Over the winter, FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote the equivalent of a novel in the form of 30 organizational prospect lists. Each list included a writeup and scouting grades for every prospect receiving a FV grade of at least 40 — that is, the equivalent of a bench player or middle reliever. For each team, roughly 20-25 prospects (give or take) met this criteria.

Of course, every organization features many more than just 20-25 minor leaguers. What about them? Using my KATOH projection system, I attempted to find the best of the rest. Just as I did last year, I’ve identified the players with the most promising statistical profiles who missed Eric’s 40 FV cutoff.

I think this goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: these are non-prospects of the worst kind. They were ranked below the future utility players, below the future middle relievers, below the toolsy teenagers who were overmatched in Rookie ball, and below the flame-throwing relievers with hideous walk rates. I’m scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel here.

Why am I writing about them, then? Well, because nobody else is, and my math suggests they’re at least worth keeping an eye on. So I decided to round them all up and put them all in an article that will generate an embarrassingly low number of page views. The sad reality is that most of these players will never amount to much. Just about the entire baseball industry has looked at them and said “org guy,” and the baseball industry is usually right about these things. But every so often, an org guy grinds his way to the majors, and the players listed below seem like decent bets to do so.

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When asked recently about his post-retirement plans, the fabulous Ichiro Suzuki provided a response as memorable as his career: “I think I’ll just die,” he told Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald. It’s possible that he might just play forever. So it’s premature to call this remarkable at-bat in Seattle on April 19th his last in Seattle, as many did when it occurred.

But it does remind us of another great response Ichiro provided — one that gave life to the idea that he would be a great Home Run Derby entrant. “If I’m allowed to hit .220, I could probably hit 40 [homers],” he told Bob Nightengale back in 2007. “But nobody wants that.”

Ben Lindbergh once looked at the hypothetical shift in Ichiro’s outcomes if the player had attempted to hit for power, but now that we have even better batted-ball data, we can maybe take a look and see if he could have even been that 40-homer hitter at all.

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Episode 736
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is the guest on this edition of the pod. In this episode, he examines a shortstop in the Rangers system who’s playing catcher; a first baseman in the SEC who’s leading the conference in homers and stolen bases; and the strange cult of the college third baseman.

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

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 13 min play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Boog Powell’s debut, Ryan Webb’s and Matt Albers’ ongoing pursuit of history, and the ethics of baseball injuries, then discuss some early-season evidence that the save stat’s grasp on manager’s minds is starting to slip.

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I didn’t realize the Royals have lost nine games in a row. When it’s come to disappointing baseball, most of my attention was focused on teams like the Blue Jays, Giants, Mets, and Mariners. Every team mentioned here has under-performed, but sure enough, the Royals stand at 7-16, with baseball’s worst record. The upside, I suppose, is that they were once 7-7, but that’s damning with faint praise, since losing nine straight can derail even a wonderful season. The Royals have had a horrible week and a half.

As you examine things, it’s not like the Royals have experienced some kind of team-wide collapse. The defensive metrics paint a confusing picture, and the rotation has been better than the bullpen, but the Royals’ run prevention has surprisingly been a tiny bit better than average. The Royals aren’t out there just constantly getting smoked. Nearly the entirety of the problem is captured by the headline just above. Hitting. Teams need to hit. The Royals haven’t hit. It’s not unreasonable to suggest they’ve actually hit worse than ever.

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Remember last August when Gary Sanchez hit a ton of home runs and put up a .442 isolated-power figure for the New York Yankees? It was amazing. It was also special, so far as exhibitions of power are concerned. Consider: only four batters produced a higher single-month ISO last year than Sanchez. It wasn’t just improbable for a rookie; it was improbable for a major leaguer.

But the improbable is different than the impossible. Now another power-hitting Yankees prospect, Aaron Judge, has just finished his first real month as a starting outfielder in New York and has recorded a .447 ISO in the process — or slightly higher than Sanchez’s mark. The power is as large as Judge himself.

And while Judge has been the most impressive hitter for the Yankees, the club has received quite a few pleasant surprises. Starlin Castro, Chase Headley, Aaron Hicks, Matt Holliday, Austin Romine, and Ronald Torreyes have all exceeded expectations.

The result? A very successful first month of the season, leading to a 15-8 record. And while some of the club’s surprising performances won’t last — Judge included — the Yankees have banked some wins, increased their projections, and significantly improved their playoff odds, as the chart below shows.

The Yankees entered the 2017 season with playoff odds of 15.9%, the worst of any team in the AL East. Their strong April has put them over the 50% mark the rest of the way, however. At the start of the season, the Yankees were projected to have a .488 win percentage. Going forward, that number is already up to .509. Add in the wins they’ve already received, and their projected end-of-season winning percentage is up to .529.

Largely responsible for that positive trend is Judge himself. As with the club itself, his own personal projections now appear more optimistic.

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When Noah Syndergaard showed up to spring training having indulged in “Bowls of Doom” to gain 17 pounds with a view towards throwing even harder — this, after a season in which his fastball averaged 98 mph — alarm bells began clanging around the country. Among those waving red flags was the present author.

Here’s what I wrote on Feb. 13, 2017:

As exciting as all this [added strength] sounds, perhaps someone should pump the breaks. For a pitcher who threw harder than any other starter, who threw a variant of a fastball on 60% of his offerings, more velocity might not be such a great development. While we don’t have a full understanding of why so many pitchers are breaking down, perhaps the body is being pushed beyond its physical limits with the strength and velocity increases in the game. No one, among starter pitchers, is pushing limits like Syndergaard.

After pushing the limits in 2016, Syndergaard was attempting to push even harder against them this year. Perhaps he pushed too hard, flew too close to the sun, etc. Pitchers’ ligaments and soft tissue aren’t unlike wax wings; velocity, not unlike the sun. Record pitch speeds have wrought a record numbers of injuries. That Syndergaard is on the DL is, sadly, one of the least surprising developments early this season.

Sports-injury expert Will Carroll told FanGraphs on Monday that Syndergaard’s offseason work was likely unhelpful.

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Last year, Robert Gsellman came up to the big leagues and helped stabilize an injury-plagued Mets rotation. With a power sinker that had added velocity, the unheralded Gsellman missed bats and generated grounders at an elite level. And after another Steven Matz injury put the lefty’s dependability into question this past spring training, Gsellman was given a prime opportunity to grab a 2017 rotation spot and run with it. To date, however, he hasn’t returned to top form.

For one thing, the results have been ugly. By RA9-WAR, Gsellman has been one of MLB’s worst starters. That once-great sinker whiff rate has been halved. But beyond outcome-level stats, his pitch data indicates worsened stuff. Overall, Gsellman’s sinker is down 0.71 mph, and especially striking are his in-game velocity declines.

Below are LOESS-smoothed curves plotting the difference between the given two-seam fastball velocity and its initial “baseline” in that game — represented, in this case, by the average velocity of the pitcher’s first five two-seamers. By restating velocities like this, each start becomes its own “universe” and we mitigate pitch-tracking biases on the game and park level.

Out of the gate of his 2017 starts, Gsellman’s velocity is dropping. By the 40-pitch mark, he has typically lost 1 mph from his starting speed. As he approaches 80 pitches, his two-seamers are nearly 1.75 mph slower. The orange curve does rebound near its end, but a widened 95% confidence interval reflects a smaller sample of pitches and less certainty that he’ll continue to gain velocity back. Regardless, Gsellman is ending his starts at 1.5 mph off his opening speed. Compared to the dark gray curve for the league — which indicates starts this April in which pitchers threw 20-plus two-seamers/sinkers and 90-plus total pitches — Gsellman’s velocity has tumbled much more steeply.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s first piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

With one month of the season in the books, the Ivan Nova signing has been the steal of the offseason.

After performing a career 180 following his trade to the Pirates from the Yankees at the deadline last year, Nova has become even more Nova-y in 2017, recording a 1.50 ERA over 36 innings, refusing to walk batters, and working at a record-setting pace.

His 95-pitch Maddux* on Saturday night was his fifth complete game in 16 outings as a Pirate. In that stretch of 100.2 innings, he has faced 396 batters and walked only four, including just one out of the 133 who stepped into the box this season. The last starter to go at least 100 innings in a season with a lower walk rate per nine was George Bradley in 1880. That was the year the number of balls required for a walk was reduced to eight, and four years before pitchers were permitted to throw overhand.

*”Maddux” is a term coined by Jason Lukehart in 2012 to denote a game in which a pitcher records a shutout while throwing fewer than 100 pitches.

Nova has been pitching like he is double-parked all year, challenging hitters right out of the gate and getting a lot of outs early in the count. Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle uses the number of batters retired on three pitches or less as a barometer for a starter’s performance. Nova has done it 57 times over five starts this season. His first pitch has been a strike 66.9% of the time, and he’s in the zone on 51.3% of his offerings. He has said he isn’t afraid to throw strikes, but there’s a fine line between challenging hitters and going out there with a “hold my beer” mentality and daring them to go hacking at the first pitch. They haven’t had a lot of success coming out swinging, combining for a .111 average with a mean exit velocity of 80.6 mph off the bat on the first offering.

That has all resulted in an average of just 12.1 pitches per inning — the lowest since Stats LLC started keeping track in 1988. If Rob Manfred ever institutes a Pace of Play Hall of Fame, Nova would be a first-ballot inductee.

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CLEVELAND – Like so many others, Chris Devenski watched in fascination last October. He observed, on the flat-screen television of his offseason home in San Diego, as Cleveland continuously elected not to save their best arm, Andrew Miller, for the ninth inning, but rather to utilize him in high-leverage situations earlier in the game.

Unlike the many other major-league pitchers watching, however, Devenski recognized the part Miller was playing: he himself had already assumed a similar new-age bullpen role in the second half of the season with Houston. He had, in fact, become accustomed to entering games at unlikely spots much earlier than that, from his experience as a piggy-back tandem starter in the Astros’ farm system. As Cleveland advanced through the playoffs, Devenski watched as the movement to rethink bullpen usage and role — a movement of which he’s a part — advanced. The revolution was televised.

“I saw my role, man,” Devenski told FanGraphs last week. “I saw what they were doing with Miller here [in Cleveland] and [Aroldis] Chapman with the Cubs, it seems like that is what is coming about now in the game. It’s changing a little bit. I saw [in Miller] what I do. It was pretty cool. It’s big-time situations there. It’s important.”

But Devenski is arguably more of a revolutionary, more of disruptive figure than Miller. Since joining the Indians, Miller has pitched in high-leverage situations often, but he’s only recorded two or more innings in an outing three times in the regular season. He’s never recorded more than six outs in an appearance. Devenski had 18 such outings last season alone, including nine in August and September when the then-rookie was thrust into more high-leverage situations.

Devenski has recorded six or more outs in seven of his nine appearances this season and has an absurd 49.2-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) and 22% swinging-strike rate. He has become a unique weapon in an unusual role.

Devenski said his wide range of experiences — from starting to relieving to tandem-starting — made the job a natural fit. While most pitchers would rather start or rack up saves, Devenski seems to have embraced his work in a hybrid capacity.

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