At the expiration of the Major League Baseball trading deadline, 35 prospects had changed hands (beginning July 19 with Milwaukee’s acquisition of Felipe Lopez). Over the next week, FanGraphs will take a look at each prospect, while also ranking them individually in value from 35 down to one. Players such as Justin Masterson, Clayton Richard, Kevin Hart, and Jeff Clement were not considered in this list because they have expired their rookie eligibility. However, they can still technically be considered “prospects” because they are young and have yet to establish themselves at the MLB level.

We’ve already taken a look at prospects 35-15 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

A couple weeks ago I looked at Chris Davis‘s contact struggles. In that post I displayed a histogram with all contact rates from 2003 to 2008 and Davis’s half season of 2009. Here is the same figure without Davis, but with Mark Reynolds’s 2008 contact rate indicated.

Not as much of an outlier as Davis, but last year Reynolds’s rate of 62.3% was the lowest of any regular since 2003. This year he is similarly lowest in the league with 63.4%. Reynolds, unlike Davis, makes it work. Even with this very very low contact rate Reynolds has a wOBA over .400, 12th best in the league.

One thing he has over Davis is much better plate discipline, swinging at only a quarter of pitches out of the zone compared to Davis’s 35.4%. As a result, and because pitchers don’t throw in the zone to him that much, he has a healthy walk rate of 11.8%.

In addition the pitches that Reynolds does make contact with are very likely to be HRs. Fly balls make up 46% of his balls in play and 28% of those are HRs. That means 12.9% of his balls in play are HRs (tops in the league with Adam Dunn second at 11.6%). As a result Reynolds is second in the league in HRs with 32.

Reynolds represents what Davis needs to be if he is going to succeed with a huge whiff rate. He needs to stop swinging at pitches out of the zone, and make sure the pitches he hits go a long way. Not rocket science, but it is helpful to see someone how makes it work with a big whiff rate.

Everyone knows the Washington Nationals are the worst team in baseball, right? They are the only club around with less than 40 wins on the season, and they’ve been the brunt of every joke about baseball for the last few years. However, right now, they might just be putting a better team on the field than the Kansas City Royals.

When the Nationals traded Lastings Milledge and Joel Hanrahan to Pittsburgh for Nyjer Morgan and Sean Burnett on July 1st, they were 23-54, sporting a .298 winning percentage that made them a virtual lock for the top pick in the 2010 draft. Since Morgan’s arrival, however, he’s significantly upgraded the team the Nationals put on the field, posting a .396 wOBA and +7 UZR in 30 games with the team.

Not surprisingly, the Nationals have played significantly better since the deal, winning 13 of 31 games for a .419 winning percentage. They’ve thinned out their glut of 1B/OF by dealing Nick Johnson and DL’ing Austin Kearns, which lets them go with a regular outfield of Willingham-Morgan-Dukes/Harris, with Adam Dunn taking his defensive butchery to first base. This gives the Nats their best defensive outfield to date, and with Morgan getting on base for the three big hitters in the middle of the line-up, they can actually score some runs.

The bullpen is still a disaster, but the current version of the Nationals are quite a bit better than the team they were putting on the field to start the season.

So if the Nationals aren’t the easiest team to beat in the game anymore, who is? How about the Kansas City Royals? Since starting the season 23-23, they’ve won just 18 of their last 61 games. Gil Meche and Coco Crisp has landed on the disabled list, taking two of the Royals better players off the field. Yuniesky Betancourt has been brutal since coming over from Seattle, continuing to make shortstop a massive hole on the roster. Even Zack Greinke has come back to earth a bit, walking 13 batters in his last six starts, all of which have ended with a Royals loss.

The reversal of fortune for these two clubs have actually given the Royals a decent chance at passing the Nationals for the worst record in baseball. They are 5 1/2 games ahead of the Nationals in the standings, but if they keep playing .295 baseball like they have for the last two months, they’ll finish with a record of 57-105. The Nationals, if they keep playing at the .419 clip they’ve put up since Morgan arrived, would finish with a 58-104 record.

Okay, so neither of those performances are likely to continue. But it’s kind of impressive, for lack of a better word, that the Royals have been able to collapse to the point where it’s even a race to the finish.

Rocktober is making a comeback. After stumbling out of the blocks, the team fired Clint Hurdle and installed Jim Tracy as their manager, who has since guided the team to a 41-20 record. They now are on pace to win 90 games and PECOTA gives them better than 55% odds to make the playoffs. Before the season, their CHONE projection pegged them for just 78 wins. Managerial regime changes aside, what’s the story behind the Purple Revival?

For starters, it’s been the starters. Starting pitching, that is. The Rockies’ starting five has been the best in the National League by a good margin – their 125.6 runs above replacement is 11.6 runs better than San Francisco’s. The Rockies seem to have torn a page or three out of Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan’s book “Keys to Winning with an Iffy Staff”. We know Ubaldo Jimenez is great and Aaron Cook is usually solid, but the Rockies are getting good production out of three retreads – Jason Marquis, Jason Hammel and Jorge de la Rosa. What pitching coach Bob Apodaca (fun name to say) has been able to do is coax his pitchers to throw strikes and induce ground-balls.

Colorado pitchers throw more fastballs than any team – 67.6% .The starting five also induces more ground-balls than any team – at a 51.9% clip. More burned worms has led to fewer homers, as the Rockies have been surprisingly good at keeping balls in the yard – 0.83 HR/9. As I said, they’re also throwing strikes, ranking third in the National League in walks per nine innings at 2.9. So it turns out that you can pitch at high altitude, you just have to go about it the right way.

Couple the strong pitching with a resurgent Troy Tulowitzki, who his hitting .302/.392/.619 since June 1st, and more of Seth Smith in the lineup (.385 wOBA, 7.4 UZR), and it’s easy to see why the Rockies are the back in biz.

David Price hatched onto the scene last October, laying claim to the trivia question which will inevitably ask which Rays pitcher recorded the final out in the 2008 ALCS. His transition to the majors leagues as a starter hasn’t gone as smoothly. Through his July 4th start in Texas, Price had walked 30 batters in 38 innings. The 40 strikeouts represented an impressive figure, but still the southpaw needed the walks to drop and soon.

After that start I wrote a piece on my home site, discussing how Price’s ball rate was far too low to sustain such high rates of free passes. Apparently I encountered a case of fantastic timing, because in the month since Price has looked like a different pitcher. He’s begun to pound his hard fastball down in the zone and run it inside to righties. The negatives? He doesn’t work both sides of the plate and developing trust in his change-up/spike curve has been slow coming. Look at the percentages:

K%
Through July 5th 22.3%
After July 5th 18.2%

BB%
Through July 5th 16.8%
After July 5th 4.1%

Basically that’s Chris Carpenter. Price’s skill set doesn’t match up with Carpenter’s (one is a groundball pitcher, righty, less reliance on fastball, etc.) but what Price has done with two of his controllable aspects are dead ringers for Carpenter’s season. Five starts is too small of a sample size to proclaim that this is the Price we should expect to see heading forward, still the signs are encouraging.

Another hard-throwing reliever debuted last night this one going by the name of Waldis Joaquin and pitching for the San Francisco Giants. The 22-year-old pitched an inning against Houston last night, giving up a run on two hits and striking a batter out. So what makes him so special? The 11 fastballs he threw averaged out to 97.7 MPH and his top-end velocity registered at a ridiculous 98.5 MPH.

When I see numbers that extreme I check the other pitchers involved to see if the machine was simply experiencing velocity inflation.

Felipe Paulino sat at 95; Jonathan Sanchez at 92; Wesley Wright at 90; Justin Miller at 90; and Tim Byrdak at 89. Baseball Info Solutions has those players averaging 95, 91.5, 91, 88, and 89. So the pitchx numbers appear to be accurate and I guess Miller had his good fastball for once.

Not only can Joaquin bring the heat, but Baseball America also named his slider as the best in the Giants system. Throughout the minors Joaquin has showed an affinity for generating groundball outs alongside some impressive strikeout rates. In his 2005 stint at rookie ball Joaquin fanned 37 in 29 innings, after missing 2006 Joaquin struck out 30 in 38 short season innings and spent 2008 in A-ball where he struck out 72 in 71 innings. A move to Double-A deflated his punch outs and to date he only has 40 in 54 innings.

Like with most youthful flamethrowers, Joaquin showed some command issues during his time in Double-A, which raises the question: was he able to make up for those issues by simply overpowering less talented and more aggressive youth? During this writing Joaquin was actually demoted to Triple-A so it should be telling whether his strikeout rates perk up or remain flatter than usual.

Joaquin clearly has the stuff to pitch at the major league level; it’s just a matter of when and how well.

At the expiration of the Major League Baseball trading deadline, 35 prospects had changed hands (beginning July 19 with Milwaukee’s acquisition of Felipe Lopez). Over the next week, FanGraphs will take a look at each prospect, while also ranking them individually in value from 35 down to one. Players such as Justin Masterson, Clayton Richard, Kevin Hart, and Jeff Clement were not considered in this list because they have expired their rookie eligibility. However, they can still technically be considered “prospects” because they are young and have yet to establish themselves at the MLB level.

On Monday, we looked at the players ranked 35-29. On Tuesday, we looked at the prospects ranked 28-22.

The A’s came into the season looking to contend with some newly acquired position players and a group of young pitchers. The acquisitions didn’t hit and the young pitcher’s have been shaky, so the A’s traded off Matt Holliday and Orlando Cabrera to continue to stock their growing farm system and push contention off for another year. In a frustrating year there have been some bright spots, one is Brett Anderson. He has a FIP right at 4 and had the third best FIP in July.

Throughout his minor league career Anderson has been known for his very good command and great ground ball numbers. Interestingly it looks like he throws a four-seam fastball, which only gets 38% GBs. Most ground ball pitchers throw a ‘sinking’ two-seam fastball, which gets most of their grounders. Anderson, though, doesn’t get many grounders from his fastball. Instead his main ground ball pitch is his slider.

According to the BIS classification Anderson is just one of four pitchers to have thrown over 30% sliders so far this year. The pitch is very interesting. It has the speed of a slider,

and the movement of a curve.

Unlike most sliders which show a pronounced platoon split, Anderson’s shows none, more like a curve. As a result he throws it almost equally to both LHBs and RHBs. The top sliders in the game get huge whiff rates, in the 40% range, by comparison Anderson’s is rather meager at just 25%. But Anderson can get his in the zone over 52% of the time and it induces ground balls over 68% of the time. Both of these rates are very high for sliders. All together it is worth almost 13 runs and is the third best slider in the game.

Anderson is a really interesting pitcher. Most ground ball/control guys do it by throwing two-seam fastballs around 70% of the time. Anderson does it with a slurvy-slider which moves like a curve, has little platoon split, he can locate in the zone and hitters pound into the ground.

On August 13th of last year, 357 days ago, Gordon Beckham signed his first professional contract to play baseball, as the White Sox got him to put his John Hancock down two days before the signing deadline. Less than one year later, he might just be their best player.

Called up from the minors on June 4th, one week after being promoted to Triple-A, Beckham had a rough introduction to the big leagues. He went 0 for 13 in his first four games and looked a little rough transitioning from shortstop to third base. The was-he-rushed questions were inevitable, considering the White Sox had only let him rack up 250 plate appearances in the minors.

Beckham has answered those questions, and then some. Since he got his first major league hit on June 9th, he’s hitting .339/.398/.540 with 23 extra base hits and 17 walks in 197 plate appearances. He’s been even hotter than that lately – .416/.466/.675 since July 11th, spanning 88 plate appearances over his last 21 games.

Did I mention that this is his first year as a professional?

Even with the rough start and some struggles learning third base, Beckham has been worth +1.2 wins in 53 games with the White Sox. Calling up the youngster after just two months in the minors has been one of the main reasons the White Sox are still in the AL Central race. If the White Sox fans weren’t sold on their first round pick a year ago, they are now – this kid is the real deal.

Oriole fans should get happy. Their patience is going to be rewarded. The overhaul of the Baltimore pitching rotation is almost complete. The team boasted a troika of top 100 pitching prospects going into the season, and one of those pitchers is 2008 first round pick Brian Matusz, who made a solid debut last night against the Detroit Tigers.

Outside of somewhat of a rocky 2nd inning in which he walked a pair of batters, Matusz did an exceptional job of mixing his pitches and locations, keeping Tiger hitters off-balance. He allowed six hits against five strikeouts and three walks to pick up his first big league W. Let’s take a quick look at his repertoire through Pitch F/X.

First, a movement graph:

Matusz throws both four-seam and two-seam fastballs. The four-seamers are the straighter pitch; the two-seamer is the one with more sink and tail. Rather than breaking both pitches out I just lumped all his fastballs together, but you get the idea. His fastball topped at 94 MPH and averaged 92 MPH. He also mixed in a change-up, slider and a curve. All look to be about average, which –- surprise, surprise — accurately matches his scouting reports.

And now some flight paths, which you can click on to enlarge:

What really sets Matusz apart is that he has more command than your average call-up. Known for being the most polished pitcher in the 2008 draft, the southpaw posted a phenomenal strikeout to walk ratio of 141 to 22 his final season at San Diego. Between High-A and the Double-A level, he has nearly a K/BB rate of nearly 4:1 while getting plenty of whiffs –- 121 in 113 innings.

While Matusz doesn’t necessarily blow anyone away in terms of pure stuff, he’s just so freakishly polished for a 22-year old. It should only get better from here.