Usually, we expect players to follow a more or less expected curve of decline when they hit their 30s. Obviously everyone is different, but baseball is a young man’s game, and father time comes for us all. Research by Jeff Zimmerman in 2013 showed that hitters don’t even tend to peak nowadays: on average, they perform at a plateau upon reaching the majors, then they decline. Take the wRC+ aging curve for a few different time periods, for instance:

We often talk about a player being “in his prime,” but primes are probably younger than many (or most) people think. In this era, 26 is really the beginning of the average hitter’s offensive decline. Which brings us to Ian Kinsler, who will turn 34 in June: he’s currently posting what would be the highest wRC+ of his career, and Isolated Power marks in line with his best home run-hitting seasons of 2009/2011. That isn’t particularly huge news: plenty of veteran hitters have ~40 game stretches in which they match close to their prime production.

The real news is that Kinsler is currently going beyond that, showing a few underlying indicators that amount to him turning back the clock. He’s also altered his approach, and the combined forces are helping to drive what is currently shaping up to be his best offensive season since he posted a 123 wRC+ with 32 homers in 2011. Kinsler is probably never going to steal 30 bases again (or maybe even 20), but he’s picking up that slack in his production at the plate, especially power-wise.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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If you look at Nick Castellanos‘ traditional statistics, you obviously will notice that something is different. His OPS is nearing 1.000 after messing around in the 700 level before. This was the kind of improvement we were hoping for! The wait is over!

If you look at the next level, things begin to muddy. Basically 40% of the third baseman’s balls in play have fallen for hits, compared to 33% in the past. His walks and strikeouts are about the same as his previously established levels, and his batted-ball spray, in terms of pulling versus going oppo, remain roughly the same, too. He’s added a few fly balls, as he’s cut his grounder rate nearly 40%, so we could call it a little bit of power growth plus a lot of luck, and call it a day.

But we’ve got another level of statistics now, and if we look into those numbers, we see the type of growth that seems sustainable, and points to a small step in approach that may lead to a giant leap in production — even if projection systems usually call for restraint in such situations, even for a 24-year-old.

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Jose Iglesias is a shortstop capable of doing some pretty terrific things on a baseball field. I say that now because there’s going to be plenty of .gifs in this post that paint Iglesias in a not-so-positive light, and it can be a weird feeling to make a player look bad based solely upon which clips you’ve hand-chosen to show, so here, look at all the incredible things Jose Iglesias is capable of doing on defense. There. Those are the kinds of plays that earn you a reputation.

And Iglesias has certainly earned a reputation. He had earned the reputation before he ever stepped on a big league field. He was named the best defensive infielder in the Red Sox system by Baseball America from 2009 to 2012. In 2010, he was named the best defensive shortstop in the entire Eastern League, and received those same honors in the International League each of the next two seasons. From that same publication’s scouting report of him in 2010, as the No. 1 prospect in Boston’s farm system a year before his MLB debut:

Iglesias is an exceptional defender who could challenge for a Gold Glove in the big leagues right now. He plays low to the ground, using his quick feet, lightning-fast hands and strong arm to make all the plays. His instincts and body control also stand out, and he made just seven errors in 57 games at short last season. He’s fearless in the field, almost to the point of overconfidence, but he makes more web gems than mistakes.

The reputation was what it was, and it’s since carried over to the big-league level. And yet, in about two full season’s worth of major-league playing time at shortstop (1,991 innings), Iglesias has but three Defensive Runs Saved to his name. Baseball Prospectus’ Fielding Runs Above Average actually has him below average, crediting him with -0.8 runs saved over the course of his still-short career. Ultimate Zone Rating is the only defensive metric with anything more than an average assessment of Iglesias’ defense, and even that pegs him as a +13 defender over two seasons, which is certainly good, but still comes up short of the perennial Gold Glove types around whom Iglesias’ name is mentioned.

Understandably, folks have been skeptical of these assessments. It’s something our very own Neil Weinberg addressed last fall. As a community, our understanding of how to properly evaluate defense has always lagged behind other facets of the game, but the good news is, it’s getting better every day! It’s still far from perfect, but between the arrival of Statcast and advancements made by Baseball Info Solutions and Inside Edge, we’ve got more pieces to the puzzle than ever before. And they’re already helping explain some of our outliers, guys whose performance by the metrics have never aligned with the scouting reports or eye tests. Like Dexter Fowler, who we discovered was playing more shallow than any center fielder in baseball, and that it was killing his defensive metrics. The Cubs realized this, and have repositioned him. Let’s see if we can’t use some of these same advancements to better figure out the Jose Iglesias mystery.

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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If you’d just oblige me by briefly viewing one screenshot and four .gifs, I believe I’ll be able to neatly tie together all the different things that have been going on with J.D. Martinez this season. Let these five visuals serve as a reference point for the remainder of this post.

First up, the screenshot, revealing what the FOX Sports Detroit broadcast team decided to reveal about Martinez’s first at-bat, in graphic form:

Information gathered: the batter’s name is J.D. Martinez, and this is what his face looks like. J.D. Martinez flew out in his first at-bat. There is one out and nobody on in the fourth inning. J.D. Martinez is having an incredible season so far. The Tigers trail, 1-0. Dallas Keuchel is pitching. The umpire will need to look up before Keuchel delivers a pitch.

The umpire has looked up. Keuchel delivers a pitch:

It’s a first-pitch curveball, and Martinez does not swing his bat. You know who doesn’t see too many first-pitch curveballs when they’re batting? Pitchers. Because the pitcher who’s pitching doesn’t really care about the pitcher who’s hitting, so he throws him a first-pitch fastball. Nothing to worry about. J.D. Martinez? Lot to worry about. First-pitch curveball. No swing.

Keuchel, typically a low-ball pitcher, elevates a fastball, up-and-in. No swing.

Another fastball, elevated (but probably more than Keuchel wanted), another no swing.

Swing. Ground ball into the teeth of the shift.

OK. Now let’s try and tie this all together. Lot’s going on with J.D. Martinez this season.

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Shane Greene just had a nice start the other day against the Pirates. He didn’t throw a changeup. He didn’t even throw a curve, according to one pitch-type algorithm. It was all fastballs and… well… breaking balls? Greene features a cutter and a slider, but where one begins and the other ends is tough to decide.

Let’s take a look at all of his non-fastballs from Wednesday, graphed by horizontal and vertical movement and velocity. Maybe you can see two pitches, even if one system saw three. Then flip the tab to see all of his breaking balls over his career. Now how many pitches do you see?

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We have launch angle for all batted balls last year! We’re still in the infancy of Statcast, and there have been some wiggles in the wobble so far, but with the new update to Baseball Savant, it looks like we can search all batted balls for launch angle. I’m giddy.

This should give us the chance to all sorts of great things later, but for now I’ll do something relatively simple that’s relevant to the newest big slugger in the game, Matt Duffy. We all knew he’d bust out like this, and now we know why.

Turn back to Alan Nathan’s excellent post on the long ball yesterday at The Hardball Times. It’s full of nerdy goodness, but there’s also a fun little factoid that runs through most of his analysis: the ideal launch angle for a home run is between 25 and 30 degrees. Given a certain exit velocity, that range is where distance on a batted ball peaks:

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado.

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Detroit Tigers. In this companion piece, I look at that same Detroit farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Michael Fulmer, RHP (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 3.8 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 50 FV

Fulmer enjoyed a breakout season with the Mets last year and kept it going after he came to the Tigers in the Yoenis Cespedes deal. Both his strikeout rate and walk rate improved as he made the jump from High-A to Double-A in 2015, giving him the lowest ERA — and second lowest FIP — in Double-A last year.

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