As much fun as it can be to criticize, the reality is that nearly every decision made by an MLB organization is justifiable. It’s a competitive business, after all, with great potential rewards, so organizations have to look out for themselves, and they have to make sure they’re going down the right path. Decisions have to be made rationally, intelligently, and that’s what makes the occasional transaction so extraordinary. There was simply no reasonable explanation for, say, the Angels trading for Vernon Wells. Likewise, there was no reasonable explanation for the Tigers getting so little for Doug Fister. These decisions have stood out specifically because of how unambiguously bad they were. Decisions of that ilk are few and far between.

The Phillies, as an organization, are no stranger to criticism. This is a team that has yet to rebuild, the same team that gave Ryan Howard way too big of a contract. It’s an aging team, a team that’s easy to mock, a team that might believe it’s more than it is, but the latest issue with the Phillies has nothing at all to do with the payroll or major-league roster. It has to do with the draft, and with the Phillies turning in unsigned collegiate players to the NCAA for dealing with professional agents.

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A.J. Burnett’s been real good for two years, and he was better last year than he was the year before, so there’s good reason to believe he’ll be an effective pitcher in 2014. On paper, he was one of the best pitchers available this offseason, but for the longest time he was a special case because it seemed like he’d either retire or return to the Pirates. Only more recently did Burnett express his desire to play, and his openness to playing elsewhere. Immediately he looked like an interesting short-term target for probable contenders. What’s happened instead is that the Phillies have signed him, for a year and $16 million.

The Phillies were long thought one of the finalists. It seems Burnett didn’t want to stray too far from home, and that eliminated plenty of would-be interested baseball teams. And I want to make it clear that one-year deals for good players are usually good deals, and for the Phillies, I don’t have a big problem with this roll of the dice. But Burnett probably took the biggest contract, and he wound up with a mediocre ballclub. Burnett probably doesn’t make the Phillies a playoff team, and an interesting question concerns what might happen in June or July.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Philadelphia Phillies.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Phillies or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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The FanGraphs community exists in an echo chamber. As far as echo chambers go, it’s not a bad one. We expect baseball teams to (mostly) make objective, rational decisions. But we do have our own pre-conceived ideas about what makes a decision objectively rational. We also have a lot of contrarians in our midst, which prevents an echo chamber from becoming stodgy and outdated. Bill James is a noted contrarian as are many other sabermetricians. That basic instinct – it’s almost an assumption that conventional thinking is wrong – has helped our little closet industry grow to one that front office personnel read on a regular basis.

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For five years now, Bronson Arroyo has been better than his peripherals. Since 2009, only three pitchers have a bigger gap between their fielding independent numbers and their ERA, and those three didn’t come close to pitching as many innings. It’s tempting to say the free agent 36-year-old has figured something out… but what has he figured out, exactly? How has he become more than the sum of his parts? It has to be more than a whimsical leg kick.

Let’s use some basic peripherals to find comparable pitchers. His fastball struggles to break 90 mph, he doesn’t strike many out, and he doesn’t have great worm-burning stuff — but the control has been elite. Here are a few other pitchers that fit that sort of mold.
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Late last week, it was announced that the Philadelphia Phillies had reached a 25-year, $2.5 billion TV rights deal. The club will remain with its current network, Comcast SportsNet. The Phillies have reportedly upped their equity stake in the network to 25 percent and will receive some portion of the ad money. 2016 is the first season under the new contract and revenues are expected to escalate over time, starting at around $65 million. I assume that our own Wendy Thurm will offer her usual sharp analysis on the business components of this deal. Today, let’s focus on why this won’t immediately affect the team’s overall strategy.

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Nearly five seasons ago, Jonathan Papelbon was awarded a $6.25M figure in arbitration, which at the time, was the largest deal in history awarded to a closer in the first year of arbitration. At that point in his career, he had saved 113 games with a 1.84 ERA and the arbiters rewarded him nicely for those figures. He would pitch three more seasons in Boston and left the Red Sox having been worth 16.4 RA9-WAR while converting 88% of his saves.

Philadelphia handsomely rewarded the closer with a four-year deal with a vesting fifth option. Thus far, Papelbon has been worth 4.4 RA9-WAR and has converted 86% of his saves. Yet, two years into the four to five-year commitment, the Phillies are reportedly looking to move him. A quick search of MLB Trade Rumors has Papelbon mentioned in rumors regarding the Orioles and both local and national writers hearing the team is actively attempting to move the closer.

GM Ruben Amaro Jr. has his work cut out for him as Papelbon is guaranteed at least $26M with the potential of a very achievable trigger option pushing the contract to a $39M value. That is well above the money that has been doled out to any free agent closer this offseason.

On Sunday, Matt Gelb of the Philadelphia Inquirer laid out some of the challenges in front of Amaro Jr.

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I remember the way things used to be. Used to be, writing about baseball analysis was pretty easy. Inflated or deflated BABIP over here. High groundball rate over there. This guy has a big difference between his ERA and his xFIP. That guy is miscast as a role player. That’s not the way things are anymore. Many of the principles were fine, and you still see a lot of the same ideas, but over time things have grown more complex, more nuanced. We’re moving beyond pointing out weird things, and we’re moving toward trying to explain weird things. It’s all in the name of identifying what is and isn’t sustainable. All of us want to be fortune tellers.

The Phillies signed Roberto Hernandez today, as a starting pitcher. He’s going to get a base salary around $4.5 million, and with incentives he can top out around $6 million. If writing were the same as it was a few years ago, I could just write a few paragraphs about how Hernandez put up a 4.89 ERA and a 3.60 xFIP. On that basis alone, hey, look, bargain! But because of what writing and research have become, now you also get that intro paragraph.

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It appears, once again, that Domonic Brown’s name is out there cooking up in the hot stove.  Dave and Jeff each touched on Brown when his name last came up in rumors last month when a Brown for Jose Bautista rumor was floated out of Philadelphia. Both pieces laid out the caveats of such a move in that Brown’s career is still immature enough that it could go in either direction. 2013 could as much be his baseline as much as it could be his peak.

Brown’s major league career has consisted of just 1032 plate appearances. Prior to 2013, Brown was on the Philly to Reading shuttle a number of times and also had to recover from a hamate injury, which sapped some of his power through the recovery process. The amount of plate appearances he received in parts of three seasons from 2010 to 2012 were nearly identical to the ones he received in his 2013 as a full-time player for the first time. Not only were the plate appearance totals nearly identical, so were the skills.
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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Philadelphia Phillies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Boston.

Batters
Citizens of Philadelphia will be glad to see that their club’s first baseman, Ryan Howard — to whom is still owed no less than $85 million — isn’t projected by ZiPS to produce only a single win like last year. What’ll be less encouraging is how it’s because he’s projected to produce more like zero wins in ca. 400 plate appearances.

Fortunately, the club profiles as generally average almost everywhere else — with a number of starters apparent candidates to improve upon their 2013 campaigns. Domonic Brown, Ben Revere, Jimmy Rollins, Carlos Ruiz: all four receive here projected WARs better than their actual WARs from this past season. Difficult to ignore, as well, is the very encouraging projection for Maikel Franco, who recorded a 30:70 walk-to-strikeout and 31 home runs in 581 plate appearances last season between High- and Double-A. Some question remains as to whether Franco will ultimately play third or first base in the majors. Conveniently, however, those appear to be the parent club’s greatest weaknesses at present.

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