Other clubs: Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Orioles, Red Sox.

The White Sox have seen their lowly regarded farm system weakened by the Todd Frazier deal, but they still have a few guys at the top who could be impact players. This system’s biggest strength is in its depth of depth pieces, including a lot of bullpen arms and bench players that still have some upside if things break right. Perhaps the most interesting quality is how unique some of their prospects are. Many are gifted athletes who seem to have atypical looks on the field, or just unique stories. Watch Tyler Danish on the mound and how his delivery works, with possibly surprising success, depending on who you ask. Or take Eddy Alvarez, who previously won a silver medal in speed skating before coming back to baseball.

Though I don’t think this system will churn out a bunch of surprise superstars, the scouting department has done a good job bringing in gifted yet undeveloped players in at the lower levels. Give their Rookie-level players a year to develop and we may have three or four of them high on this list next year.

I think you’ll find the top three players here to be the same three as most evaluators would say, though my order is a little different. As fun as Carson Fulmer is to watch, his delivery makes it harder to project the necessary improvements to reach his upside, so I actually think Spencer Adams and Tim Anderson have a brighter future. Adams is more potential than reality in some ways, but his athleticism and easy actions are too good not to see him fully progressing. It may be a year early for most to feel comfortable with Adams’ grades, but I’m going to trust the potential.

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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 Chicago White Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
White Sox batters produced the lowest collective WAR among all 30 teams in 2015, combining the worst park-adjusted offense in the majors (-108.1 runs below average overall) with also the worst defense (-60.3 runs below average). The result: a mere three wins above replacement level as a group.

That’s not to say there weren’t encouraging invidual contributions. Jose Abreu and Adam Eaton, for example, produced nearly eight wins between them. On the one hand, that’s a positive. On the other hand, what it reveals is that the rest of the roster provided less value than freely available talent might, in theory, supply. Gordon Beckham, Conor Gillaspie, and Mike Olt — who accounted for roughly two-thirds of the club’s third-base starts — recorded a -1.5 WAR between them. Emilio Bonifacio, Micah Johnson, and Carlos Sanchez — who made all but seven starts at second base — posted a collective -1.3 WAR. Those outputs quite possibly don’t represent the true talents of all those players, but they certainly had an adverse effect on Chicago’s win-loss record.

The advantage for a club which possesses glaring holes is that addressing those holes with merely serviceable replacements represents a considerable upgrade. If the newly acquired tandem of Todd Frazier (624 PA, 3.7 zWAR) and Brett Lawrie (509 PA, 1.8 zWAR) approximate their projections in 2016, they’ll conspire to produce a roughly eight-win improvement by themselves.

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A pitcher, standing on the mound, peers in toward his catcher for a signal. It’s the first pitch of an at-bat. The catcher puts down a couple fingers, and the pitcher shakes him off once. He shakes him off twice. The pair agree on a pitch. The pitcher starts his windup, rears back, and fires. Miss. Ball one. A league-average batter now has a 37% chance of reaching base in this at-bat, just on the pitcher misfiring on his first offering alone. In an alternate universe, where the pitcher throws a strike, the batter’s chances of reaching are reduced to just 26%. Over the course of a full-length season, two identical batters with equal true-talent levels could bat 600 times each, and batter A, who starts out every at-bat with a ball, would reach 66 more times than batter B, who starts out every at-bat with a strike, the seperation being due entirely to the difference in count leverage.

We know count leverage is important, but its omnipresence makes it easy to undersell its magnitude. Someone’s always got the edge. The battle is winning it back. In the same vein, the other side of the battle is not losing it once you have it.

There’s no worse spot for a hitter to be than an 0-2 count. After falling behind 0-2, the league hit just .171 last year, with a .200 on-base percentage. It’s not any easier against Chris Sale. From a batter’s point of view, the words “easy” “against” and “Chris Sale” don’t mix well. Against Sale last year, batters were held to a .155/.169/.243 line after falling behind 0-2. Sale found himself with the advantage of an 0-2 count plenty of times — 231, to be exact. More than a quarter of Sale’s at-bats went directly to an 0-2 count. And from there, things only got worse for the hitter. Of those 231 counts that went straight to 0-2, Sale recorded a strikeout in 132 of them, with exactly one walk.

Only one time last season did Chris Sale lose an 0-2 count to a walk. Julio Teheran lost just one as well, but in 73 fewer at-bats. And, sure, what David Price did is probably every bit as impressive as Sale, except singularity is fascinating. And fascinations are worth exploring.

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Look at the rumors for the White Sox. They concern a certain part of the team. Though the club is ostensibly starting Melky Cabrera, Adam Eaton, and Avisail Garcia in the outfield, they’re supposedly looking for another outfielder now. Given their respective projections, that makes things particularly awkward for Avisail Garcia.

That’s not really the only thing that’s unsettling about Garcia’s situation.

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Generally, the bigger and longer the deal, the riskier. It doesn’t follow, of course, that the opposite makes the shortest, smallest deal the best, but it does make it less risky. And, when it comes to a guy like Nate Jones, who the White Sox just signed to an interesting deal, risk is the key word. The particulars of the deal, though, reduced the risk to the team, while also adding reward.

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I detected a real sense of impatience as far as the Dodgers were concerned. Not impatience on the part of the Dodgers — rather, impatience on the part of people observing the Dodgers. Not that they’d been totally quiet, but they had been inactive. Now, Wednesday, the Dodgers have gotten themselves involved in a doozy. It’s a three-way trade, with the best player neither leaving the Dodgers, nor joining them. Instead, the Dodgers helped facilitate the Reds sending a quality third baseman to the White Sox. The full player breakdown:

White Sox get:

• Todd Frazier

White Sox lose:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

—

Reds get:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Reds lose:

• Todd Frazier

—

Dodgers get:

• Francelis Montas
• Trayce Thompson
• Micah Johnson

Dodgers lose:

• Jose Peraza
• Scott Schebler
• Brandon Dixon

Frazier to Chicago, three Chicago prospects to Los Angeles, three Los Angeles prospects to Cincinnati. It stands to reason the Dodgers had to get involved because the Reds and White Sox couldn’t find an easy match straight up. Implying the Reds are higher on, say, the Peraza centerpiece than they would’ve been on a Montas centerpiece. These things can be kind of complicated to analyze, but let’s go team by team.

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Though baseball’s Winter Meetings seem like the playground of the front office executive, there is one other baseball man who’s ubiquitous: the manager. Semi-required to attend media events and an annual luncheon, most of the sport’s managers descend on the meetings to make their mark.

For the most part, they field questions about next year’s lineup, and try to deflect queries about front-office moves. They’ll do a little reminiscing about last year, and a little looking forward to next year. It’s a bit of a dance, since most of the reporters are looking to find out how the roster is going to look on paper, and the person in front of them is mostly in charge of putting that roster on the field.

Still, it’s a great moment to get access to many managers at once. This past August, I asked a collection of players and writers how Bruce Bochy and Joe Maddon — managers with distinctly different approaches and pasts — could both find great success. I thought it would make sense to ask the managers gathered here about their craft, as well.

What has changed about managing? How are the demands on the modern manager different than they once were?

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When the top 100 prospects in the game were ranked by Baseball America during the summer of 2010, Brett Lawrie was 26 spots ahead of Mike Trout. Both received a large cup of coffee in the majors during 2011 – Lawrie produced 2.6 WAR in just 46 games, while Trout put up 0.7 WAR in 40 – and there was a lot of optimism that we were witnessing two stars in the making: these were the athletic, ultra-talented position players of the future for two franchises.

Four years have passed since those brief debuts, and we know the history of both players has been quite different: Trout has produced a stunning 37.8 WAR, establishing himself as a perennial candidate for best player in baseball, while Lawrie has produced 6.2 WAR in a series of injury-interrupted, slightly above average seasons.

Being compared to Trout is unfair for basically every player in the game, but the point is this: early success doesn’t always mean continued success, mostly because baseball is about how well you adjust, not necessarily how much raw talent you have. A lot can change in the course of four seasons, especially when we’re trying to evaluate young players.

Because of the content of the four years since his debut, we view Lawrie through a certain lens: he was a top prospect, but he’s not a top major-leaguer. He’s had his chance, the thinking goes, and this is what he’s done with it. Major-league baseball is a boiling hot cauldron into which young men are thrown, and they either develop sufficiently thick skin to handle the heat or they don’t. It’s been over four seasons, and this is who he is.

Something complicates that viewpoint, however, and it’s that Lawrie will have just turned 26 when Opening Day rolls around in 2016. It might seem like he’s been around a long time, but he’s still young, and youthful players who were once top prospects are given a longer leash to figure things out. Now, after two separate opportunities to put everything together, Lawrie is headed from Oakland to the south side of Chicago in return for two relief pitchers, Zack Erwin and J.B. Wendelken.

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Check out the MLB Trade Rumors page for Justin Upton, and you find something strange. Since a report on November 13 that the outfielder had been extended a qualifying offer, Upton has been invoked just three times there — in one case, with the Angels, merely to note that “nothing is happening” between Upton and the club. Los Angeles was merely engaged in “ongoing conversations” with Upton’s representatives. Whether those conversations are about a possible contract or fondue, no one knows. They’re having conversations.

Now check out the Ben Zobrist page. Even before signing last night with the Cubs, his name was ubiquitous across the site.

And that’s weird. One is 34 and was worth two wins last year. The other is 28 and was worth almost twice as much. You’d think the rumor count would be reversed.

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Last year was the worst year for shopping in the non-tender market since 2007. No player that was non-tendered after the 2014 season was worth even a win in 2015, which hasn’t happened since MLBTradeRumors started tracking non-tenders with their handy tool.

Before we consider it a trend, remember that the year before was the best year for non-tender shopping over the same time frame. Infielder Justin Turner netted the Dodgers three wins, oufielder Sam Fuld nearly did the same for the Rays, now-Cub Chris Coghlan was worth two wins, and catcher Michael McKenry was also nearly average.

In any case, looking over the past non-tender values, a few truths emerge. The best non-tender pickups were above replacement level the year before, for one. And, like Kelly Johnson, Willie Harris, Aaron Miles, and Jeff Keppinger before, they usually had some positional flexibility. Or at least positional value, in the case of the center fielders and catchers.

In that way, maybe last year did buck the trend to some extent. Kyle Blanks (0.8 WAR) and Justin Smoak (0.6 WAR) led the way, and they don’t offer much in positional flexibility or value. Still, last year’s above-replacement non-tenders also included Slade Heathcott (0.5) and Gordon Beckham (0.3).

So who will lead this year’s non-tender market?

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