Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

At FanGraphs, our headline WAR number for pitchers is based on FIP. Because of that, and because people enjoy debating and arguing, there’s a yearly refrain that you’ve probably heard. “FanGraphs pitching WAR only considers (X)% of what a pitcher does, how can that be used for value?” No one would dispute that year-one FIP does a better job of estimating year-two ERA than ERA does – or at least, not many people would – but the discussion around whether FIP does a good job of assigning year-one value is alive and well.

One reason for this view is pretty obvious. FIP considers home runs, strikeouts, walks, and hit batters to estimate pitcher production on an ERA scale. Our WAR does some fancy stuff in the background – it treats infield fly balls, which virtually never fall for hits, as strikeouts, and it adjusts for park and league. In the end, though, it’s estimating pitcher value using just three (well, actually four — HBPs always draw the short straw) outcomes. There are a lot of other outcomes in baseball!

In 2021, roughly 39% of plate appearances ended in a homer, strikeout, walk, hit batter, or infield pop up. One thing you could think, in recognition of that fact, is that FIP-based WAR doesn’t consider enough of a pitcher’s production. You wouldn’t use 40% of a hitter’s plate appearances to calculate their WAR, so why do it for pitchers? But that doesn’t actually make sense, as David Appelman pointed out to me recently. Assuming “average results on balls in play” is actually going to be pretty close for every pitcher, by definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Last fall, the Braves won a championship with an outfield that bore no resemblance to the one that they used for the first half of the 2021 season, as circumstances required president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos to perform an on-the-fly remake that yielded impressive results. In fact, two of the four outfielders he acquired in trade in July, Eddie Rosario and Jorge Soler, wound up winning MVP honors in the postseason, the former in the NLCS against the Dodges and the latter in the World Series against the Astros. Yet even with two of the principals whose absences necessitated that makeover — Ronald Acuña Jr. and Marcell Ozuna — back in action, this year’s outfield has been a major weakness for a team that has stumbled to an 11-15 start.

We’re still in small-sample territory to be sure — particularly with regards to the individual performances — but through Wednesday, Braves outfielders have hit a combined .191/.261/.331 for a 72 wRC+ in that role, the fifth-lowest mark in the majors. Worse, the team has dipped into the same player pool to cover its designated hitter spot, and they’ve done more sinking than swimming, hitting .171/.235/.226 for a 36 wRC+, the majors’ third-lowest mark. That lack of production has weighed down the team’s entire offense, which ranks 12th in the NL at 3.77 runs per game. Not to be outdone on the other side of the ball, Atlanta’s outfield is tied for last in the majors in both UZR (-6.3) and DRS (-7), though here I’ll remind everyone not to get overly-invested in four week’s worth of defensive metrics; both the outfield and DH spots are second-to-last in the majors in WAR, with -0.8 and -0.9, respectively. In Tuesday’s doubleheader loss to the Mets, their outfielders and DHs went a combined 4-for-28, though Travis Demeritte did drive in their only run that wasn’t accounted for by Matt Olson’s three-run homer, and Acuña collected one of their two extra-base hits outside of Olson’s pair. Read the rest of this entry »

Bob Melvin is more than a little familiar with curveballs. Now in his 19th season at the helm of a big-league club, the 60-year-old San Diego Padres manager logged over 2,000 plate appearances and was behind the dish for more than 4,600 innings during his playing career. Seeing action with seven different teams from 1985 to ’94, he caught numerous hurlers whose repertoires included plus benders.

Which pitchers have featured the most-impressive curveballs Melvin caught, attempted to hit, and that he’s viewed from his vantage point in the dugout? Moreover, how do the shapes and velocities of present-day curveballs compare to those of his playing days? Melvin did his best to answer those questions when the Padres visited Pittsburgh’s PNC Park over the weekend.

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David Laurila: Who had the best curveball you caught?

Bob Melvin: “I caught many guys with good curveballs, but none were better than Gregg Olson’s. I caught him a lot, and there were times you could literally hear it spinning coming to the plate. It was as 12–6 of a curveball that you could possibly see. He was able to throw it up top if he needed to, for a strike, but the big thing for him was the chase. Nowadays, you’re seeing a little different… a little tighter breaking ball, sometimes at the top of the zone by design. That’s one that’s really tough to lay off, especially if you’re trying to lay off the the high fastball.

“There are certain guys now that pitch strictly north-south. You see the catcher right in the middle of the plate. It’s a high fastball at the top of the zone, and then it’s either a curveball where they’re trying to nip the top or one where they’re trying to get the chase. It’s maybe a little different than back in the day, where there were more sweepers and everything was more down in the zone, unless it was for a first-pitch strike. If you look at Pierce Johnson, with us, his curveball is one of those that you think is going to break a little bit more, but it kind of stays at the top of the zone and you end up taking it for a strike.” Read the rest of this entry »

It would be an understatement to say that Eric Hosmer’s contract with the Padres has generally not worked out. Over the first four years of his eight-year, $144 million deal, the former Royal netted -0.1 WAR in over 2,000 plate appearances, making him one of the majors’ least valuable players to receive substantial playing time in that span. He’s been red-hot in the season’s first few weeks, however, and while he won’t sustain his current .382/.447/.579 clip, the question is whether he can still help a team that was close to unloading him just a month ago.

Hosmer signed with the Padres in February 2018 (right around the time this scribe joined the FanGraphs fold and shortly after noted Hosmer skeptic Dave Cameron — who included the first basemen among his free agent landmines — joined the Padres’ research and development department). In his first four seasons in San Diego, he produced WARs of -0.5, -0.9, 0.7, and 0.6, with the high coming in his 38-game 2020 season, during which he missed time due to a stomach ailment and a fractured left finger but hit .287/.333/.517 (128 wRC+) in 156 PA.

In the context of the first 11 seasons of Hosmer’s career, it would not be unreasonable to call that season a small-sample fluke. From 2011-21, he had nearly 200 38-game stretches across which he slugged .500 or better even if we limit those stretches to the same season and count overlapping ones. Yet he has never slugged .500 or better over a 162-game season, nor has he posted an isolated power of .200 or better. He maxed out on both of those in 2017, when he hit .318/.385/.498 with a .179 ISO while matching his career high in homers (25), a performance that led to the Padres backing up the Brinks truck. Read the rest of this entry »

I have some good news about the Yankees. Their collective 120 wRC+ is tied for first among all teams in baseball, an achievement that seems like an amalgamation of skill rather than luck. Case in point: They’re leading the league in every conceivable Statcast metric, including average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and barrel rate. By hitting baseballs at blistering speeds, the Yankees are turning them into valuable extra-base hits. It’s an ideal process, especially in a season where said hits have been harder to come by.

Next, I have some not-as-good news about the Yankees. It’s something I noticed while looking into Joey Gallo. The lefty slugger recently recorded his first two homers of the season, but his overall batting line is still under water. He’s striking out over 40% of the time, and the little contact he does make hasn’t returned much. You might think this is because Gallo goes after pitches he shouldn’t à la Javier Báez, but last season, he ran one of the best out-of-zone swing rates around. The problem is that even when he’s offered an attractive pitch, he has a gruesome tendency to whiff at it. When Gallo slumps, he doesn’t do so in a manner that’s even the slightest bit flattering. Read the rest of this entry »

Another week of the 2022 season is in the books and there’s been some significant movement in the power rankings. We’re still at the point where a hot or cold week can really change the outlook for a team, but we’re also starting to see some clubs separate themselves from the pack — for good or for ill.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on their expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking that is then presented in tiers below.

It’s a good time to be a baseball fan in New York. Both the Yankees and Mets have been playing fantastic baseball to start the season and both teams lead their respective divisions after a month of play. The Yanks rattled off a nine-game win streak with sweeps of the Guardians, Orioles, and the Royals. It took a little while for their bats to wake up earlier in the season, but they scored 7.4 runs per game during this stretch, including four games with double digit run totals. Unsurprisingly, it’s been their sluggers who have led the way. Anthony Rizzo’s nine home runs lead all of baseball, with a three dinger day on Tuesday and another on Friday padding his total. Not to be outdone, Aaron Judge blasted five homers last week, including two on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, when I was waxing poetic about Jeff McNeil’s ability to wait for a good pitch and then drop it into left for a single, I made an offhand mention to the player with the best swing decisions of 2021: Mike Tauchman, who doesn’t even play in the major leagues anymore. Then I moved on.

That wasn’t an accident. It’s what we in “the business” (no one calls it this) like to think of as a preview. I got multiple texts (another pro writer tip: “multiple” sounds better than “two”) from friends this weekend asking where the whole list of hitters was. That list is right here!

As a quick refresher, the idea here is to take every swing decision a hitter makes and compress them into one number. Every hitter who saw at least 50 pitches in each of the four attack zones (heart, shadow, chase, waste) is on the list. I took each of those rates and gave them league-average production for those decisions. The result looks like this, stated in terms of run value per 100 of the relevant zone/decision combination (take a waste pitch, say, or swing at a pitch in the shadow zone):

From there, I assumed a league-average percentage of pitches in each zone. Combined with each hitter’s swing rates, that let me produce an overall run value assuming an average rate of pitches in each zone.

Here’s a quick guide on how to interpret these numbers. For each hitter, there are three numbers. The first two are just the same statistic said different ways. The first metric, “RV/100,” is how many runs above or below average each hitter on the list would be, per 100 pitches, if they got exactly average results on every zone/decision combination. The higher the number, the better positioned a hitter is to succeed, by taking tough pitches and swinging at good ones.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features Wil Crowe on his circle changeup and Nick Martinez on his made-in-Japan Vulcan changeup.

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Wil Crowe, Pittsburgh Pirates

“I learned a changeup when I was about eight or 10 years old. Ex-big leaguer Steve Searcy lived in Knoxville, and my dad wanted to find me lessons — he’d played college ball, but wasn’t a pitcher — and that’s who he found. Steve was always big with fastball/changeup. I didn’t throw a curveball or slider until I was a senior in high school. Growing up, it was fastball/change. Locate the fastball, and the changeup comes off of it.

“The grip is a circle change. Now it’s a little modified; it’s out in my fingers a little more than it used to be. Middle finger and ring finger hold onto the laces, and the thumb is underneath. So it started out more of a traditional circle ball, and now it’s more on the end of the fingers. I did that in college, after I grew into my body. My hand was bigger and I was able to grip the ball better. But I think that starting at such a young age helped, because it’s a comfort thing. Read the rest of this entry »

Hoby Milner was credited with a win on April 12. For the vast majority of pitchers in their sixth big-league season, that wouldn’t be particularly notable. It was for Milner. The 31-year-old Milwaukee Brewers reliever was pitching in his 96th career game, and it was the first time he’d been awarded a W. Moreover, it was the first time Milner had been awarded a decision.

That’s a record. No pitcher in MLB history had ever made that many appearances to start a career without getting either a win or loss. And it isn’t even close. Michael Tonkin went his first 62 before getting a decision — he also got a win — with the Minnesota Twins in 2016.

Milner had an inkling that he might be a record-holder well before he became the pitcher of record in Milwaukee’s 5-4 win over the Baltimore Orioles on April 12.

“I knew around 60-something that it was kind of a lot,” Milner told me at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park earlier this week. “It was a big enough number that I did some research on my own and saw that some guy had around 60 to begin his career. I don’t remember what the website was, but it didn’t necessarily seem like it was 100% legit.”

It turns out that it was. A member of the Brewers’ media relations staff confirmed it after Milner’s remarkable streak came to an end. Read the rest of this entry »