It’s early. Like, early early. The Cincinnati Reds and Arizona Diamondbacks are tied for the best record in the National League. The Angels’ best hitter has been Yunel Escobar, not Mike Trout. Mike Leake has been among the most dominant starting pitchers in baseball. Because most teams have played eight or nine games, the standings and the leaderboards look weird. They’ll look more normal in the not-too-distant future.

But for all the wisdom that’s contained within calls not to overreact to early-season performance, the reality is that games in April count, too, and if a team digs a deep enough hole, it stops being early pretty quickly. The Blue Jays, who lost again last night to fall to 1-7, aren’t quite there yet, but they’ve certainly cleared a path towards a potentially very difficult set of decisions this summer.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Toronto Blue Jays farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .270/.360/.450 as 17-year-old in Appy League.

Scouting Report
The Blue Jays traded for international-bonus slots and were able to avoid completely blowing out their bonus pool to sign Guerrero in 2015, instead spending in a range that only benched them from big international spending for one year instead of two. While most 17-year-old international signees spend their first pro season in the Dominican, Guerrero was advanced enough to come stateside. Not only that, but after spending time in extended spring training (and often hanging around and attentively watching Jays’ Florida State League games at night in April and May), Guerrero skipped the GCL and was sent to the Appalachian League, where he was dominant.

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Paul Sporer and I were responsible for providing the starting-rotation installments of last week’s positional power rankings, posts which you can access here and here. One of the interesting things I took from the exercise was the absence of the Toronto Blue Jays from the top 15 of those rankings.

Blue Jays starters led the American League in ERA (3.64) last season. If you prefer more advanced measures, the Blue Jays’ rotation led the AL with 15.3 WAR and finished second in FIP (4.07) to Cleveland. This season, all of Toronto’s starting pitchers of significance return save for R.A. Dickey.

But despite finishing as the AL’s most productive rotation last season and despite losing arguably its weakest link in Dickey, the Jays’ rotation appeared in last week’s positional rankings as just the eighth-best staff in the AL and the 16th-best such group in the game. FanGraphs projections have the Blue Jays staff ranked behind the Red Sox and the Yankees in the AL East, and if that holds, it could be damaging to Toronto’s postseason aspirations.

Our 2017 forecasts for the Blue Jays’ likely starting pitchers…

16. Blue Jays

Name	IP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	BABIP	LOB%	ERA	FIP	WAR
Aaron Sanchez	205.0	7.9	3.2	0.9	.302	73.7 %	3.69	3.86	3.4
J.A. Happ	181.0	7.8	2.8	1.2	.303	72.5 %	4.11	4.15	2.6
Marcus Stroman	169.0	7.5	2.4	0.9	.313	71.3 %	3.85	3.64	3.2
Marco Estrada	167.0	7.0	2.9	1.4	.277	71.6 %	4.31	4.62	1.9
Francisco Liriano	149.0	9.6	4.1	1.2	.310	74.3 %	4.11	4.22	1.8
Casey Lawrence	37.0	5.1	2.4	1.5	.312	67.9 %	5.20	5.04	0.2
Mat Latos	38.0	6.6	3.0	1.3	.309	70.2 %	4.77	4.69	0.3
Mike Bolsinger	9.0	8.5	3.5	1.3	.317	71.7 %	4.51	4.36	0.1
Conner Greene	9.0	5.8	4.6	1.4	.311	67.6 %	5.77	5.63	0.0
Ryan Borucki	9.0	5.8	3.8	1.6	.310	68.3 %	5.59	5.54	0.0
Total	973.0	7.7	3.0	1.1	.302	72.3 %	4.11	4.18	13.4

So what’s going on here?

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Episode 726
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses Toronto’s Steve Pearce, matters relating to Steve Pearce, and also matters that possess no relevance to Steve Pearce at all.

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 38 min play time.)

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BRADENTON, Fla. – Jose Bautista has always played with an edge.

He has often defied expectations since his age-29 breakout with the Toronto Blue Jays.

So on Wednesday, after a World Baseball Classic tune-up game for the Dominican Republic against the Pirates — the organization with whom he began his career and a club towards which he still bears some resentment — I asked Bautista outside of the visiting clubhouse at LECOM Park if his edge has heightened this spring. His doubters have grown in number as he nears the twilight of his career, and I was curious to learn how the 36-year-old plans to continue to defy odds.

A spring earlier, Bautista was reportedly seeking a six-year, $150 million contract extension. This offseason, coming off a down year, an injury-plagued year, he settled for a one-year deal with an option in his first test of free agency. That he did not have more of a market had to bruise Bautista’s ego. The market spoke to the doubts of the industry about an aging star in an era when every team uses some sort of aging model to guide decision making.

While I visited the topic of Bautista and the defiance aging curves back in January, I wanted to speak to the man himself and and better understand why he believes he a good bet to age more gracefully.

ZiPS is forecasting a modest bounceback, a 132 wRC+ and 2.7 WAR season in 117 games. PECOTA predicts a three-win campaign and .255/.374/.498 slash line in 2017, but suspects he’ll fall off to become a 1.4-win player in 2018.

Should we expect Bautista to beat those forecasts, though? Should we toss away our aging models in deference to the 21st-century athlete, as innovative Pirates trainer Todd Tomcyzk has suggested?

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I’ll admit from the top that this is just an experiment. But anyway, I won’t waste your time. Justin Smoak is 30 years old. He’s coming off a 90 wRC+ and a WAR of -0.1. He already has seven seasons of big-league experience, and in precisely zero of those has he measured in at even one win above replacement. Relative to what he was as a prospect, he’s been extremely disappointing. Last July, weirdly, the Blue Jays signed Smoak to a multi-year contract extension. Here’s a clip from his player page:

RotoWire News: Smoak, who was previously presumed to be in line for a platoon role, is the Jays’ preferred everyday first baseman, Shi Davidi of Sportsnet reports. (2/19/2017)

Strange! But maybe…not so strange? Stick with me. As a hitter, your primary skills involve how often you make contact, how hard you make contact, and where the ball goes after contact. I’ve messed around before with pitch comps, looking for similar pitches based on velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. In this somewhat similar experiment, I’ve looked for similar hitters to Smoak based on 2016’s exit velocities, launch angles, and contact rates. Same methodology and everything — it’s all based around z-scores. In the big table below, the most similar hitters to Smoak last season, based on this method. I’ve included everyone with a combined comp score of 2.0 or lower.

The single best comparison to Smoak: Freeman, who was and is one of the best players on the Braves. You’ll notice there are but two below-average wRC+ marks out of 17. The overall average wRC+ in this group is 118. The median is 119. Last season, Jose Bautista’s wRC+ for the Blue Jays was 122.

I’ve never looked at players quite like this before, so don’t take this to mean more than it does. It seems, at least, modestly encouraging — Smoak’s exit-velocity numbers were quite good, and he didn’t struggle at all to generate lift. Maybe there’s just something about his approach that holds him back, but then, maybe he’s better than he looked. Given that he’s a slow-footed first baseman, he’s never going to top a WAR leaderboard. Yet perhaps the Blue Jays correctly identified that there’s upside still in there. The track record is what it is, but I can’t very well look at that table and dismiss it.

My regard for Mark Buehrle is growing.

We often don’t fully appreciate people or things while we still have access to them. Buehrle quietly slipped into retirement prior to last season after a remarkable career during which he struck out batters at well below league-average rates, possessed a sub-90 mph fastball for much of his career, and yet accumulated 52 WAR and a 215-160 record over 18 seasons in the majors.

His success was curious, though he was not without his gifts. He could paint corners as well as any starter in baseball. Consider his 2015 fastball location via Baseball Savant:

That’s excellent, but it pales in comparison to Buehrle’s signature skill — namely, the pace at which he worked.

With the mounting concern regarding pace of play from the commissioner’s office, with so much being made of the subject in the media, with pace itself slowing after progress made in 2015, has anyone checked in with the this century’s quickest-working pitcher to get his thoughts on pitch clocks, pace and of a pitcher’s process?

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Here’s the thing about bunting: it can be a good idea if the third baseman is playing too far back. The chance of a hit goes up in that case, and a successful bunt often causes the third baseman to play more shallow in future plate appearances, so future balls in play receive a benefit. That’s one of those games within a game we see all the time in baseball: once the positioning deviates from “normal” by a certain degree, the batter receives a benefit. Then the defender has to change his approach.

This tension created by the bunt illustrates how offenses and defenses react to each other’s tendencies. That same sort of balance between fielder and hitter might be playing out on an even broader scale, however, when it comes to the shift in general.

Too many shifts in the game, and the players begin to adjust. They develop more of a two-strike approach, they find a way to put the ball in play on the ground the other way, or they make sure that they lift the ball if they’re going to pull it. There’s evidence that players are already working on lifting the ball more as a group, pulling the ball in the air more often than they have in five years, and have improved on hitting opposite-field ground balls. So maybe this next table is no surprise.

The league has improved against the shift! The shift is dead! Or, wait: the league has actually improved as a whole over this timeframe, and the difference between the two is still about the same. And every team would take a .292 wOBA against over a .297 number. Long live the shift.

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Over at the fantasy blog, they’ll be publishing their annual bold predictions soon. Those posts, as usual, will cater to the roto side of things. They’re fun to write. And, even though I’m no longer editing RotoGraphs anymore, I’d like to continue the tradition. So I’ve decided to do a version that’s aimed more at the real game.

Let’s stretch our imagination and make some predictions that are a little bit sane (they should be rooted in reality to some extent), but also a little bit insane (since the insane happens in baseball every year anyway). Back when I did this for fantasy, I hit 3-for-10 most years. Doubt I do it again, for some reason.

What follows are my 10 bold predictions for 2017.

1. Dylan Bundy will be the ace he was always supposed to be.
Once picked fourth overall and pegged as the future ace of the Orioles, Bundy had a terrible time in the minor leagues. Over five years, he managed only 111 innings between injuries. There was Tommy John, of course, but lat strains, shoulder-calcification issues and between-start bouts of elbow soreness have dogged him throughout, as well. At least he was good while he was in, with an ERA in the low twos and great rates to support those results.

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It’s exciting to have so many statistics available to us when we’re trying to evaluate our favorite players. From the players’ perspective, though, it’s probably more exciting when those statistics allow them to improve themselves. From that point of view, metrics like launch angle and spin rate probably have a certain appeal that some others don’t: they provide a measurement of something that might help a player understand his game and get better.

There’s one problem, though — with spin rate, at least. Indications are that it’s difficult for a pitcher to change his in any material way. Still, as Jeremy Jeffress may have found, it can provide a window into betterment.

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