When we think about how parks affect players, we generally think of it in the context of hitting and pitching. Bring the fences in and batters will hit more homers. Build a taller wall or a whole new park with bigger dimensions, and pitchers are going to have an easier time preventing the long ball.

For the Houston Astros and George Springer, however, the removal of Tal’s Hill has added significance. While it might add a homer or two to Springer’s home-run ledger, the greater impact is likely to be a defensive one. This represents Springer’s first season as Houston’s starting center fielder. With four homers already to his name this year, Springer is making a big impact with the bat. His ability to play the more demanding outfield position — one now free of deadly obstacles — also deepens the Astros’ excellent lineup.

In the minors, Springer primarily played center field, getting 244 of his 267 starts at the position as he ascended through Houston’s minor-league system. Once he got to the majors, though, he was moved to a corner while a combination of Dexter Fowler, Carlos Gomez, Jake Marisnick, Colby Rasmus, and even Alex Presley all got time there. Of those players, the only real plus defender — accounting for Gomez’s hip problems — was Marisnick. Fowler, meanwhile, provided the only decent bat Houston has featured in center field, and that was back in 2014. Springer ended up starting just 16 games in center field from 2014 to 2016 — and 10 of those were on the road. The removal of Tal’s Hill helps to facilitate Springer’s transition to a full-time role in center field. The team sacrifices a little on defense in favor of Springer’s offensive ability over Jake Marisnick’s.

Springer has been a positive out in right field for the Astros since joining the team three years ago, posting positive numbers in both UZR (+2.5) and DRS(+10) over nearly 3,000 innings. While certainly solid, such numbers don’t cry out for a great defensive challenge for Springer. Prior to this season, they likely discouraged time in center field, especially in Houston. With a center-field fence extending out to 440 feet and a gigantic hill to make everything more difficult, Springer’s range likely would have been exposed. For one of the team’s best hitters, it might have put him at increased injury risk given his penchant for running into walls.

Read the rest of this entry »

For most of the winter and a good chunk of spring training, the Astros have been speculated as a potential landing spot for Jose Quintana. Reports are that they’ve made offers to the White Sox to add the left-hander to their rotation, and now that Collin McHugh has been shut down for six weeks during his rehab stint, the fit seems even better than it did over the off-season.

But while Jose Quintana would help any team, I still look at Houston’s rotation and see a pretty decent group there. Dallas Keuchel and a healthy (for now, at least) Lance McCullers are a quality pair at the front of the rotation, and while a back-end of Charlie Morton, Joe Musgrove, and Mike Fiers isn’t the strongest group #3-#5 in the game, all three project as roughly league average hurlers, and McHugh is better than that if he gets healthy. Toss in the possibility of stretching out Chris Devenski — who has looked amazing in his two long relief stints this year — or promoting one of their promising arms from the minors, and there’s depth here beyond a strong top two.

So instead of talking about their starting pitching, perhaps the Astros should start thinking about using their surplus of quality prospects to land a first baseman. Because while it’s still early, the evidence is mounting that they may have a real problem there.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

After two starts and one week of baseball, Sean Manaea has the seventh-worst ERA among qualified pitchers at 7.15. That’s a pretty useless sentence for about five different reasons, but I’m going to rely on it briefly because it’s April and being a baseball writer is very difficult in April. In early April, we’re on the hunt for indicators. Other than health and velocity, it’s hard to find anything that happens in week one that will meaningfully shift your opinion, but we’re all keeping our eyes open for signs of things to come. The data points from April matter, it’s just too early to know if they’re representative of anything.

Typically, if a promising young pitcher like Manaea recorded two starts during which he allowed 10 runs over 11.1 innings, we would either brush it aside as a product of growing pains or consider it as a possible indication that something is wrong. In general, it’s not good to give up a lot of runs, even if we’re all in agreement that pitchers don’t have complete control over how many runs they allow.

But what’s so interesting about Manaea is that, in addition to what appear to be a couple of rough starts in the outcome department, he’s excelling in two of the pitching statistics that become reliable most quickly. Any reasonably astute fan can take a look at Manaea’s strikeout rate (28.6%), walk rate (8.2 %), home-run rate (0.79 HR/9), and BABIP (.259) to determine that his opponents have stacked all their success into just a couple of weird innings. But while those indicators look good enough to chalk this up to sequencing, there are actually two deeper measures that are quite interesting.

Read the rest of this entry »

While Byron Buxton’s first week was discouraging owing to the presence of his ongoing contact issues, another former uber prospect, Miguel Sano, put together a promising opening week during the Twins’ surprising start to the season.

Sano’s resume is dotted with its own swing-and-miss issues, and strikeouts will always be a part of Sano’s game as a three-outcome slugger.

But when Sano makes contact, special things happen. According to Statcast data, he finished 13th in average exit velocity on fly balls and line drives last season (97.0 mph) — minimum 100 batted ball events — and second in 2015 (99.2 mph), trailing only Giancarlo Stanton, a frequent comp for Sano.

After giving us a taste of his promise in 2015, Sano dealt with injury, inconsistency, and perhaps an ill-advised position change last season.

But things are looking up for Sano in 2017. As Dave Cameron noted earlier this year, there’s evidence he possesses the athleticism to handle third base, the position to which he’s returned this year. And Sano received an interesting — and perhaps crucial — swing tip this offseason.

In an age when more hitters are receiving help from non-traditional sources — such as private hitting instructors, for example — Sano received some advice this offseason while home in the Dominican Republic, where he encountered former major leaguer Fernando Tatis.

Sano recalled the exchange last month for Phil Miller of the Star Tribune. From Miller’s piece:

Tatis, whose son Fernando Jr. is a top prospect in the Padres organization, watched Sano take batting practice and made a suggestion.

“He said hands up high takes me too much time to [get in position to] swing,” Sano explained, demonstrating the extra motion required to trigger his swing. “Put my hands lower, and it’s just one move. Faster.”

The result, according to Sano? “If I put [my hands] lower, I have more time. I can see the ball more,” he said. “I start them down, see the pitch, and boom.”

Consider Sano’s hand placement last season in this at-bat…

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Seattle Mariners farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)
NL West (HOU, LAA)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .395/.535/.731 with 20 home runs as junior at Mercer.

Scouting Report
Lewis crashed the national party on the Cape in 2015, distinguishing himself as the most talented prospect and youngest regular on an Orleans roster teeming with talent. (Half of the Firebirds roster were honest-to-god prospects.) His junior year at Mercer included 20 home runs, a Golden Spikes award, and questions about the quality of pitching he faced in the Southern Conference.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Mets’ starting rotation, a Keon Broxton sighting, and the five WAR leaders vs. the five WAR trailers, then talk to Rob Neyer about his oral history of Michael Jordan’s baseball career, how good Jordan was and could have been, the ways in which the Jordan experiment is misremembered, and how it differs from Tim Tebow’s current attempt, concluding with a discussion of the use and abuse of the 10-day DL rule.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Mike Trout is the best baseball player, so he’s automatically interesting. Felix Hernandez is probably not one of the best baseball players, but he has been recently enough that he remains interesting. On Saturday, Felix pitched and Trout hit, and as we all learned in school, Interesting * Interesting = Interesting^2. That’s extremely interesting! In this post, we’ll review the game’s first at-bat between the two. It was the kind of at-bat that leaves you thinking and talking about it days later, which, well, yeah, that’s what we’re doing here.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are certain unstoppable forces in this world. Some of them are acts of nature, like hurricanes and tornadoes. There’s also death, taxes, and reality television — inevitable, all of them. In baseball, there’s the bat of Mike Trout and the glove of Francisco Lindor. There’s the fastball of Noah Syndergaard and the cutter of Kenley Jansen. In the baseball present, these are facts of life, threatened only by the natural corrective measures of health and the passage of time.

While these unimpeachable laws pervade the game, there are times when events fail to obey the natural order of things. Times when Jansen’s cutter doesn’t cut or when Lindor makes an error. Or, for example, when the third out of an inning — a frequent occurrence on any given day in a season — appears unlikely to ever arrive.

Two clubs, the Washington Nationals and Seattle Mariners, suffered from this particular sort of chaos this weekend. The Nationals are good. Unfortunately, the pitcher who started for them on Saturday isn’t — or isn’t any longer. The Mariners are also pretty good. Unfortunately, with one of their best pitchers on the mound on Sunday, they failed to produce a third out in the last, most important inning of their game in Anaheim.

Jeremy Guthrie, by all reasonable measures, has had a good career. His outing on Saturday marked his 14th individual year in which he’d made an appearance in the majors. He’s thrown more than 1700 innings and made more than $43 million by playing a game. He won a World Series with the Royals. Guthrie has a reputation of being a standout human being, as well. At age 38, Guthrie has already lived a full and exciting life. His WAR, or his FIP, or his win total, mean little in the face of all of that.

He turned 38 on Saturday. On that same day, he allowed 10 runs in less than an inning — the game’s first innings — of what may very well have been his final start.

The Phillies aren’t a great offensive team. “Great” is a relative term, though. Major-league hitters are all great relative to the human population — and Guthrie, for his past, spent last year putting up a 6.57 ERA against Triple-A batters. So the fact that he even got a start at the highest level this year is an accomplishment. But the Phillies probably represented an easier task for him than, say, the Cubs or the Dodgers. Again, though: big-league hitters can knock around balls over the heart of the plate, and the Phillies did just that. Enny Romero, who follow Guthrie, would offer up some meatballs of his own before the damage was finally done.

Guthrie’s advanced age (for a ballplayer, that is) and the resulting deterioration of his stuff played a role here, but luck did as well. The ball that Cesar Hernandez hit for a leadoff double, for instance, only goes for a hit about 55% of the time. Had that been an out, perhaps the inning proceeds much differently. It didn’t, though, and the resulting offensive explosion was torrential. Even the two outs that Guthrie induced, fly balls from Maikel Franco and Freddy Galvis, were sac flies that brought runs home.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays had 12 bunt hits in 2016, with Kevin Kiermaier’s four leading the way. Expect Mallex Smith to surpass both of those numbers this season — not just the individual mark, but the team total, as well. The 23-year-old speedster already has one in the books, and if all goes to plan, more are on the way.

Mallex Smith is a bunt machine in the making. That’s not a pejorative. The kill-the-bunt crowd isn’t off base, but their primary target is the out-surrendering sacrifice. Smith’s aim is to reach safely, and to then wreak havoc once he’s on. There’s no questioning his ability to do the latter. Smith led the minors with 88 steals in 2014 (as MLB.com’s Jim Callis sagely predicted he would), and he’s a perfect three-for-three since donning a Tampa Bay uniform.

Acquired over the offseason — he went from Atlanta to Seattle to Tampa on January 11 — Smith isn’t conventional in a modern-day sense. Launch angles and exit velocity are in vogue, and the 5-foot-9 outfielder is all about electricity. He fashions himself a jackrabbit, which is exactly how his first-base coach sees him.

“Mallex is a very dynamic athlete who can do things you don’t see a lot on a baseball field these days,” opined Rocco Baldelli, who as a player was dubbed The Woonsocket Rocket. “There just aren’t a lot of players that fit that sort of speedy, athletic profile in 2017. He really endears himself to that role. He knows what he is as a player.”

Read the rest of this entry »