Archive for Teams

Let’s talk about the Twins for a moment. No, you probably don’t want to talk about the Twins, I understand, but it’s Christmas Eve, and the eight or so of you who are unfortunate enough to be in an office right now will probably be happy to talk about something, I think. And the Twins, certainly, are something.

Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan took a look at projected 2015 team defenses, and within that piece was a list of teams that you wouldn’t really want to be included on:

Now, the three worst defensive teams, projected:

• Astros
• White Sox
• Twins

It’s difficult to dispute that from a Minnesota perspective, because while Jeff noted the obvious caveats of attempting to project defense, the 2014 Twins finished 29th in DRS, 24th in UZR/150, and 27th in Defense. One of the teams regularly behind them, Cleveland, will no longer have a left side of the infield that occasionally lined up as Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana. They’ll still be below-average, but they might not be a train wreck. The Twins? The Twins’ main non-pitching move this winter has been to import baseball’s worst regular defender from a year ago, Torii Hunter, and park him in right field.

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

t4. Cory Mazzoni, RHP (Profile)

After recording just 66.0 innings in 2013 — all in a starting capacity — Mazzoni didn’t surpass that total by much in 2014, owing to a lat strain that forced him to miss roughly three months of the season. Upon returning, he proceeded to produce almost the precise strikeout and walk figures (75:20 K:BB) as he had the previous year (74:19 K:BB) — although most of them in his first exposure to Triple-A, in this case. Perhaps because of his health difficulties or for other reasons, the notion persists that the Mets will move Mazzoni to the bullpen. It seems like he’d be entirely competent there, but that he also appears to have the tools (if not the health) to survive as a starter.

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

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

I mentioned this with the Reds system as well, but I was surprised how strong the Mets system ended up being after I made all of my calls. They have a nice crop of talent on the MLB growth assets list, upper level talent that could be everyday players and some intriguing guys at the lower levels.  The organization has been aggressive in targeting top minor league talents in trades (Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard, Travis d’Arnaud, Dilson Herrera), going after top talent on July 2nd and doing well in the draft, with all recent top picks still on the prospect radar.

One thing to keep an eye on in spring training is the MLB/AAA pitching glut.  With the big league rotation looking right now like it’ll be Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Jon Niese and Bartolo Colon, that leaves seven arms with prospect value (Noah Syndergaard, Rafael Montero, Dillon Gee, Matt Bowman, Cory Mazzoni, Steven Matz and Gabriel Ynoa) as candidates for five Triple-A rotation spots or the big league bullpen.  This logjam is what made Logan Verrett expendable in the Rule 5 draft; it should cause roster crunch issues and also valuable depth to a Mets team on the rise.

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Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

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It was an exciting thing that Phil Hughes pulled off — just last season, he finished with the best-ever ratio of strikeouts to walks. It sounds good. It is good. Strikeouts are good! Walks are bad. (For pitchers.) You want to have a lot of the former and few of the latter. There’s no taking away Hughes’ accomplishment, now that the season’s complete. But then, we have come to understand that strikeouts minus walks is more meaningful than strikeouts over walks. Ratios can go crazy with little denominators. By K-BB%, Hughes didn’t set any records. He did, though, finish in between Madison Bumgarner and Jon Lester. And he established a career-best for himself.

The story, really, isn’t that Hughes became one of the best pitchers ever. It’s just that he became a much better pitcher, which is plenty. Down the stretch, it came to public attention that Hughes finished one out shy of triggering a contract bonus. There was thought that the Twins should pay Hughes the bonus anyway, since he did enough to earn it. Turns out Hughes declined an opportunity to pitch out of the bullpen to make his extra money. And now it doesn’t even matter, because the Twins have given Hughes an extension. He’s getting an extra three years and $42 million, including an extra $1.2 million in each of the next two years. In a sense, the Twins just signed Hughes to a five-year, $58-million contract.

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According to Dennis Lin of the U-T San Diego, the San Diego Padres — despite rumors to the contrary — aren’t interested in flipping the recently acquired Wil Myers to the Phillies in exchange for Philadelphia left-hander Cole Hamels.

Writes Lin:

Indications from sources within the organization… are that the Padres intend on playing all three of their newest outfielders, including Myers. The early plan is for the 2013 American League Rookie of the Year to start in center field, flanked by fellow power-hitting right-handers Justin Upton and Matt Kemp.

The bold is mine and the bold is of some interest insofar as center field, with the exception of 51 innings in 2013, isn’t a position at which Wil Myers has spent much time as a major leaguer. He played it to a greater extent in the minors, making about two-thirds as many starts there as he did in right field while still a member of the Royals organization. But one also notes that minor-league defensive assignment aren’t necessarily excellent indicators of future major-league defensive prowess. Miguel Cabrera, for example — on something more intimate than just nodding terms with inertia even as a 20-year-old rookie — nevertheless made more minor-league starts at shortstop than any other position. Michael Morse made 95% of his nearly 500 minor-league starts at shortstop leading up to his 2005 major-league debut. His physique now isn’t identical to his physique then, but he’s still the same human — and that human wasn’t a good shortstop in 2005.

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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 San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
With regard to their field players, San Francisco doesn’t currently feature so much a stars-and-scrubs sort of configuration as they do a Buster-Posey-surrounded-by-roughly-average-players one. Posey is projected by ZiPS not only to record the highest wOBA among Giants hitters by over 20 points but also to play slightly above-average defense at a position that receives the largest positive adjustment in the calculation of WAR.

Of some note, perhaps, is ZiPS’ seeming pessimism regarding Hunter Pence. After averaging five wins per season over the last two years, Pence is forecast to produce only half that figure in 2015. In fact, there’s probably less decline projected for ZiPS than one might think at first glance. Pence, for example, has recorded nearly 1.5 wins due to baserunning alone over the last two years after having posted mostly just average seasons by that measure before that. Even just applying regression here accounts for some of Pence’s seeming decline.

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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 Braves are sending right fielder Justin Upton and a yet-to-be-named-publicly low level prospect to the Padres for for pitcher Max Fried, center fielder Mallex Smith, second baseman Jace Peterson and third baseman Dustin Peterson.  It’s an interesting way for Atlanta to get a very high upside player not usually available in a package for a one-year rental.  As I did with my breakdown of the Wil Myers trade, I’ve ranked the pieces in order of my preference, with a note where there’s a virtual tie.

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