Like many of you, I spent a good portion of Memorial Day watching baseball. I started with the Rays and Yankees, and was watching the YES Network feed when rookie shortstop Taylor Walls stepped to the plate. Immediately, the broadcast went to a graphic of who the Rays elected not to call up after they traded Willy Adames to the Brewers: Wander Franco, universally seen as the best prospect in the game, and the red-hot Vidal Bruján. It was a nice little troll, but while so much attention is deservedly paid to the Franco and Jarred Kelenic types before and after they debut, not every rookie has the same kind of prospect pedigree. With that in mind, here are nine prospects who aren’t getting the same kind of hype but are performing at a level that might earn them a big-league look this year. Read the rest of this entry »

As the calendar flips to June, it means just one thing to big league teams: there’s activity on the horizon. July means trade season, and June is the month to get ready for it. It can be a complicated process, but it starts with some old school front office work, as teams get in touch with each other to lay the groundwork for the insanity to come through what are commonly referred to as reach out calls.

Before such calls occur, teams prepare by assessing their 29 potential trade partners. For each team, needs and surpluses are identified. When I was with Houston, a group of people created matrices for each club, showing what those teams might need and which players might be available, as well as a snapshot of their payroll and any anticipated flexibility in that regard. For teams seen as buyers, did we have a player who fit their needs? For those likely to sell, did they have targets to help get us into the playoffs, or who could help us win a playoff series? For those on the bubble, both possible scenarios need to be prepared for.

The calls themselves are made by a variety of people, ranging from general managers to assistant GMs to other top lieutenants at the director level or higher. During my Astros tenure, assignments were based on relationships. I generally did somewhere between six and 10 of these calls because I knew the person on the other end of the phone best. Read the rest of this entry »

Javier Báez and Will Craig were the main protagonists in the tragicomedy that took place in Pittsburgh on Thursday. In a re-scripting of Merkle’s Boner, “El Mago” was cast as the hero, while the rookie first baseman co-starred as the unwitting villain. Given their respective roles, it’s understandable that they’ve received the lion’s share of attention for what transpired.

A supporting actor deserves his own acclaim. Largely overlooked — but no less important — were the actions of Willson Contreras. Had the Chicago catcher not made a mad dash toward home plate, panic and mayhem wouldn’t have entered the equation. Craig would have simply tagged Báez, relegating the latter’s amusing backpedal to a quickly-forgotten, footnote.

I brought that up to Pirates manager Derek Shelton on Friday.

“Yeah, I mean the one thing Contreras did was, he never gave up on the play,” responded Shelton. “He continued to run, and that was an important factor. He just continued to play, and finish the play. Unfortunately, it turned out against us.”

His thoughts on his ball club’s turning a routine play into Theatre of the Absurd?

“Move on from it,” said Shelton. “If we could all live our lives without making any mistakes, it would be really fun. But that doesn’t happen. Move on.”

Brandon Hyde and Will Venable have moved on from Chicago, where they
shared a clubhouse with Baez and Contreras as members of the Cubs coaching staff. I reached out to both for their perspectives on what will likely go down as the season’s craziest play. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

It’s just under 150 miles by road from Vancouver to Seattle — not necessarily an easy round-trip distance, but one that’s covered easily enough over the course of a day, given planning around border waits and traffic. It’s certainly a more reasonable distance to cover than the thousands of miles over mountain and prairie to the only other major league ballpark within Canada’s borders. For most people in western Canada, the most frequent major league ballpark they’ll make a trip to is Seattle’s T-Mobile Park.

I’ve gone to T-Mobile Park via a few different means of transportation. When I was a toddler, my family would sometimes take day trips down in the car when the Blue Jays or Yankees were in town. We weren’t able to go for many years after that, but when we did manage to take trips down in 2016 and ’17, it was a matter of a great deal of planning: making sure the car wouldn’t break down on the way (or renting one, when we didn’t have a car), accounting for the cost of tickets and food and parking. Not to mention, too, the amount of time that would need to be committed. Added up, these trips were luxuries, a single day a year set aside for a baseball pilgrimage.

By far the most frequent way I’ve gotten to T-Mobile Park, though, is the bus. There was the Greyhound, or the Bolt Bus, or one of the other interchangeable bargain travel services that operated cross-border routes. They were frequently late, often unhelpful, and almost always uncomfortable, but they fulfilled their purpose: For someone who didn’t have a car, or couldn’t access a rental, they were a cheap way of getting from Point A to Point B.

The first time I took the bus to a baseball game in Seattle was by chance, a happy accident. My partner and I had taken a weekend trip on the Greyhound down to Olympia to see the final date of a concert tour. But our return trip was delayed: the bus coming up from LA had run into some kind of horrible traffic, and we sat for almost three hours in the stuffy, sometimes unstaffed, exceedingly cramped bus station in Olympia. As a result, we missed our evening transfer in Seattle. By the time we got there, it would be another three hours of waiting for the next bus up to Vancouver at 10 PM. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Wheeler signed a big contract before the 2020 season, and if we’re being honest, the Phillies paid for potential. That’s not to say Wheeler wasn’t an effective starter with the Mets, but his career numbers — a 3.77 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, a 22.8% strikeout rate, and an 8.5% walk rate — didn’t scream ace.

His stuff, on the other hand, spoke loudly. An upper-90s fastball and lower-90s slider invite comparisons with Jacob deGrom, and his curveball prevents batters from sitting on a single breaking ball. If you could design a pitcher in a lab — well, fine, you might come up with deGrom or Gerrit Cole. But if you ended up with Wheeler, you’d certainly be happy with your work.

When a pitcher’s results — and again, they were good results — fall short of what you’d expect from their stuff, any stretch of better outcomes feels like a tantalizing glimpse at what a breakthrough might look like. At this point, however, it’s not a glimpse: Wheeler has fully broken out into the ace the Phillies hoped for when they signed him.

Consider this: since leaving the Mets, Wheeler has the 10th-best ERA in baseball. It’s not some fluky sequencing effect, either. He has the eighth-best FIP in the game over that time frame, the 17th-best xFIP, and the 17th-best SIERA, another advanced ERA estimator. He’s done all of that while throwing the third-most innings in the game, behind only Shane Bieber and Aaron Civale. That combination of skill and volume puts him sixth among all starters in WAR over that time frame, in a virtual tie with Cole. Read the rest of this entry »

The Lineup Tracker is the latest addition to our RosterResource collection at FanGraphs. This newest feature is an extension of our “Projected Go-To Lineups vs RHP” on the RosterResource depth charts, allowing readers to pick up on trends by providing a regularly updated look at where every player has batted in the order and lined up defensively throughout the season. The link to this feature can be found in the RosterResource drop-down menu under “In-Season Tools”.

I’ll be explaining the Lineup Tracker in detail on today’s episode of The RosterResource Show, which will air live at 4:30 PM PT/7:30 PM ET on Twitch and the FanGraphs homepage. It will be the first topic covered.

As has been the case with the last few RosterResource additions, including the Closer Depth Chart, Transaction Tracker, and Injury Report, we have several ideas that would improve this feature once we circle back around for upgrades. We have only one remaining feature to build — the Schedule Grid/Probable Starting Pitchers — that had been part of the RosterResource website prior to joining FanGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

With six weeks until the draft, things are more muddled than ever at the top. If anything, the range of possibilities is continuing to widen. There is still an entire college postseason left to go, as well as what are sure to be some difficult signability discussions that move individual needles significantly. In a dramatic turn of events, it suddenly looks as if the Pittsburgh Pirates are focused on positions players over pitchers with the first pick in the draft. Instead of doing a mock this early (we’ll have one soon, though more to share information than to try to pull a Kreskin with so much time until Day One), I decided to set the current odds for the first overall pick.

The Odds

Marcelo Mayer, SS, Eastlake HS (CA): 3-1

“Marcelo Mayer or Jordan Lawlar?” is the most pressing question for those considering the first pick in the draft, and when I polled top scouts and executives, there was a nearly 50/50 split in their responses. “Mayer should be 1-1, and I don’t think it should really be a conversation,” said one scouting executive. “In terms of pound-for-pound talent, he’s the number one guy. Left-handed, good stick, future power, and plays up the middle.” Among his detractors, there are some questions concerning the up-the-middle aspect of Mayer’s game. While he makes every play and at times can be a flashy defender with plus hands, smooth transfers, a well above-average arm and excellent instincts, he’s also a big-framed kid with below-average run times coming out of a slightly awkward gait. For scouts concerned about this, Mayer becomes a future third baseman; for those who believe in all of the defensive tools beyond the twitch, he’s more comparable to Carlos Correa or Corey Seager. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve still got a week to go in May, a month that has included four no-hitters, including two last week on back-to-back days — the Tigers’ Spencer Turnbull against the Mariners on Tuesday, and then the Yankees’ Corey Kluber against the Rangers on Wednesday, plus two that were just two days apart earlier this month. That brings this year’s total to six no-hitters of the nine-inning variety, plus a seven-inning one by Madison Bumgarner that The Man doesn’t want you to count. Particularly because the major league batting average of .237 is in a virtual tie for the all-time low mark set in 1968, these remarkable achievements are threatening to lose some luster.

That’s a shame, because the experience of actually watching a no-hitter from start to finish, rather than just flipping over to rubberneck for the final three or six outs, is still one of the most gripping in all of sports. The dawning of the possibility at some point in the middle innings — individually, we all have our thresholds for when our antennae go up — and then the batter-by-batter, pitch-by-pitch suspense, knowing that this gem could disintegrate either though one bad pitch or one bad break, makes a no-hitter a thrill to watch. Every single one of them is meaningful to its participants; for the pitcher and probably the catcher as well, it’s the pinnacle of performance. It takes a heart of coal not to be moved by the likes of Turnbull or Carlos Rodón having that one day of untouchability after years of ups and downs.

That said, some no-hitters are more impressive than others, with strikeouts galore and maybe just a walk or two separating them from perfection. Particularly given the current conditions, under which three teams have been no-hit twice — Cleveland, Texas, and Seattle — it’s obvious that there are varying degrees of difficulty when it comes to opponents as well. No-hitting the Mariners, who entered Sunday with a team batting average of .198, isn’t the same as doing it to the Rangers (.236), and neither of those are the equal of, say, Sean Manaea no-hitting the 2018 Red Sox, who hit .271. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I laid out some broad categorizations of what makes a slider effective, when viewed in the aggregate. As a quick recap: The most important single characteristic is hitting the corners of the strike zone. If you have a slider with plus horizontal movement, it’s also okay to miss over the middle of the plate. The middle of the plate is a great location early, but a poor location late in counts. There’s more, but those were the key findings.

That analysis left some additional factors out, because there are only so many tables you can fit into an article before it all starts to look the same. Additionally, some of those factors are beyond the scope of this analysis. Sequencing and tunneling, for example, are too complex to reduce to a two-dimensional grid. Deception might be even more confusing; I’d struggle to quantify it at all, let alone simplify it into a few buckets for analysis.

Today, I’d like to look at the rest of the factors I found easy to quantify and analyze. First, let’s talk about pitch movement. Last week, I looked at horizontal movement, because that’s the classic action we associate with a slider. It’s not the only type that pitchers throw, however. Sliders are such a broad category of pitch that they encompass pitches that mostly break sideways, mostly break down (at least, relative to a fastball), or have some mixture of the two.
Read the rest of this entry »