Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Byron Buxton, OF, Minnesota Twins (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 20   Top-15: 1st   Top-100: 1st
Line: 20 PA, 0.0% BB, 40.0% K, 1 HR, .150/.150/.350 (.182 BABIP) at High-A

Summary
Buxton and Mike Trout have very little in common at the moment as the Twins’ center fielder has been injured longer than expected.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people think Pablo Sandoval is back. I don’t know if I agree.

In a lot of minds, baseball players are constantly coming and going, and it seems like that shouldn’t be true. Results waver; ability doesn’t — at least not so much. I don’t think Pablo Sandoval was ever gone, but what we can say with certainty is that early 2014 Sandoval didn’t look right. Recent 2014 Sandoval has looked a lot better. He’s looked a lot more familiar. He seems to be back on track to be one of the Giants’ positional leaders.

And there’s an interesting thing about that. In April, Sandoval drew 10 unintentional walks. In May, he’s drawn zero. In April, Sandoval swung at an above-average rate of pitches. In May, he’s swung at more pitches. This is what writers call an “understatement.” It’s what non-writers also would call an understatement, because that’s a everyday word.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about elbow injuries and then, in honor of Dan Uggla’s displacement, discuss the least-productive teams at each position.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Before the season started, we had the Astros projected for the worst starting rotation in baseball, by a good margin. It was simultaneously embarrassing and expected, as one Scott Feldman can do only so much. Yet, as I write this, the Astros’ rotation ranks ninth in baseball in WAR, having been more of a strength than a weakness. A lot of this has to do with the development of Dallas Keuchel, who Mike Petriello wrote about. Out of nowhere, Keuchel has blossomed into a possible no. 1, and recently there was a little controversy when Lloyd McClendon spoke in less-than-glowing terms after watching his team get shut down.

After the Astros [and Keuchel] beat the Mariners 4-1, McClendon said: “I saw average stuff. We didn’t swing the bats very good. At some point you’ve got to stop giving credit to average pitchers.”

Now I get to check this off the list of sentences I never thought I’d write: it’s not all about Keuchel, though, as his success has overshadowed the similarly surprising success of an unheralded teammate. ZiPS projected Dallas Keuchel for a 5.02 ERA. It projected Collin McHugh for a 5.25 ERA. Both have instead been absolutely phenomenal, and if you want to stretch the comparison further, let’s go back to the end of April:

After the Astros took their second in a row from the A’s on Sunday – the teams split a four-game series – A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson suggested that McHugh wasn’t flashing elite stuff.

“Stuff-wise, I thought he was OK,” said Donaldson, who went 0-for-3 with a walk. “I don’t think it was anything special. But he changed speeds well and pitched to his game plan.”

Keuchel doesn’t blow people away, but he’s blown people away. McHugh doesn’t blow people away, but he’s blown people away. In a world in which Dallas Keuchel is attracting positive attention, it’s time to divert some of that to another guy, who might be even more of a shock.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout has a .386 wOBA and a 151 wRC+. He’s not exactly hitting poorly, but he is striking out a lot more than he has previously, and relative to his own previous performances, a .386 wOBA is perhaps a minor disappointment. Now that David Appelman has released our fancy new heatmaps, we can see exactly where Trout’s trouble areas have been.

First, here’s Trout’s contact rate map for 2013.

And now here’s that contact rate map for 2014.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Plouffe had a good June 2012 — he hit .327/.391/.735 with 11 home runs — and announced himself to the baseball world in his third season. Unfortunately for him, though, those were good results after a process that didn’t fit him best. It was the slump that came after (.226/.279/.381 with eight home runs) that taught the Minnesota Twins third baseman the tools he needed to become a better player.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve rolled out new heatmaps to the site!

There are a number of ways to customize each heatmap:

– Options to choose either a traditional 5×5 grid or a more granular 10×10 grid.

– Choose a heatmap from the viewpoint of either the pitcher or the batter.

– For the 10×10 grid, you can choose your own level of smoothing, which will change the weighting of adjacent buckets.

– Filtering on single or multiple years, handedness, and count.

– A variety of different stats to choose from.

The color grading on the heatmaps is always compared to an MLB average player for the selected time period and handedness.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the Toronto Blue Jays were supposed to be contenders.

They were crowned the winners of the off-season after acquiring Josh Johnson, Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle, R.A. Dickey, and Melky Cabrera in the same winter, giving their roster a big boost on paper. On the field, though, it didn’t work.

Johnson was lousy and injured, while Buehrle and Dickey failed to improve the rotation much even though they avoided the DL. Reyes and Cabrera both struggled with injury issues of their own, with Cabrera performing as one of the worst players in baseball when he did play. Instead of joining the A’s, Indians and Pirates in the Postseason of the Upstarts, the 2013 Blue Jays instead became another reminder of the perils of trying to build a team around splashy, big-name acquisitions.

Coming off a miserable season, the Blue Jays backed off from aggressive off-season upgrades. They signed one free agent to a Major League contract: Dioner Navarro, a part-time catcher signed for part-time money. Despite being linked to big names like Jeff Samardzija, the team’s most notable trade involved reliever Brad Lincoln going to Philadelphia for backup catcher Erik Kratz. Basically, the Blue Jays stood pat, despite what looked to be glaring holes in the rotation and at second base, not to mention all the questions about the big-names who disappointed so dramatically a year ago.

So, put it all together, and you have a last-place team that made no substantial upgrades over the winter, built around a core group of players that are almost universally on the wrong side of 30. That’s not a classic recipe for success, but as we head towards June, the Blue Jays are alone atop the American League East, and they now look like the prohibitive favorites to win the division.

How did the Blue Jays fix themselves by doing nothing? There are two primary, obvious differences between this year’s model and last year’s version.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com