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It was barely a month ago that we ran our annual positional power rankings series. Perceptions of players and teams ought not to change too much after just a few weeks of baseball, but the neat thing about having projections is around is that they update themselves every night. Never by much, but they’re constantly re-evaluating to reflect whatever’s happened by the appropriate amount. In this sense, they’re like an overreaction guide, holding your hand through the early goings of a season and letting you know just how much to make of Player X’s early-season struggles/successes. Like, for example, if you’re wondering whether to freak out about Rich Hill, you look to see how much the projections have changed since the start of the year, and you listen to the projections when they tell you that it’s perfectly OK to freak out.

And just as the projections can be used as a guide to gauge how much early-season performances mean for players, they can do the same for teams. Team projections are just a composite of a bunch of player projections, after all. And while no one individual has improved their projection nearly as much as Hill, something stuck out to me while doing the research for that post:

In the interest of full disclosure, the Rays don’t possess the most improved rotation, overall. That’d be the Phillies, by a sizable amount. I’ve written about the Phillies and their ubiquitous curveball usage, but frankly, while it’s fun that they’ve seemingly accelerated their rebuild with an already-good rotation, it still doesn’t really matter, in the scope of 2016, that the Phillies have the most improved rotation. But for the Rays, who have the second-most improved rotation with another gap separating them from third, it does matter, because the Rays aim to compete.

When we ran the positional power rankings, we split the starting pitching rankings into two halves. The Rays made the cut for the first half, but just barely. Just over a month ago, the forecast had the Rays’ rotation ranked 15th, with a projected group WAR of +13.0. Now, the Rays are ranked eighth, with a forecast that would put the group around +15 WAR over a full season. It only took 21 games for the projections to give the Rays’ rotation an extra two wins in the future, based on what they’d seen.

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Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Washington Nationals, which concluded his “Evaluating the Prospects” series. Previously, Baseball America published their top 100 prospects list, as did Baseball Prospectus (top 101), Keith Law, MLB.com and newcomer 2080 Baseball (top 125). Additionally, I put out KATOH’s top-100 list back in January. All of these works attempt to accomplish the very same goal: identifying and ranking baseball’s best prospects. But KATOH goes about it in a very different way than the others. While most others rely heavily on scouting, KATOH relies exclusively on statistical performance.

On the whole, there’s a good deal of agreement between KATOH and the more traditional rankings. Many of KATOH’s favorite prospects have also received praise from real, live human beings who’ve watched them play. JP Crawford, Corey Seager, Orlando Arcia and Julio Urias all fall within this group. However, there are other KATOH favorites who’ve received very little attention from prospect evaluators. The purpose of this article is to give these prospects a little bit of attention.

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On a few occasions over the winter, I theorized that we might be seeing the beginning of the end of pitch-framing value. It has nothing to do with the idea of an automated strike zone. Rather, I think there are two factors. One, umpires have an increasing awareness of framing reputation, and that can have effects, even if they’re not intended. And two, as teams develop and acquire better framers, that raises the floor, and in turn it raises the average, making it more difficult to stand out. You know — if everyone has a good framer, no one has a good framer. That sort of thing. I do genuinely think that we’re in a transition period.

But things are still transitioning. This is something that would play out over several seasons, not one or two. Framing is very much still alive, meaning the idea of differing strike zones is very much still alive. Fair? Unfair? Don’t know! But we’ve got numbers. Here come some early-season numbers.

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Let’s take a look at what we’re dealing with, here. This is a simple plot of AL West division playoff odds over time, beginning with the start of the season, through, I don’t know, right now? About an hour ago, I guess.

The calendar on my wall tells me it’s still April, and the much smaller calendar on my computer agrees, so this early you don’t expect many big huge shifts in playoff probabilities. Long ways to go, and all that. Looking at the image above, you see teams kind of holding steady. The Rangers are close to where they started. The Angels are down a little bit. The A’s are up a little bit. The Mariners are up even more. All of those teams are bunched together — they’re separated by just 1.5 games. But then you have the Astros. Based on our own math, the Astros opened as overwhelming division favorites. They’ve already coughed that up, and then some. Odds are based on projections, and projections are imperfect. I get that. So here’s a fact: At 6-15, the Astros presently have the worst record in the American League. It doesn’t mean they’re a bad team, but it does mean they’re a team in real trouble.

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Ben and Sam banter about the Braves and Rich Hill, then answer listener emails about fun-fact distortion, Adrian Beltre vs. Chipper Jones, assessing broadcaster quality, and more.

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As I begin writing this post, the three most-searched names in the FanGraphs search bar are Jake Arrieta, Rich Hill, and Clayton Kershaw, or, the three greatest pitchers in baseball.

I kid. Mostly. Hill faced a righty-heavy Tigers lineup in Detroit last night and threw seven shutout innings while striking out eight, walking none, and allowing just four hits. It’s the kind of start that’s become commonplace for him since September of last year, and it’s the kind of start that, if commonplace, makes you one of the best pitchers in baseball. I don’t know if Rich Hill is actually one of the best pitchers in baseball. I don’t think he is, but that’s kind of what this is all about — Rich Hill is making us think now.

Last year, we saw the four starts, and they were amazing, and we reconsidered everything we knew about baseball, and then the playoffs happened, and the offseason happened, and six months went by, and it seemed like more than enough time for 36-year-old, injury-riddled, never-done-anything-remotely-like-this-before Rich Hill to lose everything he gained during those four starts in Boston. That’s the fear with any player who ends a season on a hot stretch, that whatever that hot player had in September will have worn off by next April. That fear felt especially appropriate in this particular scenario, given Hill’s history.

And then Spring Training happened, and Hill was awful. And then he was forced into an emergency Opening Day start when Sonny Gray fell ill, and Hill only lasted 2.2 innings. At that point, it was over. Hill was cooked. Whatever happened at the end of 2015 was a total fluke, a gift from above, and Rich Hill was back to being Rich Hill.

And then he rattled off another four-start stretch that rivaled 2015’s. Back to Rich Hill. Thirty-four strikeouts in in 23 innings, eight walks, five earned runs. Over Clayton Kershaw’s last nine starts, he has a 1.85 FIP, and over Hill’s nine starts during that same time period, Hill has the better strikeout rate, the better home-run rate, the better ground-ball rate, and the better ERA.

So I wanted to play a little game. Hill has been Kershaw’s equal since September of last year, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison, because Hill is (probably) pitching at the absolute peak of his career, and we’ve just compared him to a less-than-peak (but still amazing) Kershaw. To make a truly fair comparison, we need to go peak against peak. In the interest of full disclosure, I originally thought this might work with Kershaw, but then I looked at Kershaw’s best nine-starts stretches and realized how foolish I am. Kershaw isn’t a human. But Max Scherzer is a human! And also one of the best, I don’t know, five pitchers in baseball? Based on those two statements alone, he became our new subject. Let’s play a guessing game, pitting Scherzer’s career-best nine-start runs in particular statistical categories vs. Hill’s last nine starts. Click the .gif below each question to reveal the answer.
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A year ago, Kris Bryant’s failure to make the Cubs Opening Day roster made a good deal of news because (a) Bryant, 23, had dominated the minors and was clearly ready for the majors, and (b) by holding him down for a couple weeks, the Cubs prevented Bryant from recording a full year of service time in 2015, which also prevented him from recording the necessary six years of service time for free agency before the end of the 2021 season. Bryant was the number-one prospect in baseball at the time, but he was not the only player kept in the minor leagues at least in part due to service time considerations. Carlos Correa, Maikel Franco, Francisco Lindor, Carlos Rodon, Addison Russell, and Noah Syndergaard all spent time in the minors last year before succeeding in the big leagues. There has been little uproar this year regarding service time shenanigans. While there is no Bryant-like player, the potential for some service-time manipulation is still there.

To identify players who are ripe for manipulation it’s best to begin with the very best prospects. Of the players mentioned above, six of seven appeared among Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list last year; only Franco appeared outside the top 20, down at 38 overall. Taking a look at Baseball America’s top 20 prospects this season, we can get a good start in identifying players.

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The White Sox beat the Blue Jays last night by a score of 10-1 (box). Comprehensive victory. Chris Sale won his fifth game, going a ho-hum 8 innings versus a lefty-destroying lineup in a hitter’s park. Southside hitters compiled 15 hits. They won on Monday in the first game of the series and five of the six games before that, too, and today they go for the sweep at the Rogers Centre — at which park the Blue Jays haven’t been swept since 2013. No one is saying that two games and the prospect of an early (and difficult) road sweep make a season, but the White Sox are one of two teams in baseball with 15 wins, and that merits some investigation. It would merit investigation no matter what team it was, but it especially merits investigation given where the White Sox were projected to finish this season.

At the beginning of the season, our projected American League Central standings looked like this:

There’s a lot of parity in the AL this season — not necessarily top-tier parity, but a solid, middle-of-the-road type where each of the division races could go down to the wire. The AL Central fits that mold, with the preseason projections telling us the Indians were clear favorites — though if the 2014-2015 Royals were any indication, we could expect the race to possibly be tighter. The Central was potentially seen as one of the more volatile divisions, with the possibility we could have a four-way race for the division. There was even the idea before the season started that even the Twins — with a little luck and a few breakouts — could be in the mix, but that seems less possible (to put it nicely) given their woeful start. Where do the playoff odds stack up for the Central now? Let’s take a look:

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