Yasmany Tomas, LF

Hit: 40/45+, Game Power: 55/65, Raw Power: 70/70, Speed: 45/45+, Field: 45/50, Arm: 45/45+

Upside: .275/.350/.480 with 25-30 homers, fringy defense & baserunning value in left field

Note: The “upside” line is basically a 75 percentile projection as explained here, while the tool grades are a 50 percentile projection. See the scale here to convert the hit/power tool grades into production.

Tomas is the latest Cuban defector to hit the market: he should be declared a free agent shortly and is holding private workouts in the Dominican this week after a big open workout for over 100 scouts from all 30 clubs on Sunday at the Giants Dominican complex. The above video is from last summer when the Cuban national team faced college Team USA in Durham, North Carolina. The Cuban team had a lot of trouble making contact against a loaded USA pitching staff (five pitchers from the staff went in the first round last June) and Tomas in particular struggled, going 3-for-19 with 3 singles, 1 walk and 8 punch outs over the 5 game set. Tomas was in bad shape and looked lost at the plate at times when I saw him, but he has shown big league ability in other international tournaments and as a professional in Cuba.

The carrying tool here is raw power, which draws anywhere from 60 to 70 grades on the 20-80 scale from scouts, but the question mark is how much he will hit.  Tomas has a short bat path for a power hitter and quick hands that move through the zone quickly.  The tools are here for at least an average hitter, but Tomas’ plate discipline has been questioned and he can sometimes sell out for pull power in games (here’s video of a particularly long homer in the WBC).  Some scouts think it’s more of a 40-45 bat (.240 to .250 average) that may keep Tomas from getting to all of his raw power in games, while others see a soon-to-be-24-year-old with the tools to hit and think the hot streak of Cuban hitters in the big leagues will continue with him.

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Episode 487
On Wednesday of this week, FanGraphs author Eno Sarris published an entirely amusing interview with Oakland corner-type and sabermetric enthusiast Brandon Moss. This is the rough but spirited audio from same.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 20 min play time.)

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Sometimes, you talk with a guy and there isn’t a great narrative that ties it all together. That’s what happened when I talked to Jimmy Rollins before a game with the Athletics this month. Sure, the general question was how he’s been able to stay fresh and relevant and productive through the latter part of his career. How he’s known what to change and what not to change. But Rollins has enough character to leave it alone and let him speak in his own words.

Eno Sarris: I noticed that last year you had 666 plate appearances.

Jimmy Rollins: Did I? Wow.

Eno Sarris: That explains everything!

Jimmy Rollins: I thought it was me! That’s crazy.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Seattle at Toronto | 16:07 ET
Tom Wilhelmsen (77.0 IP, 94 xFIP-, 0.2 WAR) faces Daniel Norris (124.2 IP, 32.5% K, 8.6% BB in Minors). This game, despite featuring little — one might reasonably say just 0.4% — in the way of playoff implications, does represent the left-handed Norris’s first major-league start. A second-round pick in 2011 by Toronto out of a Tennessee high school, Norris entered the season having exhibited both excellent moments and also command issues during his minor-league career. After recording promising figures both at High- and Double-A this season, though, he transformed essentially into a starting version of Aroldis Chapman with Triple-A Buffalo, with which club he produced strikeout and walk rates of 44.7% and 9.4%, respectively, over five appearances and 22.2 innings.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio.

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Tuesday on these very pages Mike Petriello wrote a piece about the Pirates’ pitching staff, discussing in part their ground ball tendencies and recent upgrades in their infield defense. I figured I’d approach similar subjective matter from a slightly different angle today, focusing on the (recent) historical significance of their ability to keep the ball on the ground, and the manner in which this aspect of the club fits into the Pirates’ overall plan to win with a small to mid-market payroll. To put it mildly, the starting rotation the Pirates have put together in 2013-14 is not getting all of these grounders by accident. Read the rest of this entry »

People love a breakout, so they’re always on the hunt. You’ll see a bunch of potential breakouts get written up in the first half, as season sample sizes start to grow. Among those potential breakouts, you will find the actual breakouts. But you’ll also find the noisy duds, because it turns out half of a season has a limit on how meaningful it can be. In the first half of this season, Lonnie Chisenhall posted a 163 wRC+. In the second half of this season, he’s posted just about the same wRC+, except without the 1 in it. Chisenhall’s gotten much much worse. Early on, J.D. Martinez was another potential breakout. As I write this his wRC+ is sandwiched between Giancarlo Stanton‘s and Paul Goldschmidt’s. Martinez, to a large extent, has kept things up, and he’s produced like one of the top hitters in baseball.

Because one half of one season can be noisy, two halves of one season can be noisy, particularly when a guy hasn’t been a full-time player from the start. Martinez hasn’t totally established his new baseline yet, but it’s not like this came without warning — Dan Farnsworth was all over it in December. I think we can see J.D. Martinez is better. So the question is: How much better is he?

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Ben and Sam banter about Matt Kemp, Phil Hughes, and the wild card races, then talk about their most memorable errors of 2014.

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Teams are behaving more and more alike. There’s less separation between front offices by the month, and talent is fairly equally distributed, and people everywhere believe many of the same things. There are, of course, better situations and worse situations, but when it comes to team strategies, generally speaking everyone agrees: play the best baseball. Pitch the best pitches, swing the best swings. The Dodgers have a better on-field product than the Rockies, but they try to go about their business similarly. Neither really has a signature philosophy you can observe in the numbers.

Such philosophies are few and far between. People believe one of them is the Diamondbacks and pitching inside, but in reality the Diamondbacks pitch inside as a staff an average amount, and they’ve hit a roughly average amount of batters. They’ve just had a tendency to talk. The Diamondbacks don’t have a team philosophy of brushing hitters back. You don’t see a lot of philosophies that stand out, because successful ones will be copied, and unsuccessful ones will be abandoned. But some do still exist. You’ve presumably heard about each, but I feel like they should be put together in one place. I can think of three standout examples. Do let me know if I’m missing any others.

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Among the points one is compelled to make when arguing on behalf of Corey Kluber’s candidacy for this year’s Cy Young award is that the defense behind him has been of suspect quality, leading to an inflated BABIP (.316) and higher ERA (68 ERA-) than his main rival for the distinction, Felix Hernandez (63 ERA-). Indeed, the main defensive metrics available at the present site, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) and Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) rate Cleveland’s fielders as collectively the worst and… also the worst among the league’s 30 clubs.

With this as the background, then, one might naturally regard Danny Salazar’s line from Tuesday night with some measure of surprise (box score). On a night when he Salazar struck out 30% of the 26 batters he faced and recorded an xFIP and FIP of 3.75 and 1.63, respectively, that same right-hander also conceded eight hits and five runs over 4.2 innings, producing a single-game 9.64 ERA. While it’s not impossible for a pitcher to allow a .533 BABIP over the course of one start, it’s also not a common occurrence — and even more suspicious when it happens to a Cleveland pitcher.

In any event, Cleveland lost perhaps the last meaningful game they’ll play all season on a night when their starter recorded an above-average fielding-independent performance. Did Cleveland’s defense sabotage the game? Was it merely a case of batted-ball variance? A combination of the two?

Without defensive-tracking technology such as that presented by MLBAM at the beginning of the season, there’s no way to tell for sure the speed or efficiency of the routes with which each play has been executed. In the absence of a more sophisticated method, then, what I’ve done below is identify the five hits which led directly to Kansas City’s five runs and attempted to determine if the responsibility for them lay with Salazar, the defense, or some combination of both.

Fourth Inning
Batter: Alex Gordon
Outcome: Single
Sabotage? Probably Not

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