This is a Shohei Ohtani Update. The World Baseball Classic is officially underway, and after a weekend packed with games, it’s time to check in on one of the biggest stars in the world. With Samurai Japan fresh off a 4-0 rampage through Pool B, FanGraphs can now officially report that Shohei Ohtani is still good at baseball.

The issue was not necessarily in question, but it’s worth taking a look at Ohtani’s performance considering his sudden disappearance at the end of the 2022 season. The two-way star didn’t play in a single game for more than four months — essentially the entire winter. Although he posted 9.5 WAR in 2022, several straw men constructed for the purpose of this sentence wondered whether, after such a long layoff, Ohtani would even remember how to play baseball at all.

Fortunately, Ohtani arrived at spring training in mid-February. After spending a couple weeks re-familiarizing himself with the sport, Ohtani got into three spring training games. Ohtani the batter hit a triple on the first pitch he saw, and has gone 2-for-5 so far. Ohtani the pitcher made one appearance, throwing 2.1 scoreless innings with no hits, two walks, and two strikeouts. Cactus League sources indicate that both a 1.200 OPS as a hitter and a 0.00 ERA as a pitcher are considered good. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring is for extensions. As surely as swallows flock to Capistrano or salmon charge upstream, major league teams spend February and March offering their young stars sackfuls of money in exchange for years of team control. Sure enough, the Diamondbacks and Corbin Carroll followed the path of least resistance over the weekend in agreeing to an eight-year deal worth $111 million, with a ninth-year option for $28 million and $20 million in various contract incentives.

That sounds like a lot of money. Carroll, after all, has only played 32 games in the major leagues and has accrued only 772 professional plate appearances. But do the math, and you can see why Arizona offered this deal, and also why Carroll accepted it.

Carroll isn’t some random recent debut. He’s the number two prospect in baseball, a power-contact-speed-and-defense threat who has dismantled every level of competition he’s faced. That includes the major leagues; that 32-game debut saw Carroll hit .260/.330/.500 with superlative baserunning and defense. He looked like an All-Star right away, and truthfully, he’s always looked like an All-Star. That’s how you end up as the number two prospect in baseball as a 5-foot-10 outfielder so quickly despite missing nearly two consecutive seasons of playing time thanks to the pandemic and then injury. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerrit Cole faced Jordan Walker for the first time on Wednesday, and he came away impressed. The New York Yankees ace induced a ground-ball out from the top prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals system in the first inning, but then surrendered a line-drive single to him on a 95-mph heater a handful of frames later. When Cole met with members of the media mid-game — standard fare for starters during spring training — I asked him about his matchups with the fast-rising phenom.

“I thought he put a good swing on it,” Cole said of Walker’s knock. “It was a good adjustment from the first at-bat. It was a good pitch, a borderline ball, and one of the better swings of the day, for sure.”

Cole needed clarification as to whom he was opining on before offering the praise. Understandably focusing on preparing for the regular season, he admitted — this with the caveat that he wasn’t being disrespectful — he didn’t know where Walker was hitting in the St. Louis lineup.

Walker was understandably very aware of Cole. Asked about what the five-time All-Star had said — the question came from a St. Louis scribe whom I’d shared the quotes with — he was equal parts pleased and humble.

“It means a lot, man,” said Walker, who is No. 12 on our Top 100 and at age 20 has a legitimate chance to break camp with the Cardinals. “He’s a helluva pitcher. His stuff was really electric today. His stuff was really jumping. His slider was good. So it means a lot to hear that from him. A wonderful pitcher.”

As Cardinals fans are discovering, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Stone Mountain, Georgia native is more than just a star in the making. He also exudes fun. I asked the effervescent outfielder how he is balancing that trait alongside being hyper-focused in his quest to earn a big-league job. Read the rest of this entry »

“You can never have too much pitching” is an adage that predates the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a notion that’s at least as old as Old Hoss Radbourn’s sore right arm. Every team goes into the season expecting that its rotation will need far more than five starters, and one pitcher’s absence is another’s opportunity to step up, but that doesn’t make the inevitable rash of spring injuries any more bearable. This week, we’ve got a handful of prominent ones worth noting, with All-Stars Carlos Rodón and Tony Gonsolin likely to miss a few regular season turns, top prospect Andrew Painter targeting a May return, and José Quintana potentially out for longer than that.

The latest-breaking injury involves Painter, the freshest face among this group. The fast-rising 19-year-old Phillies phenom placed fifth on our Top 100 list. Moreover, the 6-foot-7 righty, who sports four potentially plus pitches, had already turned heads this camp, reaching 99 mph with his fastball in his spring debut on March 1 (Davy Andrews broke down his encounter with Carlos Correa here). While he topped out at Double-A Reading last year after two A-level stops, he was considered to be in competition with Bailey Falter for the fifth starter’s job, and had a legitimate shot at debuting as a teenager, though his 20th birthday on April 10 didn’t leave much leeway.

Alas — there’s always an alas in these stories — two days after Painter’s outing, manager Rob Thomson told reporters that he was experiencing tenderness in his right elbow, and several subsequent days without updates suggested there was more to the story. Indeed, an MRI taken on March 3 revealed a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, with the finding subsequently confirmed via a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, hence the delay. The Phillies termed the injury “a mild sprain” that isn’t severe enough to require surgery. The team plans to rest Painter for four weeks from the date of injury (so, March 29) and then begin a light throwing program that under a best-case scenario would have him back in games in May. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the point in the offseason when it’s time for one of my favorite/most hated preseason traditions: my attempt to predict breakouts and busts. Since any breakouts or busts beyond what a projection system suggests are naturally going to be low-probability outcomes, there’s a high probability of me looking pretty silly — something writers try to avoid. Let’s start by looking back at how smart I was last year…or how foolish:

First, the bad news. Kelenic and Adell were both just awful, and I would definitely call 2022 a giant miss for both players as they enter their post-prospect period. I suspect there’s more hope to still be had for Kelenic than Adell, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself prescient about either. Kepler’s breakout didn’t happen at all, and his power all but disappeared. Anderson I’ll call an incomplete because of injury, and while Higashioka did match his entire previous career in WAR, that was largely due to defense, which I can hardly claim credit for predicting. Hiura did hit far better than he had recently, but he also didn’t exactly get a ton of playing time with the Brewers, who appeared to have lost interest in him. There were a few triumphs, however: Kwan and Lux both had excellent seasons, especially the former. Read the rest of this entry »

In a winter that didn’t lack for shocking free agent moves — and even more shocking plot twists — the Rangers’ signing of Jacob deGrom was as eye-opening as any of them. After opting out despite two injury-shortened seasons, the 34-year-old righty left the Mets to sign a five-year, $185 million deal with the Rangers. The move was surprising not only because deGrom bolted from the team with which he’d spent his entire professional career, but also because he chose a club that won 68 games in 2022 over one that won 101.

The Rangers didn’t stop at adding deGrom when it came to addressing a rotation that was among the majors’ worst last year, ranking among the bottom seven in ERA, FIP, and WAR. In addition to retaining All-Star Martín Pérez and trading for Jake Odorizzi, they added both Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney via two-year free agent deals of $30 million and $20 million, respectively. Thanks to those additions plus holdovers Pérez and Jon Gray, Texas’ rotation ranks second in projected WAR via our Depth Charts, behind only the Yankees (who got some bad news on Thursday, as Carlos Rodón has suffered a mild forearm strain, cutting into the depth already compromised by Montas’ injury). The Rangers lead the majors when I compare the actual production of last year’s rotations to the projected production of this year’s units — though not without some caveats. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Volpe has a chance to be a star, and his bat is one of the reasons why. No. 11 on our Top 100, and No. 1 on our New York Yankees list, the 21-year-old infield prospect is on the doorstep of the big leagues thanks in part to a re-engineered swing that our own Eric Longenhagen has described as being like a right-handed version of Juan Soto’s. Playing at Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre last year, Volpe slugged 21 home runs while logging a 117 wRC+.

Volpe discussed his evolution as a hitter at Yankees camp earlier this week.

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David Laurila: How do you approach hitting? Are you a hitting nerd or more of a keep-it-simple guy?

Anthony Volpe: “Probably a little bit of both. During the season I definitely try to keep it simple. We have a great hitting department here with the Yankees that helps us set our routines so that during games we can just go out there and play. There is obviously a lot that goes into it, but at the end of the day it’s about staying simple and performing in the game.” Read the rest of this entry »

Monday offered a rare sighting, as Chris Sale took the mound in a game for the first time since last July 17 — even if it was only a Grapefruit League game against the Tigers. Limited to just 11 starts over the past three seasons due to injuries, the soon-to-be-34-year-old lefty took his first step towards both reestablishing his spot among the game’s top pitchers and helping to support a promising but rickety rotation that may be the Red Sox’s best hope for respectability this year.

Once upon a time, Sale ranked among the game’s most durable pitchers. From 2012-17, only Max Scherzer, R.A. Dickey and Jeff Samardzija threw more innings than his 1,230. Sale was limited to 27 starts in 2018 due to left shoulder inflammation, though he wobbled through the postseason while helping the Red Sox win the World Series. It’s been downhill ever since, as he pitched to a 4.40 ERA and missed the last seven weeks of the 2019 season due to left shoulder inflammation, then tore his ulnar collateral ligament the following spring and had Tommy John surgery. The Red Sox took a slow, deliberate approach to his rehab. He didn’t return to the majors until August 14, 2021, nearly 17 months after his surgery and two years and a day since his last regular season outing.

Sale made nine starts with mostly good results in 2021, posting a 3.16 ERA and 3.69 FIP while striking out 28.4% of hitters, but hopes that that performance would carry over into 2022 didn’t last long. About a week after the lockout ended, the Red Sox revealed that Sale had suffered a stress fracture in his right rib cage while throwing batting practice at Florida Gulf Coast University in mid-February; he wasn’t allowed to tell the team until the lockout ended. He finally made his first of four rehab starts on June 20, and returned to the Sox after a frustrating five-walk outing that was capped by him destroying a television and other equipment in what he later called “a 7-year-old temper tantrum.” On July 12 he finally took the mound for Boston, throwing five shutout innings against the Rays, but five days later, he didn’t make it out of the first inning against the Yankees, as a 106.7-mph Aaron Hicks line drive hit his left hand, fracturing his pinky. Around three weeks later, while the pinky was still healing, he broke his right wrist in a bicycle accident and needed season-ending surgery. Woof. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Baker has some of the best raw stuff in the Philadelphia Phillies system. He also has one of the best backstories. A 22-year-old right-hander with a high-octane heater and a breaking ball that’s arguably better, Baker converted from catcher to pitcher in junior college and initially hated it. Moreover, he’d once been scared to take the mound.

Baker — an 11th-round pick in 2021 who finished last year in Double-A — is currently in big-league camp with the Phillies. He discussed his atypical path to prospect prominence over the weekend.

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David Laurila: You were a high school catcher and didn’t become a pitcher until college. Is that correct?

Andrew Baker: “Yes. I did the full switch at the beginning of my freshman year in 2019, so I’ve really only been pitching seriously for about four years.” Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas will take his first swing of spring training today. That wouldn’t be that notable, except that Vargas has already played in six spring training games and had 11 spring training plate appearances. He just hasn’t swung yet. That’s been necessary because of a hairline fracture in his right pinkie he suffered while taking groundballs. Vargas is the Dodgers’ fifth-ranked prospect, and with Gavin Lux out for the season and Messieurs Turner and Turner off to Boston and Philadelphia, Los Angeles needs him at second base. The Dodgers want Vargas getting game reps at the keystone and seeing live, competitive pitches. So there he is, playing despite the fact that he’s not medically cleared to swing the bat in a game.

Just seeing pitches is plenty important. You don’t need to swing to track pitches and work on your timing. Take Kyle Schwarber, whose heroics in the 2016 World Series came after a horrific knee injury cost him most of that season. After acing his six-month checkup and being cleared to hit, Schwarber flew out to the Arizona Fall League, where he could see as many pitches as possible before the Series. He played in two real games and two simulated ones, but the real work happened in the cage, much of it with the bat on his shoulder. Per Tom Verducci, “Schwarber hit or tracked 1,300 pitches in four days — many out of a pitching machine that fired major-league quality breaking pitches, some from two Class A pitchers the Cubs brought in to pitch to him in the simulated games and some from coaches.” Read the rest of this entry »