FanGraphs Baseball

On Monday, I wrote about how the Mariners were transitioning back to a speed-and-defense team, looking to cover up the weaknesses of their pitching staff with elite athletes in the outfield. In comparing them to the Royals of recent years, I ended the piece with a little bit of skepticism.

And, of course, another part of the recent Royals success was some magic, as they significantly outperformed their BaseRuns win expectations. If the speed-and-defense plan was a primary reason for that success, then perhaps the Mariners can copy some of that, but if the bullpen was the key to helping the Royals to win more close games than expected, then that’s probably bad news for Seattle’s ability to recreate that part of the formula. And that’s why we currently have the Mariners projected as an 82-80 team heading into 2017, putting them in line with other fringe contenders who need a bunch of things to go right to snag a playoff spot.

The outfield defense is probably going to be great, and the team will run the bases a lot better than they have in recent years. But winning with a thin line-up and a mediocre rotation isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and especially with a bullpen of one good guy and a bunch of random arms, the Mariners probably can’t count on repeating the Royals success. But given the moves of this winter, that’s clearly what they’re trying for.

48 hours later, and that description of the Mariners pitching staff is already obsolete, because this morning, Jerry Dipoto made two more trades, and in the process, made the team’s stockpile of arms a lot more interesting than they were on Monday.

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The 2017 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2017, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Since this decade began, the home-run leaders among players who’ve recorded at least two-thirds of their games in center field are (in order) Adam Jones, Mike Trout, and Andrew McCutchen. Coming not too far after those three is Colby Rasmus, who’s authored 140 homers over the past seven seasons. Rasmus is coming off a pretty miserable 2016 season, during which he hit well below average while playing mostly in a left-field platoon before ending the season with a groin/hip injury that required surgery. As a result, the Houston Astros declined to make a qualifying offer to Rasmus like they did after his 25-homer, 117 wRC+ 2015 campaign, and the winter action on Rasmus seemed to match his own health: poor. The Tampa Bay Rays appear to have signed Rasmus for a very reasonable $5 million, with $2 million in incentives.

Coming up through the minors, Rasmus was at least a four-tool player, with maybe a knock on his ability to hit for average. While ranking him the third-best prospect in baseball ahead of the 2009 season, Baseball America had this to say about Rasmus’ tools and his future:

Rasmus oozes big league talent and exhibits fluid athleticism at the plate and in the field. He has a balanced, potent swing from the left side and his young frame has filled out with strength, which has begun to turn some of his ropes into the gaps into shots launched over the wall. As he showed in big league camp, Rasmus has the plate discipline to be a leadoff man when he arrives in the majors and the extra-base thump to mature into a middle-of-the-order hitter. The same plus speed and instincts he shows on the bases are even more apparent in center field, where he’s a defensive standout. His glove is good enough to keep him in the lineup even when he’s scuffling at the plate.

Eight seasons and four MLB teams later, Rasmus hasn’t lived up to his promise, but he has been a mostly productive player, putting up league-average hitting numbers to go along with solid baserunning and decent defense. His 18.5 career WAR isn’t a terrible outcome before age 30 for just about any prospect. Per 600 plate appearances, Rasmus has been worth 2.8 WAR during his career. Even with his disastrous 2016 season, he was a 2.9 WAR/600 player in his two years with Astros.

After a contact-heavy, low-power rookie season, Rasmus quickly morphed into the three-true-outcome player we see today. More than 40% of his plate appearances over the last seven years have ended as walks, strikeouts, or home runs. The strikeouts have especially been high the past few seasons. Since 2013, the only players to record as many plate appearances and a higher strikeout rate than Rasmus’ 30.8% mark are sluggers Chris Davis and Chris Carter. Those guys have hit for quite a bit more power than Rasmus, although Rasmus can still make himself valuable running the bases and on defense.

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On Monday, I wrote about how the Mariners were moving towards the model used by the Kanas City Royals the last few years, putting a heavy emphasis on outfield defense to help prop up a mediocre rotation. GM Jerry Dipoto added Jarrod Dyson to Leonys Martin and Mitch Haniger, giving the team a starting outfield of three guys capable of playing center field, plus a couple of reserves who have some defensive abilities. So, it was pretty weird when the team announced that they’d traded one of their best prospects, lefty Luiz Gohara, to Atlanta for center fielder Mallex Smith and reliever Shae Simmons.

Smith, like Martin and Dyson, is a speed-and-defense center fielder who has some real offensive question marks. As a low-power guy who ran a 73% contact rate in the majors last year, it’s tough to see him ever developing into more than just a below average hitter who tries to make up for his offensive weakness with stolen bases and diving catches in the outfield. It’s the Billy Hamilton profile, just with a 10 percentage point reduction in contact rate and normal earth-person speed, instead of whatever Hamilton got his ability to run from from.

On a team without a real center fielder, Smith would probably be a useful piece, a flycatcher who could hit at the bottom of the order and hold down his spot while making the league minimum. On the Mariners, though, he made little sense, because he’s not good enough to supplant any of the team’s three starters, and because the team’s starters are already good defenders, there isn’t much room for a late-game defensive replacement. So why would Dipoto trade one of the team’s best young arms for another copy of what he already has? Well, there’s this.

Jerry Dipoto isn't done yet. He's working on another deal that could include Mallex Smith, the OF he just acquired from the #Braves.

— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) January 11, 2017

So, apparently, like Friday’s series of trades that went together, the Mariners made a move that allows them to make another move. Speculatively, Cleveland could certainly use a guy like Smith, allowing them to push Tyler Naquin back to a corner outfield spot, or perhaps the Tigers would like Smith as an alternative to Anthony Gose, even though Gose is a warning about getting too excited about speed-and-defense prospects who can’t make contact. There are teams out there who Smith makes sense for; Seattle just isn’t one of them.

Right now, turning a left-handed pitching prospect with premium velocity into a 4th OF and a reliever doesn’t look like a great idea, but we’ll apparently have to wait and see what Smith fetches in this apparent second deal.

If you’re the Braves, though, you have to be pretty thrilled about this. Even if Simmons might have some real value as a potential high-end reliever, turning him and a guy blocked by Ender Inciarte into another high-upside pitching prospect is a pretty nifty move. While we don’t know exactly what the Mariners are doing, it seems pretty clear that the Braves saw a chance to turn a couple of spare parts into a potential core piece, and jumped on it when they could.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager (675 PA, 5.4 zWAR) won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award with ease in 2016. Were a similar award to exist for second-year players, Seager would be the favorite to win that, as well. ZiPS calls for Seager to record less gaudy BABIP and fielding numbers in 2017, but that’s to be expected. At the most basic level, a projection system is a regression machine. BABIP and fielding runs require large samples before they begin to represent true talent. As a second-year player, Seager lacks that kind of sample by definition.

Here’s some other news, though: ZiPS also projects a nearly three-point improvement in Seager’s strikeout rate, from 19.4% this past season to 16.7% in 2017. This does not appear to be a product of regression to the mean. It can’t really: the lowest strikeout rate National League batters have produced over the last three seasons is 19.9%. Szymborski’s computer, in other words, appears to be calling for actual improvement. Or perhaps a different sort of regression — regression to Seager’s 2015 numbers, when he made more contact in the minors and (for a brief stretch) majors. In any case, two propositions are true: both (a) Corey Seager is very good and (b) this section, which is intended to provide a brief overview of all the club’s starting field players, has failed to do that.

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Maybe the most painful part of writing about baseball for a living is that your biases — the same biases of which we’re all guilty — are constantly laid bare for everyone to see. Vladimir Guerrero reminded me of that problem most recently.

David Wright and Joey Votto embody my first bias. Plate discipline was a way to find great hitters! I’d read Moneyball and used it to draft Chipper Jones first in my first fantasy league, back in 2001, and I was money. I had baseball all figured out.

Good one, early 2000s dude. Good one.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Pittsburh Pirates 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 .266/.333/.536 between Double- and Triple-A as a 21-year-old.

Scouting Report
Meadows dominated Double-A for 45 games before receiving a promotion to Triple-A Indianapolis in mid-June. Soon after that, he spent a month on the DL with a hamstring injury, the third one with which Meadows has dealt in as many years (he had reoccurring hammy issues in 2014) and never got things going after he returned, slashing .214/.297/.460. Even so, that’s not alarming in any way for a 21-year-old, especially in a small sample.

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Carlos Gonzalez is good theatre.

He hit baseball’s most impressive home run last season, according to Jeff Sullivan. The shot left Gonzalez’s bat with a 117-mph exit velocity and 14.2-degree launch angle. That’s baseball equivalent of a 1-iron from an in-his-prime Tiger Woods.

That’s not a snapshot of a player you’d worry about losing it the near term.

He also hit baseball’s fifth-longest home run last season, according to HitTracker. The 475-foot, third-deck shot at Coors Field featured his signature, and aesthetically pleasing, follow-through and bat drop.

For me, Ken Griffey Jr. had the best swing and home-run pose of the modern era, but Gonzalez’s swing is right there among today’s best left-handed batters. It’s the kind of cut to which you could get emotionally attached. The swing has allowed Gonzalez to distinguish himself as one of the sport’s most productive hitters since 2009.

But time catches up to all of us, and looks – and swings – can be deceiving. Gonzalez was once a tools-laden player who could impact the game a number of ways; now he’s more of a bat-only threat with mixed assessments of his defense. He’s entering the final year of a seven-year deal and is owed $20 million by the Rockies. As pretty as that left-handed swing is, 2018 will represent his age-32 season, and he’ll be arriving at a place on the aging curve where mild declines can accelerate in the wrong direction.

He’s become the type of player for whom the market has over-corrected, according to FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron.

So it’s interesting to see the Rockies remain interested in keeping Gonzalez around beyond his current contract. There’s been buzz about an extension dating back to December, and Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich confirmed to MLB.com’s Thomas Harding on Tuesday that the Rockies are open to a contract extension.

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