For the next two weeks, we’re going to spend a lot of time and energy debating Shohei Ohtani’s trade market, just in case the Angels continue to backslide and Arte Moreno can be extricated from his fortress of solitude and cajoled into trading his franchise player. And it should be so; Ohtani is the most interesting player in baseball, and once the trade deadline passes, I’m sure we’ll move on to talking about where he’ll land next year and how many hundreds of millions of dollars he’ll earn over the next decade.

But Ohtani is not the only free-agent-to-be who’s playing out the string on a disappointing team. As much as the Angels are taking on water, they’re not sunk yet. And the Padres are even less sunk than the Angels are. With that said, I’m sure they’re not happy to be in fourth place in their division during the last week of the Tour de France, with open questions about whether Blake Snell will be a part of the team’s future.

Snell obviously can’t do all that 60-homer pace stuff Ohtani does, but he’s going to be one of the most sought-after pitchers in the forthcoming free agent class. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Strider currently leads all qualified starters in strikeout rate. When I learned that bit of information, my immediate reaction was, “Wow, that tiny little guy’s on track to throw enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, good for him!”

But Strider is way out in front of the field. His K% is 38.9%; Kevin Gausman is second at 32.6%, with a small group of pitchers clustered behind him in the low 30s. Strider isn’t particularly walk-averse — his BB% is 40th-lowest among 67 qualified starters — and yet his K-BB% of 31.4% would be the fifth-best strikeout rate in the league.

I don’t want to say this is happening without anyone batting an eye — here we are, after all, batting our eyes at Strider’s strikeout rate. But we’ve become so inured to this kind of performance, and so quickly, that it’s worth taking a step back to consider the gravity of what he’s doing. Read the rest of this entry »

I write to you, dear readers, during the interregnum between the All-Star Game and the second half of the season. Soon enough, the focus of every baseball writer in North America will be on the trade deadline, and after that, the stretch run before the playoffs. The season is basically over already; goodness, how the time flies.

Having spent most of the past month concentrating on the draft and the NCAA tournament, I’m not quite ready to let go of that fun midseason diversion. So I’ll spend that interregnum the way I spent the rest of the All-Star break: working the draft query tool on Baseball Reference. Today, we’re going to talk about shortstops.

In Wednesday’s column on first-round catchers, I discussed at some length the logic behind spending early picks on up-the-middle prospects. If the player hits and stays at a premium position, that’s great. If he can only contribute on one side of the ball, that’s still frequently a useful big leaguer. There’s just so much more room for developmental error for shortstops and center fielders than there is for first basemen. And it seems MLB teams agree; in the first round of this past week’s draft, 14 shortstops went off the board, an all-time record. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite picks in the first round of this year’s draft was the 14th overall selection, when Virginia catcher Kyle Teel fell into Boston’s lap and the Red Sox gobbled him right up, thank you very much. The New Jersey native has backstopped the Cavaliers to two trips to Omaha in three seasons of college ball. He’s a winner, he’s a grinder, and WEEI callers are going to fall in love with this kid within about 30 minutes of his big league debut. “This is the leadahship the Sawx have needed since Pedroia, Murph!” and so on.

All that would be perilous enough to national mental hygiene on its own, but Teel is also really good. He’s going to stick behind the plate. He’s also going to hit — maybe not 20-homer power, but a ton of doubles and line drives that rattle around in the nooks and crannies of Fenway Park’s unique outfield. I’m surprised he fell into the teens, but great work by Boston for stopping the slide when he got to them.

Teel was one of three catchers taken in the first round on Sunday. A pair of high schoolers, Blake Mitchell and Ralphy Velazquez, went eighth to Kansas City and 23rd to Cleveland, respectively. (Teel to the Royals as heir presumptive to Salvador Perez was a popular prediction in the days before the draft, but it was not to be.) Both Mitchell and Velazquez (20th and 45th on the pre-draft Board) are bat-first prospects. Neither is a lock to stay behind the plate, but both can hit the ball a long way when they make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Come with me, friends, and let’s talk about Hurston Waldrep. When the Braves took the former Florida Gator 24th overall on Sunday night, no less an authority than Eric Longenhagen called the pick “a huge coup.” As a college starter, Waldrep struggled to throw strikes, but he has the most eye-watering repertoire of any college pitcher in this draft, Paul Skenes excluded. Behold, Waldrep’s start against South Carolina in Game 2 of the Gainesville Super Regional.

As a South Carolina partisan, I couldn’t muster the energy to be upset at suffering a season-ending loss. Waldrep allowed three hits and struck out 13 over eight scoreless innings, and honestly the Gamecocks could’ve kept going up there and hacking until the following Tuesday afternoon and they still wouldn’t have scored off Waldrep. Every fan has seen their team lose games like that. It’s a humbling experience.

Waldrep can be so unhittable because he possesses skills that are relatively common in isolation (with one very important exception) but unusual in combination. And it’s hard to imagine professional hitters faring much better against him. Read the rest of this entry »

In a stunning revolt against Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, the answer is almost certainly yes. But now that you’ve clicked, you might as well stick around to find out why I asked the question. All season, the conventional wisdom has been that an LSU Tiger would be the best prospect selected in last night’s amateur draft. Since last season, outfielder Dylan Crews has topped most draft big boards, and a winter of tutelage from outgoing Tigers pitching coach Wes Johnson moved Skenes from a top-10 prospect to the no. 1 overall pick. The pair are the first teammates to be taken first and second overall in MLB draft history.

But over the last week or so of the NCAA tournament, a third LSU player emerged as a potential first-rounder. The last time scouts laid eyes on Ty Floyd, the right-hander struck out 17 Florida Gators in Game 1 of the College World Series final. That’s no mean feat; that same Florida lineup — featuring no. 4 pick Wyatt Langford and potential 2024 top pick Jac Caglianone — hung 24 on LSU the following afternoon. Floyd’s 17 strikeouts equaled a 51-year-old record set by Arizona State’s Eddie Bane, best known now as the scouting director who drafted Mike Trout (along with Randal Grichuk, Garrett Richards, Tyler Skaggs, and Patrick Corbin, in what must be the best two-round run by any team in draft history).

Floyd made himself a lot of money in Omaha, and he and Skenes are now in select company: Pitchers from the same team who went in the first round of the same draft. And if you think the first two paragraphs of this post were a fire hose of useless trivia, well, strap in, because we’re just getting started. Read the rest of this entry »

You come to your senses at the controls of a small, single-engine airplane. The pilot is gone. The terrain below is unfamiliar. And suddenly, as if by the whim of a cruel god, the aircraft rolls violently to one side, pitching you from your chair and out the door.

From an altitude of 8,000 feet, you have a little less than 30 seconds to fall. The wind stings and dries your eyes, the sound of rushing air pummels your ears, blocking out all other noise except the rapid thumping of your heart. It’s a long enough fall to leave you time to contemplate your fate, to dwell on your regrets, to consider those you’ll leave behind. The horizon falls away as the ground rushes toward you. You can make out trees, fenceposts, telephone poles. The end, by every indication, is here.

But you are not afraid, because Enrique Bradfield Jr. will catch you. Read the rest of this entry »

Out of all 323 players who attended last week’s MLB Draft Combine, I was only familiar with a few before setting foot in Arizona. I’d watched highlights of a few high school prospects, caught several college players on TV. But the first player at the combine I’d seen in person was neither an all-SEC player nor a high school showcase monster, but a junior outfielder from Princeton University named Scott Bandura.

If you were aware of baseball and had basic cable in the summer of 2014, you’ve probably seen him play too.

One of my first big trips as a young reporter was to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 2014. There I witnessed the biggest media circus of any Little League World Series since. That year, the Taney Dragons, of nearby Philadelphia, made a run to the national semifinal behind star pitcher Mo’ne Davis. Bandura was Taney’s catcher and leadoff hitter back then. Now, he’s trying to make the jump to pro ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Roch Cholowsky is one of the top high school shortstop prospects in the 2023 draft class, and one of the few potential first-rounders to do the full battery of drills at last week’s MLB Draft Combine. Attending the combine was unusually convenient for Cholowsky, who went to high school in Chandler, Arizona, less than half an hour from Chase Field.

It’s a very, very good place for a young ballplayer to grow up. In the suburbs east of Phoenix you’ll find six teams’ spring training complexes, plus Arizona State. This part of the world has no shortage of high-quality baseball infrastructure, and is crawling with scouts on the lookout for the next Gold Glove shortstop.

“Moving here was the best decision my parents ever made,” Cholowsky says. Read the rest of this entry »

An empty major league stadium can evoke some unsettling sensations. I’ve been behind the scenes at numerous ballparks before, of course, but usually in the lead-up to or aftermath of a game. I know the low-grade background patter of concessions workers setting up and taking down stalls, the thump of the grounds crew packing the dirt around home plate, the smell of smoked meat on the grill.

During the week of the third annual MLB Draft Combine, Chase Field was a little different. The Cold Stone on the first base-side concourse still smelled delightfully of freshly-baked ice cream cones, even though the stall itself was buttoned up. The whizzing of an MLB Network camera drone was audible throughout the first two days of the combine, as was every crack of the bat and pop of the glove from batting practice, bullpens, and infield drills — even from a suite situated behind the right field foul pole on the stadium’s second level. A vivid palette of ambient noise, because a crowd of dozens, mostly scouts, wasn’t drowning it out.

Of the big four American men’s pro sports leagues, MLB was the last to organize a scouting combine for its draft-eligible prospects. While the NBA and NHL combines have their moments in the sun, the NFL’s is the cream of the crop, an event with almost four decades’ worth of folklore that generates a week’s worth of live TV content for the league’s cable channel, followed by months of buzz afterward. It is said to make and break prospects.

Baseball is a different beast than football; its schedule is unique, its athletes measured and evaluated differently. But 2023 represented a concerted effort by the league to attempt to make the combine into an event. Read the rest of this entry »