Retirement announcements are seldom surprising, because even from the outside it’s pretty simple to tell when a player has outlived his utility. Willie Bloomquist is 38, now, and after spending the offseason making up his mind, he tweeted the following last Friday:

Make your last swing your BEST swing. Farewell @MLB. Thank you for 14 amazing seasons. It’s been an incredible ride. pic.twitter.com/VuImzqOrSl

— Willie Bloomquist (@williebloom) March 11, 2016

Bloomquist is hanging them up, which means Bloomquist articles on analytical websites must also hang them up. In a way it’s amazing Bloomquist achieved such Internet fame in the first place, being a career reserve, but his name meant a little something over the years, and here, for one last time, I want to talk about what Willie Bloomquist was.

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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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Billy Hamilton did last year what we all were afraid he’d do: not hit. Somehow, despite a .274 on-base percentage, Hamilton managed to steal 57 bases, which is exactly why his shortcomings at the plate can be so frustrating — think of what he could be if he just hit a little. Despite missing some time to a shoulder injury and being one of the 10 or so worst hitters in baseball, Hamilton managed to be worth two Wins Above Replacement, so it’s not like he wasn’t still a productive player for the Reds, what with his elite speed and center field defense. It’s just, a guy can’t run a .226/.274/.289 slash line forever. That will eventually wear thin with any team, regardless of the player’s contributions outside the batter’s box.

So of course, Hamilton wants to get better at the plate — he needs to get better at the plate — and with Hamilton, it seems like it starts with the approach. These last two years, Hamilton’s put the ball in the air more often than Nelson Cruz. He’s put the ball in the air more often than Josh Donaldson, Albert Pujols, Matt Kemp, Evan Gattis and plenty more sluggers whose fly-ball rates, ideally, should dwarf Hamilton’s. Yet, his swing plane seemingly disagrees with his speed and strength (or lack thereof), and Hamilton has mastered the unbecoming art of the harmless fly out.

Jeff Sullivan wrote last year about this phenomenon, and concluded, understandably, that Hamilton needs to do a better job of putting the ball on the ground, and maximizing his strengths. Now, Hamilton has seemingly come around to that idea, and here’s an excerpt from a recent C. Trent Rosecrans article in the Cincinnati Enquirer to support that idea:

Hamilton said he and [third base coach] Hatcher not only worked on the physical approach — his hands, bunting and such — but also the mental side. Hatcher showed him just how many times he hit the ball where, how many times he popped up and to where and why he was and wasn’t being successful.

“We really sat down and went over all that stuff,” Hamilton said. “I have a plan and I just have to put it together.”

And a remarkably candid quote, from later on:

“I’m going to bunt way more than I did last year.”

Hamilton desperately wants to be Cincinnati’s leadoff hitter, and understands that he’ll have to raise the OBP in order to remain at the top of the lineup. To raise the OBP, he’ll have to change his game, and the way to achieve that goal seems to be clear: more balls on the ground.

Except, here’s a quote from a Mark Sheldon piece during Spring Training last year:

Price would also like to see Hamilton take advantage of his speed by hitting more line drives and balls on the ground instead of lifting them into the air. That would include more bunting.

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Well, a new team, for starters. What Jay Bruce is missing is a new team. Rather, a new team is missing Jay Bruce. Twice now, the Reds have reportedly been on the verge of trading Bruce. First, to the Mets at last year’s trade deadline, more recently to the Blue Jays, just last night. Twice, Bruce has reportedly been on the verge of being dealt, and twice, the deal has fallen apart.

Maybe that tells you something about Jay Bruce. Or maybe it tells you something about the other players in the deal, as both deals collapsed due to medical hangups concerning the players whom the Reds were attempting to acquire. In July, it was the Reds who backed out of the proposed deal that could have netted them Zack Wheeler, in the midst of his recovery from Tommy John Surgery. Last night, it wasn’t even Michael Saunders‘ bum knee that gave the Reds pause.

Neither proposal fell apart because of Bruce, specifically, but that doesn’t mean the failed deals don’t tell us something about Bruce, because they do. What they tell us about Bruce is this: thus far, teams have only appeared willing to give up already-injured players for him.

Which is shocking, given where Bruce’s career was just two years ago. Just two years ago, he was a 26-year-old Gold Glove-caliber right fielder who doubled as one of the game’s most prolific home run hitters. Now, the Reds are struggling to rid themselves of his salary for anything more than damaged goods.

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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Most of the discussions surrounding the Cincinnati Reds during the past calendar year has centered around what to do with an aging core of players that are careening toward free agency on a club with little chance of competing. That’s the right type of conversation to have in the Reds’ situation – a situation in which Joey Votto had a historically great season on a last place team. We’ve known for a while what the Reds should do, and they’ve already started the rebuild by trading Aroldis Chapman and Todd Frazier. There is unquestionably more to be done, and more that will be done. There’s another interesting angle to their 2015 season, however, and it’s an issue that turned a season that was expected to be not-so-great into the second-worst record in baseball: the issue of clutch hitting.

“Clutch” — as we are discussing it today — is the measure of how well a player or team performs in high leverage situations vs. context-neutral situations. I implore the interested reader to examine the full rundown on our glossary page, but what we’re really talking about is the importance of the situations in which players produce or don’t produce. There has been some evidence that a “clutch skill” might exist – that some players are simply better in certain situations than others – but there is usually a lot of variability for players from year-to-year, and any true skill is likely to have a small impact.

Take, for example, Josh Reddick: he had a Clutch rating of -3.89 in 2012, the worst since Bob Bailor in 1984 (-3.84). That means he was responsible for “losing” his team almost four games due to his performance in high leverage situations. The next year (2013), Reddick had a Clutch rating of just -0.18, or right about average. Poor fortune, bad timing – these things happen, and sometimes they happen an extreme number of times in the same year. Because of this, Clutch isn’t really predictive, and is much better utilized as an indicator of what has already happened.

That brings us to the Reds, and measuring team-wide Clutch statistics. There are two versions of Clutch for teams: pitching Clutch and batting Clutch. The Reds were actually above average when it came to pitching Clutch, sitting just below the middle of the pack with a 1.16 rating. For comparison, the Oakland A’s were the worst Clutch pitching team in 2015 at -6.05; this is one of the reasons why they were so terrible in one-run games, and it’s the main reason why they were the biggest underperformer in recent BaseRuns history.

However, on the other side of the ball, the Reds were historically terrible in Clutch situations. How terrible? Let’s just cut straight to the chase — here are the 15 worst Clutch hitting teams since 1974 (the first year we have Clutch data available):

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati .

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors. Read the rest of this entry »

Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Jose Peraza, 2B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 14.9 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Peraza burst onto the prospect scene in 2014, when he hit .339/.364/.441 between High-A and Double-A. His high BABIP came back to earth a bit in Triple-A last year, but was still roughly a league-average hitter. His .293/.316/. 378 showing wasn’t bad at all for a 21-year-old. Peraza is an interesting prospect due to the outlier-ness of many of his attributes. For example, both of the following sentences are accurate. One: he’s a 70-grade runner who makes tons of contact, is a strong defender up the middle, succeeded in Double-A as a 20-year-old, and held his own as a 21-year-old in Triple-A. And two: he’s a second baseman with minimal power who never walks and has been traded twice in the past seven months. There are clearly pros and cons to Peraza’s profile, but when fed into KATOH, they yield a very favorable projection. I’m always skeptical of the projections for outlier cases like Peraza, so let’s turn to the Mahalanobis comps for more clarity.

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Other clubs: Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Orioles, Red Sox, White Sox.

I share the view of many fans in wondering if the return from the Todd Frazier deal was justified, even though I do think Jose Peraza and Scott Schebler are valuable prospects. Even if all three (Brandon Dixon being the third) were busts, the Reds have amassed quite an assortment of high-upside and -floor prospects who could the club competitive in a short time frame. And that’s without including Nick Howard and Jonathon Crawford as promising assets, both of whom were highly thought of as recently as last offseason before their lost 2015 years.

The Reds have an uphill road to climb this season to contend, with the Cardinals, Cubs and Pirates all looking like present contenders. Depending on how their young players respond at the major league level, we could see an influx of talented players turn them into a contender akin to the way the Cubs did last season. Most likely they still have a year or two to expect the results to resemble their collective potential, but this crop is an exciting group to monitor this year.

They may lack a sure thing top-of-the-rotation starter or cornerstone shortstop, but you can’t help but be interested in seeing where pitchers like Robert Stephenson, Cody Reed and Amir Garrett settle in. And between Blandino, Peraza and Blake Trahan, at least one of them should be able to supplant Zack Cozart at short, allowing Eugenio Suarez‘ likely move to third base.

This was a hard organization to cover, due to the endless amount of legitimate bench and bullpen pieces behind a sizable list of 50+ future value players. The system boast a ton of mid-level talent to go along with their solid top talent, and is a team I’ll be following closely this year to see how everyone’s stock improves.

As usual, there are a few rankings here that differ from popular opinion. I have Winker ranked number one, since I maintain confidence in his hitting ability while also expecting his power to come on strong. Ian Kahaloa and Gavin LaValley are too newer additions to the organization whose futures I am higher on than what I have heard elsewhere. I am not as bullish about Eric Jagielo’s bat progressing, and am also lower on Antonio Santillan, Yorman Rodriguez and Aristides Aquino. Admittedly, Santillan and Kahaloa are so early in their development that you could make a case for either of them moving up or down ten spots, and I wouldn’t argue with you.

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If you go to our leaderboards and click on “career,” you’ll get a sample of 3,879 qualified position players, and 2,988 pitchers. If you lower the playing time threshold down to zero on each, you end up with 16,824 and 9,127. Now, obviously there’s some overlap in those numbers, but the point is that at least 16,000 players have suited up for a major league game. In that context, when I note that only 472 players total (314 position, 158 pitcher) have crossed the 40 WAR threshold, you can see it’s a big deal. It’s more or less the top-500 players in the game’s history (you can fill in the gaps — and probably then some — with Negro League players for whom we don’t have WAR or any advanced metrics).

That’s not to say there’s a lot of fanfare with getting to 40 wins. No one throws you a party, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything to the person. But since we know that 50 WAR is sort of the dividing line for whether a player can be a Hall of Famer (as I noted recently, there are plenty of players in the Hall of Fame who barely cracked the 50 WAR plateau, and I believe there are even some in who are below it), then 40 WAR is sort of the dividing line for whether we’ll argue about a player being deserving of the Hall of Fame. Well, for everyone except relief pitchers, anyway.

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