Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
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When A.J. Puk debuts today — and even though he has been in the bullpen since late-June, he is likely to pitch this evening against the Yankees — he’ll be the 51st player from the 2016 draft to play in the big leagues. He does so, despite missing more than a year recovering from Tommy John surgery, before every high school pitcher selected in 2016, other than Dustin May. Among 2016 draftee prospects still eligible to be on THE BOARD, Puk is ranked sixth; were I to include graduated players from that draft, he’d be seventh. Nick Senzel would slot ahead of him, but I’d still take the next half decade of Puk ahead of Pete Alonso, who I worry will have an early, precipitous decline phase. Read the rest of this entry »

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The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
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As soon as I finish this piece, I’m going to get ice cream. There’s a soft serve frozen yogurt place owned by a surprisingly fastidious stoner about a mile from my house, and I go there once or twice a week. If I told you there are 10 rotating flavors, with chocolate and vanilla as constants, how long do you think it would take you to learn what I like by watching me fill my bowl (there are all sorts of bowl-packing jokes on the store’s signage)? How many times would I need to go in there and pull that soft serve lever before you’d know that vanilla is actually pretty high on my pref list, and that only a few things, like coconut or coffee, will pull me away from it? Or that I avoid all of the fruit flavors?

How long before we can start to identify team regime patterns in player acquisition, and start talking about team preferences with confidence, the way we do when we say that progressive clubs look for common arm slots and hand positions, or fastballs that spin? The current Marlins regime has basically now been in place since the fall of 2017, when Gary Denbo was brought in as Vice President of Scouting and Development. Miami has made a lot of seller’s trades during that year and a half, and they clearly have a type, especially when you look at their amateur acquisitions. Yesterday, that type came further into focus after a deadline deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Here’s the trade:

Marlins get:
SS Jazz Chisholm

Diamondbacks get:
RHP Zac Gallen

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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 »