Yesterday, Tyler Chatwood signed with the Cubs for $38 million over three years. Given his velocity and run prevention at altitude, there’s a reasonable case to be made that Chatwood comes with enough upside to make this a very intriguing bet by the Cubs.

But while Chatwood remains interesting, one thing he can’t be described as is durable. He’s had Tommy John surgery twice (once in high school), missed nearly all of the 2014 and 2015 seasons, and has never thrown more than 158 innings in a season. The history of guys who have already had Tommy John revision surgeries is not very good, and quite simply, Chatwood’s health is a legitimate question mark. While the Cubs bought some real upside here, there is also a non-zero chance that they just spent $38 million to watch Chatwood spend most of the next three years rehabbing his elbow.

So, if we were plotting all pitchers on a risk/reward graph, Chatwood would be about as far from the middle of the graph as a point gets. Interestingly, though, the market also recently decided that the guy at the very opposite end of this spectrum is also worth $38 million over three years.

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Right-hander Tyler Chatwood signed with the Cubs today for three years and around $40 million, according to Jon Morosi. The contract is about what one might expect. Dave Cameron, for example, called for Chatwood to receive $10 million a year for three years. The Cubs have given him more annually than Cameron expected. But for one of the youngest pitchers on the market, it’s not absurd.

But there’s also another reason for optimism regarding Chatwood’s near future besides just his relative youth. Given the tools at our disposal, there appears to be evidence that Chatwood’s stuff hasn’t fully translated into results.

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The hot stove is flickering! There is actual news!

Cubs have agreed to a three-year deal with RHP Tyler Chatwood

— Sahadev Sharma (@sahadevsharma) December 7, 2017

Chatwood was one of the more interesting free agents in this class. Mike Petriello made a case for why Chatwood could be this year’s Charlie Morton, a high-velocity guy with a high-spin curveball who just needs a change of scenery. He was always likely to sign with an analytically-inclined organization, and the Cubs certainly qualify.

Chatwood ranked 17th among our Top 50 free agents heading into the off-season, with projections that work out to roughly league-average pitching when he’s on the mound, with durability a legitimate question.

I projected he’d get $30 million over three years, but it sounds like he did a bit better than that.

Tyler Chatwood's contract with #Cubs is worth around $40 million over 3 years, source says. @MLB @MLBNetwork

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) December 7, 2017

At nearly $40 million, Chatwood is no huge bargain, but there are definitely things to like about having him as a back-end starter with upside. There’s also plenty of risk here, of course, and the fact that an upside play with a limited track record of success costs $40 million tells you that this is a good winter to be a free agent pitcher.

The most curious entry on Shohei Ohtani’s list of seven finalists is the San Diego Padres. Given the club’s relatively diminutive market and general lack of competitiveness over the last decade, the Padres don’t immediately profile as a destination for a player of Ohtani’s magnitude.

But the Padres aren’t the only outlier. There’s another. If not quite as unexpected as the Padres, the Cubs certainly represent the second-most surprising team on Ohtani’s list.

The Cubs have the market. They also have a recent track record of success and the roster to compete in the future. They represent a geographic outlier among Ohtani’s remaining suitors, though. Of those seven final clubs, the Cubs are located in the eastern-most and coldest-climate city. For a player who seems to have a strong preference for playing on the West Coast and in ideal weather conditions, Chicago is a curious choice.

Ohtani eliminated every other NL East, AL East, NL Central, and AL Central club, en route to selecting his final seven teams. That he retained the Cubs must mean that he really likes something about the team apart from geography and market size. In other words, he really likes something about the Cubs that their decision-makers within the organization can control or sell.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Chicago Cubs farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH (stats-only) 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.

50 FV Prospects

Far too advanced for the AZL, Ademan made his U.S. debut in the Northwest League with Eugene. He hit .286/.365/.466 there, played great defense, and earned a promotion to the Midwest League for the final month of the season. He turned 19 a week and a half after South Bend finished their year.

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Every Major League Baseball organization has players who fly below the radar. They add value — or are projected to do so in the future — yet are underappreciated, if not unnoticed, by the vast majority of fans. The same is true for coaches, and even some managers, particularly at the minor-league level. Other behind-the-scenes personnel, such as scouts, are largely invisible. Given their contributions, many of these people deserve more accolades than they get.

With that in mind, I asked a cross section of general managers and presidents of baseball operations if they could point to a person in their organization who stands out as being under the radar. With a nearly across-the-board caveat that it’s hard to name just one, all gave interesting answers.

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Chaim Bloom, Tampa Bay Rays: “I’ll go with two guys who we feel strongly about that are actually no longer on the radar, because we just put them on our big-league staff. That would be Kyle Snyder and Ozzie Timmons. They were with us in Durham for a while and have played a huge role in the development of a lot of our young players. One of the reasons we’re excited about what’s coming was on display with that club. They won a Triple-A championship with a very young team.

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Javier Baez strikes out. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s his whole thing, but it’s kind of a big part of his whole thing. Picture Javier Baez. Picture him hitting, not running or slapping a tag down on some poor, unsuspecting opponent. You see that swing? We’re all picturing the same swing. Sometimes that swing connects and it hits the ball a very far distance. Many more times, that swing whiffs. It finds nothing but the disappointing freedom of air. I don’t need to further explain Baez to you; his reputation is well established. He just homered 23 times, and twice more in the playoffs. He just struck out 144 times, and 11 times more in the playoffs. He wound up with a contact rate of 66%.

So Baez strikes out. I’m here to ask you about one strikeout in particular. Really, it’s two strikeouts, I guess, but they’re virtually identical, and one is from Game 5 of the recent NLCS. I didn’t write about this immediately because it didn’t seem relevant, not within the greater, ongoing postseason context. The postseason is dead now. Now we’re in a very different kind of postseason. So I’d like to shine the light on unusual Javier Baez strikeouts. Specifically, I want to know what you think about them.

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There’s a growing number of windmills sprouting around the country. One can see fields of them from plane windows at 30,000 feet. There’s even a giant one on the east side of Cleveland that’s visible, on a clear day, across Lake Erie from the shores of Bay Village, Ohio, a small municipality on the west side of the city, where this author now resides. The windmills are harnessing the power of the wind to create clean energy, which can be delivered anywhere, I presume, including the car-charging stations I’ve noticed pop up in places like the nearby Whole Foods parking lot. Despite very conspicuous advances and installations, we’re apparently decades away — perhaps not until the 2040s — from reaching Peak Oil, according to Reuters. Clean and renewable energy is taking some time to gain market share.

Some innovations take time to grab hold, others advance quickly. It can be difficult to project when a trend will reach its high-water mark. But we might have seen a prominent 21st trend and strategy reach that point in major-league baseball. In 2016, after a dramatic rise this decade, baseball might have reached Peak Shift.

This year, shifts declined for the first time since their rapid rise earlier in the decade. Ten years ago, shifts were being used against left-handed power hitters exclusively. There wasn’t a shift employed against a right-handed hitter, according to the Baseball Info Solutions database, until June 11, 2009, when the Phillies moved three infielders to the left side of second base against Gary Sheffield. At that point, in the late 2000s, the Rays and Brewers were at the vanguard of wholesale shifting. In 2012, league-wide shift usage doubled, though it was still modest in terms of raw numbers. Gradually more teams bought in — teams like the Pirates, who increased their shift usage by 400% from 2012 to 2013. In 2014, usage doubled again, as the 10,000-shift mark was breached for the first time. The practice has since proliferated across the sport.

From 2012 to -16, shift usage grew by at least 34.8% each season.

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If Shohei Ohtani isn’t able to play in the major leagues next season, that would quickly make Yu Darvish the clear No. 1 free agent available this winter — and perhaps the only clear top-of-rotation arm. And even if Ohtani is cleared to migrate across the Pacific to play professional baseball, Darvish is likely to walk away as the highest-paid player from this free-agent class.

Yes, Darvish’s awful World Series performance is still fresh in the collective consciousness, but that shouldn’t negate his late-season work with the Dodgers. After some data-informed tweaks (documented here by Eno and also by Andy McCullough of the L.A. Times), Darvish was excellent. With the Dodgers in the second half, the right-hander struck out 61 and walked 13 in 49 innings.

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Following the final game of the regular season, Jose Altuve told a small group of reporters that once October rolls around, “everybody starts with zero wins and zero losses, and everybody’s average is zero.”

Nearly a month later, the Astros are even-steven with the Dodgers in the World Series and Altuve’s average (.322) is farther above zero than anyone’s in the postseason (minimum 20 at bats). That’s hardly a surprise. The 27-year-old second baseman captured his third American League batting title this year, hitting a career high .346. He doesn’t consider it his biggest personal accomplishment to date.

“That would be the Silver Slugger,” Altuve told the scribes, citing an honor he was awarded last year. “With the batting title, they only care if you hit .300/.320, but the Silver Slugger is all around — doubles, triples, home runs — and I’m 5’ 5” and 160 pounds.”

His numbers have been anything but Lilliputian. Over the past four seasons, the Venezuelan spark plug has a .334/.384/.496 slash line and 254 extra-base hits. And while he leads MLB in one-base hits over that same period, it’s not as though singles are a bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »