Chin Music enters 2022 with more prospect talk, which means another co-hosting spot from the always entertaining Eric Longenhagen, as we ramble for two hours and don’t even need a guest to do it. We begin by talking about the current state of the pandemic and if professional baseball is even tenable given these circumstances. Then, after a brief chat about news from the world of media, Eric and I get into the weeds on prospects, with an in-depth discussion about the farm systems of the Blue Jays, Brewers and Tigers, whose prospect lists were published at FanGraphs since we last spoke. Then it’s your emails on failed (or not as failed as you think) top draft picks, prospect trades, and kitchen gadgets, followed by some video game and podcast recommendations. As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Strangelight.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com.

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Warning One: While ostensibly a podcast about baseball, these conversations often veer into other subjects.

Warning Two: There is explicit language.

Run Time: 2:07:31

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

As the Phillies looked to turn the corner from pretenders to contenders in the new millennium, they signed future Hall of Fame slugger Jim Thome to provide some middle-of-the-lineup thump via a six-year, $85 million contract in December 2002. Outwardly at least, they didn’t appear to expect much from their fifth-round 2001 draft pick, a 6-foot-4, 220-pound first baseman with 80-grade raw power but notable contact issues and questions about his defense. Thome’s presence kept Ryan Howard in the minors long enough for him to hit 46 home runs across two levels in 2004, his age-24 season. But when Thome suffered a season-ending elbow injury the following year, Howard stepped in and flat out stole the first base job.

Howard won the NL Rookie of the Year award in his abbreviated 2005 season, leading the Phillies to trade Thome to the White Sox that winter, then followed up by launching 58 homers and claiming NL MVP honors in ’06. He became a cornerstone of the Phillies’ five straight NL East titles from 2007 to ’11, a run that included a World Series win over the Rays in 2008, and another NL pennant in ’09.

At a time before the lessons of Moneyball had been fully absorbed on a league-wide basis, Howard’s big home run and RBI totals led to massive paydays, while his limitations in the field and on the basepaths — which had already become significant factors as he’d filled out to a listed 250 pounds — were overlooked. Unfortunately, an Achilles tendon rupture, suffered on the final play of the 2011 Division Series agains the Cardinals, turned his biggest contract into an albatross. Midway through that deal, an ugly legal fight within his family over the handling of his finances came to light, a heartbreaking turn of events that couldn’t have made his on-field struggles any easier. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

The departures of Mark Canha and Starling Marte are a real setback for Oakland, but the lineup’s core remains intact. This starts with bullishness on the Matts.

Five-win projections from a first baseman are kind of rare in ZiPS — I started building WAR projections into ZiPS in 2014, and this will be only the sixth time it’s happened — but Matt Olson is at the likely height of his powers. As terrific as he was in 2021, with a .271/.341/.540 line and 5.0 WAR, ZiPS isn’t projecting a dropoff, thanks both to regression and because it thinks he was somewhat unlucky in BABIP the last two years relative to his hit data. Vladito versus Olson for supremacy in the AL should be a fun battle the next few years, though the former is likely to vanquish the latter for good in a few years given their respective ages.

ZiPS isn’t projecting Matt Chapman to set any new personal bests, as his offense has fallen off enough that he’s probably left his 2018–19 MVP-ish peak for good. Getting back to the four-win threshold would still make him All-Star level, though. Chapman seems to come up in trade talks reasonably regularly, but I’m not sure the A’s actually move him this year unless the playoff race is an uphill battle in July.
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Episode 956

On this edition of FanGraphs Audio, David Laurila welcomes Rob Kaminsky, former first-rounder and St. Louis Cardinal.

The pair first spoke back in 2014, and while Kaminsky has put a lot of baseball under his belt since then, he is still just 27 years old. We hear stories about coming up with Carson Kelly, Alex Reyes, and previous podcast guest Cole Sulser, as well as how special it was for Kaminsky to make his major league debut in a Cardinals clubhouse with veterans like Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright, and Paul Goldschmidt. We also get an anecdote about striking out a protesting Joey Votto, as well as appearing in a COVID-19 vaccine PSA.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 25 minute play time.)

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the second year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley continue their “Measuring the Unmeasurable” series about studying difficult-to-quantify aspects of the sport by talking to Patrick Brennan about his studies on assessing player development at the major and minor league levels, the challenges of evaluating player development, the data he wishes he had, the most and least successful player development organizations, his work as the director of analytics for the Kansas State baseball team, analyzing pitch sequencing, and his baseball ambitions. Then (34:32) they bring on Pitcher List’s Grant Washburn to discuss his metric for measuring unpurchased wins, Wins Below Replacement Ownership, the importance of having a good owner, the data he couldn’t include, the owners who spend the least on player payroll relative to revenue, why having a high payroll isn’t always enough, saying “the MLB,” and more.

Audio intro: Billy Joel, “A Minor Variation”
Audio interstitial: The Legal Matters, “Minor Key”
Audio outro: Aerosmith, “Eat the Rich”

Link to Patrick’s study on MiLB player dev
Link to Patrick’s study on MLB player dev
Link to first Driveline study on player dev value
Link to second Driveline study on player dev value
Link to article on Patrick’s work with Kansas State
Link to Patrick’s study on pitch sequencing
Link to Ben on college player development
Link to Grant’s WBRO study
Link to Grant’s WBRO data

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