It’s over. Maybe.

Mark Buehrle has told reporters this offseason that he is “not planning on playing next season but is not ready to officially announce retirement,” which is a sort of confusing follow-up to the rumors we heard in October that the 36-year-old veteran starter was planning to retire. If Buehrle does wind up pitching in 2016, it sounds like the only team that could lure him back are his hometown St. Louis Cardinals. If Buehrle winds up retiring, it will mark the end of a remarkable and fascinating career.

Buehrle’s no Hall of Famer. But he’s close. Closer than you might think. He’ll be on the ballot in five or six years, and he’ll get a handful of votes. By our WAR here on the site, which underrates Buehrle by using FIP, Buehrle ranks 40th all-time among starting pitchers in the expansion era. By RA9-WAR, the Preferred Buehrle Method of Evaluation, he jumps up to 30th, with a WAR of 61 that places him right on the verge of the generally accepted Hall of Fame consideration threshold.

And if you think of Buehrle simply as a “compiler,” you’d be mistaken. Buehrle had the peak. When Buehrle entered the league in 2000, his contemporaries included Pedro Martinez, Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling, who were turning in some of the most dominant single-season pitching performances baseball has ever seen. Buehrle didn’t have any of the strikeouts or any of the dominant peripherals, but believe it or not, he was right there, just a few steps behind the Pedros and Units and Schillings of his time. Buehrle put up 26 WAR between 2001-05, making him the seventh-most valuable pitcher during that half decade, just a win or so per season behind the true greats. Buehrle’s peak ranks 67th among all pitchers in the expansion era, just ahead of Fernando Valenzuela and just behind David Cone.

But to simply state the WAR figures does a disservice to Buehrle, who is truly one of a kind. In an age where pitchers are hurt more than ever, Buehrle’s never been on the disabled list. He fell five outs short of throwing at least 200 innings for what would have been an unthinkable 15th consecutive season. During that time, Buehrle logged 3,232 innings. That’s 300 more than second place, 500 more than third place, 1,000 more than 18th place.

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It seems to me there are two ways of thinking about things. Baseball, as you know, is the one major sport where the playing dimensions between venues can be wildly different. Given that, I think you can either prefer neutrality and standardization, or you can choose to embrace the differences. There are limits to the latter — I don’t think anyone wants to see a stadium that makes a mockery of the contest, because you don’t have reasonable competition. But we haven’t gotten to the mockery point. So, personally, I like the quirks, even if they seem occasionally unfair.

Focus on that unfairness for a moment. If something were simply too unfair, it wouldn’t work. Fans wouldn’t support it. You couldn’t play a real baseball game with fences right behind the infield because the product wouldn’t be recognizable. I think there are certain features, currently, that approach the threshold without crossing it. Like, left field in Minute Maid Park approaches the line, because it yields a number of pretty weak home runs. It’s true, but without being out of control. On the opposite side of things, there’s straightaway center field in Minute Maid Park. If you want to conquer that, as a hitter, you have to hit the most difficult homer in baseball.

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Success is often best measured relative to expectations. I am a lifelong Philadelphia Eagles fan. Rich Kotite is one of the few coaches in Eagle history to finish with a career record over .500; Chip Kelly is another. I watched Kotite coach; he very well might have been the single worst head coach, in any sport, whom I have ever had the pleasure to watch. While most coaches are hired to take over foundering or rebuilding clubs, Kotite had taken over Buddy Ryan’s exceedingly young and talented club, coming off of three consecutive playoff appearances. He torched it in record time, then had a dire run with the Jets.

In an offbeat kind of way, Stephen Strasburg is a baseball equivalent of Rich Kotite. Though he has compiled a 54-37 record and 3.09 ERA — and produced a scintillating 901/192 strikeout-to-walk ratio (K/BB) in 776.2 career innings — most would agree that he has failed to accomplish as much as expectations would have suggested. Kotite went nowhere with a young, three-time playoff Eagles’ team that he inherited from the fired Buddy Ryan; Strasburg, meanwhile, has only received Cy Young Award votes in one season, finishing ninth in the 2014 balloting, to cherry-pick one piece of data.

Well, I’m here to tell you that this is quite likely the year that Strasburg’s perfect storm could engulf the National League. And the timing would be quite fortuitous, given the amount of cash a fully actualized Strasburg could command on the free market, as he enters free agency following the 2016 season.

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

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
It represents an instance of damning with faint praise to observe that, in 2015, Milwaukee batters outproduced Bryce Harper by roughly a win. On the one hand, that’s better than not outproducing Bryce Harper. On the other, the phrase “Milwaukee batters” denotes a group of professional ballplayers, while “Bryce Harper” is just one person by himself. In light of how baseball works, a group of players should basically always outperform a single guy.

A brief inspection of the projections for Milwaukee suggests that, while the 2016 campaign is unlikely to yield wild success, there’s also less of a chance that the entire club will find itself contending with a 22-year-old outfielder for supremacy of the WAR leaderboards. Apart from whatever value he provides from pitch-framing, catcher Jonathan Lucroy (481 PA, 3.3 zWAR) is forecast to supply enough offensive and (more traditional) defensive value to record an above-average line, while Ryan Braun (582 PA, 2.7 zWAR) and relative newcomer Domingo Santana (570 PA, 2.5 zWAR) receive solid-average projections. Again, it’s not an overwhelming collection of talent. Between the deep depth, however, and the possibility of some useful platoons, the Brewers have a chance of skewing towards the direction of average.

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Let’s define an ace. Together, I mean, while acknowledging it can’t really be done. Not conclusively, because of the reason leading to this post in the first place — there is no definition, and there never has been. No one has ever been in the presence of a stone tablet inscribed with a divine description of what makes an ace starting pitcher, so there’s plenty of leeway, making this one of the great baseball arguments. No one denies that there are obvious ace starting pitchers, just as no one denies that there are obvious Hall-of-Famers. The difference is where you draw the cut-off. There’s only one definition of, I don’t know, “bookshelf”. There are countless definitions of “ace”. For everyone who thinks about it, it’s a feel thing.

Neatly, though, feel things can be quantified. And that’s the goal of this post, which contains 20 very simple polls. Below, you’ll find the names of 20 starting pitchers, and then for each there’s the yes-or-no question: Is this pitcher an ace? And I want for you to reply based on however you feel. Maybe you have an immediate feeling, or maybe you want to think a little bit, in which case you’ll notice I’ve linked to the player pages. Think however much or little you want, then choose an answer and move on. You might be able to do all of them in less than a minute.

The pitchers were chosen semi-randomly, so not every good pitcher is included. Some names are surely going to get a lot more yes votes than others, and I’m interested in seeing where the support dips below 50%, assuming that it ever does. That’s my own arbitrary cutoff, but I’m keeping things simple — to me, if the majority of this community thinks a guy’s an ace, then he counts as an ace, even if he’s got one vote over half. When the results are in, then we can review them to see what makes a guy an ace, in the eyes of the community, and then why other pitchers fall short. The results won’t be inarguable, because all of this is subjective, but we can at least try to apply some logic to a nebulous idea.

It’s time to crowdsource the definition of an ace. In the end, we’ll have a definition plenty of people still disagree with. So it’s like trying to solve an unsolvable problem, but this should still be an illuminating exercise. Have fun! Or don’t. You’re your own boss.

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After first demonstrating that batted ball exit velocity matters, and then establishing that it might stabilize rather quickly and represent an actual repeatable skill, the next step in our exploration of the data is its application. We want to find something that’s predictive and could possibly provide clues for future performance. In the second part of this series, we looked at a lot of relationships between first- and second-half data to determine if exit velocity is a repeatable skill. To attempt to find meaning in the data, we will again use the numbers we have for the first and second halves with a view towards identifying some meaningful information.

Looking for potentially predictive information, the simplest thing to do is look at the overall outcome — in this case, second-half production — and see if there is anything in the first half which might have portended the numbers from the second. In Part II, a scatter plot of first- versus second-half wOBA was used to show the relationship between halves. Here is that graph again.

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Ben and Sam banter about Alvaro Espinoza and Kenta Imamiya, then draft candidates for the 2016 Comeback Player of the Year Award(s).

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Cincinnati Reds. In this companion piece, I look at that same Cincinnati farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Jose Peraza, 2B (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 14.9 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Peraza burst onto the prospect scene in 2014, when he hit .339/.364/.441 between High-A and Double-A. His high BABIP came back to earth a bit in Triple-A last year, but was still roughly a league-average hitter. His .293/.316/. 378 showing wasn’t bad at all for a 21-year-old. Peraza is an interesting prospect due to the outlier-ness of many of his attributes. For example, both of the following sentences are accurate. One: he’s a 70-grade runner who makes tons of contact, is a strong defender up the middle, succeeded in Double-A as a 20-year-old, and held his own as a 21-year-old in Triple-A. And two: he’s a second baseman with minimal power who never walks and has been traded twice in the past seven months. There are clearly pros and cons to Peraza’s profile, but when fed into KATOH, they yield a very favorable projection. I’m always skeptical of the projections for outlier cases like Peraza, so let’s turn to the Mahalanobis comps for more clarity.

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As we head towards the expiration of the CBA this winter, there seem to be three pretty common discussion points or narratives making the rounds in MLB right now.

1. The problems with the qualifying offer system, highlighted by Howie Kendrick’s contract with the Dodgers and the lingering free agency of Dexter Fowler, Ian Desmond, and Yovani Gallardo.

2. The unhappiness of some owners in regards to their view that some teams are “tanking” in an attempt to stockpile high draft choices and the bonus pool allotments that go along with those picks.

3. The continued silliness of the international signing rules, and the perverse incentives created by the system for signing players from other countries.

Yeah, there’s some talk about the DH and the luxury tax threshold, but those haven’t been as pervasive over the last month or so as the conversations about the qualifying offer, tanking, and the Dodgers decision to spend almost $100 million on international teenagers in the last six months. And, interestingly, those three things all have one thread in common: the draft.

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