I think my most recent seven posts here at FanGraphs were about the Giants or the Royals or both, a necessary side effect of being a regular baseball writer during the World Series. Sometimes it feels like there’s only so much you can say about James Shields or Joe Panik or Lorenzo Cain, but really, why bother talking about something else during the most important games of the year?

With that finally behind us, we can look forward to 2015, and I keep thinking about the team that seems most likely, at this far-too-early date before any real offseason moves have been made, to make a move next year. You probably think I’m talking about the Cubs. I’m not talking about the Cubs. I’m talking about the Cleveland Indians. I was asked, during a live chat of one of the World Series games, whether I thought the Royals could hold off the Tigers in the AL Central next season. At the time, I said I thought Cleveland might be better than both, and now it’s time to put some words behind that feeling. In fact, let’s do this internet style. On to the <h3>’s! Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps my favorite players to stumble upon betwixt my scouting escapades are the “Conversion Guys”, players who are undergoing a positional change because shortcomings in their skill set force them to find a new path to the Majors if they hope to achieve that dream at all. Most often this occurs when a position player with superlative arm strength struggles to hit so mightily that his employer abandons all hope in his ability ever to learn how and moves him to the mound.

These conversions happen at various stages of development and have any number of useful results. Jacob deGrom moved off of shortstop between his sophomore and junior year of college and is a budding rotational mainstay. Kenley Jansen spent four years catching as a pro before moving to the mound in 2009 and exploding to the majors as a reliever. Tony Pena Jr. moved to the mound at 28 and became a minor league depth arm who ate innings at upper levels for a few years and made Veteran Minor Leaguer Money for a little while longer than he would have if he would’ve been a stubborn, punchless shortstop.

Plenty of these developmental journeys begin in the Rookie-level Arizona League (AZL), where I was lucky enough to observe a handful of them this summer.

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The winner of the 2014 American League Cy Young Award is going to be either Felix Hernandez or Corey Kluber. Yes, indeed, there are other worthwhile candidates, and yes, you can argue whether Chris Sale should be penalized that heavily for his injury early on, but it’s a virtual lock that this is coming down to one of the two guys. So let’s just accept that assumption, and move forward. Which of the pitchers is going to win? And just how big will the winning margin be?

When we talk about awards, I don’t think we really care about the awards. I think it’s about the fun of trying to solve a problem, and about seeing how other people try to solve the same problem. It’s basically mental exercise, and in many cases there’s no obviously clear deserving winner and you can get as detailed as you like. For example, let’s take Felix vs. Kluber. You know one way to get really detailed? What’s Felix’s benefit of having pitched to Mike Zunino, against Kluber’s benefit of having pitched to Yan Gomes? That’s a question worth asking. This is really the fun of it every year, but for purposes of this post, let’s not try to figure out our own preferred winner. Rather, let’s consider the actual voters’ processes. What will the results tell us about how the BBWAA feels about splits?

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   –Kiley

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For years, people have been writing “nothing good ever comes out of Cliff Lee trades” articles. I’m sure somewhere along the line, I wrote one too, and that’s mostly because, well, nothing really had. Justin Smoak was probably the best player to come out of any of those deals, and he isn’t any good. Jason Donald, Jason Knapp and Lou Marson didn’t amount to anything, nor has Blake Beavan. I don’t want to talk about Josh Lueke. Among Ruben Amaro’s many missteps, the 2009 deal that shipped off Lee to Seattle for the massive return of Tyson Gillies, Phillippe Aumont and J.C. Ramirez probably doesn’t get enough press.

For most of the last five-plus years — yes, really, it’s been that long — Carlos Carrasco was lumped in with those failures, too. In parts of four seasons with Cleveland (2009-11, ’13) he’d put up a 5.29 ERA and 4.48 FIP in 238.1 innings. He’s been DFA’d at least once, lost all of 2012 to Tommy John surgery, and served multiple suspensions for head hunting. While he won the fifth starter job out of camp this year, he was also sent to the bullpen in favor of Zach McAllister after four lousy starts.

At the time, his career ERA stood at 5.43. He had mediocre strikeout numbers, and the inexplicable combination of “gets both groundballs and home runs.” We’ve been writing stories about him here since at least 2008, and all we’d seen in that time was disappointment and absence. There was really little reason to think any of that was going to change. After all, it had already been five years of struggle since the trade.

Carrasco moved back into the rotation in August. Since then, he’s made eight starts. He’s allowed seven earned runs, and since four of them came in one game, that means he’s made seven starts allowing zero or one earned run, including Wednesday’s two-hit — neither of which left the infield — shutout of Houston. He’s got a 59/7 K/BB in that time. Is this finally the Carrasco Cleveland had waited so long to see? Let’s find out.

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After 2013’s surprise run to the playoffs, in 2014 Cleveland is making a good show of it. However, at this point their playoff contention is mostly nominal.

Cleveland had a number of good things happen for them this year. They have both a serious Cy Young contender in Corey Kluber and (in a Trout-less world) a legitimate MVP candidate in Michael Brantley. The team has also made some free agent signings over the past couple of years, acquisitions that were supposed to be part of the team’s return to relevance. Despite the overall success, though, players like Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn have mostly been disappointing. In the case of Bourn, it is not any one thing, but a number of factors that have contributed to his disappointing performance the last two years.

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It seems like top up-the-middle prospects like Francisco Lindor don’t come around very often. It seems like you can’t get enough shortstop prospects, especially if you run the Cubs. It seems like a building team like the Indians shouldn’t trade their top prospect. It seems like a team like that should hold on to their prospects like they were precious baubles to be hoarded in dark places.

Maybe all of that is wrong. Maybe the Indians should trade Francisco Lindor.

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

As I was learning to evaluate, I was overwhelmed by this challenge of grading the hit tool. I wasn’t advanced enough to notice when hitters seemed uncomfortable as fast as I wanted to notice it and I hadn’t been on the beat long enough to have multiple years of history with players to know how to put what I was seeing in context of their whole careers. The easier part, however, was noticing the raw hitting tools. By the time an evaluator gets good at noticing and grading these, the other stuff tends to follow.

I break hitting into three components, but you could easily break it down further into many more. I saw three basic groupings and put every observation into one, then graded each group on the 20-80 scale, then use those to get to a hit tool grade in a more objective way. Scouts all have different ways that they do it and I’ve tinkered with different methods, but this one works for me and also gives me a guide for what to ask scouts about with hitters I haven’t seen recently.

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We can’t ever be sure exactly who a player is. Some guys are easier to project than others. Some guys have many years of data and consistent results. Guys like Hunter Pence or Ben Zobrist. Other guys have minimal data and inconsistent results. Danny Salazar is a guy like that.

Nevertheless, a large portion of what we do is try to figure out exactly who players are. We can’t have a definitive answer as to what a player’s true talent level is, but we do have data. We do have video, and we do have people inside the game with whom to converse. Let’s combine these three things and try to figure out what to make of Danny Salazar.

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Two facts, with which you as a FanGraphs reader are likely familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays are among the most sabermetrically-inclined organizations in major league baseball.

• Sabermetrically-inclined folk generally are against the decision to sacrifice bunt.

One more fact, with which you are less likely to be familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays have attempted 58 non-pitcher sacrifice bunts this season, by far the highest mark in the major leagues. No other team has even 50.

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