Both Kiley and I will be posting in-person scouting reports on draft prospects we see throughout the spring. Well, summer and fall, too. Here is my first dispatch from Arizona.

Grand Canyon RHP Jake Wong was on the periphery of our preseason top 30, as scouts pegged him as a second- or third-round prospect entering the year. He dominated top-10-ranked TCU on Friday night, allowing two hits and two walks over six inning, striking out nine.

Wong was 94-96 in the first inning before settling into the 92-94 range, touching 95 here and there throughout the rest of his start. The fastball missed bats up above, and within, the strike zone and induced weak ground-ball contact when located down. It’s a plus fastball and easily Wong’s best pitch.

His secondaries were pretty generic. He has an upper-70s curveball that has some depth to it when located beneath the strike zone, but it lacks bite and he babies it into the zone when he wants to throw it for a strike. His changeup ranged from 84 to 89 mph. He has feel for locating it in competitive locales, and it occasionally has bat-missing movement, but it isn’t consistent right now.

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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 our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

45 FV Prospects

Lewis’s pro career just cannot get off the ground. After signing in 2016, he was sent to short-season Everett — a pretty cushy assignment for a top college draftee, but not unusual for a small-school prospect — where he played for a month before tearing his right ACL in late July. When Lewis got back into games during extended spring training in Arizona the next year, he didn’t look ready. His bat speed was intact, but he was noticeably hobbled in a way that scouts thought impacted him on both sides of the ball. They suspected he was rushing back too quickly.

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Yesterday, Kiley and I ranked the prospects who graduated in 2017. As part of the that re-evaluation exercise, I came across a subset of players whom I thought merited a deeper dive. Many prospects “graduate” off of prospect lists but remain unfinished developmental projects who get bounced to and from Triple-A for an extended period of time. Others get hurt at an inopportune time and virtually disappear for years.

Nobody really covers these players in a meaningful way; they exist in a limbo between prospectdom and any kind of relevant big-league sample. To address this blind spot in coverage, I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting players who fall under this umbrella — players who have either made relevant changes or whose profiles have changed based on relevant info we could only have learned with a big-league sample.

As far as Future Value grades for this group are concerned, they look like this:

Now, on to the reports.

*****

Francis Martes, RHP, Houston Astros
Martes’s stuff is nasty enough that he’s very likely to play a significant big-league role even if he never develops starter’s command, and Houston obviously has a recent history of finding ways to maximize what guys with fringey command — like Lance McCullers and Brad Peacock, for example — are able to do. Martes sits 95-99, while his mid-80s curveball features a spin rate around 2600 rpm. Curveballs with that combination of velocity and spin are rare. Jose Fernandez, Ariel Hernandez, and Yordano Ventura are all recent peers by that criteria. Scouts think it could be a 70 curveball.

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The free agencies and likely departures of Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, and Mike Moustakas led most to believe that Kansas City was in for some kind of rebuild. It seemed likely than any such attempt at a rebuild would lead to major-league opportunities for upper-level prospects like Hunter Dozier, Samir Duenez, and Ryan O’Hearn and/or post-prospects like Cheslor Cuthbert and Raul Adalberto Mondesi to pass or fail the big-league test and establish themselves as Royals of the future.

For most of those players, such an opportunity is still likely to emerge. With the announcement on Friday, however, that Alcides Escobar would be returning to the Royals, the future for one of them has become less certain. The presence of Escobar and 2017 breakout Whit Merrifield raises immediate questions about Raul Mondesi’s prospects in Kansas City, as it appears his path to regular big-league playing time is once again blocked.

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Thursday’s Christian Yelich deal with Milwaukee netted Miami four prospects: OF Lewis Brinson, 2B Isan Diaz, OF Monte Harrison, and RHP Jordan Yamamoto. Full, deeper reports on each of these players is available on our Brewers pref list, but below are condensed summaries of each.

Lewis Brinson, CF (60 FV) – It’s important to note that Brinson opinions among scouts and executive vary pretty widely, especially for a player who has performed at the upper levels of the minors. Some people just don’t think he’s going to hit, but Brinson has made relevant swing adjustments multiple times as a pro and his strikeout rate has dropped every season. It’s been a very reasonable 20% over the last two years and he has monster complementary tools in plus power and plus speed.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Los Angeles Angels farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. The KATOH (stats-only) 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 our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

70 FV Prospects

Where to begin? First, it’s worth discussing why Ohtani is even included within these rankings in the first place. There’s a pretty good argument that he doesn’t belong here: he’s an MLB-ready product who probably won’t take a minor-league bus ride in his life. Nevertheless, we felt that a few facts about him merit his inclusion.

1. He’s younger than many of the players who appear throughout our lists.
2. He was an amateur international free agent literally weeks ago.
3. He’ll be providing the Angels with a prospect’s surplus value. (He’d be worth at least $250 million on the open market but will be making league minimum in 2017. So, great job, MLBPA.)
4. Because of Ohtani’s geographic location, the injury issues that made him hard to see in 2017, and the inexact nature of NPB/MLB statistical equivalencies, most of what we know about Ohtani comes from him being scouted very heavily during the last two years.

Shohei Ohtani is perhaps the most talented all-around baseball player on the planet. He is a toolsy, but volatile, prospect as a hitter with plus-plus raw power and plus speed; he could also immediately be one of the best pitchers in baseball because of the elite quality of his stuff. Teams have been on Ohtani since he was in high school. The Dodgers, Giants, Rangers, and Red Sox all pursued him during that time, and the threat that Ohtani would go to MLB right out of high school created a buzz in Japan. (This was in 2012 and 2013, during the time of soft international bonus caps. Ohtani said publicly at this time that he wanted to go right to MLB.) NPB teams (specifically the Hokkaido Fighters, who picked first overall in the 2012 draft) were forced to play chicken with Ohtani’s MLB suitors. There was risk he’d be picked up at the top of the NPB draft and just leave, but Hokkaido took him and convinced him to stay.

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