A couple of years ago, the Blue Jays were blown away by the spring training performances of a couple of 20-year-old flamethrowers, and because they were the team’s two best pitchers in the Grapefruit League, the team decided to carry both Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro on the Opening Day roster. Castro even took over as the team’s closer for the third game of the season; the Blue Jays bet big on talent over experience, and while Castro is a reminder that spring training success doesn’t always carry over to the regular season, the team struck gold with Osuna, who has been one of the game’s best relievers the last two years.

There aren’t any 20-year-olds threatening to crack the end of a contender’s bullpen this year, but over in Washington, the Nationals do look like they’re giving strong consideration to handing the ninth inning job to rookie Koda Glover, who turns 24 a week after the season starts. Like Castro and Osuna, Glover is opening eyes with elite velocity and a fine spring training performance, and since Dusty Baker seems to prefer Shawn Kelley and Blake Treinen in setup roles, Glover is the guy who most looks like a traditional closer, even if he doesn’t have the type of experience that is usually required before earning the job.

Unlike the Toronto pair, Glover already did his A-ball to the Majors climb last year, pitching well at every stop on the minor league ladder before scuffling a bit in the big leagues. But while he ran an ERA over 5.00 in the Majors, and failed to record as many strikeouts as you’d expect with his stuff, it’s also not like he got lit up last year; opposing batters hit just .200/.277/.387 against him, good for just a .284 wOBA. Glover’s minor league performances also suggest the team has some reason to think that this plan might work, as both ZIPS and Steamer think he’s effectively as good as anyone in that bullpen besides Kelley.

And spring training dominance, while often overstated in value, isn’t worth ignoring entirely. As Dan Rosenheck showed a couple of years ago, you can improve pre-season projections by incorporating spring training data, and the effects are largest for young players on whom we have the least amount of big league data, meaning the projections have more room for error. And Glover’s spring numbers thus far are exactly the types of numbers Rosenheck identified as potentially worthwhile predictors of a performance that could be better than the current projections state.

His grapefruit league line, to this point.

8 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 11 K.

The hit and run categories don’t matter much, but that 39% strikeout rate? That’s something to pay attention to. Rosenheck’s study showed that big spikes in spring training strikeout rate did tend to suggest better pitching performances in-season, and all Glover really needs to do to become a high-end reliever is miss more bats. The fact that he’s destroying opposing hitters in spring training should be a very encouraging sign.

But there’s a caveat here, because Dusty Baker has decided to get Glover ready to pitch the ninth inning by having him actually pitch the ninth inning, rather than getting his work in earlier in the game. This means that by the time Glover has pitched, he’s generally been facing minor league hitters, since big leaguers aren’t playing all nine innings in the Grapefruit League. Because MLB.com helpfully has game logs for spring training, we can actually go through and look at the 28 batters he’s faced so far this spring. So let’s do just that.

3/20, NYY: Clint Frazier, Pete Kozma, Billy Mckinney, Kyle Higashioka
3/18, HOU: Max Stassi, Colin Moran, Alejandro Garcia, A.J. Reed
3/16, NYM: Ricardo Cespedes, Jacob Zanon, Andres Gimenez
3/13, DET: Steven Moya, Mike Gerber, Juan Perez, John Hicks
3/10, STL: Breyvic Valera, Wilfredo Tovar, Chad Huffman
3/7, BOS: Mitch Moreland, Chris Young, Jackie Bradley Jr
3/3, MIA: Ryan Jackson, Matt Juengel, Austin Nola, Destin Hood
2/28, HOU: Juan Centeno, Jake Marisnick, Andrew Apin

Among those 28 opponents, exactly four are likely to break camp with a big league team this year, and one of those four is Jake Marisnick, who hits like a minor leaguer. The good news is that, when asked to face the bottom of Boston’s line-up, he struck out all three of the Red Sox big leaguers. The bad news is that I don’t know how much the Nationals have really learned about Glover in the other 24 at-bats, given that we already knew he was capable of blowing minor leaguers away.

So, while it’s better that Glover is carving up the likes of Juan Perez and Matt Juengel than if he was struggling against them, we probably can’t apply Rosenheck’s study directly to Glover’s performance, since most of the players in that study faced mostly big leaguers by playing in the early innings of spring training games. And while Glover didn’t need a big spring training adjustment in order to be a decent enough option to close, the quality of competition should temper the excitement about what he’s done this month.

With a mid-90s fastball and a slider that looks like an out-pitch, the big question facing Glover is probably how well he’ll handle left-handed hitters, which could be the difference between him succeeding as a closer and being more suited to a match-up role. If the Nationals wanted to gather the most pertinent information to help them evaluate his readiness for the closer’s role, they probably should have had Glover face as many big league lefties as possible this spring.

With a few weeks of spring training left, there’s still time for Baker to shift his usage plan, and test Glover against the kinds of guys he’ll actually have to get out if he wants to pitch the ninth inning in D.C. this year. But until that adjustment happens, we probably shouldn’t put too much stock in Glover’s dominant spring training numbers. We already knew he could get low-quality hitters out. If he’s going to be the closer for a contending team, the Nationals need to figure out if he can get big leaguers out too.

The conversation began a bit clunky, then it turned a little nerdy. Not in a numbers-crunching way, but rather in a bat-path way. Danny Espinosa, it turns out, wasn’t too loopy after all.

I’d never formally met the Angels infielder prior to approaching him in Tempe earlier this spring. We had interacted, albeit briefly. That was last September, when he was in Pittsburgh as a member of the Washington Nationals, and I was interviewing Trea Turner. Sidling up from the adjoining locker, Espinosa raised an imaginary microphone and asked his then teammate: “Are you the best player in the National League?” He then walked away, bemused, as I claimed that was going to be my next question. (It wasn’t.)

Fast forward to our recent, and more expansive, exchange. The first thing I asked Espinosa, who was acquired by Anaheim over the offseason, was why he was so inconsistent with the bat as a Nat. After a quizzical look that led me to rephrase my question, he suggested he’s happy to be in the American League.

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In 2017, I am probably more interested in Adam Eaton than I am any other player in baseball. As the centerpiece of a controversial blockbuster, coming off a monster season where a lot of his value was tied a huge swing in his defensive value, Eaton was always going to be a fascinating experiment for paying a perceived premium price for outfield defense. But it gets even more interesting, because the Nationals are switching him from right field back to center field, so we throw a position switch in the mix as well, and get another data point on whether his weird splits between RF and CF actually mean anything.

So when the MLBAM guys released their outfield catch probability leaderboard last weekend, Eaton was naturally one of the first players to examine. And when Jeff took an early look at the published 2015-2016 data, he found that Eaton ranked seventh in Catch+, or whatever we might want to call plays made above the averages of the buckets they had opportunities in. And when he looked at the catch data relative to the range portions of UZR and DRS, he actually found that the Statcast data showed that Eaton had the largest positive difference, suggesting that, by hang time and distance traveled variables, Eaton may have been even better defensively than the public defensive metrics thought.

So yeah, Eaton is really interesting. But the more I dig into Eaton’s defensive data, the more remarkable it all gets.

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For Lucas Giolito, KISS doesn’t mean Keep It Simple Stupid. Given his intellectual curiosity — picking Max Scherzer’s brain didn’t hurt — the acronym more aptly equates to Keep It Simple Smart.

Giolito is now in the White Sox organization, having been acquired by Chicago from Washington in December’s Adam Eaton mini-blockbuster. Blessed with a big arm and a made-for-movies persona, the 6-foot-6 righty projects as a front-line starter, but only if he can keep his delivery in sync. That was an issue in last year’s six-game cameo with the Nationals, when he allowed 39 baserunners in 21.1 innings.

The 22-year-old former first-round pick believes that striking the right balance is the secret to future success. Being studious and cerebral comes naturally to Giolito, but at the same time, he understands that simplicity is a pitcher’s friend.

———

Giolito on how analytics impact his thought process: “It’s tough, because they make it a little more complicated, and when I’m pitching I like to make it super simple. But things like spin rate and extension play a role in, ‘How good is your stuff?’ What I especially looked at last year was… usually, I’m a big extension guy. On my fastball, I’ll get seven-foot-whatever.

“I was looking at some numbers, and saw that I was down to six-foot-eight, six-nine, six-whatever. That’s not what I should be doing. Sure enough, video showed that I was flying open and yanking everything. So that stuff can be very helpful. Same thing with spin rate. Is the ball coming out of your hand at its best right now? It used to just be a feel thing, and now you can actually look at the numbers to back it up.

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Two years ago, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester signed deals worth a total of $365 million between them, agreements which would keep both players employed into their age-36 seasons. The accepted wisdom, dating back at least as far as Mike Hampton and Barry Zito, is that signing free-agent starting pitchers to massive contracts into their 30s is a poor idea. If early returns are any indication, last season’s deal for Zack Greinke is unlikely to serve as evidence to the contrary. David Price’s injury scare, meanwhile, provides another reminder of the risks inherent to long-term agreements with pitchers.

Not all such commitments are doomed, however. We’re just entering the third year of the contracts signed by Scherzer and Lester, for example, and so far those deals look quite good.

Two offseasons ago, Lester and Scherzer represented the only two players to receive a contract of $100 million or more. Eight other players signed for at least $50 million, though. All 10 such contracts are listed below. For each player, I’ve also provided an estimate of the value he would have been expected to provide starting with the time he signed. To calculate this estimated value, I began with each player’s WAR forecast from the 2015 FanGraphs Depth chart projections, started with $7.5 million per win, added 5% inflation per year, and applied a standard aging curve. The rightmost column indicates whether the player in question was expected to outperform or underperform the cost of his contract.

The surplus and deficit figures for individual players vary by quite a bit. Overall, however, the actual contract and value numbers are within 1% of each other.

It might be hard to believe that, at the time, projection systems were calling for Chase Headley to record $100 million in value. Remember, though, that he had averaged more than five wins over the three previous seasons and had just completed a four-WAR year. From this point, it looked like Scherzer, Lester, and Hanley Ramirez signed contracts pretty close to their expected value. The number for Scherzer is probably even closer than what we see above after accounting for his deferrals, as he makes just $15 million per season over the playing life of the contract.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Washington Nationals 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)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .280/.376/.423 with 37 stolen bases in 2016.

Scouting Report
Scouts rightly venerate Robles’ heavenly feel to hit. He identifies balls and strikes consistently, makes mid-flight adjustments to breaking balls, casually wields plus bat speed and has feel for the barrel. He’s one of the better pure hitting prospects in the minor leagues, spraying high-quality contact to all fields and then wreaking havoc on the bases. Robles is also a plus-plus runner whose routes in center field are fine, if perhaps a bit circuitous at times. But, just on his speed, he projects as a 55 defender in center field rather conservatively, which allows him to vigilantly guard both outfield gaps. There’s a chance he’s plus there at peak if his reads (especially on balls hit toward shallow center) improve. He also has a plus-plus arm.

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So I don’t want to make too much of a couple swings early in spring training but…

Here’s Bryce Harper’s first at-bat of the spring from last week.

And here’s his second homer in nine spring at-bats, an event having taken place on Thursday.

In Harper’s first four spring games, he’s gone 4-of-9 with two homers and three walks against two strikeouts. It’s really early. This might not mean anything. But after last season’s dramatic decline from his 10-win, MVP-earning 2015 campaign, maybe it’s something. There were whispers about Harper playing through a shoulder injury last season, and his agent Scott Boras said last month that there was “an issue” with which Harper dealt. There sure seemed to be something not quite right.

His average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives fell from 94.5 mph in 2015 to 92.7 last season. Here’s his rolling 2015 exit velocity compared to the league average from Baseball Savant…

And his 2016 average exit velocity…

Or maybe the Cubs just got in Harper’s head in early May, walking him 13 times in a four-game series, three times intentionally. After a 19% walk rate during the first half of last season, that mark slipped to 14.7% in the second half. At the same time, his strikeout rate rose from 15.8% to 22.8%. But this is a player who posted a 20% walk rate in 2015. He’s used to being pitched around. So maybe Harper was playing through injury, though he or the Nationals never acknowledged that. Maybe he fell out of a good approach and comfort level at the plate. Maybe it was a combination of factors.

Whatever the reason, his very different 2015 and 2016 seasons make him one of the more interesting players to watch early this season. And if you believe he was hurting after an outstanding April last season, he sure looks healthy right now.

The expectations for 2017 are tempered surrounding a player who is considered to be a generational talent. PECOTA is projecting a four-win season, a .270/.375/.501 slash line, and 27 homers in 575 plate appearances. ZiPS forecasts 4.4 WAR, 29 homers, and a .280/.406/.521 slash line over 600 plate appearances. The Fans projections have Harper being about equal in value to Gary Sanchez.

While Harper’s 2015 was fueled by to some extent by an overperformance on fly balls, pulling a Tyler Naquin, it was still an all-time great season.

And while it’s dangerous to make something of a few spring at bats, sometimes they can mean something. And if these two swings indicate Harper is healthier than he was a year ago, then perhaps he’s a good bet to exceed his projections, and do some in dramatically.

The Scott Boras influence on the Nationals’ roster is “inescapable” wrote Washington Post scribe Barry Svrluga on Monday.

Svrluga calculates that, after the Matt Wieters signing, nine players on the Nationals’ projected Opening Day roster will almost certainly be Boras clients, their contracts totaling $551.4 million.

When Dave Cameron examined the curious signing of Wieters by the Nationals earlier this month the FanGraphs editor wrote:

The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

At the plate, Wieters isn’t clearly better than Norris, even with the latter’s miserable 2016 as our most recent data point. …. Statcorner has Norris at +22.5 runs from framing in his career, while Wieters is at -20.9. Prorated to 10,000 pitches, that’s roughly +6.5 per season for Norris and -3.2 for Wieters, so about a 10 run swing between them per year.

The Nationals needed help. They needed to bolster their bench, they required bullpen help, and reportedly added Joe Blanton Tuesday. What they didn’t need was Wieters, a poor receiver with a middling bat. With Wieters, Boras appears to have sold ice to an arctic village. It was a surprising fit, only it wasn’t, as Boras and Nationals owner Ted Lerner have developed something of a deal-making relationship.

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Before today, the last post containing information about Joe Blanton on the baseball news aggregator MLB Trade Rumors went up on February 2nd. He was one of the seven remaining players in the right-handed reliever section of the site’s list of free agents, alongside players like Jerome Williams and Jonathan Papelbon who have fallen victim to the passage of time. Blanton is 36 years old, with 1723.1 regular-season innings’ worth of mileage on his right arm. Our Depth Charts projection system looked into its cybernetic crystal ball and foresaw just 0.7 WAR for him this year. In a way, it’s not surprising that Blanton didn’t have an employer until today, when he signed with the Nationals.

But it’s also quite strange that he couldn’t find a deal until now, and that he didn’t find more than $4 million for a year (and, in typical Washington fashion, $3 million of that sum is deferred). He’s been just as valuable as Shawn Kelley these last two years, ever since he was reborn from the pitching ashes as a reliever. Blanton’s career was through, collapsed under the groaning weight of home runs surrendered. He didn’t appear in a big-league game in 2014, and then reappeared as a member of the Royals’ bullpen the following year. He’s been a valuable relief workhorse ever since.

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In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

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