Offseason Notes – With Final DWL Leaderboards

Ricardo Nanita relaxes near a white tiger in heaven.

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Offseason Notes.

1. Assorted Headlines
2. Final (!) SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
3. Projections: ZiPS Converted Poorly to WAR

Assorted Headlines
Trumbo’s Foot: Still Not Healed
The stress fracture in Mark Trumbo’s right foot isn’t healed yet, nor does the cornerman expect it to heal until around late February, reports MLB.com’s Alden Gonzalez. With the addition of Albert Pujols over the offseason, Trumbo obviously won’t be playing first base much; however, the injury prevents him from taking reps at third base and likely also hurts his trade value for the short-term, if that’s a direction in which the Angels were interested.

Liriano Pitches in Dominican Winter League
The Minnesota Twins have permitted left-hander Francisco Liriano to pitch up to 20 innings over the remainder of the Dominican season, Joe Christensen of the Star Tribune reports. Liriano made his debut last night, facing eight batters in 1.2 innings and posting two strikeouts and one walk.

All the Records Pujols Will Break
Very Important Man and two-time FanGraphs Audio guest Sam Miller considers all the records Albert Pujols will break as an Angel.

SCOUT Leaderboards: Dominican Winter League
Announcement
The regular season portion of the Dominican Winter League (DWL) is now complete. Final SCOUT leaderboards for batters and pitchers are below. Complete SCOUT figures are available by clicking here.

Batting Leaderboard
Here is the SCOUT batting leaderboard for the DWL. SCOUT represents an attempt to derive something meaningful from small samples and is the average of a player’s standard deviations from the DWL mean in three important (and regressed) stats: walk rate, strikeout rate, and home-run rate. (Click here for more on SCOUT.)

Notes
• Outfielder and/or first-baseman Ricardo Nanita finishes the DWL season atop the SCOUT batting leaderboard. Nanita, who turns 32 this season, is still a free agent, per Baseball America’s Minor League Free Agent Tracker.
• Let’s talk about Jhonatan Solano for a moment. He’s a 26-year-old catcher in the Nationals system who’s been pretty excellent at limiting the strikeout (12.9% K rate in 279 PA at Triple-A in 2011). OLIVER isn’t particularly optimistic, rating him as basically replacement level.

Pitching Leaderboard
For pitchers, SCOUT is the average of a player’s standard deviations from the DWL mean in (regressed) strikeout and walk rate.

Notes
• Kansas City left-hander Everett Teaford takes away the very prestigious honor of SCOUT pitching leaderboard champ. The 28-year-old is likely to pitch out of the bullpen again this season — i.e. what he did for most of the 2011 season.
• Atlanta minor-league reliever Jairo Asencio was excellent all season, especially at the striking-people-out part of the game.

Projections: ZiPS Converted Poorly to WAR
Dan Szymborski has published a number of his ZiPS projections over the break, including for the Atlanta Braves, Baltimore Orioles, Colorado Rockies, and Houston Astros.

In an effort to catch up with the Prolific Pole (as he’s not known to anyone), I’ve attempted to translate poorly some notable projections into WAR (or, WAR per 600 plate appearances). Park Factors are from wOBA platoon Park Factors at StatCorner. I haven’t attempted at all to integrate fielding runs (beyond positional adjustments, that is), but one can add or subtract those easily enough. All numbers assume major-league competition. All errors are mine and not Szymborski’s.