Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Cincinnati Reds farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Dramatically increased ISO (.170 as a sophomore, .243 as junior) at University of Tennessee in 2016 and stole 25 bases at an 86% clip.

Scouting Report
A young-for-the-class SEC hitter with a long track record of success, Senzel was the most polished bat available in the 2016 draft. I saw him early in the year during a four-team round robin in Arizona and thought he’d go somewhere in the top 10-15 picks. While facing pitching far beneath the quality of arms he’d see later in the year during SEC play, Senzel finished the weekend 8-for-13 with four doubles, six walks, five of those on the final day of play. Despite my own enthusiasm, when a scout told me they thought he had an outside shot at going 1-1, I scoffed. Senzel was drafted No. 2 overall by Cincy in June. There are probably a few reasons for this, beyond a potential misevaluation of Senzel’s talent. Prospects ahead of Senzel on my board at that time (such as Jason Groome, Delvin Perez, Alec Hansen) all saw their stocks dip for one reason or another during the spring, while Senzel continued to rake. Moreover, he was one of the safest prospects in a draft class without huge, risk-worthy talent up top.

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The home-run swing comes in many forms. It ranges from the artistic whip-like movement exemplified by Ken Griffey Jr. to the panicked marionette impression favored by Hunter Pence, the muscled uppercut of Prince Fielder to the paintbrush stroke of Carlos Gonzalez. All of them are impressive and beautiful in their own way. (Yes, even Pence’s. The fact alone that he can hit a ball that far with mechanics like that probably means he deserves no fewer than 20 awards.)

The prospect of a Chris Davis home run has become a mundane event. The big man is paid to hit dingers, and lots of them. He does just that. He is Paul Bunyan, and he plays in a stadium that was probably bought at Toys “R” Us and came with Matchbox cars. It helps that he can hit the ball out anywhere, but has taken up residence in Baltimore. Davis home runs are like Billy Hamilton steals and Max Scherzer strikeouts. They happen early and often, and therefore it’s easy to lose sight of just how damn cool they are.

“Cool” perhaps isn’t the first word to pop into one’s head when seeking to describe Davis. “Big,” “strong,” “gargantuan”… these are all good and sound adjectives. But make no mistake. Davis is cool on the field.

Let’s watch him hit a home run.

See. That’s what cool looks like. That’s a cool home run.

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The forces of supply and demand appears to be bringing the offseason to a standstill when it comes to heavy hitters. Not many teams are looking for that type of player, and yet a number of them remain available. Edwin Encarnacion had to take less than he wanted, while Jose Bautista and Mark Trumbo headline a group of bat-first guys still available on the market. It’s a group that also includes Chris Carter, who was non-tendered by the Brewers, as well as Pedro Alvarez, Brandon Moss, and Mike Napoli. The qualifying offer hurts for Bautista and Trumbo, but the real reason Trumbo remains unsigned is that he isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and he probably isn’t even worth the $17.2 million attached to the qualifying offer.

There’s certainly some sort of market for Trumbo and the 47 homers he hit in 2016. As a player, though, he only does one thing really well, and it’s tough for him to compensate for his deficiencies with that one strength. It’s not just that Trumbo is a poor defender and baserunner, it’s that he isn’t even that good on offense. Last season, Trumbo’s on-base percentage was .316, below the league-average mark of .323 for non-pitchers. Sure, his .533 slugging percentage was very good, but it wasn’t among the top 10% of baseball, and when combined with his lackluster OBP, his 123 wRC+ ranked a respectable 40th out of 176 qualified players last season. While respectable, getting such little mileage out of 47 homers is a little disconcerting.

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What type of contract would Mike Trout have commanded this offseason had he been a free agent? Coming off an MVP-award-winning campaign in which he compiled 9.4 WAR and about to enter just his age-25 season, Trout would have easily been one of the most sought after players ever to hit the open market. And given the state of this year’s historically weak free-agent class, the bidding for Trout may very likely have ended up in the $400-500 million range over eight to ten years.

Considering that Trout signed a six-year, $144.5 million contract extension back in 2014 – an agreement that runs through 2020 – this is just an interesting, but hypothetical, thought experiment, right?

Not necessarily. A relatively obscure provision under California law — specifically, Section 2855 of the California Labor Code — limits all personal services contracts (i.e., employment contracts) in the state to a maximum length of seven years. In other words, this means that if an individual were to sign an employment contract in California lasting eight or more years, then at the conclusion of the seventh year the employee would be free to choose to either continue to honor the agreement, or else opt out and seek employment elsewhere.

Although the California legislature has previously considered eliminating this protection for certain professional athletes – including Major League Baseball players – no such amendment has passed to date. Consequently, Section 2855 would presumptively apply to any player employed by one of the five major-league teams residing in California.

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Every year, we run lots of pieces here in the FanGraphs family of blogs. We take a look at the “best” of them each week, but that’s fairly subjective, and there’s also an effort to spread the love, since a true “best of” post would just be 10-15 articles by Jeff Sullivan every week, and that wouldn’t be an entertaining exercise. Not even for Jeff.

This article is something we try to do every year, though sometimes I forget. This is all about the numbers — which posts were the most popular? We’ll do an overall top 15, since we do 15 posts for the “best of” post, with some honorable mentions as well. We’ll start at No. 15, because if nothing else, I want to make you scroll you down the page a little. Just in case it’s not clear, this top-15 list is going to be limited to pieces which were posted in 2016.

No. 15 (Mar. 29)
Let’s Find Rusney Castillo a New Home, by Dave Cameron
Sadly, Rusney Castillo did not find a new home, though he did hit better in the second half in Triple-A. I’m still not ready to give up on him, but Boston’s outfield is beyond crowded, so this story might not have a happy ending.

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Mike Mussina never won the Cy Young Award. He made the All-Star team only five times over his 18 years in the big leagues. He won 20 games just once, in the final season of his career. His career ERA mark is closer to 4 than it is to 3. In other words, it’s not difficult to see why Mussina hasn’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame yet, given the traditionalism of the electorate. There have been many worthy candidates who’ve accompanied Mussina on the ballot since he first appeared there, of course. Nine players have been elected since Mussina first became eligible, all of them slam-dunk candidates.

Whatever the arguments against him, though, Mike Mussina is almost surely a Hall of Famer. Hall of Fame voting has already technically concluded, so this column serves less as an appeal to voters and more of a general appraisal of the situation, if nothing else. Also, have you seen baseball news lately? I haven’t either, so here we go.

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To this point, the Blue Jays’ winter hasn’t really gone as they had hoped. The team made a strong push to re-sign Edwin Encarnacion right out of the gates, but when he turned down a reported $80 million over four years in order to test the market, they decided that they needed to make sure they didn’t get left without an alternative option, and so they pounced on the worse-but-cheaper Kendrys Morales, giving him $33 million over three years instead.

When the news leaked, I explained why I wasn’t a big fan of the signing.

With Edwin Encarnacion and Jose Bautista, the Jays have two DH-type players that they could have signed to much more lucrative long-term deals, but Morales presents a much cheaper option, giving the team the flexibility to spend the extra $40 or $50 million on an outfielder, bullpen upgrades, or both. Instead of putting their money into one better player, the Jays look like they’re again going to bet on depth.

In general, I think that plan can often work out, especially if you have some serious holes on the roster that need addressing, as the Jays do. In practice, though, I’m not sure if I’m as excited about spending $33 million on Kendrys Morales as part of a spread-things-around approach.

…

So, yeah, $33 million for the age 34-36 seasons of a decent hitter who can’t run seems like not a great use of funds to me. The team could still make this plan worthwhile if they spend the savings on a quality regular or a couple of good role players, but Morales himself just isn’t that good.

By giving Morales just a portion of what the team had allocated for Encarnacion, the Jays should still have some money to spend in order to round out the roster. Just the difference between their DH offers total $47 million, which should be enough to get them an upgrade (or two) over Ezequiel Carrera and Melvin Upton in the outfield. Of course, you won’t get a superstar for that kind of money — Josh Reddick got $52 million, for reference — but there’s at least enough money left to make the decision to not let Encarnacion’s market play itself out look a little less awkward.

After all, it’s easy to crush the Blue Jays for giving Morales $33 million when Encarnacion ended up signing for $60 million, but that is using information not available at the time to say that the Jays should have anticipated that Encarnacion’s market was going to crater. I don’t know that it was something that should have been reasonably forecasted, given his consistency, durability, and the fact that MLB teams have generally paid well for his skillset. I projected Encarnacion would get 4/$84M this winter; the crowd projected 4/$90M. It’s fair to say that the Jays perhaps should not have seen Morales as a target so good they couldn’t let him get away, limiting their options in the process, but I think once Encarnacion turned down 4/$80M, they probably were correct to think that they were better off going another direction, since similar players to Encarnacion have not aged particularly well.

But right now, with Encarnacion in Cleveland on a contract the Jays clearly would have signed in a heartbeat at the start of the winter, the series of decisions that led to this point are easy to take issue with. Sure, they have some money to spend, but they now have a worse old DH, a 1B platoon of a bad player and a frequently injured guy, and they still haven’t found any corner outfielders. On January 3rd, this all doesn’t look great.

But in looking forward, I wonder if this isn’t actually going to work out just fine for the Blue Jays. Because, barring some unforeseen new bidder for Jose Bautista, the Jays might end up getting the better of their two star sluggers back, with perhaps enough money left over to make their team better than if they had been able to re-sign Encarnacion to begin with.

As Jeff Passan wrote recently, Jose Bautista (at his original asking price, anyway) has been essentially rejected by the league, and has found himself without any real serious suitors through the first two months of the winter, and is reportedly now open to talking about a one year deal. If he has a bounce back 2017 season and hits free agency next winter without a qualifying offer attached — the new CBA states that players can’t be offered a QO more than once in their career — he could very likely do better overall than by taking a discounted multi-year deal this winter, even though he’ll be another year older.

And a one year deal with Bautista is just about the perfect option for the Jays. For all the talk of Bautista aging and his skills declining, he just put up a 122 wRC+ in a down year, which is still pretty good. For context, the Jays have been frequently mentioned as a possible landing spot for Jay Bruce, since they tried to trade for him last spring, and as a corner outfielder with one year left on his deal, he’d fit what the Jays are looking for. Except in the best offensive season of his career (2010), Bruce put up a 124 wRC+, the only time he’s ever put up a better offensive season than what Bautista did last year. A broken-down, playing-through-injury Bautista was basically as good a hitter as Bruce at his absolute best.

If the Jays can really get Bautista for something like $20-$25 million on a one-year deal, they’ll likely be better off than if they had re-signed Encarnacion and traded for Bruce (or someone of his ilk) to fill the hole in RF. The Jays were never going to bring back both of their star sluggers, so if they had landed Encarnacion at that $20 million a year price tag, the replacement outfielder would probably have ended up being roughly equal in price and value to Morales. Landing Bautista for something close to the Encarnacion salary for 2017, without the multi-year commitment on the more expensive player, would give the Jays similar expected performance without nearly as much long-term risk.

While his poor-for-him 2016 season and the league’s muted interest in his services might help push the narrative that Bautista is reaching the end of his career, both ZIPS and Steamer see Bautista as roughly a +3 WAR player next year, with similar offensive projections as Encarnacion. While reasonable people could certainly prefer Encarnacion, and it’s fine to wish the team had gotten him for the 3/$60M that Cleveland ended up paying, it’s hard to argue that Bautista at 1/~$20M is not an even better option. Even if it’s closer to $25 million, that’s still a reasonable price for a high-level hitter.

And then, with another year of information about how well his body is actually holding up, the Jays could decide whether to keep him in Toronto for the end of his career, or allocate that significant chunk of their budget elsewhere next winter; an option they would not have had if they had re-signed Encarnacion.

Right now, it’s easy to look at the Jays’ winter and say that they should have done things differently. And some of us were even saying that the Morales signing was questionable when it happened, not just after Encarnacion’s price ended up coming down. But whether by good fortune or because they anticipated that Bautista might have a tough road in free agency, the Jays might end up in a better position for both 2017 and long-term than if Encarnacion had taken their original offer. If they get Joey Bats back on a one year deal, we might still question some of the decisions that got them to this point, but the end result might just be better than if they had gotten their way from the start.

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While the 2016 campaign is over and the flurry of moves after the season has come to a halt for the moment, a whole year’s worth of data remains to be examined. Today’s post is an easy one and a fun one. Let’s find the best pitches that were thrown regularly last year.

Before we begin: the word “results” appears in the headline, but I’m not going to use results judged by things like singles and doubles and the like. The samples gets pretty small if you chop up the ball-in-play numbers on a single pitch, and defense exerts too much of an influence on those numbers. So “results” here denotes not hit types, but rather whiffs and grounders.

I’ve grouped all the pitches thrown last year, minimum 75 for non-fastballs, 100 for fastballs. I combined knuckle and regular curves, and put split-fingers in with the changeups. So the sample per pitch type is generally around 300 — a lot less for cutters (89) and a bunch more for four seamers (500) — but generally around 300 pitches qualified in each category. Then I found the z-scores for the whiff and ground-ball rates on those pitches. I multiplied the whiff rate z-score by two before adding it to the ground-ball rate because I generally found correlations that were twice as strong between whiff rates and overall numbers like ERA and SIERA than they were for ground-ball rates.

The caveats are obvious. Pitches work in tandem, so you may get a whiff on your changeup because your fastball is so devastating. This doesn’t reward called strikes as much as swinging strikes, so it’s not a great measure for command. On the other hand, there isn’t a great measure for command. By using ground-ball rate instead of launch-angle allowed, we’re using some ball-in-play data and maybe not the best ball-in-play data.

But average-launch-angle allowed is problematic in its own way, and ground-ball rate is actually one of the best ball-in-play stats we have — it’s very sticky year to year and becomes meaningful very quickly. Whiff rates are super sexy, since a swing and a miss represents a clear victory for the pitchers over the batter — and also because there’s no room for scorer error or bias in the numbers. And while the precise way in which pitches work in tandem remains obscure in pitching analysis, we can still learn something from splitting the pitches up into their own buckets.

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I was one of the large majority of BBWAA members who voted for transparency in Hall of Fame balloting. On the off chance you missed the news, all ballots must be made public beginning next year. I’m fully behind this decision, albeit with one concern.

More and more writers are making their ballots public well in advance of the January announcement, and they are being scrutinized ad infinitum on social media. While mostly a good thing, this could unduly influence a small yet meaningful percentage of voters.

Say you’re on the fence between two players for your tenth checkmark. You’re leaning one way, but your peers — not to mention the online community — are bullish in the other direction. Following the herd is a safer option than following your heart (and mind). No one likes to be lambasted for being a black sheep in the BBWAA brethren. Read the rest of this entry »