Christian Bethancourt made the Padres! This is exciting, because he’s making the team as a catcher and a reliever at the same time. His existence challenges norms in a sport that’s known for the specialized roles of its participants. That said, we’ll have to see if he’s more Brooks Kieschnick or more Kenley Jansen eventually. Because hitter-slash-pitcher Kieschnick was nearly a unicorn, while Jansen — though a special reliever since abandoning his work as a catcher — has a story that’s been told in baseball’s history before.

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Since people take us for experts for some reason, we’re commonly asked what we consider important in the season’s very early going. What’s most important — and this should be abundantly clear — is that there’s active baseball in the first place. At the very least, there’s spring-training baseball, and as of just yesterday, there’s meaningful baseball. That’s it! That’s the whole point. Everything else is a detail.

But since we all get worked up over the details, we’re asked which details are most important early on. Statistically, the answer is, not much. A high or low batting average isn’t too suggestive. A high or low ERA isn’t too suggestive. A win or loss here or there are but ones of dozens. The more important things are the measurements that take less time than others to stabilize. Changes in, say, power. Changes in contact. Or changes in velocity. There are few things that stabilize in less time than how fast a pitcher throws. This is why so many of our March and April stories and tweets are about unusually fast or slow fastballs. This all brings us to Zack Greinke, the Diamondbacks’ opening-day starter.

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After having produced one of the best overall lines on Cleveland’s World Series club and subsequently received a $26 million extension, Jose Ramirez enters the 2017 campaign as a core member of the Indians’ major-league club. For as obvious as that sounds, it represents a departure from his status at this same point last year.

Known as a useful defender with good contact skills, Ramirez also began the 2016 campaign having produced just a 78 wRC+ over his first 635 major-league plate appearances (a number of which he’d compiled while holding Francisco Lindor‘s place before the latter’s promotion). Nevertheless, he exhibited sufficient promise and present-day skill to make the Opening Day club and was used in a multi-positional role over the first four months of Cleveland’s season, recording starts at second base, third base, shortstop, and left field — the majority coming at that last position. When teammate Juan Uribe’s season ended at the end of July, Ramirez assumed third-base duties on a regular basis. Supplementing his contact ability with unprecedented power, Ramirez ultimately produced a nearly five-win season.

Officially speaking, Ramirez is now Cleveland’s starting third baseman. He also retains positional flexibility, however. So when it became clear that Jason Kipnis would have to begin the season on the disabled list, Ramirez represented an obvious choice to slide across the infield. The less obvious choice was who should fill the spot vacated by Ramirez.

One of the solutions to that quandary is utilityman Michael Martinez. Martinez has the benefit and drawback, from Cleveland’s perspective, of being a known commodity. One knows that Martinez can field almost any position. One also knows, however, that he can’t hit sufficiently to support any of them. He’s the Platonic ideal of a replacement player.

The other solution is Yandy Diaz. Signed out of Cuba in 2013 for $300,000, Diaz has been a fixture within the author’s Fringe Five columm, appearing among the top-10 finishers on the arbitrarily calculated leaderboards for that column both in 2015 and 2016. In many ways, Diaz is a clone of Ramirez.

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Yesterday, the Giants’ 2017 season started much like their 2016 season ended, with a questionable bullpen blowing a late lead. Despite their $62 million investment in Mark Melancon over the winter, the team’s bullpen remains mediocre, and the Giants are going to have to hope that the rest of their team is good enough to overcome this weakness.

But despite the Opening Day loss, there was some good news for the Giants. Because, once again, it looks like their ace may be getting better.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Boston Red Sox farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, NYY, TB)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .295/.360/.475 during big-league call-up.

Scouting Report
There were evaluators who didn’t know Benintendi was a draft-eligible sophomore as the 2015 season began. They had little reason to. He was solid but unspectacular as a freshman at Arkansas (in part due to injury), showing promising on-base skills but hitting for zero power while offering what appeared to be little physical projection. He didn’t play summer ball as a rising sophomore, either, as he recovered from a leg injury. He was allowed to do upper-body strength training and little else, so Benintendi bulked up. The following spring he was dominant, whacking 35 extra-base hits, posting a 1.205 OPS against mostly SEC opponents, and rocketing up boards into the top three or four for some clubs. The Red Sox drafted him seventh overall.

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TAMPA, Fla. — In the fourth week of July last year, while hosting Baltimore, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman reached an agreement to send Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs. It would be the first move in a partial dismantling of the club, a rebuild in New York representing one of the rarest roster-construction projects in baseball. But Cashman, and Cubs president Theo Esptein, had to wait. They had to wait for approval from Yankees ownership.

With the framework having been agreed upon, Chapman was still a Yankee as he entered a game on July 23rd against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium. He pitched the ninth and 10th innings.

“Chapman went two-plus innings, not something normally [that occurs] if you are going to execute a trade” Cashman told FanGraphs. “[Steinbrenner] waited 72 hours to green light it as he discussed it with his family. It was not an easy decision. I was keeping Theo on hold, essentially. I told him ‘I will let you know if ownership says ‘yes’.’ I said ‘I am recommending it. We’ll see what happens.’”

Chapman was still a Yankee as the club boarded a charter flight on July 24th to play a series in Houston. When the Yankees arrived in Houston, ownership had OK’d a type of plan rarely seen in New York. In a rare tactical retreat, the Yankees traded instant gratification — the hope of sneaking into the playoffs as a Wild Card — for the delayed variety. The Yankees had passed the Stanford marshmallow experiment. For Cashman, it had taken more than a year to lobby to adopt such a strategy, an approach that some believe has positioned the Yankees for their next sustained run of excellence.

The Yankees enjoy a No. 2 ranking in Baseball America’s recently released organizational talent rankings, after ranking 17, 18, and 18 in the three previous seasons, respectively. And the Yankees should have plenty of financial flexibility in the 2018-19 offseason, with a relatively paltry sum of $70 million in guaranteed salary on the books for ’19.

“It’s not the first time I’ve suggested that,” Cashman said of retooling. “It’s the first time ownership actually agreed to do it.”

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Austin Meadows is Pittsburgh’s top prospect, and one of the most-promising young hitters in the game. The 21-year-old outfielder has a sweet left-handed stroke, and — according to our own Eric Longenhagen — “projects to hit for in-game power without sacrificing much contact.”

He won’t be doing so with a Josh Donaldson approach.

“A downward angle on the ball to generate backspin has always been my philosophy,” Meadows told me prior to a recent game. “That’s what I learned, and it’s what I’ve stuck with. It’s got me to where I am today.”

It’s hard to argue with the results. The Pirates drafted Meadows ninth-overall in 2013 out of a Loganville, Georgia high school, and he has an .848 OPS since signing. And while he doesn’t have a Donaldson-like strive-for-loft mindset, he certainly understands the mechanics of hitting.

“I’ve always been short to the ball, and able to keep my hands long through the zone,” said Meadows. “Different hitters have different bat paths, and different launch angles, and it’s whatever works. For me it’s about getting in a strong position, down on the ball.

“I try to use the gaps to my advantage, and if the ball takes off, it takes off. I’m not up there trying to hit home runs. I’m trying to generate backspin, and if the ball goes out, it goes out.”

Meadows has 29 home runs in 1,335 professional plate appearances, although his raw power suggests that number will grow exponentially as he matures. But again, trying to create fly balls isn’t his modus operandi. To him, well-struck singles are perfectly acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »