Watching the Mets and the Nationals Sunday night on ESPN, there was a lot of talk about momentum. Momentum that the Mets seem to have, which has allowed them to catch and overtake their heavily-favored rival. It’s an easy thing to say, and an easy thing to believe, but then, right before the Mets caught fire, you could argue they bottomed out. They lost to the Padres, they had the whole Carlos Gomez fiasco, and then they lost to the Padres much much worse. The Mets right now are at a local maximum. Immediately preceding this, they had crashed to a low point.

There are some parallels between the Mets as a whole and their own Lucas Duda. Overall this season, Duda’s been pretty good. Over the last week and a half or so, Duda’s been the very hottest hitter in baseball. But from the start of June through July 24, Duda slugged .275. He then ripped off a stretch of nine homers in eight games. The timelines aren’t the same, but, Duda, like the Mets, bottomed out, and then reversed course in an instant. Duda flipped his own momentum, and in so doing, he wound up bashing an anomalous dinger.

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With Rick Porcello headed to the disabled list following a triceps injury, the Red Sox were in need of a starting pitcher for tonight’s start against the Yankees. Rather than turning to a Triple-A scrub to take Porcello’s spot in the rotation, the Sox opted to call up top prospect Henry Owens. Owens will take the mound in Yankee stadium tonight for his big league debut.

Owens, 22, has pitched exclusively at Triple-A Pawtucket this year, where he’s put up a 3.16 ERA and 3.68 FIP over 122 innings of work. The 6-foot-6 lefty has struck out 21% of the batters he’s faced, and has walked 11%. Other than Owens’ height, none of the figures cited above sound particularly impressive. Owens’ strikeout rate is hardly better than the International League average of 18.6%, and his walk rate is significantly worse than average. If you didn’t know any better, you might look at Owens’ 2015 stat line and conclude that he’s a fringe prospect.

Owens’ 2015 numbers may not be much to look at, but he performed markedly better in his first three seasons as a pro. In 2012, the year after the Red Sox took him 36th overall, Owens struck out 29% of opponent batters faced in Low-A. The next year, he whiffed 30% between High-A and Double-A in 2013. However, while the strikeouts were certainly encouraging, his 11% walk rate inflated his FIP to 3.61 over that span. Read the rest of this entry »

The hands seem so important when it comes to hitters, it’s fair to maybe be fascinated with them. Where are they before the swing? How do they get to the ball? How important is the top hand with respect to the bottom hand? It’s easy to spot them, it’s easy to track them, it’s easy to talk about them.

But so much of what you do with your body determines what is happening with your hands. And so, if you talk to Josh Donaldson about hitting, he won’t have a ton to say about his hands. But his shoulders? His torso? He’ll have plenty to say about those things.

And so, even if I asked Donaldson about his hands, it’s what followed that was maybe more interesting.

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There’s no questioning that the Colorado Rockies’ rotation has been awful this season. In fact, by way of FIP-, the 2015 Rockies have the third worst rotation since 1915. As of this writing, not a single Rockies pitcher with more than 10 starts has a FIP that’s even above-average this year — which leaves fans with little to look forward to. That’s about to change, though, as the Rockies have summoned 23-year-old top prospect Jon Gray from Triple-A Albuquerque to start tonight’s game against the Mariners.

The Rockies drafted Gray third overall in the 2013 amateur draft out of the University of Oklahoma, and he immediately began to perform in the minor leagues. He closed out his draft year by pitching to a 1.93 ERA and 1.88 FIP in nine starts between Rookie Ball and High-A. Gray appeared to be on the fast track to the majors after such an exciting debut, but his performance tailed off substantially in Double-A last year. After striking out 26% and 42% of batters faced in Rookie Ball and High-A, respectively, he whiffed just 22% at the Double-A level. Along with a 8% walk rate, this resulted in a middling 3.91 ERA. KATOH forecasted Gray for just 2.3 WAR through his age-28 season. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Saturday, I was collecting some first-hand accounts on a few players at the NBC World Series in Wichita, Kansas. The NBC World Series brings in some of the top teams from various college summer leagues for a double elimination tournament. On Friday, I was up until 2 a.m. watching the final Friday game and then at the stadium for the 8 a.m. game.

During the day’s third game (Liberal Bee Jays vs San Diego Force), a play was just finishing, when I heard the sound that resonated throughout the stadium. The on-deck batter was taking a warm-up swing and hit the team’s bat boy in the head. While I didn’t see the actual contact the Bee Jays’ player made with their bat boy’s head, I saw the last few steps the boy made in his short life. He stumbled twice and then fell to the ground. Then chaos ensued for a few minutes. The player who just hit the boy was holding the lifeless body in his arms. The boy’s mother was screaming as she jumped on the field. The home plate umpire immediately began to administer first aid. During this whole time, I never saw the little guy move.

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The trading deadline has come and gone, and while it wasn’t quite as insane as last year’s, significant major leaguers and prospects of varying status changed uniforms in reasonably large numbers. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve taken a look at each club’s respective minor league talent arsenals, from which they might be able to obtain established talent. Now, let’s take a look backward, and see which clubs traded some future for the present, and vice versa. A handful of other clubs, on the other hand, offer brightness or bleakness all around.

As we have the last couple of weeks, we’ll rank the 30 minor-league systems based upon my midseason position-player and starting-pitcher rankings. If you aren’t familiar with my minor-league lists, here is a brief refresher. They aren’t pure top-prospect lists; they basically serve as follow lists, after which traditional scouting methods are used to tweak the order. Qualification for my lists are based upon a combination of performance and age relative to league/level. The younger a prospect is at each level, the less production is required to get him onto the list. At level-specific “optimal ages” (22 at AAA, 21 at AA, 20 at High-A, 19 at Low-A), a player qualifies regardless of performance. At level-specific, much older ages (26 at AAA, 25 at AA, 24 at High-A, 23 at Low-A), you can’t qualify for the list no matter how loud your performance. Only full-season league prospects are considered.

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On Saturday, Tampa Bay’s John Jaso went 3 for 5 in an 11-7 loss to the Red Sox at Fenway Park. The left-handed-hitting Rays DH – a former catcher – faced right-hander Joe Kelly in his first three plate appearances. Righty Justin Masterson and lefty Craig Breslow were on the mound in his subsequent at bats. Jaso — hitting .344/.414/.508 since returning from a long stint the DL — broke down his five plate appearances the following day.

LEAD-IN

“My big baseball philosophy changed when I heard something Pete Rose had said. Every at bat he took, he wanted to do the exact same thing. I kind of ran with that. I treat the late-inning clutch situation the same as I do a first-inning at bat. Take the other night when I hit the pinch-hit double to drive in two runs and put us ahead. I was just looking for a pitch to hit and trying to stay short and straight to the ball.”

FIRST AT BAT, VS JOE KELLY Read the rest of this entry »

With last week’s additions of Troy Tulowitzki and David Price, the Toronto Blue Jays made themselves into a legitimate postseason contender, adding two of the game’s best players to a roster that was already pretty solid. Our rest-of-season forecast now has the Jays with the best projected winning percentage in the American League going forward, and while they’ll likely have to win their win into the division series through the Wild Card game, the Jays look like they could be a dangerous team in October. Price, along with bullpen upgrades Latroy Hawkins and Mark Lowe, gives them a good bit more pitching depth than they had previously, and Tulowitzki adds another quality hitter to a line-up that was already overflowing with offensive weapons.

But the more I look at this roster, the more I begin to wonder whether we’re overlooking one potentially significant flaw in this team’s construction, especially when it comes to the postseason. A week ago, when writing about the Tulowitzki acquisition, I noted that adding a good hitter to a good line-up could actually provide non-linear positive returns, above and beyond just that single player’s individual abilities, because getting guys on base leads to better outcomes for everyone else in the line-up. As I wrote then, we shouldn’t be too concerned about diminishing returns from the Blue Jays already having “enough” offense.

One aspect of the Jays line-up I didn’t talk about enough, however, was the fact that you can have diminishing returns based on line-up construction. Specifically, if you line up too many hitters from one side of the plate, your team will probably score fewer runs than would be expected based solely on overall batting lines, as a line-up that is dominated by same-handed hitters becomes a fairly easy match-up for the opposing manager in important situations. And while Troy Tulowitzki is an excellent player, the Blue Jays line-up may now lean too heavily to the right side.

Here is where the Jays non-pitchers stand relative to the rest of baseball in 2015 performance against RHPs and LHPs, to this point in the season.

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It has been argued that being the worst at something is as impressive as being the best. After all, both sides of a bell curve are equally proportional. Nothing like starting an article off with some distribution humor! But more germane to this, a baseball website, is that this is yet another way the Mets outfield is not impressive. They are not good to be sure, but also not the worst. And yet, as far as teams that still aspire to the playoffs go, the Mets outfield might be among the worst outfields. Curtis Granderson is having a nice season at the plate and Michael Conforto is an exciting young player but one good player and a dash of hope does not make a productive outfield. This is why the Mets sprung for Yoenis Cespedes at the trade deadline. Thank God for the Wilpons!

As his famous video shows, Cespedes is a man of many talents, only a few of which translate directly to the baseball diamond. His arm is like one of those plastic whip things that throws tennis balls for dogs at the park. His swing is powerful like one you’d see in a whiffle ball league. His pig barbecuing skills are at least a 75 on the 20-80 scouting scale, but sadly those skills are wasted on a baseball player. Even so, Cespedes has harnessed those other skills and become a productive major league player if not the transcendent star some thought when he came on the scene.

But a cursory glance at his stats shows a difference between his offensive production in his rookie season in 2012 and that in the following two seasons. His home runs were present the whole time, but the other skills had settled into a degrading state. The issue was which was the real Cespedes? The one from his stand-out rookie campaign in 2012 that came with power and above average on-base ability, or the one from the following two seasons who sold out for power at the expense of just about everything else?

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As digital technology and internet speeds have improved, there has been an increasing realization that consumers do not — or should not, given the incredibly powerful cable providers — need to subscribe to massive cable bundles with hundreds of channels. Netflix has shown people the amount of programming they could have for under $10 per month, and iTunes and Amazon have allowed people to purchase individual shows while Hulu has provided a combination of both options. HBO Now has lent optimism to the idea that consumers will soon be able to purchase their desired channels a la carte.

For years, MLB.tv has provided both the best and worst aspects of meeting consumer needs, providing an incredible amount of games to fans at a generally acceptable price, but accepting big cash outlays to blackout local games and help keep the current cable bundling model alive. While the St. Louis Cardinals’ new television contract, the latest in a line of local billion-dollar deals, is another example of increasing awareness in Major League Baseball that the current cable model will not last forever. How long it will last is still a matter of great debate.

In many ways, the Cardinals new deal is similar to the deal signed by other teams over the past few years. Despite a market that ranks behind Orlando, Cleveland, and Sacramento, and just ahead of Portland, Charlotte, and Pittsburgh in terms of households, the Cardinals were able to sign a lucrative deal due to incredibly high local ratings and generally high interest in the ballclub. According to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the deal is set to pay the Cardinals more than a billion dollars over 15 years, an amount that does not include a signing bonus or a 30% stake in FoxSports Midwest, with any revenue received from station ownership not subject MLB’s revenue sharing.

The Cardinals, in the last three seasons of their current deal, are receiving between $25 million and $35 million with the new deal starting close to $55 million in 2018 when the new contract begins. Over the life of the contract, the yearly payout will increase to around $85 million, according to Forbes, who estimated that the new deal increased the value of the Cardinals’ franchise to $1.6 billion, a $200 million increase over their estimate at the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »