Most players make it to Major League Baseball without a fully refined skillset. Some players make it to the majors with a particular skill so great it outweighs a lack of skills normally required to function at the major-league level. Sometimes, it is an electric fastball despite a lack of command or secondary pitches. For Dee Gordon and Billy Hamilton, it was elite speed. For players like Yadier Molina and Jose Iglesias, their defensive skills so outweighed their offensive ineptitude that they were brought to the major leagues without the ability to hit anywhere near a major-league level.

Jose Iglesias never hit well in the minor leagues, but his glove has earned him repeated promotions and a starting shortstop job. Iglesias’s development as a hitter was slowed further by losing 2014 due to stress fractures in both legs, but he’s been very successful putting the ball in play this season, capped by a recent extra-inning single that knocked in the winning run in Detroit’s 4-3 10-inning win against the Cardinals on Saturday. At just 25 years old, he has a hitting profile similar to current BABIP sensation Dee Gordon, and while Iglesias could still develop as a hitter like Yadier Molina or other defensive-first shortstops like Ozzie Smith or Omar Vizquel, his hot start is not likely to last.

Iglesias was called up for a week in 2011 as a 21-year-old for the Boston Red Sox when he was hitting .259 with just two walks and no extra-base hits in the early part of the season. He received just four plate appearances before returning to the minors. He was called up again in September to receive a couple more trips to the plate, after hitting just .235/.285/.269 in close to a full season in the minors. In 2012, during the Red Sox lost season, Iglesias again earned a callup, this time after hitting .266/.318/.306 in his final full Triple-A season. He notched just eight hits in 77 plate appearances at the big-league level, but already received comparisons to Omar Vizquel. He began 2013 in Triple-A and hit just .202/.262/.319 before making the big leagues for good.

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Joe Nathan has had Tommy John surgery before. Joe Nathan will need to have Tommy John surgery again. He has proclaimed that he intends to come try to return, but the odds are against that — 41-year-old major league pitchers are in short supply (there are just two this season). Whether he does or doesn’t make it all the way back, any subsequent seasons are unlikely to add much to his statistical ledger. And an impressive ledger it is.

A sixth-round pick in the 1995 draft, Nathan has been one of the few players left in the game who saw action back in the 90s, as he debuted for the Giants back in April of 1999. He was a starter back then, though he wasn’t particularly good. He only struck out three more batters than he walked in those 14 debut season starts. He would get another crack at starting the next season, but in his 15 starts in 2000 he struck out four fewer batters than he walked, and that was the end of that chapter.

Well, sort of. He would be a starter for the bulk of the next two seasons, at age 26 and 27, but he would do so in the minor leagues. His 2001 was an unmitigated disaster — he struck out 54 against 70 walks in Double-A and Triple-A — he walked more guys than he struck out at both levels. He was better in 2002 — 117 Ks against 74 walks, all at Triple-A Fresno — but he allowed 20 homers, had a 1.647 WHIP and 5.60 ERA. Better, but not good. He would come back up to San Fran in September for four scoreless relief appearances, and never looked back.

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I’ll start this one like I think I’ve started another, probably also about Shane Greene. Who remembers? Last summer, while working on an article for The Hardball Times Annual, I talked to Brandon McCarthy about the significance and implementation of contemporary data. It was a long interview and a lot went into the article, so I’m not going to sit here and spoil everything, but McCarthy noted something he learned immediately upon joining the Yankees. Right away, they told him about the value of an elevated fastball. Even though McCarthy was more traditionally a sinker-baller, he found that he could get easy outs sometimes going hard and up, with hitters geared for pitches down. Adding one new level made hitting exponentially more difficult.

As the conversation went on, it turned to then-Yankees sensation Shane Greene. Maybe “sensation” is over-selling him, but he came out of nowhere, and he was throwing gas. Greene was whiffing a batter an inning, powered by a mid-90s sinker that he kept down by the knees, and as we neared the end, McCarthy made one more point. The Yankees had given Greene very simple offseason instructions: he was to improve his ability to throw a fastball up.

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Yesterday, against the Pirates, Anthony Gose finished 0-for-3 with two strikeouts. He has, so far, struck out nine times in 23 plate appearances. Let’s talk about why he’s possibly better.

Through his first three opportunities in the bigs, Gose came to the plate more than 600 times, and he managed a .285 wOBA. That’s a bad wOBA — the sort of wOBA acceptable only from a pinch-runner or defensive specialist. For 2015, our own projections peg him for a .292 wOBA, which is technically better, but ranked with Shane Robinson and Aaron Hicks. It’s a perfectly sensible projection; it matches what Gose has done, allowing for a little improvement from the 24-year-old. But there’s something projections can’t account for as they analyze the history: what if a hitter changes his swing?

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Hello! The baseball season just started. We’ve gone from one Sunday to a second Sunday, and we still aren’t allowed to do anything with statistics because nobody cares about them yet. While, in theory, spring training is supposed to get everyone ready for the year, the beginning feels like an extended spring training, a transition period following a transition period, and at this point the standings mean nothing. If you were to ask a player today about the wins and the losses, you’d get laughed out of the clubhouse. It doesn’t just feel like there’s a long way to go — it feels like there’s the whole way to go. Also, the Indians and White Sox are four games back of the Tigers and Royals.

It happened fast. It happened before anyone cared, but the White Sox have been swept by the Royals, and the Indians have been swept by the Tigers. Series conclude every few days, and standings change literally every day, but this is notable because the AL Central has four teams who’ve been thinking about the playoffs. The same four teams are still thinking about the playoffs, but as much as you want to say nothing matters yet, everything matters. This is my most- and least-favorite post to write every season.

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We’re halfway done, with the wests — both NL and the AL — and covered NL Central yesterday. Today, we tackle the AL’s version of the country’s heartland.

The Projected Standings

With no great teams and only one franchise not really trying to contend this year, this is one of the most up-for-grabs divisions in the sport. Our forecasts suggest that there are two tiers within those going for it, but I think things might be a bit more bunched up than the numbers above suggest. Let’s go team by team.

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It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Detroit Tigers. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Detroit’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Tigers’ system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Detroit system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays & Tigers

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects

I mentioned in some of the top 200 prospects content that this process inherently values the organizational approaches some teams have, while punishing others. The Tigers are a team that gets punished. The cutoff of a certain amount of big league playing time means that I’m ranking guys that Detroit sees as trade chips to help the big league team, whereas a team like Tampa Bay sees the farm as the only way they’ll be able to survive three years from now.

Of guys that would be on this list, the Tigers originally signed then traded RHP Jake Thompson 55 FV, Rangers), SS Willy Adames (50 FV, Rays), 2B Devon Travis (45+ FV, Blue Jays), RHP Corey Knebel (45+ FV, Brewers), RHP Jonathon Crawford (45 FV, Reds) and 2B Domingo Leyba (40+ FV, Diamondbacks), with White Sox RF Avisail Garcia, Rays LHP Drew Smyly and Reds SS Eugenio Suarez all recently traded and recently losing prospect status.

I point this out because the perception from casual fans via perennially low rankings of their farm system is that Detroit’s scouting and development people aren’t good. If the big league team’s strategy was to keep all their prospects and then add some here and there, they’d be somewhere around the middle of the pack in these rankings. Detroit has a clear type of player they like: big, physical power pitchers and up-the-middle type defenders with instincts and some feel to hit. Given that they don’t spend huge internationally but keep finding solid prospects and always draft in the back half of the first round, rarely with extra picks, I think Detroit’s system (for acquiring players) is underrated, even if the current prospect list is in the back third of the league, as usual.

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Maybe it was all a setup for the headline, but in Anthony Fenech’s piece about Justin Verlander and his effort to return to glory — titled “Tigers’ Verlander ‘way ahead of the curve’ early this spring” — the pitcher points to the current state of his curveball as a sign of early success.

“I’ve seen a pretty dramatic difference,” he said. “The curveball seems to be a lot better already than it was at any point last year.”

Catcher Bryan Holaday, who stood in for the final few pitches of the session, agreed, saying the spin was nice and tight.

Verlander notices the difference, especially in the break, from last year, when his breaking pitches, “Neither one of those pitches was good at all last year. They didn’t have the same bite.”

Much of the previous analysis of Verlander’s poor year focused on his fastball velocity and fading release points. And the pitcher himself referenced those factors a bit when, later in the piece, he admits that he was underweight due to last year’s offseason surgery on his core.

But this might be the first time we’ve heard about the curve missing tightness.

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