We’ve already previewed the two western divisions, the NL and the AL. Today, we move into the middle of the country, and look at perhaps the most interesting division in baseball.

The Projected Standings

It’s a three team race at the top, with a couple of teams not quite willing to rebuild but also probably not good enough to contend. Let’s go team by team.

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At first, it looked like pitchers that play their home games in extreme parks have extreme home run splits — that pitchers in pitchers’ parks go on the road and give up more home runs than expected. But it turns out, it might just be a Pittsburgh Pirates problem.

Staffs that leave the six most pitcher-friendly parks to go on the road have a 10.5% home run per fly ball rate, we found. But if you remove the Pirates (12%), that number for other six drops to 10.3%, very much close to the 10.1% sample average.

Take a look at the road homer per fly ball rates per team over the last five years. There’s a clear outlier.

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You play 81 games at home a year, so it seems like it might be a good idea to think about that park when you’re building your team. Then again, you play 81 games on the road, maybe it’s not a good idea to worry too much about one half of the ledger, particularly if your home park is an extreme one.

Extreme parks lead to extreme home-road splits. That part seems obvious, but it bears out in the winning percentage, too. Take a look at how teams that have called extreme parks home have faired over the last five years compared to the middle.

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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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What follows is a brief excerpt from the latest edition of FanGraphs Audio featuring Kiley McDaniel, and also the approximate moment when I started conducting research for this post and subsequently stopped giving my undivided attention to the aforementioned podcast:

A very literal transcript, for those unable to listen to the embedded audio for whatever reason:

Carson Cistulli: Starling Marte is really — uh, is so good.

Kiley McDaniel: How good is he?! (sarcastically)

CC: Well, he’s good! He also has a strange profile — you’re probably aware of this. But, his plate discipline is still not particularly well-developed. But he probably has, at least, one of the best batted ball profiles of any major leaguer at this point.

KM: I remember when I was in Pittsburgh, the sort of — well, I don’t want to speak for the organization — but the question I was asking is, is he the guy that can walk very little and still, like, has the bat-to-ball skills to make it work? And, y’know, hit .280 with a 4% walk rate or whatever his numbers are. And I watched him in Altoona — he was in Altoona the year I was there — and I thought yes, but I wasn’t willing to bet tens of millions of dollars on him being, like, one of the very few guys that can do that. Yeah, he’s definitely a unique fit.

So now you know where I’m coming from.
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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 Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Washington.

Batters
On multiple occasions over the course of Woody Allen’s 1999 film Sweet and Lowdown, jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (played by Sean Penn) announces that he’s the best in the world “except [for] this gypsy in France” (understood to be Django Reinhardt). It’s not particularly daring to suggest that, likewise, Andrew McCutchen is the best non-pitcher in baseball — except for this center fielder in Los Angeles. McCutchen and Mike Trout possess largely similar skill sets; it’s just, in most cases, Trout possesses them a little harder. Even still, McCutchen’s projection (659 PA, 6.3 WAR) is among the best published so far in this series.

Of some interest is ZiPS’ forecast for recent Korean signing Jung-ho Kang (502 PA, 1.5 WAR), which is slightly (although not substantively) less strong than incumbent Jordy Mercer’s projection (504 PA, 1.9 WAR) for 2015. A potential area of concern for Kang appears to be his ability to make contact. To wit: ZiPS projects Pedro Alvarez to post a 30.0% strikeout rate; Kang, a slightly higher 30.5% mark.

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It’s been a frustrating offseason for Baltimore fans, he says to people who already know just how little the Orioles have done. Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis, Andrew Miller, and Nick Hundley have all left town. The entirety of the work the team has done to replace them was to bring back Delmon Young and import reliever Wesley Wright. While you can’t draw a straight line between the team’s inactivity and the ongoing “is Dan Duquette leaving for Toronto” saga, it’s easy to see how some may look to see a relationship there.

Trading for Travis Snider, as the O’s did on Tuesday night, won’t change that. But that we’re talking about him says a little bit about what the Baltimore offseason has come to, a lot about the state of baseball news on January 28th, and something about a player that the Orioles clearly hope can become their next scrapheap pickup to yield results on a team that’s making something of a habit out of confounding the expectations.

There’s no way to sugarcoat this, really: Snider’s major league career has been a bust, at least so far as the expectations go for being the 14th overall pick in the 2006 draft. It’s fair to wonder what might have been had the Blue Jays let him get more than 18 Triple-A games before promoting him to the big leagues as a 20-year-old in 2008, despite the fact that he’d struck out 27.4% of the time in 423 Double-A plate appearances prior to that. Still, he was rated as a top-6 overall prospect by both BA and BP headed into 2009… and never quite stuck. Read the rest of this entry »

The MASN dispute between the Orioles and Nationals continues to wage on in New York state court. As a review, the fight involves an arbitration decision issued last year by MLB’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee (the “RSDC”), awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million dollars per year in broadcast rights fees from the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network. This award was nearly $30 million more per year than the team had previously been receiving, but far less than the roughly $120 million it had requested.

The Orioles, who own a majority share of the MASN network, have contested the arbitration outcome, contending that the arbitrators – the owners of the New York Mets, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Tampa Bay Rays – were biased in favor of the Nationals. MASN and the Orioles filed suit back in August, asking the court to overturn the arbitration decision. Last month, the court ordered MLB to produce documents in the case relating to commissioner-elect Rob Manfred’s involvement in the arbitration proceedings.

This week both MASN and the Orioles filed new papers with the court, further describing the alleged bias of MLB and its arbitrators.

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This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but if you’re a position player and your team asks you to pitch, it’s pretty likely that they don’t see you as a critical piece for the future. Even though position players usually just walk to the mound and keep it simple when called upon, the risk of injury prevents clubs from letting truly valuable players fall on the sword which is why the Pirates let Josh Harrison toss one-third of an inning in 2013.

Legend has it that it was the first time he had pitched since Little League (although it doesn’t appear that anyone called his high school’s official historian to verify that) and he faced one batter and induced a fly out against the Rockies Corey Dickerson. Harrison was the utility guy the Pirates turned to in order to avoid burning through an arm in a blowout in 2013, but his 2014 went in a very different direction.

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Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

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