In 2015, there were fewer pitchers (74) qualifying for the AL and NL ERA titles than in any season going back to 1995 (70). In any given season, the number of first-time ERA qualifiers is about a quarter of that population. This last year was no exception, as 18 pitchers qualified for the ERA title for the first time.

What was unique about 2015 was the high quality of those first-time ERA qualifiers. AL first-timers included Carlos Carrasco, Danny Salazar, Taijuan Walker, Collin McHugh, Trevor Bauer and Marco Estrada. Their NL counterparts included Jake Arrieta, Jacob deGrom, Gerrit Cole, Kyle Hendricks, Carlos Martinez and Michael Wacha. There are some heavy hitters on those two lists; you might have to go back to the Class of 1984, which boasted Dwight Gooden, Orel Hershiser, Mark Langston, Mike Moore and Oil Can Boyd among its members, to find a comparable group at the top.

Beginning last week, I have reached reach into the large population of zero-time ERA qualifiers to identify the top breakthrough candidates for 2016 in both leagues. Last week, we took a look at the Orioles’ Kevin Gausman. This time around, we’ll switch over to the senior circuit and hone in on the Reds’ Raisel Iglesias.

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A couple of days ago, news broke that the Yankees had traded for uber-reliever Aroldis Chapman. In exchange for Chapman’s services, the Bombers coughed up four prospects: Starting pitcher Rookie Davis, corner infielder Eric Jagielo, second baseman Tony Renda and reliever Caleb Cotham. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about this quartet.

Rookie Davis, RHP (Profile)
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 2.6 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 0.7 WAR

The Yankees took Davis in the 14th round out of high school in 2011, but he soon proved to be a steal at that spot. In 2013, he dominated Short-Season A-Ball with the help of a mid-90s fastball. He continued to establish himself in 2014 by posting a sub-4.00 FIP as a starter in Low-A.

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At best, Aroldis Chapman is unstable. A manageable sort of loose cannon. At worst, he’s violent, a danger not only to himself but to others. There’s a lot to try to handle here — more than we want to have to handle when we’re dealing with baseball players and baseball trades. We don’t want to have to consider this stuff, but here we are, and it can’t be avoided. Aroldis Chapman has been traded to the Yankees, for Rookie Davis, Eric Jagielo, Caleb Cotham, and Tony Renda. Chapman would’ve been a Dodger by now, or maybe a member of the Red Sox, but for an off-field incident involving alleged violence and gunfire. Chapman wasn’t arrested, but he might still be suspended under MLB’s new domestic-violence policy. That part of this story is front and center. Were it not for the incident, Chapman wouldn’t be on the Yankees. Were it not for the incident, Chapman would’ve commanded a higher price.

I can’t tell you how you’re supposed to feel. I can’t tell you what Chapman did or didn’t do. At this point I bet even the parties involved couldn’t tell you exactly what Chapman did or didn’t do, given the memory’s tendency to warp. All that’s known is there was something ugly, and Chapman was in the middle of it, and the details caused some teams to back off. If you love the trade for the Yankees, that’s fine. If you don’t want to root for Chapman anymore, that’s fine. If you feel like it’s getting harder and harder to be a sports fan these days, that’s fine. The more we know our athletes, the more we know them as real people, and real people are complex, where sports are supposed to be simple. This isn’t what a lot of us signed up for.

Your job is to figure out how you feel. And how you want to feel, if it’s different. My job is to tell you about the baseball. I’m not qualified to do the other stuff. And here’s the reality of baseball: no team likes off-the-field concerns, or potential pending suspensions. Every team wants its 25 players to be saints. But character is only part of it, and when the talent level is high enough, teams will overlook everything else. Aroldis Chapman is one of the greatest per-inning pitchers on the planet. Of that there is zero question. There are questions about his character, but teams know this stuff blows over. And beyond that, you could say Chapman’s off-field problems created a market inefficiency. Just ask Brian Cashman:

“Given the circumstances that exist, the price point on the acquisition has been modified,”Cashman said. “We felt this was an opportunity to add a big arm to our bullpen.”

There you go. Sometimes executives are reluctant to share the whole truth. Cashman is more of a straight shooter, and that excerpt tells you everything. Chapman’s got some troubles. Those troubles scared off other teams. And that made it appealing for the Yankees to strike. As far as roster management is concerned, Chapman’s incident is practically a good thing. Value value value. Below, I’m going to write more about baseball. After all, there’s a transaction to analyze, and I have a job to do. Read, or don’t. I’m not here to judge you or anybody. I’m here to judge statistics, and Chapman has some awesome statistics.

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Little less than a year ago, I wrote a post here called What Happens When Billy Hamilton is on Third Base? Answer: not much! Slightly more detailed answer: less than I was expecting!

What I’d expected, rather, what I’d hoped for the sake of an interesting post, was that every time the Reds had runners on first and third with Hamilton being the guy on third, that the guy on first would just take off every time. Like, no matter what, no matter who you are or what situation the game’s in, just run. It’s Billy Hamilton on third base for crying out loud. If they throw down to second, we’ve got ourselves a run. If they don’t, hey, free steal!

It happened less often than I wanted it to. Which, I thought was kind of peculiar. Couple other things popped up — teams altered their defensive alignments slightly, it made a rundown between first and second turn into a run and a runner on second — but for the most part I came away empty-handed and sad.

I understand this isn’t relevant to anything that’s going on right now. I also understand that my first two post ideas this morning failed miserably and around noon I started to panic, so I opened up the TextEdit document on my laptop titled “rainy day topics.” It isn’t raining outside, but I do need to get my Christmas shopping done today, so this is what you get. “joey votto stealing with hamilton on third” it says here next to this bullet point. Not sure where this came from. Guessing someone tipped me off on this. Wasn’t totally sure what it meant, but I had a pretty good idea.

The last time Joey Votto played a full, healthy season before this most recent one, he stole six bases. Over his previous three seasons, he’d average six steals a year. In 2015, Joey Votto stole 11 bases. Eleven minus six is five. That’s some math. Hey, what’s up with those extra five steals?

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At the winter meetings, I asked a small collection of managers about the evolution of the role, and all of them — save perhaps Mike Scioscia — spoke to the importance of communicating with the media and with their players.

But that story had a longer scope, and a more universal one. I also asked them about a smaller more immediate thing — I asked many of them what they had learned this year, on the job. And for those just coming to the job, what they have tried to learn before they first manage a game.

Of particular note was what former position players did to learn about pitching, and vice versa. Managers have to communicate with all sorts of different players, and yet they came from one tradition within the game. And each has spent time developing themselves in their present role.

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I detected a real sense of impatience as far as the Dodgers were concerned. Not impatience on the part of the Dodgers — rather, impatience on the part of people observing the Dodgers. Not that they’d been totally quiet, but they had been inactive. Now, Wednesday, the Dodgers have gotten themselves involved in a doozy. It’s a three-way trade, with the best player neither leaving the Dodgers, nor joining them. Instead, the Dodgers helped facilitate the Reds sending a quality third baseman to the White Sox. The full player breakdown:

White Sox get:

• Todd Frazier

White Sox lose:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

—

Reds get:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Reds lose:

• Todd Frazier

—

Dodgers get:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

Dodgers lose:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Frazier to Chicago, three Chicago prospects to Los Angeles, three Los Angeles prospects to Cincinnati. It stands to reason the Dodgers had to get involved because the Reds and White Sox couldn’t find an easy match straight up. Implying the Reds are higher on, say, the Peraza centerpiece than they would’ve been on a Montas centerpiece. These things can be kind of complicated to analyze, but let’s go team by team.

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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 Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Kansas City / Philadelphia / Toronto.

Batters
In terms of results, Cincinnati’s 2015 season was unambiguously poor. In terms of indicators, it was much more ambiguously poor. By BaseRuns, the club ought to have won nine more games than they actually did in 2015 — and most of those potential wins appear to have been conceded by the offense. Sequencing was largely the culprit: despite producing the ninth-best park-adjusted batting line (92 wRC+) in the National League with the bases empty, the Reds recorded the very worst batting line (72 wRC+) with men in scoring postion.

Entering the 2016 campaign, the starting corps of the Reds’ offense actually appears to be quite strong. It isn’t surprising to find that Todd Frazier (624 PA, 3.6 zWAR) and Joey Votto (574 PA, 4.6 zWAR) are both projected to produce comfortably above-average seasons. But Jay Bruce, Zack Cozart, Billy Hamilton, and Brandon Phillips all profile as roughly average players, too.

Of some interest is how the Reds will manage left field. Eugenio Suarez (607 PA, 2.3 zWAR) would appear to represent a legitimate solution to the problem. There’s also Adam Duvall (536 PA, 1.7 zWAR), though, too. In both cases, the projected numbers are more optimistic than one might have otherwise supposed. Omitted from the tables below — because damn Szymborski submitted the relevant forecast as the author was shuffling off to bed — is Rule 5 selection Jake Cave. ZiPS projects Cave to slash .223/.274/.319 and record a -0.4 zWAR in just over 600 plate appearances.

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Though baseball’s Winter Meetings seem like the playground of the front office executive, there is one other baseball man who’s ubiquitous: the manager. Semi-required to attend media events and an annual luncheon, most of the sport’s managers descend on the meetings to make their mark.

For the most part, they field questions about next year’s lineup, and try to deflect queries about front-office moves. They’ll do a little reminiscing about last year, and a little looking forward to next year. It’s a bit of a dance, since most of the reporters are looking to find out how the roster is going to look on paper, and the person in front of them is mostly in charge of putting that roster on the field.

Still, it’s a great moment to get access to many managers at once. This past August, I asked a collection of players and writers how Bruce Bochy and Joe Maddon — managers with distinctly different approaches and pasts — could both find great success. I thought it would make sense to ask the managers gathered here about their craft, as well.

What has changed about managing? How are the demands on the modern manager different than they once were?

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As everyone reading this is by now undoubtedly aware, Monday’s proposed blockbuster trade that would have sent Aroldis Chapman from the Cincinnati Reds to the Los Angeles Dodgers is on hold, following reports that the star closer was allegedly involved in a domestic incident with his girlfriend back in October. Although the Reds remain free to trade Chapman pending Major League Baseball’s investigation of the incident under the league’s new domestic violence policy, the market for Chapman is reported to have predictably dried up as teams wait to learn what type of punishment the pitcher will face.

It remains unclear how much, if anything, the Reds knew about the allegations against Chapman prior to Monday’s media reports, or if the team took any steps to notify potential trade partners of the incident. Nevertheless, the episode has raised questions regarding the extent to which teams are expected to disclose unfavorable information of this sort to one another during trade discussions.

As is so often the case, this is an area in which MLB operates a bit differently than most other industries.

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It’s different when you’re an executive for a smaller-budget organization. It’s not bad, and it might even be fun, but the circumstances force you to be a little more imaginative. You don’t ever really get to splurge, not unless you get lucky. More often, you have to be creative — you have to try to see things where other people don’t. You’re forever hunting for bargains, looking for upside where others might see downside. So much is about accepting flaws and reclamation projects. It can be a rewarding challenge, but only the challenge part is certain.

It’s simpler when you have resources. There’s a lot more pressure, as there are higher expectations, but when you have resources, you don’t always need to overthink. When you have resources, like the Dodgers, you can determine that you have a weakness in the bullpen, and you can just go get Aroldis Chapman to try to fix it. The Dodgers looked somewhat thin behind Kenley Jansen, who’s one of the best relievers in baseball. So word is they’re on the verge of picking up another one of the best relievers in baseball.

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