguments in favor of Bryant breaking camp with the Cubs, he was sent to Iowa. He waited a week and a half, at which point the team called him up. He proceeded to have a great season. By waiting to promote him, though — a decision that wasn’t without some controversy — the Cubs ensured that Bryant wouldn’t be a free agent until after 2021 instead of 2020.

The Chicago White Sox’ Yoan Moncada, named the top prospect in baseball recently by Eric Longenhagen, deserves (and doesn’t deserve) the same fate. Allow me to explain.

The Chicago Cubs “generously” gave Kris Bryant a $1 million dollar salary this season when they could have given him close to half, but that is nothing compared to the potentially tens of millions of dollars they stand to gain by having Bryant’s services in 2021. One year of a great player in his prime — and Bryant will be 29 years old in 2021 — is incredibly valuable. The cost of six wins on the free-agent market is roughly $50 million. Such a large figure might seem improbable at first: no players receive $50 million salaries and some six-win players (David Price and Max Scherzer, for example) do hit free agency. However, those players sign multi-year deals, often receiving the same salary in Year One as Year Seven despite the fact that expected production in that first season greatly exceeds that of the latter years of a contract. The production and salary are expected to average out by the end of a deal, with overpayments in later years compensating for underpayments in the earlier ones. The point here — and one that makes sense even in the absence of the math — is that one extra year of a player’s services can be incredibly valuable.

As for what such a young and talented player deserves in terms of compensation, there are a lot of ways to attack the concept. Kris Bryant deserved to be on the Opening Day roster in 2015 due to his play. Unfortunately, that play — and the promise it suggested — rendered Bryant too valuable for the Cubs not to manipulate his service time. Therefore, they waited those 10 days.

That isn’t a great system. It creates disincentives, even if very small, to putting the best team on the field. But it’s the system under which MLB is operating presently. And it matters right now because of Yoan Moncada.

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Though it started with a strikeout and a ground out, the World Baseball Classic appearance by Jose Berrios Wednesday didn’t end well. He allowed a single to the scuffling Nolan Arenado, then hit Eric Hosmer and walked Andrew McCutchen before he was replaced. In essence, the outing encapsulated the ups and downs of Jose Berrios as a pitcher: tantalizing stuff, near-fatal flaws. If you focus on the former, though, maybe the latter is just an adjustment away from being a faded memory.

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According to a Naver Sports report out of South Korea, Pirates third baseman Jung Ho Kang has been denied a visa to enter the United States putting his 2017 season and future with the Pirates very much in doubt.

Kang has had a myriad off-the-field troubles. After a Dec. 2 incident in Seoul in which Kang fled the scene of a crash, Kang was convicted of a third DUI this winter in South Korea. The two previous DUIs came before he was signed by the Pirates prior to the 2015 season, and the club claims to have had no knowledge of those incidents. For his most recent DUI, Kang was sentenced to eight months in prison, but Kang has appealed the sentence. He has missed the entire spring due to his legal issues. There was also a sexual assault claim made against Kang last year, alleged to have occurred in a Chicago hotel. But Kang was not charged and Chicago Police said last fall they have not been able to locate his accuser.

Off-the-field, Kang has his troubles and now the Pirates have on-the-field issues at third base.

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Terrance Gore can fly. The 25-year-old outfielder is as fast as anyone in the game, and he’s especially lethal on the base paths. Gore has 19 steals in 21 attempts as a Kansas City Royal, and he is 251 for 275 down on the farm. He takes his leads with a green light.

There is one thing holding him back: Gore has yet to invent a way to steal first base.

Hitless in seven big-league at-bats (his thefts have come as a pinch-runner), Gore has slashed .243/.342/.273 in 1,806 minor-league plate appearances. The OBP number in that slash line is acceptable, but given his SLG and his size — he’s listed at 5-foot,7, 165 — anything resembling Giancarlo Stanton-like respect is little more than a pipe dream. To earn ABs at the highest level, he’ll need to hit his way on.

He’s working on that, and — feel free to raise an eyebrow — launch angle plays a part in the process.

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Jay Bruce is not going to win any popularity contests in New York’s largest borough when the season opens next month.

Through no fault of his own, the Mets exercised his $13 million option this winter, ostensibly as insurance in case Yoenis Cespedes fled elsewhere. With the return of Cespedes, though, Bruce is now regarded primarily as an impediment to promising young outfielder Michael Conforto’s ability to receive more playing time. This is not a post arguing that Confroto shouldn’t be the recipient of more playing time. I would like to see a full season from Conforto, too. This is a post about Bruce independent of playing-time issues in New York.

This is a post, in part, about a player using batted-ball data to rethink his ideas about lifting the ball, a subject we’ve detailed exhaustively at FanGraphs this offseason and spring. This is also a post about a player who’s running out of time to live up to his lofty prospect pedigree. While Bruce’s 111 wRC+ last season and 107 mark for his career continues to render him employable, his declining defense has him pushed him near replacement-level the last two seasons, when he has combined for one unit of WAR. This is a player who must get more out of his bat to secure another lucrative contract, and to secure steady playing time.

But what’s a little different about this story is that Bruce already hits more fly balls than ground balls. This is a fly-ball hitter who wants to become an extreme fly-ball hitter, as James Wagner details in a recent, excellent New York Times feature.

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Last Friday, Craig Edwards published a post titled “The Best One-Two Punch in Baseball.” He didn’t focus specifically on just hitters, or just pitchers — the idea was to look at every team’s projected top two players. It’s a fun exercise, and this one is similar to that one.

In this post, in short, I’d like to look at every team’s projected top five players. This is something I’ve kept track of for a while, and even though five is an arbitrary number, I like how this method can separate top-heavy teams from teams with more depth. Below, a few plotted breakdowns, followed by a table comparing the projected MLB landscape to the way things played out last season. Let’s get this over with!

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(Thanks to Eno Sarris and Nick Stellini for their help on this post.)

The corner outfielder posts yesterday were kind of depressing, but I have good news; I’ve found all the talented outfielders that were missing from the LF and RF posts. The best outfielders in the game mostly play center field now.

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Previous editions: AL East / AL Central / NL East / NL Central.

Opening Day is in sight, and we have only two more installments of this divisional preview series. The two western divisions remain; today, we’ll focus on the AL West.

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Every year we release team projections, and every year people express disagreement with them. But it’s not large-scale disagreement — typically, people differ on one or two or three specific teams. Sometimes it’s been the Royals, sometimes it’s been the Orioles, and this year it’s the Rockies. Most of the projections are considered basically fine. The FanGraphs crowd has determined that the Padres’ 2017 projection is basically fine. The Padres are projected to be the worst team in baseball, at 65-97, and we put their playoff odds at 0.1%.

But there are certain numbers I love to bring up. I have team projections going back to 2005, and since then, all the teams projected to win no more than 70 games have averaged 68 projected wins, and 68 actual wins. In that sense, the projections have been great. Yet the 2008 Marlins were projected to win 68 games, and they won 84. The 2010 Blue Jays were projected to win 65 games, and they won 85. The 2012 Orioles were projected to win 70 games, and they won 93. All of those teams were thought to be bad. All of those teams were contenders.

The Padres, right now, are thought to be bad. What if they turned into contenders? Let’s follow an 11-step process to make that happen. Let’s try to get these Padres into the playoffs, without doing anything too unrealistic.

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Tim Anderson and the Chicago White Sox have agreed to an extension that will pay the young shortstop $25 million over six years and which includes two team options that could double the amount of the contract.

The deal is both big and small. It’s the largest contract ever given to an MLB player with less than a year of service time. So that’s significant. On the other hand, the contract also figures to pay Anderson an average annual value that equates to an amount less than deals signed this winter by Boone Logan and Mitch Moreland. If Anderson doesn’t progress as a major-league player and is out of the league in a couple years, he’ll have at least made $25 million — a substantial figure, in other words. If Anderson is good, then the White Sox will have themselves a huge bargain.

Contracts like Anderson’s aren’t very common. While extensions are signed with some frequency by players who’ve recorded a year-plus of service time — and occur with similar frequency for players at each year of service time until free agency — that’s not the case for players like Anderson, who have little experience in the majors.

Consider: since 2010, there have been 143 extensions of three or more years given to players who’ve recorded less than six years of service time, per MLB Trade Rumors. Of those deals, Tim Anderson’s is just the fifth signed by a player with less than a year of service time. That’s a rarity, as the graph below reveals.

As to why these contract extensions are so rare, one likely explanation is the lack of incentive for a team to pursue a deal any earlier. While extensions such as these can certainly represent bargains for team — and while teams certainly like bargains — clubs can frequently secure players for similar terms after a year or two of play. That allows them to gather more information about the player in question.

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