Ben and Sam preview the Rays’ season with ESPN Insider’s Tommy Rancel, and George talks to Tampa Bay Times Rays beat writer Marc Topkin (at 24:47).
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Early next week, our Positional Power Rankings are going to turn to the pitching staffs. I’m slated to write about the top 15 starting rotations, and if I were to begin writing that piece now, I’d end up discussing how the Dodgers have the best starting rotation in the game. This is a controversial statement, because the Dodgers are built upon fragility, and they’ve already had something like 27 pitchers injured. How could the Dodgers possibly have a better rotation than, say, the Mets? The Mets roll four or five deep. They have three could-be aces. It’s easy to love the Mets; it’s correct to love the Mets. The argument for the Dodgers is that they have plenty of depth, and it’s also — importantly — that they have Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw’s not hurt, and Kershaw is basically two aces in one. No rotation has a better starting point.
I’ll write about that next week. I’ll write about it using many of the same words. When ranking the best groups, I think people have a bias toward even spreads over something more top-heavy. All of this here also functions as a spoiler. The PPR series runs down the rankings at every individual position, but a question a lot of people like to debate is, which team has baseball’s best outfield? We’ve had this conversation before, a year ago or something, when fans would compare and contrast the Marlins and the Pirates. Those remain two very good outfields. Yet based on what we have on FanGraphs, baseball’s best projected outfield for 2016 will play half its games in Anaheim.
As basically everyone knows, the typical exchange rate between words and pictures is about 1,000 to 1. Due to advanced work being conducted by top scientists, the following image has actually been valued at roughly 6,000 words. Or, at least that’s how many words follow it.
Right fielders: are they more than just left fielders on the opposite side of the diamond? It’s the question of our time. Let us go then, you and I, and consider it at exhaustive length.
#1 Nationals
| Name | PA | AVG | OBP | SLG | wOBA | Bat | BsR | Fld | WAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bryce Harper | 651 | .306 | .421 | .577 | .420 | 52.8 | 0.8 | 1.9 | 7.3 |
| Clint Robinson | 28 | .249 | .324 | .383 | .310 | -0.2 | 0.0 | -0.1 | 0.0 |
| Matt den Dekker | 21 | .252 | .309 | .394 | .306 | -0.2 | 0.0 | -0.1 | 0.0 |
| Total | 700 | .301 | .414 | .562 | .413 | 52.4 | 0.8 | 1.7 | 7.3 |
Whether it’s true or not in every case, accepted wisdom nevertheless suggests that wildly talented ballplayers rarely possess the appropriate temperament to become, later in their careers, wildly talented coaches. The reasoning goes like this: a player who contends with considerably little failure during his active career is unlikely to understand the trials of those who are forced to contend with failure at a much higher rate. Or something along those lines.
It wouldn’t be surprising to find such a phenomenon applying to Bryce Harper, who’s been (to varying degrees) one of Earth’s best hitters since he was 17 or 18 years old and who — at the age of 22 — just produced the top batting line of this young and frightening century among all players who aren’t Barry Bonds. One can imagine a 55-year-old Harper, taking control of club that’s just finished in last place, and wondering why all his players just don’t decide to be the best in the league at hitting.
Because projections are, at the most basic level, regression machines, Harper isn’t forecast to approach the 10-win threshold in 2016 like he did last season. But given his youth and talent and constantly improving approach, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he did that. And it would certainly be even less of a surprise if he recorded the top season among major-league right fielders.
Previous editions: Arizona / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Minnesota / Milwaukee / New York (NL) / New York (AL) / Oakland / Philadelphia/ Pittsburgh.
Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the San Diego Padres. In this companion piece, I look at that same San Diego farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Padres have the 11th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.
There’s a weird narrative going around with regards to the Dodgers right now. Somehow, the team’s lavish spending on international prospects has been construed as a sign that the team isn’t committed to winning in the short term. Or something. I’ll let Dylan Hernandez’s words from the LA Times try to explain it better.
This was the risk the front office assumed with its long-term plan, which is to be in 2020-something what the World Series favorite Chicago Cubs are now. That strategy explains why the pitching staff consists of primarily spare parts while tens of millions of dollars are being invested in Latin American teenagers.
There’s some logic to the idea, except you wonder if the team’s decision makers are looking too far ahead to recognize the opportunity right in front of them — specifically, that Clayton Kershaw is theirs for at least three more seasons.
At the end of the 2018 season, Kershaw will have the option of doing what Zack Greinke did over the winter and void the remainder of his contract. Greinke didn’t return. Kershaw might not, either.
The three-year period coincides with Kershaw’s prime years; the three-time Cy Young Award winner turned 28 on Saturday.
It’s puzzling why the Dodgers aren’t maximizing their chances of winning a World Series while this once-in-a-generation pitcher is on their roster.
Let’s look at some facts.
Aaron Sanchez wants to be a starter. Most pitchers want to be a starter. Jesse Chavez and Gavin Floyd want to be starters, too, and they all might deserve it, which is the current conundrum in Toronto. Not that having too many qualified starters is a bad thing, per se, but it presents the team with some tough choices, choices that could complicate things down the line.
At the very least, Toronto can feel good about their depth. The top of their rotation might not match the firepower of their contending peers, but they’ll be sending two seemingly competent starters to the bullpen at the end of Spring Training, with Drew Hutchison heading to the minors as perhaps the eighth starter on the depth chart.
As I’m writing this, I’ve come upon a tweet by Jon Heyman who was present in Blue Jays camp the other day and reported that Chavez is set to the head to the bullpen, so in fact it looks like the last rotation spot is down to two. And Chavez to the pen makes sense anyway; he’s had the worst spring of the three, for what it’s worth, but more importantly, he’s done the swingman thing in the past. Each of the last two years, he’s seamlessly shuffled between relieving and starting — not something everyone can do — and so he doesn’t necessarily need to be stretched out right now to be able to contribute to the rotation later down the line. And Chavez will need to contribute to the rotation later down the line. Pitching is fickle.
So we’ve got Gavin Floyd and Aaron Sanchez, and in that same Heyman tweet I linked, he seemed to suggest Floyd has the leg up on the last spot. Sometimes with Twitter, it’s hard to tell what’s being reported and what’s being speculated, but there’s clearly some sort of sense that Floyd could be the leader in the clubhouse.
| 1:22 |
: dedicated to the baby child, or his song dedicated to me I guess.
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| 12:00 |
: Masterson gonna pitch in majors this year, and will he have any value at all?
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| 12:00 |
: Doubt it.
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| 12:00 |
: Floyd or Sanchez get the 5th spot? I can see arguments for both
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| 12:01 |
: Sanchez. If you put him back in the pen one more time it’s the last time.
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| 12:01 |
: How nervous are you about Grandal’s injury?
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Ask a current major league batter about his two strike approach. Watch the words stop coming out of their mouth.
About twenty minutes into a long conversation with Josh Donaldson about his approach to swinging the bat, we got to what he can do to deal with the low and away pitch in counts where he has to protect. I didn’t realize it, but I’d asked for his two-strike approach. “I don’t really want to get too in depth into that,” he said, shutting off the inquiry.
Brandon Moss, the most loquacious of interviews, just laughed when I asked him about how his approach changed. Quickly, I learned not to talk about it.
But it was still out there. And when Paul Konerko told me (during another long conversation about hitting) that he felt like a strikeout was a weakness, my ears perked up. He’d tell me about his two-strike approach. He wasn’t in the league any more.
Last season, Billy Butler ran into 10 outs. If you didn’t know that before, you definitely know that now. And if you’re anything like me, now that you know that, you want to know what happened. Boy have I got the post for you. It’s this post!
If you wanted to characterize the state of the position, you might lead with the well-rounded players who occupy it, but also the fact that there are very few great left fielders. No team’s left field unit projects for more than 4.0 WAR, joining only second base and DH as positions with such low projections for the top spot. On top of that, there project to be many poor left field units, as no other position comes close to the ten teams which project to produce less than 1.0 WAR at the spot.
