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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In the wake of of the Jon Lester signing, we’ve had a spate of articles suggesting caution about the fortunes of the 2015 Chicago Cubs. After all, while Lester is a nice little pitcher, this is a team that won 73 games a year ago, and had Jeff Samardzija performing at Jon Lester levels for the first half of the year. Or, as our friend Rob Neyer put it over at JABO this morning:

In 2015? The Cubs will need a lotta luck to challenge the Cardinals and the Pirates.

In 2014, the Cubs went 73-89 and were outscored by nearly a hundred runs.

In 2014, Jason Hammel and Jeff Samardzija combined for 216 2/3 innings and a 3.14 FIP with the Cubs. Also in 2014, Jon Lester pitched 220 innings with a 2.46 ERA. Not exactly but essentially, Lester does little but replace what the Cubs lost when Hammel and Samardzija were mailed to Oakland last summer.

In the short term.

The Cubs have also acquired Miguel Montero. Now, Montero’s better than incumbent catcher Wellington Castillo, particularly if you believe in Baseball Prospectus’ pitch-framing metrics. But it’??s not like the Cubs just replaced Drew Butera with Buster Posey or something. Castillo’??s decent, Montero’??s pretty good.

In the short term, adding Lester and Montero makes the Cubs maybe two or three games better than they were last year. Or maybe I’m WAY OFF … and it’??s four or five games. Now tack on another four or five to account for the mystical powers of Joe Maddon. That still leaves them well short of scaring the Cardinals.

While I retain my fondness for Rob as a person and a writer, I think he’s a little bit off here. I think the Cubs really are contenders in 2015 now, and I think I have the data to prove it.

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We all knew that the time was coming. The Cubs themselves talked rather openly about it. Blessed with the best system in baseball, the Cubs were coming up on a period of hopeful contention. The soft target, for many, was 2016. By that point, enough prospects might’ve established themselves, and the Cubs would be able to gun for the playoffs. But it was always reasonable to think the Cubs might try to accelerate things. That they might hit that transition between stockpiling and spending, and spend big to hurry things up. There was a way for the Cubs to become a potential playoff team next season. Whether you think they’re there yet, the Cubs have now checked off a lot of boxes.

In Jason Hammel, the Cubs just locked up a pretty talented starter for the back of the rotation. In Miguel Montero, the Cubs upgraded behind the plate, getting kind of a poor man’s Russell Martin equivalent. And now the Cubs have their big fish, agreeing with Jon Lester for six years and $155 million. For Lester, the Cubs were long considered a favorite, but there’s a difference between something being possible and something getting done. We can now, officially, say this: the Cubs are ready to try to go to the playoffs. There’s no mistaking their intentions, and Lester’s a giant upgrade.

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Clubs rebuild. It’s a part of the process. Just look at what’s happening in Oakland right now. Every year, franchises begin rebuilds, continue rebuilds and occasionally start them all over again when the first one sinks into the swamp.

Rebuilds take patience. They can be exciting, and they can be frustrating. Those feelings are not mutually exclusive, in this case. The start of a rebuild can be exciting, because it ushers what is oftentimes a much-needed change in direction. There are typically big transactions that occur at the start of a rebuild, and big transactions are exciting.

The middle part of the rebuild sucks, and is the frustrating part. For several years, the on-field major league product is bad, and watching bad teams isn’t fun. The hopes of the team lie in minor league prospects, and minor league prospects don’t always pan out. When they don’t pan out is when the rebuild starts all over again, and that’s the worst kind of rebuild.

But as exciting as the beginning of a rebuild can be, nothing tops the realization of a successful rebuild and the expectation of imminent success that looms. Years of patience are awarded by the arrival of top prospects reaching their potential, coupled with a couple of marquee additions to compliment the shiny budding plants that are the homegrown prospects. The successful rebuild culminates with the flip of a switch, seemingly overnight, from “rebuild” mode to “contend.” It’s as liberating a switch as there is to be flipped as a front office executive of a major league franchise, and it’s a switch the Cubs are flipping as we speak.
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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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The word we’re supposed to use is “introduced”. As in, the Cubs introduced Joe Maddon on Monday as the team’s new manager. Really, Maddon’s a guy who needs no introduction, and in addition to that, Maddon isn’t a guy you bring in, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re on the verge of something. Maddon isn’t a guy you give five years and $25 million, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re entering a new era. The Cubs didn’t want to get rid of Rick Renteria, but at the same time, this wasn’t an opportunity they could let pass by. As was noted in the days prior to Monday’s press conference:

On Friday, Epstein said Maddon “may be as well-suited as anyone in the industry to manage the challenges that lie ahead of us.”

About those challenges — there are always challenges, for everyone, and there are certainly always challenges in Chicago, but the challenges that lie ahead now are quite different from the challenges that were ahead a few years back when the Cubs overhauled the front office. The idea now is that Maddon can help the team transition from loser to winner, and though that’s what all losers want, the Cubs are in a particular position. Maddon spent a chunk of his press conference talking about the 2015 playoffs. Theo Epstein, at the end of the regular season, also talked about the 2015 playoffs. The Cubs see Joe Maddon as the first step in a new level. The Cubs now intend to be serious about the present. So how far away are the Cubs from looking like a competitive team?

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Under pretty much all circumstances, relative to people involved in the game, we the public have a lesser amount of information. Sometimes, it’s close, like when it comes to specific player valuation — we have access to almost as much as the teams and executives do. But sometimes we’re bringing a straw to a knife fight. There’s perhaps nothing we understand less than the value of a manager. Analysts have tried to dig in deep, and within our heads we have ideas of which guys are better than others, but ultimately we’re always guessing on the impact. What are we supposed to do with charisma and leadership? The attempted evaluation of managers causes many people to just throw up their hands. Why even bother?

So, from the outside, we can barely say anything. We simply don’t know. And maybe teams don’t know much, either. Maybe they’re guessing almost as much as we are. But we can at least evaluate market behavior as an indirect reflection of a guy’s perceived value. And the market has responded strongly to Joe Maddon’s sudden and unanticipated free agency. The Cubs are going to hire Maddon, officially, maybe before I’m done writing this post. It’s pretty clear, then, how highly Maddon is thought of.

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I spent last week at a 4-day showcase in Ft. Lauderdale, FL for July 2nd eligible players from the Dominican Prospect League, then went to a 5-day tournament in Jupiter, FL for the top high school travel teams, which included many top draft prospects.  I’ll cover the Jupiter tournament and players rising/falling on draft boards later this week.  That said, this year’s tournament didn’t have the out-of-nowhere pop-up prospect or mid-round player jumping into the first round that we’ve had in past years, so my rankings from last month are still pretty close to what I have right now.

The DPL showcase was my first time seeing many of the top 2015 July 2nd prospects. I was last in the Dominican in January for a week of showcases for 2014 prospects and the DPL and rival International Prospect League (IPL) both briefly showcased their top 2015 prospects when many of them were 14 years old.  So, I’d seen some of these players before, but we’re in the part of their development where big physical changes can come in a few months, so every new look will shuffle any scout’s rankings.  If you’re looking for the next July 2nd super prospect, I wrote about a kid in the 2016 class, Venezuelan switch-hitting shortstop Kevin Maitan, last month and some video of him popped up since then.

As I talked about in more depth last year, the biggest effect that the new international bonus pools had on July 2nd signings is teams agreeing to verbal deals with players far earlier than they had in the past.  Essentially, MLB put a soft cap on spending that at least 25 teams stay under each year, so the best way to make the most of a fixed budget is to get discounts by locking up targeted players as early as possible.  MLB didn’t like this and some associated things that came with this shift in the industry and is basically trying to create, via recent rule changes, a “July 2nd season” that starts in January , though nearly everyone from players to agents to scouts to executives think the recent rule change causes more problems than it solves (more on the details of this situation from Ben Badler).

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Chicago Cubs. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Chicago’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Cubs 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 the Cubs 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. Kyle Schwarber, C/OF (Profile)

Calculating a projection for Schwarber presents some difficulties insofar as (a) he’s clearly more valuable at catcher than left field, presuming he’s an average defender at both, but also (b) he’s probably not an average defensive catcher. Not currently, at least. As McDaniel notes, however, the Cubs are committed for the time being to developing Schwarber behind the plate. His offensive profile, complemented by the benefit of a catcher’s positional adjustment, would conspire to create an impressive major leaguer.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs & White Sox

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

The Cubs have the deepest system I’ve written up so far and the most impact talent, with much of it at the upper levels.  There’s a case to be made that this is the best system in baseball and  it has to be in the top five, but I’ll hold off on an official determination until I’ve formally evaluated all of the candidates. The rebuilding of the organization and system is evident in looking at the types of players I rank below; a number of prospects from the 2013 July 2nd spending spree, aggressive over-slot bonuses on high upside draft prospects, solid low minors prospects acquired in trades along with hitting on nearly all the high profile, big money signings in recent years.

There’s still some position fits to work out before the fanboys will see their ideal lineups of the future in living color (see Russell and Schwarber reports for new information on that front), but the Cubs are being proactive to try to solve this, with multiple position players converting to a position of long-term need (catcher) during instructs this fall (more notes below).  There’s a reason this system seems a lot like the last team I evaluated, the Red Sox, because both are among the best systems in the game and were put together with the same kinds of principles and resources along with some of the same top executives.

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