The swing is noisy and needs refining, but Lewis has the physical ability for superstardom.

That line, written by Eric Longenhagen, led Royce Lewis’s writeup in our 2020 Top 100 Prospects rankings, which were published earlier this week. Both halves of the sentence are intriguing. While the first is potentially a red flag, the second is indicative of a blue-chip up-and-comer with a sky-high ceiling. Selected first overall by the Minnesota Twins in the 2017 draft out of a San Juan Capistrano high school, Lewis holds down the No. 13 slot on Longenhagen’s list.

Alex Hassan isn’t all that concerned with the 20-year-old shortstop’s swing. According to the Minnesota farm director, the underlying characteristics are what really matter. Lewis possesses plus bat speed, a good bat path, and “when he makes contact, he does a lot of damage.”

While nothing is actually broken, Lewis isn’t exactly quiet in the box.

“There are some characteristics that are unique to Royce,” said Hassan. “What’s interesting is that leg-kick piece. Last year, I went back and looked at some of his GCL video from right after he signed, and there are plenty of pitches where his leg kick goes right up to his belt, and he executes his swing from there. It’s something he’s tinkered with. It can be a big leg kick, somewhat of a medium leg kick, and at times he’ll try to get his foot down a little earlier. But the kick has been there since he came into the system. It’s simply a feature of Royce, as opposed to some kind of bug that’s popped up.”

Hassen espouses an if-it-ain’t-broke-fix-it approach, but at the same time he recognizes that excessive movement can be deleterious to a hitter’s ability to consistently square up baseballs. He’s seen Lewis make strides toward. Moreover, he’s seen them made cautiously, and without undue urging. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Major League Baseball made official a handful of rule changes that had been in the works for nearly a year. In case you missed it while following the latest twists and turns of the Astros’ sign-stealing saga or the excitement of pitchers and catchers reporting, here’s the full press release, which spares us from having to retype it:

Rule changes for the 2020 season were announced today by @MLB. pic.twitter.com/cXZrFzHv3F

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) February 12, 2020

The three-batter minimum rule — and the existential threat it poses to lefty specialists — has been the most discussed of these changes. Our own Ben Clemens illustrated that it won’t matter all that much, a conclusion supported by Sam Miller’s examination, while other analysis such as this article by Tom Verducci and this one by Cliff Corcoran suggest it could have a negative impact.

The changes to the injured list and the service time tradeoffs that come with the permanent 26th man and the limited September roster size can bear closer analysis, but the rules that have my attention today — and this should be no surprise if you’ve been reading my work here — are the ones concerning position players and two-way players. By themselves, they won’t amount to much, and while they do close the loopholes that come with the 13-pitcher limitations on the new 26-man rosters, those are some pretty narrow loopholes to begin with. What they really do is stamp out a bit of novelty, not that the sport needs further encroachment by the Fun Police. Read the rest of this entry »

My two previous posts on the contentious PBA negotiations between MLB and MiLB focused on the most significant portion of MLB’s proposed plan: eliminating short-season baseball and contracting or reclassifying the 40 teams that go with it. As Baseball America noted, significant changes would be made to current leagues:

The proposal also completely reorganizes the full-season minor leagues. While there would still be Triple-A, Double-A, high Class A and low Class A, those four levels would be completely reworked to make the leagues much more geographically compact. In Triple-A, the Pacific Coast League would shift from 16 teams to 10. The International League would grow to 20 teams. The 14-team low Class A South Atlantic League would be turned into a six-team league with a new Mid-Atlantic league springing up.

The short-season Northwest League would move to full-season ball.

Part of MLB’s stated motivation for those changes is a desire to improve facilities at the minor league level and make travel, both between the majors and minors and between affiliates during the minor league season, less taxing for players. As Morgan Sword, recently promoted to executive vice president of baseball economics and operations, indicated in this New York Times piece regarding MLB’s plan, there are several factors in determining a minor league team’s affiliation:

One was a team’s proximity to its parent club and to potential opponents. Another was the condition of the facilities. A third concerned everyday life, such as hotel availability and general security.

Read the rest of this entry »

Black swan events are a defining feature of each baseball season. Like any good sport, the contours of the game and its season elicit a comfortable and familiar warmth. But also like any good sport, the details that make up the fabric of a particular contest or campaign are essentially unpredictable. It’s the round ball, round bat game: Weird stuff happens all the time.

Once they happen though, unexpected events have a way of enmeshing themselves in the game’s broader narrative as if they were just another ad on the outfield wall. Our brains struggle to handle surprises, and so we rationalize them. For a time, it was very weird that Lucas Giolito suddenly looked like one of the best pitchers in baseball; by the time the Cy Young ballots were tallied, his breakout season was just another event from 2019, a feel-good moment and a developmental win, but no longer a curiosity. Lucas Giolito is now good and we accept this for what it is.

But there’s so much more fun to be had with unexpected events. They’re worth celebrating on their own merits. In one form or another, they happen every day and to every team and we should remember the most notable of those surprises. More to the point, one of these is coming for your team in 2020. Like a birthday present waiting to be unwrapped, each team is just a month or so away from discovering something weird about itself. Today, we’re going to use recent history as a guide to imagining what that will look like.

Below, I’ve recounted the most unexpected thing that happened to each team from last year — with a twist. Instead of simply reflecting on what happened, I’ve assigned that very same outcome to a different, random team in 2020. For example, the Cleveland Indians saw one of their cornerstones play like Triple-A flotsam for three months, for no apparent reason. What would that look like if it happened to the Rays?

This is the longest article I’ve ever written for FanGraphs, so Meg (sensibly) made me break it into two pieces. Today, you get the American League teams; the NL will follow early next week. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros cheated. That’s not in dispute. The search for just how much the banging scheme helped the team, however, is ongoing. Rob Arthur got the party started. Tony Adams chronicled the bangs. Here at FanGraphs, Jake Mailhot examined how much the Astros benefited, which players were helped most, and even how the banging scheme performed in clutch situations. In a recent press conference, owner Jim Crane downplayed the benefit, saying “It’s hard to determine how it impacted the game, if it impacted the game, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It’s a rich literature, and not just because it’s fun to write “banging scheme” — but I didn’t want to leave it there.

I thought I’d take a different tack. All of these studies are based on reality, and reality has one huge problem: it’s so maddeningly imprecise. You can’t know if we captured all the right bangs. You can’t know if the system changed, or if it had details or mechanisms we didn’t quite understand or know about. And even when everything is captured right, those sample sizes, those damn sample sizes, are never quite what you need to feel confident in their results.

If we simply ignore what actually happened and create our own world, we can skip all that grubby, confusing reality. Imagine, if you will, a player who makes perfectly average swing decisions and achieves perfectly average results on those decisions.

Let’s further stipulate, while we’re far off into imaginary land, that pitchers attack our perfectly average batter in a perfectly average way. For each count, they’ll throw a league average number of fastballs, and those fastballs will be in the strike zone at — you guessed it — a league average rate. The same is true for all other pitches — with cut fastballs included in “all other pitches” in this analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

While Yasiel Puig remains unsigned, a couple of other free agent outfielders came off the board on Wednesday via one-year deals at rock-bottom prices that belie their potential productivity even in part-time roles. Cameron Maybin returned to the Tigers, with whom he debuted in 2007, via a $1.5 million deal that includes an additional $1.3 million in incentives, while Jarrod Dyson agreed to a $2 million contract with the Pirates.

The well-traveled Maybin, who turns 33 on April 4, has played for eight different major league teams and has already passed through the hands of the Tigers twice. They made him the No. 10 pick out of an Asheville, North Carolina high school in 2005, and brought him to the majors in 2007, but dealt him to the Marlins that December in the Miguel Cabrera blockbuster. After three years with the Marlins, four with the Padres, and one with the Braves, he sparkled in a return to the Tigers for the 2016 season (.315/.383/.418) but was nonetheless dealt to the Angels that November and continued on his merry way. After splitting the 2018 campaign between the Marlins (again) and Mariners, he went to spring training last year with the Giants but was cut in late March after being arrested on a DUI charge. He landed with the Indians and opened the season with the team’s Triple-A Columbus affiliate before being sold to the Yankees for all of $25,000 on April 25, a time when Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, and Clint Frazier were all sidelined by injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks have a potential future ace in 24-year-old righty Zac Gallen. Making his debut for the Miami Marlins in June 2019, Gallen finished the season with a 1.6 WAR, and armed with a filthy changeup, became one of the more exciting young pitchers to appear in the major leagues last year.

This spring, Gallen will battle for the fifth spot in the Diamondbacks rotation. If he isn’t able to secure a starting role, Arizona may have him begin the season in Triple-A. Gallen could claim that rotation spot with an assist from an adjustment to one pitch, which in turn will tighten up his entire arsenal and help him become one of the tougher pitchers to face in baseball.

Though the sample is limited, Gallen did well during his first 15 big league starts. Through 80 innings pitched, Gallen produced an ERA of 2.81 (3.61 FIP), struck out 96 hitters, and posted a 2.96 K/BB ratio. Gallen also demonstrated good command last year, though his 10.8% walk rate indicated he may have struggled a bit with his control.

Gallen attacked hitters with a four-seam fastball, a knuckle curveball, a changeup, and two types of cutters: a sweeping (or hybrid) cutter and a backspinning cutter. Eric Longenhagen put a 50 FV on Gallen’s overall arsenal, with special consideration given to his changeup (55 FV). Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners are bringing former top prospect Taijuan Walker back to the Northwest. Yesterday afternoon, the right-hander signed a one-year contract worth a base salary of $2 million, with incentives that could push the deal up to $3 million. As with Kendall Graveman earlier this winter, the Mariners have done well to round out their thin rotation with a low-cost option that could plausibly produce a significant return on their investment.

Unlike with Graveman, there’s plenty of sentimental value here, too. For most of the early part of the decade, Walker was the player Mariners fans salivated to see. Prior to Seattle’s current crop of farmhands, Walker led the vanguard of exciting Mariners prospects, the jewel in a class that also included Danny Hultzen, Brandon Maurer, and James Paxton. Stories of Walker’s athleticism and skill spread quickly as he blitzed through Seattle’s system — my personal favorite is the time he wrote “Tai was here” on a piece of athletic tape and then showed off his NBA-esque vertical by jumping and sticking the tape too high for anybody else to reach — and many pinned their hopes of a Mariners resurgence on his powerful shoulders.

But just when Walker looked ready to make his mark in Seattle, he suffered a few incremental setbacks. He needed the better part of two years of seasoning at the upper minors before reaching the big leagues for good in 2015, and then ran into plenty of bumps that first season. His secondaries backed up between Double-A and the show, and big league hitters routed his pin-straight fastball and sloppy secondaries over the first two months of the year — a period during which a promising Mariners club imploded in part because of Walker’s 7.33 ERA in his first nine starts. Read the rest of this entry »

“It feels like there’s still no closure and everything has been thrown into question — past outcomes are being second-guessed and even future games will be cast in doubt. There can be no redemption arc after an institutionalized scandal like this until there’s some accountability.” — Sean Doolittle, Nationals reliever

Sean Doolittle speaks for all of us. Four weeks after Commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report on the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing efforts and suspended both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season, new revelations about the scheme continue to emerge, some of which challenge his findings or call his judgment into question. So long as such information keeps coming to light, Major League Baseball can’t make this scandal — or the justifiable outrage from players within the game and fans outside of it — go away. Not even a leaked report about a cockamamie 14-team playoff format will deflect attention from Houston’s various schemes.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond reported on an effort by the Astros’ baseball operations department to decode opponents’ signs and relay that information to hitters in real time, one that preceded the trash can banging scheme and that general manager Jeff Luhnow had awareness of, though it went unmentioned in the commissioner’s report. Later that day, MLB Network aired an exclusive interview with A.J. Hinch, one in which the Astros’ former manager expressed regret over his own role in failing to stop his players from participating in the sign-stealing scheme but gave a carefully parsed answer when it came to the possible use of wearable buzzers. On Monday, pitcher Mike Bolsinger, who retired just one of eight Astros hitters he faced in his final major league appearance on August 4, 2017, filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, “accusing the Astros of unfair business practices, negligence and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations,” according to USA Today’s Nancy Armour. Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Priester is a talented young right-hander with a lot to learn. Drafted 18th overall last summer by the Pittsburgh Pirates, he’s a 19-year-old Illinois native who came to pro ball with scant schooling on the baseball front. Unlike most high-profile preps, Priester didn’t have a pitching coach growing up.

He fared well in his inaugural efforts versus professional hitters. The 6-foot-3, 195-pound hurler got his feet wet with 36.2 innings split between the Gulf Coast League and short-season West Virginia, logging a 3.19 ERA while averaging over a strikeout per frame. Not that the numbers matter. What does is his potential. Our Pirates prospects list isn’t yet out, but you can expect to see Priester toward the top.

Priester talked about his repertoire, and the early stages of his development, at the tail end of the 2019 season.

———

David Laurila: What do you consider your best pitch?

Quinn Priester: “I’d say my curveball and my two-seam sinker. Those are the two pitches that stand out the most.”

Laurila: Let’s talk about your curveball. When you did you first begin throwing one?

Priester: “I was actually really young; probably too young, to be honest. When I was 11, we had a coach who didn’t allow us to throw curveballs, but he did tell us, ‘Hey, when you do throw a curveball, this is how you put as little stress on your arm as possible.’ We were taught one grip, and how to throw it that one way.

“Even though I had to keep it my back pocket, I started having a lot of fun with it. And I loved to throw it, so I’d always work on it. Then, when I was about 12 or 13, I was able to start using it [in games]. From that point on, I was able to get decent movement on it.”

Laurila: How were you taught to throw a curveball? Read the rest of this entry »