Everton-Bournemouth stands out among today’s Premier League matchups, as the former will secure a return to England’s elite division with a win (they could also survive with a loss or a draw, but only if both Leeds and Leicester City likewise fail to win). Everton FC, which is located in Liverpool, was last relegated below the top flight in 1951.

As most EPL fans are aware, Everton’s home grounds, Goodison Park, are located less than a mile from Anfield, the historic home of Liverpool FC. They also know that the principal owner of Everton’s longtime arch rival is John Henry, whose Fenway Sports Group purchased the more-ballyhooed of the two clubs in 2010.

According to a new book by Bruce Schoenfeld, the acquisition happened only after initial reluctance from FSG’s ultimate decision-maker. As chronicled in Game of Edges: The Analytics Revolution and the Future of Professional Sports, Henry proclaimed the following during a business meeting held to assess the possible purchase:

“But I don’t want to own a soccer team.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. 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 »

Carlos Correa has foot problems. No, we’re not talking about the concerns that scuttled his preliminary agreements on a pair of contracts in excess of $300 million this past winter. Those centered around the risk of future problems with his right foot, a legacy of the fractured fibula he sustained in 2014. Correa, who was scratched from the lineup for Tuesday’s game against the Giants and sat out Wednesday as well, is currently dealing with issues in his left foot and is likely to wind up on the injured list, stalling his recovery from a very slow start to his second season with the Twins.

On Monday night at Target Field, Correa roped a double to left field off the Giants’ Sean Manaea. He came into second standing up, but as he explained on Tuesday, he took an odd step rounding first base, whereupon his left heel began to bother him. He gutted out the remainder of the game but was in more pain the following morning and, after undergoing an MRI that revealed inflammation in his heel, was scratched from Tuesday’s game.

On Wednesday, Correa was diagnosed with a muscle strain in his left arch as well as plantar fasciitis, the inflammation of the thick band of tissue that connects the heel bone to the toes. The team has not decided whether he’ll be placed on the IL, and at least as of Tuesday, he harbored hopes of returning for this weekend’s series against the Blue Jays. Manager Rocco Baldelli was less sanguine, telling reporters, “I think we get to Friday and some of our decisions might be made for us.”

Even leaving aside the strain, plantar fasciitis isn’t something that’s going to dissipate in a couple of days. The Baseball Prospectus Recovery Dashboard contains 13 instances of players going on the IL for plantar fasciitis since 2016 (though none for 2020). Those 13 stints averaged 35 days, with a low of 12 (John Lackey in 2016), a median of 30, and a high of 85 (Harrison Bader last year).

Again, this is the opposite foot from the one that led the Giants and the Mets to pull their respective offers — 13 years and $350 million for the former, $12 years and $315 million for the latter — due to concerns that emerged during his pre-signing physicals this past winter. Those concerns could be traced back to 2014, when as a 19-year-old prospect at High-A Lancaster, Correa caught his cleat in a base as he slid, fracturing his right fibula, damaging ligaments, and requiring the surgical insertion of a plate in his ankle. Though he’s never missed a major league game traceable to those injuries, both teams got spooked. Once the Mets backed away, Correa returned to the Twins, with whom he spent 2022, via a six-year, $200 million deal that has vesting and club options that could reach a maximum value of $270 million over 10 years.

While Correa’s current woes aren’t related to those previous concerns, the fact does remain that he’s had a hard time staying on the field. He’s topped 150 games only once, playing 153 as a 21-year-old in 2016, and averaged just 116 games in the five non-pandemic seasons since. What still appears to be a Hall of Fame career in the making thanks to his excellent play at a young age — early in his age-28 season, he’s already tied for 34th in JAWS at the position, 10 spots ahead of Omar Vizquel, and could pass the likes of Miguel Tejada and Nomar Garciaparra by the time he’s 30 — can only withstand so many roadblocks on the way to Cooperstown.

If Correa winds up on the IL, he’ll fall short of 150 games again. Even if he misses a comparatively short amount of time — six of the 13 stints were 20 days or fewer — that’s a blow to the Twins, who at 26–24 lead the AL Central by three games but have been in a slide lately. After going 17–12 in March and April, they’re 9–12 this month and had lost three in a row and five out of six before beating the Giants, 7–1, on Wednesday. Kyle Farmer started at shortstop, as he had done on Tuesday and April 9–12, when Correa missed four games due to back spasms. Even with those outages, Correa entered Thursday tied with Byron Buxton for the team lead in plate appearances (192) and 41 innings ahead of any other Twin in defensive innings (376.1).

That said, Correa has been off to a slow start, hitting just .213/.302/.396 with six homers and a 94 wRC+, though lately he had been trending upwards, with a .227/.326/.453 (114 wRC+) line in May after a dismal .202/.283/.351 (77 wRC+) line in April. His numbers have improved notably since the point just over two weeks ago when he had a .185 batting average and conceded, “I’d boo myself, too, with the amount of money I’m making if I’m playing like that and I’m in the stands.”

Correa’s .244 xBA and .410 xSLG suggest his overall numbers should be at least a bit better. On Monday, Esteban Rivera examined the shortstop’s early-season struggles, pointing out that his Statcast percentile rankings — 67th for hard-hit rate, 80th for barrel rate, 94th for maximum exit velocity, with only a 50th percentile for average exit velo out of the ordinary — offer reassurance that he’s still hitting the ball hard. He’s hitting to the opposite field more often (32.8%, well above his career 27,1%), though Rivera was able to tease out of the data the likelihood that a flatter swing and contact deeper within the strike zone are contributing to less impactful contact even when pulling the ball — a matter of timing, but probably a transient one.

The whole piece is worth a read. One thing I will note is that Correa’s oppo/pull imbalance was really an April thing (30.8% pull rate, 45.8% oppo) that had disappeared this month (47.2% pull, 15.1% oppo). Here’s a look at his rolling 15-game rates over the past two seasons:

And here’s a look at his rolling xwOBA:

Beyond his performance, Correa’s injury comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Twins. Second baseman Jorge Polanco, utilityman Nick Gordon, and corner outfielders Trevor Larnach and Max Kepler are all on the 10-day IL, and none has a clear timetable to return. Kepler and Polanco both have left hamstring strains, though both are considered mild. Larnach is battling pneumonia. Gordon is out with a fractured right tibia sustained when he fouled a ball off his leg and will be down for quite awhile. Additionally, Joey Gallo missed Wednesday’s game due to left hamstring soreness but is hoping to avoid an IL stint.

In Correa’s absence, the Twins are likely to continue rolling with Farmer, who’s currently hitting .274/.326/.405 (105 wRC+) and has split his time between third base, second base, and shortstop. The Twins acquired the versatile 32-year-old from the Reds with the belief that he would be their shortstop this year after Correa opted out of his contract, one year into the three-year, $105.3 million deal he signed shortly after the lockout ended in March 2022.

Given the slew of injuries, it’s worth noting that as of next Monday, Royce Lewis will be eligible for activation. The first pick of the 2017 draft tore his right ACL for the second time in a year and a half last June, just 12 games into his first stint in the majors (and three innings into his first major league appearance in center field), during which he hit an impressive .300/.317/.550 in 41 PA. While it’s tantalizing to imagine the Twins taking the wraps off of a player who placed 55th on our Top 100 Prospects list this spring, Lewis has just eight games of his rehab stint under his belt, the last six at Triple-A St. Paul, and while he’s hitting .333/.375/.700 through 32 PA, the Twins don’t sound inclined to rush him back. “We’ll see what he’s doing when the rehab assignment comes to an end and we have to make a decision, or whenever that time is when he’s physically and repetition-wise ready,” Baldelli said. More, via TwinCities.com:

“If Byron Buxton goes on the IL, the first day Byron Buxton is ready to come back, he’ll be back — and he’ll be hitting second or third or fourth. Correa, something similar,” Baldelli said. “But Royce, I can’t put Royce or any young player in that same type of conversation.

“He’s playing well right now, I think he’s swinging the bat well. He’s physically doing just as we would have hoped.”

If Correa does require an IL stint, obviously that increases the likelihood of Lewis turning up in the near future. In the meantime, the Twins have a difficult stretch of games ahead of them, with five of their next six series against teams with winning records: the Blue Jays (six games), Rays, Astros, and Brewers. The other is against the Guardians, who are just 21–28 and 4.5 games out of first in the AL Central but are probably the biggest threat to Minnesota in the division. If they’re lucky, the Twins will have Correa’s help for at least some of that.

Logan Gilbert discussed his new changeup in detail when he was featured here at FanGraphs 12 months ago. Not satisfied with the one he’d been throwing, the Seattle Mariners right-hander had gone to “more of a traditional circle,” a grip he felt would yield better command and consistency. His stated goals included upping the pitch’s usage from 8% (it had been 7.8% in 2021) to 10-15%.

A certain amount of success followed — opposing hitters batted .125 with a .122 wOBA against the pitch — but Gilbert’s goals went largely unmet. The 6-foot-6 hurler never felt completely comfortable with the revamped offering, and by season’s end, his changeup usage was still a meager 8%. Instead of becoming a reliable weapon, it remained little more than an infrequently used, hit-or-miss option in his arsenal.

As pitching nerds are wont to do — and Gilbert certainly qualifies as such — he went back to the drawing board. The righty traded in his circle change for a splitter over the offseason, and the results have been just what he was looking for. He has been comfortably throwing his new weapon 12.7% of the time, and it has yielded a paltry .111 batting-average-against and an equally impressive .111 wOBA.

Gilbert explained the successful transition from his changeup to his splitter when Seattle visited Boston last week. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »