Look, it would be strange if the Rockies didn’t have a weird offseason, right? It’s the Rockies. Weird has been the modus operandi with this franchise for all of recent memory. Even their run to the World Series was unexpected and strange and involved Matt Holliday perhaps not really touching home plate at one crucial point. If the Rockies went out and made a bunch of coherent moves, it might be cause for concern.

Anyways, after signing Ian Desmond to play first base and throwing a lot of money at perfectly pedestrian lefty reliever Mike Dunn, Colorado is bringing in right-hander Greg Holland, because why not? As you likely know, Holland is good at baseball. He was the closer for the Royals during their run of success, and when he was healthy, he was excellent. Holland is the owner of a career 2.35 DRA and has struck out just over a quarter of all the batters he’s faced. When he was healthy, he was one of the best in the business.

“When he was healthy” is the important phrase here. Holland missed all of last year and part of 2015 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. This makes him going to Colorado interesting, because Coors Field is not exactly the first place that comes to mind when one thinks “rebound.” Yet here Holland goes, to ply his craft for the Rockies. He’s heading there on a one-year deal, per Jeff Passan, with a vesting option for a second year. Holland will make  $7 million this year, and could potentially earn as much as $14 million through incentives. The vesting option will presumably depend either on raw innings pitched or the number of games Holland finishes.

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At long last, the Dodgers found a solution to their hole at second base, acquiring second baseman Logan Forsythe from the Rays on Monday night in exchange for top pitching prospect Jose De Leon. This came after months of rumors around a trade involving De Leon and Brian Dozier. The Dodgers had a surplus of starting pitchers and an opening at second, so it was only a matter of time before they dealt the unproven De Leon.

De Leon’s first crack at the big leagues — a four-start cameo in September — didn’t go quite as well as many had hoped. But he breezed through the minors over the last two years. He broke out in a big way in 2015, striking out an absurd 35% of opposing hitters between High-A and Double-A while walking just 8%. That performance made him a consensus top-30 prospect the following winter.

De Leon battled injuries in the first half of 2016, but began dominating again once he returned to the field. In 16 starts at the Triple-A level, he once again posted a strikeout rate well over 30%, along with solid walk and home-run numbers. De Leon proved himself at the highest level of the minors at the tender age of 23. Pitchers who meet that standard often go on to have success in the majors, especially when they miss bats as prolifically as De Leon did.

De leon grades out exceptionally well by my KATOH system. It projects him for 8.1 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method (KATOH) and also 10.1 WAR by the method that integrates Baseball America’s rankings (KATOH+). He’s the 13th-highest-ranking prospect by KATOH+ and the third-highest-ranking pitcher.

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Spring training has gotten surprisingly close, and — in terms of significant activity — the offseason is mostly complete. Just about every team around has a pretty good idea what the opening-day roster is going to look like, which means we’re coming up on projection season. Now, you could argue it’s always projection season, at least here on FanGraphs, but the team projections should, in theory, be better than they’ve been all winter. So let’s work with that.

Right now, all we have available is Steamer. We’re still a little while away from ZiPS getting folded in. But Steamer isn’t stupid, so, looking at that, we see the following teams projected to bring up the MLB rear: the Padres (66 wins), the Brewers (67 wins), and the Reds (69 wins). No one else is projected right now for a win total in the 60s, and while the White Sox would end up down there if they sold Jose Quintana, that hasn’t yet happened, so we shouldn’t assume anything.

You could argue the three worst teams are on the right tracks. All of them are openly rebuilding, and none of them think they’re going to win in 2017. Keith Law just ranked the Padres’ farm system No. 3 in the game. He ranked the Brewers at No. 6, and he ranked the Reds at No. 8. I don’t think many people thought the Reds would come in so high! There they are, though. Lots to hope for in the future.

But what about the near-term future? How good could these teams be in the year just ahead? None of them plan to win, but, miracles happen. To get to the point: I consulted my spreadsheet of team projections going back to 2005. That’s 12 years, and over that span, I found 26 teams projected to win no more than 70 games. Here’s a big (sortable) table of how all those teams did:

On average, the teams were projected to win 68 games. On average, they actually won 68 games, with an average BaseRuns win total of 68. Pretty good, all in all, by which I mean, pretty bad. The medians are also in agreement.

Of note: The worst projected team was even worse than expected. Of greater note, though, is that three of these 26 teams finished over .500. That’s about a 12% success rate, if that means anything to you. The 2012 Orioles are the greatest success story included, because they outdid their projected win total by an unbelievable 23. They made the playoffs! Their win totals leading up to the season in question: 69, 66, 64, 68, 69, 70. Between 2007 – 2011, no team in the American League won fewer games than the Orioles. Between 2012 – 2016, no team in the American League has won more games than the Orioles. That year in 2012 was when the whole story of the organization was flipped on its head.

The 2010 Blue Jays were only a little outdone. They beat their projection by 20 wins, and just looking at BaseRuns, they finished better than the 2012 Orioles. Those Jays were thought to be somewhat rebuilding, after ridding themselves of J.P. Ricciardi, and no team would expect to win after trading away Roy Halladay. The Jays played just one month that year with a sub-.500 record.

And then you’ve got the 2008 Marlins, before they decided to identify just with Miami. What the 2008 projections knew was that, in December 2007, the Marlins traded Miguel Cabrera to the Tigers. But the projections didn’t think the run prevention would improve by 124. It wasn’t a playoff season, but it was a hell of a lot better than it could’ve been.

In all, 26 projected bad teams. Of those, 23 were at least mostly bad. Odds are, the Padres, Brewers, and Reds will be bad, too. But let’s just say, for simplicity, there’s a 3-in-26 chance for each given team to do better than .500. It would follow there’s about a 30% shot for at least one of these teams to do better than .500. Wouldn’t that be something? I’ll pick the Brewers, and live with it.

How good is Kevin Kiermaier, defensively? Kevin Kiermaier is this good, defensively: Since 2003, 148 different players have played center field for at least 1,000 innings. Kiermaier leads all of them, so far, in UZR per 150 games. In case you’d like a second source, Kiermaier also leads all of them in DRS per 150 games. DRS actually likes him even more than UZR does. Obviously, because Kiermaier isn’t yet 27, we haven’t seen his decline phase. At some point, he will become a worse defender, because at some point, he will wake up and be a 75-year-old man. But Kiermaier is like an outfield Andrelton Simmons, except that, oh, by the way, Kiermaier can also hit a little.

It’s fun to examine the great ones. It’s fun to examine when the great ones are great, and sometimes it’s even more fun to examine when the great ones are not great. So I rolled over to Baseball Savant to check out Kiermaier’s plot of base hits allowed. This is a new feature, and an awesome one, and here’s what shows up for Kiermaier’s 2016:

By hang time and distance, pretty much everything here is some variety of a difficult play. Or, for many, an impossible play! There’s only one missed play that counts as either routine or easy, and you see it there within the red circle. Curious, I asked Daren Willman if he could tell me when that play occurred. He gave me the information I needed. What catch did Kevin Kiermaier miss? We rewind to early August.

The ball hung up for more than six seconds. That’s a lot of time, and it allowed Kiermaier to cover more than 100 feet of ground. Here’s a screenshot of right around where Kiermaier started, with a dot to indicate where the ball bounced off the fence.

And, the fateful moment, or thereabouts:

There’s a twist here, see. This shows up as a missed play for Kiermaier, but it’s not entirely clear this was Kiermaier’s ball to catch. Certainly, that much wasn’t clear to left fielder Mikie Mahtook, who mis-everythinged his leap. Kiermaier was right there, and it looked like he had a shot, but at the last instant, he held up, with Mahtook taking to the air. What we can’t tell from the broadcast or from the replays is whether either player called off the other. What we can tell is that Mahtook took charge. In most cases, an outfielder here will defer to the guy playing center. He tends to be the defensive captain of the outfield, so to speak. Mahtook defied convention, and Jose Bautista wound up with a double.

Why the miscommunication? It’s impossible for us to conclusively say, and it’s not like the Rays aren’t used to having Kiermaier in center field. But Kiermaier wasn’t used to having Mahtook to his right. This play happened early in the first inning on August 9. The first time this past season that Kiermaier was in center, with Mahtook in left: the first inning on August 9. It took two batters for that alignment to be exploited, and it might not be a total coincidence that Mahtook’s newest baseball future will take place with Detroit. When you get in the way of Kevin Kiermaier’s defense, a team won’t take it lightly.

This is how Kevin Kiermaier missed his easiest catch. The ball was a near home run, and another player tried to leap for it first.

The 2017 Hall of Fame class is a party of three, and voting totals suggest the electorate is becoming more accepting and forgiving.

Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, and Ivan Rodriguez were inducted into The National Baseball Hall of Fame on Wednesday, as results of the Baseball Writers Association of America’s voting were revealed on MLB Network.

Raines appeared on 86.0% of ballots in his last year of eligibility. His candidacy was promoted passionately by many, including former FanGraphs contributor Jonah Keri.

With Rodriguez’ induction to the Hall on his first ballot appearance — and the appearance both of Barry Bonds (53.8%) and Roger Clemens (51.8%) on more than 50% of ballots for the first time — voters appear to be softening against those suspected of and tied to PED use.

In 2016, Bonds appeared on 44.3% of ballots, Clemens 45.2%.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan noted only three players who’ve appeared on 50% of ballots at one point have failed, later, to enter the Hall.

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On Monday, I wrote about how the Mariners were moving towards the model used by the Kanas City Royals the last few years, putting a heavy emphasis on outfield defense to help prop up a mediocre rotation. GM Jerry Dipoto added Jarrod Dyson to Leonys Martin and Mitch Haniger, giving the team a starting outfield of three guys capable of playing center field, plus a couple of reserves who have some defensive abilities. So, it was pretty weird when the team announced that they’d traded one of their best prospects, lefty Luiz Gohara, to Atlanta for center fielder Mallex Smith and reliever Shae Simmons.

Smith, like Martin and Dyson, is a speed-and-defense center fielder who has some real offensive question marks. As a low-power guy who ran a 73% contact rate in the majors last year, it’s tough to see him ever developing into more than just a below average hitter who tries to make up for his offensive weakness with stolen bases and diving catches in the outfield. It’s the Billy Hamilton profile, just with a 10 percentage point reduction in contact rate and normal earth-person speed, instead of whatever Hamilton got his ability to run from from.

On a team without a real center fielder, Smith would probably be a useful piece, a flycatcher who could hit at the bottom of the order and hold down his spot while making the league minimum. On the Mariners, though, he made little sense, because he’s not good enough to supplant any of the team’s three starters, and because the team’s starters are already good defenders, there isn’t much room for a late-game defensive replacement. So why would Dipoto trade one of the team’s best young arms for another copy of what he already has? Well, there’s this.

Jerry Dipoto isn't done yet. He's working on another deal that could include Mallex Smith, the OF he just acquired from the #Braves.

— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) January 11, 2017

So, apparently, like Friday’s series of trades that went together, the Mariners made a move that allows them to make another move. Speculatively, Cleveland could certainly use a guy like Smith, allowing them to push Tyler Naquin back to a corner outfield spot, or perhaps the Tigers would like Smith as an alternative to Anthony Gose, even though Gose is a warning about getting too excited about speed-and-defense prospects who can’t make contact. There are teams out there who Smith makes sense for; Seattle just isn’t one of them.

Right now, turning a left-handed pitching prospect with premium velocity into a 4th OF and a reliever doesn’t look like a great idea, but we’ll apparently have to wait and see what Smith fetches in this apparent second deal.

If you’re the Braves, though, you have to be pretty thrilled about this. Even if Simmons might have some real value as a potential high-end reliever, turning him and a guy blocked by Ender Inciarte into another high-upside pitching prospect is a pretty nifty move. While we don’t know exactly what the Mariners are doing, it seems pretty clear that the Braves saw a chance to turn a couple of spare parts into a potential core piece, and jumped on it when they could.

If you had the unfortunate honor of following me on Twitter during the 2016 season, you were subjected to several dozen versions of this tweet:

Request: If your team’s catcher throws behind a runner at 1B this year, tweet me date/team/inning/batter. Please RT for science!

— Neil Weinberg (@NeilWeinberg44) April 3, 2016

I undertook a yearlong effort to catalog and analyze every instance in which a catcher threw behind a runner at first base and the product of that endeavor was an essay in the 2017 Hardball Times Annual. That essay contains answers to questions including, but certainly not limited to:

• Which catcher threw to first most often? (Salvador Perez.)
• The average success rate on back-pick attempts? (About 10%.)
• Which catcher was most accurate when throwing to first? (Yadier Molina.)
• Do base-stealers draw more throws? (They seem to.)

If said essay failed to quench your thirst for back-pick factoids, you will likely have interest in getting your hands on the raw data which you can download here. If you use the data for any sort of published work, all I ask is that you cite me and send me a link on Twitter (@NeilWeinberg44).

With the new year, you’ve probably noticed a few new things around here. For one, you can now help support the site with an ad-free membership, which is a pretty neat thing for both you and us. If you’re a heavy user of the site, it’s a great way to keep us in business but also make your FanGraphs experience more enjoyable.

And supporting us allows us to do things like hire Travis Sawchik, who made his debut as a staff writer last week, and has already made himself an integral part of the staff with pieces like the one he wrote this morning on home-field advantage. We’re really excited to have Travis here, and think he’s going to help make 2017 a great year for FanGraphs.

And we want you guys to get to know him better as well, so starting today, Travis is going to be taking over the Monday chat, and will be answering your questions starting at 12pm ET.

But don’t worry, fans of the Dan Szymborski chat; he’s not going away, he’s just moving. Dan will now be chatting on Wednesdays at 2pm ET, which should also lead to more Dan Szymborski chats, since there are fewer Wednesday holidays, so if you enjoy the Szymborski chat, you’ll probably have more of them in 2017.

So, that leaves us with the following chat schedule for 2017. All times listed are in eastern time.

Monday, 12 pm: Travis Sawchik
Tuesday, 12 pm: Eric Longenhagen
Tuesday, 9 pm: Paul Swydan and Jeff Zimmerman
Wednesday: 12 pm: Dave Cameron
Wednesday, 2 pm: Dan Szymborski
Thursday, 12 pm: Eno Sarris
Friday, 12 pm: Jeff Sullivan
Friday, 3 pm: Paul Sporer (RotoGraphs chat)

We hope you enjoy the chats, and we look forward to talking with you all this coming year.

The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.

The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.

For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.

As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.

His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.

If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.

Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.

Left-hander Marlon Arias hasn’t participated in affiliated ball since 2009, when he was a member of the Dodgers system. As for what he’s done in the meantime, it’s probably fair to say that his whereabouts haven’t been documented meticulously. His player page at FanGraphs suggests he’s passed at least a few of the subsequent years (2012 and 2014-15) in the Mexican League. Neither Baseball Reference nor Baseball Cube reveal much else of substance on the matter. Generally speaking, where the subject of Marlon Arias is concerned, mum has been the word.

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