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We have some movement in the race between immovable objects.

The Rangers on Monday capped a four-game, wraparound series win over the Mariners to take what feels like a commanding 2 1/2-game lead over them and a two-game lead over the Astros in the AL West. Texas followed that up by dropping a series to the AL-best Rays, while Seattle dropped a series from the NL-best Dodgers and Houston swept the Angels. Entering Friday’s action, the Rangers lead the Astros by a half game and the Mariners by 2 1/2 games. That’s how it’s gone for the league’s most languid division in 2026.

Monday’s win gave the Rangers a 7-3 record against the Mariners on the year, securing Texas the tiebreaker should that become relevant in late September. Meanwhile, the Rangers head to Houston this weekend for a three-game set with the Astros currently holding the tiebreaker, 6-4. A Texas sweep in the road series would give it the head-to-head advantage against both of its AL West rivals. If not, things could get even more interesting come the final week of the season.

Even so, our Playoff Odds aren’t expecting the Texas-Houston tiebreaker to matter too much. That’s because, for the first time in 2026, the 55-54 Rangers look like the favorites to win the division.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 25
After nearly five hours of sleep, Derek Jr. wakes up a bit past one in the morning. She’s clearly struggling with some gas issues. I try to soothe her without taking her out of the crib, bicycling her little legs to help her through it, but it doesn’t help at all. She displays every sign of ravenous hunger, so I change her and start her on a bottle, but the milk just won’t go down. Something is going on. She’s clamoring for the bottle, she’s pulling milk into her mouth, and she’s riotously upset every time I take the bottle away, but she keeps letting all the milk run right down her chin. She doesn’t need to burp. It’s not her diaper. I’m not sure what else could be wrong, so after awhile, I give up on the bottle and get her into what has become my standard soothing-a-gassy-baby position. It’s basically a human swaddle.

I settle Derek Jr.’s shoulder in the crook of my right arm, my hand reaching down to grab hold of her right thigh and pull her knee up toward her belly. With my left hand, I give her a pacifier and press her right arm across her chest, then I turn my right arm to press her into my body so that her face is buried in my chest, which holds the pacifier in place. When it works, this position soothes her instantly, though she still pulls frantically at the pacifier. It takes a good 20 minutes for her to work through the gas, and then, suddenly, she relaxes. Not only is she hungry, but she wolfs down the entire the bottle and falls promptly to sleep. I settle her on my shoulder to burp her gently, and I pull out my phone to check what happened in baseball today.

Tomorrow — well, today I guess — is my first official day back at work. I spent the morning preparing this journal’s introduction and first installment for editing, then going through my wife’s camera roll looking for images I could use. I found pictures of myself from the day Derek Jr. was born. Parents are strongly encouraged to give the baby as much skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible. It’s good for bonding and it promotes the release of oxytocin, so there I am in the hospital room wearing my FanGraphs hoodie with no shirt underneath, feeling supremely silly, the zipper cold against my chest. It never really worked out, though. Derek Jr. just wasn’t comfortable being against my chest that way, and I felt like I’d failed. I’d forgotten about that until I saw the pictures this morning.

Tonight, my wife and I only had an hour or so of free time between getting Derek Jr. down to sleep and going to bed ourselves. My going back to work will be enough of an adjustment, so I didn’t want to force her to spend her one hour of relaxation time watching baseball. We put something else on the TV while I perused the leaderboards looking for something to write about tomorrow. As a result, I still have no idea what happened during tonight’s games. What I missed was Houston’s Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combining to no-hit the Rangers. With Derek Jr. still asleep on my shoulder, I pull up the highlights. They are hilarious.

It’s got to be one of the sillier no-hitters in history. The highlight package starts in the first inning, with no outs and two Rangers already on base, because apparently Imai walked the first two batters of the game. He only strikes out two, and aside from a couple popups, every ball in play seems to fall into one of two categories. Either center fielder Jake Meyers is running down what looks off the bat like a surefire double in the gap, or a middle infielder is standing on his head to corral a hard-hit grounder that appears destined either to fracture Imai’s tibia or end up in center field.

Imai started the season (and his MLB career) in disastrous fashion. He went on the IL with arm fatigue, got shelled in one of his two rehab appearances, then got shellacked in his first start back in Houston. He came into the game with an 8.31 ERA and -0.2 WAR. Tonight, he walked twice as many as he struck out and had a 50% hard-hit rate. The Rangers walked fewer batters and allowed only one more hard-hit ball than Imai did, and they got lit up for nine runs. The Astros didn’t throw a single offspeed pitch or curveball all night. Aside from four sinkers from Imai, every pitch was either a four-seamer or a slider. Somehow, that didn’t help the Rangers much. Maybe this is what I should write about tomorrow.

A minute or so into the highlights, Derek Jr., still asleep, does sort of a reverse bear crawl from my shoulder down to my chest. She settles with her knees on my lap and her torso pressed against mine, her head resting sideways just below my chin. It’s a position both the teachers of a parenting class and the nurses at the hospital encouraged us to use, as it allows for maximal skin-to-skin contact. They made it sound special, and I was excited for it. I’d seen other people hold their babies that way. It’s why we have those dumb pictures of me holding Derek Jr. with no shirt under my hoodie. But I couldn’t make her comfortable that way, and I gave up. All of a sudden, two months later, it’s where she wants to be. After a rough afternoon and night, she’s finally comfortable and happy, her warm little body pressed against me. She gets so tense when she’s upset; sometimes we lift her up from the crib and her whole body is stiff as a board. But she’s relaxed now. The highlight package is long, and as I watch the Rangers smash the ball every which way except into some grass, I’m overwhelmed by gratitude for the chance to have this moment with Derek Jr. melted against me. Maybe it’s the oxytocin.

I shouldn’t be up writing this. I’ve mortgaged two hours of sleep to document this moment, and I have to be up in three-and-a-half more to write about how James Wood can’t seem to figure out which pitches to challenge. If Derek Jr. wakes up right now — which could absolutely happen — I’ll be doing so on very, very little sleep. That’s been the tradeoff of this whole project, though. I can make sure we never forget all of these special moments, but only if I’m willing to lose some sleep in the night and be a bit more of a zombie during the day. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it going now that I’m going to be spending my days writing. It’s certainly felt worth it so far, and I’ve been so lucky to have had this time, to have such an amazing job that lets me write this journal at all.

Here’s one thing that I haven’t been able to document, that I don’t think I’ll be able to document fully. I’ve written a lot about what it feels like to have Derek Jr. asleep in my arms in the rocking chair in the middle of the night. It’s the most special thing I have. It’s my time to be close to her, to share my warmth, and to know that I’m taking care of her as well as I possibly can. I sing to her. I tell her how loved and beautiful she is. I crane my head down to look at her perfect face, and then I tilt my head back until I’m looking at the ceiling (my God, does that hurt, by the way) and try to burn the image into my memory. But I can’t do it. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I can’t hold onto it, and there’s no way to take a picture of it. I know I’m going to forget this image. It is the most precious thing to me, and I’m going to lose it. In some sense, I’ve lost it several times already; too slowly for me to notice, it must have changed so much as Derek Jr. has grown and grown over the past two months. No matter how tightly I hold her, so much slips away. So I stay up late. I put it into words as best I can. I get through the day.

As August 3 draws closer, we’re continuing to update the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in clear need of a significant upgrade, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. Today, we’re evaluating the Milwaukee Brewers.

In tandem with an evaluation of team needs and posture, we’ve also updated Milwaukee’s Top Prospect list. The new list accounts for the graduations of Brandon Sproat, Logan Henderson, and Craig Yoho, and offers a fresh valuation on several notable farmhands. The big news is that Alexander Frias, Brady Ebel, and Tyson Hardin have moved onto our Top 100, while Jett Williams has fallen off. We’ll cover them, and a couple of the other big changes, in more detail below.

The Situation

The Brew Crew is at it again. Milwaukee has the second-best run differential in baseball and a 5.5-game lead in the NL Central. As of Thursday afternoon, our Playoff Odds give them an 83.4% chance to win the division and all but guarantee a spot in the tournament. Enviable pitching depth has helped them weather absences from Quinn Priester, Brandon Woodruff, and Kyle Harrison without missing a beat. The club’s big divisional lead has even afforded them the luxury of letting Sproat work through some kinks in the big league rotation. Offensively, they’ve mostly been healthy this year, and are again working miracles with a modern version of small ball. Last in baseball in homers, the Brewers are nonetheless fifth in runs and sixth in wRC+. They take their walks, don’t strike out much, steal efficiently, and otherwise run the bases well. Potential upgrades to this unique club make most sense viewed through the prism of who can help them win a series against the Dodgers rather than who can help them clinch a playoff spot. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays came agonizingly close to winning the World Series last fall, but this season has been a much different story. They haven’t had a winning record since April 4, and haven’t played above .500 in any full month besides May (15-14). While they clawed their way back to .500 on May 29 (29-29) and June 22 (39-39), an 11-20 skid since then has buried them in the AL East cellar, 14 games behind the Rays. Ten American League teams either occupy a playoff spot or are within 2.5 games of one at this writing, but the Blue Jays aren’t one of them; they’re 5.5 games out of the third Wild Card spot, with playoff odds around 7%. As the August 3 trade deadline approaches, several of their players could be on the move to contenders and are worth a closer look.

So little has gone right for Toronto this year. Last season, the team had four regulars with a wRC+ of 116 or higher in George Springer, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Bo Bichette, and Alejandro Kirk, each of whom topped 3.0 WAR, as did defensive whiz Ernie Clement. Four part-timers (Joey Loperfido, Davis Schneider, Daulton Varsho, and Tyler Heineman) also met that offensive threshold. But Bichette, Heineman, and Loperfido are now elsewhere, and the rest have been far less productive. No Blue Jay with more than 25 plate appearances has a wRC+ higher than newcomer Kazuma Okamoto’s 113, while Guerrero, Kirk, Schneider, and Varsho are all below 100. Vladito even landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list, which isn’t great news for a player whose contract runs through 2039. Okamoto is the only Blue Jays position player on pace for 3.0 WAR. Ouch.

In 2025, the Blue Jays’ offense ranked second in the AL in scoring and WAR, and third in wRC+, but this year, the team has fallen to second-to-last in scoring and WAR, and last in wRC+:

By comparison, Toronto’s run prevention has been nothing to write home about, whether we’re considering last year (4.45 runs per game, 10th in the league) or this year (4.50 runs per game, ninth). It’s easy to forget that the club’s near-miss happened despite a makeshift October rotation that included just one of the three pitchers who took at least 18 starts for the team (Kevin Gausman) and featured a rookie with three regular-season starts (Trey Yesavage), a deadline acquisition who had just returned from Tommy John surgery (Shane Bieber), and a 40-year-old veteran who missed the first three months of the season with right thumb inflammation (Max Scherzer). Read the rest of this entry »

I came into this week with a ton of trade deadline hype built up in my brain just waiting to spill onto the page the first time I had a deal to analyze. I had some clever turns of phrase, some bon mots (or “annoying puns,” if you’re not into it), and next week, you’ll surely get to hear those. But they’re staying in the proverbial writer’s quiver today, because the trade I’m analyzing is more of a mystery than a blockbuster. The trade in question: the Rangers acquired Logan O’Hoppe and Chase Silseth from the Angels in exchange for Low-A infielder Angel Arredondo, as Jeff Passan first reported.

The Rangers have lurched into the AL West lead in recent weeks, turning aside the equally-scuffling A’s and Mariners while trying to hold off the surging (surging to a .500 record, to be fair) Astros. They have one of the worst catching situations in the majors – the 0.2 WAR their catchers have accrued is 27th in baseball. So surely, that’s the play here, I innocently thought as I saw this trade cross the tape. But that was a red herring, the first twist in a deal full of them.

O’Hoppe was a catching prospect of some note, a late-round Philadelphia draft pick in 2018 who ascended to Top 100 prospect status and then got swapped straight up for Brandon Marsh in 2022. He hit well enough to cover up some defensive shortcomings in his first few seasons of injury-interrupted work, but then he posted a 72 wRC+ in 2025, dragging his total contributions below replacement level. He’s hitting .209/.271/.295 this year, good for a 59 wRC+, and is below replacement level again. In fact, the Angels have accrued negative WAR at catcher, so they’re hardly where the Rangers should be looking for improvement. And indeed, as I tried to puzzle through how much of an upgrade O’Hoppe would even be, the Rangers rendered my thinking moot: They optioned O’Hoppe to Triple-A. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Middlebrooks didn’t have an especially accomplished career. Hampered by injuries, the slugging third baseman saw action in just 347 big league games — the bulk of them with the Boston Red Sox — before hanging up his spikes shortly after his 29th birthday. But there were memorable moments along the way, and he has good stories to go with them. Now a broadcast analyst for the Red Sox, Middlebrooks shared several of them in the latest installment of our Challenging Career Quiz series.

I began by asking which pitcher he faced the most times.

“I had the most success against Mark Buehrle, and it could have been him,” replied Middlebrooks, who logged 262 hits, including 43 home runs, while playing from 2012-2017. “I know I faced him a lot. Was it Buerhle?”

Nope. Middlebrooks stood in the box against the longtime Chicago White Sox southpaw 19 times, going 8-for-18 with a pair of doubles and a hit-by-pitch, but it’s another hurler who has the honor. Asking Middlebrooks if he had any other guesses prompted a good exchange. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals have been one of my favorite teams to watch this season. Their offense has been spectacular, the best in the majors in multiple statistical categories. They’re scoring 5.48 runs per game, which easily paces the league. Even better for my viewing purposes, they rarely play a dull game. That’s because their pitching staff allows nearly as many runs as their offense scores. They’ve allowed the third-most runs in the majors this year, an ugly 5.21 per game.

This combination of amazing hitting and questionable pitching has given the Nationals their best shot at making the playoffs since they won the World Series in 2019. It also makes their goals at the trade deadline simple: Get more pitching. But before the Nats decide who to acquire, they need to figure out who to replace. That means the question I’ve been wondering in recent months is also surely of great interest to the DC decision-makers. That question: Is Cade Cavalli this good?

The majority of the Washington rotation is easy for me to evaluate. Foster Griffin? Pretty good! He came back from a three-year stint with the Yomiuri Giants this winter, and the six-pitch mix he developed there has served him well. Nothing he throws will wow you, but he has good command of it all and uses everything well. Sure, he’s not as good as his 2.76 ERA, but pretty much every other ERA estimator has him in the mid-to-high threes. The Nats, again, are allowing more than five runs a game. He’s an outlier relative to the rest of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees have been limping along since losing Aaron Judge to a stress fracture in his right first rib in early June, and they’ve been without Giancarlo Stanton for even longer due to a right calf strain. Now their lineup has suffered another major blow, as Cody Bellinger sustained a Grade 2 left hamstring strain on Saturday and landed on the injured list, a loss that ought to affect how the Yankees approach the August 3 trade deadline.

The 31-year-old Bellinger injured himself during Saturday’s game against the Phillies. While hustling his way into a double on a two-out eighth-inning hit to left-center field off Jonathan Bowlan, he appeared to slow up a bit before sliding into second. He ended up advancing no further, and when the Yankees took the field for the bottom of the eighth, Max Schuemann replaced him in left field.

Bellinger was spotted doing light agility drills on Sunday, but once it was clear to him that he wouldn’t be ready to return within a few days, he suggested an IL stint made sense because he didn’t want his teammates to play while down a man. “I just feel like I won’t be able to put on the cleats for the next four days, at least,” he said on Sunday. “So being short a man for that long, they’ll get a full roster up here and give the guys as much opportunity as they can.” Read the rest of this entry »

As August 3 draws closer, we’re continuing to update the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in clear need of a significant upgrade, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. Today, we’re evaluating the Texas Rangers. The new list accounts for the graduations of Gavin Collyer and Robby Ahlstrom, includes the team’s new draftees, and reflects some of the biggest developments down in the minors this season.

It hasn’t been a great year for most of the upper-level pitchers on our offseason Rangers list, but there are a couple arrow-up hitters in the mid-minors and some very intriguing talent blossoming on the complexes. It’s a farm in flux, packed with eye-of-the-beholder players, which makes this a particularly interesting org for prospect heads to monitor at the deadline.

The Situation

Aging, banged up, and barely playing .500 ball, the Rangers nonetheless find themselves atop the AL West. Though they’re two games up on the Astros and 2.5 up on the Mariners, our Playoff odds only very recently tilted their divisional chances above pre-season favorite Seattle’s. Right now, we estimate that they’re about a 50/50 shot to win the division, and their chances of reaching the playoffs at all are up around 67%. That isn’t normally the résumé of a big deadline buyer, particularly since this isn’t a case of a talented squad weathering an unexpected rough patch: Coming into the year, we pegged the Rangers as a .500 team.

And yet, there’s a strong case to make that Texas should act aggressively because this era of Rangers baseball is drawing to a close. Corey Seager is 32, recovering from an abdominal injury, and showing signs of decline amidst the worst year of his career. Brandon Nimmo is 33. Jacob deGrom is 38 and Nathan Eovaldi is 36. Josh Jung feels young and vaguely prospect-ey still, but he’s actually 28 and his injury history is nearly as checkered as Seager’s. MacKenzie Gore is only around for one more year. This core will never be better than it is right now.

Needs: Starting Pitcher, Bullpen Depth, Catcher

There are two kinds of players you can trade for at the deadline: guys who can help you get to October, and guys who can help you win in October. While the latter are the better, more desirable players in practically every circumstance, they’re also rarer and more difficult to obtain. Conveniently for Texas, players in the former category would do quite a bit of good here.

This is perhaps clearest when evaluating the Rangers rotation. Even the 2026 versions of deGrom, Eovaldi, and Gore are compelling playoff starters. Texas would obviously benefit from a luxury addition like Reid Detmers, but what the club really needs is a better fifth starter than Cal Quantrill. There aren’t many internal candidates on the horizon: Jack Leiter is recovering from ankle surgery and theoretically should be available later this summer, but that shouldn’t reassure anybody. Cody Bradford is on the mend, but he’s still working in fairly short stints in his rehab assignment. Winston Santos and David Davalillo, good options on paper at the outset of the year, do not seem ready to contribute meaningfully. Even the generic no. 4/5 starters on the market look like a real upgrade.

A similar sentiment applies in the bullpen. Jacob Latz has been great as a closer — the Rangers won’t be desperate to find this year’s version of Jhoan Duran or Mason Miller — but it’s hard to imagine them making a run through October with Peyton Gray and Jakob Junis as their top setup men. Even if you mostly trust those guys, there’s precious little depth behind them. As a unit, Texas’ bullpen is 15th in FIP, 27th in groundball rate, and 26th in strikeout rate. Those last two in particular look like a dicey combo in the playoffs.

The Rangers are also in the unenviable position of needing to find a catcher midseason. This didn’t look like a glaring weakness until very recently, but Danny Jansen hurt his elbow and is considering undergoing season-ending surgery, while Kyle Higashioka is also out indefinitely with a flexor strain. We don’t know if the Rockies would seriously consider moving Hunter Goodman, but Texas, arguably more than any team, should be kicking the tires in Denver. The same applies to Ryan Jeffers and really anything resembling an everyday catcher not nailed down on other clubs.

The Rangers’ needs are otherwise less acute on this side of the ball. There isn’t a replacement out there that offers more than what a healthy Seager and Jung can provide, and so the front office is mostly left to cross its fingers and hope they return as the most potent versions of themselves. Squint and you can see an average regular or better everywhere else.

State of the Farm

The arrow is down a little here relative to the offseason. The Rangers had five prospects on our February Top 100 list, and a baker’s dozen received a 40+ FV grade or better, but the pitchers in that tier haven’t progressed much. Caden Scarborough deserves a lot of grace for his uneven 2026 season — it feels wrong to fret much about a guy’s fastball velocity when he’s returning from cancer treatment — and he held his place on our midseason update. But while the rest of the crew — Davalillo, Santos, Jose Corniell, Leandro Lopez, and Marc Church — all looked poised to contribute this year, they’ve combined to throw all of six innings in Arlington.

The reasons why read like a failure to launch manual. Davalillo’s control fell completely apart in Triple-A, and he’s sprinkled in a lot of 91s and 92s on the gun in recent outings, a combination troubling enough that we dropped him from the Top 100. Santos fell off the list as well, in large part because he’s not getting results. He’s long been a personal favorite, and I still like his athleticism, arm strength, and changeup. At some point, though, you have to get hitters out, and it was untenable to keep a pitcher with a high-minors ERA north of 6.00 in that kind of orbit. Corniell’s stuff, which looked crisp in his return from injury last year, has backed up and he’s again on the IL. Lopez started giving up homers for the first time in his career this spring, and he too is on the shelf. Church’s grade was an aggressive projection on a reliever with good stuff; he’s continued to battle injuries and the strike zone, and was outrighted off of the 40-man earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the two hitters who ranked above the 40+ FV tier this offseason have also missed a lot of time. Sebastian Walcott has only played in 10 games this year, though he recently made his triumphant return from a UCL tear a little ahead of schedule, and has wasted no time reminding us why he’s one of the game’s best prospects. Paxton Kling has been out since mid-June with a wrist injury; before getting hurt, he’d put up decent surface-level numbers, albeit with more swing and miss and less power growth than I’d anticipated. There’s enough uncertainty here to slide him.

The positive energy in this system is mostly coming from the kids. Yolfran Castillo remains a stand out, as he’s hitting in Low-A and looks like an above-average defensive shortstop. His measurable power is up only slightly year over year, but he’s making a ton of contact and, more importantly, he has one of the most projectable frames in the low minors. His teammate, Paulino Santana, remains on the 40+ track, as he’s managed to hit for power in Low-A while slightly improving some of his scary contact metrics. He’s also physically projectable and could grow into real thump.

Arguably the two most interesting players in the system spent the summer in Surprise. The two-way guys both had productive years and, delightfully, we’re not much closer to seeing where on the field Seong-Jun Kim fits best long-term. He looks like a no. 4 pitching prospect, sitting 92-96 with impressive command for his age, particularly for a guy splitting his attention. On the other side of the ball, he still projects as a contact hitter and long-term fit at shortstop. I remain skeptical that he has the physicality to pull off double duty over the long haul, but for the time being, the game hasn’t told him to pick a lane just yet.

Josh Owens, meanwhile, has the physicality but might not have the contact skill. The power is legit, but he’s whiffing 35% of the time on the complex, and precious few hitters have missed that often at that level and gone on to have any kind of career. His fastball/slider mix looks pretty darn good on the mound, though, and it’s starting to look like that’s where his future lies. I’m already itching to see what kind of strides he can make as a pitcher — he isn’t yet throwing a change in games — if or when that becomes his full-time job.

The ACL club had a couple of other pleasant developments. Jay McQueen, a 20th-round, $280,000 flier out of a Mississippi high school in the 2025 draft, joins the list. While raw at the plate, McQueen has average power, he made a viable amount of contact on the complex and he showed some ability to move the bat head up and down. He’s a high-variance fourth outfielder prospect. Jacob Johnson gets some of the longest tail on a two-seamer I’ve encountered, and he pairs it with a slider that flashes above average. While he’ll need a beat to harness his fastball, he’s already got uncommonly good feel for locating the bender. After sneaking onto the main section of the offseason list, his arrow is up a little bit as well; like McQueen, he was recently promoted to Low-A Hickory.

For those who really like a sleeper, there’s Breyner Figuereo. He signed with the Cubs as an outfielder in the 2025 international class but was released after one season. The Rangers signed him, put him on the mound, and now he’s touching 98 with good feel for spin from the left side down in the DSL. He’s been aggressively fast-tracked onto the main section.

In the mid-minors, a couple of honorable mention bats have taken big steps forward. I’ve worn a hole in my shoe kicking myself for not listing Rafe Perich on the main section this spring. I liked him on the backfields in March of 2025, but lost my nerve after he posted pedestrian numbers as an older player in Low-A. He’s gone nuts at two levels in 2026, and his age (he’s 24) no longer looks so scary now that he’s giving Texas League arms a rough ride. A switch-hitter with plus raw power, he’s hit 10 homers in 44 games since a midseason promotion, with a barely a dip in his ability to make contact. We gave him a look as we built our recent Top 100 update and didn’t quite see a fit there, in part because he’s no more than a fringy defender at third, where he has a long, slow release and tends to scatter his throws. Still, if he can offer power off the bench and fill in at a couple of spots, that’s a big win for the Rangers amateur and dev groups.

Hector Osorio also slots in. He’s a hitterish outfielder who has suddenly bashed 21 homers out of nowhere. While I think some of the league and ball contexts explain a good deal of the power surge, you still have to pull the fly balls, which Osorio is proving that he can do.

Texas prioritized intriguing, risk/reward players in the draft. They also spent big early: Their first three draftees received bonuses north of $2 million, and then only one other guy in the entire class signed for more than $200,000. Gio Rojas was the best high school pitcher in the class and a potential no. 2/3 starter, though his delivery is more violent than you normally see out of a high school pitcher. Connor Comeau, who had committed to Texas A&M, has big lefty power projection, but less promising feel for contact. Brody Bumila is hurt and will have elbow surgery in Texas after his signs. He’s a spring pop-up arm with triple digit heat, freakish size, a precocious changeup, and a breaking ball that needs some pitch design love; we’ll see if this is the right org for him. Hudson Calhoun is a walk-prone reliever with a bat-missing fastball; he tucks in at the very end of the updated list.

A couple of other minor notes: Aidan Curry goes from the bottom of the 40 FV tier to near the top, as he’s throwing more strikes while working deeper into games in Double-A. Rotation mate Dalton Pence climbs with him. I was a little too bearish on the lefty’s command projection and chances to start in the spring, and in any case he alleviated some of the concerns I had about the moving parts in his delivery by making his motion more fluid and compact. If his slider continues to play like a plus pitch (I’m a little skeptical), Texas will really have something here.

Finally, a quick word on three recent early-round picks. AJ Russell, Malcolm Moore, and Dylan Dreiling are all holding steady. Russell looks ever more like a reliever, as he’s still heavily reliant on his fastball and prone to missing badly even with that pitch; he also hasn’t yet completed the fourth inning in any of his starts. Dreiling’s surface numbers have jumped considerably at Double-A this year, but once you adjust for context and take a look under the hood, he’s still tracking like a fourth outfielder. Moore, meanwhile, has struggled since a midseason promotion to Frisco, where his chase and strikeout rates have climbed markedly. Here are the players graded as 40 FVs and above on the updated list:

The team’s full list, complete with scouting reports and tool grades, can be found on The Board.

It’s rare, though not necessarily tricky, to find a backstop midseason. Contending teams don’t like to do it, as they’d understandably prefer not to have their starting catcher acquaint himself with a brand new pitching staff in the heat of a pennant race. The Rangers have to do that anyway, though, so they might as well see if they can find an everyday regular for the job. Clubs with catching to spare — Colorado, Minnesota, Miami, and perhaps Washington spring to mind — would presumably love to pry away Castillo or Scarborough, and may be able to make it work if they throw in some pitching to sweeten the deal. If not, Santos and Davalillo look like intriguing change-of-scenery candidates.

Among the prospective secondary pieces, the arrow-up arms in Frisco look attractive. Curry and Pence each have a chance to start and runway for growth (perhaps a little more velo as he fills out in Curry’s case, a better change in Pence’s). For the more adventurous sorts, McQueen and Figuereo have impact traits and enough risk to keep the price point fairly low.

Not counting RotoGraphs posts, Jake Mangum has been a featured player in three articles on this site since the start of last season. In two of those — one each by myself and David Laurila — the phrase “Old School” appears in the headline.

I wouldn’t put too much stock in headlines, especially my own, but in this case it tells you everything you need to know.

Mangum, a legend at Mississippi State, has a style of play that firmly rebukes generations of baseball wisdom. That’s why I wrote about him last April; if you hate hitters who strike out too much and look to hit doubles and home runs instead of dinking drop shots behind the infield, Mangum is your man. Read the rest of this entry »