Like most baseball fans ranging from prospect-curious to prospect-obsessed, I too have been awaiting Nate Lowe’s first extended big league opportunity. It appears he’ll finally get one, as the Rangers acquired him on Thursday as part of a five- or six-player trade with Tampa Bay that involves Top 100 prospect Heriberto Hernandez. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 Rule 5 Draft was conducted via conference call on Thursday, with 18 players selected during the Major League phase. Pre-draft chatter was focused on whether more young, inexperienced players would be picked this year due to an anticipation of expanded rosters, and a few picks appeared to be made with that in mind. Here are my thoughts on all those selected, as well as some on those picked during the Minor League phase. Remember you can venture over to The Board for more info on several of these players.

But first, my annual refresher on the Rule 5 Draft’s complex rules. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger are eligible for selection after five years of minor-league service if their parent club has not yet added them to the team’s 40-man roster. For players who signed at age 19 or older, the timeline is four years. Teams with the worst win/loss record from the previous season pick first, and those that select a player must not only (a) pay said player’s former club $100,000 ($24,000 in the Minor League phase), but also (b) keep the player on their 25-man active roster throughout the entirety of the following season, with a couple of exceptions, mostly involving the Injured List; players taken in the Minor League phase aren’t subject to roster restrictions. If a selected player doesn’t make his new team’s active roster, he is offered back to his former team for half of the initial fee. After the player’s first year on the roster, he can be optioned back to the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

This fall, during the little bit of Instructional League ball to which I was personally privy, I saw a small school reliever who was taken on Day 2 of the 2019 draft. He was sitting 96-99 and threw several great sliders. We are about a year and a half removed from when Nick Robertson was drafted, and he’s turned into the sort of prospect who, with comparable stuff, would get a bonus close to a million dollars.

Because the 2020 Draft was only five rounds, there are literally hundreds of players who would have gone in rounds sixth through 10, as well a few dozen who would have gotten a bonus well over-slot on Day 3, who are now (or again) playing college ball (and will be for a while), while many have spilled over into junior colleges or have transferred. That’s a few hundred players who may make a leap in the same amount of time Robertson did.

The group of players who was supposed to be in the 2020 Draft class was deep with talent, and so the 2021 Draft class will be very deep, too, but the industry will be working with less information, or at the very least will have one hell of a time trying to acquire it. We’ll likely still be dealing with COVID-19 in February when the college season begins, and we have yet to see all the schools where college baseball programs will become collateral damage as a result of fewer football games being played. Also remember that both COVID and the operational budgets imposed upon MLB scouting staffs will likely discourage travel next spring, just as they did during the summer. So teams will lean on data, which, remember, now gets shared. More on that in a minute. Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s prospect list and subsequent discussion surrounds international players, and like most things you’ve experienced this year, it’s going to be a little bit different than usual. Typically, the international prospect coverage at FanGraphs consists of a preliminary list of players during our February Prospects Week, with a longer, more thorough ranking published closer to July 2, historically the day foreign amateur players are allowed to start signing.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, MLB pushed this year’s signing day back by six months from July 2020 to January 2021. For the purposes of my workflow, previewing the signing festivities now lines up with nicely with the early free agency period when pro players from foreign leagues are being posted by their old clubs and courted by their new ones. And though not exclusively, it has also generally fallen to me to acquire basic scouting notes on these players, though there has never been a central location on the site, like The Board, to house those reports.

This change in timing, combined with the way the Future Value scale enables apples-to-oranges comparisons between very different baseball players, led me to decide to simply fold the foreign pros in with the fresh-faced youngsters whose big league dreams are still half a decade away. And so The Board’s International Players tab will now be a running pref list of players abroad regardless of their origin or experience level, subject to sweeping updates a couple times of year while also changing incrementally throughout as players sign and move to the pro side of The Board or become known through my sources and research.

This likely isn’t just a single-year, COVID-related change to the international amateur calendar (and therefore my work). All of the people in baseball I’ve spoken to for this list think that MLB will also push the next signing period back six months, and that a January start to the signing period will become the new normal, until and unless an international draft is instituted. Like many of the societal shifts we’re all dealing with during this difficult time, the changes to the international calendar and signing rules have had immediate consequences to those who had planned for a world without them. So before I talk more about what’s on The Board, let’s consider the changes to the international amateur market and what they’ve meant for this year’s class. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to begin FanGraphs’ annual offseason trip through our team prospect lists. Once again, we’ll aim to provide the most in-depth, comprehensive analysis in the public sphere. Before we get to the meat of the team-by-team rankings, we’ll first publish a few bigger pillars, including a list of international prospects and updates to my draft lists. Those will begin to roll out later this week along with the debut of, and some discussion surrounding, cosmetic changes to The Board, which houses the most robust, easily-accessible prospect scouting grades and data anywhere in media, all available for free but made possible by your support.

But I want to start the list parade by touching on the big leaguers who graduated this year, the complete list of which can be found on the Seasonal tab over on The Board. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, while the player pages of younger big leaguers include their prospect-era tool grades and rankings, those are often from the offseason before they graduated. This year, I took the opportunity to comment on prospects who played in the big leagues for an extended stretch and update their tool grades where applicable so they’re not quite as stale.

This is also in response to reader feedback. People have sometimes been confused about the tool grades featured on player pages, thinking they represent the site’s up-to-date opinions on the abilities of big leaguers rather than a look at how they were evaluated as prospects. Others have expressed a desire to see prospects’ scouting reports on their player pages, but often there is not enough space on the screen for the whole report, and I’d rather readers head to either a team’s list or The Board to read these. With the help of Sean Dolinar, I’m attempting to solve the first issue and compromise on the second by putting little scouting snippets about top prospects and all graduates (similar to the TLDRs readers may be familiar with from my Top 100 lists) on the player pages. The graduates’ version of this will be written as a debriefing of sorts, discussing the player in the context of their rookie season or early career so readers will know when the tools grades are from. This also increases accountability on my part (or on the part of whoever is helming prospect coverage here) since our final thoughts on the prospect will live on their player page forever. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get to the names, if you missed Monday’s post, you’re going to want to read that straight away. Please know that this doesn’t preclude anyone else on staff from offering their own opinions on this matter. I also think readers should know how I put the list together. Similar to the recipe for my mock drafts, I’m using a combination of informed speculation by industry folks and myself, with some concrete dope mixed in. My own speculation is driven by:

• Weighing each player’s ability and importance to their team against their projected arbitration number (duh).
• How their team/front office has behaved in the non-tender market before.
• Whether the team behaves in a cost-conscious way, generally.
• Whether the team has behaved in a cost-conscious way lately due to the pandemic (ops layoffs, decisions on player options, etc.).
• If there are major league-ready prospects behind said player.
• Miscellaneous, subjective stuff, like strongly-perceived player/team discord and whatnot.

Let’s take a quick peek at each club’s number of non-tenders since 2015 so we’re all on the same page for the second category above. The table below is sortable.

I’m not just touching on the players for whom there’s an argument to non-tender; I’m trying to predict these as best as I can. Like my mock drafts, the goal is to try to predict what will happen, not say what I think should happen. I don’t even bother mentioning some arbitration-eligible stars, like Cody Bellinger and Lucas Giolito, for reasons I hope are obvious. These go alphabetical by team name. Read the rest of this entry »

As many readers have likely deduced from some of the early offseason transactions and the flurry of cuts made to scouting, player development, and other parts of baseball ops, owners are tightening their belts after a gate-less season and the repercussions are diffusing across the industry. If these early moves — like Brad Hand’s $10 million option being declined, and no team picking him up on waivers — are indications of how teams are going to behave this offseason, then this will, among other things, modulate some of the already-changing, pre-COVID shifts in the thinking surrounding payroll allocation and roster construction, which was already cutting deeper into the bottom of rosters.

I’d like to specifically talk about how I think the COVID-19 financial ripples will impact the way teams approach non-tendering players this offseason. It’s logical to assume that teams will be apt to non-tender players more often this year than ever before because of financial fallout from the pandemic, but based on recent trends, the game was perhaps likely to see a record number of non-tenders anyway. Here are the past 12 years of league-wide non-tender totals:

Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I spent the summer watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. This is the final divisional installment of those thoughts, as well as a general recap. The other divisions can be found here: National League East, NL Central, American League East, Central, and West.

Below is my assessment of the National League West, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of these final 2020 changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on the updated Board, though I provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West, AL East, and Central. Below is my assessment of the , covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: The Rays did indeed add Josh Fleming, along with José Alvarado, who had been on the Injured List with a shoulder issue; the team DFA’ed Oliver Drake to make room for Alvarado on the 40-man. Trevor Richards and Brett Phillips were dropped from the ALCS roster to make room for Fleming and Alvarado. The Astros, meanwhile, added Chase de Jong and bumped Chas McCormick from their ALCS roster.

Sunday’s American League Championship Series Game 1 begins the next layer of MLB’s grueling postseason schedule, one where each club’s pitching depth will be tested by the best lineup they’ve faced all year without the grace of an off day for travel. Two teams, seven games, in seven days (if necessary).

Let’s touch on the narrative. This series pits an infamous-but-talented Houston Astros team, whose players are publicly engaged in cognitive dissonance as a means of self-motivation, against a Rays team sometimes incorrectly billed as an underdog because of its sparse, owner-imposed payroll, even though Tampa was the AL’s top seed. There’s the intrigue of longtime Rays employee (and new Astros GM) James Click facing his old club while he and manager Dusty Baker try to shepherd the franchise through a PR hell that’s probably going to last longer than the pandemic. Houston’s young pitchers (a well that never seems to run dry) led by breakout third-year lefty Framber Valdez and a slew of great rookies who can go multiple innings in relief, face a dynamic group of Rays hitters who run 12 or 13 deep, and punish opponents by creating tough, mid-game matchups.

Let’s get down to brass tacks. Yesterday the Astros announced Valdez would start Game 1 on the usual four days rest, while ALDS Game 1 starter Lance McCullers Jr. will go in Game 2 on extended rest. Both work heavily off their sinkers and curveballs, especially Valdez, whose changeup usage dwindled throughout the regular season before totally evaporating in the playoffs. He threw no cambios in the Wild Card round, and tossed just four of them in his ALDS start against the A’s, throwing one to Ramón Laureano and Chad Pinder each time he faced them.

Blake Snell will take the ball for Tampa Bay in Game 1, and while they haven’t announced it yet, it’s fair to anticipate former Astro Charlie Morton going in Game 2 and Tyler Glasnow in Game 3, though that’s more an educated guess than a certainty. In Friday’s ALDS Game 5, Glasnow threw on two days rest, his bullpen day, meaning Sunday’s Game 1 would be his scheduled day to start if the Rays just replaced his routine bullpen with his Game 5 outing. I think the structure of the Championship Series (seven games in as many days) means we’re unlikely to see an extended outing from Glasnow early in this series (he threw 93 pitches in his first ALDS start) since there’s an old-school style importance to starting pitchers going deep into games, forcing Tampa Bay to start and get bulk innings from Glasnow rather than piggybacking him. Read the rest of this entry »