Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. 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 »

Only 62 men and 20 women have scored a goal in a FIFA World Cup Final. It’s a rare achievement that holds a sacred place in sports history. Being the starting pitcher in a World Baseball Classic final is a bit less prestigious — at least for now, check back with me in 60 years to know for sure — but only 10 people can say they’ve done it.

Among them, Diamondbacks right-hander Merrill Kelly. “I’ve said it a million times before, but I’m super grateful I was able to be a part of it. Just the clubhouse in general, the quality of players on that team — by far the best team I’ve ever been on and it isn’t close,” he says. “Obviously, we would’ve liked it to go a different way in the last game.”

The circumstances that led to Kelly starting that game are interesting. When Team USA was setting up its rotation for the group stage, Kelly lobbied manager Mark DeRosa for the toughest assignment of pool play: Mexico. That start went to Padres right-hander Nick Martinez, who got crushed in an 11-5 loss. (This result led to Kelly being on the receiving end of some good-natured trash talk when he and Team Mexico center fielder Alek Thomas returned to Diamondbacks camp.)

When Kelly picked up a crucial win in the pool finale against Colombia three day days later, there was a silver lining to not getting his preferred rotation spot.

“One of the things DeRosa told me to console me was if I pitched against Colombia at home, that would line me up for the championship as well,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a few star shortstops off to slow starts with the bat this season. Trea Turner and Willy Adames are two of them, but the one I want to focus on for this piece is Carlos Correa. Through Saturday’s games, he ranked 11th among qualified shortstops with a 90 wRC+. The good news is that his defense and speed look great! But 2023 represents the slowest start at the plate of his career. Over a quarter of the way through the season, Correa is still looking to turn it around with the stick.

Like many of the Padawans of the Astros’ hitting development system over the last 10 years, Correa has always run above-average whiff and strikeout rates. That’s the M.O. of the core of hitters who came up in Houston – they don’t strike out too much and still hit for good power. Correa has typically paired that with above-average walk rates as well, and this year is no different. But for the first time since 2016, Correa is running a 39th-percentile whiff rate and a 38th-percentile strikeout rate. So what’s going on?

My first thought was to see if Correa has experienced any deterioration in his bat speed. Sometimes hitters lose a bit of bat speed and take a second to adjust; while that adjustment is ongoing, their whiffs tick up. But Correa’s bat speed indicators are all fairly typical for him. Here are some peripherals showing where Correa stands relative to his peers over the last few seasons:

Nothing out of the ordinary! Other than a slight downtick in average exit velocity, everything still looks darn good for Correa. The decrease in average exit velocity is probably indicative of more mishits than usual, but it’s a good sign that he is still capable of hitting the ball as hard as anybody. The next step is to check in on my hunch of him producing more mishits. Below are some additional details on his batted ball profile:

Right away, my eyes are drawn to Correa’s opposite field and popup rates. Correa has had the greatest success when he has kept his opposite field mark under 30%; the uptick here is worth looking into. It doesn’t appear to be related to Correa’s swing decisions — his chase and swing rates are in line with career norms. That makes me think it could be related to his contact point, which is tied into his swing mechanics. We might expect this type of change if his contact has gotten a little too deep and Correa isn’t impacting the ball on the upswing as frequently; we’d also expect more mishits, as seen in the increase in popup rate. Making deeper contact isn’t always a bad thing, but it seems like Correa’s bat angle is being thrown off by the change in depth. While we don’t have public access to contact point (the depth in the strike zone at contact), we can look at Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) courtesy of SwingGraphs.

VBA is the angle of a player’s bat at impact. A player’s average VBA doesn’t always tell the entire story because the number is highly dependent on pitch height. But it can help inform our understanding of fluctuations in a player’s bat path and contact point. If a player swings at higher pitch heights on average, their VBA should decrease. If they swing at lower pitch heights on average, it should increase. It’s about a hitter matching their barrel to the pitches they see. If they’re making deeper contact than usual, you’d expect their VBA to decrease because they haven’t gotten to their peak upswing. Typically, a hitter is better able to get their bat on an upswing farther out in front of the plate.

First, I’ll try to control for pitch height to make sure my hunch is valid. Using Baseball Savant, I searched for the average height of the all pitches Correa made contact with last season and this season. In 2022, that mark was 2.54 feet, while this year, it’s 2.52 feet – a negligible difference. Because of that, you’d expect that his VBA year-over-year would be somewhat close as well. In 2022, his average VBA was 33.6 degrees, and fluctuated between 33.5 and 34.1 degrees in the final three months of the season. This year, that number is 30.6 degrees. Basically, his swing is flatter at impact than it was last year, which perfectly tracks with making deeper contact, adding popups, and increasing his oppo rate.

Correa may be expecting his barrel to be in one place when it’s actually in another. For a hitter with fantastic barrel accuracy, this difference might well be enough to throw off his sense of how his body is moving. In this case, his increased whiff rate and career-high popup rate make sense. To provide even more context, we can look at how Correa fares when pulling the ball. If he’s making deeper contact than usual to the pull side, I’d expect there to be a change from previous seasons. The below table focuses on Correa’s hard-hit balls (>= 95 mph) to the pull side from 2021 through this season:

Well that’s interesting! Correa isn’t getting nearly as much out of these batted balls as he has in the past. His average launch angle has decreased by over 4.2 degrees since last year, and his xwOBACON has shot down as a result. This tracks with the theory of him having a deeper contact point than in the past and explains why Correa’s overall xwOBACON sits at .385 despite an overall barrel rate of 80%. That’s still pretty good, but for a player who routinely runs an xwOBACON greater than .415, it’s a bit underwhelming. If Correa can adjust his timing to be earlier and move his impact point further in front of the plate, I’d expect this to turn around quickly. He is still hitting the ball as hard as ever has. Sometimes a hitter takes a little more time than usual to get their timing down, and that’s what I’m leaning towards here. What’s more, against fastballs this year, Correa’s xwOBA is .372, but his actual wOBA is .292. On top of his timing being slightly off, he has gotten a bit unlucky.

All of this is to say, we shouldn’t be too worried about Correa’s profile. His 107 wRC+ and .224 ISO in the month of May suggest that he is working his way back to his career norms. This is still a very good hitter, one we should expect to continue to be as successful at the plate as he always has been.

All statistics are through May 20.
An edit was made to reflect that the relationship between VBA and pitch height is inverse.

Andre Pallante has a unique delivery and an atypical movement profile. He’s also adept at killing worms. Since debuting with the St. Louis Cardinals last April, the 24-year-old right-hander has a a 64.6% ground-ball rate, which ranks second only to Houston’s Framber Valdez among hurlers with at least 100 innings. This year he’s at 69.4%, behind only Baltimore’s Yennier Cano (minimum 15 innings). Making those numbers especially notable is the fact that Pallante’s primary fastball is a four-seamer. More on that in a moment.

Drafted in the fourth round by the Cardinals out of UC Irvine four years ago, Pallante was a starter throughout the minors, but he’s primarily worked out of the bullpen since reaching St. Louis. All told, he is 8-5 with a 3.34 ERA and a 4.17 FIP over 61 appearances, all but 10 of them as a reliever. And again, his delivery is unique. Last summer, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen described it as “looking almost more like a tennis serve than a pitcher’s mechanics.”

I asked Pallante for the story behind his pitching motion when the Cardinals visited Fenway Park last week.

“Honestly, I feel like there really isn’t a story,” replied the righty, who is 2-0 with a 4.50 ERA in 16 innings so far this season. “It’s just kind of always how I’ve pitched. For as long as I can remember, it’s how I’ve thrown from the mound.”

There actually is a story. Elaborating, the Mission Viejo native explained that he began long-tossing when he was around 12 years old, this at the behest of his father — “a pretty big in-taker of baseball pitching books” — with a goal of building arm strength. The end result, as Pallante put it, is “pitching mechanics that are kind of from long-toss mechanics, trying to throw the ball up in the air as high and hard as I can.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve made another small series of updates to the Top 100 Prospects list, which you can find on The Board. For the first time this season, I’ve reshuffled some of the names in the top 15 to 20 spots. Mostly, I’ve done some incremental reordering near the top based on health and current level of play. For example, Mets catcher Francisco Álvarez, who has kept his head above water after being thrust into the primary catching role in Flushing, has hopped over Jordan Walker, who’s struggling to get comfortable on both offense and defense down in Memphis. Neither player’s evaluation has had an overhaul — this is just a better representation of how things line up right now.

The biggest mover in the 60 FV tier is Diamondbacks center fielder Druw Jones, who falls toward the back of that group due to his quad strain and early-season strikeout issues. It could make sense for Jones to rehab in extended spring training or during the early part of the Complex League schedule and hit his way back to Visalia. It sounds like he will be back sooner than Phillies righty Andrew Painter, who remains at the very back of the 60 FV tier while he continues to rehab from a UCL injury.

Changes to the top of the 55 FV tier buoy the hitters who are performing toward the top of that group. The players from no. 14 to 18 overall (Marcelo Mayer, Brooks Lee, Endy Rodríguez, Brett Baty, Josh Jung) now stack ahead of Jordan Lawlar and Diego Cartaya, who are both striking out a lot at Double-A. The other changes within the 55 FV tier come toward the back of that group. Red Sox outfielder Miguel Bleis and Pirates infielder Termarr Johnson slide about 20 spots (the two of them were stacked at no. 19 and 20 overall), while Rays infielder Junior Caminero (who had been floating among the high-variance hitters in the back third of the 50 FV tier for about a year now) moves up from 110 overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Shohei Ohtani had a weird night in Baltimore on Monday, at times spectacular and at times unsettling. As a hitter, he went 4-for-5 with a huge three-run homer and three runs scored in the Angels’ 9-5 win. As a pitcher, he matched a career high by serving up three homers and allowing five runs in seven innings, continuing a string of shaky outings. One can’t blame the guy for having some mixed emotions.

Ohtani the pitcher was not at his best, yielding a two-run homer to Adam Frazier in the second inning, erasing a 1-0 lead. He walked Jorge Mateo to lead off the second inning, then allowed a two-run homer to Anthony Santander, costing him a 3-2 lead. By the time he got around to giving up his third homer of the night, he at least had a 9-4 lead and the bases empty in the fifth inning when Cedric Mullins took him over the wall; he would retire seven of the eight batters he faced after that to end his night on the mound. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s officially hot start season. Now is the time when we write about players who have rocketed out of the blocks, then hope beyond hope that they don’t tumble to the track immediately after our articles get published. Today I’m looking at Jonah Heim, the Rangers’ switch-hitting catcher.

Heim has started off the 2023 season in a big way. Then again, maybe that’s not news, as Jonah Heim just has a tendency toward bigness. He’s 6-foot-4, which really should be too tall to be a catcher. Seriously, here he is (crouched!) next to Nick Madrigal just over a month ago:

I would pay good money to watch Heim pat Madrigal on the head and address him as “Scout.” Last year, the Rangers backstop accrued 2.8 WAR, which made him a top-10 catcher in baseball. It’s now May 17, and he’s already put up 1.9 WAR, ninth among all position players and second only to fellow-former-Athletic Sean Murphy among catchers. He’s slashing .313/.368/.519, up from .227/.298/.399 in 2022.

Last week, Esteban Rivera included Heim in an article about hitters who had improved after adding some movement to their swings this season. At that point, I was also interested in Heim’s breakout, but while I was watching him I got distracted by one of his very twitchy teammates. Heim’s production at the plate has improved in every single season of his career, and that trend will almost certainly continue this year. Even if his production were to fall off a cliff starting today, he’s already banked 144 plate appearances with a 144 wRC+.

When we talk about player breakouts, we look for reasons to believe that whatever changes they’ve made will stick around. We look for skills and tendencies that they haven’t demonstrated before, specifically the underlying metrics that tend to stabilize more quickly. Toward that end, I’m going to show you an extremely busy graph. Feel free to give it a quick glance and move on. Its purpose is to show you that almost nothing Heim is doing right now is completely without precedent:

Heim is at a career high or low in these metrics, but it’s worth keeping in mind that over the course of his young career, he’s already logged stretches at or near his current rate in all of them. If you’re looking for something in the numbers that says Heim is a completely new hitter, you’re likely to come up empty.

As a note, in this article I won’t spend much time separating out Heim’s approach or results from the left and right sides, because he’s only had 36 plate appearances as a righty. Almost all of the trends I’ll mention are true on both sides of the plate, but there’s just not enough going on from the right side to draw separate conclusions.

Let’s start with Heim’s approach. He’s been more aggressive at the plate, but he’s also been taking the first pitch more than ever:

If you ignore 0-0 counts, his swing rate on the pitches over the heart of the zone is four points higher than it was last year. Overall, his swing rate on pitches that Baseball Savant classifies as meatballs is up more than 10 points.

This increased aggression has lowered Heim’s contact rate just a tiny bit, so his walk rate has dropped by a tick while his strikeout rate has held steady. However, it’s worth noting that Heim’s contact rate has dropped significantly on pitches outside the zone and risen on pitches inside the zone. A couple weeks ago, I noted that Randy Arozarena was doing the exact same thing: “He’s making more contact in the zone and whiffing more when he chases. I don’t know how repeatable that is, but it’s a neat trick if you can pull it off.” The trick was not, in fact, repeatable for Arozarena. Since then his zone contact rate has crashed, and it’s now to five points beneath its 2022 level. That’s definitely something to keep an eye on for Heim, but I’ll also note that he’s seeing an elevated number of pitches on the edge of the strike zone, and that’s likely the kind of statistical noise that could be affecting these numbers.

As I’m sure you’ve surmised, if Heim’s walk and strikeout rates haven’t changed much, then his newfound success must be driven by what happens when he puts the ball in play:

Well that definitely looks much better. Although Heim has not yet touched his max exit velocity from either 2022 or 2021, he’s hitting the ball harder, and he’s also barreling it up more often. Both his wOBA and his expected wOBA are more than 100 points better than they were last year. From both sides of the plate, Heim is hitting the ball in the air more, which is good, but we’re not just talking about average launch angle. We’re also talking about launch angle tightness. Take a look at his launch angle charts:

Heim has dropped the standard deviation of his launch angle by nearly six degrees, which is a huge amount. His popup rate is down 3.6 percentage points and his groundball rate is down 7.5. See the red area on the left, where all of Heim’s hits came in 2022? In 2023, that’s pretty much the only place he’s hitting the ball. In 2022, 55% of Heim’s batted balls came off the bat between 0-45 degrees. In 2023, it’s 73%. Jonah Heim is actually building the whole plane out of the black box.

It’s not just that Heim is hitting the ball in the air. Heim was already a pull hitter, but he’s increased his pull rate to 53.3%, eighth highest in the league. If you refer back to the busy graph at the beginning, you’ll note that his pull rate really took off early last summer. However, when it came to fly balls and line drives, he pulled the ball just 20% of the time last year. This year he’s at 52%. When he does pull the ball in the air, Heim’s performance is roughly the same as it was last year (although his expected stats are improved). It’s just that he’s doing that a lot more often.

As Esteban noted in his article, Heim’s swing adjustments have helped him reach pitches lower in the zone, which would help explain why he is missing less often against breaking stuff and hitting those breaking pitches 6 mph harder than he did last year. Here’s what that looks like in a heat map. Lots more contact at the bottom of the zone, even though his swing rate down there hasn’t changed nearly as dramatically:

Here’s one thing I find really interesting. So far I’ve been grouping Heim’s air balls together, but here’s what happens when you separate out his fly balls and his line drives:

Last year, Heim’s line drives were scorched at 96.5 mph, while his fly balls were hit at 89.9 mph, right around his average EV. This year, that trend has been completely reversed.

That’s probably a good thing. First, players hit a lot more fly balls than they do line drives. Second, as long as they’re not hit softly, line drives are always valuable. Despite dropping 6 mph, Heim’s line drives have only shed 23 points of xwOBA. Fly balls are more dependent on exit velocity to make it past outfielders and over the wall, so Heim’s xwOBA on them jumped more than 200 points. For both reasons, Heim has benefitted from allocating his EV where it can have the most impact.

Between this chart and his launch angle graphs, it seems reasonable to assume that Heim’s swing is geared more toward elevation than it was in the past. Last year, when he really got hold of a ball, he was hitting it at about 18 degrees. This year, his hardest hits have come anywhere between 16 and 34. However, his soft hit rate is also the lowest it’s ever been. Maybe it’s just that he’s just adding some liners by muscling a few more pitches over the infield than he used to, pitches that he might previously have popped up or rolled over. As I said at the beginning, most of Heim’s underlying metrics show him doing things that he’s been able to do before. Being aggressive while still walking and striking out at the same rate, pulling the ball in the air with power. Only time will tell whether he can keep them going at the same time.

What’s got four thumbs and is set up for a real doozy of a pitchers’ duel in Arlington this evening? That’s right, Nathan Eovaldi and Spencer Strider. These two are second and third in baseball in pitcher WAR, and have many things in common besides: They’re both right-handed starters with big fastball velocity who are pitching well now after struggling to stay healthy at times… Okay, that’s about all they have in common.

It’s a bit early in the season for any individual game to be a must-watch, particularly an interleague matchup between two teams with basically no history apart from the Mark Teixeira trade. But if you’ve got time to kill and no strong preference about which game to scroll down to on MLB.TV, this is set to be the best pitching matchup of the night, and one of the best of the entire season so far.

Strider has become one of the most internet-popular pitchers out there for three reasons. First and most important, he’s good. Second, Strider has the vibe of a cool nerd from the early 2010s. He and a friend, inspired by their frustration with Pitchfork’s album grades, maintain a detailed Google Sheet where they rank indie rock records. Baseball Twitter is full of lapsed emo kids with too much liberal arts education for their own good (including me), and these folks love nothing so much as a ballplayer who gives the impression of having read a book once. Read the rest of this entry »

Players the caliber of Juan Soto are rarely available via trade, so when the Padres acquired him via trade last summer from the drowning Nationals, it made a huge splash on the level of dropping a Sherman tank into your neighborhood swimming hole. But rather than continue his previous level of superstardom, he struggled to meet expectations in San Diego. His .236/.388/.390 line was still enough for a solid wRC+ of 130, but relative to his normal level of excellence, it’s hard to call that line anything but a disappointment.

Soto’s start in 2023, though, pales even next to his post-trade performance last year. April 17 may be the nadir of his career in San Diego: the Padres were shut out for the second game in a row, and he put up his fifth consecutive hitless game, leaving him with a triple-slash of .164/.346/.361. For the calendar year ending on that day, he was hitting .230/.391/.435 and had compiled 3.5 WAR — good enough for mere mortals, but not entities made of sterner stuff.

Around this time, Harold Reynolds talked a bit on MLB Network about Soto’s swing and the changes he was making. While I’ve criticized Reynolds plenty for his general analysis when it crosses into the jurisdiction of analytics, I bookmarked this video at the time, as the analysis rang true to me. He believed that Soto’s tinkering would pay dividends, and whether it’s a coincidence or not, he’s looked a lot more like the Soto we love over the last month. In 23 games since then and through Sunday’s action, he hit .321/.447/.571 and amassed 1.2 WAR, the kind of MVP-level production we’ve expected to see from him in mustard and brown and largely have not. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. 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 »