The phrase “wait ’til next year” is a popular one for fans of perennial losers, but no professional sports team shares a more lasting affiliation with the axiom than the Chicago Cubs; there’s even a movie about the team with that exact title. For the Cubs, winning has rarely been a this-year thing, and so the fan base has had to take solace in the future, even if that future has often brought just more losing. Well, Cubs fans, I have some good news, even if you’ve grown tired of hearing this; next year really might be your year.

Much has been written about the young talent coming up through Chicago’s farm system. Cuban sensation Jorge Soler is going to be the newest hyped prospect to reach the big leagues when he makes his debut today, where he’ll join Arismendy Alcantara and Javier Baez to form a trio of exciting young rookies. And these guys are just the first course, as even better prospects — third baseman/maybe outfielder Kris Bryant and shortstop/maybe second baseman Addison Russell are the cream of the Cubs crop — are not too far behind. The Cubs have so much young talent that people are actually stressing out over whether the team will actually have room for all of them on the roster at the same time.

Of course, prospect hype doesn’t guarantee Major League success, and Cubs fans have been burned by supposed waves of talent that didn’t pan out before. So what’s different this time? Well, for starters, this roster is a lot better than people might realize, even without factoring in all the prospects on the rise.

Yes, I’m talking about the roster of a team that is currently 59-72, good for last place in the NL Central. On the surface, this is just another terrible Cubs team in a long line of terrible Cubs teams, but once you dig a little bit deeper, you’ll find that this team has actually shown some real promise this year.

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The Giants can take no more. Well into Tim Lincecum’s third straight year of mediocrity — since the start of 2012, he’s got a 134 ERA- and 114 FIP- — and most of the way through the first year of his 2/$35m extension signed last winter, San Francisco will skip him in the rotation and instead give Thursday’s start to Yusmeiro Petit, a 29-year-old journeyman who has found a home as a swingman this season. Petit has appeared in 33 games for the Giants in 2014, which is one more major league game than he’d seen in the past five seasons combined.

Petit was once a top-100 prospect, and he has been around for so long that he was part of the 2005 trade that sent Carlos Delgado from the Marlins to the Mets, but he’s also been DFA’d at least twice, including by the Giants last year, and lost on waivers from Arizona to Seattle another time. For a three year stretch between 2010-12, he threw exactly 4.2 big league innings, and he spent all of 2011 in the Mexican Leagues before the Giants took a flyer on him as a non-roster guy in January of 2012. In the minors, he was once described as having the potential to be a “Nelson Figueroa type,” which: high praise!

It’s not really news that Lincecum is a shadow of what he once was. Petit, a soft-tossing righty who’s kicked around for a while, isn’t exactly the next hot prospect. But if you happen to find yourself with nothing to do at 3:45 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, you should take the time to check out Petit’s start against the Rockies anyway, for one simple reason: Petit, an otherwise nondescript pitcher of little repute, might just break a major league record for pitching dominance. 38 times in a row, hitters have stepped to the plate, and 38 times, they’ve failed to reach base. The record of 45 is within reach. Let’s take a walk through Petit’s magical month. Read the rest of this entry »

When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

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The Toronto Blue Jays season is a two-part story. What began as a pleasant surprise quickly descended into a lucid, waking nightmare. Two Blue Jays’ outfielders heading into free agency embody each of those characteristics. While Melky Cabrera is putting together a brilliant platform season before heading to free-agency, Colby Rasmus seems to have spent all the good will he earned with his strong 2013 campaign.

Rasmus, as you probably know, was terrific last year. He hit 23 home runs and posted nearly 5 WAR in just 120 games. He looked every bit the future star the Blue Jays thought they had when they acquired him at the 2011 trade deadline. Unfortunately for Rasmus, his 2014 looks much more like his forgettable seasons in the woods following his 2010 breakout as a 23-year-old in St. Louis.

The soft-spoken Jays center fielder has long been a magnet for criticism and scrutiny, due in no small part to his frank father/coach/mentor and to the personality clashes with his former manager and Hall-of-Famer, Tony La Russa. On the field, Rasmus is a devoted tinkerer at the plate and the author of wildly divergent periods of production.

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C.J. Wilson doesn’t have a simple approach to pitching. The 33-year-old Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim lefthander throws everything but the kitchen sink at opposing batters, and there’s a reason behind each pitch. That reason could be based on a weakness or it could based on feel. And the pitch may not come from the same arm angle as the one that preceded it. In all likelihood, it will have a different spin axis, which is a subject Wilson knows better than most big-league pitchers.

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Wilson on his mindset: “When I throw a really good game, I feel like I’ve pulled off a master heist. I’ve stolen their ability to win that day with a well-thought-out, totally under control, non-emotional, logical plan. I knew exactly how much time I had before they called the cops on me.

“We all have different personalities. Some guys literally grip it and rip it. They throw as hard as they can every single pitch. They just stare at the catcher and try to throw the nastiest slider they can throw. I’ve never pitched that way. I was a control pitcher before I had Tommy John surgery. I was crafty. I modeled myself after Tom Glavine, who I watched growing up. I wish I had Pedro 1999 stuff, but I don’t and never have.

“Felix Hernandez is able to change speeds from 90 to 96. It’s a different gear. David Price can throw 97 if he feels like it. Tommy Millone throws 88. You have to understand where you are on the continuum. I feel I have to be the criminal mastermind on the mound if I want to win.”

On spin rates: “Spin is a big thing. It’s like swing planes for hitters. Hitters who have certain swing planes may have what we call bat lag – the way they bring their hands through the zone, the barrel kind of drags a little bit. That allows them to stay inside the ball more and hit for a higher average. They don’t hook balls and roll over, they’re able to cover a wider speed variety.

“Spin control is sort of the same thing. You’re trying to create the illusion of a white baseball. The faster it spins, the whiter it’s going to look. Most hitters assume that if it’s white, it’s a fastball. Therefore they’re going to swing at the very top of where that ball is going to go – in their mind, where they think the ball is going to go. A perfect curveball is going to have exactly the opposite spin of a fastball, but if it comes out white the hitter is going to react to it like it’s a fastball. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Wainwright would tell you himself: he’s currently in a funk, and he’s been in a funk for about a month and a half. It’s not like you have to dig very deep to find out why he feels that way. After blanking the Pirates on July 7, Wainwright’s ERA stood at 1.79. Since then, it’s been in the mid-4s. Through July 7, he threw 67% of his pitches for strikes. Since then, he’s come in at 62%. The walks are up, the hits are up, the strikeouts are down, and Wainwright’s frustrated, looking for clue after clue so he can get back to what he was. They say no one in baseball’s better at making adjustments than Adam Wainwright. He’s still looking to make the right one for this most current slump.

It feels like this could be easy to explain. Wainwright’s almost 33, and he’s had Tommy John surgery before. Last year he threw just about 300 innings, which is an extraordinary total, and earlier this season he missed a start with non-UCL discomfort in his elbow. He’s also pitched through illness and a sore back without alerting the media, so it could be he’s still feeling something and not owning up to it. Injury, fatigue, fatigue leading to injury — we don’t know. It could be anything. But what if the answer’s a different sort of simple? What if Adam Wainwright just misses pitching to Yadier Molina?

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Tim Lincecum is headed to the bullpen. After a miserable start to the second half — opposing batters are hitting .331/.422/.622 against him since the All-Star break — the Giants have finally removed him from the rotation and will experiment with Lincecum as a relief pitcher. Of course, Lincecum famously dominated out of the pen in the 2012 playoffs, and ever since, speculation has mounted that this was going to be the path to Linecum’s career revival. Bullpens are full of failed starters, some of whom have gained significant velocity while pitching in shorter stints and have turned into lights-out bullpen arms.

The Giants would be thrilled if Lincecum turned into their version of Wade Davis, for instance; as a starter, he allowed a .341 wOBA over his career, but hitters have posted just a .222 wOBA off him in his relief work. Some guys just need the boost that comes from throwing 20 pitches instead of 100, and it’s not hard to draw a correlation between Lincecum’s decline in velocity and performance. If moving Lincecum to the bullpen gets his fastball back to the mid-90s, he might be able to reinvent himself in the new role.

However, Lincecum’s struggles present a perhaps unique challenge in turning him into an ace reliever. As I wrote for Fox a few months ago, almost the entire portion of Lincecum’s struggles can be chalked up to struggles with men on base. I think the tables that were shown in that article are worth showing again, though I’ve updated the 2014 and total lines to take into account the more recent data.

Lincecum, career, bases empty.

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When deciding who will represent them in contract negotiations, professional baseball players can choose from hundreds of certified agents. There are big shops like Boras Corporation, Excel Sports Management (Casey Close) and Wasserman Media Group (Arn Tellum), and smaller agencies like Frye McCann, Sosnick Cobbe and Jet Sports Management. Whatever their size, most agencies charge a commission between four and five percent of the value of the player’s pro contract. For that commission, the agency does everything: negotiate the contract, arrange for equipment endorsement deals, and advise the player on financial planning and taxes. It’s a concierge approach: the player is cared for 24/7 in all aspects of his life, whether at home or on the road.

Proformance Baseball is trying a different approach. The Richmond, Virginia agency was created by Jeff Beck and Bean Stringfellow more than 20 years ago. The two met in Virginia Tech’s baseball program in the 1980’s. Stringfellow was drafted by the New York Yankee in 1984 (didn’t sign) and then re-drafted by the Atlanta Braves in 1985 but never made it to the majors. Beck started his career in the capital markets.

Proformance dropped its commission to one-and-a-half percent and will stick to what Stringfellow calls “the business of baseball” — negotiate the player’s contract and equipment deals, advise him on baseball rules, and answer questions when the player reaches out. No more flying to have lunch with the player six times a season. No more marketing efforts to land local appearances and commercials. No more financial planning and taxes.As Beck and Stringfellow see it, most agencies charge four to five percent commission to cover the costs of all the other services, whether a player wants or needs them.

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

Chris Anderson, RHP, Rancho Cucamonga Quakes (LAD, High-A – most recently viewed 8/17 at Rancho)

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You know where this is going already, but, right before July’s non-waiver trade deadline, the A’s made a splash in adding Jon Lester, and the Tigers made a splash in adding David Price. The intentions were obvious: Oakland and Detroit were loading up for an extended playoff run. The two teams had the appearance of being the two best teams in the league, and so they shuffled some parts around to focus more on the short-term. It wasn’t a question of whether the teams would make the playoffs; it was a question of how far they would go.

And, yeah. So, not too long ago, we finally rolled out historical playoff odds. That is, all season long we’ve had playoff odds as of the moment, but now you can go back to any date you like to see where things stood then. I think it’s worth a look now at how things have changed since the last day of July. The month of August isn’t over, but it’s almost there, and already we’ve seen some significant shifts. How has the baseball landscape changed since the passing of the non-deadline deadline?

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