Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luc Rennie, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: NR   FV: 30
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 14 K

Notes
Rennie is four appearances deep into his first year back in affiliated ball since 2015, when he was with Baltimore. He’s spent the last several seasons with Evansville in the independent Frontier League and was injured for a portion of that time. He was dominant for the Otters this spring and signed with the Mets earlier this month. Last night he pitched the game of his life and struck out 14 hitters, a Columbia franchise record, with most of them coming on a plus upper-70s 12-6 curveball. Rennie has five pitches. His fastball has natural cut, he has a two-seamer, an average mid-80s slider, that curveball, and a below-average changeup. He’ll run the fastball up to 95 but sits 90-92 and mixes his breaking balls well. Rennie is carrying a 0.83 ERA through 21.1 innings at Low-A.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first pitch Blake Snell ever threw as an American League All-Star ended up in the left-field bleachers. I assume he had other plans.

That this might, for some, represent an enduring image of Snell’s All-Star experience is a bit of a shame, because most of the pitches he threw last Tuesday night were actually pretty good. In his first inning of work, he got Javy Báez to reach out on a letter-high fastball and bounce the ball back to the mound; he walked Paul Goldschmidt on a borderline 3-2 fastball; he struck out Nolan Arenado with a gorgeous curveball on the fourth pitch of the sequence; and he retired Freddie Freeman via ground out. In his second inning, he struck out Matt Kemp and Bryce Harper consecutively before losing Nick Markakis, of all people, on a 3-1 fastball that missed badly. He was pulled after that in favor of Joe Jiménez. All in all, though, not bad for a 25-year-old.

In fact, of the 39 pitches Snell threw on Tuesday, just one — the one Willson Contreras deposited into the left-field seats — was hit in the air at all. The rest were either taken or, in the cases of Báez and Freeman, hit into the ground. I want to fixate on this for a moment because I think it’s at least somewhat relevant to Snell’s breakout 2018, in which he’s finally managed to pitch ahead of his peripherals (and up to his potential) to the tune of a nifty 2.27 ERA in 119 big-league innings. After long being part of the future for Tampa Bay, Snell is now firmly part of the club’s present and has established himself — albeit tenuously, for the moment — a place among the top-25 or -30 starters in the game. But how?

Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

On July 10th, the Brewers were in Miami to face the Marlins in a game that didn’t seem to have anything of note going into it. Jhoulys Chacin was facing Pablo Lopez, there were no stats leaders in the game, and playoff spots weren’t directly at stake. After both teams put up a run in the first inning, J.T. Riddle stepped in and whacked a slider in the middle of the zone to center field.

Okay, “whacked” might be an exaggeration. It exited the bat at only 71.1 mph and, with a launch angle of 30 degrees, represented a pretty standard short fly ball. Fortunately for Riddle, it was well placed and landed in front of the center fielder for a single. Despite Starlin Castro coming around to score and giving the Marlins an early 2-1 lead, it would ultimately go for naught: the Brewers put up four in the top of the second and went on to an easy 8-4 win.

Seems like a throwaway single in a relatively meaningless game, right? On the one hand, yes. On the other, there’s something interesting in that moment, and it has nothing to do with Riddle or the Marlins. Rather, it’s an interesting event for Brewers center fielder Keon Broxton. “But why?” I hear you say. “He didn’t catch the ball. Sure, it looks like he considered diving there for a brief second, but he didn’t and let the ball land.” However, the fact that the ball landed is what’s notable. That bloop single is the only ball hit to Broxton in 2018 — with a catch probability greater than 0% — that he didn’t catch. And he was only a couple of strides from reaching it at that! In a part-time role, necessitated by his poor hitting and the Brewers’ very crowded outfield, Broxton is putting up an unprecedented defensive season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not all opponents are created equal, nor has that ever been truer than in baseball’s current era of imbalanced schedules and interleague play. While strength of schedule can be a modest factor for a club, it has the potential to influence rest-of-season results. Now, with the All-Star break about to conclude, seems like an appropriate time to check in and see which teams can expect scheduling headwinds and tailwinds in the second half.

Many in the audience are probably familiar with FanGraphs’ projected standings and playoff odds. Many might also wonder what the difference is between the two. Briefly stated, the latter accounts for strength of schedule, while the former is presented independently of scheduling. The projected standings attempt to measure true talent based upon projections and our best guesses at playing-time distributions. Art and science. Click here for a full explanation of the secret sauce.

To understand what kind of bump teams can expect from schedule strength in the second half relative to their present level of talent, we can simply calculate the difference between the rest-of-season, projected-standings wins and rest-of-season projected wins from the playoff odds. That difference is presented in the following chart. (Note: data doesn’t reflect the Manny Machado or Brad Hand trades, so numbers might vary slightly now.)

While these projected-win advantages are relatively modest and most strength-of-schedule adjustments don’t exceed a single win in either direction, scheduling often has a bigger impact on second-half performance than any trade-deadline addition. The impact of the trade deadline is often overrated. The deadline quite possibly matters less than ever. There have been only seven players traded over the past five seasons who have added two or more wins to their new clubs in the second half. Not all of them are negligible, of course. The addition of Justin Verlander last fall was integral to the Astros’ world-championship season. The quality of competition is typically a significant factor, however.

Read the rest of this entry »

On the Tuesday prior to the All-Star break, at a game which this author observed from the Progressive Field press box, Trevor Bauer left his start after eight innings with the Indians holding a 4-0 lead. Then a call to the bullpen, complete with a miscommunication error, followed. Dan Otero faced Joey Votto. The Indians lost. It was not necessarily a great surprise: so often something has gone amiss for Cleveland this year after such calls to the bullpen.

As readers of this Web site are likely aware, the Indians’ bullpen has struggled mightily this season, sitting in the bottom quartile by many notable bullpen skill metrics.

The group ranks 28th in WAR (-0.9), 23rd in WPA (-1.07), 29th in ERA (5.28), and 29th in FIP (4.85). There has not been any positive regression, either. Over the past 30 days, the Cleveland relief corps has posted a 4.87 ERA, a 5.10 FIP, and a -0.15 WPA.

Bullpens are fickle beasts. The Indians’ 27th-ranked left-on-base percentage (68.7%) suggests some poor first-half fortune was bound for second-half positive regression. Oliver Perez and Neil Ramirez have been useful finds, with Ramirez perhaps building on his physical talents by learning more how to harness his high-spin fastball and breaking ball in concert. But the Indians had a clear manpower shortage in their bullpen, particularly with Andrew Miller still sidelined and out for much of the first half.

As the All-Star break approached, it felt like the Indians had to do something. Baseball knew the Indians had to do something, so if the Indians were to do something, it was not going to be done cheaply. And on Thursday, the Indians did something.

Read the rest of this entry »

As is the annual tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the week of the All-Star Game — while (some of) the industry pauses to take a metaphorical breather — to take stock of the top-50 trade assets in the sport. For more context on exactly what we’re trying to do here, see the honorable-mentions post linked at the top of the page.

For this post and the others in this series, I’ve presented a graphic (by way of the wizard Sean Dolinar) breaking down each player’s objective skill level (represented, in this case, by a five-year WAR projection from ZiPS), contract/team-control details, rank in last year’s series, and then year-by-year details of age/WAR/contract through 2023, although a couple players have control beyond those five years. For those readers who are partial to spreadsheets rather than blocks of text, I’ve also included all the players we’ve ranked so far are in grid format at the bottom of the post.

The ZiPS WAR forecasts did influence the rankings a bit: for players who were bunched together, it acted as an impartial tiebreaker of sorts, but the industry opinions I solicited drove the rankings.

With that said, let’s get to the next 10 spots on the Trade Value list this year.

Torres was our 12th-ranked prospect entering the year and, while that top tier has mostly stayed where they are (except for party-crashed Juan Soto), there’s been a shuffle of the name up top. Torres is one of the players to whom I refer in the introduction who wouldn’t have appeared on this list before the season began (although he would’ve been in the mix for an honorable mention) but whom it would be insane to exclude now. The difference? Just 63 big-league games. If Torres had no pedigree and was pulling some Shane Spencer or Bo Hart business, this wouldn’t be the case, as his age, pedigree, and track record have all suggested this sort of thing was on the table.

Read the rest of this entry »

Among qualified hitters, Manny Machado currently ranks eighth in baseball in wRC+. He ranks 12th in baseball in WAR, despite some ugly defensive numbers that might not reflect his actual talent. This isn’t just a flash in the pan, either; the projections the rest of the way have Machado as a top-ten value. Which is all to say, Manny Machado is all kinds of good. He’s an incredible player months away from becoming a free agent, and it’s been clear he’d be traded since shortly after the season began. It was only a question of where, and for how much. Today we have our answers.

Machado plays for the Dodgers now. The Dodgers had been thought of as a favorite from the moment they lost Corey Seager. They held off for a while — maybe the Orioles couldn’t pull the trigger, or maybe the Dodgers thought they might clever their way in another direction. We are, though, where many people assumed we would eventually be. The Dodgers have rented a new superstar, and the Orioles’ rebuild is finally underway. It will never hurt worse than it hurts at this instant.

Dodgers get:

• Manny Machado

Orioles get:

• Yusniel Diaz
• Dean Kremer
• Zach Pop
• Rylan Bannon
• Breyvic Valera

With the trade, we learn more about the price of a star-level rental. Let it not be suggested the Dodgers got Machado for cheap. You could see all five of the players going the other way reaching the majors. In rumors, Machado had been linked to teams like the Phillies, Brewers, and Diamondbacks. That’s undoubtedly part of the whole idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first month of the season was marked by cold weather throughout much of the country. It seemed to have an adverse affect on offense, with power numbers particularly affected. MLB players put up an isolated-power figure of .156 this March and April, which was the lowest mark since April of 2016. Rob Arthur, who has performed extensive research on the juiced ball, noticed the ball wasn’t traveling quite as far in early April even after accounting for weather — this despite a barrage of homers in the spring. Alex Chamberlain conducted some research of his own and determined hard-hit balls and barrels weren’t doing as much damage as in previous seasons, and he wondered if baseballs had been de-juiced. It’s an interesting question that deserves further research.

Chamberlain speculated that MLB had taken the juice out of the ball, potentially through the use of humidors. He found that hitters had to hit the ball harder to get it out of the park. He also observed that, when controlling for exit velocity and launch angle, batted balls weren’t quite doing the same damage as in years past. He concluded that, since we are now well past the cold-weather days of April, the change in batted balls this season is meaningful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, the Cardinals fired manager Mike Matheny. Several teams are and were doing worse than the Cardinals in the standings, but then, the Cardinals hold themselves to a certain standard, and there were mounting concerns regarding not only Matheny’s strategy, but also leadership skills. The clubhouse seemed to be fracturing around him, so management pulled the trigger in the hopes that the season and roster might be salvaged. The response was immediate, and nearly unanimous: It was about time. Over the years, no other manager seemed to attract such a degree of internet criticism.

In a podcast after the firing, Ben Lindbergh and myself wondered who might take Matheny’s place. Not with the Cardinals — that’s Mike Shildt — but on the internet at large. Matheny was probably the most criticized manager in baseball. Now he’s out of work, which means someone else will become the most criticized manager in baseball. Who, though, will it actually be? That conversation led me to this broader polling project. This felt like a question to take straight to the FanGraphs community.

If you’ve been around for any length of time, you know how these things work. Below, you will find a poll for every team. There are actually two polls for the Cardinals. For the sake of consistency, I have to ask about Shildt, but I’m also asking about Matheny, despite the fact that he’s gone. Anyway, for each poll, the question is simple: What do you think of the manager? We don’t talk about managers here a whole lot, but they wouldn’t get paid what they do if they didn’t matter, and I want to evaluate the landscape of community opinions.

I’d ask that you only vote in polls for teams that you care about and follow pretty closely. If you don’t have much of an opinion, that’s fine, and I’m collecting that information, too. Don’t worry if you don’t know whether a manager is actually good. We don’t know if any managers are actually good or actually bad. I just want to know what you all think, because you know more about your own managers than I do. So who am I to pretend I’m all-knowing?

As far as the question is concerned, keep in mind the extent of a manager’s responsibilities. First and foremost, a manager is supposed to serve as a leader of men. Do you sense that a given manager is an effective leader? An effective communicator? The strategy does also matter, too. Do you love or hate how a given manager uses his bullpen? Does he seem particularly creative, or especially stubborn? Compare the current manager to previous managers. Compare to other active managers, if you’d like. I know it basically comes down to gut feelings, but if you have a gut feeling, I want to record it. God knows I can never get enough of another polling project.

Thank you all in advance for your participation. We’ll look at the results either later this week, or early next week. Then we’ll see which manager might take Matheny’s place as an internet punching bag. And we’ll look at everybody else, as well. Who doesn’t love a 1-through-30 ranking? With your assistance, we’ll have that very thing coming up.

Read the rest of this entry »