Kris Bryant hit two more home runs yesterday for the Chicago Cubs during the Will Ferrell extravaganza. He stands tall among prospects, ranking number one according to Kiley McDaniel. The FanGraphs Depth Charts have given him a conservative 100 games played, and he still manages to top 3 WAR. The ZiPS projections give him closer to a full season, and he tops four wins despite never having taken an at bat at the major league level. He is not even on the Cubs’ 40-man roster. Despite that inexperience, he is going to make the Cubs look very bad for sending him to the minor leagues to start the season. It brings back memories of the Los Angeles Angels in 2012 holding back Mike Trout in the minors to start the season, but Kris Bryant’s situation is very different from Mike Trout’s.

In 2012, Mike Trout, like Bryant today, was one of the very best prospects in all of baseball and likely ready to play in the majors, but the Angels sent him to Triple-A to start the season. The Angels started the season 6-14, recalled Trout from Salt Lake, went 83-59 the rest of the way, and missed the playoffs by four games. Looking back at Trout’s excellence now, it might be easy to draw the conclusion that the Angels likely make the playoffs with Trout for the entire season and that the Angels were manipulating Trout’s service time to save money. The former is impossible to determine, but the latter is highly unlikely.
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The art and science of swing mechanics is largely opaque even to those among us who watch the game regularly and/or played competitively as amateurs. Augmenting the confusion is the surfeit of coaches who, though well-intentioned, provide instruction that is sometimes in direct contradiction of those properties which physics itself suggests ought to appear within the optimal swing.

Dan Farnsworth is a swing instructor currently based in Los Angeles (although relocating to New York soon). He’s written a number of posts for FanGraphs on swing mechanics — including, most notably, a thorough documentation of the improvements J.D. Martinez had made to his swing a few months before he was signed by Detroit and proceeded to produce a nearly four-win season in 480 plate appearances.

What follows is series of three brief conversations with Farnsworth regarding swings by Cubs prospects Jorge Soler, Javier Baez, and Kris Bryant — which threesome recorded consecutive home runs, in that order, during Tuesday’s Cactus League game against Cleveland (box). In each case, the author has allowed his unbridled naivete to guide the course of conversation and relied on Farnsworth to provide clarity.

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The first thing you might notice about Kris Bryant is not the prodigious power. You’d have to watch a couple of plate appearances before you could really understand that side of him.

The first thing you would probably notice about Kris Bryant is that he’s tall. But when you ask him how that’s affected his plate discipline, you’ll stump him for a second.

At least when it comes to walks, Bryant hasn’t worried too much about having a bigger strike zone. “I haven’t been 6’5″ my whole life,” he laughed. He may not be an Eddie Stanky, but as he’s grown, he’s “figured out” his own strike zone, and begun focusing on getting to pitches in order to use his length as a strength.

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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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Earlier, I published a post including this graph:

Of all the things that stand out, perhaps nothing stands out quite like the Cubs. Over the last 10 years, they’ve won 55 fewer games than they’ve been projected to win, and while there are some quibbles you can have with blending all the years and all the projection systems, at the end of the day, projections aren’t too dissimilar and they haven’t changed super dramatically over the decade, and no one comes particularly close to matching the Cubs’ level of disappointment. At -55, they’re separated from the next-lowest team by 19 wins.

I don’t think there’s really anything predictive, here. I’d never bet on a given team beating or undershooting its next-year projection. Certainly not based on what it just did. But -55 seems worthy of investigation. What can we find out, about why this might’ve happened? What traits or events might’ve contributed to the Cubs coming off as such a disappointment?

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The Chicago Cubs scored a preliminary victory on Thursday in the lawsuit filed last month by the owners of several of the rooftops looking into Wrigley Field.  As I explained at the time the suit was filed, the case is the latest in a series of legal proceedings challenging the on-going Wrigley Field renovations, and in particular the Cubs’ construction of two new outfield scoreboards.   Unlike earlier legal challenges to the project – which are focused on trying to overturn the city’s approval of the renovation plans – the rooftop owners’ suit against the Cubs charges the team with a variety of legal violations (antitrust, defamation, unfair business practices, breach of contract).

Last week, the rooftop owners asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) preventing the team from building the scoreboards until the case is resolved.  Following four hours of argument on Wednesday, Judge Virginia Kendall issued a decision on Thursday morning denying the rooftops’ request, helping clear the way for the Cubs to move forward with construction of the disputed scoreboards.

In order to receive a TRO, the rooftops generally had to show that they: 1) were likely to prevail in the case, and 2) would suffer an “irreparable” injury (i.e., one that cannot be fully remedied by money) if the restraining order was not granted.  The rooftop owners believed they had established both requirements, arguing in particular that the imminent construction of the scoreboards would destroy their business. Meanwhile, the Cubs argued that the rooftops were unlikely to prevail on any of the claims they had asserted in the lawsuit, and that they could easily be compensated for any damage to their business resulting from the construction of the scoreboards through the payment of monetary damages.

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Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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Seems we’ve been talking about the Cubs more than usual this offseason. Which makes sense — the Cubs are really interesting right now. They’re really interesting right now, and it’s been a while since they’ve been interesting at all. It’s finally their turn. Of course we’re going to talk about them more than, say, the Mets or the Rangers. Sorry, Mets and Rangers.

Bullpens are all the rage in today’s MLB. Starting pitchers are being asked less and less to work deep into games, and so the importance of having multiple bullpen weapons to work the final few innings is at an all-time high. Used to be you’d hear about a team that “played eight inning games.” A team like the Yankees could let out a sigh of relief when they entered the ninth with a lead, because they had Mariano Rivera. Last year, we saw the emergence of the team that played six innings games, as the Royals let out their collective sigh of relief with a lead in the seventh inning as they watched Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis and Greg Holland toy with hitters for three innings to close out games.

Everyone would like to have their own version of the Royals’ three-headed monster in the back of their bullpen, which brings us to the back end of the Cubs bullpen.
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Pretty often, we get accused of overvaluing young players and prospects. The line of thinking is that we don’t properly appreciate the chances of a player flaming out and failing to accomplish anything of consequence. Yet, I don’t think we’ve ever been accused of overvaluing Kris Bryant. Around Bryant, there’s developed a consensus. Kiley ranked him first among Cubs prospects, obviously. Keith Law ranked him first in baseball. ZiPS is in love with Bryant, projecting a .364 wOBA. And Steamer, too, projects a .364 wOBA, exceeding its projections for Adrian Beltre and Robinson Cano. The No. 1 ZiPS comp is Evan Longoria. Bryant has yet to play in the major leagues, but already he’s considered a huge reason why the 2015 Cubs ought to contend for a playoff spot. He probably won’t be on the team out of camp, but he should be locked in before Memorial Day.

What I don’t intend to do is try to convince you that Bryant is going to bust. I don’t think Bryant is going to bust. He is uncommonly good, and uncommonly powerful, with power to all fields that comes out of a shorter swing than you’d expect. Yet there is one thing about Bryant worth considering as hype continues to build. He’s not a perfect prospect; there’s no such thing as a perfect prospect. Every prospect has a flaw, and Bryant’s is enough to raise the eyebrows. Think of it this way: if Bryant were to disappoint, why might that be? It seems we could already have a sign.

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As I reported on twitter moments ago, MLB sent a memo to clubs detailing the new process for Cuban players to go from leaving the country to signing with an MLB team. The short version is that super prospect Yoan Moncada is eligible to sign now, after a maddening long delay.

For those new to this topic or if you just want a refresher, here’s a recap of my coverage of this Moncada saga from the start:

– October 3, 2014: Moncada is confirmed out of Cuba, but no one knows where he is.  We assume his whereabouts will become clear soon as he’s the most hyped prospect to leave the island in years. Here I first quote the common “teenage Puig that can play the infield and switch hit” comp and break down all the implications about who can sign him, who is likely to pony up the big bucks, game theory implications and more.

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