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The Braves kept working the trade machine on Thursday, as they continue to tear down their team in hopes of building it back up. The club once again directed its attention to the National League West, this time getting the now-limbered-up Padres into the mix. And in doing so, they managed to get a couple of players in Casey Kelly and Ricardo Rodriguez who may have interest in the future for a player — Christian Bethancourt — whose interest probably has died out.

Once upon a time, Casey Kelly was going to be a star. If you’re looking for a player to whom you might point when attempting to characterize the risk inherent in prospects, Kelly would be a great example. As one of the prizes of the Adrian Gonzalez trade, Kelly was thought to be within striking distance of the majors heading into the 2011 season. After all, when the Red Sox had traded him to the Padres, Kelly had 21 starts at Double-A under his belt. That’s plenty these days. Jose Fernandez didn’t make any before he graduated. Neither did Carlos Rodon. Lance McCullers made five, and then graduated. Anthony DeSclafani made 21 in Double-A before graduating to Triple-A, and hit the majors after 13 starts there. I’m cherry picking, but you get the point: at the time of the trade, Kelly was (understandably) thought to be on the cusp.

He wasn’t. He made 27 starts in Double-A in 2011, and didn’t graduate to Triple-A or the majors. At 21, his 3.98 ERA wasn’t exactly blowing people away, nor was his 3.77 FIP or 17.1% strikeout rate. So he opened 2012 in the minors. He started at Triple-A, but he missed most of the season after straining his elbow during his second start of the season. That was probably the red flag for his career. Had he shut it down and had Tommy John surgery right then, he might be working on his second major league season already. But he didn’t. After sitting out from mid-April to late July, he came back and made six starts in the minors — striking out 14 against two walks in the last two, both at Double-A — before making his major league debut.

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Note: this post was published earlier today at FOX Sports, before reports surfaced that Heyward has reached an agreement with the Chicago Cubs.

Look towards the top of any list of free agents available this off-season and you’ll find Jason Heyward’s name. There are good reasons for this. Sure, he’s polite at parties, never leaves the seat up, and always holds the door open for the elderly, but it’s more than that. He’s got perhaps the most well-rounded set of skills the free-agent market has ever seen. He’s got a career wRC+ of 118, so he can hit; he’s got some power in there, as well as on-base ability; he’s an excellent baserunner and a superb fielder. There’s really nothing that Heyward doesn’t do well, and when you add his age into the equation, that’s when things get silly, financially speaking. Ah, his age. That’s really the crux of this whole thing.

Heyward is 26 all year, so unlike most free agents, the team that signs him will get his peak seasons. There are some players who have many of Heyward’s abilities but who won’t approach what he’s expected to get. Ben Zobrist, for instance, is an interesting comparison. He’s a good fielder, a smart baserunner, he has some pop in his bat and he’s exhibited about as much on-base ability as Heyward has. He also plays 70 positions despite baseball not having that many. But Zobrist was born in May, 1981, meaning he’ll be 35 years old next season. Heyward was born in August of 1989, so he’ll be 26. This is why Zobrist just signed with the Cubs for four years, $56 million while Heyward is expected to more than double both the total years as well as the AAV of Zobrist’s contract. Imagine if you could go back in time and sign Ben Zobrist for 10 years beginning at his age-26 season. In today’s market, that would be a bargain.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

Well, it seems like the Cubs have won the Jason Heyward sweepstakes.

Multiple sources indicate Heyward has indeed chosen Cubs over Cards, Nats.

— Gordon Wittenmyer (@GDubCub) December 11, 2015

BREAKING: Heyward has decision. Told now it's #Cubs. Source earlier told PD #Cardinals alerted they're out. https://t.co/8gMFYljxEc Updated

— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) December 11, 2015

Cubs are believed to have gotten heyward for less than $200M. Apparently taking less to be at addison and clark. @GDubCub 1st

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeymanCBS) December 11, 2015

At “less than $200 million”, as Heyman reported, I’m guessing the deal will end up at $192 million over eight years, or something in that range. He’ll almost certainly have an opt-out, probably after the third or fourth year. We should find out official terms soon, but one thing looks like a safe bet: the 2016 Cubs are going to be the pre-season favorites to win the NL Central.

The 2015 Rule 5 draft has come and gone. A total of 16 players were selected in the major league portion of the event. In what follows, I take a look at what KATOH has to say about the players selected. The players are listed in the order they were selected in yesterday’s draft. Projections have been produced based both on 2015 and also 2014 minor-league stats.

Tyler Goeddel, OF (Profile)
New Team: Philadelphia
Old Team: Tampa Bay
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 2.9 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 1.5 WAR

Goedel was one of the players I profiled in my Rule 5 preview. He transitioned from third base to the outfield in 2015, and he took a step forward offensively as well. He hit a strong .279/.350/.443 in Double-A and also kicked in 28 steals. Goeddel’s had some trouble making contact in the past, but his combination of power and speed is intriguing. Hitters who both possess that skill set and have already succeeded in Double-A don’t grow on trees. He may not be quite ready for the show going by the numbers, but is close enough that he probably won’t embarrass himself. And at 23, there’s still room for him to improve. The Phillies won’t be winning many games in 2016, so Goeddel is exactly the type of player on whom they should by taking fliers. Maybe they’ll catch lightning in a bottle like they did with last year’s Rule 5 pick, Odubel Herrera.

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Welp, so much for that. A few hours after I wrote that the Cardinals were the best fit for Jason Heyward among the three finalists, Ken Rosenthal suggests that he won’t be going back to St. Louis after all.

#STLCards out on Heyward, sources tell me and @jonmorosi. @dgoold had indicated they no longer were in play.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 11, 2015

That leaves the Cubs and Nationals, assuming there isn’t a second mystery team. And between those two options, I’d expect Heyward to go to the Cubs, though of course, I just linked to a reason why you shouldn’t put too much faith in my expectations of these things. If it is the Cubs, then it will be fascinating to see if they really want to roll with a Schwarber-Heyward-Soler outfield, or if signing Heyward opens the door to a trade of Soler for a center fielder.

Stay tuned!

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As the winter meetings drew to a close yesterday, the market for Jason Heyward heated up, and based on reports from around the game, it appears that the three finalists for his services are the St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs, and (surprisingly) the Washington Nationals. The Cardinals interest in keeping their star right fielder has been known for a while, while the Cubs have long been a rumored suitor; Heyward is the kind of player that analytically-inclined organizations are more likely to pay for, and teams don’t get a lot more analytically inclined than the Cubs right now. Besides, with a hole in center field — though Heyward could slide to right field if the team traded Jorge Soler and acquired another CF — and a young core of players poised to put the team on the brink of perennial success, Heyward makes plenty of sense for Chicago.

The Nationals weren’t really attached to Heyward much at all until yesterday, when Jon Heyman outed them as the mystery team in this chase. The team apparently jumped in on the outfielder after losing out on Ben Zobrist, and would likely slot Heyward in as their center fielder as well, creating an elite trio along with Bryce Harper and Jayson Werth. The Nationals have been looking to add another left-handed bat to their line-up, and with Michael Taylor maybe best suited for a fourth outfielder role at this point, signing Heyward is perhaps the easiest path to solving that problem while also upgrading perhaps the weakest spot on the team.

But where does he fit the best? Who needs him the most, and should be incentivized to pay the highest price? Let’s look at all three options.

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For the last few weeks, the Braves have been fielding calls from teams who wanted to trade for Shelby Miller. And for good reason: Miller is just 25 years old, is coming off a strong season in which he reminded everyone he was one of the game’s best pitching prospects coming up through the Cardinals organization, and he won’t be a free agent until after the 2018 season. With the price of pitching exploding in free agency, three cost-controlled years of a quality young starter is a valuable asset, and with the Braves in full rebuild mode, trading Miller to acquire players who could be core pieces of their long-term future made a lot of sense.

But when they discussed trading Miller as part of their rebuilding process, they could not have imagined the outcome that resulted tonight. After reportedly talking to the Cubs and Dodgers without securing the kind of impact young talent they were looking for in exchange, they ended up striking a remarkable deal with the Diamondbacks. The trade brings in major league outfielder Ender Inciarte along with minor league prospects Dansby Swanson and Aaron Blair.

Except, these aren’t just any minor league prospects. Dansby Swanson was the #1 overall pick in the draft just five months ago, a shortstop who shows quality offensive skills for a middle infielder. MLB.com currently rates him as the #10 prospect in baseball, and that’s after just collecting 100 plate appearances in his professional debut this summer. With a reasonable performance as he climbs the minor league ladder this summer, he’ll likely be in the mix to be considered the best prospect in baseball at this time next year.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

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 Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Kansas City / Philadelphia / Toronto.

Batters
In terms of results, Cincinnati’s 2015 season was unambiguously poor. In terms of indicators, it was much more ambiguously poor. By BaseRuns, the club ought to have won nine more games than they actually did in 2015 — and most of those potential wins appear to have been conceded by the offense. Sequencing was largely the culprit: despite producing the ninth-best park-adjusted batting line (92 wRC+) in the National League with the bases empty, the Reds recorded the very worst batting line (72 wRC+) with men in scoring postion.

Entering the 2016 campaign, the starting corps of the Reds’ offense actually appears to be quite strong. It isn’t surprising to find that Todd Frazier (624 PA, 3.6 zWAR) and Joey Votto (574 PA, 4.6 zWAR) are both projected to produce comfortably above-average seasons. But Jay Bruce, Zack Cozart, Billy Hamilton, and Brandon Phillips all profile as roughly average players, too.

Of some interest is how the Reds will manage left field. Eugenio Suarez (607 PA, 2.3 zWAR) would appear to represent a legitimate solution to the problem. There’s also Adam Duvall (536 PA, 1.7 zWAR), though, too. In both cases, the projected numbers are more optimistic than one might have otherwise supposed. Omitted from the tables below — because damn Szymborski submitted the relevant forecast as the author was shuffling off to bed — is Rule 5 selection Jake Cave. ZiPS projects Cave to slash .223/.274/.319 and record a -0.4 zWAR in just over 600 plate appearances.

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On Wednesday night, the Astros acquired lights-out reliever Ken Giles from the Phillies in exchange for Vincent Velasquez, Brett Oberholtzer, Thomas Eshelman and outfield prospect Derek Fisher. Velasquez and Oberholtzer both pitched a substantial number of big league innings the last couple of years, and since KATOH’s only built for minor league stats, they fall a bit outside of my jurisdiction. I wrote about Velasquez when he was called up in June. Eshelman was the Astros’ second-round pick, and threw all of just 10 professional innings after signing. That’s not nearly enough to formulate a meaningful projection.

That leaves me with Derek Fisher — a toolsy outfielder who’s coming off of a 20-30 season in A-Ball. A 2014 supplemental first round pick, Fisher slashed .274/.364/.481 between Low-A and High-A last last year. His power is his most redeeming quality, as he posted ISOs north of .200 at both stops. The downside was that he struck out in 23% of his trips to the plate. A strikeout rate that high is a huge detractor for a guy in the low minors. KATOH projects Fisher for 2.6 WAR through age-28, which makes him roughly a back-end top-200 prospect.

Fisher’s upside is tantalizing. Last winter, Kiley McDaniel gave his raw power and speed grades of 60 and 65, respectively, making him one of the toolsiest players out there. But the 6-foot-3 slugger will need to work on making more contact at the higher levels. While he’s made it work in the low minors, low-contact hitters often sputter against better pitching. Here are his Mahalanobis comps.

Fisher’s statistical comps are riddled with toolsy players who fizzled in the high minors, from Dave Krynzel to Rod Smith to Dee Brown. On the bright side, players like Ian Desmond and Danny Espinosa made enough contact to make it work. Fisher’s a boom or bust prospect, whose ultimate future will likely depend on whether he makes enough contact to leverage his impressive power.