When I first dreamt this post up, I figured the title would somehow include the phrase, “Billy Hamilton Effect.” That was before I discovered Eno already wrote a post called “Todd Frazier and the Billy Hamilton Effect” back in July. Point is, there are a lot of unusual ways in which Billy Hamilton affects the game, because Billy Hamilton is an unusual player. We know this because stealing 155 bases in a single season is not usual, and neither is this.

I wrote a post about Frazier last week, examining how he was able to steal 20 bases despite possessing what appears to be just mediocre speed. In that post, I noted that three of Frazier’s 20 steals “were essentially catcher’s indifference.” Catchers indifferences are typically insignificant, but these three were noteworthy because they all happened for the same reason. At the time, I didn’t get into the details because I didn’t want to spoil the premise of this piece, but after I saw the first one, I knew I had to write a post about it.
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I’m gonna go ahead and write about Todd Frazier again.

I wrote about Frazier last week, with a focus on the combination of both power and speed he displayed in 2014. According to a metric devised by legendary historian Bill James in an attempt to quantify one’s combination of power and speed, Frazier’s Power/Speed was third in the major leagues, behind Carlos Gomez and Ian Desmond and ahead of Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen.

That’s really impressive for a third baseman who we didn’t know had this kind of speed and blah blah blah I’m starting to repeat myself from last week. Point is, Frazier did these two things really well. I focused moreso on the power in last week’s post, but the more surprising part is the steals, so I wanted to investigate that a bit further.
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Sometimes, you read something or find a stat that changes your perception of a player. It probably shouldn’t be just one stat that changes your entire perception, but seeing that one stat may cause you to dig a little deeper into who that player is and what they’ve been doing, and your collective research could lead to a shift in perception.

Hey, Todd Frazier.

I spend enough time on FanGraphs that sometimes I forget about the little, exclusive stats offered by other websites. It’s fun to go dig around in the lesser-known parts of a site like BaseballReference, because it can make you think about things you might not have thought about while digging around on FanGraphs. Some deep BR digging led to a post I wrote a couple months back about David Price and the art of the three-pitch strikeout, and now it’s going to lead to a post about Todd Frazier.

The metric that caught my eye is called PwrSpd. It was developed by Bill James, and it’s a very basic metric. The leaderboard that caught my eye was topped by Carlos Gomez in 2014, who’s probably one of the first few people to come to mind when you think of elite combinations of power and speed. Ian Desmond was second and Jacoby Ellsbury was fourth. Mike Trout is in the top 10, and so is Andrew McCutchen. These names all make sense.

But sitting up there at No. 3, right above Ellsbury, is Todd Frazier. It sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at it. Really, it’s just a fancy way of saying Frazier was one five players who had 20+ homers and 20+ steals last year, alongside Gomez, Desmond, Michael Brantley and Brian Dozier. But either way you put it, that’s surprising. In the top 10, you’ve got five center fielders, two shortstops, a second basemen, a left fielder, and Todd Frazier. It’s not a top 10 meant to be inhabited by third baseman, yet there he is.
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The Phillies just traded Marlon Byrd to the Reds for a pitcher that couldn’t crack Cincinnati’s top ten prospect lists. Could the Phillies have done better than Ben Lively for their asset? The answer to that question depends on deception.

Even though Byrd’s old, he’s been an above-average player the last two years, and he’s signed to a nice contract. Ever since he started swinging harder, missing more, and hitting the ball in the air more, he’s showed enough power to make up for declining defense and patience. Given his publicly-admitted adjustments, and the now two-year sample of evidence, maybe the deceptive thing about Byrd is that he’s not the same player that Steamer is projecting for a half win.

If you base Byrd’s trade value on recent outfield signings instead of straight dollars per win, he has more trade value. In terms of on-field production over the last two years, he compares favorably to another older corner outfielder that got two years and $21 million from the Mets at least. He’d even represent some surplus value when compared to Michael Cuddyer, probably.

Source: FanGraphs — Marlon Byrd, Michael Cuddyer

So you can see that there’s probably not a lot of consensus when it comes to Marlon Byrd’s trade value. There’s even less consensus about the value of the prospect going back to the Phillies.

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There are many different ways to describe the quality of a pitch. We have movement numbers on this site. There are ground-ball rates. There are whiff rates. There are metrics that use a combination of ground-ball and whiff rates. And metrics that use balls in play. There’s a whole spectrum from process to results, and you can focus on any one part of that spectrum if you like.

But there’s something that’s so appealing about the whiff. It’s a result, but it’s an undeniable one. There is no human being trying to decide if the ball went straight or if it went up in the air or if the ball went down. It’s just: did the batter swing and miss? So, as a result, it seems unassailable.

Of course, there are some decisions you still have to make if you want to judge pitches by whiff rates. How many of the pitch does the pitcher have to have thrown to be considered? Gonzalez Germen had a higher whiff rate on his changeup (30.7%) this year than Cole Hamels (23.7%). Cole Hamels threw seven times as many changeups (708 to 101).

So, in judging this year’s best pitches, let’s declare a top pitch among starters and a top pitch among relievers. That’s only fair, considering the difference in number of pitches thrown between the two. It’s way harder to get people to keep missing a pitch they’ve seen seven times as often. And, in order to avoid avoiding R.A. Dickey the R. A. Dickey Knuckler award, we’ll leave knucklers off the list, and include knuckle curves in among the curves.

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The story of the week was all about the Dodgers, whose new front office pulled off a trading frenzy that dramatically re-shaped the look of one of baseball’s strongest rosters. Before the Dodgers took over, though, all the conversations had to do with the Cubs, who added Jon Lester, Miguel Montero, and Jason Hammel within a matter of a couple days. The Cubs moved to open their contention window early, and one of the possible side effects involved the plan of the Reds. There was thought that, with the Cubs loading up, the Reds would be more motivated to sell pieces off and build for the future.

Indeed, with the winter meetings wrapping up, the Reds made a couple of trades that dealt away members of the starting rotation. Though they might’ve gotten lost in the insanity, Cincinnati sent Mat Latos to Miami, and it sent Alfredo Simon to Detroit. Both are due to become free agents in a year, and the moves signaled to some that the Reds are ready to tear down. But in reality, the Reds are preparing to give contention one more go in 2015. With the two quiet trades, the Reds trimmed payroll and added to the long-term outlook, and the roster didn’t actually lose much of anything.

The Reds have occupied one of the most difficult positions in the game. It’s been pretty clear their window is closing. Yet, the roster contains a number of high-impact, quality players. There’s been too much talent to tear it all down, but the team hasn’t had the money to supplement the talent already in house. So they’ve been stuck in between, with almost an entire rotation looking at one final year of team control. The Reds had difficult waters to navigate.

And if you examine the team projections we have at FanGraphs, the Reds look like they might be the worst team in the NL Central. They’re projected for as many wins as the Twins, barely surpassing the Padres and Diamondbacks, so on that basis the Reds don’t appear like a team that should be focusing still on the one season ahead. But there are reasons for optimism here. Legitimate, short-term optimism. And the moves they made added longer-term pieces at the same time, helping the Reds stay relevant while improving 2016 and the seasons beyond.

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As was made evident by the Giancarlo Stanton extension, the Marlins are trying to build up to win. On Wednesday, they added Dee Gordon, a player who has been good in one year. On Thursday, they added Mat Latos, a player who has been good in several. There’s another difference, though — in 2014, Gordon was at his best. Latos, meanwhile, missed half the season due to a variety of injuries. The Marlins are betting on him to be successful in his last year of team control before free agency. To Cincinnati go Chad Wallach and Anthony DeSclafani.

Latos is a player of particular interest. Previously in his career, he was moved from San Diego in a blockbuster. Twice, he’s hit 4 WAR, and two other times, he’s come in around 3 WAR. He’s now coming off a half season in which he was worth 1.5 WAR. In a full season in 2015, Steamer projects Latos to be worth 1.2 WAR. It’s a surprisingly pessimistic figure, for a pitcher who just turned 27, so it’s worth explaining why Steamer thinks the way it thinks. Why is Steamer so down on a front-of-the-rotation starter?

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Most of the Arizona Fall League attendees have been seen enough that the scouting community has a well developed opinion on each player before they arrive in the desert. Even that year’s draftees (such as Nick Howard and Trea Turner this year), while new on the pro scene, were heavily-scouted, top-of-their-class players who many have seen at least a time or two and have some sort of background with. This year saw three reasonably high-profile Cuban prospects get Fall League reps in Raisel Iglesias, Rusney Castillo and Daniel Carbonell who had scarcely been seen on domestic soil by scouts.

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The Boston Red Sox, as you might have heard, currently have an outfield glut. There is ten pounds of outfield meat in their five pound bag. Something has to give, and that something is likely Yoenis Cespedes.

When the Sox acquired Cespedes from Oakland in the Jon Lester trade, it felt more like a rental than a long-term investment in the player. Cespedes’ unique contract allows him to become a free agent at the end of the 2015 season, so Boston put themselves in an enviable position. They received an established big leaguer in exchange for their walk-year ace and got an up-close and personal look at a potential big free agent bat.

Whether or not a look under Cespedes’ hood informed their decision to sign both Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval, that’s the route they went down. Now Cespedes is trade bait, the precious “right-handed power” commodity in a marketplace clambering for those skills. He’s headed into his age-29 season, he’s owed $10.5 million this year, and there’s going to be a line around the block to bid for his services. Where might he land?

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Cincinnati’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Reds system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Reds system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Kyle Waldrop, OF (Profile)

Waldrop began the 2014 season by repeating at High-A Bakersfield and reacted precisely the way a club would want him to — which is to say, by exhibiting greater control of the plate and also producing better contact (or, at least a markedly higher BABIP, which is the best statistical proxy). He retained those improvements following a mid-June promotion to Double-A Pensacola, as well — which, that’s encouraging for a 22-year-old. Given his positional limitations, his future major-league value would appear to depend on the degree to which he’s able to convert his above-average raw power to games. Steamer, for its part, projects him to hit only 13 home runs per 600 plate appearances.

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