FanGraphs Baseball

On Monday, while the world was reacting to the news of Max Scherzer’s signing, the Texas Rangers made a nifty little trade, acquiring Yovani Gallardo from the Milwaukee Brewers for three so-so prospects that they probably won’t miss too much. Gallardo immediately slides in behind Yu Darvish and Derek Holland as the team’s #3 starter, giving them some much needed pitching depth in their quest to avoid a repeat of their disastrous 2014 season.

The Rangers clearly needed at least one more reliable starting pitcher, and Gallardo has made 30 or more starts in six consecutive years, proving to be a durable innings eater at worst, while occasionally flashing some front-of-the-rotation stuff. But there’s a reason the Brewers traded him, and it wasn’t just to open up a rotation spot for young hurler Jimmy Nelson; Gallardo’s slowly becoming a different kind of pitcher than he was earlier in his career.

The graph below is the easiest way to see Gallardo’s evolution as a pitcher:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Here’s what we know about what’s left on the free agent market: If you wanted a bat, you should have acted months ago. Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Michael Cuddyer, Russell Martin and others came off the board pretty quickly. With Nori Aoki in San Francisco and Colby Rasmus in Houston, the best remaining bat might be… who? Geovany Soto? Rickie Weeks? It’s similar for starting pitchers, because while James Shields is still out there, after him, it’s something like Kyle Kendrick and the remains of Chad Billingsley.

But relievers… well, relievers are another story. The big fish like Andrew Miller and David Robertson are long gone, and guys like Zach Duke and Luke Gregerson got paid too, but you could still put together an entire big league bullpen, at reasonable cost and decent productivity, with what’s still left out there.

In fact, let’s play a quick game. “Free agents” are listed as though they’re baseball’s 31st team on our Depth Charts, mostly so that players without a home have a place to be listed so that we can see their projections. With the caveat that WAR isn’t exactly the best way to rate a reliever and that this is for entertainment purposes only, look at where the Free Agent team ranks on the per-positional projection pages:

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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 Cleveland Baseball Club. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Chicago AL / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
Cleveland finished tied with Houston in 2014 for last place among all clubs in defensive runs. That’s not ever really a “positive” distinction. That said, were one in the business of identifying silver linings, a legitimate one in this case might concern how defensive metrics are prone to greater regression than most offensive stats — and thus projection systems such as ZiPS are unlikely to weight seasons like Cleveland’s 2014 campaign as heavily.

By the projections, the 2015 iteration of Cleveland’s baseball team doesn’t actually profile as a particularly bad defensive club. Lonnie Chisenhall, Jason Kipnis, and Carlos Santana are all forecast to finish on the negative side of the defensive ledger relative to their position, but Michael Brantley and Yan Gomes and Jose Ramirez are all projected to save more runs than average at their respective positions. The result, it would appear, is a roughly league-average group of hitters.

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I don’t think one should require much convincing that the Houston Astros are taking a worthwhile shot in signing Colby Rasmus. Most simply, it’s a one-year contract for a 28-year-old, and it’s worth just $8 million. Rasmus has had a volatile career — last year he finished with a .287 OBP — but he was still overall an average hitter. The season before, he was a lot better than that. The Astros had a role for Rasmus, after dealing Dexter Fowler. If he’s good, he’ll help. If he’s really good, he’ll be worth a qualifying offer. If he’s bad, well, lots of Astros have been bad, and Rasmus alone won’t stop the Astros from getting where they’re trying to go. At the end of the day, 2015 is just a season the Astros have to play out before the seasons they want to play out.

So I don’t think the contract is necessarily that interesting. Rasmus is talented, and he’s trying to bounce back. The Astros, as a team, aren’t as good as the Mariners, Angels or A’s, so it seems like they’ll be fighting the Rangers for fourth in the American League West. A year from now, I doubt we’ll be thinking much about this. But there is one interesting note we can discuss in more detail: Rasmus strikes out a lot. Several Astros strike out a lot. It seems like the Astros are going to strike out a lot.

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Ben and Sam banter about their favorite regular-season games, then answer listener emails about player relocation, bidding for top prospects, transaction crowdsourcing, and more.

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This offseason has been so full of thrills and spills it’s been easy to forget that two of the FanGraphs Crowd’s four most-valued free agents went unsigned well into 2015, with Max Scherzer waiting to become a Washington National until January 19. We don’t yet know why Scherzer waited so long to sign, or why the almost-as-valuable James Shields has waited even longer. Perhaps they have been sitting with fingers crossed in hopes that they would receive a substantial offer from a team other than the Houston Astros. Maybe they just want to take their time making such a big life decision.

Regardless of their reasons for remaining on the free agent market for so long, we’re just about reaching that point in the offseason when Pitchers & Catchers Reporting is visible on the horizon’s crest. One of the perks of being a phenomenal major league player on the level of Scherzer and Shields is that you are afforded comparatively ironclad job security, especially compared to their journeymen peers, many of whom have to annually shuttle their families to new locales across the nation.

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Visual evidence of Jung-Ho Kang playing catcher.

Though the player himself is conspicuously unconcerned about his own defensive skills, some question certainly remains as to whether recent Pittsburgh signee Jung-Ho Kang has the tools to play a league-average shortstop. The purpose of this post is not to shed any light on a potential answer to that question, but rather merely to note that, in the event that Kang is unable to adequately play the six, that he has exhibited some competence, as well, at positions one through five.

Indeed, visual proof of him doing that has been made available by way of Korean weblog MLB Park, which site features a series of 10 GIFs depicting Kang at first and second and third and short and catcher and pitcher. With what level of skill he’s playing the aforementioned positions is an area of concern for individuals more qualified than the present author. In meantime, all GIFs are available here.

Credit to Dan at MyKBO for providing the relevant link.

Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles & Yankees

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

Something that came up on every call with an Orioles official was their internal prospect list. Most teams I’ve talked to don’t have a consensus list; maybe a list a couple people in the office maintain with agreed-upon tiers of players, but not one that the whole organization refers to. Others in the org maintain their own lists as well. At one point or another, this master list was referenced enough that I saw some trends where the Orioles own list would diverge from my own.

They skewed high for the near big league ready players, with down list players like Dariel Alvarez and Henry Urrutia much higher than I have them and thus some lower level players like Stephen Tarpley lower than I have them. As you would expect, they also have some information a typical scout may not have, regarding injuries and progress in private workouts, so some players with subpar 2014 season are higher than I have them, like Urrutia, Michael Almanzar and Josh Hart. Other than those two main differences, our lists ended up being pretty similar, with only a handful of players we disagreed on that didn’t fall into one of those two groups.

There’s positives and negatives of having such a list. The official-ness of it means it gets referenced internally all the time and is the starting point for trade talks, so it can morph the internal dialogue about a player for better or worse. While it’s less divisive than it was 10 years ago, there is also still a scouts vs. stats divide on subjects like prospect lists in most organizations, since the evaluation method (particularly on high minors players with lots of data) differs a good bit.  There’s also a positive to having the dialogue that leads to a consensus list, so various factions within the organization know where “their” guys stand and thus know when to speak up in-season if they think their guy warrants a better ranking.

The O’s have had solid drafts under the Dan Duquette regime; they haven’t had tons of extra picks or a high draft position to give them the money or opportunity to get the super elite prospect. That said, the early returns are solid considering that and their lower investment in international bonuses, with Jomar Reyes looking like a steal less than a year after signing.   There’s also depth in pitching at the upper levels, with 5 of the top 12 prospects being pitchers that could contribute in the big leagues in 2015.  From my current ranking of the farm systems of all 30 organizations, I have Baltimore 18th, which may still change before I formally publish those rankings.

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