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How necessary is it for an MLB front office to pick a direction and stay the course? Based on the responses of 10 general managers I queried on Tuesday, there isn’t a simple answer. A lot of factors go into the decision to rebuild, especially when it’s a complete teardown. Ditto going all in to win now. That typically costs money — a bigger issue for some organizations than others — and often involves trading top prospects, which compromises the future.

A third option is to remain a middle-of-the-road team, not good enough to seriously contend, nor bad enough to seriously build for the future. Addressing short-term needs to go from 80 wins to 82, more often than not, is a recipe for baseball purgatory.

Here is what the executives had to say on the subject.

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Chris Antonetti, Cleveland Indians: “Each team has its own opportunities and challenges within its market. It’s incumbent upon the leadership within that organization to develop a path to success, and that path could look very different in one market than it will in another.

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Last spring, for the first time in a decade, maybe more, no pre-arbitration pitchers signed a contract extension taking away multiple free-agent seasons. There were a few decent candidates in Jacob deGrom, Sonny Gray, and Carlos Martinez, the last of whom just signed a contract extension of his own earlier this winter. None of those players signed last spring, however, and it’s a possible indicator of a chilling effect on these types of extensions. The lack of deals isn’t due to a lack of candidates, though. In fact, a few of the best pitchers in baseball might be prime for long-term extensions.

When attempting to characterize the recent history of such deals, it’s difficult to say what’s a trend and what’s a random event because only two to five players sign extensions of this sort every year. The recent drought might be a product of players and agents beginning to recognize how much clubs were benefiting from signing extensions with younger players. It’s possible, on the other hand, that teams were less likely to dole out guarantees when the outcome of the CBA was in doubt. When Madison Bumgarner signed his extension right as the 2012 season was starting, he was one of five young pitchers to do so. When Chris Sale signed his ahead of the 2013 season, he was the only one. Sale and Bumgarner’s contracts have proved to be two of the bigger bargains in the majors.

When the White Sox traded Chris Sale to the Red Sox for Yoan Moncada, Michael Kopech, Luis Alexander Basabe, and Victor Diaz, they weren’t just trading Chris Sale. The White Sox were also trading Chris Sale’s contract, which included a $12 million salary for 2017 and options for 2018 and 2019 totaling $26 million. If Sale hadn’t signed that contract, he would have been a free agent this winter and received $200 million. San Francisco has no interest in trading Madison Bumgarner — who would have also been a free agent this winter — while they’re contending, so his value to the Giants is greater as a player on the field than in a trade. His contract is similar to Sale’s and so favorable that it had some discussing whether the team should negotiate a contract extension out of fairness, which does have some precedent.

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The Yankees were trying last year, as silly as that may have been. They lacked the rotation muscle or offensive firepower to truly compete, but damn if they didn’t have a bullpen. That bullpen, combined with a largely mediocre roster, kept them just within spitting distance of relevancy until the very end. Even after trading Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Ivan Nova, the Yankees still managed to hang around and win 84 games.

They didn’t make the playoffs, of course. They did make Gary Sanchez into a national sensation, and they did bring Tyler Clippard and Adam Warren back into the fold for this year’s bullpen. Chapman came back, and then they signed two sluggers (Chris Carter and Matt Holliday) to extremely tradable one-year deals. The Yankees are the Yankees, so they brought back their well-known closer and his 100 mph fastball. They need to have star power at all times and must, at least, give the appearance of trying to compete. Those are the expectations that come with being the Yankees and having an owner named Steinbrenner. According to reports, they came very close to buying instead of selling last year.

An inspection of the team’s roster tells a different story. Last year’s team was brimming with veterans. It was a poor man’s win-now team built around the bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, and hope. This year, it’s built around a weaker bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, whatever’s left in Holliday’s bat, and hope that Sanchez can continue to terrorize opposing pitchers while Greg Bird immediately rebounds to 2015 form. That’s all while having an even weaker rotation than last year.

It’s probably not going to happen. Our projections have the Yankees finishing at .500 and tied for last place, and PECOTA foresees an ever-so-slightly better 82-80 finish. Basically, the Yankees appear to be the very definition of mediocre right now. They can try to sell fans on the idea that they’re going to be competitive, and in a way that’s sort of true. The team probably won’t be a total pushover, and if a few things here and there fall the right way, maybe they’re once again on the precipice of being interesting at midsummer’s time. New York would need their many young and relatively untested players all to hit the ground running if they really want to make the playoffs, and they’ll likely need a firecracker of a debut from Clint Frazier, too.

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You’re probably aware of the Dellin Betances arbitration case and the interesting comments Yankees president Randy Levine made afterward. FanGraphs’ Nicolas Stellini wrote about the situation over the weekend.

No player or team likes going through the arbitration. Both parties try to avoid the process if at all possible, as it can create animosity between the camps.

And if you’re a player, you’re perhaps increasingly motivated to avoid allowing a panel of arbitrators determine your salary. Historically, teams beat players in the majority of arbitration cases, according to data compiled by Maury Brown:

Moreover, Brown reported this week that the advantage in favor of the owners has widened in recent years. The process increasingly seems to favor clubs — in part, perhaps, because arbitrators remain behind the times in how they evaluate performance.

Consider this David Laurila Baseball Prospectus Q&A from 2012 with long-time arbitrator Roger Abrams. Abrams suggests that the information presented to arbitrators is typically “not quite sabermetrics” and that arbitrators are not “baseball specialists.”

DL: You used the phrase “not quite sabermetrics,” but can it be assumed that more advanced statistics are presented today than in years past?

RA: It’s a mixed bag. What you don’t want to do is confuse the arbitrators, and some of the sabermetric stuff can be rather confusing. On the other hand, arbitrators can understand the importance of a strikeout-to-walk ratio. They can understand why ERA is a critical stat as opposed to wins and losses, which are meaningless–the pitcher doesn’t win or lose the game; the club wins or loses the game. The pitcher is responsible for earned runs. That is very simple-minded sabermetrics, and that is helpful in salary arbitration. Of course, it’s all glossied up in the submissions, which, frankly, you don’t have enough time to read within 24 hours, let alone digest.

Now, maybe arbitrators are slowly changing how they evaluate performance, but, at best, it’s a slow process that’s probably not caught up to better ways of understanding and measuring player value.

At a time when owners are making gains in percentage of revenue share, the arbitration process — especially in early arbitration years — is one more force working against players.

So does that mean everybody would be OK just eliminating the arbitration system? I’m guessing the answer is “No,” but I do think the players union would benefit from replacing the current system with something that exists in other major pro sports — namely, restricted free agency.

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Over at the fantasy blog, they’ll be publishing their annual bold predictions soon. Those posts, as usual, will cater to the roto side of things. They’re fun to write. And, even though I’m no longer editing RotoGraphs anymore, I’d like to continue the tradition. So I’ve decided to do a version that’s aimed more at the real game.

Let’s stretch our imagination and make some predictions that are a little bit sane (they should be rooted in reality to some extent), but also a little bit insane (since the insane happens in baseball every year anyway). Back when I did this for fantasy, I hit 3-for-10 most years. Doubt I do it again, for some reason.

What follows are my 10 bold predictions for 2017.

1. Dylan Bundy will be the ace he was always supposed to be.
Once picked fourth overall and pegged as the future ace of the Orioles, Bundy had a terrible time in the minor leagues. Over five years, he managed only 111 innings between injuries. There was Tommy John, of course, but lat strains, shoulder-calcification issues and between-start bouts of elbow soreness have dogged him throughout, as well. At least he was good while he was in, with an ERA in the low twos and great rates to support those results.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Atlanta Braves 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 .302/.361/.442 in 145 MLB plate appearances.

Scouting Report
The first-overall pick by Arizona in 2015, Swanson barely played affiliated ball for the Diamondbacks after he was hit in the face by a Yoan Lopez pitch on the backfields in Scottsdale shortly after signing. Swanson, who still wears a face guard on his batting helmet, was traded to Atlanta that December in the Shelby Miller deal.

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Geography is a powerful force. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, for instance, Jared Diamond argues that geography is the most powerful force to have shaped civilization. Societies that have benefited from favorable geography and access to resources have enjoyed more prosperity than those that have not.

In baseball, geography has mattered quite a bit, too.

Generally, teams residing along the coasts are located in larger markets and enjoy more fans — which means they enjoy more paying customers, more advertising dollars and corporate sponsors, and greater TV deals, too. The Yankees, residing in the game’s largest market, own 27 World Series titles. Teams based in the fly-over country cities of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Milwaukee, have combined for 32 World Series titles, with the Cardinals alone accounting for 11 of those.

So perhaps the lasting legacy, the top achievement of Bud Selig, was ushering in an era of greater competitive balance that made geography and market size less deterministic. The small-market Royals won the World Series in 2015, and small-market Cleveland was one more timely hit away from doing so last fall. Twenty-one of the sports’ 30 franchises have advanced to the postseason since 2013, and every team has reached the postseason in the 21st century.

In the 1990s, competitive balance, the divide between the large- and small-market clubs, was a frequent talking point. In the latest round of collective-bargaining talks, it was not often the subject of discussion outside caps placed on international spending. For The Hardball Times last month, Gerald Schifman demonstrated objectively that “hope and faith” are at record levels in baseball. The majority of teams enter the season with a plausible path to at least the No. 2 Wild Card. I wrote in 2015, about how fly-over country was no longer irrelevant.

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Last week, I wrote up what I thought were the 10 best transactions made this winter, looking at teams that helped themselves the most with quality upgrades. Today, we tackle the flip side of that coin, and look at the moves that I liked the least.

However, because of the significant improvements teams have made in their decision-making processes, the reality is that this list simply lacks the magnitude of the best moves of the winter. It was really quite difficult to find even 10 transactions that I think did real damage to the franchises that made them, and the ones that ended up towards the end of this list are the kinds of boring little moves that most fans aren’t even going to realize happened.

Even at the top of this list, we’re looking at teams spending a little inefficiently on useful players who can help them win, with no real huge overpays or franchise-killing contracts that will be regretted for years to come. There were no “what were they thinking?” trades this year, no insane free-agent signings that show a huge gap between the market’s perception and a player’s on-field value. So, these are deals I liked the least in a winter full of mostly good moves. At this point, every team knows what they’re doing, and they just aren’t giving us much meat for these kinds of columns.

But symmetry says we have to publish it anyway, so here are the 10 moves for which I didn’t entirely care this offseason.

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Mike Montgomery threw the pitch that ended 108 years of frustration for Cubs fans everywhere. Three-plus months later, he’s in camp competing for the fifth-starter spot in Chicago’s rotation. If that doesn’t come to fruition, the southpaw will settle for being a valuable bullpen arm on a juggernaut.

A lot has changed in 12 months. Montgomery was a Mariner at this time last year — he came to the Cubs in July — and his old club wasn’t expecting much from him.

“Seattle basically told me I wasn’t going to make the team,” Montgomery said during the World Series. “I bet on myself. I said I was going to show up and earn a spot, and that I was going to pitch well. I had some success — I had some failures, too — but it was kind of my breakthrough.”

Eight years after being drafted 36th overall the Kansas City Royals, the now 27-year-old lefty finally stepped up his game. He made 47 appearances between Seattle and Chicago — all but seven as a reliever — and fashioned a 2.52 ERA over 100 innings.

An improved curveball was the catalyst. The pitch was a primary focus going into the season, and it became an even bigger one once Montgomery got to Chicago. Pitching coach Chris Bosio played a major role. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training is here, which means it’s time for the annual winter retrospectives. While teams that have been crowned the “winners of the offseason” are often overrated heading into the next season, the reality is that teams do make significant transactions that can alter a playoff race and, in some cases, can change the entire direction of a franchise. In this post, we’re going to look at the 10 moves that I liked the most this winter, in terms of either pushing a contender towards their goal of winning in the short term or a team making a move to significantly improve their long-term outlook.

Deals that move the needle to a larger degree get more credit on this list, so this isn’t necessarily just about the most efficient allocation of resources. As such, the moves at the top of the list are more of the big-acquisition types, while the round-out-the-roster bargains end up on the bottom of the list or in the honorable-mentions category.

Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the 10 moves I liked the least, and the traffic on these two posts will once again show that you guys like head-scratching far more than back-patting. But today, let’s give some kudos to the teams I think made the best moves this winter.

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