Other clubs: Astros, Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, White Sox.

Let’s get this out of the way up front: this is not a high-potential system. Joe Gatto sits at the top of these rankings because someone had to. That’s not meant to demean Gatto’s abilities, or anyone else’s in the Angels’ minor league pool, but it’s just a product of owner Arte Moreno’s and upper management’s decisions the last five years. Most of the top talent has been included in trades to bring in less volatile assets at the big league level. A lot of early picks have been given up to sign present-value free agents, and the draft philosophy has been mostly focused on safety rather than upside.

That said, the system isn’t designed terribly to the end of supplementing their strategy for the parent club. They get their stars from outside the organization, and they will be able to fill in the gaps with a lot of role players, upside bench bats and decent pitching depth that this group should be able to provide. So while, in a vacuum, the system may seem like a disappointment, it just puts a little more pressure on the front office to make sound major league signings and hold them over for a few acquisition seasons. Management deserves credit for bringing in some projectable talent in the last couple drafts, with many of them figuring to restock the upper levels of the minor leagues in due time.

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Mike Scioscia has a reputation as an old-school manager who has little interest in analytics. He doesn’t want you to believe that. The extent to which you should is subjective. Scioscia certainly isn’t cutting edge — at least not by today’s standards — but he’s by no means a dinosaur. His finger is on the pulse of what’s going on in today’s game, even if he isn’t always pushing the same buttons as his more progressive contemporaries.

On Monday, I had an opportunity to ask the Angels manager for his thoughts on analytics. Here is what Scioscia had to say:

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Scioscia on analytics: “Analytics have been around forever in the game of baseball, from when Connie Mack would use spray charts and move guys around from the dugout, to now. Analytics for projecting player performance have mushroomed over the last five years. Analytics in dugout probabilities have increased. We’ve had data, we’ve had analytics, since I’ve been in the game. And they’ve evolved.

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Let’s cover some old ground, and let’s cover some new ground. Chris Iannetta is going to catch pretty often for the Mariners. The previous four years, he caught pretty often for the Angels. Last year, offensively speaking, was mostly bad. Yet last year, defensively speaking, was mostly good. I wrote in April about how there were signs Iannetta had gotten significantly better in terms of framing pitches, and though I didn’t later re-visit that, I guess I didn’t need to — John Dewan just highlighted Iannetta in a post entitled “The Most Improved Pitch Framers.” The early indications held up; between 2014 and 2015, Iannetta took a leap forward.

Iannetta now is all aboard the framing train, and there seems to be a pretty simple explanation for his improvement. In short: he didn’t realize he was doing anything wrong, and then all of a sudden he learned what to change. Inspired in part by this Tangotiger post, I think it’s worth discussing two things that Iannetta’s step forward means.

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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 Los Angeles Angels. 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 NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
For how much of an outlier it is, Mike Trout’s projection (688 PA, 9.3 zWAR) represents probably one of the easiest to calculate on the back of an envelope. In each of his first four seasons, he’s produced about five or six wins above average by way of his bat, added another half-win or so by means of base running, and recorded slightly above-average defensive numbers. Add in a little more than two wins’ worth of replacement value and the result is an 8.0-9.0 WAR forecast. Whatever influence there might be from regression is likely offset by a combination of Trout’s youth and the nearly 3,000 plate-appearance sample over which he’s established this level of play. The calculus is a strange combination of simple and impossible, not unlike Trout himself.

A team composed of all exactly replacement-level players and also Mike Trout would record roughly 57 wins over the course of a season — meaning the Angels, as a group, need to augment Trout’s contribution with about 30 wins of their own in order to qualify for the postseason in some fashion. Kole Calhoun (604 PA, 2.7 zWAR) and the newly acquired Andrelton Simmons (590 PA, 3.7 zWAR) would appear to be useful in that endeavor. Depending on the health of his foot, Albert Pujols (602 PA, 2.7 zWAR) might also be, as well. After those four players, however, finding even an average projection among the club’s hitters is difficult.

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When I saw that only two players had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this week, my thoughts immediately turned to future years. With only two deserving candidates going in, there was still going to be a log jam. How would that impact the players who are coming onto the ballot next year? There are three who have a real case for being in the Hall of Fame: Vladimir Guerrero, Manny Ramirez and Ivan Rodriguez.

Ramirez and Rodriguez seem pretty easy to peg. Ramirez — one of the great right-handed hitters to ever grace this planet, but also a player with several off-field transgressions, including two failed performance enhancing drug tests — seems likely to get a middling level of support, similar to Mark McGwire. Enough to remain comfortably on the ballot, but not enough to be near induction. Rodriguez will vault firmly into the middle of the pack at the very least, and stands a strong shot at induction on his first go-round. He has 13 Gold Gloves, the most of any catcher, and while he had PED whispers, so did Mike Piazza, and he just got in. The tide seems to be turning on the “Steroids Era.”

Guerrero, however, is a total wild card. At least to me. I could see him vaulting into strong induction contention, or I could see him scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s hard to get a good read on his candidacy.

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Hall of Fame voting season is over, the results are out, but Hall of Fame discussion season isn’t over quite yet. Maybe that irks you and you just want this all to go away, but if that’s the case, you probably didn’t click on this post to begin with. If you did, just think of this more as the appreciation of a career, tied to some voting results.

It should come as no real surprise that Jim Edmonds fell off the ballot in his first year of eligibility, receiving just 11 votes (2.5%). If you’d been following Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame tracker, you’d have long seen this coming, and it never seemed realistic that Edmonds would actually make it in in the first place. But it’s kind of sad, because Edmonds had a remarkable career, one that stands head and shoulders above the typical “fall off the ballot in the first year of eligibility” career, yet here we are.

It’s not the first time it’s happened. A couple years back, it was Kenny Lofton who fell off in his first year of eligibility. A couple years before that, and perhaps most egregiously, it was Kevin Brown. Dwight Gooden‘s first-ballot exclusion may have come as a bit of a surprise in 2006, and maybe the most famous example of this phenomena was Lou Whitaker’s first-year showing of 2.9% that dropped him from the ballot in 2001.

Edmonds isn’t the first player with a borderline Hall of Fame-worthy career to receive just one turn on the ride, and he won’t be the last. Some of Edmonds’ detractors will reference his laissez-faire, some might characterize it as careless or lackadaisical, attitude. If that’s the case, maybe we care about this more than Edmonds himself. And in some ways, maybe falling off the ballot on your first year is better than falling off in year two or three. Guys who fall off the first time around were never going to make it anyway, and there’s less recognition for the guy who falls off in year three after clinging onto the 5% threshold in years one and two. You fall off in year one with a legitimate case, and you get used as an example in an article.

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Though baseball’s Winter Meetings seem like the playground of the front office executive, there is one other baseball man who’s ubiquitous: the manager. Semi-required to attend media events and an annual luncheon, most of the sport’s managers descend on the meetings to make their mark.

For the most part, they field questions about next year’s lineup, and try to deflect queries about front-office moves. They’ll do a little reminiscing about last year, and a little looking forward to next year. It’s a bit of a dance, since most of the reporters are looking to find out how the roster is going to look on paper, and the person in front of them is mostly in charge of putting that roster on the field.

Still, it’s a great moment to get access to many managers at once. This past August, I asked a collection of players and writers how Bruce Bochy and Joe Maddon — managers with distinctly different approaches and pasts — could both find great success. I thought it would make sense to ask the managers gathered here about their craft, as well.

What has changed about managing? How are the demands on the modern manager different than they once were?

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On July 7th, 2006, a 23-year-old righty made his major league debut against the Tigers. He entered the game in relief and immediately began putting up 99s on the radar gun. It wasn’t enough, however, to prevent Chris Shelton from singling to shortstop and beating out the throw. Brandon Inge also wasn’t afraid of the velocity, as he hit a ground-rule double to center. The young righty was now flustered. He hit Curtis Granderson to load the bases. He paced around the mound, gathered himself, and then rallied to strike out Placido Polanco, get a weak grounder from Ivan Rodriguez, and strike out Magglio Ordonez to end the threat.

On that day, Mark Lowe began a journey that started with the Mariners and continued on to the Rangers (in the Cliff Lee deal), and then the Dodgers, Angels, Nationals, Rays, Indians, Mariners (again), and Blue Jays. And now, almost ten years later, the Tigers have signed him with a two-year deal to be their setup man. It’s been quite a trip for him.

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We are living in a golden age of youthful, historic talent, especially among position players. This was the case even before 2015, when the likes of Kris Bryant, Carlos Correa and Francisco Lindor — all 23 years old or younger — joined the party. Previously, the Cubs had run out a slew of young stud position players on a daily basis, and Manny Machado and Bryce Harper have been around enough to truly be called veterans at this point. All of these greats all reside in the shadow of the best young player of them all, however: some guy named Mike Trout.

With a little luck, or perhaps some better judgment among voters, Trout could very well be celebrating an unprecedented fourth consecutive MVP award right about now. He’s got one of those on the mantle, along with three relatively controversial second place finishes. While I did predict in an ESPN Insider article this past March that Josh Donaldson would win the 2015 AL MVP, there is no doubt that, if I had a ballot, I would have slotted the Blue Jay third sacker on the second line, behind the Angel center fielder.

How great is Trout, and where might all of this be headed? Let’s take a somewhat unorthodox look at his first four seasons relative to some of the game’s all-time inner-circle superstars, and see where he fits in.

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