The Brewers appear to have unearthed a gem in Keon Broxton, whose admirers are growing in number, the bandwagon led by FanGraphs’ own Jeff Sullivan.

If the projections are right, the Brewers found more sneaky value in their 2017 first baseman, Eric Thames, who spent the last few years launching home runs in South Korea.

And on Thursday, the Brewers reached a one-year, $5.35 million million deal with Neftali Feliz as first reported by Jon Heyman.

On the surface, Feliz was solid last season, and produced value for the Pirates on a one-year deal. After three seasons marred by injury and inconsistency with the Rangers and Tigers, Feliz struck out 28% of the batters he faced in 2016, posted a 19-point difference between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%), and recorded his hardest average fastball velocity (96.1 mph) since 2011.

While a .240 BABIP kept his ERA at a reasonable 3.52, that’s also probably a function of his approach: Feliz’s fly-ball tendencies have helped him to a .241 BABIP for his career.

He looks like another Ray Searage special.

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I’ve encouraged you to believe in Keon Broxton before. In baseball-game terms, that wasn’t even very long ago. So you could accuse me here of being unoriginal, but I’ve prepared a counterargument. For one thing, it’s January, shut up. For a second thing, I bet a lot of you missed my previous summary. And for a third thing, now there’s some new information. This is a Keon Broxton article, and I’ll tell you why I think he’s already the best player on the Brewers, headed into 2017.

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The signing of Eric Thames and the projections subsequently produced for him represent two of the more interesting, if lower-profile, developments of the offseason. Since Thames took his quick left-handed swing across the Pacific, he’s become one of the top sluggers in the hitter-friendly Korea Baseball Organization.

If you have 30 free minutes you can watch all 47 of his 2015 home runs thanks to YouTube:

Despite having already played in the majors, Thames is something of a mystery, a curiosity, in transitioning from a foreign professional league. If the projections are accurate, however – and his Davenport translations are pretty close to other, former international unknowns like Jose Abreu, Yoenis Cespedes and Jung Ho Kang – then the Brewers have themselves a steal.

In the cases both of Cespedes and Kang, who played in foreign leagues that draw fewer scouts, analytics played a considerable role in the decision to sign them. Analytics and projections also played a significant part in the Thames signing, as Brewers GM David Stearns told David Laurila in the latter’s Sunday notes this weekend.

Kang was the first KBO hitter to make the jump directly to the majors. There were no direct comparisons. But plenty of South Korean stars had played in the Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball Organization, so the Pirates looked at their production in Japan and then studied the more sizable sample of NPB position players who have played in the majors.

Back in 2013, the A’s were also creative in projecting Cespedes, then a trailblazing Cuban defector, as detailed by Ben Reiter in Sports Illustrated.

“[Farhan] Zaidi built a model that analyzed not just the grades the scouts had given to Cespedes on the usual eight-point scale, but also the scouts themselves. Say three guys have a six power on him, three guys have seven power on him. What kind of minor leaguers or major leaguers do those guys have those grades on?”

The A’s did not miss a chance to scout Cespedes when access was available. The Pirates did send scouts over to evaluate Kang in addition to video analysis (though Kang’s off-the-field issues were apparently not discovered). Still, recent success stories of players signed from foreign pro leagues are analytics-heavy because they’ve had to be. There are few scouting resources committed to South Korea and Japan. Cuba has been difficult to scout due to political reasons.

But what are MLB clubs missing at the professional and amateur levels by not having more of a scouting presence in places like South Korea? And why are such areas not heavily staffed?

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Milwaukee general manager David Stearns has dedicated the first year-plus of his tenure with the Brewers to a pursuit of affordable pieces that might contribute to the club’s next winning season, while trading away the most valuable pieces of its most recent one. The ZiPS projections here reflect the results of that endeavor. On the one hand, no field player is projected to record more than three wins in 2017. (Jonathan Villar, at 2.8 zWAR, is best acquitted by that measure.) On the other hand, 20 positions players receive a forecast of 1.0 WAR or better.

For context, consider: three of the National League’s playoff clubs from 2016 have been included thus far in this series of ZiPS posts. By comparison, only 16 of the Cubs’ position players receive a projection of one win or better. Only 13 of Washington’s do. And only 10 field players for the San Francisco Giants are expected to cross the one-win threshold, per ZiPS. Milwaukee, in other words, has gathered a large collection of players whose median probable outcome is slightly below average. Given the youth of that group, however, and the vagaries of the world, some of those players will develop into average or better players.

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Back on November 29th, the Brewers decided to non-tender first baseman Chris Carter, despite the fact that he hit 41 home runs for them last year. Despite his big time power, they wanted to open the position for Eric Thames, a free agent they signed the same day. Thames has been a star over in Korea the last few years, and the Brewers decided to bet on his uncertainty, hoping that some of his success over there is based on real improvements, and not just evidence of what a minor league slugger can do to inferior competition.

Normally, when teams make moves, we like to cite the projection system data as a baseline, to give us a rough understanding of what a player might reasonably be expected to do going forward. Because Thames was playing in Korea, though, we didn’t have a Steamer projection for him at the time, and in fact, we didn’t have one for him until yesterday, when Jared Cross finished running his forecasts for international players. And so, starting today, we’re officially displaying a projection for Thames here on the site. And it’s a pretty good one.

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Right after the end of the playoffs, we lost August Fagerstrom to a major-league front office. I miss having August around, because he was a good friend and an excellent writer. If there was one complication, though, it was that, shockingly often, we wanted to write about the same things. The same sorts of stuff inspired us, and in this line of work, there’s nothing more precious than a half-decent idea. It would be discouraging to want to do something, and then realize another person already had something along the same lines in progress.

It’s not good to have August gone. Less quality content is less quality content. But if nothing else, I am now freer to pursue what I like. Which means I am now freer to write about Domingo Santana. Used to be, August would carry that torch, and he wrote positive things about him any number of times. Now it’s up to me. Much like August, I consider myself a Domingo Santana fan. And it looks like he could become a crucial piece of the Brewers’ organizational rebuild.

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It’s possible not to have noticed Ryan Braun last season, but the 32-year-old had a pretty good year. He hit 30 homers, put up a 133 wRC+, and produced just over three wins. There was some talk during the season that Braun might be traded, and a trade that would have sent Yasiel Puig to Milwaukee might have been close. At the time, trading Braun made a lot of sense for the Brewers: the club was firmly situated in a rebuilding stage and Braun’s represented the only big contract remaining on the team’s payroll. While he played well down the stretch, Braun’s trade value has declined nonetheless: he’ll now be another year older, his future production will be worth considerably less than his present, and there’s a glut of bat-first players available on the market.

If Ryan Braun were a free agent, he would be one of the more sought after players available. Consider Braun’s 2016 stat line compared to those produced by two of the best hitters to hit free agency this year.

Cespedes signed with the Mets for $110 million, costing the Mets a compensation draft pick in the process. Edwin Encarnacion has reportedly turned down four years and $80 million. Ryan Braun now has four years and $76 million left on his contract, although $14 million of that amount is deferred interest-free, putting the actual value of the contract closer to $65 million or $70 million in the way we normally think of guaranteed contracts. Braun is two years older than Cespedes, but is one year younger than Encarnacion, and can actually play in the outfield. While Braun isn’t a particularly good defender, saving a few less runs than average in a corner-outfield spot makes his bat playable out there.

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The 2016 season featured the second-most home runs in baseball’s history. Though a few people around baseball want to attribute it to the placement of power hitters higher in the lineup or better coaching based on better data, the evidence that both exit velocity and home runs per contact are up across the league refutes the first, and the evidence of the latter is minor. It’s a bit of an open mystery, but it’s certainly possible that the ball is different now.

In any case, the fact that homers are up is irrefutable. And it’s on the game to adjust. So I asked many of baseball’s best managers a simple question: with home runs up, how have you adjusted how you approach the game? Lineups, rotations, bullpens, hooks: is anything different for them today than it was two years ago?

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Terry Collins, New York Mets: No, really doesn’t. The game has changed, that’s the game now: home runs. And we’re lucky we got a few guys who can hit ’em. That’s where it’s at. As I said all last year, our team was built around power, so you sit back and make sure they have enough batting practice and be ready to start the game. We’ve got a good offensive team. Neil. Getting Neil Walker back, that’s big. David back and Ces and Jay and Granderson. We got a bench full of guys that could be everyday players. We’re pretty lucky.

I watched the playoffs, too, and I know what you’re talking about. I talked to Joe Maddon a couple days ago about how the playoffs may change and he said, ‘We didn’t have your pitching. I’ll leave ’em in.’

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The Red Sox have landed right-handed reliever Tyler Thornburg in exchange for a trio of players: big-league corner infielder Travis Shaw and prospects Mauricio Dubon and Josh Pennington. Here’s how the minor leaguers headed to Milwaukee grade out by my KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar a methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

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Mauricio Dubon, SS, (Profile)

KATOH: 4.6 WAR (92nd overall)
KATOH+: 3.5 WAR (138th overall)

After hitting respectably in the low levels of the minors, Dubon broke out big time last year. He opened the year by hitting a rock solid .306/.387/.379 at High-A, pairing a 9% strikeout rate with a 12% walk rate. He continued raking following a June promotion to Double-A, but did so a bit differently. His walk and strikeout rates both trended in the wrong direction, but for the first time ever, he hit for power.

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Any idiot with modest control both over the English language and also Microsoft Excel is capable of writing a weblog post about the implications of Mauricio Dubon’s statistical record as a minor leaguer on his possible future as a major leaguer. The only idiot prepared to do it for FanGraphs.com, however, is the one composing these words right now.

Who is Mauricio Dubon? A different person to everyone he meets, probably, because this is how humans work. Who he is for the purposes of the current post, however, is one of the players received by Milwaukee in a deal that sent reliever Tyler Thornburg to Boston this morning. Travis Shaw is almost certainly the most well-known player acquired by the Brewers. Dubon, however, is likely the best.

As a professional, Dubon almost immediately joined that class of player who presents a challenge to evaluators. He was drafted in the 26th round, has always lacked a carrying tool, and plays what amounts to probably just a fringe shortstop. At the same time, however, he also possesses nearly elite contact skills and — regardless of the position at which he’s being deployed — profiles as a net-positive defensive contributor.

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