These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Yohan Ramirez, RHP, Houston Astros
Level: Hi-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: NR   FV: 35
Line: 4.1 IP, 1 H, 1 BB, 0 R, 8 K

Notes
Ramirez has been up to 97 and is sitting 92-95 while making heavy use of an above-average curveball. Spinwise, he averages about 2300 rpm on his heater, and 2500 on the curve, which is relatively tame for Houston prospects. His changeup is a distant, tertiary offering. He’s K’d 30 in 20 innings so far, but looks like a two-pitch relief candidate at most.

Zach Plesac, RHP, Cleveland Indians
Level: Double-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: HM   FV: 35
Line: 6.2 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 9 K

Notes
Plesac’s velocity is up. He sat 90-94 in college and was back in that range following Tommy John, but this season his fastball is averaging about 94 and bumping 97. His changeup is plus, and he is throwing a lot of strikes, something that he didn’t do as an amateur. There’s still not a great breaking ball here and that might limit Plesac’s role, but he’s starting to look like a near-ready bullpen option, at least. Cleveland continues to do quite well developing college changeup artists.

Rico Garcia, RHP, Colorado Rockies
Level: Double-A   Age: 25   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 35
Line: 6.2 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 11 K

Notes
Garcia will sit 93-96 and touch 97 early in outings but lose command and zip later in starts. There are a variety of opinions about Garcia’s delivery, as one source thinks his deliberately paced mechanics are easy for hitters to time, while another thinks Garcia hides the ball really well. He’ll flash an above-average changeup and slider, and shows an ability to manipulate the fastball to sink and cut at various times. He’s more of a middle relief candidate than potential rotation piece, but it appears Colorado has found a big league piece in the 30th round.

On Tuesday night in Arizona, CC Sabathia claimed a little slice of baseball history. With his strikeout of the Diamondbacks’ John Ryan Murphy, the 38-year-old Yankee became just the 17th pitcher to reach 3,000 for his career, the first since John Smoltz on April 22, 2008, and just the third southpaw ever, after Steve Carlton and Randy Johnson. It’s a milestone worthy of celebration, a testament to longevity, dominance, and tenacity. It’s also inextricably a product of this high-strikeout era, a point worth considering when placing Sabathia’s accomplishment in context.

But first, to savor the moment. Sabathia, who entered the night three strikeouts short of 3,000, collected all three in the second inning, first freezing David Peralta looking at a sinker, then whiffing Christian Walker on a high cutter. After yielding a solo homer to Wilmer Flores and an infield single to Nick Ahmed — the latter on an 0-2 changeup well outside the strike zone — he induced Murphy (who caught Sabathia’s 2,500th strikeout in 2015) to chase an 84.2 mph changeup:

Alas, while Diamondbacks starter Zack Greinke — himself a potential 3,000 strikeout club member, more on which below — held the banged-up Yankee lineup to a single run over 7.2 innings, Flores also added a fourth-inning RBI double off Sabathia. The big lefty departed on the short end of a 2-1 score, and the Yankees ultimately lost, 3-1, putting a mild damper on the celebration.

Of the major traditional milestones among pitchers and hitters, 3,000 strikeouts is the least common. Thirty-two players have notched at least 3,000 hits, and 27 have swatted 500 home runs. On the pitching side, 24 pitchers have collected 300 wins. Nearly all of the players who have reached any of those round numbers have been elected to the Hall of Fame, with the exceptions generally related to performance-enhancing drugs and other bad behavior. Among the members of the 3,000 strikeout club who have preceded Sabathia, only Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling remain outside, for reasons besides on-field performance. This could very well be the big man’s ticket to Cooperstown. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, most baseball fans are probably aware of Cody Bellinger’s start to the 2019 season. Through 31 games and 132 plate appearances, Bellinger has put up an almost-immortal .431/.508/.890 slash line, with a 256 wRC+, swatting 14 home runs, drawing 19 walks and striking out just 15 times.

He’s leading baseball in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, wOBA, wRC+, home runs, RBI, and runs scored. (He’s even stolen five bases so far this year, good for 15th.) As the calendar has now officially turned, Bellinger has tied the record for most home runs before May 1, and has set the record for most RBI before May 1.

Now, this season, baseball’s March 28 Opening Day was the earliest that it has been in history, giving Bellinger (and, Christian Yelich, who also tied the home run record) a few more games than their historical counterparts to set these marks. And, as we know, more games equals more opportunities to pad one’s numbers, especially counting stats like home runs and RBIs.

(Warning: I’m about to talk some about RBI. I also know that RBI isn’t an especially illuminating stat. I am writing about this for historical sake, so just bear with me.)

Consider this: Bellinger set his RBI record on April 29, his 30th game of the season. Mark McGwire and Juan Gonzalez — who previously shared the RBI-prior-to-May-1 record with 36, each doing so in 1998 — had only played 25 and 24 games, respectively, upon reaching that pinnacle. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last decade, hitters have been fighting a losing battle against incredibly talented pitchers who throw at higher velocities with even more effective offspeed and breaking pitches. Faced with the increase in talent and velocity on the pitching side, position players have done their best to adapt. The emphasis on launch angle, so as to hit balls harder and farther to get an extra base hit, is a fight against hitters’ inability to take the ball the other way or string together rallies, which are increasingly blunted by the strikeouts. Hitting an 89 mph fastball on the outer edge of the plate to the opposite field is a strategy that might work well. Unfortunately, those 89 mph fastballs aren’t as prevalent as 89 mph sliders that dart away from the outside corner and the fastballs that are routinely in the mid-90s. Hitters are continuously adapting to changes in pitching in order to be successful, and this season, they are getting better by not swinging.

Hitters tend to get some blame for their role in there being fewer balls in play, what with the proliferation of strikeouts and homers and three true outcome players who seek walks and power and have a willingness to swing and miss, but much of what hitters do is simply react to what pitchers do. The increase in strikeouts over the years isn’t due to hitters actively choosing to strike out, but to pitchers who have gotten much better at striking hitters out. When I looked at the issue last season, the rise in strikeouts was due to primarily two factors: the increase in the number of pitches at 95 mph or greater, and the increase in the use of non-fastballs to get hitters out. It’s hard to catch up to velocity, and it’s really hard to lay off breaking and offspeed pitches. This season, pitchers are still throwing hard, and as Ben Clemens demonstrated, they are throwing even fewer fastballs.

To go along with the increased use of non-fastballs is an accompanying decrease in pitches in the strike zone. The graph below shows the number of fastballs and non-fastballs in the strike zone over the past few years. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

I’m going to eschew minor league lines from last night to talk about the players I saw in the Northeast over the last week. My trip prioritized draft coverage but included some pro stuff due to rain.

Let’s start with Navy righty Noah Song who, like former Air Force righty Griffin Jax before him, has a military commitment that complicates his draft stock. In May of 2017, the Department of Defense changed a policy which had only been in effect for about a year, that allowed athletes at the academies to defer their service commitment in order to pursue professional sports.

Jax has been able to continue pitching after he was accepted into the World Class Athlete Program, which enables military athletes who fit certain criteria to train for the Olympics full-time. This only recently became an option for baseball players, as baseball will once again be an Olympic sport in 2020. The exemption grants a two-year window for training prior to the Games. Considering that it took Jax several months to apply and be accepted into the program, this avenue is probably too narrow for Song. Read the rest of this entry »

When I last checked in on Marcell Ozuna, the Cardinals’ left fielder had just etched himself into blooper reels for an eternity with his epic misplay of a Kiké Hernandez fly ball. Since then, however, Ozuna has atoned for his mistakes with some of the hottest hitting this side of Cody Bellinger. After a disappointing debut season in St. Louis, he’s become a centerpiece of a revamped Cardinals’ lineup that has powered the team to the best record (18-10) in the National League.

The Cardinals acquired Ozuna from the Marlins in exchange for a quartet of prospects on December 14, 2017, just days after their attempt to trade for Ozuna’s teammate, Giancarlo Stanton, fell through. Though he had earned All-Star honors for the first time a year before, Ozuna was coming off a breakout 2017 in which he’d set across-the-board career highs with 37 homers, a .312/.376/.548 line, a 144 wRC+, and 5.1 WAR. He had not only made his second All-Star team, he’d won his first Gold Glove. He looked to be a significant addition to the Cardinals’ lineup, but hit just .260/.308/.337 with three home runs and a 76 wRC+ through the end of May. Ozuna eventually heated up, hitting .290/.334/.482 (120 wRC+) with 20 homers over the remainder of the season, with a wRC+ of 133 or better in three of the final four months. Still, his overall 106 wRC+ and 2.7 WAR represented significant drops from 2017, ones that stuck out like sore thumbs on a team that fell three games short of a Wild Card spot.

To be fair, Ozuna spent much if not all of 2018 battling tendinitis and an impingement in his right shoulder, more or less maintaining his uptick in production in either side of a 10-day stint on the disabled list at the end of August. The injury eroded his arm strength to the point that his outfield throwing speed ranked last according to Statcast, and, by his own account, he struggled to hit pitches on the inside part of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees haven’t been able to catch many breaks to start the season. They have an insalubrious number of starters on the injured list with everything from a small labrum tear, to a strained oblique, to a left biceps strain, to a left ankle injury, to a grade 2 lat strain. Despite all that, the team itself, at least when it comes to the standings, isn’t doing badly. They just won nine out of their previous 10 games and are one and a half games back from the Tampa Bay Rays. As of April 29, the Yankees are currently tied with the Astros for the fifth-best winning percentage in the majors (.607).

In the middle of all that is Domingo German, who’s off to a stellar start. We at FanGraphs have noted his talent before, citing his arsenal, his ability to throw strikes, get whiffs, and more. We’re talking about a guy who can make hitters look like this:

Or like this:

But his 2018 left a lot of questions about his future. As a 26-year old, German put up a 5.57 ERA and a 4.39 FIP in 85.2 IP across 21 games (14 starts). True, there were some encouraging numbers — a 27.2% strikeout rate and 14.9% swinging strike rate, for instance — but the Yankees had to have hoped for more. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Glasnow has a plus fastball — a somewhat-unique plus fastball — and he relies on it heavily. The Tampa Bay Rays righty is throwing it 66% of the time, the fourth-highest rate among qualified pitchers. A four-seamer delivered from Glasnow’s towering 6-foot-8 frame, the offering has an average velocity of 96.6 mph. It’s the pitch you’re going to read about here.

When I approached him on Saturday, I’d actually been thinking about his changeup. While it’s a pitch Glasnow throws infrequently, the always-insightful Daniel Russell wrote about it recently at Drays Bay, and I was intrigued. When I’d spoken to Glasnow last August, we talked primary breaking balls; his seldom-used change-of-pace wasn’t even mentioned.

Glasnow threw me a changeup on Saturday. When I suggested it as a topic, he said we should talk about his fastball instead, for the aforementioned reason: he rarely throws his changeup.

The following day, Glasnow threw nine of them in a dominating performance against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. That’s as many changeups as he’d thrown in his first five starts combined; hence his subterfuge. It was part of the plan going in.

Is it also his plan going forward? I asked that question following the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, we talked about the so-called “baseball rule,” which protects baseball teams from liability for injuries caused by foul balls. To wit:

As explained in the Restatement, there exists in the law a doctrine called “assumption of the risk.” In the context of baseball, that basically means that if you sit in an area without protective netting and you know it’s a possibility that a foul ball might come your way, you can’t sue the team for getting injured by that foul ball. As one court put it in a case called Edward C. v. City of Albuquerque, a fan “must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile” — even if that projectile is traveling upwards of 100 mph.

There’s a really excellent write-up on this that you can read here. In short, however, this “baseball rule” represents the majority rule in the United States. If a foul ball comes your way at a ballpark, the law basically says you should have seen it coming. You’ll probably find language on your ticket saying you assume the risk of injury by foul ball, like the Yankees have on theirs.

But baseballs aren’t the only projectiles spectators will encounter during baseball games. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported on a lawsuit filed against the Houston Astros for a fan injury caused by a T-Shirt Cannon:

A woman has sued the Houston Astros for more than $1 million, saying that a T-shirt cannon by the team’s mascot at a game last season broke her finger.

The Houston Chronicle reports that Jennifer Harughty alleges that the mascot, who is named Orbit, “shattered” her left index finger during a game last July when a T-shirt fired from a “bazooka style” cannon into the stands struck her finger.

The Astros said in a statement Tuesday the team is “aware of the lawsuit with allegations regarding Orbit’s T-shirt launcher. We do not agree with the allegations. The Astros will continue to use fan popular T-shirt launchers during games. As this is an ongoing legal matter, we will have no further comment on this matter.”

The Chronicle reported court records said Harughty was seated in the middle of the first deck behind the third base line when the incident occurred. The lawsuit said the fracture required two surgeries to repair.

Read the rest of this entry »

2018 wasn’t supposed to be the year of Juan Soto in Washington. It was supposed to be the year of Victor Robles. Robles, the consensus No. 1 outfield prospect in the Nats system and probably the No. 2 outfield prospect in all of baseball behind Ronald Acuña, was ready for the majors. Only a hyperextended elbow kept Robles from making an impact in the majors last year, but in abbreviated playing time in August and September, he looked like he was making up for lost time (.288/.348/.525, 131 wRC+).

Robles’ 2019 hasn’t been quite as impressive, but you can see in his performance why he’s such an exciting talent. Even while running a 30.5% strikeout rate and walking only 4.8% of the time, Robles has put up a league-average batting line (.265/.308/.480, 102 wRC+). Watch Robles play, and you can immediately see what the hype is about. He’s electric both at the plate and in the field. With all that said, I’m not here today to talk to you about Robles’ tremendous potential or his jaw-dropping athleticism. I’m here for the bunts.

Victor Robles leads the major leagues in bunt singles this year (he’s actually tied for the lead with teammate Adam Eaton). It’s a good thing, too, because he’s also first in bunts (fair balls that were bunted — it’s hard to get a good count of foul bunt attempts). If that seems weird to you, you’re not alone. We’re talking about a guy with non-negligible power — the FanGraphs prospect team graded him at 50 raw power this offseason. He has four home runs so far this year, and he ran a .157 ISO in the minor leagues, which isn’t Joey Gallo level or anything, but is certainly not poor.

Take a look at this list of players with the most bunts per plate appearance since 2017, Robles’ first playing time in the majors. I liberally filtered out pitchers and people with less playing time than Robles:

Robles sticks out like a sore thumb on this list. Magneuris Sierra literally had a zero ISO in 64 plate appearances in 2017. He’s never hit more than four home runs in a season, minors or majors. Delino DeShields hit six home runs in 440 plate appearances in the bigs — once. Robles has four this year already. Depth Charts projects him for another 11 over the balance of the year. Heck, he had three homers in 66 PA last year when he was called up. Maybe he’s not a power hitter, but he’s certainly not a slap hitter either. What’s up with the love for bunts? Read the rest of this entry »