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After years of false starts and uncertainty, we’re finally here — the Diamondbacks are going to start storing their baseballs in a Chase Field humidor. The idea itself isn’t particularly new, and of course the Rockies beat the Diamondbacks to the punch by more than a decade and a half. But, well, this isn’t a race. Arizona took its time to get to this point, and Chase does happen to be the second-most hitter-friendly ballpark around. It’s behind only…Coors Field, which the humidor didn’t render neutral, but the humidor there is still serving a purpose.

When the Diamondbacks have talked about this installation, they haven’t so much indicated a desire to drive offense down. Rather, the goal seems to be to make the baseballs more “grippy.” Pitchers have complained about the balls in Arizona being slick, and that has a lot to do with the low relative humidity of the climate. Now, you can’t exactly help pitchers without hurting hitters as a consequence. But there’s also just more going on. A humidor wouldn’t change only the surface of the baseballs. Moving forward, Chase Field might no longer be a hitter-friendly environment.

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Me, I’m kind of sick of hearing about J.D. Martinez. I’m sick of hearing about all the free agents. All I want is for the ones who’ll get jobs to get jobs so that we can move on with all our affairs. Seems like Martinez is destined to end up in Boston. Arizona is reportedly trying to stay involved by playing with what present and future money they have, but you can never really tell what information is just out there because Scott Boras wants it to be. It would remain surprising if Martinez doesn’t spend 2018 in a Red Sox uniform. Someone will simply have to give in.

To Martinez’s credit, a lot of us probably do take him for granted. When you talk about free agency, you talk about the future, but Martinez has put together a remarkable past. At least as far as the recent era goes, Martinez is among the original so-called swing-changers. He’s a daily reminder that even the Astros don’t get everything right. And, since 2014, 289 players have batted in the majors at least 1,000 times, and Martinez has ranked fifth in wRC+, between Bryce Harper and Paul Goldschmidt. Martinez isn’t much of a runner, and he isn’t much of a defender, and he turned 30 years old in August. Guy can hit, though. He was perfect for the home-run era, even before the era began.

That’s an introduction about J.D. Martinez. Now let’s use him to talk about somebody else.

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Jeff Sullivan wrote last week that the DH just had its worst season. That was the main point of his piece. Along the way, though, Jeff also did some myth-busting with regard to how the DH spot is being utilized these days. There’s an emergent belief that the DH has become a revolving door on many clubs, used more often to keep players fresh and create roster flexibility, and less often to simply give a lone, defensively challenged hitter a full complement of at-bats.

What Jeff found contradicts this belief, however. Last season, the top-15 designated hitters in the AL accounted for 64% of plate appearance. Since 1973, though, the average for primary DHs is just 56%.

From Sullivan’s piece:

So designated hitters are hitting worse than ever not because of a transformation of the role itself but just because they’re hitting worse than ever.

While the collective production of DHs might improve in 2018, it’s still a bleak landscape, with only seven AL teams projected to produce a win or better from the position. The Mariners (3.0 WAR), Yankees (2.6), Indians (2.4), Athletics (1.8), and Rangers (1.2) account for the top-five DH teams. Their respective depth charts at the position are led by Nelson Cruz, Brett Gardner, Khris Davis, Edwin Encarnacion, and Shin-Soo Choo. The average age of those players is 34.2 years. While the DH position often allows for aging bats with diminishing defense to find their way into the lineup, there is hardly a youth movement occurring at the position. It’s possible the position is even weaker than in 2017.

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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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To answer your first question: no, there isn’t a slam-dunk, generational talent among the prospects ranked below. We’ll have to wait a little longer, it seems, for the next Bryce Harper to emerge. Nevertheless, the 2018 draft class is generally seen as deep and strong, particularly in prep pitching. There isn’t a player yet on whom we’d currently put a 55 FV (that is, the lowest grade received by the first 42 prospects on the recently published top-100 list), but almost every draft class ends up with a couple of those, and obviously these names will shift around during the season.

For reference, last year’s draft ended up with one low 60 FV and five players with 55 FV grades by the time the offseason arrived. So expecting three to five of the following prospects to emerge in the top 50 of next year’s Top 100 seems reasonable. As you might guess, the top 10-15 prospects are pretty tightly packed. With most of the early-season action occurring in Arizona, Florida, and SoCal, we’ll both be out to get lots of early looks this spring to quickly start sorting more out.

It’s too early to do a mock draft that would amount to anything much greater than a collection of guesses (here’s the draft order, for reference), but something to monitor is the presence of those clubs that lean risk-averse/analytic/etc. in the top half of the first round. In light of certain trends within the game — and, in particular, what appears to be a greater interest in near-ready, low-end-regular types — this could push college players (and, specifically, college bats) up into the high first round. Both Oregon State and Missouri State have TrackMan units at their home parks, so clubs will have multiple years of data on Madrigal and Eierman to aid their evaluations. Hitters from Virginia have benefited in much the same way from strong, large-sample TrackMan data in recent drafts.

Just as the recent minor-league top-100 list prominently featured the sons of Dante Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero, and Fernando Tatis, the lists that follow also feature quite a bit in the way of bloodlines. We have the sons of Jeff Conine, Troy Percival, David Weathers, and Bobby Witt, along with the younger brothers of Pirates Triple-A RHP Nick Kingham, Rays Double-A 1B/LF Joe McCarthy, Padres Double-A 1B Josh Naylor, and Blue Jays Triple-A CF Dalton Pompey. Kumar Rocker’s father, meanwhile, is Tracy Rocker, a former NFL defensive tackle and current defensive line coach for Tennessee.

We could have ranked more players or included more names for each list (especially projectable high-school arms), but we chose to limit ourselves in this preseason installment. Things will obviously expand as we get more information. We’ll have a slightly different presentation of the list than in years past, to more closely resemble the sort of information at what clubs are looking in draft rooms. We’ll both be at games starting this week and will keep you guys updates with tweets and InstaGraphs posts (along with longer posts when warranted) and updated rankings a couple more times leading up to the draft.

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Taylor Hearn is the top left-handed pitching prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates system. Long and lanky, the 23-year-old native of Royse City, Texas possesses a high-octane heater and a changeup that he considers his best pitch. He also has a background unlike that of any other player in professional baseball.

According to the young southpaw, his grandfather was the first African-American to attend Oklahoma State on a rodeo scholarship, and the first professional black cowboy. Dubbed “Mr. Black Rodeo,” Cleo Hearn joined the calf roping circuit in 1959.

The tradition was passed down, both within the family and throughout Texas. Robby Hearn followed in his father’s footsteps, and he went on to teach his own son the tricks of the trade.

“Growing up, it was kind of bred into me to do that,” Taylor Hearn told me. “I did it until I was 17. It’s still a big thing in Texas, including for African Americans. Cory Solomon has been in the national finals the past few years.”

Hearn doesn’t do much calf roping these days —“only now and then, because I don’t have the time” — but he does hope to get back into it down the road. For now, he’ll settle for (ahem) showing his girlfriend the ropes. Read the rest of this entry »

“You don’t want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run there’s so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization. But we have a lot of players who have reasonable salaries who contribute an awful lot who might put us in a position to consider it going forward and in the future… It’s not our preferred method. We would prefer to make a small deal and find another Jake Arrieta, but you can’t do that every year, either.”

– Cubs president Theo Epstein

The Cubs know the pitfalls of free agency.

Yet, as I wrote back in November and as esteemed colleague Craig Edwards also noted more recently, the Cubs needed Yu Darvish.

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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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