Last July, Rockies owner Dick Monfort earned some well-deserved ridicule by indicating that his team wouldn’t consider trading 33-year-old free-agent-to-be Jorge De La Rosa, despite the fact that Colorado was well on its way to a 96-loss season and De La Rosa is, all things considered, pretty mediocre and not even that durable. The owner’s money quote: de la Rosa “has won our last three,” without noting that the three wins had required 21 Colorado games to attain. According to a Peter Gammons report, Monfort killed a potential deal that would have sent De La Rosa to Baltimore for Eduardo Rodriguez, who was instead swapped to Boston for Andrew Miller and has impressed so much since that he ranked No. 23 overall on Kiley McDaniel’s recent Top 200 Prospects list.

While Rockies fans cringe at that thought and pray that Gammons’ information was incorrect, the Rockies instead gave De La Rosa two more years and $25 million in September. Considering that the team’s major additions this winter were minor pieces like Daniel Descalso, Kyle Kendrick, John Axford, Nick Hundley, and David Hale, it’s looking like another season of praying that this is the year that Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez stay healthy at the same time, while hoping that young arms Jon Gray and Eddie Butler can contribute.

While it’s difficult to see a scenario where the Rockies break through this year, it’s perhaps even more difficult to see De La Rosa still being around to contribute to the next good Colorado team. But while Monfort’s direction and baseball sense may have been misguided, he’s not wrong about one thing: “he pitches great here,” and in a sport where finding any pitcher who can be anything other than awful in Coors Field has proven terribly difficult, maybe that’s not such a meaningless thing to have.

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You play 81 games at home a year, so it seems like it might be a good idea to think about that park when you’re building your team. Then again, you play 81 games on the road, maybe it’s not a good idea to worry too much about one half of the ledger, particularly if your home park is an extreme one.

Extreme parks lead to extreme home-road splits. That part seems obvious, but it bears out in the winning percentage, too. Take a look at how teams that have called extreme parks home have faired over the last five years compared to the middle.

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Jason Giambi announced his retirement on Monday, after 20 seasons as a major leaguer. For most of those 20 years, Giambi was one of the best hitters in the game. I won’t waste your time putting down the narrative of his career — Jay Jaffe already did that better than I would anyway. But I thought today that we would celebrate his career with a few choice facts and/or moments from a career that at the very least belongs in the Hall of Very Good.
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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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I’ve got Coors Field on the mind. And while usually I’m able to flit from one subject to another — probably too easily, to be honest — when I think about Coors, it tends to stick, because the Rockies are one of baseball’s greatest experiments and we still aren’t quite sure what to make of them or what to make of baseball at altitude. The game that’s played within Coors Field is recognizably baseball, of that there’s no question, but it’s the oddest brand of baseball that exists in the major leagues, so it’s fascinating to consider as many angles as is possible. Just what is it really like to play there?

For this post, I want to examine pitch selection. And not just for pitch-selection’s sake; this should, in theory, reflect what effects people think Coors has on pitching. There’s a thought out there that Coors is bad news for breaking balls. What would we expect, then? A reduction in breaking-ball rate in Colorado, because teams and pitchers aren’t idiots. Let’s say Pitcher B has an optimal mix of 60% fastballs, 20% breaking balls, and 20% offspeed pitches. Let’s say he senses that he doesn’t have a good breaking pitch on a particular day. Then we might expect, I don’t know, 65% fastballs, 10% breaking balls, and 25% offspeed pitches. That’s the theory. So what do we see in Colorado? That’s what these big giant tables are for.

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This is all the excuse I need:

#Rockies sign SS Omar Quintanilla, a utility INF for 2005-09 teams, and re-sign veteran RH reliever Rafael Betancourt

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 30, 2015

I’ve developed a very minor obsession with Rafael Betancourt. If you’ve paid close attention over the years, you might’ve noticed, but I wouldn’t blame you for not paying close attention whenever I write about Rafael Betancourt. But here I am doing it again, because I don’t think I’ve talked about this for more than two years, and each time I do it, I have a little more data. Do you like fun facts? Betancourt comes with a couple awesome fun facts. They’re almost totally irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, but then, what isn’t?

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Yesterday, Dave put forward a proposal about how Major League Baseball could possibly improve its pace of play and run scoring in one fell swoop: limit the number of pitchers allowed per game to four. He couched it by saying that it was an admittedly crazy idea. But after compiling a grid of how many pitchers are used per game, I’m not so sure that it is.

What I wanted to see is a grid of how each team used its pitchers. How many games with two pitchers, three pitchers, etc. Thankfully, Baseball-Reference’s pitching game logs are very accommodating in this regard. In order to get a representative sample, I scrubbed out extra inning games, as well as games that were shortened for some reason (most likely rain). That leaves just the games where the pitchers threw eight to nine innings. Now, there’s certainly a chance that there was some weird game that was stopped for rain after eight innings, but barring that, this should be a sample of all the “regulation” games from last season. No team had fewer than 141 of these games, and no team had more than 154. Most of the games removed were extra-inning games, there were just a handful of shortened games.

Enough talk, let’s get to the grid:

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The Rockies are always in a weird spot. No matter what they do or don’t do, no one ever really seems to care about them. They’re just kind of there. They maintain a low profile, and even if they never spend big, their payroll is not so low that it sticks out. Most stories that gain traction are “oh, those crazy Rockies” sorts of stories. The Four-man rotation, the GM with an office in the clubhouse, the two-headed GM, the humidor, the Giants whining about the humidor, and altitude, altitude, altitude. Rarely do we just focus on what’s going on in between the lines with the Rockies. But this season, that may change, as there is a legit case to be made for the Rockies as sleeper team.

Based on our projected standings, which are a combination of Steamer’s projections and our playing time manipulations from our depth charts, there are two definitively good National League teams — the Dodgers and Nationals. At 91 wins apiece, they pace not just the NL but all of baseball in our projected standings. But aside from them, the league doesn’t have any real standouts, and the teams sort of congeal around two spots on the win curve:

• 83-86 wins: Cardinals, Cubs, Giants, Pirates
• 81 wins: Marlins
• 76-79 wins: Brewers, Padres, Mets, Reds, Rockies

So, if we accept that two playoff spots are tied up by LA and Washington (a big assumption, obviously, but go with it for now) then these 10 teams are vying for the other three. To be clear, the Rockies are pegged at 77 wins. You might think that sounds about right, or even generous. But, let’s roll through a few reasons why the Rockies could clear that bar and swaddle themselves in the middle of the playoff pack.

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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 Colorado Rockies. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Tampa Bay.

Batters
For those who haven’t dedicated much time of late to the study of the Colorado Rockies, finding that ZiPS projects outfielder Carlos Gonzalez for fewer than two wins in 2015 might be a surprise. It’s less surprising, of course, in light of Gonzalez’s 2014 season, during which he recorded a -0.3 WAR in 281 plate appearances. The cause of that uncharacteristically poor performance was largely a BABIP about 60 points lower than his career average. The cause of his limited playing time was some combination of a damaged patella tendon, a finger tumor, a calf contusion, and a sprained ankle. It’s reasonable to assume that there was some interaction between the injuries and the deflated offensive numbers.

With regard to how Colorado might best deploy their other three outfielders, ZiPS’ computer math would appear to advise a platoon of Charlie Blackmon and Drew Stubbs, with Corey Dickerson occupying left field by himself. Blessed with less athleticism than Gonzalez, Dickerson nevertheless features a similar offensive approach, dependent upon power on contact, but with something less than ideal plate discipline.

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When the Rockies came to town this year, there was a tap on my shoulder. Adam Ottavino wanted to talk pitching. For some reason, I didn’t turn on my recorder. That’s fine, I guess, sometimes you just lose yourself in the conversation and want to kick yourself later when you look down. We had a good time talking, is what I remember. I even got some grips pics from him.

But anyway, I don’t have the exact quotes and so I can’t provide you a break down of Ottavino’s season peppered with the interesting things that Ottavino said about his craft. Just know that, yes, he thinks about platoon splits. And the primarily fastball/slider righty thinks about changeups. But a changeup hasn’t worked for him yet, and the strategies he’s had to deal with platoon splits have had varying success.

What stuck with me since that conversation was a pitcher he was interested in: Steve Cishek. Really, Ottavino was interested in how a primarily fastball/slider pitcher could avoid platoon splits. So, Adam, if you’re out there, let’s take a look at Steve Cishek for a bit. The rest of you that are still here, come along for the ride!

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