The first round of the Major League draft is just a little over three weeks away, and the Houston Astros will select first for the second consecutive year. Right now, the consensus belief is that there are two college pitchers — Mark Appel of Stanford and Jonathan Gray of Oklahoma — who are a step ahead of the rest, though University of San Diego third baseman Kris Bryant is putting on quite the power display and could be an option if the Astros preferred to build around bats rather than arms. However, the decision for the Astros may not be made simply on talent alone.

Last year was the first draft under the new bonus structure, which assigns a fixed amount of dollars to each team based on where they pick in the draft, with some pretty severe penalties for exceeding those limits. Now, if a team is interested in paying over the slot value for a pick, they’ll have to borrow the money for that overpayment from another pick, making the draft as much a game of cost management as it is talent acquisition.

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How far can a player go on base running alone? Probably not too far. Speed as a tool is obviously quite valuable, especially at an elite level, as it feeds both into the ability to provide value on the bases and in the field. Strictly in terms of offense, though, how good can a player be with a terrible bat and good base-running skills? Just for fun, here are five recent individual seasons with the biggest differential between base-running value and batting value.

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After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.

But here is the deal:

A) Pitchers do not consistently practice hitting. (Simple fact.)

B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)

C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)

All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.

Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
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In Arizona, J.D. Sussman and I hit the back fields together to scout talent from the Mariners, Indians, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Cubs. Each of us took notes, collected radar gun readings, worked angles and collected the best information we could.

Back from the warm weather, we decided to rank the 10 best prospects we scouted together to highlight differences in opinion and player preference. Scouting is an inexact science. Prospect followers tend to pit opinions of writers against each other, but of course there’s room for dissent and discussion even among friends and colleagues.

Here’s my top-10 of players I liked the most. J.D.’s list will follow in an hour.

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Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.

We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.

Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.

With those caveats, let’s begin.

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Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.

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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.

Let’s get on to the rankings!

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Nolan Arenado’s development has been a roller coaster ride. From prospect with major helium, to disappointment with maturity issues, the third baseman lost his luster this off-season.

With four home runs in his first 17 at bats this spring, Arenado is all the rage again as he attempts to wrangle the third base job away from the combo of Chris Nelson and Jordan Pacheco.

Of course arbitration clocks, service time and other internal decisions will be a part of the decision making process, but what about the production? Will 150 game of Nolan Arenado have more on field value than Nelson/Pacheco? I’m not so sure.

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Jeffrey Loria and the Marlins’ front office need to save face as much as anyone since Harvey Dent (dated pop culture reference: check). One suggestion has been that they should re-sign their one remaining superstar, Giancarlo Stanton. That is easier said than done, given that Stanton publicly expressed displeasure in the immediate wake of the team’s massive trade with Toronto. Even if he had not, why would any player want to make a long-term commitment to the Marlins at this point (note to Giancarlo: make sure and get that no-trade clause in writing. Also, stick with rentals.)?

As Buster Olney points out, even if one thinks Stanton is unlikely to sign an extension, if the Marlins do at least make a good faith offer, they can at least say they tried, which in itself would be progress and might help them a bit in the court of public opinion. If he turns it down, at least they could feel free to trade him when is value is highest. Naturally, Loria is saying exactly the wrong thing: “Giancarlo needs to play this year.” Aside from the particulars of the whole Marlins mess, when considering how much it would cost to extend Stanton, not many recent comparisons come to mind. Olney cites an agent to compares Stanton to the Rockies’ Carlos Gonzalez after his 2010 season, when he signed for seven-years and $80 million dollars. That comparison makes sense in that Gonzalez was then and Stanton is now young, talented, and still a year away from arbitration eligibility. A comparison with Gonzalez is a helpful starting point, but beyond the increased money in baseball now, there are good reasons to think a Stanton extension would be significantly bigger. As good as Gonzalez was and is, Stanton projects to be even more valuable.

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Craig Calcaterra made me do something I have not done for a long time yesterday: think about Deion Sanders. Calcaterra’s post is worth reading in itself (at least click the link to see an incredibly time-bound photograph), as it is reflection on Buster Olney’s (annual) reflection (how meta!) on some interaction Olney had with Deion Sanders years ago as a rookie reporter. Okay, that sounds equal parts boring and confusing, but Craig makes it funny, at least to me. Leaving aside the mystery of why Olney makes this his annual Spring Training Kickoff Tradition and what it is supposed to mean (nothing against Olney; like Craig, I am simply baffled by the whole thing): man, it has been a long time since I’ve thought about Deion Sanders, especially Deion Sanders the baseball player.

My memories of that are pretty hazy, so others can recall various cool, fun, or just ridiculous Deion Sanders stories. I do not want to take that approach and end up with a car wreck of a post. Sanders had his moments on the diamond, and the whole part-time football/baseball thing is itself a curious artifact of the past. (The latter is worth a long post in its own right. “Well, sure, I could make millions guaranteed, but I think I’d rather spend part of the year doing something far more dangerous for non-guaranteed money.”) Leaving all of that aside, I was struck by just how unusual, especially these days, Sanders combination of skills was. What players recently have had seasons like Neon Deion at his best?

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For at least three franchises, this offseason could have taken a very different path. When Justin Upton vetoed a trade to the Mariners, he altered the direction of Seattle, Arizona and Atlanta, at the very least. Such negated transactions make for fascinating what-if’s, and now that we are edging into the time of year when all we will read is “best shape of my career” posts, I thought we could step back and take a look at some of these.

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