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 Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
It isn’t sound practice merely to find the sum of all the WAR projections in the depth-chart image below, add those to the 48 or so wins which constitute a replacement-level team, and then regard the result as the club’s ZiPS win projection. That said, examining the forecasts for those players expected to begin the season on Minnesota’s opening-day roster, it’s difficult to conclude that this club is destined to win much more than 70 games.

Moderately heartbreaking is Joe Mauer’s very regular two-win projection. If it seems low, that’s not necessarily a novel sentiment. Multiple readers suggested last year, when ZiPS produced a 2.8 WAR figure for Mauer, that they’d take the over. It would have been a losing bet, that: even with a .342 BABIP, he recorded only a 106 wRC+. In the context of the first-base positional adjustment, that’s too little offense.

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There was once a statistical revolution that was supposedly about on-base percentage. Scott Hatteberg showed us the power of patience, right? In today’s league, though, it’s virtually impossible to make a living if the ability to walk is your only real skill.

The Twins just designated Chris Parmelee for assignment. He might not be a perfect comparable for Scott Hatteberg, but he’s close. Not a defensive asset anywhere but first, Parmelee also doesn’t have above-average power. So far so good.

Parmelee hasn’t shown great patience in the big leagues yet, but that’s complicated. He did have a 12.3% walk rate in the minors, and there have been grumbles in Minnesota that he was too passive as a hitter. Perhaps he’s been trying to be less patient in response to that pressure.

Parmelee himself admitted to me in May this year that he’s spent the last few years searching: “I was trying to find who I was as a hitter.” In the newest variant on his game, he’s been more aggressive. This year, he swung more than ever. He reached more than ever, too. “It might not be that perfect pitch that you were looking for, but it’s still a ball that you can put the barrel on and drive somewhere,” he said.

No matter. To date, Parmelee’s best skill to date has been his walk rate. He’s been just about league-average with the bat, but he’s been above-average with the patience. He *could* be a modern-day Hatteberg for the right team.

Except that it looks like, today, teams aren’t really interested in players that can walk but are having trouble adding value in any other way.

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Let’s talk about the Twins for a moment. No, you probably don’t want to talk about the Twins, I understand, but it’s Christmas Eve, and the eight or so of you who are unfortunate enough to be in an office right now will probably be happy to talk about something, I think. And the Twins, certainly, are something.

Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan took a look at projected 2015 team defenses, and within that piece was a list of teams that you wouldn’t really want to be included on:

Now, the three worst defensive teams, projected:

• Astros
• White Sox
• Twins

It’s difficult to dispute that from a Minnesota perspective, because while Jeff noted the obvious caveats of attempting to project defense, the 2014 Twins finished 29th in DRS, 24th in UZR/150, and 27th in Defense. One of the teams regularly behind them, Cleveland, will no longer have a left side of the infield that occasionally lined up as Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana. They’ll still be below-average, but they might not be a train wreck. The Twins? The Twins’ main non-pitching move this winter has been to import baseball’s worst regular defender from a year ago, Torii Hunter, and park him in right field.

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It was an exciting thing that Phil Hughes pulled off — just last season, he finished with the best-ever ratio of strikeouts to walks. It sounds good. It is good. Strikeouts are good! Walks are bad. (For pitchers.) You want to have a lot of the former and few of the latter. There’s no taking away Hughes’ accomplishment, now that the season’s complete. But then, we have come to understand that strikeouts minus walks is more meaningful than strikeouts over walks. Ratios can go crazy with little denominators. By K-BB%, Hughes didn’t set any records. He did, though, finish in between Madison Bumgarner and Jon Lester. And he established a career-best for himself.

The story, really, isn’t that Hughes became one of the best pitchers ever. It’s just that he became a much better pitcher, which is plenty. Down the stretch, it came to public attention that Hughes finished one out shy of triggering a contract bonus. There was thought that the Twins should pay Hughes the bonus anyway, since he did enough to earn it. Turns out Hughes declined an opportunity to pitch out of the bullpen to make his extra money. And now it doesn’t even matter, because the Twins have given Hughes an extension. He’s getting an extra three years and $42 million, including an extra $1.2 million in each of the next two years. In a sense, the Twins just signed Hughes to a five-year, $58-million contract.

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International baseball has been in the news often lately with the ongoing saga of Yoan Moncada (he’s in America now), the signing of Yasmany Tomas and yesterday’s news that Cuba-U.S. relations could be getting much better.  In recent news, at the yearly international scouting directors’ meeting at the Winter Meetings last week, sources tell me there was no talk about the recent controversial rule change and no talk about an international draft, as expected.

So much has been happening lately that you may have temporarily forgotten about last summer, when the Yankees obliterated the international amateur spending record (and recently added another prospect). If the early rumors and innuendo are any indication, the rest of baseball isn’t going to let the Yankees have the last word.

I already mentioned the Cubs as one of multiple teams expected to spend well past their bonus pool starting on July 2nd, 2015.  I had heard rumors of other clubs planning to get in the act when I wrote that, but the group keeps growing with each call I make, so I decided to survey the industry and see where we stand.  After surveying about a dozen international sources, here are the dozen clubs that scouts either are sure, pretty sure or at least very suspicious will be spending past their bonus pool, ranked in order of likelihood:

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The 2014 Winter Meetings went on at a fairly furious pace, all things considered. There was of course speculation as to what kind of moves would be done. Jon Lester was expected to sign — he did. There were rumors Matt Kemp could get traded — he was. The Red Sox were thought to be looking to alleviate their crowded outfield — this also happened. But a ton of other things happened. The White Sox tried to get better, the Reds had a mini fire sale, and the Dodgers turned the Winter Meetings into their personal Out of The Park game. I don’t really want to call it a tradeapalooza, but I want to call it a tradepocalypse even less, so I’ll stick with the former. And in the middle of it all was the Twins signing Ervin Santana to a four-year, $55 million contract. If one were skimming the pages of MLB Trade Rumors looking for the fallout of the Winter Meetings, the Santana headline would most likely cause them to shrug unemphatically. Because Ervin Santana, as a player, is an unemphatic shrug. And he’s probably the best that the Minnesota Twins can do. Read the rest of this entry »

Someday, an up-and-coming SABR scientist should try to measure the psychic effect that losing has on ballplayers. As everyone knows from watching “The Natural,” losing is a disease — as contagious as polio, syphilis and bubonic plague. Attacking one but infecting all, though some more than others. And no other major leaguer over the past decade, among hitters, lost as frequently as Josh Willingham did.

Willingham, 35, recently announced his retirement after playing nine full seasons and parts of two more. What a relief it must have been for him to finish as a part-timer with the Kansas City Royals, who made it to the seventh game of the World Series. Only once before had Willingham played significant time for winning team (with the Florida Marlins in 2008), and never had he played in the postseason. Cross it off the list, call it a career. And it was a good one, aside from all of the losing.

Overall, his teams went 503-644 in Willingham’s appearances, producing a .439 winning percentage, the worst among anyone who recorded at least 4,000 plate appearances since he broke into the majors in 2004. It usually wasn’t Willingham’s fault that his team lost; he was the best hitter on the Marlins as a rookie, after Miguel Cabrera, and he was better than Hanley Ramirez. He was the fourth-best hitter in ’07, the third-best in ’08 — and in ’09 and ’10 after being traded to the Washington Nationals. He was the best hitter on the Oakland Athletics in 2011, and the Minnesota Twins in 2012.  It’s just that Willingham’s teams lost anyway.

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The list of non-tenders is out. Time to dream!

It’s actually a very tough place to shop, even if there are a few names that seem attractive this year. Only about one in twelve non-tenders manages to put up a win of value the year after they were let loose. Generally, teams know best which players to keep, and which to jettison.

You’re not going to get 12 non-tenders in your camp in any given year, but there is a way to improve your odds. It’s simple, really: pick up a player that was actually above replacement the year before. If you do that, you double your chance of picking up a productive major leaguer. So let’s look at this year’s market through that lens first.

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Last night, the Twins signed outfielder Torii Hunter to a one-year, $10.5 million contract, presumably to end his career. Hunter will play right field in Minnesota, the same place where he made his debut as a center fielder in 1997.

The move really doesn’t mean much. The Twins had somewhere in the vicinity of $10-$20 million of available cap space, and they’re not a team that has a realistic chance to contend in 2015. It’s an understandable fit as a reunion tour signing, and that’s essentially what this is, as Dave Cameron noted in his instant analysis of the move last night.

The Twins signing Torii Hunter probably doesn’t need an entire post for itself. Hunter is 39 years old and he’s coming off a season in which he was worth just 0.3 WAR. He posted his worst wRC+ in nearly a decade, his worst OBP in over a decade, and his outfield defense appears to have declined to an almost unbearable level. Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating each agreed that Hunter’s defense in right field was worth -18 runs last season, both MLB-worsts in right. Of course, defensive metrics in one-year samples are noisy, and we can’t expect Hunter to be quite as bad in 2015, but it’s hard to imagine him being anything but a negative defender at this point in his career.

But again, this signing wasn’t so much about Torii Hunter’s production or the Twins winning in 2015. It was more about holding the fans over, and maybe drawing a few more back in, for 2016 – when things could actually start mattering again.
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The Arizona Fall League championship game (domestic professional baseball’s de facto funeral for the year) featured superlative performances from a number of prospects that may have piqued your curiosity. Here’s a look at how, after nearly two months of evaluating these players, I feel things will play out moving forward.

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