Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to say. Trying to encapsulate the true feelings of a fan base can leave us searching for words, grasping at the disparate ends of an often tattered, communal cloth. Those words might not be too hard to find for the Padres fan base right now, however. After being swept by the Dodgers this week while scoring zero runs in their opening series, it probably consists of a long string of expletives. Maybe a few sudden sobs. The meat of this article might not make you feel better about the past three games, Padres fans. But something brought me back to this series — not just its historic futility on the part of one of the teams, but the nature of that futility.

First, the history. The 2016 Padres are the first team in baseball history to score zero runs in their first three games of the season. That’s been well publicized. There’s more, though. There always is, but in this case, the more is really just more of less. Take a look at where the 2016 Padres stand among the worst-starting teams in baseball history in terms of a few chosen statistics, found through Baseball Reference’s Play Index (all ranks are through the first three games of respective seasons):

The wrong kind of historic across the board, these are the sort of numbers we see when the team that was projected to score the fewest runs in the majors goes up against a Dodgers rotation featuring Clayton Kershaw, Scott Kazmir, and Kenta Maeda. And, looking at these numbers, a lot of readers are probably going to think the Padres deserved this sort of start from the way their team is constructed and the way they played. But what actually goes into a historically bad start like this? Was it truly the Padres’ futility, or did the baseball gods have a part to play in this series? The answer almost certainly lies somewhere in between, but the finding out is the fun part. So here we go!

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Dan Straily needed to see a doctor. He wasn’t running a fever or suffering from strep throat; he had a bum shoulder. The symptoms of his malady were decreased velocity and general ineffectiveness. He initiated some independent research, and upon the recommendation of Houston Astros pitching coach Brent Strom and bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, Straily, 27, picked his practitioner.

After sitting in the waiting room that is Triple-A for much of the 2015 season, Straily paid a visit to Driveline Baseball in Seattle, where he met with Kyle Boddy. Boddy — the subject of a recent post here by Eno Sarris — isn’t an M.D., but you can think of him like a pitching doctor. Straily showed up, rattled off his ailments, and named his desired health benchmarks.

Straily told Boddy he needed to get his fastball back to sitting at 92 mph, with the ability to touch 94. That’s where he was when he first came up as an exciting, 23-year-old pitching prospect with Oakland back in 2012. Lately, his fastball had been sitting 89, and he struggled to touch 92 at all, and his effectiveness plummeted. The reason was the shoulder; he needed to get that healthy. And his breaking ball, he told Boddy, needed sharpening up.

Straily’s average fastball velocity by year

Boddy listened to his patient, and ran the preliminary examinations. That meant a trip to the biomechanics lab to analyze Straily’s delivery, and some tests to measure the movement and spin rate on his pitches. The doc came back with good news.

“I brought everything back and I said, ‘You know, your breaking ball is actually fine. I think that problem will go away if you throw 94 and sit 92,’” Boddy said. “And [Straily] said, ‘Alright, perfect.’ So we were on the same page from the get-go.”

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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL) / New York (AL) / Oakland / Philadelphia/ Pittsburgh.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the San Diego Padres. In this companion piece, I look at that same San Diego farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Padres have the 11th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

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The Padres took something that was a tremendous weakness after last offseason’s trade and spending spree, and turned it into a system that can start feeding the next competitive team in San Diego. There isn’t a ton of depth or more than a few high-probability prospects, but there is some upside to which Padres fans can look forward. The Craig Kimbrel trade was a big win, almost enough to wipe away the flop that was the 2015 season (of course, not really).

Two of the prospects that came over in that trade jump right into the 50+ FV group. Everyone agrees Manuel Margot is a legitimate prospect, but I’m a little lower on Javier Guerra, and Carlos Asuaje for that matter. Logan Allen is actually the prospect I’m picking to be the second-best prospect coming out of that deal. Guerra’s power potential isn’t a sure thing in my view, while Allen has the potential to move very quickly despite having been a prep pick just last June.

After last year’s dramatic improvements, I’m buying high on Colin Rea, believing the pitch mix and excellent command keeps him in the rotation for the foreseeable future. Also on this list, I make the case for why Travis Jankowski shouldn’t be dismissed as a fourth outfielder yet, while also acknowledging how much risk there is in Ruddy Giron’s future.

The depth of this system is really in the Quick Hits group. There were probably another 10-15 names I could justify putting there, but I wanted to stay focused on some of the more interesting ones. Their exclusion was less about not believing in their ceilings and more about an attempt to be concise about the prospects I wanted to highlight. It’s not as exciting of an area in which to possess depth, but there are quite a few players that could step up and appear on this list by midseason.

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The San Diego Padres were the most active team in baseball last winter, as newly-minted general manager A.J. Preller put his mark on the franchise with a mind-numbing mass of moves that aimed to quickly turn the Padres into a contender, mostly by injecting a bevy of ever-coveted right-handed power bats into a previously punchless lineup.

The plan didn’t work, for a host of reasons neither here nor there, and now a new plan has emerged. Justin Upton walked to free agency, Craig Kimbrel was shipped off to Boston, Wil Myers got out of center field, and Preller might not be done jettisoning the very players he acquired last year, the ones who were supposed to form The Next Good Padres Team.

Last week, Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Rangers continue to covet an upgrade at catcher, though their top target may not be Milwaukee’s Jonathan Lucroy, as previously expected, but rather Padres’ backstop Derek Norris. The Rangers like Norris because he’s cheaper than Lucroy, he’s got an extra year on his contract, and the Padres have more pieces that could be packaged together with Norris to make for a potential blockbuster deal.

While Norris may not be the same caliber player as a healthy Lucroy, he would presumably offer an upgrade over Texas incumbent Robinson Chirinos, both behind the plate and with the bat, while also providing much-needed depth. But the glove has only been a plus for one year — Norris graded as a well below-average pitch-framer before last season — and the deeper you look into the bat, the less promising it becomes. And evidently, pitchers around the league agree.

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We’re about two weeks away from Opening Day, and with teams starting to get a sense for what they have — and more importantly, what they don’t have — we’re likely to see some trade talk pick up soon. Mostly, spring trades revolve around out-of-options guys or bench players who played their way out of an organization, but occasionally, teams find common ground on a major trade that reshapes their roster right before the season starts. Last year, the Padres were involved in just such a deal, acquiring Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton from the Braves right before the season started. And I think they should make another big trade before the season starts this year.

Over the last few days, talk has picked up that the Rangers have interest in acquiring Derek Norris, the Padres starting catcher. The Rangers don’t really have much catching depth, while the Padres have three catchers after their off-season of Christian Bethancourt, so a deal between the two teams makes a decent amount of sense. But rather than making a small deal in which the Rangers pick up Norris for some mid-level prospect or two, there’s a case to be made that the two sides should expand the talk and make a legitimate blockbuster.

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Wil Myers has filled a few roles in his short time in the public eye. He has been a top prospect. Then the top prospect. Then one of the biggest trade chips in the game. Then Rookie of the Year. And then he was traded again, and filled the role of afterthought. But now, as we look to 2016, can he fill another one — that of team leader?

No one is suggesting of course that Myers fill an actual leadership role on the Padres. They have veteran players like James Shields, Matt Kemp and Melvin Upton to give motivational speeches. (And you don’t come here to read those kinds of stories anyway.) But when looking over the Padres depth chart, one notices that Myers has the best wOBA projection of the bunch.

ALL Batters Padres

The edge over Kemp is ever so slight, but it’s still there, and for the 99% of us who aren’t die-hard Padres fans, that may come as a bit of a surprise. After all, the die has seemingly been cast on Myers. Where once we were very quick to proclaim the decision by Kansas City to send Myers to Tampa Bay a disaster, now we are often quick to declare it a win for the Royals. After all, they went to back-to-back World Series, and are now defending the crown. The fact that Myers was quickly shipped out of town by Tampa Bay — in a trade where they didn’t receive a ton in return for him — only increases the sense that KC won after all.

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Baseball has started, sort of, and it’s time to have a meetup. Don’t worry about the team projections, all of our teams are still in it, at least until April. Please come drink, rosterbate, and theorize with the following writers at OHSO Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, March 11th, at 6pm. Free appetizers for attendees!

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A month ago, I put out the most recent version of KATOH’s top-100 prospect list. The top of the list looked like this:

1. JP Crawford
2. Jose Peraza
3. Orlando Arcia
4. Corey Seager
5. Ozhaino Albies
6. Julio Urias
7. Max Kepler
8. Ruddy Giron

Seven of those eight players are consensus top prospects. Baseball Prospectus and Baseball America ranked each of the first seven in their top 100s this winter, while six of those seven — excluding Peraza — cracked Keith Law’s list. Crawford, Arcia, Seager, Albies and Urias didn’t just make those lists, but ranked very close to the top. And then, ranked eighth overall, is a prospect excluded from all the industry’s most notable top-100 lists: Ruddy Giron.

Who?

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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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