The recent promotions of Kris Bryant, Addison Russell and Carlos Rodon have created a good deal of buzz these past couple of weeks. Deservingly so. Kiley McDaniel ranked the trio first, third and eighth respectively in his pre-season rankings. Any time a prospect of that caliber gets called up to the big leagues, it’s certainly newsworthy.

But there was another promising, young prospect who recently got the call. But his debut was somewhat overshadowed — at least outside of the New York region — by Russell and Rodon, who both debuted on the same day. As you probably guessed by the title of this piece, that player is 24-year-old Mets catcher, Kevin Plawecki.

Plawecki got the call to replace Travis d’Arnaud, who broke his finger after taking a pitch on the hand. d’Arnaud’s expected to miss at least the next month, but that timeline could easily grow longer given the unpredictable nature of hand injuries. Plawecki — and not the objectively handsome, yet offensively challenged, Anthony Recker — will pick up the lion’s share of playing time in d’Arnaud’s absence, meaning Plawecki will play a crucial role for the surprisingly-competitive Mets.

Plawecki may not have the cachet of the other guys who got called up over the last couple of weeks, but he’s a pretty well-regarded prospect in his own right. A supplemental first round pick in 2012, Plawecki placed 40th on Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list last winter, and landed in the middle of just about every top 100 list out there. Read the rest of this entry »

A fun question from last Friday’s chat:

Comment From Zob Lerblaw
How many games do the Mets have to get ahead of the Nationals and by what date to believe they may win the east? 15 games by June 1?

Since the question was asked, the Mets lost two of three over the weekend against the Yankees. So, if you’re a believer in momentum, the Mets have a little less than they used to. On the other hand, since the question was asked, the Nationals lost three of three against the Marlins. So while the Mets lost ground to Miami, they gained on Washington, which is the team they’d be most concerned about. At this writing, with the season almost 12% over, the Mets lead the Nationals by a full seven games.

The Mets are a worse baseball team than the Nationals are. I’m not 100% certain that’s true, but I’m definitely more than half certain that’s true. There is some point at which the season record becomes more meaningful than the projected numbers, but that point comes nowhere close to as early as April, and just last year the Nationals won almost 100 games. Any system that overreacts to the early start is a bad system; from this point forward, the Nationals should realistically be expected to be terrific.

Yet, the season still feels new. It feels like just yesterday that the Nationals seemed to have the biggest division edge in baseball. Already, that edge is almost all gone. The NL East is on the verge of becoming a coin flip.

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The Mets can’t lose, and having won 11 straight games on their way to a 13-3 record, they own the best winning percentage in baseball. On Monday, I pointed out that we have to take them seriously as contenders because of this hot start, as those wins aren’t going to be stripped away in the future even when the Mets stop playing this well. But, while the wins-in-the-bank argument is still valid, there is a pretty decent counterpoint to that argument; the Mets have essentially been borrowing from their overall expected win total by playing a collection of lousy opponents so far.

Among the 16 games they’ve played this season, we find three against a depleted Nationals team that started the year with a Spring Training roster, six games against a Braves team that projects as one of the NL’s weakest squads, four games against a mediocre Marlins team that might be worse than expected, and three against the Phillies, everyone’s pick for the worst team in baseball. In addition, 10 of their 16 games have come at home, so while home field advantage isn’t a huge factor in baseball, they have gotten a slight bump from a disproportionately low number of road games.

So, yes, the Mets have been beneficiaries of a very easy schedule so far, but how much should we have expected them to win based on their opponents to date? This is actually something we can answer now, since we publish pre-game odds for every match-up in baseball on our scoreboard page. These odds take into account the actual line-up and starting pitcher for that day, so we’re also accounting for the fact that their games against the Nationals included match-ups with Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Jordan Zimmermann; facing those guys is not the same thing as facing the Nationals when they’re throwing Doug Fister or Gio Gonzalez, with no disrespect intended to two quality pitchers who just aren’t quite at that level.

By looking at the difference between a team’s average game odds for the year and their expected rest-of-season winning percentage from Opening Day, we can get a decent idea of a team’s quality of opponents. So, with some assistance from Sean Dolinar, that’s exactly what I did, and the results can be seen in the graph below.

Teams above the line have had an easier schedule, teams below somewhat tougher.

The numbers confirm what we’d expect; playing a steady diet of the Marlins, Phillies, and Braves has indeed given the Mets the easiest schedule of any team in the big leagues to date; their average game odds have put them at an expected .535 winning percentage, up 30 points over their pre-season .505 mark. The other team who has seen a 30 point spike in their average game odds compared to their pre-season expected winning percentage? The 12-4 Royals, who have baseball’s second best record. It is not a coincidence that the two teams who have started the strongest have also played the softest schedules of any team in baseball; quality of opponent matters.

But again, what we really care about is the magnitude of the factor, and with a .535 expected winning percentage based on average game odds, the Mets are still trouncing their expected record. Having a weak slate of opponents would have suggested that we think the Mets should be 9-7 after this stretch, not 13-3. This isn’t the kind of variable that explains the entirety of the Mets success so far, and we can’t just wave away 13 wins in 16 games as the sole product of having played a weak schedule. The weak schedule explains just one of their extra five wins.

And it’s not like a slate of weak opponents is any kind of guarantee of success. Of note, check out the Brewers in that graph; they had a pre-season expected winning percentage of .481, but have had average game odds of exactly .500. When you look at their overall opponents — six against PIT, three each against STL, CIN, and COL — you might not think it was a relatively easy ride, but they got really lucky in their starting pitching match-ups against the Pirates: two starts each from Vance Worley and Jeff Locke, plus a call-up start by Casey Sadler, and then one tough game against Gerrit Cole.

Misisng both Liriano and Burnett makes those games against the Pirates easier match-ups than you might think, and Andrew McCutchen sat out one of the contests as well. The Reds and Rockies aren’t very good, so combine those seven games with easier-than-expected match-ups against the Pirates, and the Brewers have actually had a pretty easy go of things as well. And yet, even after getting a good draw to start the year, they’re 3-13, and their season is effectively over already. The Mets have taken advantage of weak opponents; the Brewers inability to win the games they’ve played suggests that they might be even worse off than we think.

Likewise, the Marlins (.500 pre-season expected record, .527 average game odds) have also benefited from playing the Braves and Phillies, at least theoretically, but they haven’t capitalized on those games the same way the Mets have. While people like to cite record versus winning teams as some kind of true barometer of roster quality, the reality is that playoff teams usually just pound bad teams into the ground, then try and hold their own against the decent or good teams. The Mets and Royals have done exactly what they needed to do thus far; beat the pants off of lousy opponents.

So, yes, the Mets have had an easy schedule. No, they don’t get to keep playing the Braves, Marlins, and Phillies all year, and they will find the road more difficult when they travel to face some better opponents. But the Mets low quality of opponents to date doesn’t cancel out the fact that they’ve played .812 baseball against a slate of games where we expected them to play .535 ball, and the difference between their current winning percentage and their game-odds expected winning percentage is still the largest in baseball. No team has outperformed expectations more than the Mets, even after you adjust for the fact that they’ve played the Marlins, Braves, and Phillies 13 times.

As it stands this morning, there are five teams in the National League that have at least a 50% chance of reaching the postseason, according to our Playoff Odds forecasts. The three top teams are the same three that everyone had winning their divisions before the year began; the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Nationals. The fourth team — or first Wild Card, if you want to make it sound a little better — is the Padres, whose winter moves made the largest splash the world has seen since Noah decided to build an ark. And finally, as you’ve likely surmised from reading the headline, there’s the New York Mets, currently given exactly a 50/50 chance of reaching the postseason this year.

Yep, that puts the Mets ahead of the Pirates and Cubs, the two young darlings of the Central, each with rosters more stacked with young talent. It also puts the Mets well ahead of the Marlins, a trendy pre-season pick to make a run this year, but instead are a team that is reportedly considering firing their manager after getting their clocks cleaned in Queens over the weekend. After that four game sweep, the Marlins now find themselves seven games behind the Mets; it’s the largest gap between any two division rivals in baseball.

Of course, it’s still really early. It’s April 19th, and because the season started a week later this year, that date is even more deceiving than usual. We’re two weeks into a 26 week race. After 13 games last year, the Brewers were 10-3, standing with the best record in baseball; they went 72-77 after that point and finished six games behind the two Wild Card teams. While the games that have been played still count and can’t be taken away, a 10-3 start doesn’t mean the Mets are really a great team.

But that’s the thing about baseball in 2015; they don’t really need to be. They don’t even need to be particularly good, because in this day and age, a hot start and a roster that doesn’t suck makes you a contender.

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We’ve moved our from the west — both NL and the AL — and covered both the NL and AL Wests the last two days. Today, we’ll do both eastern divisions, starting with the National League.

The Projected Standings

The easiest division in baseball to handicap. The favorites just have to avoid implosion to punch their ticket to the postseason, with only two teams even pretending to put up a fight, and neither one looking quite ready for the postseason yet. The fight for second place could be a Wild Card battle, but more likely, there is only one playoff team here, and it’s probably going to be the one we’d all expect.

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The Chicago Cubs made big news yesterday when they demoted Kris Bryant as he is clearly better than other players remaining on the major league roster. Leaving Bryant aside, there are several other prospects throughout the majors who will not get starting roles with their teams who might already be better than the players ahead of them, including fellow Cubs prospect Javier Baez. There are myriad reasons to keep a player in the minors, some related to service time, some related to player readiness, some related to lack of urgency to win, and some due to sunk costs already on the major league roster.

Below are four players who could help their team now, with three players on teams that could contend, but will likely not make the major league roster. Other players who were considered, but not discussed in depth below are Rob Refsnyder on the New York Yankees, Alex Meyer and Miguel Sano of the Minnesota Twins, Archie Bradley of the Arizona Diamondbacks, Joey Gallo of the Texas Rangers and potentially Micah Johnson of the Chicago White Sox. The numbers below come from the FanGraphs Depth Charts. All plate appearances are prorated to 600 and all innings pitched are prorated to 180.
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It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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News broke on Monday that Zack Wheeler had a tear in his UCL, and would need to undergo Tommy John Surgery. This sucks. It sucks every time we lose an exciting, young arm to injury, and this case is no different. But one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity. While unfortunate for both Wheeler and the Mets, Wheeler’s injury helps clear up the log jam in the Mets rotation. It opens the door for a slew of youngsters, who may have otherwise spent a good chunk of the year in Triple-A or the bullpen.

Even after losing Wheeler, the Mets are still able to field a full rotation without turning to any unproven rookies. Dillon Gee will presumably join Matt Harvey, Bartolo Colon, Jon Niese and Jacob deGrom in New York’s rotation. Still, even if the Mets rotation is set for now, we all know that teams almost always need more than five starting pitchers to get through a season. Furthermore, the Mets number one and number two starters are coming off of Tommy John Surgery and old as dirt, respectively. It’s only a matter of time before they will need to dip into their farm system, and luckily for them, they have no shortage of replacements to choose from.

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Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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As we move tantalizingly close to pitchers and catchers reporting dates, with many players already descending on spring training complexes in Arizona and Florida, the New York Mets are beginning to draw a little buzz. It’s understandable, but there’s just one problem — those pesky projection systems. While the three systems that I regularly reference don’t bury the Mets, they aren’t exactly pushing them into any sort of pole position — be it for the National League East or Wild Card. That’s not to say the Mets can’t get back to October for the first time since 2006, but much will depend on which version of the starting rotation they get.

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