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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

We’d also like to extend our condolences to the friends and family of the late Daniel Flores, as well as the Red Sox international scouting department. We were excited to watch Daniel play baseball and can’t imagine what those who anticipated watching him grow up have dealt with since his untimely passing.

If you were to look just at Chavis’s 2016 stats and with the knowledge that he was only a viable defensive fit at first base, you’d call him a non-prospect. This dip in production was brought about by a broken finger, and in 2017, Chavis was back to taking monster hacks that produce comfortably plus raw power. He’s going to strike out, and he isn’t especially patient, but he has a good chance to get to most of that power and do enough damage to profile at first base. Chavis has the arm for third base but lacks the horizontal mobility to profile there in a vacuum. Boston has shown a willingness to put up with less lateral range on their infield, but a left side of the infield which features Chavis and Xander Bogaerts together is probably too heavy-footed for comfort, even with proactive defensive positioning. Chavis projects to first base and has dealt with an oblique injury this spring.

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I don’t know if you just watched the Royals and the Tigers. Probably not. Neither team is very good. The Royals won 1-0. Jakob Junis was terrific. The teams combined for just eight hits, and seven of them were singles. Somewhat more notably, the teams combined for a ground-ball rate of 32%. The average launch angle in the game, according to Baseball Savant, was a hair over 22 degrees. What does it mean? By itself, hardly anything. The game, however, was not by itself.

Nothing that follows ought to come as much of a surprise. We’ve been talking about air balls and launch angle for a couple of years. It’s not just fan sentiment, either; we know that more and more players are buying in. And, based on the data from this most recent spring training, it seemed as if something was going to happen. More balls were being hit in the air in the spring, suggesting we could see the same when the games started to count. There have been hints. We know that hitters are less fond of grounders than ever.

Even so, I didn’t expect quite the numbers we have. You don’t need to remind me of how early it is. Yet, already, there’s evidence of a significant batted-ball shift.

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The 2017 season was a disheartening one for the Blue Jays. After back-to-back trips to the ALCS in 2015-16 — their first two postseason appearances since 1993 — they faceplanted out of the gate, losing 11 of their first 13 games. They never reached .500, going an improbable, Sisyphean 0-8 in games that would have evened their record. Amid injuries to Josh Donaldson, Russell Martin, Aaron Sanchez, Troy Tulowitzki and others, not to mention the collapse of Jose Bautista, they finished fourth in the AL East with a 76-86 record, their worst showing since 2013. This winter, they stayed out of the deep end of the free-agent pool, making a few low-cost additions plus a handful of trades that hardly qualified as blockbusters. Yet as of Opening Day, they were projected for 84 wins, the league’s fifth-highest total. What in the name of Cito Gaston is going on?

To these eyes, the Blue Jays’ projection is like the flip side of the Brewers’ one that raised my eyebrows a few weeks ago. Recall that the Brew Crew quickly turned around from their rebuilding effort and won 86 games last year while remaining in the NL Wild Card hunt until the season’s final weekend. They added Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich over the winter, and didn’t lose anyone of importance save August acquisition Neil Walker, yet their projection called for just 78 wins.

As for the Blue Jays, when one considers that they had the majors’ oldest lineup (weighted average age of 30.9 years according to Baseball-Reference), and that even with the jettisoning of Bautista, all of this year’s projected regulars save two are on the wrong side of 30, it’s at least worth wondering why our projection system (which is driven by Steamer and ZiPS but with manual judgment in terms of distributing playing time) is so keen on them.

As I did for the Brewers, here’s a position-by-position comparison between our Depth Charts (as of March 29, Opening Day) and last year’s splits. All rankings are AL-only:

The first thing to note is how distressingly godawful the Jays were at so many positions last year. In terms of WAR, they ranked among the league’s bottom four teams at five positions, including dead last at catcher and shortstop, and received 0.5 WAR or less from six different positions including DH, with a net of 0.1 WAR for those half-dozen spots. Only at first base (Justin Smoak) and third base (Donaldson) did they receive significantly above-average work; in the latter case, that was despite the majors’ top third baseman playing just 104 games at the position due to a calf strain. Thankfully, they also received above-average production from their pitching staff, without which they might have been relegated to the independent Canadian-American League.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

Peterson had a great junior year at Oregon in 2017, showing four good pitches and throwing more strikes than is typical for a pitcher his size. He sits 90-92 with heavy sink, will touch 95, and his fastball plays up because of good extension. He made heavy use of a slider that garners mixed reviews depending on if you’re talking to a scout (who consider it a 50/55) or someone looking at a Trackman readout (40/45), but it missed Pac-12 bats and should be fine even if it doesn’t spin a whole lot.

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Ian Happ had a solid rookie season with the Chicago Cubs in 2017. The switch-hitting outfielder slashed .253/.328/.514 and went deep 24 times in 413 plate appearances. He learned a lot of lessons along the way, and they began early with an influx of high heaters.

“I was pretty successful in the first week or two,” said Happ, who logged 10 hits in his first 28 big-league at bats. “Then I started seeing a lot of elevated four-seamers. It took me a long time to figure out how to hit that pitch.”

The method he adopted was antithetical to the launch-angle swing.

“Belt-high four-seam fastballs, especially when guys have ride, or something that looks like it’s jumping at you… that’s a pitch where you need to be able to adjust your swing plane in oder to handle it,” explained Happ. “You have to be flatter. You almost have to be above the baseball and attacking with a downward plane. That’s the only way to be direct and get on that pitch, which is different than hitting an off-speed pitch or something low in the zone where you can kind of create a little more lift.” Read the rest of this entry »

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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A week ago today, the author of the current post published his own contribution to FanGraphs’ positional power rankings — an examination, specifically, of designated hitters. In the context of the positional rankings, DH occupies a slightly uneasy place. For one, the position (or non-position, as it were) doesn’t actually exist in the National League, which means the pool of players is necessarily smaller. Also, attempting to understand the contributions of a DH in the context of wins presents some difficulties. On the one hand, owing to the absence of any defensive responsibilities, designated hitters are subject to a robust negative adjustment in the calculation of WAR. On the other hand, though, hitters who are deployed in the DH role tend to hit worse than when playing the field — what analysts typically characterize as a “DH penalty.”

While one, duly motivated, could dedicate some time and energy to improving upon the extant methodology for evaluating the position, it’s also true that good hitters, when utilized in a DH capacity, tend to be well acquitted by WAR, poor hitters less so — a point illustrated by the image below.

Here one finds the chart that accompanied the aforementioned power-rankings post. Teams further to the left are projected to produce more wins out of the DH spot in 2018; teams on the left, fewer of them. The Yankees and Red Sox, who employ Giancarlo Stanton and J.D. Martinez, respectively, are expected to fare well this season. The Mariners and Indians (Nelson Cruz, Edwin Encarnacion), too.

It’s the rightmost bar of this chart that probably deserves some attention, because it largely concerns Your 2018 WAR Leader.

The White Sox were forecast, just a week ago, to receive the fewest wins from the DH position of any American League club — and not just the fewest wins, but actually negative wins. Certain current events might serve to cast that projection in a curious light.

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And just like that, the winter of our discontent is almost over. Tomorrow, all 30 teams celebrate Opening Day, and their fans with them. But before play begins, we at FanGraphs will observe our annual tradition of attempting to predict what will happen this year, before we commence our other annual tradition of getting some things wrong. Last year was a mixed bag. Astros? Nailed it. Cubs and Dodgers? Aren’t our moms proud! Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger, Rookie of the Year winners? Can’t say we saw that coming.

We gathered predictions from writers across our family of blogs; what follows are the results.

The American League

The American League predictions are marked by their overwhelming sameness. Of the 40 ballots cast, a full 29 have the Astros, Indians, and Yankees sitting atop their divisions come the season’s end. Eight others feature the Astros and Indians but swap in the Red Sox for the Yankees. That isn’t so surprising: we currently project Houston to win 100 games, while New York, Cleveland, and Boston check in at 95, 94, and 93 wins, respectively.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

60 FV Prospects

Hitters like to shorten up against Sixto after he’s blown well-placed, sinking, upper-90s gas past them for strikes one and two, which leaves them vulnerable to any of his three viable secondary offerings later in at-bats. Sanchez sits 95-99, has touched 102, and possesses advanced command. He has a long, cutting slider in the mid-80s and a two-plane curveball, both of which flash above-average, but his best secondary is a ghosting, mid-80s changeup which embarrassed hitters five years older than him at Hi-A last year.

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