A short while ago, I published a Willie Bloomquist career retrospective you might have seen. But, I know you’re probably tired of reading Willie Bloomquist career retrospectives. Ever since Bloomquist announced his retirement late last week, the Internet has been dominated by Willie Bloomquist career retrospectives. When I navigate over to Google News, all I see filling every individual section are innumerable different Willie Bloomquist career retrospectives. So in case you didn’t bother to read my latest, out of Willie Bloomquist career retrospective fatigue, let me boil it down: Bloomquist was a lot of different things over the course of his career, but one of those things, interestingly, is that Bloomquist was clutch. He hit a little better when the stakes were a little higher.

I didn’t intend for that post to spark a series. And, really, this isn’t a series — all this is is another post, the subject of which was discovered while researching the earlier post. But, okay: You probably didn’t know before today that Bloomquist was objectively clutch. And you probably didn’t know before right now that Josh Reddick has been objective unclutch. By a lot, I mean. The numbers are dreadful.

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A few weeks ago, I used some basic PITCHf/x information to note that Rick Porcello‘s curveball started to look a lot like Adam Wainwright’s curveball by the end of last season. That’s the kind of thing that’s interesting to me, even if it isn’t particularly interesting to anyone else, and then later it was revealed that Porcello actually used Wainwright’s curve as an inspiration. I wasn’t expecting that. Even though, I suppose, the data had already made the case. But it was a cool nugget to read in the news.

Now I’m going right back to the well, because once I start thinking about pitch comps again, I have a difficult time focusing on anything else. One thing that’s true is that Rick Porcello now throws a curveball that resembles Wainwright’s. Another thing that’s true is that Porcello isn’t the only one. This is all relatively new to Porcello, but there’s a pitcher in Oakland who’s had this kind of pitch in his back pocket for years.

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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It all makes the Orioles look bad, which isn’t fair. It was supposed to be easy enough for the Orioles to sign both Yovani Gallardo and Dexter Fowler. Then, within a few days, the Gallardo talks nearly fell apart, and the Fowler talks did fall apart. Instead of the Orioles and Fowler having an agreement, it turns out Fowler wanted a one-year opt-out, which the Orioles wouldn’t give him. That’s a perfectly defensible stance, but here’s where we are now: Baltimore doesn’t have Dexter Fowler. Fowler has gone back to the Cubs, for a year and $13 million. It’s all been a pretty stunning turn of events, and the breakdown in the Baltimore talks has allowed the Cubs to answer the last big question they had.

For the Orioles, it’s a bad look, and it’s frustrating, because now they have to keep poking around to fill a hole they thought they’d fill. It’s probably somewhat bad for morale, and now you can likely expect the Orioles to get in contact with the Reds about Jay Bruce. It’s not the worst fallback in the world. Yet this is all really about the Cubs. The Cubs get to keep Fowler, if only for a year. It reduces the uncertainty for what’s pretty clearly a World Series favorite.

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This time of year, everyone’s a contender. So everyone’s talking about the things they can do in 2016, and the A’s are no different, highlighting their improved bullpen and increased power. Just last week they picked up Khris Davis, and when I was reading about that move, team officials noted that Davis will provide critical right-handed pop, along with Danny Valencia. Just from reading that sentence, you know two things: (1) the A’s won’t be anyone’s AL West favorites, and (2) Valencia has won himself some organizational fans.

It’s not as if Valencia has been hurting for chances, as teams have long recognized his ability to punish left-handed pitchers who dare enter the strike zone. Valencia has been treated as one of those useful players good enough to have but not good enough to keep. He debuted in 2010, and Oakland is his sixth major-league team, having been claimed off waivers from the Blue Jays in August. The Blue Jays had themselves a roster crunch, and they weren’t buying the initial evidence that Valencia had made himself more whole. You can understand why Toronto wound up doing what they did, but Oakland seized the opportunity and now they seem to have themselves an asset. The A’s could afford to see how real Valencia really was. All he did was conquer his biggest problem.

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Khris Davis has four career outfield assists. Have you ever been curious about how he got them? Of course you haven’t. You’re a grown person, with responsibilities. A person trying to answer the big questions, a person who reads books, a person wondering what a gravitational wave is. This has never really crossed your mind, but, now you’re here. Now you’re curious. This is obviously a setup and human nature will force you to see this all the way through. You’re not as in control of you as you think.

Davis is relevant right now because he was just traded. He debuted in 2013 and, since then, on a rate basis, he ranks fifth-worst among outfielders in the DRS version of the arm-value statistic. He ranks seventh-worst in the UZR version of the arm-value statistic. According to the Fan Scouting Report, he ranks fifth-worst in release. He ranks fourth-worst by arm strength, and he ranks eighth-worst by arm accuracy, and if you put all three components together, he ranks second-worst by arm overall. Khris Davis has a bad arm. It’s been that way for as long as you’ve known about him. We don’t get to say this kind of thing very often, but there might genuinely be some of you capable of out-throwing Khris Davis, who is a major-league baseball player.

And he’s a player with four assists. Bad arm, four assists. Which means he’s been involved in throwing people out. Time to walk through the assists, like we did with Ben Revere back whenever that was. For some reason, in this moment, it’s important to know what’s happened.

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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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With so much analysis and similar thinking taking over the game, it’s easy to imagine a reality where, down the road, every player in every organization is assigned a number that reflects his total value, and trades are made based on nothing more than balancing value numbers until they match. Even if that’s an exaggeration, you can see how things could come to feel that way, like trades are just the results of equations being run. In this hypothetical future, we’d see trades a lot like the one that’s just gone down between the A’s and the Brewers. Needs have been met on both sides. Everything makes very obvious sense.

I know the A’s and Brewers just finished with the same record, but the A’s don’t do the whole rebuilding thing, while the Brewers are in deep. Oakland wanted to add power from the right side and they were seeking help in the outfield, so that’s where Khris Davis fits. From Milwaukee’s side, if anything they had too many outfielders, and they didn’t have any catching depth behind Jonathan Lucroy, so that’s where Jacob Nottingham fits. Lucroy’s basically a goner anyhow, and Nottingham might not be that far away. And Bowdien Derby, known as Bubba? Live arm. Lottery ticket. More talent for the system. The A’s win the trade for the certainty; the Brewers win the trade for the upside. The A’s wanted certainty. The Brewers wanted upside.

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The Oakland A’s had a nightmarish season in 2015. They had the biggest difference in Base Runs vs. actual record out of any team since 2002. Their bullpen had historically-bad timing. And, finally, their defensive issues were on display most of the year, especially in the early stages of the season when they were on pace for a record-breaking number of errors. The infield was mostly to blame for the last problem, with Brett Lawrie and Marcus Semien routinely exhibiting the sort of lapses that have mostly been excised from players by the time they make it to the majors. It was ugly, and it was a part of why the A’s buried themselves in a hole in the AL West standings before the season was even a third of the way through.

Through May 21st of 2015, the A’s were on pace 169 errors, which would have been the most since the year 2000 by a fairly wide margin. Here’s a graphic from the previously-linked post from May 22nd of last season that shows the error gulf we were witnessing:

The A’s finished with only 126 errors, missing out on a particularly ignominious title. However, much of the defensive blame fell squarely on Semien during the early parts of the season, and for good reason: at the time of the May post, he had accounted for 16 of Oakland’s fielding and throwing errors. By the end of May, some were claiming that the A’s might not be able to afford to keep his glove at shortstop, despite his strong production at the plate. But the team did something about it: they hired Ron Washington to tutor the young shortstop on defense, and he started doing so on May 22nd. They got right to work, with Semien doing throwing mechanics drills, and often fielding ground balls with a plank-like glove to soften his hands:

His pregame fielding routine begins by taking grounders with a “flat glove.” Rather than a soft pocket, it has a flat surface, which forces a player to field the ball with soft hands. Semien fields balls to his left, then his right with the flat glove. Only after that does he slip on his regular glove.

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Billy Burns was going to be one of those interesting test cases. His numbers in the minor leagues were strong — he drew walks about 12% of the time, and he infrequently struck out. He could motor, too, adding to his value both at the plate and in the middle of the outfield. Yet he had just two professional homers to his name, over 1,800 opportunities, and we’ve seen these failures before. So the question was, could Burns get pitchers out of the zone often enough to keep his OBP respectable, or would he wilt upon being challenged?

I don’t know what you expected from Burns, but I can tell you something I didn’t expect: here was this passive, speedy minor-league outfielder, and then as a rookie he posted baseball’s fifth-highest swing rate. For the sake of comparison, the name right ahead of him was Pablo Sandoval. And Burns wasn’t just aggressive in general — he wound up with baseball’s second-highest rate of swings at first pitches. Burns cast his history aside and turned himself into a swinger, and that’s not something that happens by accident. And no one, I don’t think, would have a problem with the results.

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