Scott Barlow made his big-league debut on Monday. Pitching for the Kansas City Royals against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, the 25-year-old right-hander went three effective innings in a 10-6 loss. With family watching from the stands, he allowed just one run while working the sixth, seventh, and eighth frames. Needless to say, it was a night the former Los Angeles Dodgers farmhand — a 2011 sixth-round pick out of a Santa Clarita, California high school — won’t soon forget.

Barlow, who signed a free-agent deal with the Royals over the winter, took us through his once-in-a-lifetime experience the following afternoon.

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Scott Barlow: “Around the fifth inning, [bullpen coach] Vance Wilson told me, ‘Make sure you’re staying loose,’ so I started stretching and kind of getting my energy going. This is my first time ever at Fenway, so I was also soaking up the scenery a little bit. Tim Hill started warming up, and they called down to have me warm up with him.

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Tanking is a problem. Professional sports like baseball are built on the assumption that both sides are trying to win. Organizations putting forth less than their best efforts hurts the integrity of the sport and provides fans with little reason to engage. That said, the perception of tanking might have overtaken the reality of late. Competitive imbalance is not the same as tanking. Sometimes teams are just bad, even if they are trying not to be.

Tanking concerns are not new. Two years ago, just after the Astros and Cubs had turned their teams around, the Phillies were attempting to dismantle their roster by trading Cole Hamels. The Braves had traded multiple players away from a team that had been competitive. The Brewers, who traded away Carlos Gomez, would soon do the same with Jonathan Lucroy after he rebuilt his trade value.

The Braves, Brewers, and Phillies all sold off whatever assets they could. Two years later, though, those clubs aren’t mired in last place. Rather, they’re a combined 54-37 and projected to win around 80 games each this season in what figures to be a competitive year for each. While the Braves and Phillies could and/or should have done more this offseason to improve their rosters, neither resorted to an extreme level of failure, and the teams are better today than they would have been had they not rebuilt. While accusations of tanking dogged each, none of those clubs descended as far as either the Astros or Cubs. None came close to the NBA-style tank jobs many feared.

One might suspect that I’ve cherry-picked the three clubs mentioned above, purposely selecting teams with surprising early-season success to prop up a point about the relatively innocuous effects of tanking. That’s not what I’ve done, though. Rather, I’ve highlighted the three teams Buster Olney cited by name two years ago — and which Dave Cameron also addressed — in a piece on tanking.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the fifth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Danny Duffy, David Price, and Sergio Romo — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Danny Duffy (Royals) on His Changeup

“My changeup used to be a two-seam circle. It was a really good pitch in the minor leagues because of the difference in velocity — I could get away with lack of movement — but, up here, it was starting to get ineffective.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All the numbered prospects here also appear on THE BOARD, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. Click here to visit THE BOARD.

50 FV Prospects

Matias’s exit velos are on par with those produced by Quad-A sluggers who have seven years on him, and he hit a quarter of his balls in play over 105 mph last season. His has a longish swing and possesses poor breaking-ball recognition, the combination of which has led to pretty concerning early-career strikeout rates.

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CLEVELAND — This spring, I’ve briefly inhabited the clubhouses of some teams that aren’t expected to do very well in 2018. I’ve been in Sarasota, Florida, to visit the Orioles. I dropped by the road locker room at Progressive Field when the Tigers and Royals were guests there last week. There are no great expectations in Baltimore, Detroit, and Kansas City this spring.

The projection systems have given those clubs little chance at postseason contention. In fact, according to FanGraphs, those three clubs each featured a 0% chance of winning the World Series as of Opening Day. The same was true for a handful of other teams, as well.

Of course, these prognostications aren’t available only to the interested public. They reach the ears of on-field personnel, too. PECOTA forecasts appear on MLB Network’s preseason coverage. Some players even visit this very web site. Our projections have the Royals winning 71 games, the Tigers 70, and the White Sox 65 in the AL Central — or 25, 26, and 31 games, respectively, behind the Indians.

In an era increasingly populated almost entirely of super teams and tanking teams, there is theoretically less possibility of contention, less reason to hope, for teams forecast to finish lower in the standings.

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We haven’t written very much about Jakob Junis. And that much makes sense — he hasn’t been in the majors very long, and it’s not like he’s broken any records. He plays for a team that isn’t that great, and he only found his groove last season down the stretch. Junis has never been a top prospect, and he was drafted in the 29th round. He doesn’t throw with eye-popping velocity, and he doesn’t rack up a boatload of strikeouts. Junis has done little to call attention to himself. Baseball analysts have done little to call attention to Jakob Junis.

I had a note by my computer to write about Junis all offseason long. I never did it. The timing never felt right. It feels better now, after Junis shut down the Tigers’ offense on Tuesday. It was cold, and, it was the Tigers, and the Tigers are bad. It’s not as if Junis went out and blanked the Astros. But he still spun seven shutout innings, with six strikeouts, and he threw 71% of his pitches for strikes. We’re talking about Jakob Junis now. And if you’re going to talk about Jakob Junis, you’re going to talk about his breaking ball. I’ve prepared plenty of clips from Tuesday’s outing. Just look at this stupid breaking ball.

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Kris Medlen was a top-shelf pitcher in the 2012-2013 seasons. Over that two-year stretch, the righty fashioned a 2.47 ERA in 335 innings with the Atlanta Braves. Then things went south. His elbow began barking, and in March 2014 — for the second time in his professional career — he underwent Tommy John surgery.

The road back proved arduous. Medlen was decent after returning to a big-league mound in July 2015 — he went 6-2, 4.01 in 15 games with the Royals — but then his rotator cuff became cranky. A truncated and abysmal 2016 season spent mostly in the minors was followed by some serious soul searching.

“I considered calling it quits,” admitted Medlen. “It would have been out of injury frustration. I’d had two Tommy Johns, and that last season in Kansas City I had three rotator cuff strains. I was on my ass, on my couch, with my kids, until late January or early February (2017). My wife was supportive — she said it was fine if I wanted to stop, and it was fine if I wanted to keep going — but I think she could tell I was a little down.” Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency is supposed to be the reward. Of course, not every player gets treated the same, but, in general, free agency tends to reward good hitting. Mike Moustakas has blossomed into a pretty good hitter. Free agency tends to reward good fielding. Mike Moustakas has been a fine defensive third baseman. Free agency tends to reward winning experience. Mike Moustakas was part of a World Series champion. And, importantly, free agency tends to reward youth. Mike Moustakas is 29 years old. He’s just one year older than Eric Hosmer, who signed for massive terms with the Padres. It feels like it should’ve been there. It feels like Mike Moustakas should’ve earned his reward.

Moustakas is returning to the Royals. It’s a one-year contract, with a $6.5-million guarantee, and while there exists a second-year mutual option, those are never picked up. It was the Royals who extended to Moustakas a $17.4-million qualifying offer, which Moustakas, in turn, declined. Now he won’t come close to that money. There’s been talk for a while this market is strange, but the Moustakas terms in particular are jarring. It’s incredible that his free agency got to this point.

MLB Trade Rumors figured Moustakas would sign for five years and $85 million. The FanGraphs community figured he’d sign for five years and $85 million. Dave Cameron figured he’d sign for five years and $95 million. Now, Moustakas can still earn big money. He won’t have a qualifying offer attached next offseason, and another strong year would improve his stock. And, also, it’s easy to try to point things out after the fact. No one knew this was how Moustakas would end up. But, in hindsight, there were issues from the beginning. A variety of factors came together to prevent Moustakas from finding the commitment he wanted.

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Because the author of this post is someone who mistakenly believed in the “transformative power of literature” as an undergraduate, $6.5 million remains only a hypothetical sum of money for me as a person. In the context of major-league baseball, however — and, specifically, in the context of compensating slightly above-average major leaguers — it’s roughly equivalent to zero dollars. It also, turns out, is roughly how much Mike Moustakas will earn in 2018.

Handsome Jeff Passan reports from the front lines of Baseball:

Jeff Sullivan will address the deal in greater depth tomorrow. For the moment, however, a collection of three bullet points should suffice to convey the improbability of this news.

Consider:

• Over the last three years, Moustakas has been worth $29.6, $5.8, and $17.6 million by the methodology used at this site — or just under $18 million annually on average.
• According to this site’s depth-chart projections, Moustakas is likely to produce about two-and-a-half wins in 2018 — or the equivalent of about $23 million, if one presumes (as people seem to presume) that a win is worth roughly $9 million.
• When Dave Cameron composed his list of the offseason’s top free agents, he ranked Moustakas eighth, projecting a deal for five years and $95.0 million. The crowd estimated only a slightly lower figure: five years and $85.0 million.

What all this information suggests is that Mike Moustakas probably should — to the extent that anyone should — be earning something just shy of $20 million in 2018. He won’t be, though. He’ll be earning probably $6.5 million, as noted above.

That’s merely one reason why this deal seems inexplicable. Why else, though, is because other notable alumni from the Royals’ world-championship team appear to be faring well enough.

For each player here, I’ve included not just his projected 2018 numbers but also the terms of the contract to which he agreed this offseason. Cain and Hosmer both signed for amounts greater than estimated by either Dave Cameron or FanGraphs’ readers. Dyson signed with Arizona for less than anticipated; however, he agreed to a greater sum of guaranteed money than Moustakas. Which, allow me to repeat that in slightly different terms: Jarrod Dyson received a larger guaranteed deal this offseason than Mike Moustakas.

The objectively slowest offseason ever has been surprising in a number of ways. This way is number + 1.

Even if you’ve been living under a rock or taking a between-jobs vacation, you’re probably aware that the Royals lost their longtime first baseman and franchise staple, Eric Hosmer, to free agency. Earlier this month, the Padres signed Ol’ Hos to an eight-year, $144 million deal, no doubt because their new head of Research and Development lobbied for the move (even after having previously declared him one of the winter’s free-agent landmines).

On Wednesday, the Royals filled their positional vacancy by committing $140.5 million less than the Padres did, inking Lucas Duda to a one-year, $3.5 million deal with plate-appearance-based incentives — $100,000 for reaching 300 PA, and for each 25 PA interval up to 600 PA — possibly yielding another $1.3 million.

While Duda and Hosmer are both listed at 6-foot-4, swing left-handed, and crossed paths in the 2015 World Series — most notably when the latter’s wild throw home in the ninth inning of Game 5 allowed the former to score the game-tying run — there are obviously some differences between the two. Hosmer, a 2008 first-round pick out of a Florida high school, has dark hair but is viewed within the industry as something of a golden boy, while Duda, a 2007 seventh-round pick out of the University of Southern California, is blond but seems to have been treated like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

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