• OK, MASH will be twice a week for the seven or so months with all the baseball news coming in. There is just a ton of Fluff right now and useful new information is a little tough to find.

• Michael Saunders will be out until around the All-Star game with a torn meniscus in his knee. This is a mess for the Blue Jays. Right now they look to replace him with internal options.

… Blue Jays general manager Alex Anthopoulos said he expects to fill Saunders’ vacancy in left field with internal options. Kevin Pillar, Ezequiel Carrera and Andy Dirks are the early favourites to win the job out of Spring Training.

Here is the projected wRC+ for the trio.

Name: wRC+
Pillar: 92
Carrera: 83
Dirks: 99

Dirks looks to have the inside track statically, but he is current still dealing with a back injury which cost him his 2014 season. If the 28-year-old Carrera gets the job, he could be a sneaky SB play with 50 SB in 2014 between the majors and minors.

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I have never thought much about, or given much attention to, FanGraphs’ fan projections. It’s primarily a matter of stubbornness: I run my own projections, and I develop my own strategy, so why should I listen to you? At least there’s a trace of rationale behind it: I know how I created my projections (whether or not they’re any good is a topic for another day), but I have no idea how you created yours. Thus, I am more likely to blindly trust a computer-generated projection system such as Steamer instead of random fan projections.

Still, there is a sort of bizarre, secondhand wisdom to fan projections. For every person who is high on a particular player, there could be another person who is equally-and-oppositely down on him. Solicit and aggregate enough fan projections and you could produce a very reasonable prediction of a player’s performance by sheer chance.

Which is why fan projections intrigue me. If, for example, Steamer predicts the most likely outcome from a wide range of possible outcomes for a player, then the fans convey the anticipated outcome for a player. The difference between them, you could say, is what amounts to a market inefficiency (aka a price distortion). The larger the difference, the greater the inefficiency. We see these inefficiencies arise every year — 2014’s most prevalent example is probably Corey Kluber — and they typically manifest because of a lack of information about certain players.

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This 30-part series will look at the projected Top 5 freshman contributors for each big league club for the year ahead. The rankings take into consideration a mixture of ceiling, readiness and potential playing time allocation, which is to say some players with lower ceilings may be ranked ahead of others with higher ceilings because they project to have a greater impact in the coming season.

In a Nutshell: The Tigers don’t feature many high-ceiling prospects on the cusp of big league action but they have some young players that could provide some decent short-term production.

1. Buck Farmer, RHP: Farmer made four MLB appearances in 2014, which is pretty impressive considering he opened the year in Low-A ball. The 2013 fifth round pick isn’t flashy but he has the strong frame needed to develop into a back-end, innings-eating hurler. After spending time at four different levels in 2014, he should open the year in Triple-A. Two new rotation candidates, Shane Greene and Alfredo Simon, come with some question marks so it may not be too long into the season before Farmer gets another shot.

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It’s time for our Depth Chart Discussions to begin. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, bullpen, and rotation) and will begin breaking them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find them gathered here.

The Diamondbacks are coming off a dismal season. Discoveries in the outfield were one of the lone bright spots. A new season and health could give the club an opportunity to play spoiler in the NL West. Their outfielders will be a big part of any success.

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The outlook on Wily Peralta hasn’t drastically changed over the last year. Coming into 2014, he was a young arm in possession of some tantalizing skills: elite velocity, two plus pitches, and a tremendous groundball rate. He repeated all of that in 2014 en route to his best season yet, but there are still some issues to iron out. His season essentially breaks up into three parts, with his success against left-handers setting the tone in each.

He got off to a great start with a 2.12 ERA in his first 10 starts. The wheels came off for an eight-start run in early-summer, and he was tattooed for a 6.38 ERA before closing out the season with a 3.00 ERA in his last 14 starts, as he held the opposition to 29 earned runs – 13 of which came in two ugly starts at the end of August. His OPS against lefties in the three parts were .681, 1.063, and .759. The blowup in the middle was fueled by the slider getting uncharacteristically smashed for a couple of weeks, as all five homers that lefties hit off the pitch came during that stretch. He allowed a 1.420 OPS with the pitch, despite a 10-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in the 24 plate appearances. Small samples can really hurt!

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On Sunday, I participated in the FanGraphs Staff Two Ottoneu auction. One of my favorite things about Ottoneu and auction drafts in general is the ability to compare their results to the greater market. If you trust crowdsourcing as a fair representation of a player’s value, then the team that came away from the auction with the most surplus value relative to player average prices across all Ottoneu leagues is the best team entering the season. You can find those total surplus dollars listed for each team below, as well as best and worst values by the same criteria. To see Ottoneu market prices, click here.
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You know that I develop my own player projections, of which I have lovingly dubbed Pod Projections. With over 500 players projected, I thought it would be interesting to compare them with the Steamer forecasts. So Steamer and I is a new mini-series in which I discuss a pair (maybe more, maybe less) of players who I have projected for dramatically different results than Steamer. To do this, I simply compared my wOBA projections with Steamers’, calculated the difference and then sorted.

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Back to our NFBC slow draft: 15 teams, 50 rounds, no post-draft transactions–a league that journeys beyond the merely deep to the abyssopelagic. Join us now as we relive our plunge into the second half of the draft.

Much of what we did was so boring it defeats all efforts at amusing commentary. We picked up too many high-strikeout no-save relief pitchers (Zach Duke, Shawn Kelley, David Carpenter, Tony Sipp, Shae Simmons[!]); some fourth-outfielder types whom you don’t have to squint at too hard to see decent playing time and some upside (Dayan Viciedo, Rymer Liriano, and [except for the upside] Jordan Schaefer); starting pitchers who could be good (Jose Urena), show signs of being good (Chase Anderson), have been good (Brett Oberholtzer), or whom we don’t actually remember drafting, much less know why we did (Jeremy Guthrie).

But there are a few guys who deserve comment.

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This post continues our Depth Chart Discussions. In an effort to suss out every team, we’ve divided them into four parts (infield, outfield, rotation, and bullpen) and will continue to break them down for you over the next few weeks. You can find the Depth Chart Discussion posts gathered here.

Between Yasmany Tomas’ attempt at third base and the messy catcher situation, this infield might look quite different once the season starts. Elsewhere, there’s an obvious star at first base and two players in the middle infield who could provide solid value.

Catcher
Tuffy Gosewisch
Oscar Hernandez
Gerald Laird

In the minors
Peter O’Brien

Gosewisch, 31, has 179 career plate appearances with a .213 batting average and one home run. He has three career walks. Hernandez was the first overall pick in the Rule 5 draft last year. He is 21 and hit .249 in Single-A last season.

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The 2014 version of the Cincinnati Reds outfield experienced some level of disappoint. Both Jay Bruce and Ryan Ludwick hit below league average in 400 or more plate appearances and Chris Heisey‘s 77 wRC+ in 299 PA’s didn’t help. Questions about Billy Hamilton’s bat and contact skills turned into legitimate concerns as the speedy outfielder posted a poor 0.29 BB:K ratio, tied for 122nd among 146 qualified batters. There should be power to be had with Marlon Byrd joining the team and Bruce potentially bouncing back. Just be warned that the rate stats the Reds OF will put up won’t be too pretty.

Left Field
Marlon Byrd
Donald Lutz
Skip Schumaker

Center Field
Billy Hamilton
Jason Bourgeois

Right Field
Jay Bruce
Donald Lutz
Skip Schumaker

In the Minors
Yorman Rodriguez
Jesse Winker

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