Starlin Castro has spent a lot of his career being frustrating, and he’s spent a good chunk of it being disappointing, but a player can’t be either of those things unless he has a certain amount of ability. Fans have to like you before they can later be frustrated by you, and so Castro’s time in Chicago was a bit of a roller-coaster. His time in New York will also have its ups and downs, but in the earliest possible going, it’s been all gold stars. Castro has two homers and seven hits in 12 trips to the plate, so gone are the concerns about how he might adjust. Yankees fans haven’t been let down yet.

You know what time of year it is. This is when we make too much out of everything, because we’re just excited to have new data. By the end of the season, Castro’s slugging percentage is probably going to look more like .400 than its current 1.250. This much I can assure you, though: Castro is showing that he’s carried over his late-season adjustments from 2015. It got kind of lost, but Castro finished last year strong. Then he had a good spring training. Now he’s off to a hot start. Castro isn’t going to finish as the best hitter on the Yankees, I assume, but he’s a better hitter now than he was for a lot of last summer. Pictures are going to help with this.

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Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL).

This afternoon, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the New York Yankees. In this companion piece, I look at that same New York farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Yankees have the 5th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH, due in no small part to the system’s depth. As you can see below, the Yankees have a lot of prospects projected for one or two WAR.

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.

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The Yankees have enviable depth at multiple positions, though it’s their bullpen options that seem to continually be a strength for them each year. This particular group is full of many of them, to the point where it seems the Yankees have an affinity for pitchers with unique deliveries and arm actions. Besides Jorge Mateo being the consensus top prospect, there is a bit more risk in their collection of 50+ FV players than most organizations have, but they make up for any uncertainty with quantity of upside prospects from the next tiers. Perhaps the only real surprise ranking here is Domingo Acevedo taking the number two spot, though he seems to sit comfortably in the top 10 by most people’s standards. His combination of velocity, athleticism and control at a young age was too interesting to rank further down the list.

You’ll notice that many of the Yankees’ recent international signings are found in the Quick Hits section, with the exception of Wilkerman Garcia, Leonardo Molina and Hyo Jun Park. These three represent the prospects I feel have the best chance out of the gate to reach the major leagues, though that doesn’t mean they necessarily have the highest ceilings. Others like Dermis Garcia, Miguel Flames, Juan De Leon and Nelson Gomez all have sizable raw potential, but in terms of 50th percentile outcomes, they are a little too far away to count on just yet. Another year of professional competition will give us the information we need about their physical development and translation to skills.

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One of the things people enjoy about sports is the role they role they play in starting conversations and debates. People enjoy arguing, especially about trivial matters like “who was the best hitter of all time?” and “who’s the best shortstop in the game right now?” These exchanges satisfy one’s desire to engage in battles of wits without challenging someone’s moral character, which is what often happens when debates turn to more sensitive topics such as politics or religion.

Sports allows for fierce debate with extraordinary low stakes. Think about how much time we’ve spent arguing about the difference between Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera! While you might think those conversations were tremendously unproductive, I would submit that they provided many people with a confrontational, emotional, and intellectual outlet. We’re a species blessed with language and reason, but cursed with imperfections in both. Arguing about the performance of athletes allows us to exercise those muscles without inadvertently causing real damage to society.

In that realm, I would like to present a baseball question to which you have probably devoted almost no attention. If you could take the best attributes of baseball’s backup catchers and fuse them into a single, lovable backstop, what components would you choose and how valuable would the resulting Frankenstein Catcher be?

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Over the past few days you may have noticed about a billion pieces on Lonn Trost’s recent comments. In fact, I wrote one, too, and you’re reading it now. The difference is I’m less concerned about Trost and his clear disdain for the — let’s call them the “non-rich” — and more concerned about what this means for baseball as a whole.

But let’s back up a second. In case you’re not familiar with what I’m talking about, Lonn Trost is COO of the New York Yankees. Last week he was answering a question about the Yankees’ new ticket policy, a policy which is designed to do two things: first, force people who intended to purchase Yankees tickets by way of StubHub to use the Yankees after-market website instead, and second, make more money for the Yankees.

Of course, Trost couldn’t come out and say that. Nobody wants to hear how the New York Yankees are going to make more money off the sales of tickets they’d already sold once before. So, while attempting to justify the unjustifiable, Trost did what what most adults do. Namely, he lied. Or, if you’re being more charitable, he was disingenuous. But it wasn’t the lie (or the disingenuousness) that was particularly notable. What was notable was how Trost explained the reason for the new policy.

The problem below market at a certain point is that if you buy a ticket in a very premium location and pay a substantial amount of money. It’s not that we don’t want that fan to sell it, but that fan is sitting there having paid a substantial amount of money for their ticket and [a different] fan picks it up for a buck-and-a-half and sits there, and it frustrates the purchaser of the full amount. And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.

Did you catch that? Let’s cut out the fat and run it again.

And quite frankly, the fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location. So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.

Hello! That statement has been called elitist and vaguely racist by some and you sure won’t catch me blocking the way of anyone making such a claim. Part of the joy of sitting in a “very premium” seat at Yankee Stadium is apparently not having to sit next to a poor person, and having to do so would compromise the quality of the seat and the ticket and, wow, that’s a disgusting sentiment. It occurs to me, though, that Trost might not be the biggest problem here.

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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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In my regular Wednesday chat this week, this question popped up:

Interestingly, a few days before, I’d been thinking about the narrative of the Yankees heading into 2016, and how so much of it is being driven by their lack of free agent spending this winter. It’s almost historically unprecedented for the Yankees to sit out an entire free agent class, but this winter, the team decided to make their upgrades through the trade market instead, and thus have not signed a single player to a major league contract this off-season. With the Red Sox stocking up for another run, the Blue Jays likely to still be a force, and the Rays and Orioles doing enough to keep themselves around .500, the Yankees are in the unusual position of being something of an afterthought in the AL East.

Thus, we get questions like this one from Christian, asking for some hope that his team might contend in 2016. Well, fear not, Christian; not only do I think there are reasons to think the Yankees are legitimate contenders, I think they might actually be the most underrated team in baseball heading into the season.

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The Yankees have assembled one of the most intimidating bullpens imaginable. This is covering ground that’s been covered, but seriously, you’re not doing anything better with your time — think about this again. The Yankees have Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances. Last year they threw 212 innings, with 347 strikeouts and a 1.66 ERA. The year before, they did the same thing. It would be a luxury to have just one of these pitchers, and this feels like something off of a fantasy roster. If the Yankees keep this group together, it’s going to help the starting rotation, and it could be an unhittable daily force in the playoffs.

As I wrote about the Chapman trade last week, I discussed how this should only continue an organizational pattern. Last year’s Yankee bullpen was outstanding, with Justin Wilson in place of Chapman. The Yankees have gotten used to strong bullpens, with Joe Girardi proving himself a skilled high-leverage manager. I didn’t think too much about this a few days ago, but now that I’ve taken the time to look back, it’s been ages since the Yankees had unreliable relief. According to how they’ve actually performed, the Yankees haven’t had a below-average bullpen in two decades.

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Your immediate reaction to the Aroldis Chapman trade was right on. The Yankees have assembled something silly, a three-headed bullpen monster to rival any in the history of the game. On talent, Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances are three of the five or ten or so best relievers in baseball, and now if this plan comes together, one will hand the ball to the other, who will then in turn hand the ball to the other. While the 2016 Yankees aren’t going to feature a roster full of All-Stars, it’s going to feel like a pitching staff full of All-Stars in the most important moments, and that’s not going to be any fun for half the people watching.

There’s something important to be said, though. On talent, the 2016 Yankees bullpen should be better than the 2015 Yankees bullpen. Yet on performance, it’ll be hard for this coming year’s group to improve on the group that was. You’ve probably seen some of the numbers, like how the Yankees were 66-3 when leading after six, and 73-2 when leading after seven. Honestly, that probably already says enough, but we can make use of some of our own statistics. Whether you go superficial or analytical, last year’s bullpen almost always got the job done, when the job was important.

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A couple of days ago, news broke that the Yankees had traded for uber-reliever Aroldis Chapman. In exchange for Chapman’s services, the Bombers coughed up four prospects: Starting pitcher Rookie Davis, corner infielder Eric Jagielo, second baseman Tony Renda and reliever Caleb Cotham. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about this quartet.

Rookie Davis, RHP (Profile)
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 2.6 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 0.7 WAR

The Yankees took Davis in the 14th round out of high school in 2011, but he soon proved to be a steal at that spot. In 2013, he dominated Short-Season A-Ball with the help of a mid-90s fastball. He continued to establish himself in 2014 by posting a sub-4.00 FIP as a starter in Low-A.

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