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Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Minnesota Twins. In this companion piece, I look at that same Minnesota farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Twins have the sixth-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

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Other clubs: Astros, Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Marlins, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, White Sox.

The Twins have done a tremendous job of stockpiling minor-league talent, and currently deserve consideration for top farm system in the league. Even with Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario graduating to the majors, this collection of players has a crazy diverse mix of floor and upside, polish and potential, offense and pitching… there aren’t many weaknesses you could find within it. The worst thing you could say is they don’t have many power bats in their upper minors, but the addition of Byung-ho Park and the rebound of Byron Buxton will limit issues stemming from a lack of immediate offensive help.

There are a few surprises here that you should notice. One is the inclusion of Park to this list, despite having played professionally in Korea. He’s still a relatively unknown quantity, and obviously he hasn’t exhausted his rookie eligibility, so here he is! If you disagree with the decision to include him, close your eyes and scroll past it, or enjoy the “free” content.

One high rank and one snub may bother some readers. LaMonte Wade had a nice half-season debut after being a relatively unknown college pick out of Maryland, but it came against Rookie-ball competition, where college players are supposed to do well. I like enough of what he brings to the table offensively and defensively to think he’s more than just a guy who was placed too low to start his career. Adam Brett Walker sits at the end of the 40+ FV group here, which was kind of a stretch if you take the likely future 35 hit tool grade literally. I just don’t see him making enough contact for his power to work, but I do recognize he could have a future as a platoon or bench bat with some improvements.

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I decided not to write a post about it, but earlier I went into the spreadsheets to compare some of the fan projections for pitchers to some of the Steamer and ZiPS projections. The idea was basically to see if there are guys the fans are particularly high on or particularly low on, and as the former is concerned, the fans are higher on a bunch of relievers. Let me tell you, there are some real believers here in Mychal Givens. And that’s great! I love Givens, too. He’s really interesting, but he’s also a reliever, and I found myself scanning for starters. A name that quickly turned up is Tyler Duffey. Steamer and ZiPS see him good for a 4.37 ERA. The few fans who participated see him good for a 3.58 ERA. That was enough to grab my attention, and now we have an article.

Duffey, despite a strong 2015 debut, remains pretty anonymous. If it weren’t for the headline, I wonder how many of you would’ve known he pitches for the Twins. We’ve been conditioned to mostly ignore the various Twins starters, and for the most part that’s been a pretty sound policy, but Duffey has some unusual things about him. He was also all but guaranteed a rotation slot the other day by Paul Molitor. Consider this, then, a Tyler Duffey introduction, in case you’ve been in need of one. Twins fans know what’s up, but I’m guessing the others are almost all in the dark.

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Early this morning, the full 2016 ZiPS projections went live on the site. This is probably news to many of you. Surprise! Happy ZiPS day. You can now export the full ZiPS spreadsheet from that link, find individual projections on the player pages, and view our live-updating playoff odds, which are powered by a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer. This is good news for everyone, including us, the authors, because now we have more information with which to work.

And so here’s a post that I did last year, and one which I was waiting for the full ZiPS rollout to do again: previewing the year’s team defenses. It’s been a few years running now that we’ve marveled over speedy outfielders in blue jerseys zooming about the spacious Kauffman Stadium outfield, and now those speedy outfielders in blue jerseys are all World Series champions. People are thinking and talking about defense more than ever, and you don’t think and talk about defense without thinking and talking about the Kansas City Royals. Defense: it’s so hot right now. Defense.

The methodology here is simple. ZiPS considers past defensive performance and mixes in some scouting report information to give an overall “defensive runs above or below average” projection. Steamer does the same, except rather than searching for keywords from real scouting reports, it regresses towards the data from the Fans Scouting Report project compiled by Tangotiger every year. The final number is an average of these two figures, and can be found in the “Fld” section of the depth charts and player pages. It isn’t exactly Ultimate Zone Rating or Defensive Runs Saved, but it’s the same idea, and the same scale.

Let’s look ahead toward the year in defense.

* * *

The Best

1. Kansas City Royals

This is one of my new favorite fun facts: the Royals outfield defense, just the outfield, is projected for 31 runs saved, which is higher than any other entire team in baseball. And with Alex Rios out of the mix in right field and Jarrod Dyson and Paulo Orlando stepping in full-time, Kansas City’s outfield defense should somehow be even better than it’s been in the past.

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Yesterday, I ran a post about the teams that we’ve run posts about. Turns out we haven’t written very much about the Twins over the years. We all kind of already knew that. People commented and here is one of them:

Twins fan here. The Twins bring some of it on themselves. For the umpteenth year in a row, they finished dead last in strikeout %. I suppose that in itself is worth thinking about. But now that I actually think about it, who isn’t getting his due? Trevor May? Who, Twins fans, should fangraphs be writing about that they’re not writing about?

I didn’t actually intend for things to work out this way, but let’s talk about the Twins pitchers and strikeouts.

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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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Miguel Sano didn’t exactly sneak up on the league. The massive 22-year-old Dominican slugger had been considered a top-100 overall prospect in baseball for each of the last six seasons, a top-20 overall prospect each of the last four. He’d have been a perennial No. 1 prospect for most any organization in baseball, if not for the presence of super-prospect Byron Buxton. In the prospect world, Sano played Pippen to Buxton’s Jordan.

Last season, they both arrived. And for Sano, the debut couldn’t have gone much better. Sano batted 335 times in his rookie season. Set the playing time minimum low enough, to include Sano on our leaderboards, and he was a top-10 hitter in baseball. Immediately, Sano thrust himself into the company of Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Chris Davis, not only as one of the game’s premier power hitters, but as one of the most dangerous all-around at-bats in the league.

Pitchers who had faced Sano in the minor leagues already knew what to expect. Pitchers who hadn’t faced Sano before quickly learned what to expect. The most simple scouting report goes like this: true 80-grade power, the kind of power that necessitates lofty comparisons with Stanton. Proceed with caution.

And that’s exactly what pitchers did. A reputation as a feared hitter is the kind of thing most guys have to earn. Bautista, Davis, Encarnacion: they had to earn their reputations as truly premier power hitters, as the most dangerous at-bats in the game. It wasn’t simply assumed. Sano? Sano arrived with that reputation.

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“Kyle Gibson?”

That was the first comment from my piece, yesterday, on Francisco Liriano, who embodies a league-wide trend of pitchers subtly altering their approach and hitters seemingly failing to adjust. You see, Gibson’s name was twice invoked in a group of unique pitchers, and, given the context of the groups, Gibson stuck out as something of a stranger in the room.

The first group looked like this:

• Carlos Carrasco
• Jacob deGrom
• Kyle Gibson
• Corey Kluber
• Max Scherzer
• Madison Bumgarner

OK, then.

The second group looked like this:

• Francisco Liriano
• Kyle Gibson
• Dallas Keuchel
• Wade Miley
• James Shields
• Tyson Ross
• Jeff Locke
• Jon Lester
• Gio Gonzalez

The second group is less illustrious than the first, but Gibson finds himself surrounded by some impressive company regardless. The first group, the distinguished group, is made up of the pitchers who most often got batters to chase pitches out of the zone in 2015. The second group is made up of the pitchers who worked out of the zone most often in 2015.

So, you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, in both these groups, throwing pitches outside the strike zone all day long and getting batters to chase at them like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer. And you’ve got Kyle Gibson, here, who had one of the lower strikeout rates in baseball last year, and has K’ed fewer than six batters per nine innings over the course of his career, while his chase-inducing contemporaries like Carrasco, and deGrom, and Kluber, and Scherzer are striking out 10 batters per nine and overpowering lineups across the major league.

What gives? Where are all of Kyle Gibson’s whiffs? He already turned himself into a solid pitcher, a three-win pitcher, last season, racking up nearly 200 innings with an ERA, FIP, and xFIP all under 4.00. He’s proven himself as a quality arm. Take a quality arm and add some extra strikeouts, and you’ve got a dominant arm. And it seems like he should be getting those extra strikeouts. Yet, here we are.

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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 Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / New York AL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
At some level, the ZiPS projections for Minnesota — and, in particular, for the positional corps of the club — represent a best-case scenario: despite having dealt with injury in recent years, wunderkind prospects Byron Buxton and third baseman/left fielder Miguel Sano already possess two of the top-three WAR forecasts on the team. This is, in a sense, a desirable outcome: the organization’s most promising young players have developed, it would seem, into its most productive contributors.

Unfortunately, Buxton and Sano receive merely three-win projections — as opposed to, like, five-win ones. Which means that, if those two are the club’s “most productive contributors,” then the other contributors profile as roughly average or below that. The Twins actually do seem to possess quite a few players (Brian Dozier, Eduardo Escobar, Joe Mauer, Byung-ho Park, Trevor Plouffe) in the dependably average range — and in the era of two wild cards, average isn’t entirely undesirable. Given the current roster, however, it would appear as though “sneaking” into the postseason represents the team’s upside.

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At the winter meetings, I asked a small collection of managers about the evolution of the role, and all of them — save perhaps Mike Scioscia — spoke to the importance of communicating with the media and with their players.

But that story had a longer scope, and a more universal one. I also asked them about a smaller more immediate thing — I asked many of them what they had learned this year, on the job. And for those just coming to the job, what they have tried to learn before they first manage a game.

Of particular note was what former position players did to learn about pitching, and vice versa. Managers have to communicate with all sorts of different players, and yet they came from one tradition within the game. And each has spent time developing themselves in their present role.

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