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 our 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. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, we’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, we’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in our 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 team 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.

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball and week of spring training. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Eric’s Notes

Marcos Castanon, 2B, UC Santa Barbara: 4-for-12, 2B, HR, 5 BB, 5 K

Entering the year, Castanon had played in more games during a dour freshman season (42 games, .214/.278/.321) than he had in two good ones (.308/.357/.488, 38 games) interrupted by a hamstring injury and the pandemic. He’s out of the gate really hot in 2020 (.358/.500/.642) and now has eight home runs in his last 30 games. Castanon doesn’t have huge raw power but he does good pull-side pop for a second baseman and can barrel velocity. He’ll make some slick plays at second, some of which help enable a lack of bend and flexibility, and overall he’s an average second baseman with a below-average arm. Though his swing doesn’t have playability all over the zone (he’s vulnerable up and in), I think the performance and near average hit/power combo put him in the early Day Two mix.

Cade Doughty, 3B, LSU (2022 eligible): 5-for-14, 4 HR, 3 BB, 3 K

Doughty was the star of a roller coaster three-game set against UT-San Antonio, during which he hit several dramatic home runs, and he already has six on the year. Doughty indeed has plus pull power and is getting to it in games when he get extended and clubs pitch on the outer half. He appears to track pitches well and has squared up a mix of fastballs and breaking balls. Let’s see how he fares in conference play. Doughty likes to swing, and SEC pitching has the best chance to expose what have been some early struggles against fastballs in on his hands. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pittsburgh Pirates have a lot of questions to address regarding their pitching staff. With the regular season just two-plus weeks away, final decisions have yet to be made on starter and bullpen roles alike. Candidates abound on both fronts, particularly the latter, with an addition and an injury-induced subtraction further muddying the waters in recent days. Here are snapshots from four conversations — three recent, and one somewhat older — with pitchers who could figure prominently in the team’s plans.

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Left on the cutting room floor from an interview I did with JT Brubaker at the conclusion of last season was what he said about his two breaking balls. The 27-year-old right-hander considers his slider his best secondary. He’s thrown it since his senior year of high school, and it’s firm. At 86.7 mph (per StatCast), it registered as the 11th-hardest among the 58 pitchers who worked at last 40 innings and had the pitch in their arsenal. Brubaker told me that while it sometimes registers as a cutter, he always considers it a slider.

Eric Longenhagen had written in his 2020 prospect profile that Brubaker’s “relatively new” curveball was his best secondary pitch. I asked the righty what might have prompted that opinion.

“Possibly the analytical side of it,” surmised Brubaker. “It’s something I’d put in the back pocket, then brought back out. I’m always been able to throw a curveball, but I’ve never been fully consistent with it.”

The pitch had actually gone into his back pocket at the bequest of the organization, as they wanted him to focus on his slider. He eventually pulled it back out in need of “something with a little more velocity separation between my changeup and slider, something in the lower lower spectrum to slow the batters down more.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. 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. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. 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.

Brady Singer played in the SEC for three seasons before being drafted by the Kansas City Royals, so he faced a ton of talented hitters prior to starting his professional career. Pitching for the University of Florida from 2016-2018, Singer matched up against the likes of JJ Bleday, Nick Senzel, Bryan Reynolds, and Evan White. Easy marks were few and far between.

Which of his collegiate opponents does Singer recall respecting the most? More specifically, which hitter had him laser-focused on making quality pitches, lest an errant offering result in serious damage?

“One that really stands out wasn’t in the SEC, but rather in Omaha,” Singer told me. “I believe it was the first game I pitched there, in 2017 when we went on to win the [College] World Series. It was Brendan McKay, from Louisville. When he got in the box, I knew I had to dial in. Just the bat path he had, and how he stood in the box — how he presented himself — was tough.”

McKay’s hitting future is obviously in limbo. Ostensibly still a two-way player, he pitched 49 big-league innings for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019, and logged just 11 plate appearances. Last season, a positive COVID test and subsequent shoulder surgery squelched his opportunities to do either. McKay’s Ohtani aspirations remain — he’s taking cuts in camp as he rehabs — but what happens going forward isn’t entirely clear.

Singer was correct when he told me that McKay could “really swing it back in college.” As the record shows, the fourth-overall pick in the 2017 draft slashed a snazzy .328/.430/.536 as a Cardinal. Singer — the 18th-overall pick a year later — is another story. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. 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. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. 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.

There has been a lot of discussion this week about the pandemic anniversary, as we are now one year removed from when things really hit the fan. Most people in the United States realized that things were really bad, or were about to be, sometime during the second week of March 2020. And as it is for many, my pandemic anniversary is today, March 11, which is also when I was in the Dominican Republic for the last time.

The trip had been planned for a while, and I was scheduled to leave for Santo Domingo on Saturday, March 7 with an overnight stop in Newark. It sounds crazy now, but at no point did I or anyone else with the Astros’ contingent heading to the island think twice about traveling. As I departed for O’Hare International, the CDC reported 437 cases of the virus in the United States. More than a quarter of those were from cruise ships or a long-term care facility in Washington State. New York, which would soon become the epicenter for the virus domestically, reported a grand total of 13 new cases. The only related sports story was a rumor that the NBA was working on a contingency plan for playing without fans if things got bad — if.

And so, partially because of our case rates, and partially because The Guardian’s home base is in the UK (I was, and usually still am, getting my COVID-19 news from them), the pandemic still felt like something happening over there. Things in China were dire, obviously, and COVID-19 was starting to spread like wildfire in Europe, where some countries were just beginning to talk about shut downs. In the United States, though, things felt safer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners’ starting pitchers can be broken into two different groups. There are the veterans at the top in Marco Gonzales and James Paxton, who between them have spent about 10 seasons in Seattle. They’ve both been successful, and so long as they stay healthy — not a given for Paxton — we know what to expect from them. The other half of the Mariners’ rotation is the young guys: Justus Sheffield, Justin Dunn, Logan Gilbert, and others. Each of them had or has considerable prospect stock, but while they’re expected to be successful at some point in the future, we can’t be sure that success will arrive in 2021.

Holding those two groups together in the middle is left-hander Yusei Kikuchi, fittingly, as he represents something from both. At 29 years old and with nine seasons spent in NPB, he’s already a veteran. But as with the young guys, there is still a lot to learn about how he will fare in the majors, given that his MLB experience amounts to two years. The first was 2019, his rookie season and first time pitching in the U.S., when he posted a 5.46 ERA and 5.71 FIP in 161.2 innings as Seattle finished last in the AL West.

The pandemic-shortened 2020 season, though, suggested there could be a lot more to him. Kikuchi’s ERA stayed above 5.00, but his FIP plummeted to 3.30, and he made significant progress with his strikeout and home run rates. If his surface numbers take the step forward this year that his peripherals did last year, it would be a major boost to the Mariners as they try to crawl toward contention.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, we looked at my favorite breakout candidates for the 2021 season. Today, we shift to the players I’m more bearish about, and I’m not talking about pilfering picnic baskets. Whether it’s players who I don’t believe will match their 2020 performance, meet their 2021 projections, or who have some aspect of their game that worries me, each of these eight hitters is one who I would place firmly in the “sell” column. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be awful or bad, but it does mean I don’t think the best is yet to come.

José Abreu, Chicago White Sox

Busts are a relative notion, and a player can make this list and still be a contributor. Abreu was terrific in 2020 and is one of the few players in baseball you could inarguably call a leader, but the fact remains that it was by far his best performance in years. Sure, he pasted the ball to the tune of the 10th-highest average exit velocity in the league, but he destroyed baseballs in 2018 and ’19 as well and was far less valuable in those full seasons. Abreu’s far more likely to be an average player than he is to contend for the MVP again, and when you have a guy whose WAR projection for an entire season comes in under his 60-game WAR from last year’s short season, who you have to admit he has some bust potential. That’s doubly true when he’s in his mid-30s; sluggers aging like Nelson Cruz are the exception, not the rule.

Jackie Bradley Jr., Milwaukee Brewers

The popular conception of JBJ is that he had something of a comeback season in 2020, and that’s true on the surface, as his wRC+ of 120 was 30 points above anything he’s done in recent years. The only problem with that part of the tale is that in this case, his .343 BABIP, 45 points above his career average, was the driver of his flashy line. Remove that and his season looked a lot like 2019, when one of the questions entering the offseason was whether the Red Sox would even tender him a contract for 2020. From the specific hit data, ZiPS thinks that he played like a player with a .306 BABIP rather than one in the .340s. He’s still a solid defensive player, but his speed numbers are starting to slip, which tends to be a leading indicator of defensive decline for an outfielder. The relatively small outfield in Milwaukee isn’t the best park to take advantage of JBJ’s talents; his defensive performance would have been more welcome in places like San Francisco or Kansas City. All that said, I should note that ZiPS disagrees with me on this one.

Justin Upton, Los Angeles Angels

Read the rest of this entry »

This season, for the first time since the Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural games in 1977, there will not be a dedicated radio broadcast of their games. Instead of a radio team broadcasting the game, the audio from television broadcasts will be simulcast to radio listeners. Rogers, the Canadian telecom giant that owns both the Blue Jays and the networks they are broadcast on, has made assurances that this is merely a safety measure in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it is unclear what the plans are for the future of the Blue Jays on the radio. Longtime broadcaster Mike Wilner was laid off this winter, and there has been no replacement announced; even apart from the loss of a Jays radio broadcast, the AM sports radio landscape in Canada has taken significant blows recently, with Bell Media, another telecom giant, unceremoniously taking a number of local stations off the air last month. Should this season prove to Rogers that having a dedicated radio broadcast is an expense not worth carrying into the future, Blue Jays baseball on the radio could prove to be another one of the casualties of the pandemic.

It’s been almost a century since the first major league baseball game was broadcast over the radio: an early-August game between the Pirates and the Phillies in 1921. Despite resistance from both traditional print media and team ownership, the popularity of such broadcasts took off, sparking a conflict that would fundamentally change the revenue structure of major league baseball. In his book Crack of the Bat: A History of Baseball on the Radio, James R. Walker writes about the forces that changed the attitudes of baseball higher-ups towards the broadcasting of baseball on the radio. Declining attendance was at first, and stubbornly, blamed on radio broadcasting, leading team ownership to call for bans on such broadcasts. But with the growing influence and financial power of advertising in broadcasting and the realization that radio was a boon to developing geographically-displaced fandom (especially in the western United States, where many people lived far from a major-league team), fewer and fewer teams held out against the practice.

There was, at the same time, a fundamental shift in what the purpose of such broadcasts was. As Walker writes, the World Series, from 1921 until 1933, was broadcast on the radio — not because it was lucrative to do so, but as a service to the country’s interested public. In 1934, though, commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis sold the rights to the World Series broadcast to the Ford Motor Company. Within a few years, a federal judge would hand down a decision naming baseball broadcasts on the radio as the property of the teams involved, and New York, the last holdout of broadcast bans, embraced this new revenue stream. Read the rest of this entry »