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 »

Mike Piazza didn’t cross the 75% threshold required for election into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Still, at 62.2% in his second year on the ballot, he’s probably close enough that his election is eventually assured. And that’s good, because he was the greatest offensive catcher in baseball history.

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The best position on a contending team is center field for the Angels. This is because that’s where Mike Trout is. There’s no single greater roster advantage in baseball right now than possessing Mike Trout. So, writing about the worst of something might seem needlessly negative, or bitterly critical, but there’s no sense in writing about the best of this, because everybody already knows. Already, we struggle with not writing every single FanGraphs article about Mike Trout. This is indirectly about Trout, in that it’s about positions that project to be the anti-Trout.

The long and short of it is that I wanted to know which position projects to be the worst out of teams looking to contend in the season ahead. It’s impossible to do perfectly, but there’s a lot at our disposal. We’ve got staff-generated team-by-team depth charts, and corresponding Steamer projections. We’ve got projections on a team level, allowing us to identify teams with legitimate hopes. If nothing else, this should get us in the ballpark, as we search for areas of considerable need. The worst position on a contender is a position that probably ought to be addressed, soon.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. 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 / Baltimore / Boston / Cleveland / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / San Diego / St. Louis.

Batters
It seems possible, given the ZiPS projections below, that Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez and Matt Kemp won’t quite be worth, on a dollar-per-WAR level, the nearly $65 million they’re owed collectively in 2014. That’s not ideal for the Dodgers, probably. The eight wins they’re forecast to produce, however, still count as eight real wins — and appear likely to be supplemented by contributions from players (Hanley Ramirez and Yasiel Puig, most notably) who are creating lots in the way of marginal value.

Of some interest to readers will be the projection for Cuban emigre Alexander Guerrero. ZiPS is optimistic (2.5 WAR in 665 PA); Steamer, less so (0.2 WAR in 630 PA). A street fight between rival systems, is what appears to be unfolding.

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There was a rumor the other day that Shin-Soo Choo turned down a seven-year contract offer from the Yankees worth $140 million. I’m not sure I believe that, but Scott Boras has been aiming high, as Scott Boras does. There are reports out that Boras is seeking Jacoby Ellsbury money, and in his most recent chat, Dave figured that Choo would end up with Jayson Werth money. The message is this: Choo is the impact guy who remains on the free-agent market, and he’s going to get paid. Plenty of teams are after him, and in the end he should get at least six years, and something in the vicinity of $20 million per. While he doesn’t come with Ellsbury’s potential for all-around value, Choo gets on base an awful lot, and what’s more important than getting on base?

A number of teams are interested in Choo, meaning a number of teams are looking for a quality corner outfielder, and have money to spend. Due to the laws of this world and this league, only one of the interested teams will actually get Choo, since there’s only just the one of him. But there is an alternative out there, and it doesn’t take the form of Nelson Cruz. The alternative is almost as good a player, and from all indications he’d be pretty easy to get. All you’d need to do is place a call to the Dodgers.

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The Cardinals have reportedly signed Mark Ellis to a one-year deal. Ellis will turn 37 next season, but played well enough the last couple of years with the Dodgers that he was sure to find a job. The question is whether the Cardinals really needed him given the presence of Kolten Wong. The answer has to do with the Cardinals’ position as a contender and their concern with depth.

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Last year, in the electronic pages of FanGraphs+, I wrote this about Juan Uribe: “There’s your run-of-the-mill ‘being terrible at baseball,’ and then there’s the performance art piece put on by Juan Uribe in 2012.” I talked about how the only two players who had a worse wOBA (with at least 450 PA) over 2011-12 were Chone Figgins and Jeff Mathis. I laughed at how Dodgers manager Don Mattingly had buried him down the stretch in 2012, refusing to start him after August 14, though he remained active; I ended, snarkily, by saying “What can be said about Juan Uribe at this point that hasn’t been already been said about other great disasters in world history? At least the Titanic had a band providing entertainment until the very end.” 

Mean, perhaps, but then again, it’s difficult to express just how phenomenally atrocious Uribe had been in the first two years of his contract. When the 2013 season began, it seemed something of a minor miracle that Uribe had even survived the winter, a fact seemingly more due to the team’s inability to find an insurance policy for Luis Cruz or a suitable first base backup for Adrian Gonzalez than anything. If Scott Rolen had accepted the team’s offer to come play third base, Uribe maybe doesn’t make the roster. If Cruz hadn’t imploded so spectacularly, Uribe maybe doesn’t see July. Either way, if his career somehow even extended past 2013, it felt all but certain it would be on non-roster invites for the rest of his days.

Over the weekend, the Dodgers reached an agreement with Uribe to come back for two more seasons. They guaranteed him a reported $15 million, and they reportedly had to beat out at least the Marlins and Rays to do so. The world’s a twisted place.  Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s any baseball story that’s just never going to end this winter — other than, “Jack Morris should/shouldn’t be in the Hall!” and “Alex Rodriguez fights with MLB!” — it’s almost certainly going to be “the Dodgers have too many outfielders, who will they trade?”

It’s been a slowly building narrative for more than a year now, and now that Yasiel Puig has proven himself to be a quality major league player and top prospect Joc Pederson is just about ready to join him, it’s deafening. That means Matt Kemp is going to the Blue Jays… or the Rangers… or the Mariners… or the Red Sox… unless Andre Ethier goes to the Mets or an unlikely Puig trade blows up the baseball world else first. It’s both a fun and frustrating time of year, where every report that one team may possibly have communicated with another about some player sends fans into a frenzy. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports.com is reporting the Los Angeles Dodgers have signed Dan Haren to a one-year, $10 million deal that has a vesting 2015 option if Haren works at least 180 innings next season. Last month, when we did our crowdsourcing for Haren, Carson Cistulli presented the following Haren facts:
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