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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Los Angeles Dodgers 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)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Recorded 34.6% strikeout and 6.9% walk rate at Low-A.

Scouting Report
The ease with which Yadier Alvarez delivers 100 mph fastballs is as unsettling as it is beautiful. Triple-digit fastballs are becoming more common but they usually involve significant visible effort. Alvarez throws 95-plus and looks like he’s settling down to take a nap. He’ll touch 101 and generally sits 96-99 and 94-97 later in starts. His fastball command is below average, as Alvarez has issues maintaining his delivery’s timing and struggles to get on top of his fastball consistently. But the grace in the delivery and Alvarez’s overall athleticism point toward significant development in this area and there are signs that it’s already begun to come. Alvarez cut his walk rate in half after moving from the Arizona League to the Midwest League while his strikeout rate held firm. Scouts who saw him late in the year complimented his ability to throw strikes, something he wasn’t doing consistently as late as June.

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Free agency is officially underway, and odds are good you’re going to spend the next few weeks thinking about who your team should sign, or not sign, depending on the faith you have in your team’s front office. To help with those endeavors, we’ve created a couple of free agent leaderboards for your perusal.

Free Agent Hitters

Free Agent Pitchers

As you know by now, this isn’t a particularly great free agent crop. Only three of the 75 pitchers on the list posted at least +3 WAR last season, and only seven of the 78 hitters got over +2.5 WAR. This is a free agent class of role players and depth pieces, not franchise-altering stars.

But role players are necessary too, and there are some useful players on the market. With these leaderboards, you can sort and filter to your heart’s content, looking for specific skills or traits that might fit your team’s needs.

For instance, does your team need a corner outfielder who can hit left-handed pitching? Well, click a few options, pick “vs L” from the splits drop-down, and all of the sudden, you have this, and can see that Franklin Gutierrez put up a 151 wRC+ against lefties in 329 PAs over the last three years. You shouldn’t expect that to be his production level going forward of course, but a guy like Gutierrez has some value to a team as a part-time player, and these leaderboards will help you find guys like him.

Or maybe you’re looking for a power arm for your bullpen. Everyone knows Arodlis Chapman is the hardest thrower on the market, but do you know who had the second highest average fastball velocity in this class in 2016? Well, now you can: Neftali Feliz, followed closely by Daniel Hudson. Goes to show you need a bit more than a 96 mph fastball to be a good reliever, I guess.

Anyway, we hope you find these tools useful. Because the player lists were created manually, we may have missed a few guys here and there, so let us know if you find any free agents not on the list, and we’ll get them added.

And stay tuned the next few days, because we’re going to be rolling out a list of the Top 50 free agents in this class, as well as providing the results of the contract crowdsourcing project to estimate what players may sign for this winter. Even in a weak class, there are still some bargains to be found.

The biggest reliever contract in baseball history was handed to Jonathan Papelbon in 2012 when the right-hander received four years and $50 million from the Phillies. The biggest yearly salary ever recorded by a reliever remains Mariano Rivera’s $15 million figure from both 2011 and 2012. This year, both of those records will surely fall.

After all, we’ve just concluded a postseason in which starters pitched the fewest innings per start in playoff history. And a reliever won the American League Championship Series MVP award. And relievers, in general, receive much more per win than players at any other position. Against that backdrop, this offseason features two elite free agents in Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen — only a year after Darren O’Day was the best reliever available in November.

It’s a combination of forces that makes you wonder how high the price might go for their services. But before we start predicting nine-digit contracts for either of these closers, we also have to remember that a deal like that would represent a doubling of the previous high.

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Two relevant facts here are indisputable. One, in this most recent season, the Angels were bad. They won 74 games. By BaseRuns, they “should have” won 71 games. That made them about as good as the Twins and the Braves. Horrible season. Two, baseball fans love a blockbuster. It’s not even unique to baseball. Sports fans love a blockbuster. They love seeing them, they love thinking about them, and they love talking about them. Big trades might be even more exciting than big games.

Connect the points and you end up with Mike Trout trade proposals. The Angels narrative is being driven by the Mike Trout fantasy — that is, the fantasy of Mike Trout being available. This comes up in every one of my chats, and my chats aren’t special. As the reasoning goes, the Angels are bad, and they’re probably going to stay bad, so why don’t they trade Trout to re-stock an empty system? It’s actually kind of convincing. The Angels’ system is in legitimately bad shape.

Yet the major-league product isn’t so terrible. Something not enough people seem to understand: The Angels are under no obligation to blow things up. In large part because of Trout, the Angels are in half-decent shape. Perhaps even better than that. They have a real path to the playoffs as soon as next year.

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Last year’s free-agent class was one of the strongest we’ve ever seen. With legitimate aces like Zack Greinke and David Price heading the class plus young outfield talent in Jason Heyward and Justin Upton, a bona fide slugger in Chris Davis, along with a host of other mid-rotation starters and solid position player options, teams spent roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars on free agents in 2016 salaries alone. This season lacks talent at the top and depth in the middle, but that doesn’t mean we should expect to see a lot less spending. Nobody is likely to receive $200 million, but teams have plenty of money to spend and it has to go somewhere.

One way to think about how much money teams have to spend this offseason is to consider the salaries departing from their rosters. The chart below measures the money that has disappeared from clubs’ payrolls. To calculate each figure, I began with every club’s Opening Day obligations from 2016 and identified those players making at least $1 million in 2016 who either (a) were traded during the season or (b) have become a free agent in the meantime. I then added up the salaries of the departing players. This shows how much teams are losing in salary based on departures alone, with data gathered from Cot’s Contracts.

We often think of payroll coming off the books as a benefit for clubs. Player contracts, especially large ones, tend not to be very valuable in their final years. Think about the Los Angeles Angels, for example, who enter the season with $60 million less in obligations. The team had large commitments to pitchers Jered Weaver and C.J. Wilson. While both of those pitchers were good at points of their careers, they provided little in terms of on-field value last year. The Angels, if they so choose, can now take the roughly $40 million formerly invested in those pitchers and put it to better use. If we work under the assumption that a win costs $8.5 million in free agency, the Angels could conceivably improve themselves by around five wins by spending that money on contributing players.

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“What was working for you today?” someone asked Rays starter Brent Honeywell after his appearance in the Arizona Fall League’s Fall Stars Game. “Everything,” he said matter-of-factly, and it’s hard to argue. He struck out five in two scoreless frames and showcased his entire arsenal of impressive pitches. A few minutes later, he took me through those pitches, and discussed what’s working and what requires more attention in order for him to contribute in Tampa next season.

Let’s start with the least sexy pitch in his arsenal, the curve. It’s the newest piece, and it’s the one with which the righty has been tinkering this fall. He threw one on strike one to Anthony Alford to demonstrate what the pitch can mean to him — called strikes. “Nobody’s going to swing at a first-pitch breaking ball,” he said. “But I’m not going to throw it a whole bunch.”

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The offseason is upon us. Free agency officially begins tomorrow, as the five day exclusive window ends, and teams and agents are free to begin officially negotiating with anyone they choose. But as we’ve seen in past years, the start of the free agent period doesn’t really set off a signing frenzy; the baseball free agent market moves pretty slowly for most players.

And that’s because teams generally want to kick a bunch of tires before committing to one path, and that tire-kicking includes exploring the trade market, figuring out who is buying and who is selling. The last few years, the league has seen a drastic shortage of sellers, as teams within spitting distance of .500 decided to fancy themselves as contenders thanks to the addition of the second Wild Card and the financial incentives related to making a deep postseason run. The reality of 22 or 23 teams trying to add talent while only six or seven teams were looking to unload veterans made for a challenging trade environment, and resulted in a bunch of teams deciding that free agency was the way to go last year.

This year, though, the free agent market stinks. There just isn’t the kind of impact talent out there that teams are used to being able to throw money at, so the trade market is likely to be even more active than usual. And yet, we might be in a similar position in regards to the ratio of buyers and sellers.

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You have a choice. Either I give you $100 right now, or you can let me flip a coin. If the coin lands on heads, I’ll give you $250. But if it lands on tails, I’ll give you $20. I’m using a fair coin, so the expected value of flipping the coin is $135 based on the 50/50 odds it lands on heads or tails. If you like risk or are a risk-neutral person, it’s an easy decision to take your chances with the coin because the odds are strongly in your favor. If you’re a risk-averse person, however, you’re more likely to take the sure thing because $135 isn’t a whole lot more than $100, and $100 is a whole lot more than $20.

Let’s add another wrinkle. It’s the same choice, but if you choose the coin flip, you have to wait a month. The dollar amounts are the same, but now there’s a time component. To get the value of the coin flip, you need to apply a discount factor to the $135. For some people, that discount factor is pretty close to one, but it might be much lower if you’re strapped for cash and the $100 would dramatically improve your life in the present.

Major-league players face a much higher stakes version of this decision when their club comes to them with a contract extension. Do they take a sure thing now, or do they wait and gamble on themselves? While we’re focusing a lot on the 2016-2017 free-agent class this month, there are 13 players who could have been free agents for the first time this year but instead chose to cash out early by signing extensions. Did they make the right decision?

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For the last three years, the overwhelming majority of baseball fans in Los Angeles have been unable to watch the Dodgers play on television. In 2014, the team partnered with cable provider Time Warner to launch SportsNet LA, a network dedicated to the franchise. Citing the excessive price that Time Warner was demanding from other cable providers for the rights to air SportsNet LA — such as an initial asking price of roughly $5 per subscriber per month — other service providers like AT&T, DirecTV, and Cox have subsequently refused to carry the network.

As a result, since 2014, upwards of 70% of Los Angeles residents have not had access to televised Dodgers games. Indeed, because Time Warner only offers cable services in parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in many cases even if fans were willing to change cable providers to gain access to the Dodgers, they were nevertheless still unable to do so because none of the available providers in their neighborhood carried SportsNet LA.

Given its high asking price for the network, it’s not surprising that the public has typically painted Time Warner as the bad guy throughout this ordeal. According to a lawsuit filed last week by the U.S. Department of Justice, however, Los Angeles sports fans’ anger may have been misdirected, as it now appears that DirecTV — now owed by AT&T — may in fact be largely to blame for the Dodgers’ three-year blackout across much of Los Angeles.

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Jason Heyward struggled with the bat all year. The expensive free agent acquisition had a .631 OPS during the regular season, and he went 5 for 48 during the postseason. He didn’t struggle with perspective.

Heyward pulled his Cubs teammates together during the Game 7 rain delay, reminding them that they were baseball’s best team. He told them, ‘We’re going to win this game.”

Nine days earlier, on the eve of the World Series, he was thoughtful while espousing the quality of his club. Read the rest of this entry »