Somewhere around two years and $6 million a year: those appear to be the terms for a certain kind of match this offseason. A match between budget-conscious teams seeking to acquire meaningful (if flawed) talent and players willing to forgo a bigger one-year deal in order to gain an extra year of security. Matt Joyce, Steve Pearce, Wilson Ramos, Sean Rodriguez, even Junichi Tazawa — they’ve all given us brief glimpses into above-average work, and longer looks at less exciting work.

In a way, Daniel Hudson fits right into this collection of players: according to Jeff Passan, he received a two-year, $11 million deal from the Pirates. If he’s their closer for the next two years, that will be a bargain; he could also return hardly anything. In either case, discussing the deal in such simple terms is selling his story way, way too short.

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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 Arizona Diamondbacks. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Chicago NL / San Diego / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Not unlike a glass that’s simultaneously half full and half empty, the Diamondbacks — on the position-player side of things, at least — serve as an effective litmus test for optimism. There are real strengths in the projected starting lineup — strengths like Paul Goldschmidt (630 PA, 4.8 zWAR), Jake Lamb (517, 2.4), and A.J. Pollock (445, 3.5). There are also real weaknesses, too, in the form of Brandon Drury (581, 0.0), Yasmany Tomas (524, 0.5), and whoever’s tasked with playing catcher.

The optimist regards this as a club that can be easily upgraded: because the flaws are so obvious, they can be dramatically improved with only a modest investment of resources. The pessimist, on the other hand, is uncomfortable with relying so heavily on the ability of just a few players. If one of them were to get injured (as Pollock did in 2016), the club would suffer unduly (as the D-backs did in 2016).

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The Mariners, who are operating with a pretty short-term competitive window, added Jean Segura right before Thanksgiving. Segura has been driving the headlines, and it’s no mystery why. He finished last year with a 5.0 WAR, and, for the sake of reference, that tied him with Joey Votto. It put him in front of Xander Bogaerts. To go a little more traditional, Segura led the National League in hits by 10, ahead of Corey Seager. It was a breakthrough season for the 26-year-old, and his ability to play shortstop plugs what had been a glaring hole. There’s no question that Segura fits the profile of a headliner.

Many who’ve written about the Mariners’ side have written about Segura. Many of the quotes from Jerry Dipoto have been about Segura. But, at risk of sounding like Dave, I have to wonder — was Segura really the Mariners’ best get? Or will we eventually reflect on this as being the move that brought Seattle Mitch Haniger?

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Apparently Mike Hazen and Jerry Dipoto don’t have anything better to do on Thanksgiving eve than make a big trade that makes those of us with stuff to do have to apologize to our family and start working. Thanks, jerks. Have some pie and take a day off already.

Personal aspersions at the GMs aside, Arizona and Seattle have pulled off a pretty fascinating trade. The particulars.

Taijuan Walker, SP
Ketel Marte, SS

Jean Segura, SS
Mitch Haniger, OF
Zac Curtis, LHP

Mike Hazen’s first big trade as Arizona’s GM is to sell high on the best player acquired by previous GM Dave Stewart. The Diamondbacks hit the jackpot buying low on Segura last winter, as a player who had racked up +3.6 WAR during his career in Milwaukee put up a +5 WAR season in his one year in the desert. Rather than bet on him coming back and having another career year, Arizona turned Segura into another buy-low guy in Walker, who has long been hailed as a possible frontline starter but hasn’t lived up to the potential yet.

It’s pretty easy to see Hazen’s rationale here; he turns a 27-year-old and a 26-year-old into a 24-year-old and a 23-year-old, picking up extra team control years in the process, and in Walker, he lands a guy who could easily be worth more than Segura long-term, especially if you don’t buy into Segura’s power spike. The Diamondbacks get younger and pick up some extra long-term value, and in reality, they probably don’t make themselves much worse in 2017 either; Haniger didn’t have a role on their team at the moment, and Curtis is mostly a throw-in.

From Seattle’s perspective, this looks reasonable enough if you buy into two things.

1. The team’s long-term future depends mostly on them winning in the short-term, given the age of the guys anchoring the roster, so current wins are worth a lot more to Seattle than future wins.

2. Haniger is a potential above-average regular. While Segura is going to be the guy everyone focuses on, Haniger might just be the guy who makes this deal work for Seattle — if it works for Seattle — by giving them a quality OF they don’t really have at the moment. Eric Longenhagen’s write-up on him from the Arizona Prospect Report is particularly useful now.

While big-league pitchers were able to exploit Haniger’s vulnerability to pitches down and away during his late-season cup of coffee, he’s an above-average runner with plus raw power. Players with that tool combination aren’t exactly easy to come by. Haniger was demoted to High-A as a 24-year old in 2015 after slugging a paltry .379 for Double-A Mobile. It looked like bad news to those of us on the outside who thought the Diamondbacks were souring on him, but in reality Haniger proactively told the D-backs he’d accept a demotion if it meant he could play every day which, with prospects Evan Marzilli, Socrates Brito and Gabriel Guerrero also in Mobile by mid-year, wasn’t going to happen at Double-A. Haniger made a swing change (profiled here and here by excellent D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro) and took off. You can see the old swing here.

Scouts are a little bit apprehensive about Haniger’s propensity to swing and miss and think there’s a good chance he either ends up as a platoon bat or power-first fourth outfielder who can play center field in a pinch. Given Haniger’s purported makeup and clear ability to make significant adjustments, I think there’s a non-zero chance he’s a late-blooming average regular but it’s more likely he falls just short of that. The Diamondbacks acquired Haniger along with Anthony Banda from Milwaukee in exchange for Gerardo Parra.

If Haniger turns into a fourth OF, I don’t know if Seattle will get the upgrade they were looking for in turning Walker’s upside and whatever Marte might be into Segura’s 2017 and 2018 seasons, but there are reasons to think that maybe Haniger has some remaining value left. Most notably, he played 182 of his 258 innings with Arizona in CF, and D’Backs beat writer Nick Piecoro texted me after the trade was announced to say that he thought Haniger’s defense in center was quite good, and definitely better than just a get-away-with-it glove.

If Haniger is a good enough defender to be a regular CF, then the offense could make him more valuable than Segura, especially if his 2016 improvement was more breakout than fluke. The projections aren’t sold, especially after he didn’t hit that well in the big leagues, but if you’re into speculative buys on late-bloomers, there are some reasons to think that maybe Haniger could be on the late-developing-star track. From a Piecoro story in August.

A year ago, he was getting inconsistent at-bats with Mobile when the organization demoted him to High-A Visalia. While there, he began incorporating a leg kick. Then in the offseason, he continued to tinker with his swing mechanics, adjusting where he holds his hands and altering his swing path.

For Haniger, the changes were borne from a question: Why was it that other hitters who weren’t as big or as strong as he was were able to drive the ball to the opposite field with more authority? He began studying swings of players like Josh Donaldson and A.J. Pollock and read up on the hitting philosophies of Bobby Tewksbary, a coach who helped both of those hitters develop into All-Stars.

“I feel like now I’m able to recognize pitches better,” Haniger said. “I can make up my mind whether to swing or not later than I have in the past because my swing is deeper in the zone. I’m able to stay off close pitches. It’s easier for me to use all fields and to see pitches better.”

Donaldson and Pollock certainly aren’t bad examples to follow, and they aren’t the only guys who have improved dramatically after working with Tewksbury; Eno Sarris wrote about Ryon Healy also making similar adjustments, and he was a revelation for the A’s this year after not really being considered much of a prospect.

There’s a lot of ifs here. If Haniger’s glove really is as good as Piecoro thought — which could make him a very good defensive corner OF in Seattle, since Leonys Martin is still around — and if some of these swing changes were the reason for his 2016 breakout, then he could be an average or better hitter with some real defensive value. And with six years of team control, that would make him the real get in this deal for the Mariners, likely offsetting a lot of the long-term value they may lose with Walker and Marte gone gone.

If Haniger is just an ordinary defensive OF without enough bat to carry him, then I think Arizona will be happy with this deal, getting younger and selling high on a guy whose value didn’t really have anywhere to go but down. But if Haniger turns into a 100 to 110 wRC+ guy with plus defense in a corner or enough glove to play center? Well, all of the sudden, that’s a pretty great piece too, and would fill a hole the Mariners definitely needed to fill.

So, yeah, this is a fascinating trade. I don’t know if I’m sold enough on Haniger, so I’d probably prefer Arizona’s side, but for a win-now Mariners team, you can see the potential for this to make the team a lot better in the near future. And given that Walker is, at this point, more upside than realized value, it’s not that hard to see why the Mariners preferred to push in now, before their old stars stop playing like stars.

And for Arizona, while I might have short-changed them in words here, this is an easy deal to like from their end. If Walker turns into this year’s Segura, and they hit on another buy-low talent, Mike Hazen will be plenty happy with his first deal as the Diamondbacks GM.

Earlier today, I published an article about the season’s worst home run. The criteria was very simple: I just selected the home run with the lowest recorded exit velocity, courtesy of Statcast. I think that position is fairly defensible, even if there might be other ways to identify other bad home runs. It’s subjective. Sorry!

Having that post go up all but demands the posting of the opposite. At the very least, I figure the community is curious. The opposite of the home run hit with the lowest exit velocity is the home run hit with the highest exit velocity. And the opposite of the worst home run is the best home run. I don’t know if this position is so defensible, but, I had to use this headline, just for consistency.

This home run is less interesting than the weak one, because this is just a really good home run. Hence this being an InstaGraphs post, instead of a FanGraphs post. The home run was hit by Carlos Gonzalez, against Zack Greinke, in Arizona, on April 4. It was the season opener for both the Rockies and the Diamondbacks. Gonzalez hit his home run at 117.4 miles per hour. You may watch it now.

The healthy version of Giancarlo Stanton is a Statcast darling. Over Statcast’s brief history, Stanton leads the majors, by far, in the number of batted balls hit at least 115mph. Gonzalez, though, comes up a distant second, which still counts as second. So Gonzalez is no stranger to absolutely stinging the baseball, and this home run was better than any Stanton hit in 2016. Stanton owns the next-hardest homer, at 116.8mph. Then there’s a tie at 115.9mph, between George Springer and Avisail Garcia. It’s interesting to see Gonzalez going deep here in a full count — you might think, with two strikes, he’d somewhat cut down on his swing. He did nothing of the sort, and Greinke made a horrible location mistake.

Greinke knew pretty quickly what Gonzalez had done to him.

Now here’s where it gets extra fun: If you watch the highlight clip, the Rockies announcers joke about the ball’s exit velocity and launch angle. They didn’t know those numbers at the time. They were right that the ball had a high exit velocity — it had the highest exit velocity, among dingers. And they were right that the ball had a low launch angle — it had the lowest launch angle, among dingers. It’s a two-fer! Gonzalez hit the ball 14.2 degrees above the horizontal. The next-lowest homer was hit 15.2 degrees above the horizontal (Kevin Pillar). A shot from the side:

It wound up standing as a very extraordinary home run. It was the sort of batted ball you’d think would be a well-stung double, but it just never came down, registering a Statcast distance estimate of 420 feet. One more time, the ball was hit 117.4mph, with an angle of 14.2 degrees. The average baseball this year hit 420 feet had an exit velocity of 105.4mph, with an angle of 26.9 degrees. Gonzalez just beat the living crap out of a terrible full-count pitch, and this is one of the reasons why he’s not simply a product of Coors Field. You can’t fake his contact quality. He makes some of the very best contact around. Congratulations, Carlos Gonzalez, on your very good dinger.

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Arizona Diamondbacks farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 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. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Strikeout rate dropped from 17% to 13% after promotion to Triple-A, while walk rate held steady at 8.5%.

Scouting Report
The Diamondbacks drafted Banda out of high school in 2011. He didn’t sign, though, and then matriculated to JUCO powerhouse San Jacinto in Houston. The Brewers drafted and signed him the next year and Banda spent two years struggling in Rookie-level ball before the Diamondbacks acquired him in the Gerardo Parra deal (along with Mitch Haniger) in July of 2014. Banda took off after that, went to the Futures Game this year and had success at Triple-A in the hitter-friendly environs of Reno.

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Yesterday, the Diamondbacks introduced Mike Hazen as their new general manager and head of baseball operations, who is taking over for Dave Stewart after a two-year failed experiment in their front office. Hazen was most recently the GM in Boston, serving as Dave Dombrowski’s second-in-command, and has been an integral part of a Red Sox front office that built one of the best young cores in baseball. The Diamondbacks are hoping Hazen will lead them in that direction now, and allow them to build a sustainable winner in Arizona.

But before he can do that, Hazen and his staff will have to determine their course of action this winter, and whether the team is going to try and retool a roster that just lost 93 games or if he’s going to pivot away from the team’s attempt to contend in the short-term in favor of acquiring assets for the long-term. When asked about this at the press conference, Hazen demurred.

“I don’t have a defined view just yet,” Hazen said. “It would be irresponsible for me at this point to sort of say exactly how we’re going to attack the roster.

“We want to bring a championship to this city and state, but we also know that there’s going to be decisions that need to be made. We’ll have more concrete answers on that as we move through the offseason. We’ll see what the landscape is in the marketplace.”

That’s a nifty non-answer, but in reality, it’s also likely the correct one. It doesn’t really make sense to be committing to a certain path on your first day on the job, for one, but also, despite the dumpster fire that was the Diamondbacks 2016 season, it isn’t actually clear what the Diamondbacks should do this winter, and they probably do need to explore both paths.

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Eric Longenhagen is publishing brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, for the moment, the Fall Instructional League. Find all editions here.

As Fall Instructional League winds down here in Arizona, teams have begun playing their games earlier in the day, allowing scouts to double and triple up should they so choose, catching instrux at 9 or 10 am before moving on to the afternoon and night Fall League games. For me yesterday, that meant seeing the Brewers’ and Diamondbacks’ instructional-league teams in the early morning. Of note from that game, the Brewers lined up second-round pick Lucas Erceg at shortstop and shifted Gilbert Lara over to third. Lara’s destiny likely lies at a position other than his usual shortstop — and so, too, does Erceg’s (despite a 70-grade arm) — and this was probably more of a fun experiment or opportunity to let Lara move around than it is earnest developmental news for Erceg, who has looked great throughout instrux but can’t play shortstop.

Luis Alejandro Basabe homered the opposite way during the game. He has more power than his incredibly small frame would otherwise indicate. His double-play partner, Jasrado (Jazz) Chisholm, showed off his precocious defensive ability at shortstop, ranging to his left behind the bag, corralling an odd hop while he simultaneously made contact with second base and then making a strong, mostly accurate throw to first base from an awkward platform. It wasn’t especially pretty but an impressive play nonetheless.

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Episode 688
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is the guest on this edition of the pod, during which he discusses recent prep work on his horrible burden — namely, the forthcoming organizational prospect lists, which will begin with NL West clubs. By way of preview, Longenhangen discusses one prospect of note from each the five western teams: Jazz Chisholm (Arizona), Joan Gregorio (San Francisco), Michel Miliano (San Diego), Riley Pint (Colorado), and Jordan Sheffield (Los Angeles).

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 16 min play time.)

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Even if you didn’t predict great things for the Diamondbacks this year, it’s hard not to be disappointed by their 2016 season. You can set aside their various front-office nonsense and still come to that conclusion. Zack Greinke hasn’t been great, A.J. Pollock missed significant time, and Shelby Miller’s year has gone about as poorly as you could imagine. The club is set to lose nearly 100 games and finish last in the NL West.

You’d think that Jake Lamb offensive exploits would be among the club’s few points of pride this season. In 2015, Lamb recorded a 91 wRC+; he’s raised that figure to 115 this year. But it’s more likely that the club is worried about their young third baseman going into the season’s final games. After a scorching hot start, Lamb hasn’t just cooled off in the second half, he’s cratered.

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