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Late in the 2014 season, the Red Sox wrote a check worth $72.5 million and handed it to a stranger. The organization had barely missed out on prized Cuban first baseman Jose Abreu less than a year earlier, and they ensured they wouldn’t be topped in the international market again by giving Rusney Castillo the largest-ever deal to a Cuban defector. Castillo wasn’t a complete stranger, of course. They’d seen him play plenty of baseball, they’d met him in person; he was no more a stranger than any other international free agent coming to America. But with Abreu, there was the kind of raw power that can’t be ignored. With guys like Yoenis Cespedes and especially Yasiel Puig, the tools were off the charts. Undeniable freak athleticism.

With Castillo, the figures of the contract could be difficult to see through a thick layer of foggy uncertainty. The upside and athleticism were there, of course. Even the Red Sox don’t hand out seven years and $72.5 million without upside and athleticism. But there wasn’t the Abreu power. There weren’t the Cespedes and Puig tools. Instead, there were concerns of a swing deficiency, and “fourth outfielder” labels, and comparisons to Rajai Davis and Shane Victorino. It was uncertain what the Red Sox new Cuban investment might be, as is the case for any Cuban investment. It’s just that, with Castillo, the comps weren’t as rosy, especially in contrast of the instant success stories of Abreu, Cespedes, and Puig.

Which brings us to the present. Here we are, more than a year later, with Castillo having played in parts of two seasons, and the thick fog of uncertainty still looms, and now it’s shading our view of the Green Monster, locked into a place in left field on Opening Day for a team with hopes of contention and little in the way of a viable, everyday backup plan in the event that the fog happens to grow thicker, and darker.

What can we make of Rusney Castillo? What’s gone right? What’s gone wrong? Where are the points of optimism, pessimism?

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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 Los Angeles Angels. 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 NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
For how much of an outlier it is, Mike Trout’s projection (688 PA, 9.3 zWAR) represents probably one of the easiest to calculate on the back of an envelope. In each of his first four seasons, he’s produced about five or six wins above average by way of his bat, added another half-win or so by means of base running, and recorded slightly above-average defensive numbers. Add in a little more than two wins’ worth of replacement value and the result is an 8.0-9.0 WAR forecast. Whatever influence there might be from regression is likely offset by a combination of Trout’s youth and the nearly 3,000 plate-appearance sample over which he’s established this level of play. The calculus is a strange combination of simple and impossible, not unlike Trout himself.

A team composed of all exactly replacement-level players and also Mike Trout would record roughly 57 wins over the course of a season — meaning the Angels, as a group, need to augment Trout’s contribution with about 30 wins of their own in order to qualify for the postseason in some fashion. Kole Calhoun (604 PA, 2.7 zWAR) and the newly acquired Andrelton Simmons (590 PA, 3.7 zWAR) would appear to be useful in that endeavor. Depending on the health of his foot, Albert Pujols (602 PA, 2.7 zWAR) might also be, as well. After those four players, however, finding even an average projection among the club’s hitters is difficult.

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I don’t know if you paid much attention to Rick Porcello last year, but I bet you have made a bad pancake. You know, one of those pancakes when you wait too long before you flip it. Or maybe you tried to make a pancake without preheating the cooking surface. The parallels work as well as any parallels do — you mess things up from the start, despite the best of intentions, but then you are still able to flip the pancake, and you don’t repeat the mistake the second time. So the second half of the cooking process beats the hell out of the first, and in the end, even a messed-up pancake is still a decent enough pancake. And you feel like the next pancake is going to be a lot better.

Porcello got things turned around after it was too late for the Red Sox to get things turned around. So the progress happened quietly, as matters involving the Red Sox go, but if you want an explanation you can just browse to the top of Porcello’s FanGraphs player page. As I write this, there’s a quote from a few days ago, where Porcello talks about how he went back to going sinker-first. The four-seamers up were a neat idea, but the experiment failed, and Porcello found himself when he went back to pitching like himself. It all makes sense, and it bodes well enough for 2016.

So looking ahead, for Porcello, there’s going to be a lot of attention on his sinker. It’s a nice pitch, but I prefer to think about something else that’s gone on in plain sight. When you think Rick Porcello, you don’t usually think curveball. But over the course of last season, he did something suspicious.

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David Ross would like to manage in the big leagues some day. According to several of his peers, he’ll be a worthy candidate. The 38-year-old Chicago Cubs catcher was by far the most popular choice when I asked a cross section of uniformed personnel: Which Current Players Are Future Managers?

What will Ross’s managerial style be, when and if he’s given an opportunity to lead a big-league team? In a followup to yesterday’s column, Ross shared several of his philosophies.

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Ross on what his managerial style would be: “I’ve gotten to play for some great managers. Bobby Cox, Dusty Baker, John Farrell, Joe Maddon. Jim Tracy was phenomenal. Terry Francona. Bruce Bochy. A lot of great ones.

“One thing I see from the best managers is that they let the players be the players. They have a rule or two, but as long as [the players] work hard and do the right thing, they mostly let them do their thing. They let them be men. The manager manages the game on the field and lets the veterans on the team police the clubhouse. And if they do need to talk to someone, they do it behind closed doors. They don’t show them up.

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So I’m sitting here, passing a Wednesday afternoon by scrolling through players Steamer thinks are going to be worse. Most of the time, I get it. Yoenis Cespedes, sure — last year, he had almost everything go right. With Francisco Lindor, I understand bat-related skepticism. I see why a projection system thinks Joe Panik will take a step back, and the same goes for Justin Turner and Nelson Cruz. Honestly, I get it with David Peralta, too. I see why Steamer thinks what it thinks. All the reasons are right there on the player page. I just think in Peralta’s case in particular, there are positive traits that should lift the expectations. Allow me to make the argument.

We haven’t written that often about Peralta, although it was just a few months ago Dave suggested he might be baseball’s most underrated player. That would be fitting, since one of baseball’s other most underrated players is outfield-mate A.J. Pollock. There’s no defining or studying underratedness, so I don’t know quite where Peralta should rank, but he’s inarguably on the list. Dave pointed to some of the numbers he’d put up. I want to point to some other numbers, some numbers I think are especially encouraging.

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Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Howie Kendrick’s contract, Scott Boras and the CBA, how teams hire analysts, young MVPs, and more.

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There’s something that should probably be acknowledged from the beginning. The Mariners have signed Dae-ho Lee to a minor-league contract. Mostly, we ignore players signed to minor-league contracts, at least before the start of spring training. The thing about Lee is that he might be a good hitter. We’ve paid very little offseason attention to, say, Chris Carter and Pedro Alvarez, who are proven above-average hitters. There’s a bias here, because Lee feels more interesting, on account of the fact that we don’t know quite what he is. Lee, in other words, is sort of a prospect, even though he’s 33 years old, and while the majority of prospects establish low ceilings, it’s fun to wonder before the establishing begins.

I don’t know if Lee is a better player than Alvarez, who is in his 20s, and who has 6 career WAR. I do know that it’s more fun to think about and write about Lee, compared to Alvarez. Maybe that’s not fair to Pedro Alvarez, but, you know what, Lee is in the news today, and this is his post, and it seems like he can do some neat things. I can’t worry all the time about fairness.

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Some of it depends on the philosophies of the front office, some of it depends on the market size, and some of it is pure luck of the draw. Every 40-man roster in baseball is built through different means, and each organization has its own unique quirks when it comes to roster construction.

This is a reboot of an exercise I did last year, with a couple fun additions. Relying mostly on RosterResource and our depth charts, I’ve got a couple spreadsheets containing every player on every 40-man roster, how they were acquired by their team, and their projected WAR for 2016, based on Steamer. Last year’s post focused mainly on the raw number of players, and the means by which they were acquired.

I’ve got a new version of that table, still sortable, and this year I’ve added international signings:

There’s some interesting information to be gleaned from this table, but not every free agent signing or trade acquisition is made the same. What we really care about is how each team’s key players were acquired. So, this year, I’ve added up the projected WAR of every player, and broke those down by the method of acquisition:
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In part one of this three-part series, we examined the (relatively strong) correlation between exit velocity and slugging percentage — and the (also relatively strong) correlation with individual wOBA, a solid proxy for offensive production at the plate. While there might be some debate over how important exit velocity is on offensive production — particularly when we dial down to an individual level — we know there is some relationship, and that relationship is enough to answer the next question, which is whether exit velocity represents a repeatable skill.

We first attempted to answer the question of whether exit velocity matters. Once we know that it matters, it is still incredibly important to try and determine if it is a skill. An appropriate analogy might be as follows: we know that pitcher BABIP against is important because when the BABIP is higher, the pitcher gives up more hits and runs. Unfortunately, we know a lot less about determining pitchers who can suppress BABIP or pitchers who seem to be prone to a high BABIP. We might believe that it is a repeatable skill; however, if it takes an incredibly long time to figure out who has the skill and who does not, then using a pitcher’s BABIP against to try and predict future performance is of limited use.

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