If you’d kind of forgotten about Ichiro Suzuki, I totally get it. I mean, he’s undeniably been an icon, but as far as his remaining a major-leaguer goes, he’s in his 40s, and he’s spent time on the bench for a team that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The league is awash with young, premium talent, and in the Marlins’ own outfield, Ichiro’s behind three young players of considerable ability. And, you know, there was this:

The wizardry had become less and less apparent. I assume that, once you’re a wizard, you’re always a wizard, but Ichiro had perhaps grown weary of using his magic. Or maybe it just takes him longer to recover his mana. He’s been chasing 3,000 big-league hits, and that’s a hell of a milestone, but when the Marlins elected to bring Ichiro back, many figured it was just a publicity stunt, a way to squeeze some profit out of a deteriorating player’s pursuit of history. That tells you something about how people see the Marlins, but that also tells you something about how people saw Ichiro.

I’m now going to embed the same plot as above, only with one extra line segment. Ichiro! is re-earning his exclamation point.

42 years old. The gap between Ichiro and Christian Yelich is old enough to vote.

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Just as much as we’ve trained ourselves not to take Spring Training stats at face value, we should also by now have trained ourselves not to take player and manager Spring Training quotes at face value. Words are words, and until those words become actions, they’re not super fun to consume or analyze. Like, here’s a few examples pulled from a preseason story by the excellent Clark Spencer, with expectations for the upcoming season inferred from comments by star pitcher Jose Fernandez and manager Don Mattingly.

Spring Training Report #1

• Expectation: “He just might not resort to his fastball quite as much…”
• Reality: Fernandez’s fastball rate is mostly unchanged, and in fact is slightly above (52%) his previous career-high (51%).

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Marcell Ozuna is the third-best outfielder on his team. He can’t match the power and discipline of Giancarlo Stanton, and he can’t match the patient, contact-oriented approach of rising star Christian Yelich. Partially related to those two statements, Yelich and Stanton have signed contracts worth nearly $400 million total while Ozuna, despite possessing more service time than Yelich and having played 50 more games than Stanton since the start of 2014, will be paid near the league minimum this year. Ozuna is off to a great start this season, and we might want to look for changes to his game after a rough 2015 season, but Ozuna is very much a similar player to the one that slugged 23 homers back in 2014.

Ozuna has a fairly unique game. He has good power, but in more than 1500 plate appearances, it has only shown up as average with a .157 ISO. He walks at a below average rate (6% for his career), strikes out at a below-average rate (23% for his career), and has maintained a high .331 BABIP. Together, it has made him a roughly average offensive player, and a difficult home park elevates his wRC+ to 104. Not too bad. On defense, Ozuna has recorded nearly 3,000 innings in center field and both UZR and DRS place him right at average. Average offense and average defense in center field combine for an above-average player. Average to above-average might sound a bit boring, but Ozuna’s streaky performance and perceived inconsistency means he gets to his stats in rather exciting fashion.

Ozuna has had one really good year, in 2014, followed by a disappointing season in 2015 that saw him receive a demotion in the middle of the season, although that demotion might have been tied more closely to Ozuna’s super-two status and his agent Scott Boras rather than any strict performance-related deficiencies. This season, Ozuna is back, picking up where he left off at the end of 2015 and playing like the player who exhibited so much promise two seasons ago. How long will this last? It’s hard to say.

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You know who’s figuring it out? Christian Yelich! Not that Yelich ever didn’t have it figured out — his big-league career began with three consecutive 117 wRC+ seasons. He was as steady as anyone you could find, but he kept on occasionally hinting at more, and now he’s showing more more often. He’s 24, and he’s being coached by Barry Bonds. People everywhere kind of saw this coming. Yet it was never going to be automatic. Yelich has put in the work to get to where he is.

This is where he is:

Yelich hasn’t been constantly hitting home runs or anything. You would’ve heard about that. He has five, which isn’t that many, but then his career high is nine. His slugging is way up, and his walks are way up, and his strikeouts are down. Christian Yelich seems to be moving into a higher tier, and he’s among the reasons why the Marlins are hanging around the early playoff race.

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Adam Conley is surprising some with his sophomore effort, just by seemingly repeating what he did in his debut last year. His velocity, ERA, WHIP — even his swinging-strike and ground-ball rates — are all about the same as they were in 2015. But he’s different! In important ways.

Late last year, in the midst of a decent debut with the Marlins that saw him hitting 94 mph on the radar gun and shutting out the Mets on their way to the World Series, the lefty starter saw a picture of himself and froze. “I really didn’t like what I saw,” Conley told me a few days before he no-hit the Brewers for seven-plus innings this year. “It didn’t look like what I thought I looked like.”

Maybe the image was something like this one from his start against the Nationals late last season. “I could see in the picture that my front side was gone completely and my foot wasn’t down,” Conley says. “My foot is floating through the air and I’m trying to throw the ball.”

But once he saw that thing, he was convinced. He had to get back to the things he’d heard growing up, when he took the drive to Pete Wilkinson’s camp to work on his pitching mechanics. He had to get away from results-oriented development — “throughout the minor leagues, they would talk about results a lot,” he said — and get back to making sure his process was good.

The effort was two-pronged. He had to make sure he was getting his power from the right places, and he had to make sure his pitches worked together. The results brought him back to where he was, in a more sustainable way, with differences that appear once you look under the hood. And as he describes it all, you start to hear all of the things that we’ve been hearing recently as the new numbers have caught up to the pitching coaches.

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Major League Baseball is now in its second decade of testing and suspensions, so we should be past surprises when it comes to the type of players getting caught for using performance-enhancing drugs. The controversy surrounding Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire might have made PEDs famous in baseball, and Rafael Palmeiro, Manny Ramirez, Ryan Braun, and Alex Rodriguez have all been suspended by MLB for PED use, but there’s no single type of player using PEDs. Bartolo Colon, Freddy Galvis, and Dee Gordon have all tested positive, as well — Gordon representing the most recent case after testing positive for exogenous testosterone and clostebol. In most cases, a suspension is held up as an example that the system works and that MLB is catching users. Given Gordon’s contract situation, however, that might not be the case here.

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Sometimes you just have to ask. Different systems have different answers for the pitching mix that Jose Fernandez brings to the mound each game. So I did ask him. I said, “Do you consider your breaking ball a slider or a curve?” And the Marlins’ righty said, “I got both. I can throw both. I trust them both equally.” It was a group scrum, not the time for a real in-depth thing, but just knowing there are two there can set us on a path.

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Based on what was happening in my Twitter feed, scouts drooled over few players in spring training quite like they drooled over Adam Conley. My memory might be exaggerating things, but I know that Conley was getting a fair bit of hype. Now, the problem was that there’s not much meaningful analysis we’re able to do with spring-training performance, especially those that take place in Florida, away from any PITCHf/x instrumentation. But, wouldn’t you know it? Conley just pitched well on Wednesday in New York, nearly beating the Mets. You want to talk a little bit about Adam Conley? Let’s talk a little bit about Adam Conley. That way we can at least get him on our collective radar.

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You may not care about Marlon Byrd. Or Edwin Jackson. Or Dana Eveland. Or Josh Wilson. That’s a reasonable position to take, as none are remarkable players at this stage of their careers. And yet here we are, not one paragraph into this piece and I’ve mentioned all of them. But wait! Don’t click on that other article you saved, the one about the rise in butt implants quite yet! There’s a very real and interesting (maybe!) reason I’ve mentioned all of these players, but you have to read the next paragraph to find out. Ooo! This is like a mystery.

So what binds these guys together? Byrd may yet manage to find a team on which to dump his age-38 season, but to date he’s an old free agent with maybe one skill to offer. Eveland is a 32-year-old pitcher who has averaged 15 appearances a season over the past decade. His specialty seems to be riding the shuttle back and forth between Triple-A and the majors. Wilson is a backup middle infielder/defensive specialist, which is a nice way of saying he can’t hit, as his career OPS+ of 64 attests. And Jackson is a once-promising fireballer who seems resigned to scooping up innings wherever he can until his clock runs out. So they’re all varying degrees of bad, but “here are a bunch of lousy baseball players” is not really a driving theme for an article. There is something that holds these players’ careers together though, and that is this: each of them has played for nine different teams in their careers.

[Pause while you read your piece on butt implants.]

I know! I can’t believe they do that either. So where were we? Oh yeah. What makes this significant is that nine is the highest number of franchises for which any active player has played — and Jackson, Eveland, Wilson, and Byrd are the leaders of that list. Actually, LaTroy Hawkins has played for 11 different teams, but he’s retiring, so as soon as this season begins the aforementioned group will be the active leaders.

The second thing that makes this (hopefully!) interesting is that the record for the most teams any player has ever played for is 13. You’ll never guess who did it, so I’ll just tell you. The record is held by Octavio Dotel. Dotel played for Houston, Oakland, Detroit, the White Sox, Kansas City, the Mets, Colorado, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, St. Louis, the Dodgers, Yankees, and Toronto.

[Pause to re-read piece on butt implants.]

Humorously enough — though not as humorous as butt implants (I know!!) — Dotel was once traded in a deal that included Edwin Jackson. Because of course he was. Baseball is a closed circle and now I’m sad I’ve already reached the quota for butt-implant jokes this paragraph.

So the obvious question now: can any of these players exceed Dotel’s total of 13 teams played for?

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL).

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Miami Marlins. In this companion piece, I look at that same Miami farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Marlins have the worst farm system in baseball according to KATOH. They’re even worse than the Angels. As you’ll see below, there isn’t much to get excited about in Miami’s system, especially from a statistical standpoint.

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