Minor League Ball daily notes, April 6, 2016

Good morning everyone and welcome to the Wednesday, April 6th, edition of Minor League Ball daily notes. Here are some baseball news links for your edification and amusement on this fine spring day.

****The main project at Minor League Ball right now is writing up a "What to Expect" article for each of the big league rookies. I hope to have all of those done by Saturday, and then during the regular season each rookie who gets promoted to the majors will have a similar article.

****At Beyond the Boxscore, Kevin Ruprecht looks at the Kansas City Royals Opening Day payroll in context.

****Also at Beyond the Boxscore, Joe Vasile says that the Royals are, despite common thought to the contrary,  actually a Moneyball team.

The Royals are a square peg of a team that doesn't quite fit into the round hole that is the rest of Major League Baseball. They've been able to parlay low-end and middling payrolls into what is becoming the dominant team of the mid-2010s by exploiting market inefficiencies ignored by other teams. The Kansas City Royals, the team lauded by Lee Judge of the the Kansas City Star as the "anti-Moneyball team", are really the "most Moneyball" team in MLB today.

Moneyball at its core was not about building a team based on sabermetrics. It was about fielding the best possible team for the least amount of money by finding ways to take advantage of characteristics and stats often ignored by one's competition, stats such as OBP and concepts such as speed on the bases being expensive.

****At Faketeams, Michael Schwarz looks at 30 starting pitchers (one for each team) who could be in the starting rotation soon. You can say this is a look at the sixth starters.

****Matt Powers previews the Triple-A International League.

****At Fangraphs, Eno Sarris comments on White Sox lefty Carlos Rodon and his in-progress breakout.

****Michael Jong at FishStripes writes about the increasing trend of contract extensions for young players and possible implications for the future of the Miami Marlins.

****Want to track an obscure but promising bat? Consider San Francisco Giants prospect Manual Geraldo, profiled today at McCovey Chronicles.