One of the most celebrated episodes of The Simpsons involves local oligarch Montgomery Burns luring professional ballplayers to Springfield so that his company baseball team can win. Homer at the Bat is the story of how these ballplayers relegate Homer Simpson and his best friends to the bench, before all being unable to play for various comedic reasons. One of those players is Don Mattingly, who quickly falls into a hair-related row with Mr. Burns, a parody of his real-life benching by Yankees manager Stump Merrill. The exchange pokes some well-earned fun at New York’s hatred of hair.

The Yankees, as you probably know, have a pretty stringent (most of the time) policy when it comes to hair. No facial hair below the lip, no sideburns, no hair that’s long enough to fall below your collar. It’s meant to make the Yankees look clean-cut, or something, while still allowing for Thurman Munson-esque bushy mustaches. Of course, we’ve seen guys like Andy Pettitte and CC Sabathia sporting some pretty serious stubble at times, but they’re veterans and they’ve earned a little flexibility, one would guess.

This brings us to young Clint Frazier, the fire-maned bat-speed-maven prospect the Yankees acquired in the Andrew Miller trade. Frazier is one of the better prospects in baseball, and he was known just as much for his long red locks as he was for destroying baseballs like they said something about his mother. He certainly wouldn’t be welcome on Mr. Burns’ team with that flow. His acquisition by the Yankees presented an obvious issue to the way he chose to wear his hair, and now things have come to a literal head: Frazier’s hair is gone.

“Distraction” was the word used to describe it. It’s hard to imagine that Frazier’s hair itself was the distraction as much as the media’s questions about whether or not he’d be allowed to keep. Sure, it may have generated questions of “Well, why can’t I wear my hair that way?” but it’s also a matter of the Yankees’ long-standing policy being tested by a rising star — and manager Joe Girardi (and Frazier himself, probably) getting tired of being asked questions about it.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the New York Yankees farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .270/.354/.421 in 2016.

Scouting Report
When I first saw Gleyber Torres shortly after I moved to Arizona during the summer of 2014, I thought he was a nice little middle-infield prospect with a good feel to hit and a chance to stay at short. I also thought the offense might not profile to another position. Two years later, Torres has already grown into more raw power than I initially projected (by a full grade) while also remaining potentially viable at short. He has become one of baseball’s best prospects.

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Perhaps no player in Florida is the object of greater expectations this spring than Gary Sanchez.

Consider: in the fantasy baseball world, only Buster Posey is being drafted earlier at catcher. Generally conservative projection systems forecast that Sanchez will be a star this season. ZiPS pegs Sanchez for 27 homers a 112 wRC+ and a 3.4 WAR season. PECOTA’s 70th percentile outlook has Sanchez recording 33 homers, a .504 slugging mark, and 4.8 wins. And the Fans’ average crowdsourced projection for Sanchez is a .274/.344/.488 slash line and 5.4 WAR season. The Fans believe, in other words, that Sanchez and Bryce Harper are going to produce similar value this season.

Last week, ESPN ran a poll asking respondents to guess how many home runs Sanchez will hit in 2017. Fewer than 10 home runs? That option received 1% of votes. How about 10 to 20 homers — i.e. the range within which he’s resided over each of his first five professional seasons in the minors? That seems like a reasonable wager, right? Only 4% agreed.

The most popular range was 21-30 homers, receiving 44% of votes. Forty-one percent predicted he will slug between 31-40 homers, and 10% think he will hit more than 40.

There’s much to like about Sanchez. This is a player with pedigree, who was regraded as the top catcher in the 2009 international class, and perhaps the second-best bat in that class after Miguel Sano.

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There are always so many spring-training home runs. Generally speaking, there’s no reason for you to care about spring-training home runs. You might consider caring about this spring-training home run.

The stakes almost couldn’t be lower. The bases were empty in the bottom of the fifth of a game in the last week of February. Had the exhibition not been televised, that home run would live only in Twitter descriptions. But that’s a video of Aaron Judge going really, spectacularly deep, and that video immediately made the usual rounds. As spring training goes, that was headline news.

Judge, right now, is a 24-year-old with 95 big-league plate appearances, and a .608 big-league OPS. When he did come to bat for the Yankees, he struck out close to half of the time, so in that sense he is completely unproven. Yet there’s this one thing he doesn’t have to prove anymore. Aaron Judge doesn’t just make regular contact. When he makes contact — if he makes contact — it’s easy to see why the comparisons to Giancarlo Stanton are no exaggeration.

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Dellin Betances made medium-level news a week ago when he lost his arbitration case. He’d been asking for $5 million — less, for example, than Trevor Rosenthal had made in his first crack at arbitration the season before. The Yankees, meanwhile, submitted a $3 million figure. The case went to arbitration, and the Yankees won. Randy Levine then took the medium-sized news and turned into big news by acting like a fool. While the $2 million difference might not seem like a big deal for Betances when he’s still guaranteed to receive $3 million, the affect on Betances’ finances in the coming years will be significantly greater.

Arbitration isn’t exactly the simplest of systems. Teams submit blind amounts, and if the parties can’t agree on a deal beforehand, they go to hearing. The FanGraphs glossary explains the process in slightly more detail, but if the player and team go to hearing, the arbitration panel decides on either the team’s figure or the player’s figure, with no option to choose a number in between. This makes the arbitration a winner-take-all scenario. If arbitrators could choose a number in the middle, settlements would be even more likely, simplifying the process and lead to far less debate. They can’t, though, and that means that arbitration decisions have a significant impact.

Also relevant is how service time fits into the process. Players’ salaries gradually increase based on service time, rendering the previous season’s salary quite relevant, as it represents the starting point for a raise. A few different researchers have gone through and figured out exactly how much salaries increase during arbitration. (Here’s a good one, for example.) As a general rule, though, it comes to something like a 50% increase in salary every year. Small differences, especially early in the arbitration process, compound to make bigger differences over time.

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Throughout much of the offseason in this space, we’ve been taking a look at hitter contact quality, using 2016 granular exit-speed and launch-angle data as our guide. We’re down to the last two installments, in which some non-qualifying hitters from both leagues will be reviewed.

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The Yankees were trying last year, as silly as that may have been. They lacked the rotation muscle or offensive firepower to truly compete, but damn if they didn’t have a bullpen. That bullpen, combined with a largely mediocre roster, kept them just within spitting distance of relevancy until the very end. Even after trading Carlos Beltran, Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Ivan Nova, the Yankees still managed to hang around and win 84 games.

They didn’t make the playoffs, of course. They did make Gary Sanchez into a national sensation, and they did bring Tyler Clippard and Adam Warren back into the fold for this year’s bullpen. Chapman came back, and then they signed two sluggers (Chris Carter and Matt Holliday) to extremely tradable one-year deals. The Yankees are the Yankees, so they brought back their well-known closer and his 100 mph fastball. They need to have star power at all times and must, at least, give the appearance of trying to compete. Those are the expectations that come with being the Yankees and having an owner named Steinbrenner. According to reports, they came very close to buying instead of selling last year.

An inspection of the team’s roster tells a different story. Last year’s team was brimming with veterans. It was a poor man’s win-now team built around the bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, and hope. This year, it’s built around a weaker bullpen, Masahiro Tanaka, whatever’s left in Holliday’s bat, and hope that Sanchez can continue to terrorize opposing pitchers while Greg Bird immediately rebounds to 2015 form. That’s all while having an even weaker rotation than last year.

It’s probably not going to happen. Our projections have the Yankees finishing at .500 and tied for last place, and PECOTA foresees an ever-so-slightly better 82-80 finish. Basically, the Yankees appear to be the very definition of mediocre right now. They can try to sell fans on the idea that they’re going to be competitive, and in a way that’s sort of true. The team probably won’t be a total pushover, and if a few things here and there fall the right way, maybe they’re once again on the precipice of being interesting at midsummer’s time. New York would need their many young and relatively untested players all to hit the ground running if they really want to make the playoffs, and they’ll likely need a firecracker of a debut from Clint Frazier, too.

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In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

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Here are some undeniable facts.

1. Dellin Betances was the third-best reliever in baseball by WAR last year.
2. He has the third-best strikeout rate, all-time, among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.
3. He has 22 career saves, with 12 of them coming last year.

Betances, eligible for arbitration for the first time, filed for a $5 million salary this winter; the Yankees countered at $3 million. This was the second largest gap for any player that got to the filing stage this year, only $100,000 behind the $2.1 million difference that Drew Pomeranz ($5.7M request) had with the Red Sox ($3.6M offer), and unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees decided to not split the difference and instead head to a hearing.

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Pitchers need to get used to a different ball when they reach the big leagues. The variance is slight, but it is nonetheless noticeable. That was the opinion of four pitchers to whom I spoke, and facts back up their feelings.

According to a source within Major League Baseball:

• The MLB ball is made in Costa Rica, and the MiLB ball is made in China.
• The MLB balls cost more.
• There are some differences in the materials, such as the kind of leather.
• Tests are conducted, and the performance of the balls are in line with one another. Even so, major-league pitchers on rehab assignment are allowed to use MLB balls during their minor-league outings.

That last bullet point seems especially telling. Given the availability of that option, there is clearly a difference.

Here is what the handful of hurlers — all of whom pitched in both MLB and Triple-A last season — told me in mid September. Along with the physical feel of the spheroid, pitch movement and the carry of fly balls were also addressed.

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On the Construction and Feel of the Ball

Ben Heller: “It seems like it’s a bit tighter in the big leagues. And the ball is slicker, too. The way they rub it down here makes it a little slicker in your hand, so I find myself trying to get a little moisture to counteract that.”

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