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These are our current projected standings. Meanwhile, this will, at some point, become our updated playoff-odds page. When that second page is updated, you’ll notice some small differences when compared to the first, as the projected records on that page will take into consideration the various team schedules. That will make for a post of its own! Because it can be worthwhile to examine schedule strength. Not all baseball schedules are created the same.

What follows here is maybe a sneak preview, or maybe a shortcut. It’s at least related, because what I’ve done is figure out projected division strength. The math almost couldn’t be simpler. Up there, I linked the team projections. In the plot below, I’ve averaged them in appropriate groups. Somehow people think of me as a baseball expert. Anyway, let me say this: As of today, it looks like the AL East is baseball’s toughest division. The AL West is close behind. And the AL Central looks like relative garbage.

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During the former’s most recent appearance on FanGraphs Audio, Eric Longenhagen and the host of that program played what they called the Over/Under Prospect Game. The rules of the game are discussed in greater detail within the pod episode. In short, though, this is how it’s played:

• Contestant A nominates a rookie-eligible player.
• Contestant A also sets an over/under figure for that player’s WAR in 2017.
• Contestant B chooses the over or under.

The results of that experiment are published here. But why this current post exists is because multiple readers suggested that they, too — with a view to holding at arm’s length the burdens and worries of life — would like to participate in the Over/Under Game, as well. So what this post does is announce the existence of such a game for readers of FanGraphs.com.

Play the Over/Under Prospect Game: Home Edition by clicking here.

For this edition of the Game, Longenhagen and I have set over/under WAR figures for 10 players, five batters and five pitchers. What sort of batters and pitchers? Rookie-eligible ones, is what kind — specifically, the rookie-eligible ones who’ve received the highest plate-appearance and innings-total projections per this site’s depth charts.

The rules of the Home Edition are as follows:

1. Choose the under or over for each prospect listed.
2. Choose an innings total for Ty Blach — as tie-breaker in event that multiple contestants finish with most correct guesses.
3. The winner will receive a gift certificate for Barrio Queen in Scottsdale, Arizona, equivalent to price of pitcher of sangria plus tax.

Ballots for the Home Edition of the game will be accepted until Sunday, March 5, at 11:59pm ET. Any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments section below. Also don’t hesitate to listen in breathless, real-time action to the making of the Home Edition on FanGraphs Audio.

Play the Over/Under Prospect Game: Home Edition by clicking here.

It’s that time of the year again. Baseball America recently published their top-100-prospects list, as have Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law and MLB Pipeline. Eric Longenhagen will be putting out his top-100 this spring, too. Below, you’ll find my KATOH projection system’s take on baseball’s most promising rookie-eligible players.

As usual, hitters far outnumber pitchers on these lists, by about three to one. The reason for this, I think, is two-fold. Primarily, it’s just that even the best pitching prospects are risky. They get hurt; they lose velocity; they move to bullpen — all with little notice. Even the pitchers who do pan out are less likely to sustain their success over several years than their hitting counterparts. Secondly, KATOH does not directly account for pitchers’ velocity (or any other measure of “stuff”). If I were able to include a measure of fastball velocity, for example, I imagine most of the top pitching prospects would project more favorably. There isn’t an obvious scouting analogue for hitters that is glaringly omitted by the numbers.

The first top-100 list ranks prospects by KATOH+, which takes into account players’ performance, age, height and ranking on traditional prospect lists. This is the more “accurate” version of KATOH. As it did previously, this incorporates a player’s rank on Baseball America’s top-100 list. However, this version also folds in Eric Longenhagen’s FV ranking for the players who weren’t ranked by Baseball America, ensuring borderline top-100 guys aren’t dinged as hard as non-prospects.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the New York Mets farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .324/.374/.459 between High-A and Double-A in 2016.

Scouting Report
When Rosario was a teenager, he was a messy amalgam of limbs, athleticism and clearly present baseball instincts that were all wholly unsupported by a lack of physical strength. As he has started to fill out (it was easy to see, even back in 2012, that he was going to) and gotten stronger, he has become more explosive, his actions more refined, and he’s begun to hit. And indeed, at just 21 years old with more room for mass on the body, Amed Rosario has just begun.

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Last year, we joined up with the Pitch Talks crew for a three-city U.S. tour, and had a blast in Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago. The response was clear, so instead of just hitting up a few cities this year, the tour is expanding to 16 dates, and we’re covering a good chunk of the country from April through August. Here’s the current tour schedule.

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The very real psychological condition known as the “yips” was on display in the brightest of spotlights: Game Seven of the World Series last fall. The Indians tried to fluster Jon Lester, whose troubles throwing in any direction other than toward home plate had become well known.

After making 98 pick-off attempts in 2010 and 70 in 2011, Lester made just five in 2012, seven in 2013, and none in 2014, according to SportingCharts data. He didn’t make a single pick-off attempt over the course of 66 consecutive starts until this one on April 13, 2015:

The issue isn’t only tied to pick-off attempts. Lester has also struggled when fielding his position, as seen on this throw from April 17, 2016:

Lester’s issue is the most well known and publicized in recent years, but it’s not the only case. This spring, Blake Swihart has struggled throwing the ball back to the mound, though Swihart is reportedly making some progress on that front.

Blake Swihart getting better with throwing back to the pitcher, but still has occasional issue. #redsox #wbz pic.twitter.com/5tJZr5X4Wj

— Dan Roche (@RochieWBZ) February 19, 2017

I personally watched and reported on Pedro Alvarez’s 24 throwing errors in 99 games at third base in 2014, a development that necessitated a move down the defensive spectrum from third to first base.

In 2013, Alvarez hit 36 home runs and played an above-average third base, according to defensive runs above average (1.8). He recorded 3 WAR. But after his struggles with throwing in 2014, after he moved to first and struggled there in 2015, he was then viewed largely as a DH last offseason. He had to wait until March to sign a one-year deal with the Orioles last spring. This spring, he remains unsigned in a market that values bat-only players less and less. Baltimore attempted to play Alvarez at third base in spots in 2016, but he was still not over the throwing issues: he recorded two throwing errors against five assists in 53 innings at the position.

The yips have cost Alvarez millions and might play a role in prematurely ending his career. The condition did end the career of Pirates broadcaster and former Pirates pitcher Steve Blass. The yips played a role in derailing the pitching career of Rick Ankiel, who said in a recent interview he drank vodka before a start in 2000 to “tame a monster” that “didn’t fight fair.”

There’s something inherently tragic about an otherwise healthy athlete failing to fulfill one of the most basic obligations of his profession. It can be uncomfortable to watch a pitcher such as Lester become vulnerable in the center of the infield. To watch a player like Alvarez inexplicably lose the ability to make routine throws is difficult to comprehend. While I had explored the issue as a newspaper reporter, I wanted to understand more about the condition and how teams might be able to ameliorate it. So last week I spoke to one of the few players who has suffered through the condition and beat it: Steve Sax.

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Byron Buxton was drafted second overall in 2012. Between that point and the loss of his rookie eligibility last season, he was eligible for four rounds of preseason prospect lists. Almost universally, he appeared at or near the top of those lists. Consider, for example, his place among the rankings published annually by Baseball Prospectus during that time frame:

• 2013: #8
• 2014: #1
• 2015: #1
• 2016: #2

Barring injury, the 2017 season is going to be the 23-year-old Buxton’s first full one in the majors. Under traditional circumstances, there would be a round-the-clock coverage of this budding superstar’s march to the top of every relevant leaderboard. Yet we find ourselves in non-traditional circumstances for a couple of important reasons.

To refresh your memory: in the summer of 2013 — Buxton’s first full season as a professional — we were only a year-plus into the Mike Trout experience and we were decidedly not taking it in stride. J.J. Cooper, writing for Baseball America, stoked the fire of comparisons between Trout and Buxton. As baseball fans are wont to do, the crowd took Cooper’s consideration of the subject to another level, and the layman’s impression of Buxton went from “really good outfield prospect” to “might be another Trout.” Buxton built his own hype in 2013, racking up a .944 OPS across multiple levels. In his first full year out of high school, Buxton’s numbers were great and people were giving reports to prospect writers suggesting he was truly elite.

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On Friday, we ran an interview with Rockies outfielders Chris Denorfia and Charlie Blackmon on the subject of launch angles and bat paths. I’ve asked a few other players for their opinion — we’ll hear from them in the near future — as well as a few managers and coaches. Craig Counsell and Jeff Banister are among them.

“Telling a player to hit a pitch harder isn’t a very good coaching tool,” Counsell told me. “The same goes for hitting it at certain angles. But it is appropriate feedback to tell them something was a well-struck ball, when they’re in the cage: Those are balls that are going to go a long way. A hitter probably knows that, but it’s still good feedback.”

The former infielder went on to make an interesting observation. Read the rest of this entry »

Dellin Betances made medium-level news a week ago when he lost his arbitration case. He’d been asking for $5 million — less, for example, than Trevor Rosenthal had made in his first crack at arbitration the season before. The Yankees, meanwhile, submitted a $3 million figure. The case went to arbitration, and the Yankees won. Randy Levine then took the medium-sized news and turned into big news by acting like a fool. While the $2 million difference might not seem like a big deal for Betances when he’s still guaranteed to receive $3 million, the affect on Betances’ finances in the coming years will be significantly greater.

Arbitration isn’t exactly the simplest of systems. Teams submit blind amounts, and if the parties can’t agree on a deal beforehand, they go to hearing. The FanGraphs glossary explains the process in slightly more detail, but if the player and team go to hearing, the arbitration panel decides on either the team’s figure or the player’s figure, with no option to choose a number in between. This makes the arbitration a winner-take-all scenario. If arbitrators could choose a number in the middle, settlements would be even more likely, simplifying the process and lead to far less debate. They can’t, though, and that means that arbitration decisions have a significant impact.

Also relevant is how service time fits into the process. Players’ salaries gradually increase based on service time, rendering the previous season’s salary quite relevant, as it represents the starting point for a raise. A few different researchers have gone through and figured out exactly how much salaries increase during arbitration. (Here’s a good one, for example.) As a general rule, though, it comes to something like a 50% increase in salary every year. Small differences, especially early in the arbitration process, compound to make bigger differences over time.

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Eno took some time on Wednesday to talk about last season’s unluckiest changeup. Today, we’re going to talk about a changeup that wasn’t unlucky so much as it was woefully misplaced. It was a first-pitch changeup that was as middle-middle as one can be.

That’s where the title comes in. Let’s roll the film.

You may remember this dinger from a recent article here about Giancarlo Stanton. Statcast says it was the longest blast of the year, at a staggering 504.35 feet. It’s pretty easy to understand how this happened.

Three variables are at work:

1. Giancarlo Stanton is more machine than man, a T-800 who warped back in time and stole a baseball bat from an innocent bystander instead of boots and a leather jacket.
2. Coors Field is the Cape Canaveral of baseball.
3. Chad Bettis missed his spot with a changeup pretty badly.

I don’t need explain the first point very much. You know all about Giancarlo Stanton and what he’s capable of doing. You’ve seen him lay waste to baseballs. His muscles are made of steel rebar. He’s been doing this for years, and if we’re lucky, he’ll do it for a while longer.

I also don’t need to explain point No. 2 very much. Coors is in Denver, and the 20th row of seats in the upper deck at Coors is exactly a mile above sea level. That means the air is thin, which means the ball flies further. This is good for guys like Stanton and bad for anybody who stands on the pitcher’s mound. Unfortunately, that includes Bettis.

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