The Mets are giving Jason Vargas a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Orioles are giving Andrew Cashner a two-year contract worth $16 million. The Blue Jays are giving Jaime Garcia a one-year contract worth $10 million, and what’s funny about that is Garcia is probably better than Vargas and Cashner, but, reasonable people may disagree. Clearly, reasonable people do disagree. And, I don’t know, maybe Garcia badly wanted to play for Toronto. Everyone operates under different circumstances, and of the three pitchers, only Vargas was a 2017 All-Star.

Vargas, I guess, was an All-Star in the classic sense, in that he was literally on the All-Star roster. But Vargas isn’t an All-Star in any other sense. He doesn’t have a track record of being an All-Star performer, and very few people would recognize him were he just walking down the street. The Mets aren’t signing Vargas because they think they can put him between Noah Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom. They know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. Vargas himself would understand he belongs at the back of a big-league rotation. That’s his talent level, and it always has been.

That’s not a criticism. The league needs back-of-the-rotation starters. The Mets in particular need reliable back-of-the-rotation starters, given their health problems, although it’s curious that Vargas is considered so safe even though he recently had Tommy John surgery on his elbow. All forms of pitching are dangerous. But anyway, Vargas is being installed to be a provider of half-decent innings. Let us now recall the season he had.

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So much talk of tanking. So much talk about teams allegedly not trying to win. I don’t really buy into the narrative so much — I think front offices, at least, are more urgently competitive than ever. But I will say there are a few teams in position to think about blowing it up. The Marlins? The Marlins have mostly already blown it up. Their rebuild is underway. I don’t really know exactly where the Tigers are. I know they’re not good. And then there are the Orioles. If there’s a trend, the Orioles have defied it. There’s a strong case to be made that the Orioles should have started selling already. But, dang it, they’re sticking together. And now they’re even adding Andrew Cashner.

The terms: two years, and $16 million guaranteed. There’s a third-year option, and incentives, and some of the money is deferred. We know that, if Cashner passes his Orioles physical, he’s going to start, because before now, the Orioles’ rotation depth chart read as such:

1. Dylan Bundy
2. Kevin Gausman

You can plug Cashner in, then. Holes still remain. The Orioles don’t look that good, in particular in a division that already has the Red Sox and Yankees. But if you’re not going to sell, you might as well do something else. Call it optimism or call it stubbornness, but the Orioles are going to give this a try.

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Among the players who’ll appear on next year’s Hall of Fame ballot, Mariano Rivera is likely to stand out as a no-doubter in his first try. He’s the all-time saves leader. He was dominant in the regular season and even more dominant in the playoffs. He’s regarded as the greatest reliever ever, and he did it all with just a single pitch.

Roy Halladay might not possess the same quantity of superlatives as Rivera, but he is worthy of enshrinement and there is little reason to delay his entry to the Hall past next year. Halladay’s untimely passing will likely bring a more somber tone to his candidacy. At this site, both Jeff Sullivan and Dave Cameron wrote touching tributes to Halladay’s career after his death. That said, Halladay needn’t benefit from sympathy or nostalgia to earn a place in the Hall. His case on the merits is very strong.

Based on the traditional measures alone, the argument for Halladay is decent, if not rock solid. Some notable facts:

• He has 200 pitcher wins and two Cy Young Awards. Every other pitcher to do so is in the Hall of Fame except for Roger Clemens.
• Of the 76 pitchers with at least a single Cy Young Award, only 15 recorded at least 200 wins and an ERA of 3.38 (Halladay’s career ERA) or better. Among that group, only Roger Clemens and Vida Blue (who pitched in a lower run-scoring environment) are absent from the Hall of Fame.
• In addition to Halladay’s two Cy Youngs, he finished second in the voting twice, third once, and fifth place on two more occasions. According to Cy Young Shares at Baseball Reference, Halladay’s total of 3.5 is behind only Roger Clemens, Randy Johnson, Greg Maddux, Clayton Kershaw, Steve Carlton, Pedro Martinez, Jim Palmer, and Tom Seaver.

So this is already a good start, but Halladay’s case goes well beyond these basic facts, too.

Halladay’s career was defined by greatness in an era dominated by hitters. Consider: since 1901, only 203 pitchers have reached 2,500 innings. Of those 203 pitchers, Halladay’s 3.38 career ERA ranks just 91st. But offense was hovering around record levels during much of his time as an active player. Relative to the era in which he pitched, Halladay’s actually prevented runs at a rate 24% better than average, and that mark actually ranks 15th since 1901. All 14 pitchers ahead of him by that measure are in the Hall of Fame except for Roger Clemens.

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So far this offseason, the Chicago Cubs have signed seven free-agent pitchers. That’s a lot. (According to ESPN Stats & Information, it’s actually the second-most ever behind the 2001 Rangers.) You may have heard of one of them: Yu Darvish.

Travis Sawchik has already written about who Darvish is as a pitcher, and how he and the Cubs needed each other, and I agree with most of that. I want to write about something else — namely, the signing’s impact on Chicago’s bullpen, and how it’s really rather bad news for one rather excellent pitcher: Michael Paul Montgomery.

The big reason for that, of course, is that Montgomery was, prior to Saturday’s news, projected as Chicago’s fifth starter. Following Sunday’s news, meanwhile, Montgomery is now projected as Guy Who Joe Maddon Uses for More Relief Innings Than You’d Exepect.

This second role was actually the one Montgomery played for much of 2017, throwing out of the bullpen in 30 out of 44 appearances, and averaging a bit over two innings in those games. Seven times, he pitched three or more innings in relief. Once, he threw 4.1 innings. No pitcher in the game who recorded as many relief innings also threw more innings per relief appearance in 2017.

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The players are mad right now. They are mad at owners for not spending and they are mad at union leadership for not anticipating the lack of spending this winter. The owners are also mad — or at least pretending to be — because the players aren’t signing the contracts that the owners want them to sign. Finally, the fans are mad. Mad at the owners for not spending, at the players for not signing, and at writers like me for not writing more about baseball.

What we all really need are actual games. We won’t have that for a while, of course — although the wait for a new collective bargaining agreement between players and owners will continue even beyond this season. Because the players have to wait years for that shot, there isn’t a whole lot they can do right now. Maybe that’s why they are voicing their frustrations to the press. A spring-training boycott, such as was rumored recently, is unlikely to get them very far. Disbanding the union is a rather drastic step for the moment.

However, there is one thing players could do right now that would help them in the future — namely, stop signing contract extensions before reaching free agency.

This year’s hypothetically amazing free-agent class is missing. Jose Altuve, Paul Goldschmidt, and Mike Trout all signed team-friendly contract extensions earlier in their careers. The same thing was true last year when Madison Bumgarner, Freddie Freeman, Buster Posey, Chris Sale, and Giancarlo Stanton would have all been able to offer their services to any of the 30 teams.

The year before that, it was Wade Davis and Andrew McCutchen in a free-agent class that was already very good. It might seem counterintuitive to propose that players should be trying to get to free agency without extracting larger guarantees from their teams when the problem right now is that teams are not spending in free agency, but getting more, higher quality players to free agency would help the players immensely.

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At the beginning of the offseason, Travis Sawchik suggested in these pages that, at a moment in the game defined by the presence of Haves and Have Nots, that the Cubs would need to sign right-hander Yu Darvish in order to retain their standing among the former group. Much later in the offseason — just a couple weeks ago, in fact — Craig Edwards asserted that the Cubs still needed to sign him.

As of this afternoon, however, the Cubs no longer need Yu Darvish. Because they already have him, is why. Please allow Ken Rosenthal to explain.

Given the strength of their offense, the Cubs were never in danger of failing to compete at some level this season. Chicago’s field players recorded the fifth-best WAR collectively among the league’s 30 clubs last season. They’re currently forecast to improve upon that finish, situated second at the moment in FanGraphs’ depth-chart projections for 2018.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Yesterday, Kiley and I ranked the prospects who graduated in 2017. As part of the that re-evaluation exercise, I came across a subset of players whom I thought merited a deeper dive. Many prospects “graduate” off of prospect lists but remain unfinished developmental projects who get bounced to and from Triple-A for an extended period of time. Others get hurt at an inopportune time and virtually disappear for years.

Nobody really covers these players in a meaningful way; they exist in a limbo between prospectdom and any kind of relevant big-league sample. To address this blind spot in coverage, I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting players who fall under this umbrella — players who have either made relevant changes or whose profiles have changed based on relevant info we could only have learned with a big-league sample.

As far as Future Value grades for this group are concerned, they look like this:

Now, on to the reports.

*****

Francis Martes, RHP, Houston Astros
Martes’s stuff is nasty enough that he’s very likely to play a significant big-league role even if he never develops starter’s command, and Houston obviously has a recent history of finding ways to maximize what guys with fringey command — like Lance McCullers and Brad Peacock, for example — are able to do. Martes sits 95-99, while his mid-80s curveball features a spin rate around 2600 rpm. Curveballs with that combination of velocity and spin are rare. Jose Fernandez, Ariel Hernandez, and Yordano Ventura are all recent peers by that criteria. Scouts think it could be a 70 curveball.

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This is not only one of the final installments of Prospect Week 2018, but also Sung Min Kim’s first piece as part of his February residency at FanGraphs. Sung Min is a staff writer for River Avenue Blues, the biggest independent New York Yankees blog on the web, and has freelanced for various publications including Deadspin, Sporting News, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and more. He can also be found on Twitter. He’ll be contributing regularly here this month. Read the work of all our residents here.

While I’ve been an ardent follower of Major League Baseball since middle school, my interest in the sport increased considerably when I began following the Asian leagues closely. There are three popular leagues in East Asia: Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) based in Japan, Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) based in Korea, and the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) based in Taiwan. I was “born into” the KBO because of my Korean nationality. I slowly learned more about the NPB, though, as I grew up and Korean stars like Tae-Kyun Kim, Samson Lee, Seung-Yeop Lee, etc., headed there to play.

At around the time I was becoming more well acquainted with the particulars of the aforementioned leagues, major-league teams also began showing greater interest in Asian talent. Daisuke Matsuzaka‘s move to Boston was particularly significant to raising the profile of Asian baseball in the States. Yu Darvish and Masahiro Tanaka made their own splashes by bringing posting fees to their respective NPB teams and earning big contracts right out of Japan. Hyun-Jin Ryu’s move to the Dodgers was a landmark event, too, as it represented the first time ever that a Korean-born KBO player landed a big multi-year deal with a major-league club. More recently, of course, the entire Shohei Ohtani storyline — which ultimately landed the two-way star in Anaheim — has unfolded in very public fashion. There are more I’d mention but I’ll spare you for now.

It’s clear that more attention has shifted to the Asian leagues’ top players. There are clear major-league talents on the east side of the globe, and some of them — mostly the star-level types in each respective league — have decided to forego the comfort of their domestic leagues to challenge themselves in a whole new culture.

Some of those experiments have worked out, some have not. It is not easy to predict how a particular player will do in majors because there are so many factors to weigh. Skill is one thing. There are also cultural adjustments, too, and subtle differences to which players must adjust on the field. For instance, early in his MLB career, Hideki Matsui had difficulty dealing with the two-seam-heavy approach utilized by some pitchers. It is difficult to become adequate in all these aspects right away — especially for those players who are expected to start. Nonetheless, many Asian players dream of playing in the majors.

So, here, I present a list — accompanied by scouting reports — of six prospects playing in Asia. For this list, I considered only those players who (a) would be available to leave Asia within the next three years (or, before the start of the 2021 season) and who (b) have expressed interest in coming to the MLB or have, at least, not publicly refuted such a thing. Some players, like top NPB shortstop Hayato Sakamoto of the Yomiuri Giants (dubbed as the “Derek Jeter of Japan”), prefer to stay in Japan. Sakamoto has been ML scouts’ favorite for a while, but it’s possible that he just wants to stay and remain a star of Japan’s most popular team.

Yusei Kikuchi, LHP, Saitama Seibu Lions

Kikuchi is all but guaranteed to appear in the States by 2019. Not only does he features an arsenal that would easily make him a starter in the majors, but also he has strongly expressed desire to come over to the US. Back in 2009, as a top high-school pitching prospect for Hanamashi Higashi (the same high school attended by Shohei Ohtani attended), Kikuchi attracted much MLB interest. For instance, the Rangers recruited Derek Holland to try to persuade Kikuchi to sign with Texas. However, Kikuchi decided to stay in Japan and was drafted in first round by the Seibu Lions, for whom he has pitched ever since.

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Over at Baseball Prospectus, it’s PECOTA day. Now, that means a whole lot of different things, but one of the things it means is that now BP gets to unveil its projected 2018 standings. Some years ago, I used to get extremely excited about seeing the first standings projections. Then FanGraphs decided to start hosting projections year-round. They’re always right here, and for months, that information has been based on the Steamer projection system. Pretty soon, well in advance of opening day, the ZiPS system will get folded in, to say nothing of remaining transactions. The point being, having projected standings is fun. They serve to keep the mind occupied with thoughts of baseball.

Projected standings aren’t just a toy for the public. I mean, the public ones are, but teams also have their own private projections, that might be better, or that might be basically the same. Team projections drive perceptions, and team projections drive transactions. We feel like we have a pretty good idea of which teams are situated to contend. We also feel like we have a pretty good idea of which teams are far away. Right now, in 2018, based in part on the projections and in part on what just happened a year ago, we have the sense we’re in an era of super-teams, which might be keeping the market slow. Other teams might not feel like they’re close enough to invest.

I love having access to team projections. I use them all the time for analysis and articles. But I feel like I should remind you of the limitations. This is something I could probably write every single year. I’m sure on some level you already know what I’m going to say. Projections are pretty good. They can also end up very, very far off.

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