We don’t really know what to make of hitting coaches, but we know what to make of hitters, and we know what to make of Barry Bonds, so Bonds linking up with the Marlins is at least greatly intriguing. If you let yourself get carried away by your own imagination, you can see Giancarlo Stanton breaking Bonds’ own dinger record. Perhaps more realistically, it’s going to be interesting to see whether Bonds can tap into Marcell Ozuna’s considerable offensive reserves. With Ozuna sticking around in Miami after an active stretch of rumors, which way he goes will play a big role in which way the Marlins go.

For my taste, though, I’m the most captivated by Christian Yelich. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with Bonds, necessarily; I’d be equally captivated if Bonds were somewhere else. But, I think we know about and have observed Giancarlo Stanton’s ceiling. Marcell Ozuna has been good before, but I get the sense he’ll always be streaky. Christian Yelich seems steady, and he seems like he is what he is, yet I think his upside is massive. And I think Yelich stands a good chance of getting there. Quietly, Yelich has hinted at a star-level future.

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Only three batters last year recorded both 300-plus plate appearances and also a .300 isolated-power figure: Chris Davis (670 PA, .300 ISO), Bryce Harper (654 PA, .319 ISO), and Giancarlo Stanton (318 PA, .341 ISO). That’s merely one of the many possible ways to state an obvious thing — namely, that the Marlins’ right fielder is among the most impressive power hitters in the league. What else that set of criteria reveals, however, is that Stanton was limited by injury. Because if the plate-appearance threshold were raised to 319, his name would disappear.

In his five years as a regular, Stanton has averaged 512 plate appearances per season. Not the worst case scenario, certainly, but not ideal — and the results have been fantastic, regardless. If his projection (499 PA, 4.9 zWAR) seems a bit light relative to his prodigious talents, however, it’s the result of a somewhat modest plate-appearance forecast.

Examining Miami’s field players as a whole, one finds a group well equipped to produce wins at an average rate in 2016, with Dee Gordon (606 PA, 2.6 zWAR), Martin Prado (578 PA, 2.6 zWAR), and Christian Yelich (596 PA, 3.2 zWAR) all complementing Stanton. First base, meanwhile, appears to be the most immediate area of concern: even in a platoon, Justin Bour (501 PA, 1.1 zWAR) and Chris Johnson (443 PA, 0.2 zWAR) might exhibit some difficulty in separating themselves from replacement level.

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I’ll tell you what this was supposed to be about. Over the weekend, Howie Kendrick was in the news, since he re-signed with the Dodgers. I was going to take the opportunity to write about how Kendrick just about never hits a pop-up. It’s one of those things that helps explain why he’s been able to run high batting averages, and even though I know I wrote about this very thing like a year ago for Fox Sports, Kendrick didn’t hit a single pop-up in the most recent season. Nor did he hit a single pop-up in the previous season. So, by our numbers, Kendrick has gone more than two regular seasons without a pop-up, which is insane and well worth re-visiting. Who doesn’t like to read about the weirdos?

But, you know, ideas evolve, especially when you give them a few days to simmer. Kendrick, pretty clearly, is exceptional in this regard. However, he’s not unique. You might be thinking right now about Joey Votto, and Votto is also pop-up averse, but this past year there were just two regular players who successfully avoided pop-ups: Kendrick and Christian Yelich. This is fitting, because over the past five years, if you set a 1,000 plate-appearance minimum, Yelich and Kendrick own the lowest pop-up rates in baseball. They both feature phenomenal bat-to-ball skills, reflected by these numbers, and they’re valuable because of the extra singles they can scratch out.

So, Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. Yelich doesn’t hit pop-ups. By at least one source, neither hit a pop-up in 2015. Might it be possible to crown either the 2015 pop-up champion?

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Marlins Park opened to much fanfare four years ago, and while the team quickly abandoned what it had taken on as its new operational identity, there’s no abandoning a ballpark that fast. Not that the Marlins want to leave, anyway, but — love it or hate it — Marlins Park will be around for a while yet. One of the funny things about the stadium is that it took exactly one game for people to be left with a certain impression. That impression: it’s enormous. In the opener, Giancarlo Stanton hit into a couple warning-track outs, and Lance Berkman was one of many players to talk about the park to the media. Said Berkman:

“If they don’t move the fences in after this year, I’d be surprised,” Berkman said. “And I’m going two years as the over-under on that.”

He continued:

“It’s the biggest ballpark in the game,” Berkman said. “And people have tried that big-ballpark deal, and it never works. Detroit moved the fences in. New York (i.e., the Mets) moved the fences in. I mean, there’s a reason why it’s 330-375-400 (in most parks). That’s a fair baseball game. You try to get too outrageous, and you end up with something that I think is going to be detrimental to their ballclub. I mean, Stanton hit two balls that probably were two home runs. And they were both outs. And we won the game.”

To further Berkman’s point, Seattle and San Diego also later moved in their fences. In the end, Berkman was wrong about his estimate — the Marlins didn’t move in the fences after a year, or after two years. But they are now making changes after four years. Pretty much all the fences are being lowered, and maybe more importantly, they’re doing something about the vast center field. It’s taken this long, but like so many other newer ballparks, Marlins Park is taking a step toward neutrality.

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Catcher defense is all the rage, at least for some. For those of us who care deeply about catcher defense, this year has brought us glimpses of Statcast and Baseball Prospectus’ recently gathering of enough data to extend their pitch framing, blocking, and throwing metrics back as far as 1950 in some cases. We’ve always known about catcher defense, but our ability to measure and understand it has improved greatly in the last five years, and more advances are likely on the horizon.

This ability to measure something affects our perceptions not just of that thing, but of all other things related to that thing. As Ben Lindbergh recently noted, Mike Piazza was known as a horrible throwing catcher during his career and that colored his entire defensive perception. Yet our modern metrics look back favorably upon his blocking and framing. It’s important to note that we didn’t just learn about blocking and framing in 2015. It’s not as if baseball fans couldn’t conceive of their value in 1997, it’s just that the only thing we had rudimentary numbers for at the time was his arm. We could measure that and see it most clearly relative to the other skills, so it did the heavy lifting in our minds.
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Yesterday I wrote about Carter Capps, who last year was on his way to an almost impossible season before elbow trouble sent him off. The idea was to remind you of just what Capps was able to do over 30-odd innings, and in support of that, I noted that Capps had baseball’s most unhittable pitch if you set the minimum to 100 of a given pitch type thrown. That’s important — Capps’ slider is one of the very best sliders, on account of what he can do with his fastball.

But, we talked about how minimums are arbitrary. You can set them wherever you want, and, you know, 100 pitches is plenty, but you could look for more. For fun, why don’t we double the minimum? Here are the most unhittable pitches last year, for pitches thrown at least 200 times:

1. A.J. Ramos changeup, 34.8% swinging strikes
2. Will Smith slider, 29.5%
3. Carlos Carrasco curveball, 28.3%

At the 100-pitch minimum, Capps had a lead of about six percentage points over Ramos. At the 200-pitch minimum, Ramos had a lead of more than five percentage points over Smith. Ramos isn’t a freak in the way that Capps is a freak, but you could just as easily argue Ramos is more impressive since he doesn’t do anything to challenge the rules. A.J. Ramos just pitches, pretty quietly, and pretty quietly, he’s thrown a changeup as good as almost anyone else’s.

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I’m not going to lie to you — I didn’t think much of Dee Gordon. Two years ago, I thought he was barely a big-leaguer. Even last year, when the Dodgers sent Gordon to the Marlins, I thought the Marlins were buying high on a utility sort. I was critical of the move when I wrote up the trade, and I felt pretty strongly, and now it’s been another year, and the Marlins have signed Gordon to a five-year deal worth $50 million. And now it’s not a case of the Marlins overpaying. It’s a case of Gordon having proven me wrong. The Dee Gordon that exists now is considerably better than the versions that have come before.

Overall, it’s not like the player profile has changed that much. Gordon puts the bat on the ball, and he puts the ball on the ground, and his legs take him toward first faster than some cars take people to work. Gordon will forever be built like someone who could fit in a suitcase, so you can’t expect any kind of power, but the selling point is his mobility. He can move as a hitter and he can move as a defender, so his game is almost about pure athleticism. Gordon has all the same general skills — he’s just added some polish, and in order for that process to occur, he had to leave Los Angeles for Miami. Only there did he meet the man who could get the most out of his tools.

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We don’t talk a whole lot about minimums, even though we’re always using them. Sometimes the minimums are obvious, but other times, they’re completely arbitrary. For example, let’s use a minimum of 60 innings pitched last season. Going from there, you could say the Yankees have assembled something hilarious, when you sort pitchers by strikeout rate:

1. Aroldis Chapman, 41.7% strikeouts
2. Andrew Miller, 40.7%
3. Dellin Betances, 39.5%

If you were to just bump the minimum down to 50 innings, though — which would be perfectly defensible — then you get an intruder to spoil the party.

1. Chapman, 41.7%
2. Miller, 40.7%
3. Kenley Jansen, 40.0%

Adjusting minimums is one of those ways you get to sort of manipulate the statistics. If not that, directly, then you get to manipulate statistical arguments. And, you know, while we’re playing around with minimums, why don’t we just drop the minimum to 30 innings, for fun, and-

1. Carter Capps, 49.2%
2. Chapman, 41.7%
3. Miller, 40.7%

You forgot about Carter Capps. Un-forget about him. See, at the end of this post, I have a question for you. I want to know your guess for Capps’ 2016 strikeout rate. It’s a simple and straightforward poll, but before we get to that, we need to talk about Capps so you remember fully what he’s all about.

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There’s a pretty dramatic difference between the two leagues. Anything, of course, could go on to happen, but the American League and the National League are looking at some wildly different 2016s. In the AL, you’ve got a whole gradient of could-be or would-be playoff squads. No single team appears to be dominant, and no single team appears to be a non-contender. Everyone should have some kind of chance, and there’s currently no obvious favorite. In the NL, meanwhile, there are two tiers. There are the clear contenders, and there are the others, those being the teams either admittedly rebuilding or the teams that should be. People talk about “tanking” as an industry problem. The bad teams are all clustered together.

In between the two NL tiers, there are, I think, two clubs caught in the middle. Two clubs that would fit in the AL picture, two clubs that could end up going either way depending on certain breaks. One of them is the Diamondbacks, who have spent the offseason trying to beef up. And then there are the Marlins, who have too many good players to be bad, but too little depth and reliability to be great. The Marlins want to be a contender, though. Believe it or not, Jeffrey Loria hates to lose. So now the Marlins have addressed a team weakness on the free-agent market, spending pretty big to lure Wei-Yin Chen. Chen is no one’s idea of a major splash, but he is, at least, a healthy starting pitcher, which is something the Marlins have sorely lacked.

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