James Shields was traded this off season from the Rays to the Royals. He has been known for his durability over the years. Spanning the last two seasons, he is first in complete games with 14. Also, he is second to Justin Verlander in innings thrown. The durability and consistency he is known for may be coming to an end. At the end of the last season, he showed signs of breaking down because he was not able to throw strikes and wasn’t able to maintain a consistent release point.

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The Angels have spent the last few off-seasons pursuing superstars and signin some of them, but even with the wallet open, they cannot fill every position in that manner. Prior to the 2011 season, one of their primary targets was Adrian Beltre, who ended up going to Texas. The Angels got revenge by taking C.J. Wilson and Josh Hamilton away, but I would imagine the Rangers are not regretting the signing of Beltre one bit, as he has spent his post-Seattle years building a potential Hall of Fame resume.

The Angels would love to have Beltre, too, but they have not exactly been hurting at third base. Alberto Callaspo, while not a Beltre-level superstar, has been pretty good for them the last couple of years. Callaspo was going into his last year of arbitration, but the team and player instead agreed on on a two-year deal for just under $9 million. The deal clearly fills a need for the Angels. Of more interest is how Callaspo demonstrates how it can take a little while for a player to get slotted into the right position in the field and can become a usable hitter despite only having one good skill at the plate.

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For at least three franchises, this offseason could have taken a very different path. When Justin Upton vetoed a trade to the Mariners, he altered the direction of Seattle, Arizona and Atlanta, at the very least. Such negated transactions make for fascinating what-if’s, and now that we are edging into the time of year when all we will read is “best shape of my career” posts, I thought we could step back and take a look at some of these.

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The World Baseball Classic is a cool idea. It is a bit hypocritical for me to write that, as I have not been terribly engaged by the WBC in the past, but I’m jumping on the bandwagon, such as it is. I am not here to convince you that you should love it, and I understand why many MLB fans would be almost impossible to win over. The WBC has its issues, one of which is the perceived lack of star power on the U.S. team. I do not want to enter that debate here. Writers like Craig Calcaterra and Drew Fairservice have done a good job of responding to that sort of hand-wringing. Fairservice makes another excellent point: it is up to the fans to turn the WBC into a thing that stars won’t miss.

I want to take a different tack on this by trying to look at things from the players’ perspective. In particular, I want to think about a certain subset of players — younger players still in their initial years of team control and without guaranteed contracts beyond this season — for whom the stakes are a bit higher.

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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, will be released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Cubs / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers.

Batters
Jeff Francoeur remains better at baseball than almost everyone — but likely not as good as an average major-leaguer. It will probably not shock Royals fans that Francoeur — who GM Dayton Moore suggested in December will remain the team’s starting right fielder even after posting a -1.2 WAR in 2012 — is projected to be the weakest link among Kansas City’s field players.

Of some interest will be how the club handles second base this year. Despite having posted just a 64 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR in his first 376 major-league plate appearances, 25-year-old Johnny Giavotella’s profile — according to ZiPS — remains that of league-average player. To his credit, he posted one of the best regressed offensive lines in the Pacific Coast League last year among prospect-aged batters.

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In a stunning development, the Yankees reportedly have no interest in former Rays, Twins, and Tigers designated hitter and “outfielder” Delmon Young. A glance at a current rumors (as of this posting) about Young’s free agency seems to turn up at least as many reports of teams not being interesting in Delmon Young as teams that might be. Part of that might be that Young is waiting to get serious about shopping his services until he recovers from ankle surgery. Part of it might be Young’s public history of less-than-stellar behavior, both recent and in the past. And part of it might just be that over 880 major league games and 3575 major league plate appearances, Delmon Young has been mostly terrible. But is there still reasonable hope for Young to be a decent everyday player? After all, he just turned 27, was once considered the best prospect in baseball, and he has mashed the ball in recent postseasons. It might just be worth looking a bit more closely at Young alongside a player with a somewhat similar history and skill set to see where that kind of thinking can lead.

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Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
2. Graphs: Miguel Tejada’s Career in WAR
3. SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League

Assorted Headlines for the Baseball Enthusiast
Kansas City Sign Chavez, Tejada
The Kansas City Royals have signed outfielder Endy Chavez and infielder Miguel Tejada to minor-league deals, reports MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The latter will become an MLB deal worth $1.1 million, according to Dionisio Soldevila of ESPN Deportes (with credit to MLB Trade Rumors’ Edward Creech for collecting same information). Tejada, who enters his age-39 season, has been worth 43.8 WAR over his career, although only about one of those wins has come over the previous three seasons.

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Why isn’t there more interest in Michael Bourn? A six-win center fielder is on the market, and our most recent article on the subject is whether or not his agent has waited too long to get him a deal. We don’t know what his asking price is, but the idea that a player coming off a career year and four straight seasons with more than four wins now needs a pillow contract seems to suggest that either there’s a reason to doubt Bourn’s work, or there’s a lack of demand for his services in the market place.

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A week ago, I was one of many who criticized the Royals decision to trade a package of young talent — including Wil Myers, one of the best offensive prospects in the game — for James Shields, even though I’m a big fan of his and I think he’s likely to provide a significant upgrade to Kansas City’s rotation. The argument against making the trade essentially went something like this; the Royals aren’t likely to be a playoff team in 2013 even with Shields, while Myers himself could have served as a valuable upgrade over the ineffective incumbent.

Today, it seems likely that the Toronto Blue Jays are about to make a very similar trade. According to Joel Sherman, the current incarnation of the big rumored trade is a seven player deal that would ship R.A. Dickey (and stuff) to Toronto for Travis D’Arnaud, Noah Syndergaard, and stuff.

The deal isn’t done, and we don’t even know the names of the secondary prospects going each direction, but it’s probably safe to assume that the structure of this deal is going to be similar to the just-completed Shields trade. In this case, D’Arnaud is Myers, Syndergaard is Odorizzi, and the rest of the stuff is probably going to be some offsetting combination of near term value versus long term potential. While that trade wasn’t Myers-for-Shields, and this trade won’t be D’Arnaud-for-Dickey, both deals are centered around an elite-prospect-for-front-line starter swap.

The 2012 Royals were 72-90 and were outscored by 70 runs. The 2012 Blue Jays were 73-89 and were outscored by 68 runs. The talent exchanges are similar. The cost and team control of the acquired pitchers will be similar, assuming Dickey signs an extension with Toronto, which seems like a pretty strong bet. So, if we ripped the Royals for the Shields trade, how can we not rip the Blue Jays for making a similar trade?

In this case, the prior moves make all the difference in the world.

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