About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.

Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:

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Previous editions: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York (AL) / New York (NL)  / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Washington Nationals. In this companion piece, I look at that same DC farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Nationals have the 16th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

*****

1. Trea Turner, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 8.8 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 60 FV

Turner scuffled in his first taste of big-league action last year, but previously did a bang-up job in the minors. Speed is Turner’s calling card, but he also showed a decent amount of power when he popped eight homers in the minors. Turner’s high-ish strikeout rates are a bit concerning, but his overall offensive package is extremely promising for a shortstop.

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Since the 2012 season, the question of the best player in baseball has been pretty boring. Mike Trout busted onto the scene with a +10.3 WAR season as a 20 year old, and he’s since dominated the sport in a way that has rarely been seen in the game’s history. There were good players having great seasons in Trout’s shadow, but no one put up any real serious challenge to the idea that they were a better player than Trout. But now, that might be changing, as Bryce Harper is putting together a realistic run at the title of the best player in baseball.

Obviously, Harper’s 2015 season was outstanding, as he won the NL MVP by wrecking opposing pitchers on a daily basis. But because of how good he was last year, it can be easy to forget that Harper is still just 23 years old, and he appears to be getting even better.

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Bryce Harper’s at-bats have become events. Maybe more so than any other player in baseball, a Harper at-bat is the kind of thing that you set an alert for on MLB.TV so you can switch over to the Nationals’ feed when he comes up. He averaged more than four pitches per plate appearance last year, so you’re probably getting your money’s worth, and the allure of seeing a baseball hit 450 to center is ever present. A Harper at-bat is a spectacle, not only because of the raw power, but because of the craft.

I was one of those people keeping tabs on each Harper at-bat yesterday, except this time it wasn’t because I was enticed by the power. This time, it was because I wanted to see if he’d strike out. He did. Which is a pretty normal thing for baseball players to do. Except this time, it was noteworthy, because Harper hadn’t yet struck out this year. Entering the game, he was just one of two qualified hitters to have not yet K’d, and the other was Melky Cabrera, who never K’s. Cabrera’s offensive game is built around putting the bat on the ball, without much care for authority. Harper is all about authority, and it’s already been on display, which makes his strikeout-averse start to the season feel like it means more than Cabrera’s.

Harper went 21 plate appearances into the season without being sat down on strikes, a streak which lasted four games and then some. Last year, he only went four games without a strikeout once, and never beyond that. Last year’s streak lasted 22 place appearances. There was a 22-plate-appearance run in 2013. He didn’t set any personal records — though if you want to get technical, you could extend back to last year and say he actually went 28 consecutive plate appearances without a whiff — but it also means the first we’ve seen of Harper this year is, in this one particular way, Harper at his best. For a 23-year-old coming off a historic MVP season, that’s fun, because we spent the offseason wondering what he’d do next. Maybe it’s “never strike out.”

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Stephen Strasburg didn’t pitch the game of his life on Wednesday or anything, but he was plenty solid, allowing one run over six innings. He threw his fastball around the familiar 95. He threw his changeup around the familiar 88. He threw his curveball around the familiar 81. And then it seemed like there was something else. The Nationals broadcast on several occasions noted that it looked like Strasburg was throwing some kind of slider, at 89 – 90. He’s fiddled with the pitch before, but only infrequently. Strasburg himself? He later denied that he was up to anything.

Strasburg appeared to get Norris on a slider, which would be a new pitch in his arsenal that he seemed to mix in a few times throughout the night. After the game, however, Strasburg denied that he had added a slider.

“No, same stuff I’ve been doing in Spring Training,” he said.

Now, that’s not the most firm denial. But it also just doesn’t matter much. Strasburg can say what he wants, but he can’t control what we see with PITCHf/x. And PITCHf/x picked up on something.

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With the start of the regular season just four days away, we find ourselves in the thick of preview season. No matter where you look, it all boils down to the question: what’s 2016 going to look like? At FanGraphs, we’ve just wrapped up our yearly Positional Power Rankings that assess the season through the lens of each position.

As you might have noticed, each team is made up of the sum of these positional projections and they will all start playing together as 30 units in nine-inning contests next week. If you’re into that sort of thing, we offer Playoff Odds that estimates each club’s shot at postseason baseball (explained here).

It’s important to remember, for all the reasons cited in the previous link, that these projected standings are incapable of total precision. In reality, even with a perfect model for individual player projections, you still wouldn’t hit on every team. And we don’t have anything close to a perfect model for individual players. Yet these projections do offer an objective reading of where the teams stand relative to one another based on what we know. They might wind up being wrong, but they’ll be wrong because they’re flawed not because they’re trying to write an interesting narrative.

Despite clear signs of parity, especially in the American League, our projections think only one division is going to be particularly close: the National League East.

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Adam LaRoche may or may not be retiring. It certainly seems as though he is, and it seems as though his decision was made abruptly. While that may not be 100 percent certain, now seems like a good time to look back on his career. On one hand, LaRoche was sort of a letdown, in that he never really took off the way it seemed like he might. On the other hand, LaRoche was a huge success, and should be celebrated as such.
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If it weren’t for Bryce Harper, fans of the Washington Nationals might be hard-pressed to admit 2015 ever happened. The team began last season with expectations as high as this year’s Cubs (sorry, Cubs fans) and ended it with a symbolic choke. Nobody could stay off the disabled list — Anthony Rendon, Jayson Werth, Denard Span and Ryan Zimmerman were all hindered by injuries — and the ones who could — Ian Desmond and Wilson Ramos — became liabilities at the plate, seemingly overnight.

But it was the pitching that truly got the hype train a-rollin’ in the preseason — an already star-studded staff with Max Scherzer as the sweetest cherry on top — and the pitching didn’t disappoint. Stephen Strasburg had a rough go of things in the first month and and Doug Fister had his fair share of struggles, but when it was all said and done, the rotation finished with a top-three WAR, a top-five FIP and a top-10 ERA. The expectation was that Washington’s starting pitching would be elite — it ran five deep with proven, quality arms — and Washington’s starting pitching was elite. But even proven arms need to adapt, lest they lose their title of proven. And while, on the surface, Washington’s hurlers for the most part looked like themselves, every member of the starting rotation made an adjustment, all similar in nature but unique to each individual. Unlike a tweak to one’s mechanics or pitch mix, it’s the type of adjustment that alters the very foundation of a pitcher’s DNA — every member of the Nationals starting rotation changed the way they throw their fastball.

Generally speaking, pitchers can be classified as high-fastball guys, or low-fastball guys. Unless you’re Bartolo Colon, you probably don’t want to try your hand at being a down-the-middle-fastball guy, and even a both-sides-of-the-plate-fastball guy like Johnny Cueto shows up as an extreme high-fastballer. High-fastball guys can always throw higher, and low-fastball guys can always throw lower, and last year, the Nationals made an effort toward the extremes.

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Over at ESPN today, they published a feature on Bryce Harper. It’s really good, and you should read the whole thing, but there’s one section that stands out; the part where the story shifts from the view of Harper as a person or a player, and to his view of baseball needs to evolve.

He wants to change the game. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris?

“Endorsements, fashion — it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. “In soccer, it’s Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it’s Curry and LeBron. In football, it’s Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion.”

There are impediments endemic to the sport. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”

And then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. Case in point: Papelbon vs. Harper. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking — a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside.

Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now.

“Baseball’s tired,” he says. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

“Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling — hoorah … if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot … I mean — sorry.”

He stops, looks around. The hell with it, he’s all in.

“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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