Funny thing about the WAR leaderboard is, as much as it’s still very early in the season, familiar names are starting to find their places. There’s Mike Trout. Of course there’s Mike Trout. If “WAR” didn’t sound so damned good, the stat might be called Wins Below Trout, and one would reasonably expect him to lead baseball from now through the end of the year. There’s Chase Utley, and as much as the Phillies have fallen apart around him, Utley remains one of the better all-around players in baseball, despite the injuries he’s been through. There’s Troy Tulowitzki, and of course Tulowitzki is one of the elites for as long as he can stay on the field. There’s Justin Upton, who has flashes of superstardom. There’s Freddie Freeman, who’s young enough to have this much upside. There are good players, and real good players, and some early surprises, and among the early surprises is Colorado’s Charlie Blackmon.

If you read FanGraphs, you’re more than a casual baseball fan, so you’re more likely to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Also, if you read FanGraphs, you’ve read Carson Cistulli, so you’re more likely still to have heard of Charlie Blackmon. Blackmon has long been one of Cistulli’s crushes, but the thing about Cistulli’s crushes is that he deliberately falls in love with the fringey and unheralded. Those players aren’t supposed to blossom into stars, not anywhere outside of Cistulli’s head, but here we are and we have to acknowledge what Blackmon’s been up to since winning a job with the Rockies out of camp.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
After a romp through the Pioneer League last year, McMahon is continuing to crush the ball, and he projects well going forward.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Alex Balog, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 11 IP, 9 H, 5 R, 1 HR, 9/5 K/BB, 4.09 ERA, 4.38 FIP

Summary
The 70th overall pick in last year’s draft struggled mightily upon his introduction to pro ball in 2013, but has regained the stuff that got him drafted so high.

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Perhaps we should be used to this by now. Just four years ago, Craig Kimbrel was just some guy who walked more than 18 percent of the batters he faced. Now, he’s Craig Kimbrel. In the same timeframe, Drew Storen went from talented rookie set-up man to closer on a suddenly not terrible Nationals team. In their wake, young relievers like Kenley Jansen, Kelvin Herrera, Trevor Rosenthal, Addison Reed and others have taken the baseball world by various degrees of storm. And there was this Aroldis Chapman guy, too.

This season has been no different. Seemingly anonymous relievers have been springing from the figurative woodwork to capture spots on the top of various reliever leaderboards, most notably K% and velocity. Let’s meet some of them, shall we?

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Watching the Braves rotation grab appendages has been tough this spring. Kris Medlen has ligament damage in his elbow, Brandon Beachy has biceps soreness, and Mike Minor survived a scarred urethra only to encounter shoulder soreness. None of the three is a lock to make the opening day rotation. And this is a team that brought two veteran free agents in for depth and had extra youth at the back end of their rotation. They might be fine without Ervin Santana, but yet that team does inspire a question. How many major-league ready starting pitchers should a competitive team field in a given year?

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There’s nothing at all strange about a city the size of Denver having a major-league baseball team. I’ve been to Denver. Not only is it big enough to have multiple gas stations — it’s big enough to have multiple kinds of gas stations. Where things do get strange is in the details. Denver, of course, is really high up, relative to where sea level is, and that makes for an unavoidably different baseballing experience. There’s nothing, really, to be done about it. Baseball in Denver’s played at altitude, so baseball in Denver’s a different sort of baseball.

Things happen differently there, and for that reason Denver’s a perfect case for why park factors have to exist for analysts to get anywhere. It’s simply an extreme hitter-friendly run environment. Now, when it comes to games in Denver, everyone, at least, is on a level playing field (literally!) (figuratively too). But there are games played outside of Denver, and additionally, there are players who are removed from Denver. Whenever a position player leaves the Rockies, people get worried that he’s going to fall apart, because he’ll miss the lopsided circumstances. With players who used to play in Colorado, there’s a tendency to be cautious, and perhaps even skeptical.

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Once upon a time, Franklin Morales was the future of the Rockies. That time was 2007 and 2008, but things have never really worked out the way they were supposed to for the Venezuelan lefty. Now though, he has a World Series ring, but more importantly, another opportunity to be a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Back in Colorado, Jhoulys Chacin’s spring training injury and Brett Anderson’s overall brittleness signal that the Rockies are going to need plenty of starting pitchers this season, and while Morales may not be in the rotation come Opening Day, he has a chance to be one of the first off the depth chart. It may be his last chance to prove he can start in the majors.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Colorado Rockies.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Rockies or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto.

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If you’re the sort of person who likes to look around minor league statistical leaderboards for under-the-radar performance prospects, the name Francisco Sosa may have emerged on your radar in 2013. Sosa’s 2013 statline has several intriguing numbers: his triple-slash was .315/.397/.529, he clubbed 20 homers and ripped 35 doubles, and he also swiped 30 bases. No other player in the minor leagues attained that combination of doubles, homers, and steals.

Sosa doesn’t really show up on prospect lists, though, for a few reasons. For one, he was a 23-year-old left fielder in Low-A, on the wrong side of the defensive spectrum and well older than most legitimate prospects who have yet to sniff the upper minors. Second, 2013 was the first time in his six-year career that he posted remotely interesting numbers–only twice before had he managed an on-base percentage over .310, and only once had he slugged over .400. Finally, he played in the silliest home park in organized baseball.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Colorado Rockies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
Crafting a definitive depth chart for the current edition of the Rockies presents some difficulties. DJ LeMahieu might be the club’s starting second baseman, but also so might Josh Rutledge. Corey Dickerson and Drew Stubbs will probably split starts in left field, but Charlie Blackmon has a chance of making the opening-day roster, as well. Were manager Walt Weiss to rely on ZiPS exclusively, he’d probably choose just Stubbs in the former situation and Rutledge in the latter. The odds of him doing that are low and lowest, however.

Of note regarding Jordan Pacheco: as the attentive reader will note, Pacheco is projected on the tables below as a first baseman (in which capacity he recorded the majority of his starts in 2013) but as a catcher on the depth chart (in which capacity he’s likely to record the majority of his starts in 2014). As a first baseman, his projection is pretty miserable (-1.2 zWAR in 483 PAs), very probably owing to the large negative runs adjustment for that position. Which is to say, projected as a catcher (for which position he’d receive a large positive adjustment, provided his defense there isn’t atrocious), his forecasted value is likely quite a bit higher. Positive, even, maybe.

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