If it seems like we’ve written about the Dodgers second base competition a lot this offseason, it’s because we have. Two months ago, I looked into the questionable depth the team had at the position; a few weeks ago, Eno Sarris revisited the situation to see whether it would present a problem. Now, barely more than a week before the team kicks off the season in Australia, there appears to be a winner, at least if you believe this beat writer or that one or that one, and it’s not $28 million Cuban import Alexander Guerrero: it’s former shortstop Dee Gordon, who has 3.2 career innings at the position.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Dodgers or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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Baseball, without question, is going to be a worse game without Mariano Rivera. It wasn’t just that Rivera was consistently excellent. It’s that he was also unwaveringly humble and gracious, being the rare sort of Yankee you could like even if you rooted for a team of non-Yankees. But Rivera’s retirement does, at least, open up some questions that previously wouldn’t have been up for debate. When it comes to picking the best at something, Rivera’s absence gives a chance to somebody else.

I was asked in my Tuesday chat to identify the new most dominant pitch in baseball. Before, the answer was automatic: Mariano Rivera’s cutter. It was that way for nearly two decades, as Rivera rode one masterful pitch to glory and a certain place in the Hall of Fame. Rivera never really declined, and his cutter topped the list because of his command, his results and his longevity. But now we’re able to entertain the idea of other pitchers and other pitches. With Rivera out of the picture, choosing another pitch isn’t blasphemous. The way I see it, there are two contenders.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers signed Cuban emigre and infielder Alexander Guerrero this offseason, with a view (it would seem) towards installing him at second base for the 2014 season. Because Guerrero didn’t participate in the most recent World Baseball Classic and because there’s little in the way of other extant footage of him and because there’s only so much his Cuban league stats can tell us — regardless of how responsibly they’re translated — there’s naturally an air of mystery surrounding him. Indeed, Guerrero’s two plate appearances during the Dodgers’ spring-training opener on Wednesday against Arizona were the first which offered competitive footage of him in any sort of broadly available way.

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The Dodgers have a problem at second base. The Dodgers don’t really have a problem. This’ll make sense soon, I promise.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Dodgers rotation from a fantasy perspective for RotoGraphs. At that time, the Dodgers had a pool of starters than went 10 deep. Now they have 11 potential starters. Most teams would be satisfied with 10 starters. They might look to add some minor league depth, like a Rodrigo Lopez type, but they probably wouldn’t give out any more major league contracts.

However, the Dodgers have reason to worry about their depth. Chad Billingsley is currently rehabbing from injury. Prospects Zach Lee and Ross Stripling might not be ready in 2014, or the Dodgers may prefer not to rush either pitcher. Stephen Fife is a decent swing man, but the Dodgers would probably prefer to avoid turning to Matt Magill. Josh Beckett and Dan Haren are penciled into the rotation, although both pitchers were less than stable in recent seasons. Beckett in particular is coming off a nerve impingement surgery that limited him to eight starts last season.

So what have the Dodgers done to combat the flakiness of their rotation depth? Why they’ve hired yet another pitcher who fits into the back of the rotation and comes with health concerns.

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Clayton Kershaw signed the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history on Wednesday. In doing so, he became the first player in MLB to agree to a long term deal for an annual average value of more than $30 million, so on a per season basis, he’s also the highest paid player in baseball history. And he got that deal a year before he was eligible to hit free agency, so this price reflects a discount over what the Dodgers believe he would have gotten with competitive bidding. Given these facts, it’s easy to look at this deal as a harbinger of escalating prices and further proof of significant inflation in Major League Baseball.

Interestingly, however, it’s really not that at all. I walked through Kershaw’s expected value about a half hour before the contract was announced on Wednesday, and my guess for the total price came out to $230 million over seven years, a little less than what he actually signed for, but also didn’t include the value to Kershaw of getting to opt-out after year five. Including that offsetting value, I think my guess was pretty decent.

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Yesterday, the Dodgers signed Clayton Kershaw to a seven year, $215 million contract, or, if you prefer, a six year, $195 million extension, as they already owned his rights for 2014 at an arbitration price of around $20 million. That’s the amount that the Dodgers have guaranteed to pay Kershaw anyway, but I don’t know that it’s really all that accurate to describe it in that way, because there’s a pretty good chance the deal is actually going to end up as a five year, $150 million contract (or an extension of 4/$130M) when all is said and done. That’s because Clayton Kershaw is the latest to join the recent trend and get an opt-out clause negotiated into his deal; he can choose to void the final two years of the deal after the 2018 season if he so chooses and become a free agent again heading into his age-31 season.

Kershaw joins teammates Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu in having received opt-out clauses from the Dodgers, so this is clearly something LA is comfortable negotiating into their deals in an attempt to outbid other suitors. Texas also gave two opt-outs to Elvis Andrus in his long term extension signed last year, so Kershaw is the fourth player in the last year to receive a guaranteed paycheck but also the right to reset the terms if he stays healthy and performs at a high level over the next few years.

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Over the last few years, a common thought experiment among nerdy baseball fans has been to imagine what Mike Trout would sign for if he was a free agent. He was the best player in baseball before he could legally drink, and if the market had to price a player of his ability and youth, $400 million wouldn’t be out of the question. You could even make a case for $500 million if the contract was long enough. But it was all just fun mental gymnastics, a hypothetical that didn’t exist in reality.

However, Mike Trout isn’t the only historically special player currently dominating the big leagues. Clayton Kershaw has also put up numbers that few his age have ever matched, and since he’s only a year from reaching free agent status, we’re about to find out just what the market will pay for a young superstar on a Hall of Fame track.

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Earlier this week, my esteemed colleague Jeff Sullivan took a look at major positional problem areas on contenders, and came up with several potential trouble spots. One of those ended up being second base for the Dodgers, and with good reason — they appear at the bottom of our second base projections, largely because no one has any idea what to make of Alexander Guerrero. As Jeff pointed out, Steamer has him down for only .220/.280/.330 and sees him as basically a replacement-level player, while ZiPS projects him at 2.5 WAR and .259/.324/.386. While Steamer and ZiPS are probably my two favorite projection systems, it’s so difficult to project incoming Cuban players that it’s probably not worth losing a lot of sleep over either line, and because of that questionable data Jeff says that this is a spot that “barely belongs” in his piece. He’s probably right, because we have no idea what Guerrero is going to turn out to be.

But while there’s obvious questions about how reliable the projections might be, the unavoidable truth is this: if Guerrero doesn’t work out or isn’t ready, the Dodgers have almost nowhere else they can turn, and so if this isn’t the worst situation for a contender in the bigs, it’s almost certainly the riskiest. Read the rest of this entry »