There are good systems, there are poor systems, then there’s 50 pounds of effluence, and then there’s the Marlins. Add another 50 pounds, and you’ve finally reached the Angels.

– Baseball Prospectus, 2016

Disclaimer: The side effects of reading through the entire Angels Top 30 may include drowsiness and an upset stomach.

– Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2016

I’ve been doing these rankings for eight years now, and this is by far the worst system I’ve ever seen.

– Keith Law, 2016

The practice of farming is prohibited. All right or claim of a major league club to a player shall cease when such player becomes a member of a minor league club, and no arrangement between clubs for the loan or return of a player shall be binding between the parties to it or recognized by other clubs.

– National Agreement, Article VI, Section 4 (1903)

Sometimes the most important things are the things that aren’t there. Those words from the 1903 National Agreement, the peace treaty ending the brief but intense war between the National and American Leagues, were omitted from the revised agreement in 1921. And into that omission rushed Branch Rickey, who did not invent the practice of “farming” minor league players, but who perfected it with a ruthless efficiency that real farmers would only achieve much later with he generous application of pesticides. Rickey purchased not players, but teams, and in some cases entire leagues.

The 1903 farming ban codified, albeit temporarily, the American League’s declaration of independence from the National League, first issued in 1901. The farming ban was Ban Johnson’s announcement to the world that no one was going to treat his league’s players as farmhands. The ban also helped secure the loyalty of the Players’ Protective Association, an incipient union opposed to the practice (see pdf p.2), and was one factor encouraging star players to jump to the new league.

Major league owners routinely eluded the farming ban, however, and by 1920, baseball’s next crisis year, the ban was on the ropes. Wracked by gambling scandals, poor wartime attendance, and the ghastly death of Ray Chapman, organized baseball forged a new National Agreement in 1921. The new agreement omitted the farming ban, perhaps because the AL, having by that time firmly achieved major league status, lost interest in the cause of player liberty. Although Commissioner Landis despised the concept of farm systems, he was largely unable to prevent their development.

Landis failed because the economic logic of farm systems is unassailable: By owning most (though certainly not all) aspects of the production process, major league teams could greatly reduce the transaction costs inherent in developing major league-caliber players. Farm systems also limit the competition among teams for minor league player’s services. After the draft, the player is essentially under team ownership for several years, unable to work for any other team without the owning franchise’s consent.

Every major league team eventually developed a farm system, though (as Bill James has noted) laggards like the Cubs and Pirates paid a heavy price, suffering through years of mediocrity beginning in the 1940s. It is now impossible to imagine a major league team without a farm system. Or at least it was until this year. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim today stand on the threshold of an alternate future, a future in which Judge Landis won. Alone among MLB franchises, the Angels today entirely fail to benefit from the major league owners’ long twilight struggle to reduce minor league players to peonage.

I want players. Lots and lots of players.

– Billy Eppler, 2016

The Angels’ recently minted general manager, Billy Eppler, will lead the team through the next phase of its dystopian journey. To be fair, it’s not exactly true that the Angels have no farm system at all — they have minor league affiliates in thrall to the major league club, just like other major league clubs do. And those affiliates may even win a few games (so far, just a few). But the system is bereft of impact talent at any level. A handful of these guys will turn out much better than now perceived, but the vast majority won’t. The next pennant winning Angels lineup and rotation is invisible without experimental pharmacological assistance.

One way to get “lots and lots of players,” or at least a relatively large haul of good players, would be to trade Mike Trout. The idea has been debated on these pages and elsewhere, and I don’t propose to rehash the details here. One thing Eppler might want to consider, however, if he contemplates such a drastic move is that nothing of the kind has ever happened in baseball history. Nothing even close.

Trout had a 9.4 bWAR last year; no player with that high a WAR has ever been traded in the following season. Connie Mack infamously sold Eddie Collins and his 9.1 bWAR to the White Sox after the 1914 season. The woeful Boston Braves traded Rogers Hornsby (8.8 bWAR) to the Cubs after the 1928 season for a clown car of substandard players and $200,000 in a classic salary dump.

Mike Piazza was traded twice in one year after his 8.7 bWAR in 1997. First, the Dodgers shipped him to the Marlins in exchange for a pile of good but expensive players; in this odd case the salary-dumping team received a superstar, although it also unloaded a superstar in Gary Sheffield. The Marlins then Marlined it up real good just one week after Piazza put on the teal, sending him to the Mets for Geoff Goetz, Preston Wilson, and Ed Yarnall. Centuries from now the Marlins will be viewed as we view the giant Moai of Easter Island: with a mixture of awe at the achievement and amazement that the people responsible failed to put their limited resources to better use.

And that’s about it for the top 200 player-seasons. So Eppler would be piloting the S.S. Anaheim into uncharted seas if he traded Trout; there is no comparable trade out there by which one could even vaguely assess his value.  That doesn’t mean Eppler shouldn’t try, but he shouldn’t try too hard. Trout is still just 24, and it is conceivable that the next pennant winning Angels lineup could still have him in it. No other GM in baseball history has seen fit to trade a player of Trout’s caliber; Eppler should be wary of being the first.

There is another way, pioneered by a team just a few hours north on the 5. In 2002 the San Francisco Baseball Giants made it to the World Series with a team that GM Brian Sabean had built around Barry Bonds. Bonds, for you youngsters out there, was the Oughties’ Mike Trout, though I suspect that both men would bristle at the comparison. Drug-fueled or not, Bonds dominated the game like few ever have, yet Sabean labored mightily to get Bonds into the World Series. Ultimately, Sabean achieved this not by tending crops in the blazing fields from dawn to dusk, interrupted only by a cholesterol-laced dinner at noon. Your 2002 Giants had exactly one (1) player with a bWAR over 1.o who had come up through the Giants farm system. That was Russ Ortiz, a pitcher many may remember as a failure because the red crystal in his palm began glowing right after his age 30 season, but up to that point he was a reliable innings eater with roughly a league average ERA.

So here’s the point:

Giants total 2002 bWAR: 50.6

Giants 2002 bWAR from home-grown players:  5.3

Yeesh. Tony Torcato. Damon Minor. Trey Lunsford. Yep, they’re in the 5.3, and they’ll be gleefully wielding flaming pitchforks in Scouting Hell. The news wasn’t all awful — Joe Nathan is in that 5.3, as is the aforementioned Ortiz. But it’s safe to say that the 2002 Giants are a team that Judge Landis might have liked. Well, you know, except the PED part.

So how did Sabean do it? If you haven’t guessed the answer, you probably should consider taking some of those self-paced training courses you’ve been blowing off. He signed him a passel o’ free agents (including Bonds himself, of course, as well as Reggie Sanders (3.5 bWAR in 2002) and Benito Santiago (2.6)). And he traded. Oh, did he trade. Jeff Kent was the most critical acquisition, amassing a 7.0 bWAR in 2002, which, as the alert reader will quickly grasp, exceeded the entire Giants farm produce by a wide margin. Here are the other significant guys Sabean dealt for:

David Bell (3.2)

Kirk Rueter (3.0)

Robb Nen (2.5)

Jason Schmidt (2.3)

Tsuyoshi Shinjo (1.9)

Kenny Lofton (1.7)

Tim Worrell (1.5)

That’s 15.9 bWAR for those of you keeping score at home, and adding in Kent brings the total to 22.9, or just under half of the Giants’ 2002 total. The best players traded away for those guys, by far, were Matt Williams (cumulative 12.5 bWAR after being traded for Kent) and Bill Mueller (11.8 cumulative bWAR after being traded for Worrell). Given that Williams brought Jeff Kent, the only clear mistake in hindsight was Mueller, an outstanding but aging and fragile player who put together some memorable late career seasons after being traded for Tim Worrell.  That trade may not have worked as Sabean would have hoped, but it was defensible at the time.

So the Chapter 7 condition of the Angels’ farm system doesn’t necessarily prevent Eppler from remaking his roster. But it does severely constrain his efforts; the players Sabean traded away for the most part didn’t pan out, but he was able to convince other baseball executives that they would, executives who get paid good coin to see through exactly this kind of B.S. (those are Sabean’s initials — it’s probably a coincidence). Eppler doesn’t even have enough talent on the farm to fake it.

But the current Angels major league roster has some useful bits in addition to Trout. Kole Calhoun, Andrelton Simmons, and Garret Richards (albeit currently with a UCL subject to manufacturer recall) aren’t exactly a “core,” but they’re not a bad franchise starter kit. Nick Tropeano and Andrew Heaney (albeit currently with a UCL subject to manufacturer recall) offer some hope that young Angels fans might see a quality start before they have their first legal beer. And Josh Hamilton’s $26 million of dead weight exits the ledger after this year. The Angels will be paying Albert Pujols until humans colonize the Alpha Centauri system, but other than that, their contracts aren’t awful.

So one plan might include trading some (though certainly not all) of the above-named players, especially Calhoun, who is developing into an advanced hitter at a somewhat advanced age. It will also include signing free agents in bunches, more than Sabean did. Harder to do now than in the past, given that teams seem to be locking up their top-tier young players with greater frequency, but this is why scouts get paid (or should get paid) the big dollars. Some franchise (do I smell fish?) will undervalue its own talent, and Eppler must be there to pick up the pieces.

Or he can trade Trout.

I’m glad I’m not Billy Eppler.

It seems that 2016 will be the year that Statcast begins to permeate Fantasy Baseball analysis. Recently there has been a wealth of articles exploring the possibilities of using these kinds of data. These pieces have provided relevant insights on how to improve our understanding of well-hit balls and launch angles. Also, they’ve facilitated access to information on exit velocity leaders and surgers, as well as provided thoughtful analyses to the possible workings behind some early-season breakouts.

However, there is still a lot we don’t know about Statcast data. For instance, we are uncertain of how consistent these skills are over time, both across seasons or within seasons. Also we don’t know what constitutes a relevant sample size or when rates are likely to stabilize. All in all, this makes using 2016 Statcast data to predict rest of season performance a potentially brash and faulty proposition. Having said that, we can’t help but to try; so here’s our attempt at using early-season 2016 Statcast data to partially predict future performance.

One of the early gospels of Statcast data analysis posits that the “sweet spot” for hitting homers comes from a combination of a launch angle in the range of 25 – 30 degrees and a 95+ MPH exit velocity. If this is indeed the ideal combination for hitting home runs, one could argue that players that have a higher share of fly balls that meet these criteria should perform better in other more traditional metrics such as HR/FB%.

Following this line of thought we dug up all the batted balls under the “sweet spot” criteria, and divided them by all balls hit at a launch angle of 25 degrees or higher (which MLB determines as fly balls) to come up with a Sweet Spot%. In an attempt to identify potential HR/FB% surgers, we compare Sweet Spot% and HR/FB% z-scores (to normalize each rate) for all qualified hitters with at least 25 fly balls and highlight the biggest gaps.  Here are the Top five gaps considering the games up to May 28^th:

Calhoun seems like a good candidate for a power uptick. He has the third-highest Sweet Spot% of 2016, and he has sustained similar Hard% and FB% to the previous two seasons. Yet somehow he has managed to cut his HR/FB% to less than half of what he put together in either 2014 or 2015.  More so, he has had some bad luck with balls hit in the “sweet spot”; his batting average in these kinds of balls is .500, whereas the league average is around .680. He is not killing fly balls in general, with an average exit velocity of 84.6 MPH, but if he keeps consistently hitting balls in the “sweet spot” range he should improve in the power department. Look out for a potential turnaround in the coming weeks and a return to 2015 HR/FB% levels.

Piscotty holds second place in the Sweet Spot% rankings. However, his FB% is very similar to what he did in 2015 whilst his Hard% is down from 38.5% to 32.5%. Lastly, he plays half of his games in Busch Stadium, which has a history of suppressing home runs. I would be cautious of expecting a major home-run surge, but in any case Piscotty is likely to at least sustain his performance in the power department, which would be welcome news to owners that got him at bargain prices.

Carpenter is another dweller of Busch Stadium, however his outlook might be a bit different. He is the absolute leader in Sweet Spot%. He is posting the highest Hard% and FB% marks of his career. Carpenter is also crushing his fly balls in general, with an average Exit Velocity of 93.7 MPH. Just as a point of reference Miguel Cabrera, Josh Donaldson and Giancarlo Stanton fail to reach an average of 93 MPH on their own fly balls. Lastly, he has had some tough luck with balls hit in the “sweet spot”, posting a batting average of just .420. Carpenter is already putting up the highest HR/FB% of his career, and he is a 30-year-old veteran of slap-hitting fame, but the power looks legit and perhaps there is more to come.

Denard Span and Yonder Alonso show up in this list not because of their Sweet Spot% prowess but rather due to their putrid HR/FB%. They barely crack the Top 50 in Sweet Spot%. They play half their games in two of the bottom three parks for HR Park Factor. Span is putting up his lowest FB% and Hard% rates since 2013, when he ended up with a HR/FB% of 3.4%. Meanwhile, Yonder’s rates most closely resemble those of 2012, when he had a HR/FB of 6.2%. Whilst their batting average of “sweet spot” batted balls is just .500, there is nothing to look here. In any case, their power situation looks to improve from bad to mediocre.

If you are interested in the perusing the Top 50 gaps between HR/FB% and Sweet Spot%, please find them below:

Note: This analysis is also featured in our emerging blog www.theimperfectgame.com

One would do well to recall that the last feature article written about Erick Aybar appeared in NotGraphs (#KeepNotGraphs), where he was pictured as the inept, rebel fleet commander Admiral Ackbar from the good section of Star Wars. Before, that there were articles that described him as, “Erick Aybar: Not as Bad as You Might Think,” and “Erick Aybar, Perennial Sleeper,” and “Erick Aybar: 2012 Sleeper.” Since then, Aybar hasn’t had an actual FanGraphs piece done on him. It looks as though people are still sleeping on him (but for good reason this time).

One of the most interesting parts of the novel 1984 is the concept of “Newspeak,” where the government twists and eliminates the meaning of certain words to serve its own purposes. In the novel, Winston, the protagonist, is educated by one his colleagues at the Ministry of Truth, Syme. He tells Winston, “A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.” In today’s society, particularly in the world of baseball, there is a great need for descriptors such as “ungood” so that people don’t feel bad.

There are numerous expletive-laden phrases that would aptly describe Erick Aybar’s season up to this point, but perhaps it’s best to just say he’s doubleungood. That’s the clearest way of saying that Aybar has been incredibly awful this season. This isn’t just about offense or just about defense. He has been mind-numbingly, historically bad offensively and pretty subpar defensively.

It’s lucky for Aybar that the Braves aren’t exactly their c. 1998 selves because he can hide relatively easily on this roster. The Braves have three of the league’s ten worst players by wRC+ (min. 100 plate appearances), so it’s not like he’s exceptional. Moreover, it doesn’t look like the Braves are terribly interested in winning, anyway, so at least he isn’t holding back a team with championship aspirations (you’re being glared at, Russell Martin).

This season, through 43 games (many of them started) and 161 plate appearances, he has amassed an unimpressive -1.7 WAR, worst in the league. Also absolute worst in the league is his wRC+, which is 11! That’s insane. It’s 89% worse than average! Even 90-year-old A.J. Pierzynski has a 39 wRC+. Consider this: Erick Aybar is running a .184/.222/.211 line. How can a major-league baseball player be this bad?

Well, it’s not terribly helpful to have a .223 BABIP, a number 78 points off of his career average (and basically league average) .301 BABIP. Just for fun, let’s say he has a .301 BABIP this season. That would add approximately nine hits to his total of 27 thus far, giving him a much more respectable .245 batting average. Now let’s say he maintains his ratio of hits to extra-base hits and see what that does to his slugging percentage (he ends up with one more double). This gets him to a much better .245/.279/.279 line. But that’s still probably not good enough to be a major-league player.

As you can probably guess, Aybar’s plate discipline and power numbers suck quite a bit. His four doubles and 23 singles have given him a .027 ISO, which is the worst in the league by 16 points. He has a K-BB% of 14.3%, a number that’s meritorious as a pitcher (hint: Aybar isn’t a pitcher). His O-Swing% increased by five percentage points this year and his contact rate on pitches outside the strike zone decreased by five percentage points, leading to more strikeouts and worse contact when he actually hits it. At least he’s only a slightly below-average baserunner.

Unfortunately, his defensive numbers have been subpar this year also, but at least he’s not the worst player in the league in this category. Instead, he’s eighth-worst, with a raw UZR of -4.9 and a UZR/150 of -22.9. He isn’t committing too many errors, but his range is a definite factor. Aybar hasn’t completed a single play in the remote to unlikely range per Inside Edge. He’s also seen a marked drop in even chance fielding opportunities (down 6.7%) and likely opportunities (down 3%).

There aren’t a whole lot of good reasons for this. He isn’t injured (although he did have to get a chicken bone removed from his throat) and he doesn’t look injured. I can’t find a way to press the videos onto the article, but his swing looks a lot different from last year, at least from the right-hand side of the plate. I’m not a swing expert, but it looks like he isn’t using his hips to turn on the ball like he has in years past, which would explain the lack of power. Additionally, Aybar looks off-balance this year as compared to last year, when he was much better. Another thing to consider is that it seems like his swing has less lift than before, resulting in more ground balls and less power. On the other hand, maybe Aybar is just getting old. He’s 33 and hasn’t missed a lot of time in his career.

On the other hand, he actually was a very good player for a long time, a sleeper even. From 2008 through 2014, he was worth 20.1 WAR, combining passable offense for a middle infielder with good baserunning and decent defense. In fact, he was 57th* in WAR during that time period, better than more highly esteemed names like Carlos Beltran, Nelson Cruz, and David Ortiz. He was a very good player for a very long time, making more money than most people ever dream of. And that’s cause for positivity.

It stands to reason that Aybar will regress back to the mean. No one can sustain those numbers for a full season, if only because they would definitely get benched. There’s a reason why sample size and past performance matters and Mr. Aybar embodies it. If we expected him to keep playing at this level with the same amount of playing time, then he’d end up with the worst season in baseball history with a little over -6 WAR (not that six fewer wins would make that big of a difference to the Braves). But that isn’t going to happen. He’s projected to finish around zero, which would make him an average player the rest of the way. Based on his past performance, I fully expect that to happen and I want it to happen. It’s terribly sad when one of the game’s great, unknown players spirals into oblivion. Nonetheless, what he’s doing right now is insane and not for the right reasons.  Just as Admiral Ackbar managed to right the rebel fleet, Aybar can do the same with his performance.

*Fun fact: Mike Trout is 19th on that list. Remember, WAR totals from 2008 through 2014.

All statistics current through 5/26/2016