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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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 Oakland Athletics. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
There’s always the sense, given the organization’s record of innovation and willingness to reconstruct its roster, that the A’s are likely to succeed then most when mediocrity appears to be the only possible outcome. If that sense is correct, then Oakland is likely to succeed very hard in 2016 — because the club, as presently constructed, is not well-acquitted by the projections.

Consider the following table, a version of which appears in the glossary entry for WAR and which provides a rough characterization for various WAR ranges:

WAR Figures in Context

Category	WAR
Scrub	0-1
Role Player	1-2
Solid Starter	2-3
Good Player	3-4
All-Star	4-5
Superstar	5-6
MVP	6+

By this rough taxonomy, Oakland currently employs only two batters classified as “solid starters” (Josh Reddick, Marcus Semien) and a third (Billy Burns) who profiles as precisely average. That triumvirate represents the exact sort of cost-controlled core a team like Oakland requires to win. Unfortunately, they’re surrounded not by stars, but role players.

It’s difficult, while examining the modest projections here, not also to consider for a moment the distinctly less modest one produced by ZiPS for Josh Donaldson. Last year’s American League MVP is expected to record more than six wins in 2016, at the cost of about $11.5 million. One needn’t be employed — or even have any training — as a rocket scientist to recognize what a benefit Donaldson would be to this club.

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It might seem easy to envy the life of a major league baseball player: even the least famous of them make a lot of money, have a bunch of Twitter followers, and get to play a game for a living. But it’s always been a little tougher for me to envy the life of a relief pitcher, who seems to experience the worst drawbacks of the job with little of the upside. As opposed to starting pitching — where one’s mistakes can be more easily made up for by logging good innings — relief pitching is simply less forgiving, with every mistake massively amplified. And no pitcher has embodied that more in the past two seasons than Evan Scribner.

You might know about Scribner, as he was just traded from the A’s to the Mariners last month. There’s more than that to him, of course, and one of the big things is the number of strikeouts he’s recorded compared to the number of walks he’s issued. That’s important, because we like the K-BB% stat a lot for pitchers: it’s been shown to be the best ultra-simple ERA estimator we currently have. It’s not perfect, but it can be a handy way to get an idea of how a pitcher could perform in the future. There’s even some work that shows it performed better than xFIP, FIP, and SIERA at predicting second-half ERA after a first half was in the books. All of this is just a set up, really, for this table, which shows the 15 best K-BB% marks for relievers with at least 70 innings pitched between 2014-2015:

The list is pretty much a who’s who of dominant relievers, as every guy in the top 10 is closing or has closed for their respective teams sometime during the past two years. Then there’s Scribner, who sticks out like a sore thumb mostly because of his ERA and the fact that he walks no one. Well, not no one, but in major league terms, he walks no one. He has the lowest walk rate among relievers who have pitched meaningful innings in the past two years (20+ innings), and it’s not particularly close; in raw numbers, he’s walked four batters in 71.2 innings.

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At the winter meetings, I asked a small collection of managers about the evolution of the role, and all of them — save perhaps Mike Scioscia — spoke to the importance of communicating with the media and with their players.

But that story had a longer scope, and a more universal one. I also asked them about a smaller more immediate thing — I asked many of them what they had learned this year, on the job. And for those just coming to the job, what they have tried to learn before they first manage a game.

Of particular note was what former position players did to learn about pitching, and vice versa. Managers have to communicate with all sorts of different players, and yet they came from one tradition within the game. And each has spent time developing themselves in their present role.

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