You understand this well enough you might as well have been born with it: the 2015 Red Sox were a failure, and while a number of things went wrong, nothing sunk them quite like the twin disappointments of Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez. Both big investments turned out to be negative-WAR players, and now as we turn our attention to the season ahead, there’s a lot riding on how those two players perform. Most recently, they were genuinely awful, and there’s no other way around it. This is something the Red Sox just have to deal with.

While the 2015 Red Sox were failing, the bleached equivalent was also failing, if a bit less visibly so. The White Sox accomplished less than they were hoping to, and while for them, as well, a number of things went wrong, two things that went very wrong were Adam LaRoche and Avisail Garcia. Sandoval and Ramirez, combined, were worth -3.8 WAR. LaRoche and Garcia, combined, were worth -2.5 WAR. They were less terrible, but they were terrible, and yet through the offseason they remained in place. As of a few days ago, Garcia was lined up to be a starter, and so was LaRoche. The White Sox, like the rest of the American League, intend to make a playoff run.

Given the situation, Chicago decided to sign Austin Jackson for a year and $5 million. It makes for an obvious fit. It makes for maybe the most obvious fit.

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Earlier this week, Salvador Perez and the Kansas City Royals agreed on a second contract extension. In terms of financial need or justification for the Royals, there weren’t any compelling reasons for the Royals to sign Perez to another extension when his previous contract kept Perez under control through the 2019 season. Even with no extensions, Perez would not have been a free agent until after this season. In his analysis of the deal, Jeff Sullivan focused on the human element of the deal and being fair to Perez. Ken Rosenthal wondered if this would start a trend and named a few other players who might benefit from teams deciding to be a bit more fair. Perez is certainly not the first player to sign a very team-friendly deal, but he is also not the first player to be awarded a second deal despite having a number of years still left on his first contract.

In Rosenthal’s piece, he acknowledges that Perez was a “special case,” noting that the Royals catcher had recorded just 158 plate appearances at the time he signed the contract. That lack of experience led to a very low guarantee and the three team options that would have prevented Perez from reaching free agency for another four seasons. While acknowledging both the lack of need and the recognition of fairness, Rosenthal suggested six other players who might fit the same bill as Perez, although perhaps on a smaller scale given their larger guarantees: Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Rizzo, Jose Altuve, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner and Chris Archer.

On the whole, these types of extensions save massive amounts of money for teams, but we can take a look at the contracts Rosenthal discusses and compare them to Perez’s to see if they are actually close. The first few columns of the table below should be self-explanatory, but the last column, FA Surplus Value, might not be. To calculate the surplus value, I took current projections, applied standard aging curves, set the cost of a win at $8 million for this year along with 5% increases in years thereafter and compared the value of the projected production to the cost for free agent years only. For the players below, their arbitration salaries have also been at a discount, so if you want to include those values, feel free to add on another 20% or so (whichever number you feel like) to capture that discount as well.

Rosenthal did a very good job identifying the super-team-friendly contracts. Perez falls right in the middle of those contracts in terms of surplus value, but what makes his case different is the very low salary-level in relation to the other players — this, even if his options had been picked up. The top-four players on that list are massive bargains, but at least they will be paid around $10 million or more per year — double that of Perez. Altuve is in nearly the same boat as Perez in terms of salary, but he gave up just two years of free agency, which limits the surplus value.

Looking back through MLB Trade Rumors’ extension tracker, I identified players who were locked up to a second extension while still possessing multiple years on their first one. The idea: to find some sort of precedent for the Perez contract, or perhaps something closer to the situations of Sale, Bumgarner, Goldschmidt and Rizzo. Certain names come to mind immediately when considering players who’ve received a second extension while still playing on the first. Miguel Cabrera, for example. And Ryan Howard. These are classic cases of a team mistakenly extending players before they’d have to, but neither case is really similar to Perez’.

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Baseball has started, sort of, and it’s time to have a meetup. Don’t worry about the team projections, all of our teams are still in it, at least until April. Please come drink, rosterbate, and theorize with the following writers at OHSO Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, March 11th, at 6pm. Free appetizers for attendees!

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Baseball may have seemed to have solved the catcher concussion problem when it instituted new rules governing the play at the plate in 2014. Despite some hiccups, eliminating the play at the plate seems to eliminate the main source of player on player in-game violence — and the other, the play at second base, is currently under scrutiny. Despite the odd pitch to the head and outfielder into the wall, that should make baseball one of the safest sports for a young brain. The numbers, especially for catchers, provide hope.

But there is still one repetitive play that causes concussions regularly for catchers — and there might be a fix to that problem, too. A fix that seems to come with even fewer ramifications for the game.

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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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From what any of us can tell, the American League is going to be close, and maybe closer than ever. It wouldn’t appear that there are any great teams, and it wouldn’t appear that there are any bad teams, and my favorite thing about this kind of landscape is it means a whole season could conceivably be determined by the fate of one single player. One player greatly under-achieving could knock a given team out of the hunt. On the other side of things, one player greatly improving could push a given team into first place. The closer the pack, the less it could take to emerge. That’s the theory, anyhow.

The White Sox are one of those teams you can look at and imagine 90 wins or 90 losses. Last year’s version almost got to 90 losses, but then this year’s version promises to be better and deeper. And as you get to thinking about the White Sox’s upside, you get to thinking about Carlos Rodon, who’s going to slide into the rotation behind Chris Sale and Jose Quintana. It wouldn’t be a total shock if Rodon were to struggle. But then, if Rodon were to put his skills together, that could send Chicago to the playoffs. So Rodon should be what people like to call an “x-factor,” and in thinking about Rodon, I’ve come up with two other names. One name you can link to Rodon’s signature pitch, and one name you could maybe consider as Rodon’s future.

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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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Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday, I addressed the White Sox desperate need to bolster their rotation to be taken seriously as a contender, and suggested Yovani Gallardo as a sensible addition. The White Sox apparently agreed with me on the first count and rendered the second moot by agreeing to terms with Mat Latos just hours after the post went up.

The deal went down for one year and $3 million, a figure that jumps out as being essentially nothing in today’s free agency landscape. Especially so, when you consider what Latos was expected to receive:

Looking just at guaranteed dollars, it’s the fourth-cheapest contract of the offseason, relative to the crowd’s guess. The crowd expected Latos would earn $22 million this offseason, and what he actually got was $3 million.

Look beyond that, and Latos’ deal stands out even more. We all know about the funky Cespedes contract, and even though he got $57 million fewer guaranteed than expected, that’s largely offset by him actually getting a higher AAV. Iwakuma’s price tag dropped after failing a physical. Gordon got an equal AAV, just one fewer year. In terms of just AAV, Latos is the bargain of the offseason, so far, according to this one-track methodology. His AAV is $8 million less than the crowd predicted; no other free agent has had a gap larger than $4 million.

How did this gap come to be? Did the crowd wildly overestimate Latos’ value? Did the White Sox get a total steal?

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Let’s check in on the latest in Yovani Gallardo rumors:

• Jan. 22, @ChrisCotillo: Source: Barring the late entry of a mystery team, Yovani Gallardo will decide between Astros, Orioles, Rockies.
• Jan. 23, @harding_at_mlb: #Rockies GM downplays Gallardo talks
• Jan. 28, @ChrisCotillo: Fister to Astros means one less suitor for Gallardo. Orioles still thought to be involved, with Rockies on outskirts. No clear favorite.
• Feb. 4, @JonHeyman: orioles continue to have interest in Gallardo, and remain in contact
• Feb. 7, @Buster_ESPN: The Orioles are taking another look at Yovani Gallardo, writes Roch Kubatko

It took a while for any Gallardo talks to surface, but when they did, it was the Orioles, Rockies, and Astros at the forefront. Everyone agreed: those three were the lead suitors.

But the thought of a non-contending Rockies team forfeiting a draft pick for a pitcher entering his age-30 season seemed a bit peculiar, and then GM Jeff Bridich came out and said the talks were “overblown,” so people scratched the Rockies off the list. The Astros went and signed Doug Fister, and people scratched the Astros off the list. So on January 28, just the Orioles were left. On February 4, just the Orioles were left. And on February 7… just the Orioles were left.

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Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Chicago White Sox. In this companion piece, I look at that same Chicago 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. Tim Anderson, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection Through First Six Seasons: 6.0 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55

At the plate, Anderson’s 2015 at Double-A strongly resembled his 2014 at High-A. He struck out in over 20% in his plate appearances, walked in less than 5% and hit for an unremarkable amount of power. While he improved his walk rate to near-respectability — from 2% to 4% — he sacrificed a chunk of power in the process. Last year, however, he complemented his relatively empty .300 average with a boatload of steals, which speaks to the 22-year-old’s athleticism. Anderson’s undeveloped bat still gives KATOH some pause, but shortstops with top-notch speed don’t need to hit much to be productive.

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