I don’t think the Dodgers deserve that much credit for signing Brandon Beachy. It’s not like it’s a particularly innovative idea, and a whole host of teams were interested in landing him. The Dodgers beat out almost everyone in available resources, and they beat out almost everyone in immediate outlook, and they had this other advantage, as well:

Beachy said deciding on the Dodgers was easy, mostly because the surgeon of his second Tommy John, Dr. Neal ElAttrache, is also the Dodgers’ team doctor.

“It’s the best place to be,” Beachy said. “I have a lot of faith in Dr. ElAttrache and the training room’s view for bringing me along meshes well with that.”

Beachy was drawn to the Dodgers, and the Dodgers were sufficiently drawn to Beachy to get him to sign. Given everything, the Beachy pickup hardly qualifies as any kind of genius, but for one thing, the upside is readily apparent — the upside of these things is always apparent — and for another, Beachy makes for an interesting depth play. That point isn’t Beachy-specific. Beachy and pitchers like him make for interesting depth plays.

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Each year, it seems, there’s a hot new Cuban making an impact in the big leagues. In 2011, we got our first full season of Aroldis Chapman. In 2012, it was Yoenis Cespedes in Oakland. The next year, Jose Fernandez and Yasiel Puig finished 1-2 for the NL Rookie of the Year. In 2014, Jose Abreu won the AL version for the White Sox, while the Red Sox and Cubs got brief late looks at Rusney Castillo and Jorge Soler, respectively. This winter, we’ve already seen the Diamondbacks pick up Yoan Lopez and Yasmany Tomas, and we’re currently waiting to see just how mind-blowing the bonuses Yoan Moncada and Hector Olivera (among others) will wring out of rich, talent-hungry teams.

Cubans in baseball aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. According to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, 185 Cuban-born players have taken at least one plate appearance since the start of the 20^th century. That includes some very well-known names like Luis Tiant, Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, and Tony Perez, as well as more recent non-elite starter types including Adeiny Hechavarria, Yunel Escobar, Yasmani Grandal, and Yonder Alonso. And also, Yuniesky Betancourt!

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the reasons why. Baseball keeps restricting access to spend on young, non-union talent. Cuba’s evolving political situation has made it something of an untapped pipeline. The consistent recent jackpots on these largely unknown Cuban players – remember, when Puig was signed, the reaction was largely, “wait, who?” – have made teams more willing to jump into the market, and the prices, it seem, keep going up.

That will be the trend until one of these players busts, that is, and that’s generally been the feeling around these investments. They keep working, so why not? Which is fine, except that we’ve already seen two relatively expensive Cuban imports well on their way down that “this isn’t going to work” path, and I’m not talking about Dayan Viciedo or Yunesky Maya.  I’m talking about Dodger infielders Alex Guerrero and Erisbel Arruebarrena, who combined to receive $53 million from the team last winter, and who currently couldn’t possibly find themselves less in the team’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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I returned a few days ago from a three-day trip to the Dominican to see top July 2nd prospects (more on that in the coming weeks) and also a workout that had 18 Cuban players in it. Two of those 18 were big-time prospects, the well-known and hyped 29-year-old 2B Hector Olivera and the brand new name, 18-year-old righty Yadier Alvarez.  Here’s my notes and video on those two, along with some quick updates on the other two notable Cubans on the market, 2B/3B/CF Yoan Moncada and 2B Andy Ibanez.

For reference, in my top 200 prospects list that is coming next week, these Cuban players aren’t included on the list, but Moncada would be 8th, Alvarez would be 57th and Ibanez would be in the 150-200 range, while Olivera is ineligible due to his age and experience.

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I suppose I should preface this by saying I have no scouting background, and I don’t pretend to. What I know about Joc Pederson comes entirely from a.) things written by actual, paid scouts and b.) numbers. This post will be using the latter, and not the former, in an attempt to produce an MLB comparison for Pederson, the Los Angeles Dodgers rookie. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, great. If it’s not, well, thankfully you haven’t spent too much time reading this so far, and there are myriad scouts’ opinions on Pederson. For instance, here are a couple excerpts from our very own Kiley McDaniel, an actual paid scout:
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As I reported on twitter moments ago, MLB sent a memo to clubs detailing the new process for Cuban players to go from leaving the country to signing with an MLB team. The short version is that super prospect Yoan Moncada is eligible to sign now, after a maddening long delay.

For those new to this topic or if you just want a refresher, here’s a recap of my coverage of this Moncada saga from the start:

– October 3, 2014: Moncada is confirmed out of Cuba, but no one knows where he is.  We assume his whereabouts will become clear soon as he’s the most hyped prospect to leave the island in years. Here I first quote the common “teenage Puig that can play the infield and switch hit” comp and break down all the implications about who can sign him, who is likely to pony up the big bucks, game theory implications and more.

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I lived through the 2008 Seattle Mariners. I’m not sure quite how I did it, but I paid attention to that damn team on a daily basis, and I wrote about that damn team on a daily basis, and while I’m sure there were lots of things I cared about and thought were significant in the moment, one of the only things I truly remember about the year, and especially the second half of the year, is Roy Corcoran. Corcoran was a nobody, a journeyman reliever, but he became one of the rare positive stories on a team that went right down the crapper. One of the few upsides of following a team through a disaster year is you uncover these little surprises who otherwise never would’ve gotten a chance. You get to stop caring about a team and start caring about individual players and individual stories, and 2008 put Roy Corcoran on my radar.

And then he fell off my radar the next year, but, anyway. Last year’s Rangers had their own disaster season. It was a disastrous season for different reasons from why the 2008 Mariners had a disastrous season, but it was a catastrophe almost from the start. And as a result, in time, unfamiliar players started to show up in the bigs. I never knew anything about Jake Smolinski. The same goes for Dan Robertson and Tomas Telis and Spencer Patton and Lisalverto Bonilla. And the Rangers also introduced one Ben Rowen. Now, the Rangers are no longer in possession of said Ben Rowen:

In addition to veteran LHPs Erik Bedard & David Huff, #Dodgers also sign 3B Jarek Cunningham and RHP Ben Rowen to minor league deals.

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 23, 2015

…and maybe that’s meaningful. They had him, and didn’t think enough of him to keep him. But I’d like to show you why you should be rooting for Ben Rowen. Daniel Brim already did, having beaten me in a race, but Rowen came up in my morning chat, and had it not been for the Rangers’ 2014 nightmare, Rowen wouldn’t have won me over with his unconventional…ness. They don’t make many like this guy.

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Hyun-Jin Ryu isn’t the best Dodger starter, because Clayton Kershaw exists. He’s not the second-best Dodger starter, because Zack Greinke exists. If you can’t even make a case for being one of the two best starters on your own team, it’s going to be very difficult to make the case that you’re one of the better starters in the game. “No. 3 starter” just doesn’t have that much appeal to it, as recent third bananas like Doug Fister or Anibal Sanchez can attest to.

Being fortunate — or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it — enough to be paired with the truly elite starters in the game shouldn’t affect how you’re viewed, of course. Any player should be judged on his own merits and compared to the full population of pitchers, not just those who happen to share a clubhouse. In the same way that it’s foolish to think that Maikel Franco and Addison Russell are equal players just because they are ranked as the No. 2 prospect for their respective franchises, you can’t assume that Ryu and, say, Ricky Nolasco are of equal value because they’re the third-best starter on their team.

All of which is a long way of getting to the point, which is this: Ryu has proven himself to be one of baseball’s outstanding pitchers in his two seasons in America, and none of us — us here at FanGraphs included, unfortunately — seem to talk about him that way.

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I want you to look at three pictures. They’re all from the same play, and it would appear to be a fairly unremarkable play. But it was a remarkable play indeed, for reasons I’ll share with you right after the pictures. If you want to make a game of it, when you look at the pictures, try to figure out the significance before I tell you what it is!

Let’s go in order. What other way is there? One:

Two:

Three:

Some of you have surely guessed why this matters. Most of you, presumably, haven’t. This is a sequence in which Howie Kendrick popped up. More specifically, this features the very last time that Howie Kendrick popped up. For timing purposes, I don’t spot useful visual clues — Jonathan Villar, Marwin Gonzalez, and David Martinez all played for the Astros in 2014. But, see, I can cheat, because I know the answers. This didn’t happen anywhere in 2014. This happened in the middle of September in 2013. Howie Kendrick hasn’t hit a pop-up since September of the year that came before last year.

So Kendrick didn’t pop-up once over a full season. Now, he wasn’t the only one. Last year, Shin-Soo Choo didn’t register a pop-up. Neither did Joe Mauer. Christian Yelich only popped up on the very last day of the season. But, Kendrick batted a lot more often than Choo or Mauer did. And, this isn’t just a 2014 phenomenon. It’s not just that Kendrick didn’t pop up — it’s that Kendrick has always only very seldom popped up. And that’s an indicator of the very thing that makes him successful at the plate.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Detroit / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / San Francisco / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
This is a strong and curiously diverse Dodgers team. Among even just the starting eight one finds young stars (Yasiel Puig) and older stars (Adrian Gonzalez); stars who’ve aged surprisingly well (Jimmy Rollins) and stars who’ve aged less well (Carl Crawford); veterans who probably merit greater acclaim (Howie Kendrick) and also whatever Juan Uribe is. While diverse, the starters are uniform by one standard — namely, the likelihood that they’ll produce wins at an average rate or better.

Of some interest is the (likely) platoon in left field of Crawford and Scott Van Slyke. The latter, despite a huge body, has produced slightly above-average fielding numbers in the corner outfield and is projected to do so again in 2015. It’s with some combination of great vengeance and furious anger, as well, that he has punished left-handed pitchers, recording a 151 wRC+ over about 200 career plate appearances against them. No player — in particular, no player who lost his rookie eligibility as a 26-year-old — ought really to be expected to continue hitting at a rate 50% better than league average. His success against lefties, however, at least helps to explain how ZiPS forecasts him to produce the second-highest wOBA on the club.

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