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Time to kick off the latest edition of what’s always my favorite polling project every year. For a while, on the site, we’ve been showing you the Steamer projections. Just in the last day or two, we’ve folded in all the ZiPS data, meaning now we’ve got projections that shouldn’t budge anymore, barring injuries or roster moves. Here is the projected American League landscape!

Overall, I assume things look more or less acceptable. Every division has a clear favorite, and we know the White Sox have initiated a rebuild that’s likely to cause them to suck in the short-term. The Twins, also, could suck in the short-term. The A’s and Rays are forever projecting to play around .500. And so on and so forth. But every year I like to see what the community thinks, because there isn’t otherwise an easy way to express disagreement with the numbers being provided. Do some of the projections just feel wrong to you? Say that in the polls below. We’ll look at the National League on Wednesday, and then I’ll examine all the results at the end of the week.

Something I’d like for you to keep in mind: Please vote according to what we know now. Don’t vote anticipating midseason additions or subtractions. It’s one thing if you think a team will or will not call up a top prospect, but don’t vote planning on trades. I think everything else is self-explanatory, so, have fun. For each team and each poll, I’ll offer brief commentary that serves little purpose since I don’t want to actually bias anything myself. I think that’s it for the intro. Thank you and I love you!

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In the middle of last July, rumors started to spread that, come free agency, Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal. Then, in the second half of the season, Hosmer batted .225, with a 76 wRC+. Now, in a new article from Ken Rosenthal, it’s expressed the Royals believe Eric Hosmer could seek a 10-year deal.

Hosmer is represented by Scott Boras, and you can see here how Boras effortlessly presupposes Hosmer’s significance:

“We all know that Hos is a franchise player, a world champion. He’s done all this at a very young age,” Boras said.

World champion? Sure, that happened. Very young age? Hosmer is still only 27 years old. But, there’s that first thing. We don’t all know that Hosmer is a franchise player. The majority of people would actually disagree with that notion. This is a phenomenally easy idea to argue against.

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Over the last couple years, the author has published a periodic statistical report designed to serve as a mostly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, possess more enthusiasm for collegiate baseball than expert knowledge of it. Those reports integrated concepts central to much of the analysis found at FanGraphs — regarding sample size and regression, for example — to provide something not unlike a “true talent” leaderboard for hitters and pitchers in select conferences.

What follows represents the first such report for the 2017 college campaign, which began last Friday.

As in the original edition of this same thing, what I’ve done here is to utilize principles introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Over at the fantasy blog, they’ll be publishing their annual bold predictions soon. Those posts, as usual, will cater to the roto side of things. They’re fun to write. And, even though I’m no longer editing RotoGraphs anymore, I’d like to continue the tradition. So I’ve decided to do a version that’s aimed more at the real game.

Let’s stretch our imagination and make some predictions that are a little bit sane (they should be rooted in reality to some extent), but also a little bit insane (since the insane happens in baseball every year anyway). Back when I did this for fantasy, I hit 3-for-10 most years. Doubt I do it again, for some reason.

What follows are my 10 bold predictions for 2017.

1. Dylan Bundy will be the ace he was always supposed to be.
Once picked fourth overall and pegged as the future ace of the Orioles, Bundy had a terrible time in the minor leagues. Over five years, he managed only 111 innings between injuries. There was Tommy John, of course, but lat strains, shoulder-calcification issues and between-start bouts of elbow soreness have dogged him throughout, as well. At least he was good while he was in, with an ERA in the low twos and great rates to support those results.

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For most of the offseason, industry speculation suggested that the Nationals were the most likely landing spot for Matt Wieters. They were losing Wilson Ramos to free agency, which created a hole at the catcher spot, and Wieters was already comfortable with the geographic area, having spent his entire career in Baltimore to that point.

But all winter, the team didn’t seem to show much interest. At the beginning of December, Washington traded for Derek Norris, who had a terrible 2016 but has plenty of signs pointing to a 2017 bounce-back. With Norris and Jose Lobaton in the fold, they had a perfectly capable pair of receivers, both of whom rated as well above average in Statcorner’s catcher framing metrics. Catching wasn’t the strength of the team, but neither was it some glaring weakness like their bench, and if ownership was going to allow for more spending, there seemed to be plenty of other places for the Nationals to upgrade.

But today, the winter of industry speculation proved prescient, as the Nationals have reportedly signed Wieters, giving him $21 million in guaranteed money over two years along with an opt-out after the first year. The lesson, as always; if you’re not sure where a Scott Boras client is going to sign, Washington is always a safe guess.

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Mark Appel is one of the great unknowns this spring. He remains something of an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, and now shrouded in post-surgery mystery.

I will begin with a brief history of a player who has seen his prospect luster diminished as dramatically as few pitchers in recent memory.

Recall that the former Stanford University ace was drafted twice in the first round. In 2012, under the new restrictions on amateur signing bonuses, the Pirates weren’t willing to forfeit a future draft pick for exceeding their pool limit. Appel’s signing demands were not met, and he returned to Stanford.

He returned for his senior year, which seemed like a risky decision given that injury or poor performance could diminish his stock. But Appel won the bet on himself as he was drafted No. 1 overall in 2013, by Houston, one spot ahead of Kris Bryant. While Appel over Bryant looks like Bowie-over-Jordan-like decision at the moment, Appel had an impressive resume coming out of school, including a mid-90s fastball and wipeout slider that helped him set the program’s strikeout record with this very pitch against UCLA nearly four years ago:

But few have fallen further than Appel in the last four years.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Atlanta Braves 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 thes 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, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .302/.361/.442 in 145 MLB plate appearances.

Scouting Report
The first-overall pick by Arizona in 2015, Swanson barely played affiliated ball for the Diamondbacks after he was hit in the face by a Yoan Lopez pitch on the backfields in Scottsdale shortly after signing. Swanson, who still wears a face guard on his batting helmet, was traded to Atlanta that December in the Shelby Miller deal.

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