The players are mad right now. They are mad at owners for not spending and they are mad at union leadership for not anticipating the lack of spending this winter. The owners are also mad — or at least pretending to be — because the players aren’t signing the contracts that the owners want them to sign. Finally, the fans are mad. Mad at the owners for not spending, at the players for not signing, and at writers like me for not writing more about baseball.

What we all really need are actual games. We won’t have that for a while, of course — although the wait for a new collective bargaining agreement between players and owners will continue even beyond this season. Because the players have to wait years for that shot, there isn’t a whole lot they can do right now. Maybe that’s why they are voicing their frustrations to the press. A spring-training boycott, such as was rumored recently, is unlikely to get them very far. Disbanding the union is a rather drastic step for the moment.

However, there is one thing players could do right now that would help them in the future — namely, stop signing contract extensions before reaching free agency.

This year’s hypothetically amazing free-agent class is missing. Jose Altuve, Paul Goldschmidt, and Mike Trout all signed team-friendly contract extensions earlier in their careers. The same thing was true last year when Madison Bumgarner, Freddie Freeman, Buster Posey, Chris Sale, and Giancarlo Stanton would have all been able to offer their services to any of the 30 teams.

The year before that, it was Wade Davis and Andrew McCutchen in a free-agent class that was already very good. It might seem counterintuitive to propose that players should be trying to get to free agency without extracting larger guarantees from their teams when the problem right now is that teams are not spending in free agency, but getting more, higher quality players to free agency would help the players immensely.

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This offseason, clearly, has been defined both by inactivity and an attempt to understand it. As free agents sit home just days before pitchers and catchers are scheduled to report, baseball and its fans have engaged in a conversation about economics and worth, value and spending. For some, inherent to that conversation is a sense that players ought to be content with what they have, that front offices presented with aging sluggers and hurlers have their hands tied. Voices as estimable as Bill James have endeavored to distance ball players from those who do so-called “real work.” Others have posited that owners are just being smart, and that really, don’t grown men playing a game make too much compared to the rest of us already? They aren’t teachers or firefighters, after all.

Players and analysts often seem surprised by this reaction. How can normal folks side with billionaires over millionaires? The incredulity is understandable: when moved to attribute avarice to strangers, it seems as if those with billions would make for more compelling targets. We get worked up over it, furious at the dearth of solidarity, fearful for what it might mean for other, less public struggles that involve our friends and neighbors.

But I wonder if we haven’t made a mistake. We’ve assumed that the sides are clear. But I think most fans don’t see millionaires pitted against billionaires; I think most fans don’t see the owners much at all.

Players stretch out over green fields. They thump home runs. They give us little bits of themselves to take with us. But players also leave. They give themselves to new people, people who aren’t our folks, who live in different places. They do that to us, or that’s how it can feel. The fan’s relationship with a player must necessarily be flexible. Players are a source of great fun and joy, but also embodiments of frustration. Fans weave those feelings, those experiences, together into a fabric in which we can cloak ourselves, a name across our backs, but one which is also liable to be pulled taut and ripped apart when we perceive conflict with the name on the front.

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To answer your first question: no, there isn’t a slam-dunk, generational talent among the prospects ranked below. We’ll have to wait a little longer, it seems, for the next Bryce Harper to emerge. Nevertheless, the 2018 draft class is generally seen as deep and strong, particularly in prep pitching. There isn’t a player yet on whom we’d currently put a 55 FV (that is, the lowest grade received by the first 42 prospects on the recently published top-100 list), but almost every draft class ends up with a couple of those, and obviously these names will shift around during the season.

For reference, last year’s draft ended up with one low 60 FV and five players with 55 FV grades by the time the offseason arrived. So expecting three to five of the following prospects to emerge in the top 50 of next year’s Top 100 seems reasonable. As you might guess, the top 10-15 prospects are pretty tightly packed. With most of the early-season action occurring in Arizona, Florida, and SoCal, we’ll both be out to get lots of early looks this spring to quickly start sorting more out.

It’s too early to do a mock draft that would amount to anything much greater than a collection of guesses (here’s the draft order, for reference), but something to monitor is the presence of those clubs that lean risk-averse/analytic/etc. in the top half of the first round. In light of certain trends within the game — and, in particular, what appears to be a greater interest in near-ready, low-end-regular types — this could push college players (and, specifically, college bats) up into the high first round. Both Oregon State and Missouri State have TrackMan units at their home parks, so clubs will have multiple years of data on Madrigal and Eierman to aid their evaluations. Hitters from Virginia have benefited in much the same way from strong, large-sample TrackMan data in recent drafts.

Just as the recent minor-league top-100 list prominently featured the sons of Dante Bichette, Vladimir Guerrero, and Fernando Tatis, the lists that follow also feature quite a bit in the way of bloodlines. We have the sons of Jeff Conine, Troy Percival, David Weathers, and Bobby Witt, along with the younger brothers of Pirates Triple-A RHP Nick Kingham, Rays Double-A 1B/LF Joe McCarthy, Padres Double-A 1B Josh Naylor, and Blue Jays Triple-A CF Dalton Pompey. Kumar Rocker’s father, meanwhile, is Tracy Rocker, a former NFL defensive tackle and current defensive line coach for Tennessee.

We could have ranked more players or included more names for each list (especially projectable high-school arms), but we chose to limit ourselves in this preseason installment. Things will obviously expand as we get more information. We’ll have a slightly different presentation of the list than in years past, to more closely resemble the sort of information at what clubs are looking in draft rooms. We’ll both be at games starting this week and will keep you guys updates with tweets and InstaGraphs posts (along with longer posts when warranted) and updated rankings a couple more times leading up to the draft.

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Taylor Hearn is the top left-handed pitching prospect in the Pittsburgh Pirates system. Long and lanky, the 23-year-old native of Royse City, Texas possesses a high-octane heater and a changeup that he considers his best pitch. He also has a background unlike that of any other player in professional baseball.

According to the young southpaw, his grandfather was the first African-American to attend Oklahoma State on a rodeo scholarship, and the first professional black cowboy. Dubbed “Mr. Black Rodeo,” Cleo Hearn joined the calf roping circuit in 1959.

The tradition was passed down, both within the family and throughout Texas. Robby Hearn followed in his father’s footsteps, and he went on to teach his own son the tricks of the trade.

“Growing up, it was kind of bred into me to do that,” Taylor Hearn told me. “I did it until I was 17. It’s still a big thing in Texas, including for African Americans. Cory Solomon has been in the national finals the past few years.”

Hearn doesn’t do much calf roping these days —“only now and then, because I don’t have the time” — but he does hope to get back into it down the road. For now, he’ll settle for (ahem) showing his girlfriend the ropes. Read the rest of this entry »

“You don’t want to make a living or habit out of trying to solve your problems with high-price pitching free agents because over the long run there’s so much risk involved that you really can hamstring your organization. But we have a lot of players who have reasonable salaries who contribute an awful lot who might put us in a position to consider it going forward and in the future… It’s not our preferred method. We would prefer to make a small deal and find another Jake Arrieta, but you can’t do that every year, either.”

– Cubs president Theo Epstein

The Cubs know the pitfalls of free agency.

Yet, as I wrote back in November and as esteemed colleague Craig Edwards also noted more recently, the Cubs needed Yu Darvish.

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Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the new spring training camp for free agents, return to the topic of why so many high-profile free agents remain unsigned, discuss Todd Frazier’s contract with the Mets, and talk about whether a proposed “Tank Tax” is a solution in search of a problem. Then they preview the 2018 Dodgers (19:54) with LA Times Dodgers beat writer Andy McCullough, and the 2018 Marlins (1:02:11) with Miami Herald reporter Barry Jackson.

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Everything in life is cyclical; just look it up. Depending on your subject of interest, you can likely find some meditation on the cyclic nature of events in that particular field. Politics, history, sociology — heck, even opera has cycles. Baseball is no different. Whether it’s the dynamic between pitchers and hitters, strategic trends, or the success of individual teams, each side of the coin will come up eventually.

One key area in baseball that exhibits this cyclic nature is in the relative strength of organizational prospect talent. Every year, we see various outlets publish their rankings of the league’s assorted farm systems, thus giving hope to downtrodden franchises everywhere. Baseball America just released their list, while Baseball Prospectus and John Sickels will surely follow soon with their own. As all these lists are published, it’s worthwhile to consider how clubs tend to navigate the crests and troughs of such rankings, and what that movement implies for a team’s future.

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