At long last, the Dodgers found a solution to their hole at second base, acquiring second baseman Logan Forsythe from the Rays on Monday night in exchange for top pitching prospect Jose De Leon. This came after months of rumors around a trade involving De Leon and Brian Dozier. The Dodgers had a surplus of starting pitchers and an opening at second, so it was only a matter of time before they dealt the unproven De Leon.

De Leon’s first crack at the big leagues — a four-start cameo in September — didn’t go quite as well as many had hoped. But he breezed through the minors over the last two years. He broke out in a big way in 2015, striking out an absurd 35% of opposing hitters between High-A and Double-A while walking just 8%. That performance made him a consensus top-30 prospect the following winter.

De Leon battled injuries in the first half of 2016, but began dominating again once he returned to the field. In 16 starts at the Triple-A level, he once again posted a strikeout rate well over 30%, along with solid walk and home-run numbers. De Leon proved himself at the highest level of the minors at the tender age of 23. Pitchers who meet that standard often go on to have success in the majors, especially when they miss bats as prolifically as De Leon did.

De leon grades out exceptionally well by my KATOH system. It projects him for 8.1 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method (KATOH) and also 10.1 WAR by the method that integrates Baseball America’s rankings (KATOH+). He’s the 13th-highest-ranking prospect by KATOH+ and the third-highest-ranking pitcher.

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What happened to Clayton Kershaw in Game 6 of the NLCS? According to a new study by Northwestern University, maybe it was jet lag.

Looking at 20 major-league seasons and 40,000 games’ worth of data, researchers found that jet lag perceptibly “impairs” player and team performance. The study is likely to be passed around many major-league front offices and strength-and-training departments. In a sport where every team is looking for hidden value at the margins, the value of better rest and recovery is just beginning to be explored, understood and focused upon — and is perhaps a considerable inefficiency in the game.

Dr. Ravi Allada, a circadian-rhythms expert, led the study:

“The negative effects of jet lag we found are subtle, but they are detectable and significant. And they happen on both offense and defense and for both home and away teams, often in surprising ways….

“For Game 6, the teams had returned to Chicago from LA, and this time the Cubs scored five runs off of Kershaw, including two home runs. While it’s speculation, our research would suggest that jet lag was a contributing factor in Kershaw’s performance.”

One of the homers in question:

Of course, Kershaw did pitch on extra rest that start, and Kyle Hendricks himself did just fine after traveling back east, but perhaps the rest could not save Kershaw from the clutches of jet lag.

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There may be no more confounding player in baseball than Yasiel Puig. His natural talent seems boundless. For bursts of weeks and months, Puig will look for all the world like a demigod in a Dodgers uniform, mashing and running and throwing like he was put on this planet to torture pitchers and baserunners.

Those stretches of time have grown scarcer, however. Every year since his blistering 2013 debut, Puig’s wRC+ has steadily fallen. It wasn’t as apparent in his five-win 2014, and frankly nobody expected him to keep up the 160 wRC+ he’d notched the year before. The last two years, though, have been rough. Puig has been limited to just 183 games since the start of 2015. He’s been sidelined by a variety of injuries, and that’s affected both his playing time and (likely) his production. Puig was even sequestered away in Triple-A for a month this year.

The question of who Puig really is as a player might be an easy one, but it feels complicated. Is he still going to be a star? How many offseasons in a row have we had this conversation now? Why do we care so much about a man who may just be a good-but-not-great cog on a great team? There have been plenty of blue-chip prospects who have developed into merely average players before, and there will be again. Puig may be the latest in that long line. It’s a simple answer, and it’s an acceptable one. What is it about Yasiel Puig that captures your attention and imagination?

It’s this.

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Joe Blanton was all kinds of “meh” as a starting pitcher.

In 1,553 career innings a starter – his role during the first nine years of his career – Blanton produced a 4.47 ERA and 4.20 FIP. He was a back-of-the-rotation arm. He soaked up innings. His starts were not going to spike ratings or attendance or win expectancy.

But in 2015 he found himself in the Kansas City bullpen and something strange occurred: he became one of the game’s most effective relievers despite an atypical tools profile.

Blanton was effective in the Royals’ bullpen, and when he was traded to the Pirates at the trade deadline, he was again successful in a relief role. During the following offseason, he signed a modest one-year, $4 million deal with the Dodgers and was, again, successful pitching out of the bullpen.

Since 2015, Blanton has appeared in 107 games, all as a reliever. In that time he ranks 11th in ERA (2.29) among all relievers, 24th in FIP (3.02) and 26th in K-BB% (19.1 points).

So what’s strange — in an era during which we hear more interest and talk about teams relying more heavily on their bullpens, when we saw inspired bullpen usage by the Cleveland Indians and other clubs in the postseason — what’s strange is Blanton remains available in free agency.

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Last week, when discussing the Dodgers second base options, I talked about Logan Forsythe as a reasonable alternative to Brian Dozier, a similar player on a similar contract, but finished the section with this reason why I thought maybe they should look elsewhere.

I could potentially see a Forsythe deal working if the Dodgers were floating some pieces that could help Tampa Bay maintain the status quo and give them some long-term value, but Forsythe isn’t good enough to extract Jose De Leon, and I’m not sure the Rays really need more pitching depth.

Well, yesterday, the Dodgers traded De Leon for Forsythe in a one for one swap, so the Dodgers decided I was wrong about that whole “not good enough” part. While they deemed the Twins asking price of De Leon and something else of substantial value too high for Dozier, they were willing to part with one of the game’s best young pitchers in order to land Dozier-Lite. And as you probably guessed based on my write-up last week, that decision surprised me a bit.

Jeff did a good job of showing why the Dodgers viewed Forsythe and Dozier as similar enough to go with door #2 when they found the Twins asking price too high, but in all of the recent talk we’ve done about how comparable some of their rate stats are, there’s something that we should make sure doesn’t get lost: Dozier is better than Forsythe.

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Sometimes there are trade rumors that aren’t really true. We tend not to know about those until after the fact, but the false rumors tend to be the fleeting ones. Then there are the rumors that just don’t go away. That’s when you know there’s smoke. And there was all kinds of smoke billowing out of the rumors that linked the Dodgers to Brian Dozier.

It all added up, and there was no point in anyone issuing any denials. The Dodgers needed a second baseman, and Dozier is a good one. The Twins could stand to flip some quality assets, and Dozier is a good one. We got to know more than we usually do — the Dodgers put Jose De Leon on the table. That’s where the teams got stuck. The Dodgers liked what they’d be getting, and the Twins felt the same. They just couldn’t reach an agreement on a second prospect to go to Minnesota. The Twins held out, and the Dodgers wouldn’t budge.

And so, in the end, the Dodgers haven’t added Brian Dozier. Instead, they called up the Rays, and added basically Brian Dozier. The cost was De Leon, and nothing else.

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We tend to form memories poorly. In middle school, my band teacher was fond of telling us that if you only played two parts of the song correctly, to make it the beginning and the end, because most people wouldn’t remember anything else.

So it may be with Andruw Jones. If you pressed most people on what they remember most about Jones, there’s a decent chance that they’d recall him as the 19-year-old who homered twice in the 1996 World Series and also as a really fat guy who was terrible in his 30s. In between those two endpoints, though, he had a Hall of Fame career.

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For the better part of the off-season, the Dodgers and Twins have reportedly been trying to strike a fair deal for Brian Dozier. The Twins second baseman is a highly valuable player, but with only two years left of team control, he’s probably a better fit for a contender than a rebuilder, and right now, the Twins are still in the latter category. But, for whatever reason, the two sides seem to value Dozier differently, and as of last week, it appears that both teams have decided there isn’t a fit, at least not right now.

Sources: #Twins, #Dodgers at impasse on Dozier. No momentum toward deal. 1/2

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 10, 2017

Impasse on Dozier does not preclude future talks, but #Twins had wanted to give Dozier heightened peace of mind on status with club. 2/2

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 10, 2017

So, with Dozier potentially off the table, let’s see if we can find the Dodgers another second baseman.

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In my introduction post last week, I mentioned how I had given Yasmani Grandal an MVP vote. When voting totals were finally released, it turned out I was the only writer to grant Grandal a place on a ballot. I ranked him as the seventh-most valuable player in the NL. It’s an interesting feeling to stand out there all alone. I’m the reason Grandal will be forever credited with a 22nd-place finish in the 2016 NL MVP race.

I’ve been asked by some FanGraphs readers why I voted for Grandal, who was certainly not a name-brand candidate. So for accountability and transparency purposes, I will answer that question.

As for my vote, I’m not the first person (or projection system) to suggest Grandal is really, really valuable.

Last May, Grandal thought the idea of his name appearing on an MVP ballot was “absurd” when LA Times reporter Bill Shaikin asked him about a PECOTA forecast suggesting he would be one of the best players in the NL.

In October, ESPN’s Sam Miller asked Grandal about his fancy-stats candidacy. Grandal, again, was not inclined to cast a ballot for himself.

Much of Grandal’s candidacy centered on pitch-framing statistics.

According to the methodologies employed both by Baseball Prospectus and StatCorner, Grandal was the game’s second-best pitch-framing catcher after Buster Posey. (Posey was also on my ballot.) The drop off to third place was steep.

Think Zack Greinke missed Grandal last season?

I understand some view framing as “cheating,” but as a voter, I viewed it as a skill that added real value in 2016. I chose not to ignore the value it created. The teams themselves certainly haven’t ignored the power of framing, as evidenced by a number of transactions in recent years.

But a conversation about Grandal’s value doesn’t end with his defensive contributions.

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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 Los Angeles Dodgers. 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 / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager (675 PA, 5.4 zWAR) won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award with ease in 2016. Were a similar award to exist for second-year players, Seager would be the favorite to win that, as well. ZiPS calls for Seager to record less gaudy BABIP and fielding numbers in 2017, but that’s to be expected. At the most basic level, a projection system is a regression machine. BABIP and fielding runs require large samples before they begin to represent true talent. As a second-year player, Seager lacks that kind of sample by definition.

Here’s some other news, though: ZiPS also projects a nearly three-point improvement in Seager’s strikeout rate, from 19.4% this past season to 16.7% in 2017. This does not appear to be a product of regression to the mean. It can’t really: the lowest strikeout rate National League batters have produced over the last three seasons is 19.9%. Szymborski’s computer, in other words, appears to be calling for actual improvement. Or perhaps a different sort of regression — regression to Seager’s 2015 numbers, when he made more contact in the minors and (for a brief stretch) majors. In any case, two propositions are true: both (a) Corey Seager is very good and (b) this section, which is intended to provide a brief overview of all the club’s starting field players, has failed to do that.

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