Hello! The baseball season just started. We’ve gone from one Sunday to a second Sunday, and we still aren’t allowed to do anything with statistics because nobody cares about them yet. While, in theory, spring training is supposed to get everyone ready for the year, the beginning feels like an extended spring training, a transition period following a transition period, and at this point the standings mean nothing. If you were to ask a player today about the wins and the losses, you’d get laughed out of the clubhouse. It doesn’t just feel like there’s a long way to go — it feels like there’s the whole way to go. Also, the Indians and White Sox are four games back of the Tigers and Royals.

It happened fast. It happened before anyone cared, but the White Sox have been swept by the Royals, and the Indians have been swept by the Tigers. Series conclude every few days, and standings change literally every day, but this is notable because the AL Central has four teams who’ve been thinking about the playoffs. The same four teams are still thinking about the playoffs, but as much as you want to say nothing matters yet, everything matters. This is my most- and least-favorite post to write every season.

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We’re halfway done, with the wests — both NL and the AL — and covered NL Central yesterday. Today, we tackle the AL’s version of the country’s heartland.

The Projected Standings

With no great teams and only one franchise not really trying to contend this year, this is one of the most up-for-grabs divisions in the sport. Our forecasts suggest that there are two tiers within those going for it, but I think things might be a bit more bunched up than the numbers above suggest. Let’s go team by team.

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It’s gettin’ to that time of year when folks tend to preview stuff ’round baseball. Our annual Positional Power Rankings will be coming to the site over the next couple weeks, you’ll surely see all sorts of divisional preview pieces pop up between now and Opening Day, and this right here is going to be a preview of team defenses.

We saw last year where a good defense can take a team. The Kansas City Royals were more than just a great defense, but it was evident, especially during the playoffs, how much an elite defense can mean to a ballclub. The same was true, but on the other end of the spectrum, for the Cleveland Indians. Our two advanced defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating — agreed that the defense in Cleveland was worth around -70 runs last season. In Kansas City, it was something like +50. That’s a 120-run difference! That’s about 12 wins! Those teams play in the same division! Move 12 wins around and the result is an entirely different season! Defense isn’t the biggest thing, but it’s a big thing. Let’s look ahead.

All the numbers used in this piece will come from UZR and DRS. For the team projections, I simply utilized our depth charts and did a little math. We’re going to take a look at the three best, the worst, the teams that got better, the teams that got worse, and then all the rest down at the bottom. For the upgrades/downgrades, I used the difference of standard deviations above or below the mean between last year’s results and this year’s projections.
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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Detroit Tigers. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Detroit’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Tigers’ system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Detroit system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays & Tigers

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects

I mentioned in some of the top 200 prospects content that this process inherently values the organizational approaches some teams have, while punishing others. The Tigers are a team that gets punished. The cutoff of a certain amount of big league playing time means that I’m ranking guys that Detroit sees as trade chips to help the big league team, whereas a team like Tampa Bay sees the farm as the only way they’ll be able to survive three years from now.

Of guys that would be on this list, the Tigers originally signed then traded RHP Jake Thompson 55 FV, Rangers), SS Willy Adames (50 FV, Rays), 2B Devon Travis (45+ FV, Blue Jays), RHP Corey Knebel (45+ FV, Brewers), RHP Jonathon Crawford (45 FV, Reds) and 2B Domingo Leyba (40+ FV, Diamondbacks), with White Sox RF Avisail Garcia, Rays LHP Drew Smyly and Reds SS Eugenio Suarez all recently traded and recently losing prospect status.

I point this out because the perception from casual fans via perennially low rankings of their farm system is that Detroit’s scouting and development people aren’t good. If the big league team’s strategy was to keep all their prospects and then add some here and there, they’d be somewhere around the middle of the pack in these rankings. Detroit has a clear type of player they like: big, physical power pitchers and up-the-middle type defenders with instincts and some feel to hit. Given that they don’t spend huge internationally but keep finding solid prospects and always draft in the back half of the first round, rarely with extra picks, I think Detroit’s system (for acquiring players) is underrated, even if the current prospect list is in the back third of the league, as usual.

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Maybe it was all a setup for the headline, but in Anthony Fenech’s piece about Justin Verlander and his effort to return to glory — titled “Tigers’ Verlander ‘way ahead of the curve’ early this spring” — the pitcher points to the current state of his curveball as a sign of early success.

“I’ve seen a pretty dramatic difference,” he said. “The curveball seems to be a lot better already than it was at any point last year.”

Catcher Bryan Holaday, who stood in for the final few pitches of the session, agreed, saying the spin was nice and tight.

Verlander notices the difference, especially in the break, from last year, when his breaking pitches, “Neither one of those pitches was good at all last year. They didn’t have the same bite.”

Much of the previous analysis of Verlander’s poor year focused on his fastball velocity and fading release points. And the pitcher himself referenced those factors a bit when, later in the piece, he admits that he was underweight due to last year’s offseason surgery on his core.

But this might be the first time we’ve heard about the curve missing tightness.

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We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we gave you a little bit of a tease, giving you a glimpse into the making of FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect List. This morning, however, we present the list in its entirety, including scouting grades and reports for every prospect rated as a 50 Future Value player currently in the minor leagues. As discussed in the linked introduction, some notable international players were not included on the list, but their respective statuses were discussed in yesterday’s post. If you haven’t read any of the prior prospect pieces here on the site, I’d highly encourage you to read the introduction, which explains all of the terms and grades used below.

Additionally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you towards our YouTube channel, which currently holds over 600 prospect videos, including all of the names near the top of this list. Players’ individual videos are linked in the profiles below as well.

And lastly, before we get to the list, one final reminder that a player’s placement in a specific order is less important than his placement within a Future Value tier. Numerical rankings can give a false impression of separation between players who are actually quite similar, and you shouldn’t get too worked up over the precise placement of players within each tier. The ranking provides some additional information, but players in each grouping should be seen as more or less equivalent prospects.

If you have any questions about the list, I’ll be chatting today at noon here on the site (EDIT: here’s the chat transcript), and you can find me on Twitter at @kileymcd.

Alright, that’s enough stalling. Let’s get to this.

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As I reported on twitter moments ago, MLB sent a memo to clubs detailing the new process for Cuban players to go from leaving the country to signing with an MLB team. The short version is that super prospect Yoan Moncada is eligible to sign now, after a maddening long delay.

For those new to this topic or if you just want a refresher, here’s a recap of my coverage of this Moncada saga from the start:

– October 3, 2014: Moncada is confirmed out of Cuba, but no one knows where he is.  We assume his whereabouts will become clear soon as he’s the most hyped prospect to leave the island in years. Here I first quote the common “teenage Puig that can play the infield and switch hit” comp and break down all the implications about who can sign him, who is likely to pony up the big bucks, game theory implications and more.

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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 Detroit Tigers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Oakland / San Francisco / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
While it might seem as though, at points during his MVP rivalry with Mike Trout, that this site’s authors made it their business to convince all of America about how Miguel Cabrera was a worthless trash heap of a ballplayer, that’s very clearly not the case. What he is, in reality, is one of the most talented hitters in baseball history. Indeed, among all qualified hitters ever, Cabrera has produced the 26th-best park-adjusted batting line (tied with Joe DiMaggio, for example). Even a couple years after Cabrera’s 30th birthday, ZiPS still regards him as an elite batsman.

One thing Cabrera wasn’t, really, was a talented defensive third baseman. Two years ago, for example, ZiPS projected Cabrera to save -6 runs (or concede +6 runs, as it were) at third base. Not excellent, that. By way of comparison, however, consider current third baseman Nick Castellanos’s projection at that same position: -12 runs saved (or +12 runs conceded, as it were). Even more not excellent, that. He’s forecast to produce an above-average batting line, but it would seem as though some manner of change — either moving off of, or steadily improving at, the position — is necessary.

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