I decided while working on the Top 50 Free Agents post that it would make sense to also write up the top trade target on the market. Since new Mets GM Brodie Van Wagenen said the team plans to compete in 2019, it seems like Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard are unlikely to be dealt — or, at least not during the offseason. That points to J.T. Realmuto as the clear top trade target in the league (and No. 24 in July’s Trade Value Rankings) — and that’s before nearly half the questions in my chat on Wednesday were asking me how much it would cost for various teams to trade for Realmuto.

I could approach this from an insider-y perspective and tell you what teams are telling me the price probably is, but that approach is limited in a few ways. First off, I’m not sure anyone really knows what the price is: the Marlins have turned down strong offers for a year now and still seem inclined to try to extend Realmuto, even thoughhis agent said he’s not having it. Since Miami has this one major asset left to move in its rebuild, they may act irrationally, but the market pieces may be falling into place for someone to pay a price that justified this delay.

If forced to succinctly describe the current state of catching in the major leagues, I would say it sucks. I’ll let Mike Petriello to provide some details and point you to the positional leaderboard, but if you just tried to predict which catchers would be worth two-plus wins and remain at catcher primarily for the next five seasons, how many would you have? Realmuto is one, and if you think Willson Contreras and Gary Sanchez may play a lot more first base or get hurt or be inconsistent in this span, it’s possible that there isn’t another one. Being charitable, there’s just a handful, and they all cost a lot or aren’t available.

Putting all of this together, Realmuto offers the age-28 and age-29 seasons of the best long- and short-term catcher in the game, and he’ll cost between $15 million and $20 million for those seasons, depending on how his arbitration salaries work out. You have him long enough to make two runs at a title and get a comp pick at the end, an exclusive negotiating window for an extension, a non-risky length of a deal, and cheap enough salaries that any team can afford it.

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This past season, the Mariners and Rays were separated by exactly one win in the standings. Of the two teams, the Mariners have the larger operating budget, and although the Mariners’ division includes the Astros, the Rays’ division includes the Red Sox and the Yankees. And yet these are two teams that seem to be going in different directions, with the Rays being the club on the rise. The Mariners will have to try desperately to stay afloat while getting next to no reinforcements from an empty farm system. The Rays are young and good and cost-controlled, and their farm is in the upper tier. The differing circumstances have led to a trade — an as-yet unofficial five-player swap, just the latest in a series of agreements between the two teams.

Rays get:

• Mike Zunino
• Guillermo Heredia
• Michael Plassmeyer

Mariners get:

• Mallex Smith
• Jake Fraley

It’s an entertaining trade for all the stat nerds out there, on account of the various extremes. Zunino seldom hits the ball, but when he does, it goes a mile. Heredia and Smith hit the ball far more often, but when they do, it doesn’t go anywhere. Even Plassmeyer and Fraley are coming off eye-opening minor-league seasons. There’s something to dig into, for everybody. Plenty of numbers to be studied.

But the take-home: The Rays are trying to win, and they’ve addressed a position of need. The Mariners are apparently trying to reload, without losing too much, and they’re banking on 2018 results while adding a longer-term player. You can see an argument favoring either side of this, but I find the Rays’ to be more convincing.

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Brock Burke was nowhere to be found on top-prospect lists when he was featured here at FanGraphs last June. But he did merit our attention. Tampa Bay’s third-round pick in the 2014 draft had one of the lowest ERAs in the minors at the time. While the sample size was small — just nine starts on the season — his dominance was undeniable. He’d begun to put himself on the map.

The southpaw out of Evergreen, Colorado wasn’t nearly as good after a mid-summer promotion from low-A Bowling Green to high-A Charlotte. His ERA as a Stone Crab was exponentially higher than it was as a Hot Rod — a Brobdingnagian 4.64 as opposed to a Lilliputian 1.10.

This year he flip-flopped his ebbs and flows. The 22-year-old lefty started slow, then got on a serious roll after earning a promotion to Double-A Montgomery in July. In nine starts for the Biscuits, Burke put up a 1.95 ERA and punched out 11.9 batters per nine innings. If win-loss records are your cup of tea, six of seven decisions went his way.

He blames this season’s slow start on a confluence of timidity and anger. Read the rest of this entry »

On a recent podcast episode, Eric Longenhangen and I discussed the premise for this article, which is another way of asking which organizations are healthiest in the short-to-medium term. The factor that goes furthest towards answering that question is present on-field talent, although salary, controlled years, the presence of impact minor leaguers on the horizon, and front-office quality are all relevant — as is payroll ceiling, which serves as a proxy for margin for error. With the World Series starting tonight, it seemed like the right time to look ahead at the favorites for the five World Series beyond this one.

I’ve experimented with some objective ways of measuring organizational health. I think it’s ultimately possible to produce an algorithm that would do a solid job, ranking teams objectively in a number of key categories. It would also require considerable time. Eager to arrive at some kind of answer, I’ve settled for subjective assessment for this version of the post, but I intend to work on something more systematic in the winter.

Here are the criteria I’ve considered to produce these rankings: short-term MLB talent, long-term MLB talent/upper-minors prospects, lower-minors prospects/trade capital, payroll ceiling, MLB coaching/front office, and amateur signings (draft and international). You could quibble and combine or separate a few of those groupings, or argue some of these can’t be quantified properly. You may be right, but we’ll keep tweaking things until they are.

I had originally intended to limit this list to five teams for purposes of symmetry, but the top tier looked like seven teams to me, and the sources by whom I ran this list agreed. In the same way that the I approached the Trade Value Rankings from the point of view of a medium-payroll, medium-term-focused team, I’ve undertook this exercise by asking which team would be most attractive to a prospect GM if his or her only interest is to win the most World Series possible (and not have low state income tax, run a childhood team, or live in a cool city) over the next five seasons.

Without further explanation, here are the organizations most likely to win the 2019-23 World Series.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers

The top-three teams on this list all have some reasonable claim to the top spot, but I ultimately went with the Dodgers, as they have a little more certainty in terms of on-field personnel than the Yankees possess, while both clubs feature similar built-in financial advantages. (Houston lags behind on the second count.)

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Blake Snell has turned into one of the very best pitchers in baseball, and in order to understand how and why, we can start by just looking at the most recent batter he faced. A couple days ago, in the bottom of the seventh, Snell struck out Rowdy Tellez. The first pitch was a slider for a ball, at 88 miles per hour. The second pitch was another slider for a ball, at 89. The third pitch was a slider for a foul, at 87. Then came a fastball for a ball, at 96. Then a curveball for a whiff, at 82. Then a curveball for a foul, at 81. Finally, a fastball for a called strike, at 98. Tellez was gone, and Snell was replaced by Chaz Roe, having thrown exactly 100 pitches.

It’s not that Snell is only just beginning to emerge. His turnaround began in the middle of last year, and he hasn’t looked back. It’s last season that now looks more like a breakout. This season, however, Snell is a contender for the AL Cy Young award, even despite a DL stint that threatened to derail his progress. And while Snell was strong in the first half, before his bout of shoulder fatigue, he’s come back nearly unhittable. Between halves, he’s chopped more than a run off his ERA. He’s chopped a run and a half off his FIP, and he’s done basically the same with his xFIP. He’s added ten points to his strikeout rate while trimming his walks. Blake Snell is like a dominant closer who throws for six innings.

In one way, it’s not hard to see where Snell has improved. Yet his most recent changes are far more subtle. And they might well be the last changes he has to make for a long time. All that’s left for Blake Snell is to stay healthy.

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Since the start of the season’s second half, the Rays have posted the third-best record in baseball. For fans of the team, it’s been fun, I imagine, but it also hasn’t mattered that much, since the A’s have run the single-best record in baseball. The Rays have gone 31-18 and lost ground in the wild-card standings, such that they’re only mathematically alive. They succeeded in catching up to the Mariners, but that won’t be enough to put them into the playoffs. It’s going to be another year without a World Series. It’s going to be another year without a postseason game.

You could say that the Rays are victims of circumstance. They’re 80-65 and almost irrelevant. That record, though, would ordinarily put them in a better spot. At this time last year, the Rays would be in possession of the first wild-card slot. The same would be true of 2016, and the same would be true of 2015. In 2014 and 2013, such a record would have given the Rays possession of the second wild-card slot. Most of the time, this would be a playoff contender. The Rays can’t help that the A’s are so good.

On its own, that’s somewhat encouraging. And yet there is so much more. From all appearances, the Rays are only just opening their competitive window. The talent-accumulation phase has guided them into an enviable position.

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The American League Cy Young race is pretty messed up this season. The current WAR leader, while apparently healthy, might throw so few innings in September that he fails to qualify for the ERA title as a result. The pitcher currently ranked second by WAR in the league hasn’t pitched in a month. A third pitcher who, as of July 1, had authored a sub-2.00 ERA and fantastic peripherals — and was probably the favorite for the award — is now an afterthought.

Overall, there are probably eight candidates who deserve to appear on a ballot — and that’s without even considering the credentials of dominant relievers like Edwin Diaz and Blake Treinen. Voters, however, can only choose five names — and, as a result, it is possible that totally defensible ballots will omit the eventual winner (or that a pitcher who would have otherwise won will be omitted from a totally defensible ballot).

As I noted yesterday with regard to the NL’s Cy Young field, this award invites multiple questions about how best to evaluate pitching performance. Unavoidably, one’s choice for Cy Young will depend on how one weighs what a pitcher can and cannot control — and how best to quantify those effects. In this post, I’ll look at various metrics and consider the implications of each regarding luck, defense, and pitcher skill.

Before we get to how contact and defense might be playing a role in voters’ minds, though, let’s look at some fairly standard statistics at FanGraphs.

Jay Jaffe made the case for Chris Sale’s candidacy last week, and that case certainly looks quite strong — or would, if the season ended today. Problem is, Sale might not get too many more opportunities to build said case. The left-hander is scheduled to throw two innings for Boston today and then another three innings on the 16th. If he records those five innings and then, say, another 10 over his final two starters, he won’t qualify for the ERA title and will potentially allow other pitchers the opportunity to catch up in value.

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Joey Wendle has been scorching the baseball. The Tampa Bay Rays infielder/outfielder is slashing .350/.405/.536 over his last 50 games, and he’s been especially torrid in his last 10. Wendle has 17 hits in his last 39 at-bats, pushing his season mark to a heady .300/.349/.429.

Pair those numbers with his defensively versatility — he’s started 10 or more games at three different positions — and the result for the 28-year-old late-bloomer is a 2.7 WAR that ranks first among AL rookies. Wendle is legitimate Rookie of the Year candidate.

His offensive output is surprising, but it’s by no means shocking. Wendle batted a solid .285 with a .441 slugging percentage in 380 Triple-A games, and he more than held his own in a pair of September cameos before coming to Tampa. The Rays acquired Wendle from the Oakland A’s last winter in exchange for Jonah Heim.

His left-handed stroke has never been better, and a big reason is that he’s no longer trying to build a better mousetrap. He’s simply being himself when he steps into the box.

“Personally, I feel the best swings are natural,” Wendle told me on a recent visit to Fenway Park. “I think some of my best swings came before I had any instruction. At the same time, you can slowly build them as you progress. I’d say that my career has gone from a natural swing to a bit of a forced swing, and now to a place where I understand my natural swing better.”

I asked the former West Chester University Golden Rams standout to elaborate on “forced swing.”

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Evaluating pitchers is a real challenge. A combination of experience and knowledge can help one to better understand how variables like velocity, spin, and pitch mix translate to the majors. Even with that information, though, the influence of other factors — like injury risk, like a pitcher’s likelihood of responding to mechanical or mental adjustments — creates a great deal of uncertainty.

Nor is this a challenge that faces only prospect analysts like myself and Eric Longenhagen: even front-office execs who have the benefit of substantial resources — in the form both of data and personnel — have trouble reliably projecting outcomes for otherwise similarly talented young arms.

In my role as a talent evaluator both with FanGraphs and with a few major-league clubs, the question of how best to assess pitchers is obviously one to which I’ve returned with some frequency. In my recent efforts to get some final looks at certain top pitching prospects, however, I began to rethink how Eric Longenhagen and I should approach rankings this offseason. Three prospects, in particular, help to illustrate my concerns.

Tigers righty Matt Manning was the ninth overall pick in 2016, is an athletic 20-year-old who stands 6-foot-6, and was promoted to Double-A last week. In addition to that, he sat 94-96 and hit 98 mph in my look, mixing in a spike curveball that flashed 65 on the 20-80 scale. The positives here are numerous, and very few other minor leaguers could match even a few of these qualities.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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