By the admission of the player himself, John Smoltz had a unique career that doesn’t quite stack up against the traditional standards set by past Hall of Fame inductees. He had two careers, and “each doesn’t qualify a hall of fame type career,” as the pitcher said on a conference call after he was inducted on Tuesday.

By definition, his career is now a Hall of Fame career, but is it possible that he stacks up better against his new colleagues if you consider his career as two halves of two separate induction-worthy careers?

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The Braves are sending right fielder Justin Upton and a yet-to-be-named-publicly low level prospect to the Padres for for pitcher Max Fried, center fielder Mallex Smith, second baseman Jace Peterson and third baseman Dustin Peterson.  It’s an interesting way for Atlanta to get a very high upside player not usually available in a package for a one-year rental.  As I did with my breakdown of the Wil Myers trade, I’ve ranked the pieces in order of my preference, with a note where there’s a virtual tie.

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International baseball has been in the news often lately with the ongoing saga of Yoan Moncada (he’s in America now), the signing of Yasmany Tomas and yesterday’s news that Cuba-U.S. relations could be getting much better.  In recent news, at the yearly international scouting directors’ meeting at the Winter Meetings last week, sources tell me there was no talk about the recent controversial rule change and no talk about an international draft, as expected.

So much has been happening lately that you may have temporarily forgotten about last summer, when the Yankees obliterated the international amateur spending record (and recently added another prospect). If the early rumors and innuendo are any indication, the rest of baseball isn’t going to let the Yankees have the last word.

I already mentioned the Cubs as one of multiple teams expected to spend well past their bonus pool starting on July 2nd, 2015.  I had heard rumors of other clubs planning to get in the act when I wrote that, but the group keeps growing with each call I make, so I decided to survey the industry and see where we stand.  After surveying about a dozen international sources, here are the dozen clubs that scouts either are sure, pretty sure or at least very suspicious will be spending past their bonus pool, ranked in order of likelihood:

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The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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If you’re still looking for offense on the free agent market, you’re basically out of luck, other than the still-available Chase Headley. Looking at our Free Agent Tracker, the only hitter left who projects to reach a realistic 2 WAR — i.e., league average — is Jed Lowrie, who is undeniably talented but rarely healthy and probably not a shortstop. (Ignore the overly optimistic outlook on Daric Barton, since this is using Steamer/600, and he’s had 600 plate appearances total over the last four seasons.)

That means that if you’re still in a situation where you need a bat and you don’t have the finances or the flexibility to add Headley, you’re either totally out of luck or you’re looking to the trade market. That’s where the Padres turned in landing Matt Kemp, for better or worse. It’s where the Cardinals went when they landed Jason Heyward, and how the Tigers picked up Yoenis Cespedes, and how Josh Donaldson landed in Toronto, and how Miguel Montero became a Cub.

While we can’t ever truly know for certain who is “available” on the trade market, we can say with reasonable confidence that Justin Upton is. As the Braves signaled their intention to shift from win-now to something resembling a mild rebuild with the firing of GM Frank Wren and the trade of Heyward, moving Upton — who can be a free agent following 2015 — seems like the logical next step. Unsurprisingly, his player tag at MLBTR has been full of activity over the last few weeks.

Upton, for the moment, is still a Brave, and we don’t know whether that’s because Atlanta wants too much or other teams aren’t stepping up — the answer, almost certainly, is both. But with the added information we have thanks to recent moves, can we get closer to finding his true trade value?

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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Late this season, Padres righty Andrew Cashner came back from a shoulder injury with a new twist on his repertoire — again. This time, he featured a few more high fastballs and big curves than he had in the past. You’d think those two pitches are often linked across baseball, but the numbers aren’t as clear.

The last time Cashner came back from injury, he focused on throwing more two-seamers to get quicker outs, altered his changeup grip, and changed his grip on his breaking pitch. These changes were made with his health in mind, but they also served to make him a more complete pitcher.

This year, when he came back from shoulder inflammation that sidelined him for two months, Cashner again came back from a wrinkle. “I started throwing the four-seamer more in order to establish the high strike,” Cashner said before a game against the Giants in late September. Of course the pitcher knows best about his approach, but it’s worth noticing that he only threw an average of three more four-seam fastballs per game when he returned compared to the same time frame before his injury. And that his heat maps before and after his injury aren’t conclusive on the subject of high four-seamers.

He pointed out that he threw more curveballs when he came back, too. He’d thrown nine in his first fourteen starts before he got hurt. He threw 18 curves in the seven starts that came after his stint on the DL. This September was the month in which Cashner showed the best whiff rate on his curve ball in his career.

The second part of the plan was paired with the first, he admitted. That high fastball is “on the same plane” as the curveball. That makes all sorts of intuitive sense, considering the way the the idea of a high 94 mph high fastball coming the same general area as a big, dropping slow curve. It’s the kind of thing that seems to work for other pitchers.

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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 Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Although it hasn’t been published here yet, one assumes that Jason Heyward’s projection (when it is available) will be one of the best among Atlanta’s collection of field players. Heyward, of course, won’t be playing for the club in 2015, having recently been traded to St. Louis in exchange for Shelby Miller et al. What that means, immediately, for the Atlantans is a more playing time for Evan Gattis in left field, at which position he made zero appearances in 2014 after starting there 47 times in 2013.

Expected to inherent Gattis’s catching role from 2014 is Christian Bethancourt, who enters just his age-23 season. Despite having recorded just a 54 wRC+ and -0.2 WAR over 117 plate appearances last year in what was effectively his debut (he appeared in a single game in 2013), Bethancourt is expected to produce enough offensively to render himself a league-average player.

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As November turns into December, we have a pretty good idea of what most teams are attempting to do with their short-term futures. The Red Sox are going for it, obviously, and so are the Blue Jays. The White Sox seem like they’re trying to improve for 2015; the Phillies might finally be ready to accept that they need to start over. Teams like the Cubs, Dodgers and Yankees haven’t yet made much noise, but their intentions are clear. Other than whatever it is the A’s are trying to pull, where most teams are on the success cycle is more or less an open secret.

Other than the Braves, that is. The trade that sent Jason Heyward and Jordan Walden to St. Louis for Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins was largely unpopular in Atlanta, but it made a considerable amount of sense for both sides, because the Cardinals got one year of the best player involved and the Braves got 10 years of two pitchers with upside. For the long term, assuming they had decided that extending Heyward was just not going to happen, it’s a smart move. For the short term, it almost unquestionably made their 2015 team worse, and there’s been at least one recent media report that indicates that “it sounds as if the Braves will make moves aimed toward competing for titles in 2017 rather than the next two seasons.”

If so, that makes sense. There’s obvious appeal in having a winner ready for the new ballpark the club will move into in 2017, and this current Braves team, as constructed, isn’t likely to be particularly good. There’s constant rumors that Justin Upton could be traded, too, and Evan Gattis might follow him out the door as well — or worse, start every day in left field. There’s not currently a second baseman, or realistic hope for B.J. Upton, and the rotation is full of question marks. This was a bad offense last year, and without Heyward, now it looks worse.

With that reality, here’s the question: Why not trade Craig Kimbrel? Like, now? Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Upton is probably going to get traded. If you believe Joel Sherman’s source, there’s no probably about it; Upton is the next Brave out of town. And it makes sense; the team is clearly retooling for the future, while Upton is entering the final year of his contract. If the Braves don’t think they’re going to sign him long-term, better to trade him now than settle a compensation pick next year.

The question will be the price. Sherman reports that the asking price for Upton is going to be higher than the return they got for Jason Heyward, and that was already a pretty solid package. As I noted this morning, teams are paying through the moon for right-handed power right now, and so Upton will be an attractive option for teams looking to balance out their line-ups.

But even with the advantage of his handedness, I’d like to suggest that the price for Upton should be less than what St. Louis gave up for Heyward. And I promise, this isn’t another discussion of Heyward’s defensive metrics. I can make the point without even needing to cite UZR or DRS, because the offensive gap just isn’t as large as people think. Here are their respective lines over the past three seasons.

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