Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cincinnati Reds. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Every winter, pitchers step off the mound and into the lab. Sure, not every pitcher is in a wind tunnel with a high speed camera from October to January, but enough are that everyone seems to reap the benefits. You’ve got the sweeper, the kick change, the rise of the splitter, new fastball shapes – you name it, someone has tried it recently. That means that every year, I spend the first month or two of the season catching up to the new hot thing going on in the world of pitching.

But I have to level with you: On the whole, things haven’t changed as much this year as I expected. That won’t stop me from walking through what has changed, though, and the first shift to highlight is a subtle one – we’re seeing more bendy sliders and fewer gyro offerings:

Why? Two things are happening. First, sweeping sliders do better against same-handed batters, so pitchers are choosing that as their secondary of choice when they have the platoon advantage. In 2021, 2.6% of pitches that righties threw to righties were sweepers. In 2025, that number has ballooned to 10.7%; it’s 10.9% for lefties against lefties. Usage is less than half as high when opposite-handed batters are at the plate.

Meanwhile, “regular” sliders are on the decline when pitchers have the platoon advantage. That makes good sense – they’re just throwing sweepers instead. And when pitchers aren’t facing same-handed batters, neither slider is particularly great; pitchers are staying away from both, more or less. That means that the traditional, gyro-spin slider is declining in prevalence overall. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Correa has grounded into six double plays this season. He doesn’t lead the league; that would be Junior Caminero, who has already racked up nine, putting him on pace for an even 50 by the end of the year. If Caminero keeps that up (he won’t), he would shatter the single-season record of 36, set by Jim Rice in 1984. Still, it’s Correa whose GIDP numbers I find most intriguing.

Correa has always been prone to double plays. Since the day of his debut, 10 years ago in June, only five major leaguers have grounded into more of them. However, in 2023, Correa took things to a new level. He set a single-season Twins record by grounding into 30 double plays. He did so in just 130 games and 580 trips to the plate. His 30 GIDPs were the most by any player in a season since Casey McGehee in 2014 (31) and the most on a per-PA basis (min. 500 PA) since A.J. Pierzynski in 2004 (27 GIDPs in 510 PA). Adjusted for era, Correa’s GIDPs-per-PA rate registered as the third highest of all time:

Correa’s historically pitiful GIDP performance in 2023 made what he did next all the more fascinating. In 2024, he produced an equally historical turnaround season. He hit just five groundball double plays, 25 fewer than the year before. Admittedly, he played significantly fewer games, but even on a rate basis, the difference was astounding. Never in his career had he grounded into two-outers at a lower clip. (Quick aside: Writers need synonyms, and if they don’t exist, it’s our job to make them up. Get ready.) Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 16, Jackson Holliday ended an 0-for-17 slump with a second-inning grand slam that put the Orioles up 4-0 in an eventual 9-1 win over the Guardians. But a commanding win wasn’t the only momentous occasion taking place at Camden Yards that evening — it was also Bark in the Park night. When asked in his post-game interview if there were any furry friends he’d like to shout out, he replied, “Oh yeah, Coconut’s here,” referring to the one year old Bernedoodle that Holliday and his wife added to their family during spring training last year. Coconut attended the game wearing Holliday’s jersey and acted as his good luck charm, though Holliday believes dogs beyond his own have the power to bring him positive vibes at the plate. “I have a good track record in the minor leagues of performing on Bark in the Park, so maybe we’ll have to have these more often,” Holliday continued. That is a claim simply begging to be fact-checked.

Over Holliday’s tenure in pro ball, he’s played in eight games where fans were encouraged to bring their pups to the park, five in the minors and three in the majors. In the minors, Holliday’s teams went 1-4, as he amassed 19 plate appearances with four walks, five strikeouts, two singles, two home runs, and four RBI. That’s good for a .266/.421/.666 slash line, which isn’t bad, but when you consider Holliday posted a .303/.443/.485 line in the minors, it’s really only impressive from a power perspective (Holliday’s slash line in big league Bark in the Park games is .222/.300/.500 with four RBI over 10 PA). Still, the home runs are clearly what stand out in Holliday’s mind, and given that he went deep just 23 times over 218 games in the minor leagues and is driving the ball over the fence even less frequently in the majors, it makes sense that those four-baggers would feature prominently in his memory. Especially since all three put his team in the lead.

Now, I will confess that I only checked Holliday’s home games for Bark in the Park events. As you’ll soon see, I did an absurd amount of manual data collection for this piece, but I drew the line at checking the theme nights for every minor league affiliate Holliday faced. Maybe he disappointed dog owners up and down the Mid-Atlantic as he posted monster numbers in opponent ballparks. We’ll never know. But Holliday’s assertion that he gets a leg up from the presence of his four-legged friends led to a broader research question. Are there other players who consistently outperform their typical production with all those good boys and girls in the building? Read the rest of this entry »

A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.

Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.

All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger. Read the rest of this entry »

It was June 2024, and Matt Bowman was in a tough spot. He was 33 years old and fresh off his third DFA in six weeks. In his one appearance as a Mariner, he recorded just two outs, gave up one run on one hit — a home run — and one walk. As a righty reliever on the wrong side of 30 with a 92-mph sinker, he was about as fringey as they come.

That day in Seattle could have been his last time on a big league mound. Instead, he tried something crazy. Once the owner of an unremarkable delivery, Bowman now throws from the most extreme horizontal release point in the sport. And it looks like it has saved his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Brooks Baldwin doesn’t profile as a future star, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a long and productive major league career. Versatility is a big reason why.
A poor man’s Ben Zobrist, the 24-year-old switch-hitter has played every defensive position besides first base, catcher, and pitcher since debuting with the Chicago White Sox last summer. It may be only a matter of time before those three are added to his résumé. Counting his days as a North Carolina prep and a UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t played.

The versatility dates back to his formative years.

“I’ve been playing all over the field since I was 10 years old,” explained Baldwin, who was announced as a third baseman when the White Sox selected him in the 12th round of the 2022 draft. “It’s something my dad instilled in me, not restricting myself to one position. He played pro ball a little bit [in the Cleveland Guardians system], and before that in college at Clemson. He did the same thing.”

Chuck Baldwin’s son has seen time at first base in the minors, and the other two missing positions at the major league level are ones he’s well acquainted with. The chip off the old block caught “pretty often” in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and pitched all four years. Primarily a starter, he had a fastball in the upper-80s as a senior.

Baldwin has been switch-hitting since he was eight or nine years old. His father’s high school coach, Linwood Hedgepeth, made the suggestion. After watching the naturally-left-handed hitter in the batting cage, the member of the North Carolina Baseball Hall of Fame told the elder Baldwin,’This kid can switch it.’” Read the rest of this entry »

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 fifth 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’m so sick of this friggin’ guy,” is one of the greatest compliments one can pay an opposing athlete. And the Dodgers must be sick to death of Pete Crow-Armstrong. The Cubs and Dodgers, who opened the season together in Japan, just played five games in the span of 13 days to complete their season series. In those five games, Crow-Armstrong did his normal speed-and-defense act, but he also went 10-for-22 with four home runs.

In the two-game series that just ended, PCA went 3-for-5 with a home run and a double in the first game, and 3-for-4 with a home run and two stolen bases in the second. The Cubs won each game by one run; I don’t think it’s at all unfair to say that in a series that featured the Dodgers’ vaunted three-MVP lineup, plus Kyle Tucker, Dansby Swanson, Teoscar Hernández, and a partridge in a pear tree, it was the young PCA who singlehandedly turned the tide. Read the rest of this entry »