It’s been about a week since the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. A few days less than that since the parade. And while there will always be time for remembering this season and this team’s accomplishments, it’s okay to look forward, as well. After the Cubs won last week, Dave Cameron wrote that the Cubs have a chance at creating a dynasty, not unlike the New York Yankees two decades ago. That possibility certainly exists — and just about all the evidence we have regarding the Cubs right now suggests that they’re going to be a good baseball team for the foreseeable future. There are no guarantees.

Two days ago, Jeff Sullivan turned the FanGraphs Depth Charts numbers, based on Steamer projections, into a way-too-early projection for next season. The Cubs are already situated in the mid-90s for wins — and that’s even after accounting for the loss of starting center fielder Dexter Fowler. When we talk about the future of the Cubs, we focus on the position players, as well we should. The position players are the Cubs strength — and for the most part, they’re young and cheap, allowing the Cubs to spend money elsewhere to fill holes.

So even if the Cubs do nothing, they head to next season with a strong core both on offense and defense. Kris Bryant isn’t likely to be as good as he was this past year, but the projections factor that in. Anthony Rizzo is projected for another good year. Javier Baez and Addison Russell, both of whom retain considerable upside, are projected for similar years. Willson Contreras is expected to continue his promising transition to the big leagues.

There are certainly going to be concerns about Jason Heyward at the plate — and, to a lesser degree, in the field, if he has to play center in a full-time capacity. He’s not going to cost the team runs, but replacing an outfield alignment of Bryant/Soler/Zobrist (in left field), Fowler (in center), and Heyward (right) with Schwarber, Heyward, and Zobrist, respectively, is going to downgrade the defense a bit. The projections assume that 36-year-old Ben Zobrist will also decline just a bit from his solid 2016 campaign.

But even if Zobrist starts aging poorly, Heyward fails to rebound, and Schwarber is unable to return to previous form, the club is still in good shape on the position-player side of things. That said, there’s no guarantee for success. Even if the Cubs hit well again and defend well again, a return to the playoffs isn’t a given.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Los Angeles Dodgers 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)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Recorded 34.6% strikeout and 6.9% walk rate at Low-A.

Scouting Report
The ease with which Yadier Alvarez delivers 100 mph fastballs is as unsettling as it is beautiful. Triple-digit fastballs are becoming more common but they usually involve significant visible effort. Alvarez throws 95-plus and looks like he’s settling down to take a nap. He’ll touch 101 and generally sits 96-99 and 94-97 later in starts. His fastball command is below average, as Alvarez has issues maintaining his delivery’s timing and struggles to get on top of his fastball consistently. But the grace in the delivery and Alvarez’s overall athleticism point toward significant development in this area and there are signs that it’s already begun to come. Alvarez cut his walk rate in half after moving from the Arizona League to the Midwest League while his strikeout rate held firm. Scouts who saw him late in the year complimented his ability to throw strikes, something he wasn’t doing consistently as late as June.

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Free agency is officially underway, and odds are good you’re going to spend the next few weeks thinking about who your team should sign, or not sign, depending on the faith you have in your team’s front office. To help with those endeavors, we’ve created a couple of free agent leaderboards for your perusal.

Free Agent Hitters

Free Agent Pitchers

As you know by now, this isn’t a particularly great free agent crop. Only three of the 75 pitchers on the list posted at least +3 WAR last season, and only seven of the 78 hitters got over +2.5 WAR. This is a free agent class of role players and depth pieces, not franchise-altering stars.

But role players are necessary too, and there are some useful players on the market. With these leaderboards, you can sort and filter to your heart’s content, looking for specific skills or traits that might fit your team’s needs.

For instance, does your team need a corner outfielder who can hit left-handed pitching? Well, click a few options, pick “vs L” from the splits drop-down, and all of the sudden, you have this, and can see that Franklin Gutierrez put up a 151 wRC+ against lefties in 329 PAs over the last three years. You shouldn’t expect that to be his production level going forward of course, but a guy like Gutierrez has some value to a team as a part-time player, and these leaderboards will help you find guys like him.

Or maybe you’re looking for a power arm for your bullpen. Everyone knows Arodlis Chapman is the hardest thrower on the market, but do you know who had the second highest average fastball velocity in this class in 2016? Well, now you can: Neftali Feliz, followed closely by Daniel Hudson. Goes to show you need a bit more than a 96 mph fastball to be a good reliever, I guess.

Anyway, we hope you find these tools useful. Because the player lists were created manually, we may have missed a few guys here and there, so let us know if you find any free agents not on the list, and we’ll get them added.

And stay tuned the next few days, because we’re going to be rolling out a list of the Top 50 free agents in this class, as well as providing the results of the contract crowdsourcing project to estimate what players may sign for this winter. Even in a weak class, there are still some bargains to be found.

The biggest reliever contract in baseball history was handed to Jonathan Papelbon in 2012 when the right-hander received four years and $50 million from the Phillies. The biggest yearly salary ever recorded by a reliever remains Mariano Rivera’s $15 million figure from both 2011 and 2012. This year, both of those records will surely fall.

After all, we’ve just concluded a postseason in which starters pitched the fewest innings per start in playoff history. And a reliever won the American League Championship Series MVP award. And relievers, in general, receive much more per win than players at any other position. Against that backdrop, this offseason features two elite free agents in Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen — only a year after Darren O’Day was the best reliever available in November.

It’s a combination of forces that makes you wonder how high the price might go for their services. But before we start predicting nine-digit contracts for either of these closers, we also have to remember that a deal like that would represent a doubling of the previous high.

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I know that I’m in the middle of another polling project. It’s not going to be an offseason full of polling projects. But this is a different idea, and it’s a little time-sensitive. So here we are!

I wanted to get this out and going before the offseason moves are really underway. We have already seen some minor transactions, but, there’s nothing I can do about that. Your assignment here is simple: For as many teams as you feel comfortable with, predict a 2017 win total. I do not mean predict a 2017 win total, based on how rosters are constructed today. I want you to predict a 2017 win total, based on what you think the rosters are going to look like. Think the White Sox, for example, are going to tear it all down? Vote accordingly. Think they’ll instead try to compete one more time? Vote accordingly! Think of this as a blended offseason prediction and regular-season prediction. Obviously we can’t predict all the moves teams are going to make, but it’s mostly easy to see what teams want to do. Let that drive you.

Thank you in advance for your participation. I’m running this for two reasons. One, it’ll just be fun to analyze in the short-term. But, two, it’ll also be fun to analyze at the end of spring training next March, when I ask you to predict the standings again. Then we’ll get to see who had the craziest offseasons, and who did what they were expected to do. For so many reasons, I can’t wait until spring. Thanks again, and have fun speculating!

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A thrilling season and postseason is in the books, and another whirlwind offseason is ready to be set in motion. This would appear to be a good time to take one last look back at 2016 player performance, utilizing granular data to assess pitcher and position-player true-talent levels.

In the coming weeks, we’ll use exit-speed and launch-angle data to show what pitchers and position players “should have” done this season. Starting pitchers are first in the barrel; today, we’ll take a look at AL ERA qualifiers.

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Two relevant facts here are indisputable. One, in this most recent season, the Angels were bad. They won 74 games. By BaseRuns, they “should have” won 71 games. That made them about as good as the Twins and the Braves. Horrible season. Two, baseball fans love a blockbuster. It’s not even unique to baseball. Sports fans love a blockbuster. They love seeing them, they love thinking about them, and they love talking about them. Big trades might be even more exciting than big games.

Connect the points and you end up with Mike Trout trade proposals. The Angels narrative is being driven by the Mike Trout fantasy — that is, the fantasy of Mike Trout being available. This comes up in every one of my chats, and my chats aren’t special. As the reasoning goes, the Angels are bad, and they’re probably going to stay bad, so why don’t they trade Trout to re-stock an empty system? It’s actually kind of convincing. The Angels’ system is in legitimately bad shape.

Yet the major-league product isn’t so terrible. Something not enough people seem to understand: The Angels are under no obligation to blow things up. In large part because of Trout, the Angels are in half-decent shape. Perhaps even better than that. They have a real path to the playoffs as soon as next year.

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Since the start of the 2015 season, there hasn’t been a better hitter on the Mets than Yoenis Cespedes. He’s second among position players in WAR to Curtis Granderson, who has played more than 100 more games with the Mets over that span. As soon as he arrived at the trade deadline in 2015, Cespedes became one of the faces of the franchise, and has become a symbol of the endless possibilities of contention for Mets fans.

He’s likely to command one of the largest contracts of the offseason. Cespedes can hit for average, draws a fair number of walks, and hits for power. He plays standout defense in left field when healthy. That said, he’ll also be playing on the wrong side of 30, and may very well be finishing his expensive contract on the wrong side of 35. Cespedes spent all of the 2016 season with a nagging leg injury originally sustained on a diving effort into the stands for a fly ball. Steamer forecasts just 3.0 WAR for him next year. On a certain level, it seems as if re-signing Cespedes would be a mistake for the Mets.

But it wouldn’t be. In fact, re-signing Cespedes is the best move the Mets could make this winter.

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Heading into the winter, there has been one thing that’s pretty much universally agreed upon; this is a bad free agent class. After chasing Zack Greinke and David Price last winter, the best arms on the market this winter include the likes of Jeremy Hellickson and Ivan Nova. When it comes to just throwing money at veterans in an attempt to upgrade a team’s roster, the pickings are slim this go around.

Naturally, any time there is a diminished supply, thoughts go towards price inflation. And we see this all the time in our daily lives. Gas pipeline bursts? Gas prices go through the roof. Grower strike in Mexico? Avocados now cost like $20 apiece. We need more avocados, people; the lack of guacamole in my life lately has been a real problem.

So, it’s tempting to look at this winter’s sparse free agent crop and think we’re about to see some truly crazy contracts. After all, teams are still making money hand over fist, and there are only so many ways to spend money in baseball, with the path of least resistance being to hand it over the best free agent that will take it. This kind of landscape leads to tweets like this one, from Ken Rosenthal the other day.

Craziest prediction I’ve heard so far from a GM: Ivan Nova, five years, $75M.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 7, 2016

I don’t know, maybe Ivan Nova really will get $75 million. I’d take the under, but Ian Kennedy got $80 million (and an opt-out!) while tied to draft pick compensation, so we can’t really say that anything is completely out of the realm of reason. But, as much as there is a supply shortage of upper-end talent in the free agent market this winter, there is one reason to think that prices might not be as outrageous as some expect. That reason? A reduced supply of free agents also means reduced demand for roster spots to be filled.

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