Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t know if this happens to my colleagues, but I get attached to the players I write about. I can’t help it. Cormac McCarthy once wrote, “Things separate from their stories have no meaning,” and I’ve found that learning a player’s story, even if it’s just the story of why they need to lay off the slider, is enough to imbue them with an extra layer of meaning. Last year, I wrote about Jose Altuve after both the ALDS and the ALCS. It made me feel more connected to him, and during the World Series, whenever he came to the plate when my fiancée was in the room, I’d say, “That’s my little guy!” I really said that (and she really married me anyway).
Back in spring training, I wrote up our Positional Power Rankings for third base. It was a real crash course. We had projections for 149 different third basemen, and I needed to learn enough about each of them to articulate an opinion on what they’d do this year and why. I learned a lot about what I value when it comes to player performance. The exercise also informed the way I’ve watched the game this year. Diving deep into a league of third basemen, I formed attachments to all these players, especially the young ones, as I read prospect evaluations and beat reports and thought about their potential. Now that we’re nearing the halfway mark, here’s an update on the rookies I’ve been rooting for. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
An empty major league stadium can evoke some unsettling sensations. I’ve been behind the scenes at numerous ballparks before, of course, but usually in the lead-up to or aftermath of a game. I know the low-grade background patter of concessions workers setting up and taking down stalls, the thump of the grounds crew packing the dirt around home plate, the smell of smoked meat on the grill.
During the week of the third annual MLB Draft Combine, Chase Field was a little different. The Cold Stone on the first base-side concourse still smelled delightfully of freshly-baked ice cream cones, even though the stall itself was buttoned up. The whizzing of an MLB Network camera drone was audible throughout the first two days of the combine, as was every crack of the bat and pop of the glove from batting practice, bullpens, and infield drills — even from a suite situated behind the right field foul pole on the stadium’s second level. A vivid palette of ambient noise, because a crowd of dozens, mostly scouts, wasn’t drowning it out.
Of the big four American men’s pro sports leagues, MLB was the last to organize a scouting combine for its draft-eligible prospects. While the NBA and NHL combines have their moments in the sun, the NFL’s is the cream of the crop, an event with almost four decades’ worth of folklore that generates a week’s worth of live TV content for the league’s cable channel, followed by months of buzz afterward. It is said to make and break prospects.
Baseball is a different beast than football; its schedule is unique, its athletes measured and evaluated differently. But 2023 represented a concerted effort by the league to attempt to make the combine into an event. Read the rest of this entry »
Buck Farmer is flying under the radar while making an impact in Cincinnati. Baseball’s hottest team went into yesterday having won 12 straight games, and the 32-year-old reliever had pitched in seven of them. Moreover, the Reds had been victorious in 14 of the last 15 contests he’d appeared in. Over those outings, Farmer was credited with two wins and a save while allowing just a pair of runs in 15 innings.
He’s been solid from the start. On the season — his second in Cincinnati after eight in Detroit — the Conyers, Georgia native has held opposing hitters to a .188 average while logging a 2.41 ERA over a team-high 35 appearances. Consistently pounding the zone with a three-pitch mix, he’s issued just 10 free passes while fanning 33 batters in 37-and-a-third innings. By most statistical markers, he’s never been better.
Farmer credits Cincinnati’s pitching program for much of his success.
“I think it’s the development here,” Farmer replied when asked what differentiates his current and former clubs. “[The Tigers] were starting to change over to a more analytical approach before I left, but I don’t think they’d quite made that adjustment yet. When I came here, they were already tuned in. DJ {Derek Johnson] and the other coaches are fully invested in us. They want us to grab a little bit more here and there, and that includes taking what we’re good at and trying to make it great.”
For Farmer, that meant reworking a pitch that has become a lethal weapon. Augmented by a four-seam fastball and a changeup, his slider has flummoxed hitters to the tune of an .091 average and a .212 slug. His whiff-rate with the offering is a heady 45.3%. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Jordan Romano is one of the best closers in baseball, but you wouldn’t know it from perusing your average sports page. He’s a quiet star, in the mildly pejorative sense often implied by “quiet” — not well-enough known, not well-enough talked about, somehow lacking in whatever je ne sais quoi that makes you a star.
Here’s the thing, though: that’s silly. At FanGraphs, we try to avoid that very way of thinking, and yet we’ve written almost nothing about Romano in the past few years. An interview here, a hockey anecdote there, the occasional fantasy piece — it’s not what you’d expect from a guy at the top of the bullpen hierarchy for a playoff team. I’m not kidding myself; this article is Canadian fan service. Let’s talk about what makes Romano so dang good, and ignore why audiences in America seem to ignore him.
If you’re looking at it from a pitch perspective, this one is pretty easy. Romano is good because he throws a hellacious fastball and backs it with an above-average slider. His fastball is a work of art. All the things you’ve heard about what makes a four-seamer good? He has them. He avoids the dreaded line of normality that plagues some heaters that underperform their radar gun numbers; his is mostly up-and-down. Per Baseball Savant, his fastball drops 1.7 inches less than the average four-seamer thrown with similar velocity and also gets 2.4 inches less arm-side fade. In other words, when he throws it to a righty, it ends up less inside than they expect, and also meaningfully higher. Read the rest of this entry »
Pitching is complicated. There are so many layers to it, including mechanics, sequencing, proprioception, supination/pronation… the list goes on and on. Depending on a player’s personality and knack for including analytical information in their learning and development process, digesting this information can be a battle. Over the years, we’ve seen Sonny Gray progress through this experience with multiple teams; now in Minnesota, it seems like he is hitting his peak. As David Laurila wrote, Sonny Gray is evolving as a pitcher.
That interview that David conducted with Gray is a must read. Having the player’s perspective on how they’ve thought through their own changes and development experience helps gives direction to an analyst, and it’s clear in that interview that Gray’s goal is to have a pitch that moves in almost any direction. As somebody who doesn’t have overwhelming fastball velocity (16th percentile), it’s crucial that he stays unpredictable and deceptive. That hasn’t been a problem for him in the past, but this year he has leveled up his diversification. Below is a plot of his pitch movement chart in 2023 (top) versus 2022 (bottom):
Last season, there were essentially two tiers of separation: fastballs in one area, breaking balls in another. For the most part, there isn’t much negative blending happening within either pitch group. The two-seamer has distinct horizontal separation from the four-seamer, and the curveball has vertical separation from the sweeper. The horizontal distribution of the sweeper is on the tail ends of the curveball; Gray manipulated the pitch to have more or less sweep than the curveball to ensure that separation. This year, he has taken his 2022 arsenal, improved upon it, and added two more effective pitches in the cutter and changeup.
In this interview with Rob Friedman, Gray goes into deep detail about the shape of each of his pitches and why he thought it would be valuable to include two new ones, particularly the cutter, in his repertoire, and about the value of his cutter serving as an in-between for the two fastballs and two breaking balls. From the hitter’s point of view, doing that complicates attacking or locking in on one zone or speed. If you’re a left-handed hitter sitting on a four-seam fastball on the inner third, a cutter could move in and jam your barrel or, if it has a little more vertical depth, slide right under. The same idea can be applied for expecting breaking balls; the cutter can stay up and freeze you instead of having the level of drop or sweep of a curveball or sweeper. In addition, the cutter velocity is just a few ticks faster than the two breaking balls and a few ticks slower than the two fastballs.
Gray has has done almost everything possible to assure he maintains deception. His release points are consistent. He has multiple layers of movement both vertically and horizontally. He can vary velocity and movement within a given pitch. If you were to build a pitcher who doesn’t have great velocity but can spin the heck out of the ball, this is a darn good blueprint.
It’s important to see exactly how Gray uses these pitches within the context of an at-bat. You can have all this movement and velocity diversity, but you still need to command each pitch and sequence correctly. I’ll start with an at-bat against a right-handed hitter.
Pitch 1 (0-0 count, four-seamer)
Pitch 2 (0-1 count, cutter)
Pitch 3 (0-2 count, curveball)
Pitch 4 (0-2 count, sweeper)
Pitch 5 (1-2 count, sweeper)
Gray has gotten his cutter usage up to 17.6% on the year; you should expect to see it only one or two times in an at-bat. But this at-bat against Yan Gomes is a perfect example of how the pitch allows him to progress with a four-seamer through to a sweeper. Gomes didn’t pull the trigger on the upper third four-seamer but did on a cutter that had enough separation to miss his barrel. Gray followed up with a curveball out of the same tunnel, and Gomes chopped it on the ground for a foul ball.
At this point, Gomes had failed to differentiate his swing enough to get his barrel to any of these pitches, and Gray still had the sweeper in his back pocket. The first he threw was backed up out of the zone, but the second was placed in the same tunnel as the other three pitches, and Gomes swung too early on it. Again, the cutter isn’t the main weapon here; it’s another layer to keep Gomes guessing.
Now, here is an example of how Gray used the pitch against a lefty:
Pitch 1 (0-0 count, curveball)
Pitch 2 (1-0 count, cutter)
Pitch 3 (1-1 count, curveball)
Pitch 4 (1-2 count, two-seamer)
This is one of my favorite sequences from any pitcher all year. After starting with a curveball out of the zone against Brandon Belt, Gray followed up with a cutter that stayed up. Belt was clearly prepared for a breaking ball of some sort based on his timing and swing path, but the cutter got above his barrel. Because Gray was able to keep the pitch in the zone, Belt’s eye level was changed, leading to him chasing the next curveball below the zone. With a 1–2 count and two bad swings from Belt, Gray could’ve gone in multiple directions but ultimately opted for a front-door running two-seamer at the knees. Why? Because Belt had showed Gray that his swing was geared for middle-of-the-zone loft; horizontal entry low was unhittable for that swing path if Gray could execute it, and that he did.
Gray’s -5 run value on his cutter is eighth in the league, right behind pitchers with established elite cutters like Kenley Jansen, David Robertson, Marcus Stroman, and Camilo Doval. To add such an effective pitch — a .231 batting average against, a .233 wOBA, and it doesn’t have bad splits, with a .153 wOBA and -2.4 run value versus lefties — into your arsenal this quickly is a career-changing development. All that, and I haven’t mentioned Gray’s changeup usage and effectiveness thus far (-1 run value). Having a sixth pitch with a .125 batting average against is a premium not many other pitchers in baseball have, even if you just occasionally flash it (and Gray has thrown it just 6.4% of the time).
Gray is on pace for the highest fWAR of his career and is a mere 0.4 wins behind the AL leader, Kevin Gausman. There may be some regression coming considering he has only given up one home run all season, but that is a skill he’s displayed his entire career anyways. If he can keep this up and stay healthy, he is in a for a career year.
Marcus Semien is up to his usual tricks. He’s eighth among all position players in WAR, comfortably the best on a first-place Rangers squad. For the third straight year and the fourth out of five, he’s on track to rack up four-plus WAR as one of the two best players on his team. For someone who didn’t post an above-average batting line until his seventh major league season, it’s an impressive accomplishment.
Perhaps more impressive to me: he’s doing it right under our noses, and no one seems to notice. Semien is good at everything but not in a way that adds up to a tremendous offensive line. His best skill might be durability. He’s clearly a very good player, but his particular set of skills are highlighted by the framework we grade him under. I’m interested in Semien as a player, and I’m also interested in why he’s the poster boy for both what WAR gets right and where it has limits.
Let’s start with how Semien does it. It’s fairly straightforward: he’s above average at every phase of the game. It begins with his plate discipline. To put it simply, he doesn’t make bad decisions about when to swing. In each of the past five years, he’s accomplished an impressive double: chasing fewer pitches than league average and simultaneously swinging at more in-zone pitches than league average. To state the obvious, that’s a great way to both rack up a pile of walks and avoid strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Jacques had an anything-but-ordinary big-league debut with the Boston Red Sox on Monday at Fenway Park. The 28-year-old southpaw not only entered a game against the Colorado Rockies with two outs and the bases loaded in the 10th inning; he did so in a downpour. Moreover, the first of the five pitches he threw came on a 1-0 count. Unbeknownst to Jacques until he returned to the dugout, he’d committed a pitch clock violation before the 20-second countdown had started. More on that in a moment.
Drafted 984th overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2016 out of Manhattan College, Jacques had been claimed off of waivers by the Red Sox last December. Almost exclusively a reliever since coming to pro ball, he’d made 146 appearances down on the farm, including 23 with Triple-A Worcester this season. If there were any nerves associated with his taste of high-leverage MLB action, he wasn’t letting on.
“Honestly, I didn’t have that much of an adrenaline spike,” the Shrewsbury, New Jersey native told me on Wednesday. “That’s not the time to be panicking. With the bases loaded, in the rain, you’ve just got to come in and pound the zone. Plus, having been in Yankee Stadium the previous three days — I got hot once — definitely helped my nerves. I was pretty locked in.”
That wasn’t necessarily the case in terms of a pitch clock rule that many fans aren’t even aware of. What happened was initially a mystery to the left-hander. Read the rest of this entry »
