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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At best, Aroldis Chapman is unstable. A manageable sort of loose cannon. At worst, he’s violent, a danger not only to himself but to others. There’s a lot to try to handle here — more than we want to have to handle when we’re dealing with baseball players and baseball trades. We don’t want to have to consider this stuff, but here we are, and it can’t be avoided. Aroldis Chapman has been traded to the Yankees, for Rookie Davis, Eric Jagielo, Caleb Cotham, and Tony Renda. Chapman would’ve been a Dodger by now, or maybe a member of the Red Sox, but for an off-field incident involving alleged violence and gunfire. Chapman wasn’t arrested, but he might still be suspended under MLB’s new domestic-violence policy. That part of this story is front and center. Were it not for the incident, Chapman wouldn’t be on the Yankees. Were it not for the incident, Chapman would’ve commanded a higher price.

I can’t tell you how you’re supposed to feel. I can’t tell you what Chapman did or didn’t do. At this point I bet even the parties involved couldn’t tell you exactly what Chapman did or didn’t do, given the memory’s tendency to warp. All that’s known is there was something ugly, and Chapman was in the middle of it, and the details caused some teams to back off. If you love the trade for the Yankees, that’s fine. If you don’t want to root for Chapman anymore, that’s fine. If you feel like it’s getting harder and harder to be a sports fan these days, that’s fine. The more we know our athletes, the more we know them as real people, and real people are complex, where sports are supposed to be simple. This isn’t what a lot of us signed up for.

Your job is to figure out how you feel. And how you want to feel, if it’s different. My job is to tell you about the baseball. I’m not qualified to do the other stuff. And here’s the reality of baseball: no team likes off-the-field concerns, or potential pending suspensions. Every team wants its 25 players to be saints. But character is only part of it, and when the talent level is high enough, teams will overlook everything else. Aroldis Chapman is one of the greatest per-inning pitchers on the planet. Of that there is zero question. There are questions about his character, but teams know this stuff blows over. And beyond that, you could say Chapman’s off-field problems created a market inefficiency. Just ask Brian Cashman:

“Given the circumstances that exist, the price point on the acquisition has been modified,”Cashman said. “We felt this was an opportunity to add a big arm to our bullpen.”

There you go. Sometimes executives are reluctant to share the whole truth. Cashman is more of a straight shooter, and that excerpt tells you everything. Chapman’s got some troubles. Those troubles scared off other teams. And that made it appealing for the Yankees to strike. As far as roster management is concerned, Chapman’s incident is practically a good thing. Value value value. Below, I’m going to write more about baseball. After all, there’s a transaction to analyze, and I have a job to do. Read, or don’t. I’m not here to judge you or anybody. I’m here to judge statistics, and Chapman has some awesome statistics.

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At around 4:15 AM this past Sunday morning, I was out getting some pizza with friends, when none other than Alex Rodriguez walked through the door. Like every drunken idiot at Joe’s Pizza that night, I put forth my best effort to initiate an interaction with him, but he paid me no attention. After multiple failed attempts, I enlisted my girlfriend to approach him and ask if he’d take a photo with me on his way out. I told her to say I was with FanGraphs, hoping that would somehow help.

Through some combination of my girlfriend’s attractiveness and the FanGraphs brand, he agreed to take the photo. The end result was the following photo of me, Alex Rodriguez and Alex Rodriguez’s 80-grade pecs. In our starstruck haste, we promised I’d write an article about him. That’s one of the reasons I’m telling you this story. However, since I’m undeniably certain he won’t be checking, it’s more that I wanted an excuse to put this photo on the internet.

Those first two paragraphs explain why I’m writing about A-Rod, though it’s not as though one really needs an excuse to write about A-Rod. He’s arguably the best player many of us have ever seen, and he remains a productive one even as he embarks into his 40s.

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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 New York Yankees. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Cincinnati / Kansas City / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
However one would characterize the precise opposite of a stars-and-scrub approach to roster construction, this is what the Yankees appear to have employed in collecting their present group of talent. Eight of the club’s nine likely starters are projected to record a WAR figure somewhere between 1.5 and 3.1, from Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira on the low end (largely due to a less-than-full complement of plate appearances) to Brian McCann on the high. Wildly average, is perhaps the best description.

It will be interesting to see how Brian Cashman, Joe Girardi, et al. address what does appear to be the team’s one positional weakness — namely, right field. Dan Szymborski’s computer is pessimistic about the 39-year-old Carlos Beltran, projecting him not only for a roughly league-average batting line but also negative defensive-runs mark. That said, the club does have some internal options immediately available: the recently acquired Aaron Hicks and also Rob Refsnyder (who has considerable experience in right field) also receive forecasts in the league-average range.

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Brian Cashman wants the Yankees to get younger. Did you know that Starlin Castro is only 25 years old?

Somewhat lost in the shuffle of last night’s winter meetings madness was the trade that sent Castro to the Yankees in exchange for right-hander Adam Warren and utility man Brendan Ryan, mere minutes after Castro had been displaced in Chicago by the Cubs’ signing of Ben Zobrist.

Castro, it seems, developed something of a bad rap in Chicago, and the writing of his departure had been on the wall for some time. It’s easy to forget that Castro is still just 25, though, and for a 25-year-old, he’s accomplished quite a bit. For instance, Castro already has nearly 1,000 hits! Getting to 3,000 essentially makes you a lock for the Hall of Fame, and by age 25, Castro is already one-third of the way there. Through his age-25 season, Castro has accumulated more hits than all but 20 players in baseball history. Of those 20 players, 14 are Hall of Famers, and the other is Alex Rodriguez. Of course, I don’t at all mean to insinuate Castro will achieve 3,000 hits or make the Hall of Fame, but players who a) debut young enough and b) perform at a good enough level to continue to receive playing time generally go on to have rather successful careers.

Anyway, that’s just an anecdote about Starlin Castro that I happen to enjoy. What actually matters is that the Yankees felt an upgrade at second base over Dustin Ackley and Rob Refsnyder was in order, and that the Cubs had a young second baseman to spare. This is how trades come together.

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You’re forgiven if you don’t much care about Wednesday’s swap of Aaron Hicks for JR Murphy. Maybe you’re not a fan of the Twins or the Yankees. Maybe you’re not a fan of baseball at all, and you somehow wound up here by accident. Or maybe you are a fan of the Twins or the Yankees, but you recognize this as a trade featuring two players with less than 2 combined WAR over more than 1,200 plate appearances. Hicks has been probably the more hyped of the two, but Murphy is the younger of the two, and he seems like a backup. This isn’t on the level of Brad Miller and Nate Karns, and even that wasn’t on the level of something truly big.

These are the moves we have available to discuss, though, and if you want to speak generally, every professional baseball player has a compelling story. They’re all tremendously talented, and they’ve all dreamed of big-league success. If you want to speak specifically, Hicks is interesting, and I’d rate his level of interest above-average. He’s a former top prospect who’s trying to recover from initial struggles, and the most recent year saw him take a step forward. As far as this trade is concerned, it’s important to understand 2015 Aaron Hicks, and what follows are three keys to fully grasping the Hicks campaign. What he was in 2014, he wasn’t this summer.

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While it’s not going down as any kind of blockbuster, the Twins and Yankees struck a deal today, with Minnesota sending outfielder Aaron Hicks to the Yankees for catcher JR Murphy.

Hicks, a former highly though of prospect, finally showed some signs of life in 2015, putting up +1.5 WAR in 97 games after getting called back up from Triple-A. The improvement primarily came from his ability to avoid strikeouts, which looks to be potentially caused by a new-found willingness to swing at pitches in the strike zone; his in-zone swing rate jumped to 66%, significantly higher than it had been in his first two runs through the big leagues. With enough power to not just be a slap hitter and a good enough eye to draw some walks, Hicks profiles as something like a league average hitter going forward; Steamer projects him for a 99 wRC+ in 2016.

With some baserunning value and decent enough defense in center field, that makes Hicks a potentially interesting piece. In fact, if you look at the Steamer600 projections, where playing time is equalized for all players, you’ll note that Hicks looks like the kind of outfielder the Yankees have shown affinity for.

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Since we don’t have much more than velocity readings from Japan, it can be difficult to rely on anything but scouting reports when evaluating pitchers coming over from Nippon Professional Baseball. And now that 27-year-old Kenta Maeda is once again rumored to be coming to America through the posting system, we’re once again left wondering how to place him in context.

We have his Japanese strikeout and walk rates, which we can compare to recent postings to find comparable countrymen. We also have his velocity readings and a general sense of the quality of his pitches that we can use to compare him to pitchers beyond just ones that have come from Japan. We even have one game of PITCHf/x data to help us look at the movement of his pitches.

And the few comparable players we produce might be the best we can do from out here in the public sphere.

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In a way, it felt like the Yankees were lifeless. Few fans expressed surprise when the team was ultimately shut out, given the way the offense had gone of late. The season is over, but it’s over by a narrower margin than it might seem. The Astros scored their first two runs with two swings, and the third scored on what could be best described as an accident. Neither team on Tuesday was dominant, and you can only wonder how it might’ve gone had the Yankees gotten another break or two. That’s the sort of thinking that gets people talking about the strike zone.

It was a story during the game, and it remained a story after the fact. Here’s a post by Dave on the matter. Perception was that Astros pitchers worked with a more favorable zone than Yankees pitchers did, and while a few pitches here and there didn’t make all of the difference, they certainly could’ve made some difference. Based on the evidence, it does indeed look like the Astros benefited more. A quick glance at the Brooks Baseball zone charts shows me the Astros benefiting by six or seven strikes, comparatively speaking. That’s a big enough margin to notice, and it deserves an explanation. Those of you in favor of an automated strike zone might well want to just skip the rest of this.

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Carlos Beltran’s season ended last night in the same way it’s ended in each of the last 18 seasons he’s spent time playing Major League Baseball: without a championship. Beltran, one of the greatest postseason hitters of all time, with 16 home runs and a 192 wRC+ in 223 plate appearances, did what little he could against Dallas Keuchel, producing one of the three New York Yankees hits. Beltran, along with Adrian Beltre, are reminders that no matter how great a player is on the field, even in an age of great parity and multiple playoff berths, a World Series championship is far from certainty.

Beltran has had a Hall of Fame-caliber career on and off the field. With just eight more home runs, he will become the fifth player in MLB history to record at least 400 home runs and 300 steals (Barry Bonds, Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez, Andre Dawson). His 66 wins above replacement sit comfortably among the top 100 position players of all time. He has used his wealth and fame to start a baseball academy in his native Puerto Rico that has already produced more than 10 MLB draft picks even as Beltran himself continues to produce on the field. After a disappointing 2014 season and disappointing start to 2015 that had this author worried he was finished, Beltran hit .295/.357/.505 with a wRC+ of 134 following the month of April and added a few more WAR to his career ledger.

While Beltran’s exit is disappointing for those hoping he wins a ring before he retires, he’s not even the most accomplished player in this postseason without a title. Beltre debuted in 1998 just like Carlos Beltran and, over the last 18 seasons, has accumulated more than 10,000 plate appearances, coming close in 2011 to a World Series title but never getting over the hump. Among active players, only Alex Rodriguez has stepped to the plate more times than Beltre. As for performance, no active player has been more accomplished than Beltre without winning a title.

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