Below, please rate your favorite baseball team. Is that so hard?

In last Friday’s Effectively Wild podcast, we evaluated the Orioles against every other team. Of course, we did it subjectively, and we did it on the fly, but most of the time it wasn’t hard for us to make up our minds. The question we tried to answer 29 times: Would this given team trade everything for the Orioles’ everything?

I liked the exercise, but we only did it for Baltimore. That, in turn, left me wishing we had some information about the entire landscape. And so, per usual, this is where I’m bringing you into the fold. You all can provide that information about the entire landscape. Because our audience comprises fans of everyone out there, and you’re a knowledgeable bunch. So I’m very excited to see how you respond.

Beneath the fold, there are 30 polls, one for every organization. You probably have a favorite one. You might have a favorite two or three. For your favorite team(s), I’d like for you to select a rating, based on as many factors as you can imagine. This isn’t just about the short-term; this isn’t just about 2017. Think of it as a rating of your team’s overall outlook, weighted according to your own priorities. Consider the players on the roster today. Consider their contract statuses. Consider the strength of the farm system. Consider the financial resources available, and consider the people responsible for how all that money gets assigned. In a sense, it’s a different way of asking how many games you think a team will win over the coming five or 10 years. Is your organization looking awesome across the board? Is it miserable across the board? Do you love the future more than the present? Is the team competitive but approaching a cliff? How do you feel about that, personally?

With every one of these polling projects, I know that nothing is perfect. At the end of the day, you’re a fan, and you can know only so much. But it’s not like there’s way superior information available, and this is the easiest way to get it all in one place. In short: Please rate the health of your favorite baseball organization. Think about the players, young and old, and think about the people in charge of them. In a day or two, I’ll be able to analyze how everyone answered. And that’s going to be a whole lot of fun! Thank you in advance for your participation and enthusiasm. Onward.

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There may be no more confounding player in baseball than Yasiel Puig. His natural talent seems boundless. For bursts of weeks and months, Puig will look for all the world like a demigod in a Dodgers uniform, mashing and running and throwing like he was put on this planet to torture pitchers and baserunners.

Those stretches of time have grown scarcer, however. Every year since his blistering 2013 debut, Puig’s wRC+ has steadily fallen. It wasn’t as apparent in his five-win 2014, and frankly nobody expected him to keep up the 160 wRC+ he’d notched the year before. The last two years, though, have been rough. Puig has been limited to just 183 games since the start of 2015. He’s been sidelined by a variety of injuries, and that’s affected both his playing time and (likely) his production. Puig was even sequestered away in Triple-A for a month this year.

The question of who Puig really is as a player might be an easy one, but it feels complicated. Is he still going to be a star? How many offseasons in a row have we had this conversation now? Why do we care so much about a man who may just be a good-but-not-great cog on a great team? There have been plenty of blue-chip prospects who have developed into merely average players before, and there will be again. Puig may be the latest in that long line. It’s a simple answer, and it’s an acceptable one. What is it about Yasiel Puig that captures your attention and imagination?

It’s this.

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Joe Blanton was all kinds of “meh” as a starting pitcher.

In 1,553 career innings a starter – his role during the first nine years of his career – Blanton produced a 4.47 ERA and 4.20 FIP. He was a back-of-the-rotation arm. He soaked up innings. His starts were not going to spike ratings or attendance or win expectancy.

But in 2015 he found himself in the Kansas City bullpen and something strange occurred: he became one of the game’s most effective relievers despite an atypical tools profile.

Blanton was effective in the Royals’ bullpen, and when he was traded to the Pirates at the trade deadline, he was again successful in a relief role. During the following offseason, he signed a modest one-year, $4 million deal with the Dodgers and was, again, successful pitching out of the bullpen.

Since 2015, Blanton has appeared in 107 games, all as a reliever. In that time he ranks 11th in ERA (2.29) among all relievers, 24th in FIP (3.02) and 26th in K-BB% (19.1 points).

So what’s strange — in an era during which we hear more interest and talk about teams relying more heavily on their bullpens, when we saw inspired bullpen usage by the Cleveland Indians and other clubs in the postseason — what’s strange is Blanton remains available in free agency.

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Over 450 innings into his major-league career, Kyle Hendricks possesses both an ERA under 3.00 and a third-place finish in Cy Young voting. That’s impressive. Even after accounting for the regression he’s likely to experience in the future, he’s nevertheless proven himself to be an apt pitcher at the major-league level, something that we didn’t see coming as he ascended the ranks as a prospect. He’s done enough to wonder why we missed on him, and what he can teach us about other young pitchers out there.

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Last week, when discussing the Dodgers second base options, I talked about Logan Forsythe as a reasonable alternative to Brian Dozier, a similar player on a similar contract, but finished the section with this reason why I thought maybe they should look elsewhere.

I could potentially see a Forsythe deal working if the Dodgers were floating some pieces that could help Tampa Bay maintain the status quo and give them some long-term value, but Forsythe isn’t good enough to extract Jose De Leon, and I’m not sure the Rays really need more pitching depth.

Well, yesterday, the Dodgers traded De Leon for Forsythe in a one for one swap, so the Dodgers decided I was wrong about that whole “not good enough” part. While they deemed the Twins asking price of De Leon and something else of substantial value too high for Dozier, they were willing to part with one of the game’s best young pitchers in order to land Dozier-Lite. And as you probably guessed based on my write-up last week, that decision surprised me a bit.

Jeff did a good job of showing why the Dodgers viewed Forsythe and Dozier as similar enough to go with door #2 when they found the Twins asking price too high, but in all of the recent talk we’ve done about how comparable some of their rate stats are, there’s something that we should make sure doesn’t get lost: Dozier is better than Forsythe.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Milwaukee Brewers 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)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .382/.387/.618 at Triple-A Colorado Springs after trade.

Scouting Report
A physical freak who has undergone a half-decade of physical growth and mechanical adjustments to reach the doorstep of the majors, Brinson headlined the package sent to Milwaukee for Jonathan Lucroy ahead of the trade deadline. He had been struggling through the first few months of the season and missed several weeks with a shoulder injury. Injuries have been a prevalent aspect of Brinson’s pro career and he’s missed substantial playing time during each of the last three years with various ailments, including quad and hamstring issues.

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Jeff Bridich looks beyond baseball when he brainstorms how to better build the Rockies. The Colorado general manager — a diehard Packers fan — pays attention to how NFL teams go about their business. He’s been especially impressed with how the Atlanta Falcons — the team that vanquished Green Bay on Sunday — went from sub-.500 also-rans to Super Bowl bound in two years.

The Rockies have been chasing a winning record for the past six seasons. Fortunately for their fanbase, hope is on the horizon. Since assuming his current role 27 months ago, the forward-thinking Bridich has helped grow the analytics department, while maintaining the scouting-and-development philosophy that has been the club’s backbone. The result is a promising, young core on the verge of contention in the NL West.

Bridich shared his thoughts on team-building — with one eye on the NFL— over the weekend.

———

On admiring the Falcons: “We try to draw information and glean what we can from [other sports]. I read an article the other day praising the Falcons’ ability to build their roster from where it was two years ago. There are elements of team, and elements of winning in professional athletics, that cross over from sport to sport.

“We try to combine that with honest evaluations of who we are, right now, in the moment. That sort of thing goes on in all professional sports. You have to combine evaluation — who you are, and what you have — with what your needs are, and what you want to do.

“It would be tough for me to speak intelligently on [the Falcons’ philosophies and schemes], because we don’t live in their walls. But in terms of their personnel — how they’ve gone about that — the article I read was very complimentary of how they targeted specific things, and specific people, in free agency. They’ve also focused a lot on defense, and on getting faster and more athletic defensively, through the draft.

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The Chicago Cubs are almost perfect.

Coming off a World Series title, FanGraphs’ expected wins totals placed the Cubs at 99 victories back in November.

The young, enviable core remains. The top four starters return from the most effective rotation in baseball last season. While Aroldis Chapman departed, Wade Davis entered. Even David Ross is still around, though he’s moving upstairs to the front office. OK, not everything has gone the Cubs’ way in recent times. Quipped Cubs president Theo Epstein in regard to Tyson Ross‘ decision to sign with the Rangers: “We went 1-for-2 in Ross signings.”

Ross’ choice didn’t seem like a big deal, but maybe it will be a big deal.

As dominant as they were a year ago, the Cubs also benefited from a tremendous amount of good fortune in 2016: their starting rotation remained remarkably healthy.

Consider that, en route to a 103 wins in the regular season, five Cubs starting pitchers – Jake Arrieta, Jason Hammel, Kyle Hendricks, John Lackey, and Jon Lester – made at least 29 starts. It’s an extremely rare feat.

The Cubs are unlikely to be as fortunate this season, and the their rotation depth appeared thin entering the fourth week of January. Regression to the injury-fortune mean, combined with a lack of quality rotation depth, appeared to be the one glaring weakness facing the Cubs. (There are perhaps some bullpen issues, too.)

A Jeff Sullivan study in 2014 found teams can expect to cobble together 32 starts by pitchers outside their top-five rotation options in a given season.

A Jeff Zimmerman study found all pitchers have at least a 40% chance of landing on the disabled list in a season, risk that increases with age.

Andrew Simon of MLB.com wrote last spring that, since 1998, teams have averaged 10.3 starting pitchers used per season. Wrote Simon:

“Just 14 teams — or not even one per year — needed six starters or fewer. The last to do so was the 2013 Tigers.”

Lackey is 38. Lester is 33. Hendricks is coming off a career-high workload. There’s also Arrieta’s second half, including only a 10.6-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%), that has some in Cubs Nation uneasy. Beyond those four reside questionable depth and the unknown.

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Sometimes there are trade rumors that aren’t really true. We tend not to know about those until after the fact, but the false rumors tend to be the fleeting ones. Then there are the rumors that just don’t go away. That’s when you know there’s smoke. And there was all kinds of smoke billowing out of the rumors that linked the Dodgers to Brian Dozier.

It all added up, and there was no point in anyone issuing any denials. The Dodgers needed a second baseman, and Dozier is a good one. The Twins could stand to flip some quality assets, and Dozier is a good one. We got to know more than we usually do — the Dodgers put Jose De Leon on the table. That’s where the teams got stuck. The Dodgers liked what they’d be getting, and the Twins felt the same. They just couldn’t reach an agreement on a second prospect to go to Minnesota. The Twins held out, and the Dodgers wouldn’t budge.

And so, in the end, the Dodgers haven’t added Brian Dozier. Instead, they called up the Rays, and added basically Brian Dozier. The cost was De Leon, and nothing else.

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