Jason Giambi announced his retirement on Monday, after 20 seasons as a major leaguer. For most of those 20 years, Giambi was one of the best hitters in the game. I won’t waste your time putting down the narrative of his career — Jay Jaffe already did that better than I would anyway. But I thought today that we would celebrate his career with a few choice facts and/or moments from a career that at the very least belongs in the Hall of Very Good.
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We’re in that awkward time between the true offseason, when most deals are made, and the spring, when all the Best Shape of His Life news stars flowing in. Let’s call it Projection Season, because we’re all stuck ogling prospect lists while perusing the projected numbers for the major league squads.

One of the most frustrating things about projection season can be the fact that most projection systems remain agnostic about change. Many of the adjustments the players talk about in season don’t take, or take for a while and then require further adjustment to remain relevant. So projections ignore most of it and assume the player will continue to be about the same as he’s always been until certain statistical thresholds are met and the change is believable from a numbers standpoint.

But projections do worse when it comes to projecting pitching than hitting, so there’s something that pitchers do that’s different than the many adjustments a hitter will make to his mechanics or approach over the course of a season. The submission here is that pitchers change their arsenals sometimes, and that a big change in arsenal radically changes who that player is.

Look at Greg Maddux pitching for Peoria in 1985. He’s not the Greg Maddux we know and love. Watch him throw fourseamers and curveballs. It was enough to get through the minor leagues, but, at that point, he’s barely throwing the two pitches that made him a Hall of Famer eventually.

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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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I’m going to let you in on a little secret that might not actually really be much of a secret. The most difficult part of this job isn’t the writing or the analysis. At least, as far as I’m concerned, the most difficult part of this job is finding ideas, and finding them consistently. Once you have an idea, everything else can follow, but the thing about ideas is you’d like them to be original and, if you’re lucky, good. And interesting! Interesting is a big one. Maybe interesting and good ought to be categorized together.

For a while, I’ve personally been interested in Tyler Clippard. I’ve considered on several occasions writing about him, and about him specifically, but on every one of those occasions, I’ve talked myself out of it, because it just never seemed relevant enough. Generally, people haven’t woken up and thought, today I’d like to read in depth about Tyler Clippard. So I’ve had this idea on the back-burner for ages. But now? Now is the time to strike, since Clippard just got dealt from the Nationals to the A’s for Yunel Escobar. Tyler Clippard, to me, has always been interesting, but now he’s both interesting and topical, so, here goes nothing. Let me try to explain to you why Clippard is such a weird reliever.

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On the face of it, trading a shortstop for a reliever seems like a bad idea. Especially when the shortstop is under team control for a year longer. But teams aren’t vacuums, and you can’t cram all of your players into one depth chart without scraping some elbows. In other words, Yunel Escobar can’t pitch, and Tyler Clippard can. And so maybe this trade between the Athletics and Nationals works for both teams.

It seems from both projections, as well as general approximations of value, that Yunel Escobar can potentially give more value to a team than Tyler Clippard could. Escobar is projected to be just worse than the average major league baseball player by Steamer (1.8 WAR), while Clippard is more likely to be replacement than average (0.3 WAR). One pitches every other day for an inning, the other plays most innings at a premium defensive position.

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The White Sox have had an incredibly busy offseason, but the goal’s always been clear. The Padres, too, have had a busy offseason, striving for an obvious purpose. Right before the Padres took the industry by storm, it was the Dodgers who were making moves every half hour, toward, again, a clear goal of contention. The A’s have had their own busy offseason, but theirs had been more confusing. Giving three guaranteed years to Billy Butler seemed like a move for a team trying to win. Dealing away a long-term asset like Josh Donaldson seemed like the opposite. To Oakland’s credit, though, they stuck to their own message — they weren’t trying to rebuild. They don’t believe in rebuilds. And now we can see how things all come together.

When the Rays signed Asdrubal Cabrera, after having acquired Nick Franklin last summer, they were provided the flexibility to move Ben Zobrist in advance of his contract year. Zobrist, of course, appealed to just about every team in baseball, on account of his talent and flexibility. Now Zobrist has been moved, and he’s been moved to the A’s, along with Yunel Escobar, in exchange for John Jaso, Daniel Robertson, and Boog Powell. The trade’s interesting from the Tampa Bay side, just because it involves moving one of the best players on the team. And the trade’s interesting from the Oakland side, because it adds a great player at little short-term cost. Score yet another point for those who issue reminders that you shouldn’t judge offseasons until they’re complete.

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Perhaps all of the wheeling and dealing is not over just yet, but seeing as it’s been a few weeks since the Oakland A’s have made a trade, perhaps Billy Beane’s manic winter has wound down to something like a conclusion. Here’s more or less what’s happened so far:

I’ve been a big fan of what Beane has been doing this offseason because, heck, it’s entertaining! Things have been so unpredictable in Oakland that no move would surprise us next. Sometimes proponents of different schools of thought are split when it comes to grading transactions, but this is a rare case of universal bewilderment.

It feels like we’ll only truly understand these moves in hindsight, once some actual games have been played. Will Oakland be positioned as a buyer or as a seller during next July’s trade deadline? Either option seems a viable possibility.

While I could be proven wrong if Oakland rolls out a 70-win season, here’s my best guess as to what it all means: Beane is trying to fill up his roster with as many players who are league average or better (2+ WAR) as he can. That is, Beane would be willing to trade away one star-level player (i.e., Jeff Samardzija) in exchange for two players who project as about league-average (i.e., Marcus Semien and Josh Phegley). As Dave has written about recently, the difference in value between a star player and an average one just might be a lot smaller than we think. Perhaps Oakland is operating under the assumption that a lineup without weak spots totally makes up that gap between star and mere starter.

Let’s look at the 2015 Steamer600 projections for all the players who ended the 2014 season with the A’s, and then all the players who are currently on the Oakland roster. I included everybody who was projected for at least 100 PAs or 30 innings pitched in the majors:

So if the A’s returned their exact same lineup for 2015, they would have 13 players who are projected to produce at least 2 WAR over the course of a full season of playoff time. With the lineup the A’s actually have, they now have 10 such players.

Obviously 13 is a larger number than 10. But consider: the A’s end-season roster from last year was the result of some very expensive trade-deadline moves. Lester, Samardzija, and Hammel were purchased at a high price, with both Lester and Hammel due to become free agents at the end of last season. For all of the big names they’ve traded away this offseason, it’s remarkable, then, that the A’s have ended up with almost the same number of average-or-better players they had before their trade deadline action. (Yoenis Cespedes, traded for Lester, was another projected average-or-better player on Oakland’s roster last year.)

This is actually a pretty unique piece of roster construction. The Seattle Mariners, which FanGraphs currently projects as having the second-best record in 2015, only have eight average-or-better players (Robinson Cano, Kyle Seager, Brad Miller, Mike Zunino, Chris Taylor, Austin Jackson, Felix Hernandez, Hisashi Iwakuma). The Angels, projected to finish two games better than the A’s, also have eight (Mike Trout, Erick Aybar, Albert Pujols, Kole Calhoun, Chris Iannetta, David Freese, Garrett Richards, Tyler Skaggs). After pushing so many chips in the middle of the table this winter, the White Sox have all of six (Jose Abreu, Alexei Ramirez, Adam Eaton, Chris Sale, Samardzija, Jose Quintana).

Projected to have the league’s best record, the Dodgers have an impressive 13 of these players (Yasiel Puig, Adrian Gonzalez, Juan Uribe, Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins, Yasmani Grandal, Joc Pederson, Carl Crawford, A.J. Ellis, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, Brandon McCarthy, Hyun-Jin Ryu). The main difference being that the Dodgers will spend about four times as much on their team in 2015 as the A’s will.

By acquiring league-average players in addition to intriguing prospects, Beane just might be giving himself his best possible chance at fulfilling the intrinsically opposite goals of (1) cutting payroll and (2) remaining in contention. On Opening Day last year, the A’s had a payroll that was about 130% the size of their payroll a year previous, and about 160% the size of the payroll the year before that. If reducing payroll was the A’s top priority heading into the winter, well, Beane has definitely made lemonade out of lemons here.

Or, shoot, maybe he’s just rebuilding.

When I’m making the calls for the Evaluating the Prospects series, I start picking up trends across multiple lists.  Some of it is simple, expected things—trends in types of players I or the industry tend to underrate or overrate—but there can be more specific things that keep coming up.  I wrote earlier about the trend of top hitting prospects flopping the big leagues after appearing bored at Triple-A along with a general plea of ignorance in any scouting projections, but now there’s now another constant I keep hearing on almost every list.

It’s become part of common internet prospect lingo to ask/comment on whether a prospect that plays shortstop in the minors can “stick at the position.” What this means is if he can project to be average to slightly below, or in other words, good enough to send out there on an everyday basis, assuming his bat is enough in combination with his defense to be one of the top 30 shortstops in the big leagues.

This seems like a simple enough question, but there’s a persistent blind spot in the industry of underrating the defensive ability in short looks (a showcase, infield practice or just a handful of games) of shortstops with solid fundamentals, but without flashy actions.

Some of this comes from a team talking about their own prospect, trying to change the consensus that their own prospect can, in fact, stick at shortstop in the big leagues. I can say from working in three front offices that over 95% of the time, the team that has a prospect also has the #1 highest value of him out of all 30 teams. There’s a number of understandable reasons for this effect, but it only accounts for a small part of the overall trend.

I hear it often and in the all three talent markets: the draft, July 2nd and now on organizational prospect lists. The player getting underrated is a shortstop with anywhere from 45 to 55 speed on the 20-80 scale, that has fringy to average pure range for the position and the minimum amount arm strength (55) for the position. So many times, this player doesn’t seem in early looks like he could stick, but now a scout, a plurality of scouts or a whole organization later come to realize that he can.

You probably have a mental image of these two sorts of players. There’s the flashy (almost always Latin) shortstop with quick hands, plus speed and the actions that, after one ground ball, look like a big league shortstop.  This guy could be Elvis Andrus, Rey Ordonez, Andrelton Simmons or any other number of players you may be thinking of right now.  Then there’s the other guy, either with a third base looking frame and/or speed (Jhonny Peralta, Juan Uribe, Jordy Mercer) or just a guy with unspectacular tools (Jed Lowrie, the recently-traded Franklin Barreto or 2015 draft prospects Alex Bregman of LSU and Brendan Rodgers, from an Orlando-area high school).

You can see there’s a subtle amount of racial influence here in most cases, but what I’m realizing is that the answer to “is he a shortstop?” is a snap reaction that’s answering a different question. The answer is often addressing “does he look like Rey Ordonez?” rather than “can he be fringy to average defensively with enough bat to be one of the 30 starting shortstops?” question, which is the one being asked by the scouting report. It usually isn’t until the high minors or big leagues that the default answer by scouts is to the more important question.

I find myself (and other scouts echo my sentiment) that when you go to a showcase and see 40 kids you’ve never seen before run out to shortstop and each take a half dozen grounders that I write in my notes after you see some Jed Lowrie type tools “2B fit” or “3B fit” next to his name.  Then, this same player plays in games the rest of the evaluation period until signing/draft day and you start seeing instincts, positioning and the intangibles of defense and you slowly start thinking this kid might be able to stick.

This happens in various forms at every level of baseball, but there’s little accountability for when scouts or writers get it wrong, because the shortstop was called a future non-shortstop at every level until he proved it in the big leagues for multiple years. It didn’t matter if you were wrong, because everyone was wrong, because they were answering the wrong question.

The more accurate way to think about shortstop defensive evaluations is in three buckets: definite yes, maybe and definite no. Some scouts may already think of it this way, but odds are only the flashy guys go in the first bucket and some of them don’t show the consistency to deserve that standing. Plenty of second bucket guys are getting tossed in the third bucket way too quickly, before they claw their way to where they belonged in the first place.

Barreto and Rodgers (the front-runner for the #1 overall pick in June) are both interesting cases to watch going forward, but the best case study may be two current college players. There’s another 2015 draft shortstop prospect I haven’t mentioned yet — University of Florida product Richie Martin. He is the flashier type of shortstop and has plus speed: he immediately passes the eye test and every scout you talk to says he should be at least an average defensive shortstop.

When you drill down or talk to a scout who is really paying attention, you’ll hear it pointed out that Martin makes a number of mental errors and lapses in focus to where he’s clearly behind Bregman as a defender currently. Bregman is a smaller guy that is a tick slower, doesn’t have flashy actions and has been projected as a pro second baseman or catcher his whole amateur career for these reasons.

That said, Bregman makes every play and to make up for his merely okay range, he charges almost every ball hit to him and has sure hands, making nearly every play. Martin has always had a light bat and was almost benched as a sophomore, but had a breakout offensive summer on the Cape, so now he’s seen as a complete prospect that likely goes in the top 50 picks.  Some scouts are a little wary of the short track record of offensive success and the inconsistency on defense, so it’ll be interesting to track the scouting consensus and actual results for these two SEC shortstops.

While this is just one case study and it could go either way, I’ll be paying closer attention to scouts’ and other publications’ pronouncements, along with my own, about who can stick at short and who cannot.  This is also yet another reason why, for next year’s prospect rankings, I’ll be going through this year’s rankings and pointing out where I was wrong.  Here’s to hoping it won’t be longer than the actual list.

If I had to sum up the offseason for the Oakland Athletics and San Diego Padres, it would be thusly:

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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: Atlanta / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Tampa Bay.

Batters
Oakland catchers combined for the fourth-highest offensive and absolute lowest defensive run totals in the majors last year. In part, the poor defensive record was a result of both John Jaso and Derek Norris making starts at DH (and thereby receiving the attendant negative positional adjustment). In part, it’s because Jaso and Norris aren’t particularly excellent defensive catchers. For ZiPS, at least, the strengths compensate for the weaknesses sufficiently to make catcher the club’s likely most productive position.

Elsewhere, one finds more optimism regarding Marcus Semien’s 2015 season. Not regarding his shortstop defense, of course. ZiPS projects him to concede seven runs there in roughly a full season (which is almost precisely Steamer’s estimate, as well). However, both systems have Semien producing a roughly league-average batting line with roughly league-average (position agnostic) defense. Those estimates conspire to produce a nearly league-average projected WAR.

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