When you play in the majors long enough, and when you stick with one team for a while, you’re granted certain leverage. Brandon Phillips used his well-earned no-trade protection to block moves that would’ve sent him to Washington, Arizona, and Atlanta. That last decision took place in November, while the Braves were also talking with Sean Rodriguez. They signed Rodriguez, and the Phillips talks went cold. There wasn’t anything more to discuss.

Yet while Phillips was given more leverage, he wasn’t given *all of* the leverage. The situation in Cincinnati threatened to turn ugly, with the team clearly ready to move on and play younger players. Phillips faced the possibility of being benched or released, moves from which he couldn’t protect himself. Talks with the Braves picked back up in the aftermath of Rodriguez getting into a car accident. This time, Phillips acquiesced. The Reds aren’t getting much in return; they’re hardly even getting salary relief. What the Reds do get to do, now, is play Jose Peraza without things being uncomfortable. And, coincidentally enough, Peraza looks an awful lot like another Brandon Phillips.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

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

Batters
Cincinnati produced the worst BaseRuns record in the majors last year, tied with a very rebuilding Philadelphia team. The club’s field players weren’t really the problem, however, recording just a few wins less than a league-average unit.

The projections here reflect the general competence of the club’s position players. After Joey Votto (592 PA, 4.6 zWAR), who unsuprisingly receives the top wins forecast in the organization, there exists a collection of reasonably useful pieces. The front office probably deserves credit, in fact, for some of its discoveries. Adam Duvall (549, 1.9), Scott Schebler (564, 1.7), and Eugenio Suarez (608, 2.3) all profile as roughly league-average types, for example, despite having appeared on zero top-100 lists collectively as prospects.

This isn’t to suggest that there’s no room for improvement among the batting types here, but rather that “average” is probably not an unreasonable outcome for this group.

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Spring training has gotten surprisingly close, and — in terms of significant activity — the offseason is mostly complete. Just about every team around has a pretty good idea what the opening-day roster is going to look like, which means we’re coming up on projection season. Now, you could argue it’s always projection season, at least here on FanGraphs, but the team projections should, in theory, be better than they’ve been all winter. So let’s work with that.

Right now, all we have available is Steamer. We’re still a little while away from ZiPS getting folded in. But Steamer isn’t stupid, so, looking at that, we see the following teams projected to bring up the MLB rear: the Padres (66 wins), the Brewers (67 wins), and the Reds (69 wins). No one else is projected right now for a win total in the 60s, and while the White Sox would end up down there if they sold Jose Quintana, that hasn’t yet happened, so we shouldn’t assume anything.

You could argue the three worst teams are on the right tracks. All of them are openly rebuilding, and none of them think they’re going to win in 2017. Keith Law just ranked the Padres’ farm system No. 3 in the game. He ranked the Brewers at No. 6, and he ranked the Reds at No. 8. I don’t think many people thought the Reds would come in so high! There they are, though. Lots to hope for in the future.

But what about the near-term future? How good could these teams be in the year just ahead? None of them plan to win, but, miracles happen. To get to the point: I consulted my spreadsheet of team projections going back to 2005. That’s 12 years, and over that span, I found 26 teams projected to win no more than 70 games. Here’s a big (sortable) table of how all those teams did:

On average, the teams were projected to win 68 games. On average, they actually won 68 games, with an average BaseRuns win total of 68. Pretty good, all in all, by which I mean, pretty bad. The medians are also in agreement.

Of note: The worst projected team was even worse than expected. Of greater note, though, is that three of these 26 teams finished over .500. That’s about a 12% success rate, if that means anything to you. The 2012 Orioles are the greatest success story included, because they outdid their projected win total by an unbelievable 23. They made the playoffs! Their win totals leading up to the season in question: 69, 66, 64, 68, 69, 70. Between 2007 – 2011, no team in the American League won fewer games than the Orioles. Between 2012 – 2016, no team in the American League has won more games than the Orioles. That year in 2012 was when the whole story of the organization was flipped on its head.

The 2010 Blue Jays were only a little outdone. They beat their projection by 20 wins, and just looking at BaseRuns, they finished better than the 2012 Orioles. Those Jays were thought to be somewhat rebuilding, after ridding themselves of J.P. Ricciardi, and no team would expect to win after trading away Roy Halladay. The Jays played just one month that year with a sub-.500 record.

And then you’ve got the 2008 Marlins, before they decided to identify just with Miami. What the 2008 projections knew was that, in December 2007, the Marlins traded Miguel Cabrera to the Tigers. But the projections didn’t think the run prevention would improve by 124. It wasn’t a playoff season, but it was a hell of a lot better than it could’ve been.

In all, 26 projected bad teams. Of those, 23 were at least mostly bad. Odds are, the Padres, Brewers, and Reds will be bad, too. But let’s just say, for simplicity, there’s a 3-in-26 chance for each given team to do better than .500. It would follow there’s about a 30% shot for at least one of these teams to do better than .500. Wouldn’t that be something? I’ll pick the Brewers, and live with it.

Cincinnati has agreed to trade Dan Straily to Miami for three prospects, according to multiple reports, in a deal that indicates the intentions of both clubs — the Reds’ to continue their rebuild, the Marlins’ to compete in a top-heavy NL East.

Claimed off waivers by the Reds last spring, Straily is precisely the kind of arm a club like Cincinnati should be flipping for profit. After joining the Reds, the 28-year-old right-hander proceeded to go 14-8 with a 3.78 ERA. His FIP (4.88) and xFIP (5.02), however, suggest he outperformed his true skill level. That’s now the concern of the Marlins, though, who inherit Straily and his four remaining years of club control.

Chris Mitchell’s KATOH system isn’t too high on the prospects involved. The Marlins didn’t place a single prospect on Baseball America’s midseason top-100 list in 2016, so it’s not a particularly deep system. But Castillo rated as the Marlins’ No. 2 prospect, according to the Baseball America top-10 list published earlier this offseason.

Castillo’s an interesting arm. Now 24, he’s hit 100 mph in the past and will sit in the upper 90s. He posted a 2.07 ERA and 16-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) in 117 innings at High-A Jupiter this past season. Eric Longenhagen scouted Castillo when he was traded by the Marlins last deadline for Andrew Cashner. (When part of that deal, Colin Rea, proved to be injured, Castillo was sent back to Miami.) Also headed to the Reds are Austin Brice, ranked ninth in the Miami organization by MLB.com, and Isaiah White, a third-rounder in 2015, ranked 16th on the Marlins’ top-20 list.

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Dan Straily is on his way to becoming a Marlin. According to reports, the Reds have agreed to deal the soft-tossing, veteran righty for a trio of prospects. We’ll have more on the trade in a bit. For the moment, here’s what my KATOH system has to say about the players who are newly employed by the Cincinnati Reds organization. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar a methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

*****

Austin Brice, RHP (Profile)

KATOH: 0.9 WAR
KATOH+: 0.9 WAR

After an underwhelming tenure as a starter in the minors, Brice had success in the bullpen last year. Following a move to the pen in June, he posted a 2.10 ERA and 2.90 FIP between Double-A and Triple-A, earning him a September call-up. Brice’s recent minor-league numbers suggest he’ll have a future in the show, even if it’s a short-lived one. KATOH gives him a 50% chance of pitching in the majors again. But as a soon-to-be 25-year-old relief prospect without much track record, he isn’t likely to make a big impact. KATOH considered Brice to be the 10th-best prospect in the Marlins’ system, which says more about the Marlins’ system than it does about Brice.

To put some faces to Brice’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the hard-throwing righty. I calculated a weighted Mahalanobis distance between Brice’s performance this year and every Double- and Triple-A season since 1991 in which a pitcher recorded at least 350 batters faced. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Cincinnati Reds farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Dramatically increased ISO (.170 as a sophomore, .243 as junior) at University of Tennessee in 2016 and stole 25 bases at an 86% clip.

Scouting Report
A young-for-the-class SEC hitter with a long track record of success, Senzel was the most polished bat available in the 2016 draft. I saw him early in the year during a four-team round robin in Arizona and thought he’d go somewhere in the top 10-15 picks. While facing pitching far beneath the quality of arms he’d see later in the year during SEC play, Senzel finished the weekend 8-for-13 with four doubles, six walks, five of those on the final day of play. Despite my own enthusiasm, when a scout told me they thought he had an outside shot at going 1-1, I scoffed. Senzel was drafted No. 2 overall by Cincy in June. There are probably a few reasons for this, beyond a potential misevaluation of Senzel’s talent. Prospects ahead of Senzel on my board at that time (such as Jason Groome, Delvin Perez, Alec Hansen) all saw their stocks dip for one reason or another during the spring, while Senzel continued to rake. Moreover, he was one of the safest prospects in a draft class without huge, risk-worthy talent up top.

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While the 2016 campaign is over and the flurry of moves after the season has come to a halt for the moment, a whole year’s worth of data remains to be examined. Today’s post is an easy one and a fun one. Let’s find the best pitches that were thrown regularly last year.

Before we begin: the word “results” appears in the headline, but I’m not going to use results judged by things like singles and doubles and the like. The samples gets pretty small if you chop up the ball-in-play numbers on a single pitch, and defense exerts too much of an influence on those numbers. So “results” here denotes not hit types, but rather whiffs and grounders.

I’ve grouped all the pitches thrown last year, minimum 75 for non-fastballs, 100 for fastballs. I combined knuckle and regular curves, and put split-fingers in with the changeups. So the sample per pitch type is generally around 300 — a lot less for cutters (89) and a bunch more for four seamers (500) — but generally around 300 pitches qualified in each category. Then I found the z-scores for the whiff and ground-ball rates on those pitches. I multiplied the whiff rate z-score by two before adding it to the ground-ball rate because I generally found correlations that were twice as strong between whiff rates and overall numbers like ERA and SIERA than they were for ground-ball rates.

The caveats are obvious. Pitches work in tandem, so you may get a whiff on your changeup because your fastball is so devastating. This doesn’t reward called strikes as much as swinging strikes, so it’s not a great measure for command. On the other hand, there isn’t a great measure for command. By using ground-ball rate instead of launch-angle allowed, we’re using some ball-in-play data and maybe not the best ball-in-play data.

But average-launch-angle allowed is problematic in its own way, and ground-ball rate is actually one of the best ball-in-play stats we have — it’s very sticky year to year and becomes meaningful very quickly. Whiff rates are super sexy, since a swing and a miss represents a clear victory for the pitchers over the batter — and also because there’s no room for scorer error or bias in the numbers. And while the precise way in which pitches work in tandem remains obscure in pitching analysis, we can still learn something from splitting the pitches up into their own buckets.

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Bryan Price doesn’t believe in limiting pitchers. That much is clear based on his response to a question I posed during last week’s Winter Meetings. I asked the Cincinnati Reds manager — and former minor- and major-league pitching coach — if there are any changes he’d like to see in the way the organization develops pitchers.

I expected a more cautious answer than I received. Rather than pussyfoot, Price proffered a strong opinion. The way he sees it, babying pitchers in the minor leagues compromises their ability to work deep into games once they reach Cincinnati. Not only that, it can hinder their chances of becoming a top-notch starter.

Note: Price’s comments, which were delivered in a group setting, have been edited for clarity and continuity.

———

Bryan Price on developing pitchers: “The big challenge for me, personally, is a world where we want pitchers to throw less. I think they need to throw more. And not just necessarily bulk innings; I think pitchers need to throw more on the side. We have pitchers come through our system who throw bullpen sides of 25 to 30 pitches when we get them. I would like to see them have a bigger workload on their side days. I would like to see some of them throw twice between starts. I would like to see us build our starting pitchers to where they can carry a heavier workload in the minor leagues.

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The 2016 season featured the second-most home runs in baseball’s history. Though a few people around baseball want to attribute it to the placement of power hitters higher in the lineup or better coaching based on better data, the evidence that both exit velocity and home runs per contact are up across the league refutes the first, and the evidence of the latter is minor. It’s a bit of an open mystery, but it’s certainly possible that the ball is different now.

In any case, the fact that homers are up is irrefutable. And it’s on the game to adjust. So I asked many of baseball’s best managers a simple question: with home runs up, how have you adjusted how you approach the game? Lineups, rotations, bullpens, hooks: is anything different for them today than it was two years ago?

*****

Terry Collins, New York Mets: No, really doesn’t. The game has changed, that’s the game now: home runs. And we’re lucky we got a few guys who can hit ’em. That’s where it’s at. As I said all last year, our team was built around power, so you sit back and make sure they have enough batting practice and be ready to start the game. We’ve got a good offensive team. Neil. Getting Neil Walker back, that’s big. David back and Ces and Jay and Granderson. We got a bench full of guys that could be everyday players. We’re pretty lucky.

I watched the playoffs, too, and I know what you’re talking about. I talked to Joe Maddon a couple days ago about how the playoffs may change and he said, ‘We didn’t have your pitching. I’ll leave ’em in.’

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Some people track the passing of time through watching their children. Other people track the passing of time by looking at what time it is, and comparing that to a previous time, from back in the past. I tend to track the passing of time by thinking in baseball terms. I can’t really help it, and sometimes it takes me by surprise. It feels like just yesterday that Billy Hamilton was one of the most exciting and polarizing prospects in the sport. Now Hamilton is the subject of some trade rumors, because he’s entering his arbitration years and the Reds aren’t going to be good any time soon. Life comes at you fast. (Faster than Billy Hamilton!) (But not actually that fast.)

I don’t need to explain Hamilton to anybody. At least, not anybody on FanGraphs. Runs fast, doesn’t hit. It feels like a somewhat typical profile. Maybe thinking about Hamilton causes you to think about Willy Taveras. We’ve all seen players kind of like this. I’d like to demonstrate that Hamilton is particularly extreme. While Hamilton has maybe disappointed a few observers, he’s been his own sort of player.

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