Last night’s three-way trade between the Padres, Indians, and Reds, which was headlined by two mercurial big leaguers, also featured the movement of several notable prospects, including two from our Top 100 (sort of) in left fielder Taylor Trammell, who comes in at No. 31 overall, and left-handed pitcher Logan Allen, who is No. 110. As I move through the trade, talking about the young pieces used to headline, balance, and sweeten this deal to completion, I’ll remind you of who the team gave up to acquire the prospect. I’ll touch on some big league stuff throughout the piece because three-way deals make it hard to isolate analysis to just the prospects, but there’s also analysis that focuses on the major leaguers — including the Reds’ return, which I ignore because they only received a big leaguer — from Dan right here. Let’s begin by looking at the best prospect included in the trade.

Padres acquired
LF Taylor Trammell (55 FV)

Padres traded
OF Franmil Reyes
LHP Logan Allen (50 FV)
3B Victor Nova (35+ FV)

Trammell becomes our fourth-ranked prospect in a Padres system that we have rated as the second best in baseball; this deal helps San Diego close the gap between itself and No. 1 ranked Tampa Bay by about $20 million.

We like Trammell a lot, even though we moved him down from a 60 to a 55 FV in a recent update to THE BOARD. Until a slight (and ultimately unconcerning) downturn this season, Trammell had been a consistent statistical performer, which is atypical of most two-sport high school prospects (he was an electric high school running back and could have played college football) who often come to the pro game with an unrefined feel to hit. He’s a scowling, intense guy who plays with focus and effort. Across four pro seasons, Trammell has hit .273/.367/.408, amassing 112 extra-base hits and 107 stolen bases (76% success rate) in just shy of 400 career games. He’s a plus-plus runner who could be an elite defender in left field due to his range (his arm is comfortably below average, which is part of why we have him projected to left) and whose combination of speed and ball/strike recognition will likely make him a dynamic offensive catalyst at the top of a lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

Teams have been smiling at each another and making their fair share of prolonged eye contact, but the trade deadline tension had yielded little in the way of actual consummation until Saturday’s A’s and Royals trade that sent veteran lefty reliever Jake Diekman to Oakland for two prospects. Here’s the deal:

Oakland gets:

LHP Jake Diekman

Kansas City gets:

RHP Ismael Aquino
CF Dairon Blanco

Diekman, who has struck out 33.5% of opposing hitters and has a 3.37 FIP across 41.2 innings this year, immediately becomes the best lefty in Oakland’s bullpen, surpassing cutter/curveball/command lefty Ryan Buchter (who was also acquired from Kansas City via trade last year), and strike-throwing Taiwanese depth piece, Wei-Chung Wang. That’s less a knock on either of those two, and more to do with Diekman, who has been good with uncommon consistency for a reliever throughout his seven-year big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

Below are some changes we made to The BOARD in the past week, along with our reasons for doing so. There’s more info on all the players below on The BOARD. All hail The BOARD, prostrate yourself before it and bask in its infinite wisdom and benevolence and dynamic farm system rankings.

Note that with the trade deadline upon us, Kiley and I have been focused on seeing and making calls about players from contenders’ systems, since those are the teams most likely to move prospects in the coming days.

Remember these changes are announced as they happen by our Twitter account, @FG_Prospects.

Moved Up

Ryan Jeffers, C, Minnesota Twins:
After amateur scouts were skeptical about Jeffers’ ability to catch long-term, he has turned into a good receiver. He’s an offseason Top 100 candidate.

Bryan Mata, RHP, Boston Red Sox:
Once upon a time, Mata and Cubs righty Jose Albertos were almost identical prospects. Both had been teenagers who had unusually advanced stuff, including swing-and-miss changeups, but concerning control. For a stretch, each of them had stock-altering strike-throwing regressions, from which Mata has emerged and appears beyond, while Albertos’ season is grounded.

Alexander Vargas, SS, New York Yankees:
Vargas had $3 million on the table from Cincinnati but rather than wait until 2019 to sign the deal like the Reds needed him to, he got $2.5 million from the Yankees last year. It’s looking like quite the coup now. Vargas, still 17, was one of a handful of Yankees DSL prospects brought up to the GCL after very few games. He’s a projectable, athletic, switch-hitting shortstop with surprising power for someone his size and age. We moved him up just shy of the FVs of the late first round high school shortstops from this year’s draft. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Below are some changes we made to The BOARD in the past week, with our reasons for doing so. All hail the BOARD.

Moved Up

Ronny Mauricio, SS, New York Mets:
We got some immediate feedback on Monday’s sweeping update, which included more industry interest in Mauricio. The average major league swinging strike rate is 11%. Mauricio has a 12% swinging strike rate, and is a switch-hitting, 6-foot-4 teenager facing full-season pitching. It’s common for lanky teenagers to struggle with contact as they grow into their frames, but Mauricio hasn’t had that issue so far.

Oneil Cruz, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates:
One of us was sent Cruz’s minor league exit velocities and they’re shockingly close to what Yordan Alvarez’s have been in the big leagues. Of course, there remains great uncertainty about where Cruz will end up on defense, and hitters this size (Cruz is listed at 6-foot-7) are swing and miss risks, but this is a freakish, elite power-hitting talent.

Marco Luciano, SS, San Francisco Giants:
This guy has No. 1 overall prospect potential as a shortstop with 70 or better raw power. He belongs up near Bobby Witt, who is older but might also be a plus shortstop while we’re still not sure if Luciano will stay there.

George Valera, OF, Cleveland Indians:
Valera is torching the Penn League at 18 and a half years old, and we’re not sure any high school hitter in this year’s draft class would be able to do it. His defensive instincts give him a shot to stay in center field despite middling raw speed, and his swing should allow him to get to all of his raw power, so it becomes less important that his body is projectable. He would have been fifth on our 2019 draft board were he playing at a high school somewhere in the U.S., so he’s now slotted in the between JJ Bleday and C.J. Abrams on our overall list. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We all know factors beyond talent — be it contract length or value, a team’s competitive window, or a player’s social fit within the org, among others — have an impact on how trades balance and are agreed upon. Just being mindful that these factors exist, and that we’re not always privy to them, can help us to square what we perceive to be a context-free gap in the talents exchanged. But can we bridge what is, based on our evaluations, a sizable gap in this weekend’s Rangers and Rays prospect-for-prospect trade?

Rangers get:

2B Nick Solak, 50 FV, No. 93 overall prospect

Rays get:

RHP Peter Fairbanks, 40 FV

This deal looks very good for Texas in a vacuum based on our evaluations. Kiley and I both think Solak, who is a career .290/.382/.453 hitter in the minors and has raked since his freshman year at Louisville, is going to be an average everyday second baseman, while Fairbanks is a 25-year-old reliever who has had two Tommy John surgeries, a demographic we rarely rank at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

How would you adjust your pre-draft evaluation of a high school pitcher if you knew he couldn’t pass a physical? That is what teams needed to decide about White Sox righty Dylan Cease, who after a surgery, a year of rehab, and four years of development, will make his first big league start today.

Some version of this scenario occurs almost annually: High school pitcher throws hard during his showcase summer, becomes very famous, comes out the following spring throwing even harder, then breaks. In Cease’s case, he was 93-96 and touching 98 during showcases, then touching 100 early the following spring before he was shut down with an elbow injury that would, as teams knew ahead of the draft, eventually require surgery.

For some teams, the injury shut the door on Cease as an option entirely. He was a Vanderbilt commit whose long arm action some teams had already feared increased his risk of injury, or at least might impede his ability to develop command and a changeup, and funnel him toward a bullpen role.

But Cease also had among the 2014 draft’s best velocity and breaking ball combination. The Cubs properly assessed his signability, and after cutting an underslot deal with Kyle Schwarber for $1.5 million at pick No. 4, they suddenly had a bunch of extra bonus pool money to play with. They ended up signing three high school pitchers to overslot bonuses — Cease, Justin Steele and Carson Sands — and cutting underslot deals of varying amounts at every other pick in the first 10 rounds.

Cease signed for $1.5 million, which was the slot value of that draft’s 38th pick and is around where high school pitchers with this kind of stuff, albeit healthy ones, typically come off the board these days. It took a fortuitous intersection of several variables: Cease’s talent, the Cubs optimistic evaluation of it and his signability, the opportunity created by the underslot deal with Schwarber, and a level of comfort in taking an injured player aided by risk diversification in the other overslot high schoolers. The high school pitching crop in 2014 was wild, and a few of those players probably contributed to the current reticence to pick a similar guy very early. Read the rest of this entry »