No respectable prospect list has ever read as a leaderboard of minor-league on-base percentages. There are a million other important considerations, details that help to fill out a profile. That being said, the best hitting prospects tend to avoid making too many outs, and when you don’t make outs, you get a high OBP. Vladimir Guerrero Jr.‘s OBP this year was .425. Bo Bichette‘s OBP was .423. Lewis Brinson’s OBP was .400, and Rhys Hoskins‘ OBP was .385. Scouts are always repeating that minor-league numbers aren’t that important, but then, minor-league competition is awfully good, and the numbers show who’s most often winning the battles.

Guerrero and Bichette are both in the Blue Jays organization, and they’re considered two of the better position-player prospects anywhere. They wrapped up their seasons with High-A Dunedin, but the teenagers opened with Single-A Lansing. Down there, they were the stars of the roster, but they had one particularly unusual teammate. A teammate who fell short of Guerrero’s OBP by only four points. This player reached base in more than two-fifths of his plate appearances. He also registered a hit in barely one-fifth of his at-bats. He knocked all of one single home run, out of just about 300 opportunities. There’s nobody else quite like Nick Sinay.

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Even though they’re only five games removed from a playoff spot in the American League, you could be forgiven for not having dedicated much thought recently to the Kansas City Royals. Prior to the trade deadline, they were playing a little over their heads, exiting July in possession of a 55-49 record and the second Wild Card spot — this, despite having recorded roughly equal runs scored and allowed totals. They became moderate buyers, picking up Melky Cabrera and holding on to soon-to-be free agents Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, and Jason Vargas.

In the meantime, however, they’ve struggled, going 18-27 since August 1st. With a .490 winning percentage, the club now possesses just a 1.8% chance of making the playoffs.

Because the Royals have likely flown under your baseball radar, it’s quite possible that this bit of news did, too:

The Minor to whom Flanagan refers here is Mike Minor, a name that, prior to this April, hadn’t graced a major-league box score since 2014. The last any of us had probably heard, Minor was signing a two-year deal with Kansas City last spring. At the time, the left-hander was coming off a torn labrum that led to shoulder surgery and, ultimately, his release from the Atlanta Braves.

The thought of Minor returning to form after such a serious injury was, while not ridiculous, still optimistic. However, despite some false starts and a rough stint in Triple-A Omaha last year, Mike Minor has reemerged as an effective relief option out of the Kansas City bullpen, exhibiting both increased velocity and a greater reliance on a reinvigorated pitch.

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After the Houston Astros elected to part ways with eight scouts last month, I wrote a piece on whether scouts and Statcast could coexist following the move by Jeffrey Luhnow. (Luhnow said the vacancies would ultimately be filled.)

Carson Cistulli was also interested in this idea of redundancy, asking both Dave Cameron and Eric Longenhagen about it on different episodes of FanGraphs Audio. Dave was optimistic about the future role of scouts, while Longenhagen reported on some of the anxiety in the scouting community — anxiety with which I’m also familiar to some degree.

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This past Wednesday, I talked to Oakland A’s pitcher Chris Smith for the first time in close to a decade. After we’d exchanged pleasantries, I asked the now-36-year-old right-hander how he’d describe his career. His answer came as no surprise.

“Oh, man, how about rollercoaster?,” suggested Smith. “It was a rollercoaster early on, and it’s continued to be a rollercoaster.”

That’s an apt assessment. Since being selected by the Red Sox in the fourth round of the 2002 draft, Smith has experienced ups and downs worthy of Six Flags. A dune buggy accident compromised his 2003 season, and he’s bounced — mostly in the minors — from Boston to the Brewers to the Mariners to the Padres to the A’s.

And then there was his three-year hiatus away from affiliated ball.

“When the Mariners let me go (in May, 2011), I thought I was done,” admitted Smith. “I got released because of my performance — not because of health — and I was OK with that. If I wasn’t good enough, it was time to move on. I went back to UC-Riverside and became the pitching coach there.”

It turned out that he wasn’t done after all. After a year spent coaching at his alma mater, Smith was convinced to make a comeback in independent ball. Read the rest of this entry »

There are five spots on a Cy Young ballot. This season, in the American League, only the first two are going to matter. Last year, Justin Verlander received the most first-place votes, with 14, but he was ranked second on just two ballots. Rick Porcello, meanwhile, received 18 second-place votes in addition to his eight at the top spot. Porcello ended up the winner.

This year, Chris Sale and Corey Kluber are likely to occupy the top two spots on every ballot, and whoever receives more first-place will probably take the award. The pair have produced very similar statistical records this year, so voters will have to split hairs to decide which of the two is more deserving. Let’s begin splitting some of those hairs right now, examining defense, contact quality, various sorts of WAR, and how they all influence each other when it comes to the two best pitchers in the American League.

To provide an initial tale of the tape of sorts, here are a few numbers with which most readers will be pretty familiar.

The strikeout and walk numbers are pretty equivalent. Sale has the edge in homers and innings, leading to a lower FIP and therefore WAR. Kluber has a much lower BABIP, which helps him lead in ERA. If you want to factor for league and park, we can do that. Sale’s FIP- is 50 to Kluber’s 57, and Sale’s ERA- is 61 to Kluber’s 54. Part of Kluber’s ERA advantage comes from that BABIP. He also has an 81.6% left-on-base percentage compared to Sale’s 76.7%, though, so part of the advantage is simply due to sequencing.

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about why Rhys Hoskins‘ early process should give Phillies fans a reason for real excitement. His combination of frequently hitting the ball in the air while still making above-average contact is the foundation for high-level offensive production.

At that point, though, Hoskins had just 47 plate appearances in the Majors. Anyone can have a good 47 plate appearances, so I tried to emphasize that the results of his first 10 or so games shouldn’t have changed your opinion of Hoskins much. There were encouraging signs in the approach, and other hitters with similar skillsets also got overlooked by prospect rankings on their way to stardom, but I tried to avoid making a big deal about Hoskins running a 159 wRC+ for a couple of weeks.

Well, it’s been three weeks since that post went up, and now the results themselves are worth paying attention to.

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While so much recent focus on the Dodgers has (rightfully) centered on their recent stretch of poor play, how about this ray of sunshine: the club is on the cusp of receiving a nine-win season — the sort of value one can only dependably expect from Mike Trout — from a lone source this year.

Surprisingly, the player responsible for this unusually high level of production isn’t Corey Seager or Justin Turner or even Clayton Kershaw. It’s not even a single player, at all, but a combination of two players at one position: catchers Yasmani Grandal and Austin Barnes. The pair has accounted for 8.1 BWARP, the Baseball Prospectus version of wins above replacement that also accounts for pitch framing.

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The Cardinals won again on Thursday. It should go without saying they’re far from being the hottest team in baseball, but they’ve played well over the last couple months, hanging around in both the wild-card and Central division races. The Cardinals have won 36 of their past 60 games, which, over a full season, would be good enough to put them on a 97-win pace. Other teams have been better, but the Cardinals have been strong.

Something that strikes me about this Cardinals team in particular is its distribution of talent. Tommy Pham wasn’t expected to make this kind of impact. Neither was Luke Weaver, or Paul DeJong. Dave just wrote about the emerging Jose Martinez. It’s a team with surprises, but then, it’s also a team light on elites. Pham is their only 4+ WAR player. Carlos Martinez is their only other 3+ WAR player. So many other players have just been…good. Helpful enough. These Cardinals seem like the very opposite of top-heavy.

That’s an impression. Below is the math. Following a hunch or two, I broke down every single team, in terms of its basic WAR distribution. We can start off by just looking at overall WAR.

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After the Cubs ended their curse and title drought last fall, there was talk about a potential dynasty having arrived. There’s been less talk of that this season after the Cubs stumbled for much of the first half. While Chicago has one of the oldest pitching staffs (average age of 30.9 years) in the game, they’ve played at a higher level in the second half.

Elsewhere, a prominent magazine recently devoted its cover to the Dodgers, wondering if this year’s version of the club might be the “Best. Team. Ever?” And it’s a team, despite its recent skid, that remains six games ahead of its closest NL competitor, a team with a number of young, cornerstone stars.

Finally, it wouldn’t be surprising to observe the Yankees transform into a hegemonic power in the AL East. Their impressive young core has begun to arrive — and arrive ahead of schedule. And just about everyone expects them to be big players, and winners, in the historic 2018-19 free-agency class.

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Earlier today, I published a post examining the major-league success of players who were never considered top-100 prospects. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and among the most delightful things about the current Cleveland Indians is that they’re being led in no small part by both Jose Ramirez and Corey Kluber, who came up as relative nobodies. No one’s surprised when a top prospect becomes a top player. When a top player emerges after having been off the radar, though — every one of those guys has a story. Why, here’s a story from today, about Whit Merrifield. Merrifield was nothing, until he was something. Now he’s a part of the Royals’ present and future.

In running the analysis for the post linked above, I didn’t spot any meaningful trends. The number of good players who were unranked prospects has remained fairly steady. The amount of WAR coming from players who were unranked prospects has also remained fairly steady. Through that lens, it doesn’t seem like much is going on. Nothing, that is, that’s out of the ordinary. Yet, under the surface, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I’m saying anything original, here, but these are tough times to be a minor-league scout. Anyone can evaluate a prospect, but it’s perhaps never been harder to evaluate well.

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