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.

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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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Yesterday, Jose Bautista addressed his contract situation, and he didn’t exactly mince words.

“I did not go to them. They asked me a question, ‘What would it take to get it done?’ and I gave them an answer. It’s not an adamant, drawn lines in the sand or anything. Simply questions were asked, I felt like for this process to go down smoothly there didn’t need to be any time wasted and efforts wasted for either party. If this is going to happen, they should know what it takes, and I told them the number because they asked me,” he told ESPN’s Britt McHenry.

In comments to reporters Monday, Bautista said the Blue Jays came to him with their question two weeks ago. He said he is “not willing to negotiate.”

“I’m not going to sit here and bargain for a couple of dollars,” he said, adding later, “They either meet it or it is what it is.”

So, what is Jose Bautista’s magic number? Well, according to TSN, it’s five years, $150 million.

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Well, a new team, for starters. What Jay Bruce is missing is a new team. Rather, a new team is missing Jay Bruce. Twice now, the Reds have reportedly been on the verge of trading Bruce. First, to the Mets at last year’s trade deadline, more recently to the Blue Jays, just last night. Twice, Bruce has reportedly been on the verge of being dealt, and twice, the deal has fallen apart.

Maybe that tells you something about Jay Bruce. Or maybe it tells you something about the other players in the deal, as both deals collapsed due to medical hangups concerning the players whom the Reds were attempting to acquire. In July, it was the Reds who backed out of the proposed deal that could have netted them Zack Wheeler, in the midst of his recovery from Tommy John Surgery. Last night, it wasn’t even Michael Saunders‘ bum knee that gave the Reds pause.

Neither proposal fell apart because of Bruce, specifically, but that doesn’t mean the failed deals don’t tell us something about Bruce, because they do. What they tell us about Bruce is this: thus far, teams have only appeared willing to give up already-injured players for him.

Which is shocking, given where Bruce’s career was just two years ago. Just two years ago, he was a 26-year-old Gold Glove-caliber right fielder who doubled as one of the game’s most prolific home run hitters. Now, the Reds are struggling to rid themselves of his salary for anything more than damaged goods.

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While it’s technically true that both the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies are Major League Baseball teams, their 2015 seasons were different in a number of non-superficial ways. Yes, they both employed Ben Revere last season, but it’s difficult to find other substantive similarities between the 93-69 AL East champion Blue Jays and the 63-99 cellar-dwelling Phillies.

The Blue Jays had a 117 wRC+, while the Phillies registered a meager 86. The Blue Jays had an average, or slightly better, pitching staff (93 ERA-, 100 FIP-) and the Phillies were among the worst (120 ERA-, 111 FIP-) in the league. On defense, the Blue Jays sported a +15 DRS and +1 UZR while the Phillies delivered a -92 DRS and -31.1 UZR. The Blue Jays were good and the Phillies were not. That comes as a surprise to no one, even as we pause to note that the Phillies took steps to put their franchise on the right track during the same period.

These two very dissimilar clubs, however, did have one pretty interesting similarity during the 2015 season. They both flanked excellent center fielders with horrible defenders in the corners.

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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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In yet another sign that baseball season is coming ever closer, the arbitration process this year is coming to a close. Many players signed one-year deals before the teams and players exchanged numbers last month, while others exchanged numbers and struck one-year deals. A few players have actually gone to arbitration. Four players — Lorenzo Cain, Josh Donaldson, J.D. Martinez, and A.J. Pollock — agreed to two-year deals with their teams, buying out no free-agent seasons, but ensuring both parties that arbitration would not be necessary next year. These two-year deals are common and typically come with a discount for the team. For the four players who signed this season, however, there was no discount.

The arbitration process is set up to provide a discount to teams in the years just before free agency. The players get their first taste of actual millions while the team retains control of the player at a price much less than what the market would yield — all without having to mark a multi-year commitment. Some players sign extensions which takie them through free agency while others are non-tendered and set free by clubs who think that even the small, arbitration-produced salaries are too much compared to the expected production.

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Last night, the Jays avoided arbitration with Josh Donaldson, agreeing to a two year deal that gives him nearly $29 million in guaranteed income, and helps the team avoid a second huge raise next year if Donaldson has another great year. The team had publicly stated their desire to get Donaldson locked up long-term, but as a Super Two coming off an MVP season, Donaldson had plenty of leverage to get paid while still retaining his ability to hit free agency after the 2018 season. The team can still revisit a longer deal with Donaldson if they wish, but most likely, this two year deal signifies that he’s not looking to sell any of his free agent years at prices the Blue Jays are currently willing to pay.

So, now, with that piece of business out of the way, the Blue Jays focus can turn towards a more pressing contract issue: what to do with star outfielder Jose Bautista. The face of the franchise, Bautista is in the final year of his contract, and will likely be the best hitter on the market next winter if the Blue Jays can’t sign him to an extension this spring. Both sides have publicly stated an interest in getting a deal done, though with the Jays bringing in Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins from Cleveland to run their baseball operations department, there’s some expectation that the club will operate a bit more conservatively, and that could limit their willingness to pay Bautista the kind of money that would convince him to forego free agency.

On the other hand, there’s clearly a lot of sentiment towards just giving Joey Bats whatever he wants, and the team will face significant negative backlash if they let Bautista leave, at least in the short-term. So even with some expected belt-tightening, let’s see if we can construct an extension that both sides would be happy with.

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If you’ve recently spent time with other humans, it’s likely that you noticed that they tend to be overconfident about how well they understand the world around them. Think of all of the people you know who have tried to weasel their way out of admitting they were wrong even when presented with strong evidence that they had misinterpreted a situation. Humans are bold and unapologetic in their declarations and do not like it when you point out that they’ve made a serious error.

It’s hard to criticize people for that when it seems to be a pretty fundamental aspect of the species. It’s not good or bad, it simply is. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy little moments when someone makes a compelling argument and then the world totally destroys their hard work by changing around them.

For example, two political scientists once wrote a book called Congress’ Permanent Minority? Republicans in the U.S. House which was the first major scholarly account of how a minority party operates when it expects to be in the minority for the foreseeable future. It’s a well-researched book and was well reviewed when it came out. Unfortunately for the authors, it came out in January of 1994, just 11 months before the Republicans would win control of the House for the first time in 40 years. It was a perfectly fine analysis, it was just totally detached from the reality of American politics almost immediately.

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The word “move” is used in the context of an offseason to denote any number of varying transaction types. A trade is a move. A free-agent signing is a move. A player being designated for assignment is a move, or claimed off waivers, or sold to Japan. Players coming and going from rosters are the moves of the winter, and they’re the means by which the public tends to evaluate a team’s offseason.

The calculus for the outlook of the upcoming season is constantly changing throughout the offseason as these myriad moves transpire. When a team signs a star free-agent pitcher, we know that that team is several wins better than they were the day before. When a rebuilding club trades away its slugger in the final year of his contract for prospects, we understand that they’ve dropped a couple wins for the upcoming season.

But there’s another sort of move that happens during the offseason that’s more subtle, and it, too, changes the calculus of the upcoming season, though it often seems to be overlooked. We spend so much time and effort analyzing who “won or lost” the offseason that it’s easy to forget how much change should be expected from a team’s returning players. The Rangers didn’t go out and sign Yu Darvish this offseason, but he is expected to be a valuable addition to this year’s roster, an extra four or so wins added without any kind of traditional offseason move. Without doing anything, the Rangers rotation looks significantly better than it did at the end of last year.

Six years ago, Dave Cameron wrote a short post on this site titled 2009 Is Not a Constant. I recommend you read it, and sub in “2015” for “2009” when applicable, but here’s a relevant passage anyway:

We all know about career years and how you have to expect regression after a player does something way outside the ordinary, but regression doesn’t just serve to bring players back to earth after a big year.

Regression “fixes” a lot of problem spots from the prior year, even if the team doesn’t make a serious effort to change out players. The Royals got a .253 wOBA out of their shortstops a year ago. I don’t care how bad you think Yuniesky Betancourt is, you have to expect that number to be higher this year. They didn’t do anything to improve their shortstop position this winter, but the level of production they got from the position in 2009 is not their expected level of production for 2010.

…

You cannot just look at a team’s prior year won loss record – or even their pythagorean record – make some adjustments for the off-season transactions, and presume that’s a good enough estimator of true talent for the 2010 team.

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Sometimes, it’s only natural to wonder why it took so long for a trade to come to fruition. In an ideal world, the Nationals would have found a free agent outfielder with whom they could agree upon terms. In an ideal world, the Blue Jays would have found a free agent reliever with whom they could agree upon terms. Our world is less than ideal, though, and neither team found a fit. So a match was made between the two. Drew Storen will pitch high-leverage innings for the Blue Jays, now. As a result, Ben Revere will slap singles, run fast, and play the outfield for the Nationals.

This isn’t a trade that will make a monumental impact, either way. Revere, at his very best, is something like a three-win player who’s actually more like a two-win player, and the Nationals can keep him for another year after this one if they feel he’s deserving of a fourth trip to arbitration. Storen, at his very best, is something a two-win player who’s probably more like a one-win player, and he’s set to be a free agent after this season. Both will earn somewhere between five and ten million dollars this year. Nothing here moves any kind of needle too much. If it did, it wouldn’t make so much sense.

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