Clayton Kershaw is coming off what was legitimately one of the best starting-pitcher seasons of all time. Though he would miss a few turns due to injury, that problem was quickly forgotten, as Kershaw still approached 200 innings and finished with both an ERA and an FIP that were half the league average. There was one stretch where Kershaw didn’t allow a single run over four consecutive starts, and that stretch was bookended by a pair of one-run outings. Yet as amazing as Kershaw was, there was one game where he allowed seven runs in under two innings to the Diamondbacks. Those seven runs were 17% of Kershaw’s regular-season total. In July, I tried to investigate what went wrong.

Kershaw, in 2014, had one of the better pitcher seasons ever. Pedro Martinez, in 1999, had maybe the best pitcher season ever. Pedro posted the lowest FIP- ever by a starter, at 28. The next-best mark is 36, also posted by Pedro. The best non-Pedro mark is 45. Over the course of baseball history, that 1999 FIP- is a full five standard deviations better than the mean. Pedro’s strikeout rate that season was 5.4 standard deviations better than the mean. I should note that this doesn’t include what Pedro did in the All-Star Game, or in the playoffs. In the All-Star Game, he struck out five of six batters, with one reaching on an error. In the playoffs, Pedro spun 17 shutout innings, allowing five hits and a .267 OPS. Pedro Martinez, that season, was probably the best that any starting pitcher has been. The statistics are unreal even before you remember to adjust them for the era.

Yet on July 18, Pedro faced the Florida Marlins and couldn’t get out of the fourth. His final line shows nine runs on a dozen hits, with no other season run total exceeding four. That year’s Marlins had one of the worst offenses in either league, and they’d lose 98 games. Just as Kershaw’s disaster was fascinating, so, too, was Pedro’s, particularly in retrospect. How did one of the best pitchers ever, in probably the best pitcher season ever, get killed at home against a bad team on the wrong side of a fire sale?

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

Caminero is part of a small collection of minor-league pitchers whose fastball has been identified independently as hitting 100 mph or higher. It’s possible to fail even with that sort of velocity, but the margin of error is larger. Caminero hasn’t thrown quite that hard in limited major-league exposure, sitting more at 95-96 mph. But he’s generated sufficient whiffs both with that and his changeup to compensate for a relative paucity of strikes.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins & Nationals

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

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

The Marlins are at an interesting place in their development cycle. We’ve seen them be at every stage of the spectrum, from rebuilding to contender, over the last couple decades and now they’re flipping young players for ready-made big leaguers to put around Giancarlo Stanton while he’s in his prime. It remains to be seen how much of a contender they will be in 2015, but it’s clear a switch has been flipped and that’s evident in what the system looks like.

It isn’t that top heavy and it isn’t particularly deep in tradable assets, but I liked what the Marlins did in the later rounds in the most recent draft. The club told me they had leaned to pitching in recent drafts and needed hitters. They identified a number of lower six figure prep hitting prospects to help stock the lower rungs of the system. Going under-slot in the sandwich round for prep catcher Blake Anderson helped them do that; it’ll be a few years before we know if this draft strategy will pay off.

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A move that wasn’t a Padres move happened Friday.

Yankees send to Marlins:

• Martin Prado
• David Phelps
• $6 million

Marlins send to Yankees:

• Nathan Eovaldi
• Garrett Jones
• Domingo German

German is a prospect. Eovaldi has three more years of team control, while Jones has one. Prado has two more years of team control, and Phelps has four, although he’s a Super-Two asset. The way it’s being phrased, the Yankees are chipping in $3 million in each of the next two years to partially pay down Prado’s salary. But if you’d like, you can mentally cancel out the $6 million and German. Now, German is actually an intriguing, live-armed prospect, so his value is probably a little north of $6 million, but they’re close enough to being even. This is mostly about the major-league players, and the one who grabs your attention is Eovaldi. That’s the guy with the big, big upside.

From their end, you can see what the Marlins are doing. They didn’t need Eovaldi, and Phelps is useful enough, and Prado can play all over the place. But from the other side, the Yankees might well be ecstatic. Theirs was a roster in need of help in the rotation. It’s not often you can land an arm like Eovaldi’s without paying through the nose. It was this very player who, a few years ago, got traded for Hanley Ramirez. Eovaldi’s not even 25 years old, and he can run it up to the triple digits.

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There are plenty of ways to poo-poo Nathan Eovaldi. Dude has thrown 300 changeups and they’ve been bad, for the most part. Dude has gas, but his four-seamer gets only gets average whiffs. Dude’s thrown almost 500 innings and been league average. Dude’s done this in pitcher-friendly parks and leagues and now is headed to Yankee Stadium. Dude.

There’s at least one way to get excited about Eovaldi. By arsenal shape, speed, and peripheral results, he’s pretty much Garrett Richards.

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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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As was made evident by the Giancarlo Stanton extension, the Marlins are trying to build up to win. On Wednesday, they added Dee Gordon, a player who has been good in one year. On Thursday, they added Mat Latos, a player who has been good in several. There’s another difference, though — in 2014, Gordon was at his best. Latos, meanwhile, missed half the season due to a variety of injuries. The Marlins are betting on him to be successful in his last year of team control before free agency. To Cincinnati go Chad Wallach and Anthony DeSclafani.

Latos is a player of particular interest. Previously in his career, he was moved from San Diego in a blockbuster. Twice, he’s hit 4 WAR, and two other times, he’s come in around 3 WAR. He’s now coming off a half season in which he was worth 1.5 WAR. In a full season in 2015, Steamer projects Latos to be worth 1.2 WAR. It’s a surprisingly pessimistic figure, for a pitcher who just turned 27, so it’s worth explaining why Steamer thinks the way it thinks. Why is Steamer so down on a front-of-the-rotation starter?

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Unpopular opinion time: the Miami Marlins are the not a band of penniless rubes ready for the exploitin’ by the Dodgers slick-talkin’ front office army. The Marlins are a lot of things, but clueless is not one of them. They don’t have much in the way on field success — minus a couple of championships — but the Marlins could very well have the best player development record in baseball. The Marlins never-ending prospect churn seems to have produced more than its share of talent, and that’s probably not an accident.

At some point, even the thrifty Marlins decided to roll up their stake and make a move. The moves are still Marlins-sized, but this isn’t your typical Marlins deal. This time, the Marlins are trading pre-arb players OUT and bring established players IN, so this is not the run-off-the-mill Marlins sell-off. Something is afoot. Something is amiss. Could they be making their team…better?

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Things have been enthusiastic around the Marlins lately. They surprised the industry by managing to lock up Giancarlo Stanton, and then they turned their attention to trying to extend a handful of other promising young big-leaguers. Also, the Marlins swore to improve the immediate big-league roster, signaling that they want to get to the playoffs. There’s been a sense that, for the first time, the Marlins are serious about getting good and staying good, and paying money to do so. The Marlins are trying to convince everyone they’re entering a new era. Which is all well and good, until you make a misstep in trying to improve. That’s the real dangerous bit.

So just to restate: #Marlins getting Dee Gordon and Dan Haren from #dodgers for Heaney, Kike Hernandez, Austin Barnes and Chris Hatcher

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) December 11, 2014

I’m not sure if this is the worst move of the offseason. If it is, I’m not sure if this will remain the worst move of the offseason. But my later response continues to match my initial response: Andrew Friedman and the Dodgers are making out like bandits, successfully selling Dee Gordon about as high as possible. The Dodgers are losing a probable regression candidate, about to enter his Super-Two seasons. They’re getting probably the Marlins’ best prospect, and then even more to boot. The Dodgers picked up some more long-term assets. The Marlins might not have gotten better at all.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Tampa Bay.

Batters
At five-plus wins Giancarlo Stanton receives the top projection among Marlins players — a figure that will likely represent one of the highest WAR projections among all players to appear in this series. Unsurprising, that, for a player who just produced a six-win season as a 24-year-old.

Perhaps surprising for a player who just produced a six-win season as a 24-year-old is that Stanton’s projection isn’t more optimistic. To that sentiment, Dan Szymborski would likely reply — indeed, has replied before — that star-level players have a “pretty much one-sided risk curve.”

Notable elswhere among Marlins hitters is Christian Yelich’s very encouraging projection of nearly four wins — this, despite possessing slightly below-average (present) power and playing a corner-outfield spot. Complementing those drawbacks with strong plate discipline and considerably above-average defense in that corner, however, Yelich is a candidate to become the National League’s version of Alex Gordon.

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