The Cincinnati Reds face an uphill battle in 2015. The St. Louis Cardinals are heavy favorites. The Pittsburgh Pirates brought back most of its playoff team and could see improvement with a young roster. The Cubs have made improvements, and even the Brewers bring back many players who put them in first place for most of 2014. The odds of the Reds winning the division are not very good. The FanGraphs Playoff Odds are up, and the Reds have just a 3.0% chance of winning the division. That means out of 10,000 simulations, the Reds won the division around 300 times. Focusing in on the 3% chance side, it is possible to create scenarios where the Reds can win the division.

FanGraphs Playoff Odds are based on ZiPS, Steamer, and the Depth Chart Projections. Those projections are not very kind to the Reds. The projections currently have the Reds at 75 wins, last in the National League Central. For a frame of reference, here are the top five teams per WAR according to those projections.

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Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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

Batters
For a club that was compelled to trade some useful major-league pieces this offseason, the Cincinnati Reds feature a remarkably competent and seemingly competitive group of hitters. Depending on how one chooses to determine such a thing, the star of team (per ZiPS) is either Todd Frazier (605 PA, 3.6 WAR) or Joey Votto (468 PA, 3.4 WAR) — the former for his overall WAR projection; the latter, for his projected WAR per plate appearance. It’s not surprising to find something less than full complement of games forecast for Votto: two of his last three seasons have been interrupted by injury.

So far as weak links, however, there’s little to be found among Cincinnati’s starting eight field players. The batting projections for Zack Cozart (.282 wOBA), Billy Hamilton (.310 wOBA), and Brandon Phillips (.303 wOBA) are all below average, but each of those players is also projected to save five or more runs at a position already on the more challenging side of the defensive spectrum.

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Now that football’s officially over for a while, countless sports fans are going to look ahead to the baseball season, with 2015 promising to be The Year Of Mookie Betts. This comes on the heels of 2014, which at one time promised to be The Year Of Billy Hamilton. And, to be fair, it was in a sense The Half-Year Of Billy Hamilton, but then Hamilton fell on harder times, losing a Rookie-of-the-Year race he once had all but locked up. Hamilton is now presumably older and presumably wiser, and he remains a player of unusual intrigue, along with being an important player for a Reds team that steadfastly refuses to tear down and start over.

Hamilton, naturally, has things to improve on. Every player in baseball has things to improve on — Clayton Kershaw has things to improve on — but Hamilton’s things are bigger than Kershaw’s things. Kershaw, for example, might want to polish his changeup a little more. Or maybe not. It’ll cross his mind. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to not suck at hitting. His own manager has some ideas.

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The Reds have officially given four years and at least $28 million to Devin Mesoraco. The contract buys out what would’ve been Mesoraco’s first year of free agency, and this is a contract that would’ve looked a little weird to an observer a year ago. Through 2013, in the majors, Mesoraco owned a 70 wRC+, and against same-handed pitchers, it was a lowly 53. Before last season, Mesoraco was pretty much all potential. And then he tapped into that potential.

He wound up with a 147 wRC+. Against righties, 145. It’s not exactly new news that Mesoraco enjoyed a breakout season, and I’ve even written about this before, back in August. Everything from then remains valid, but I wanted to revisit Mesoraco’s season, to show in greater detail where he made adjustments, and where those adjustments paid off. Though Mesoraco’s remains far from a household name, he just completed one of the great breakout seasons of our time.

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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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