You’ve probably seen what Kevin Pillar did on Wednesday. On the off chance you haven’t, we’ll get to that later, at the right time. Let this much be said now: it was absolutely extraordinary. But it also wasn’t the first Pillar highlight of the season. The guy who was supposed to lose time to Michael Saunders has so far played in place of Michael Saunders, and, it’s been a busy several days.

One play alone can’t explain this: in the early going — the very-stupid-early going — Pillar leads baseball in Defensive Runs Saved, with seven. As a matter of fact, if you set a low threshold of 500 innings, then, since 2010, Pillar ranks third among major-league outfielders in DRS per inning, or per 1,000 innings, or per whatever denominator you choose. He hasn’t played enough for that to be super meaningful, but he’s done enough for that to be interesting, and it isn’t lost on me that a pillar is a stationary building support. Grant Balfour has been a pretty good pitcher. Kevin Pillar has been a pretty good defender.

So let’s review Pillar’s week that was. Everything you see below was contained within Pillar’s most recent seven games, through Wednesday, with the first game chosen because that’s when Pillar recorded his first assist. I noted that Pillar has been busy. Ever wondered what 7 DRS looks like? Wednesday’s catch was just the latest feat. And there have been close calls. And there have been misplays. The antonym of “pillar” is “Kevin Pillar”, apparently, because he hasn’t been able to stop moving around. The man’s made himself noticed.

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In Monday’s “Opening Day Staff Survey,” Dave said the storyline he was most looking forward to this season was, “Breaking in young pitching prospects as relievers.” This was a little bit vague, but he elucidated on it further later that day when he recorded his weekly podcast with Carson. If you skip to the 30-minute mark, we get to the heart of the issue:

“Earl Weaver used to do this all the time with his relievers back in the 70s, but he broke them in as long relievers; we didn’t really have these one-inning specialists that they have today. So you’d break in these young pitchers, but they’d go two, three, four innings. They’d have to face hitters multiple times, they’d have to work on multiple pitches, they’d have to pace themselves a little bit. To me, that’s a little bit different than breaking in a guy as a ninth-inning guy or as an eighth-inning guy and telling him to throw as hard as possible for 15 pitches.”

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Episode 548
Nick Gordon is the Minnesota shortstop prospect selected fifth overall in the most recent draft. Jeff Hoffman is a right-hander, also among the top-10 selections of the 2014 draft, who’s currently at the end of his recovery from a Tommy John procedure. This edition of FanGraphs Audio features both of them, in conversation with lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel. (Note: Gordon’s interview begins at about the 9:45 mark; Hoffman’s, around the 17:40 mark.)

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 33 min play time.)

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And now the final division preview, just in time for Opening Day. If you missed them, here are the first five:

NL West
AL West
NL Central
AL Central
NL East

Now, wrapping things up with the AL East.

The Projected Standings

The only division in baseball where all five teams have a legitimate shot at winning; the projected spread between first and last place in the AL East is smaller than the gap between first and second place in the NL East. The forecasts have a favorite, but this division is wide open, and nearly any order of finish could be reasonable. On to the teams themselves.

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For the second year in a row, the Blue Jays headed into spring training with no clear second baseman. Last year, their second base competition featured Ryan Goins, Maicer Izturis, Munenori Kawasaki, Chris Getz and Steve Tolleson. Unsurprisingly, this quintet ranked last in our preseason, second base positional power rankings with a collective projection of 0.1 WAR. Nonetheless, the Jays rolled with this group all season, and things got ugly. Real ugly. Blue Jays second basemen combined for 0.3 WAR last year, and 0.7 of that WAR came from Brett Lawrie, who was supposed to be the team’s third baseman, but filled at second for 32 games.

A year later, not much has changed. Goins, Izturis, Kawasaki and Tolleson are all still on the team’s depth chart, and once again, the Blue Jays checked in at number 30 in our second base power rankings. For the second consecutive year, Toronto’s outlook at at the keystone looks pretty dismal. But unlike last year, there’s reason for hope for Blue Jays fans. While last year’s cast of characters is still around, the team’s opening day second baseman will be someone new: 24-year-old rookie Devon Travis, who secured the job by hitting .352/.397/.463 this spring. Read the rest of this entry »

R.A. Dickey’s entire career has, essentially, been one giant experiment. You know the story by now. Dickey was drafted by the Texas Rangers back in 1996, and took a signing bonus for nearly $800,000 less than what was originally offered after team doctors discovered he just didn’t even have an ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow. Dickey scuffled through the minor and major leagues for more than a decade before reinventing himself as a knuckleballer and promptly becoming one of baseball’s best pitchers, winning a Cy Young Award in the process.

Dickey’s experiment, obviously, was the knuckleball. But around Dickey, other experiments followed. Like the Mets giving light-hitting catcher Josh Thole regular playing time due in large part to his ability to catch Dickey’s knuckleball. Catching a knuckleball is quite hard, you see. But Thole could do it, and the two built a strong rapport together.

Then, the Blue Jays took over the experiment by trading top prospects Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard for Dickey, and, of course, his personal catcher, Thole. In Toronto, Thole’s position was reduced to exclusively serving as Dickey’s catcher. He couldn’t hit worth a lick, but he could catch Dickey’s dancing knuckler, and that was enough to keep him on the roster.

In the offseason, the Blue Jays signed Russell Martin to a contract worth $82 million, which, alongside incumbent Dioner Navarro, gave the Blue Jays something of a logjam at catcher if they wanted to continue carrying Dickey’s personal backstop on the roster.

Then, on Tuesday, some news:

Thole was sent to Buffalo today, so Russ Martin will catch the knuckleball. #bluejays

— Brendan Kennedy (@BKennedyStar) March 31, 2015

In 2015, a new R.A. Dickey experiment begins. Maybe you’d prefer to call it a Russell Martin experiment, because Dickey’s largely going to continue throwing his knuckler the same as he ever has. Martin is the one learning something new.
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This time, at least, it’s a little different. Yu Darvish sustained an injury while pitching. Cliff Lee sustained an injury while pitching. Gavin Floyd, Masahiro Tanaka, Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, so many of the others — they sustained their injuries while pitching. Marcus Stroman sustained an injury while fielding. His throwing arm is completely fine. His throwing arm, also, is completely useless to him at the moment, because you can’t pitch through a torn ACL. The freak injury will knock Stroman out for the duration of 2015, and though he should be good to go after that, the calendar says “2015” right now, and we’ll be without something we all thought we’d have. Stroman, like the others, has been taken from his team, and he’s been taken from the game.

There’s also that other twist. Darvish is a devastating loss, but then, the Rangers didn’t seem particularly poised to challenge for the playoffs. Lee would be another devastating loss, but even with him healthy, the Phillies looked like a mess. Floyd was just re-injured, and the Indians could win the AL Central, but the Indians also have a ton of pitching depth, and they knew Floyd was a risk. The Blue Jays had dreams of winning the World Series. Stroman figured to be the No. 1, and the team didn’t look deep with him. This is a massive blow, and it’s a massive blow to a team right on that win-curve position where a massive blow can be the most massive. People are mourning this. It’s not that much of an overreaction.

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Toronto Blue Jays. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Toronto’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Jays’ system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in theToronto system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Dalton Pompey, OF (Profile)

A reasonable projection for a player with limited or no major-league experience requires the translation of that same minor leaguer’s stats to their major-league equivalents. There’s essentially a “penalty,” then, for numbers produced at Triple-A relative to the major leagues — and ever greater penalties for Double-A stats, High-A stats, etc. Pompey represents an interesting case insofar as he began the 2014 season at High-A Dunedin — indeed, remained there until the end of June — but ended it with the parent club. So, despite the fact that Pompey produced mostly competent lines in higher levels, a projection system like Steamer won’t ignore those 300-plus plate appearances in the Florida State League during which he produced very good, but also not unprecedented, numbers. If the projection appears muted relative to Pompey’s tools and/or late-season performance, this is the likely explanation.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Cardinals, Brewers, Indians, Mariners, Pirates, Royals & Giants

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Draft Rankings: 2015, 2016 & 2017

International Coverage: 2015 July 2nd Parts One, Two & Three, 2016 July 2nd

The Jays have had a steady strategy for amateur player acquisition: spend early and often and take risks. That obviously will lead to some busts, but GM Alex Anthopoulos has had a consistent vision in this regard for his six years running the team and the farm is now flush with talent. The Latin program has developed shortstop and power arms and has done a nice job turning low- and mid-level bonuses into real prospects. The gambles in the draft have also paid off with risky bets on Daniel Norris, Anthony Alford and Aaron Sanchez delivering in some form already while top 2014 pick Jeff Hoffman could be better than all of them if his rehab goes well.

It’s also worth noting that the 40 FV group on this list is filled with high upside talent. These prospects are ranked based on trade value, so they’re worth the same as the less exciting, lower upside, higher certainty 40 FV players on other lists, but this means the Jays have a wider range of possibilities in outcomes for their lower level prospects. With a strong development season, a half dozen of these prospects could take a step forward, and, with another strong year of signing amateur talent, could move a top 10-12 system another step forward.

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With the Red Sox recently adding Yoan Moncada to the fold last week (details and audio interview), the biggest international domino has fallen and now there’s more certainty for teams and agents going forward about what teams can spend on July 2nd. In an early draft of this article, I was going to point out that MLB still hadn’t told teams what their international bonus pools were, in an effort to discourage teams from agreeing to verbal deals since they wouldn’t know the exact figure of what they could spend. MLB sent out those figures this week, and they fell in line with what teams expected: last year’s slots with a 5-7% bump.

I reported back in December that up to 12 teams were rumored to be considering or had already put enough agreements in place to exceed their bonus pool. I conceded that nowhere near that many would do it and that looks to be true, with closer to five teams looking likely to go over, but many more looking to spend their full pool and maybe trade for a little more, along with rumors of teams considering going over in 2016. Part of the reason for the uncertainty about which teams are going over is the uncertainty surround young Cuban players.

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