While Jake Odorizzi is clearly the top free-agent pitcher still available as March opens, Jackie Bradley Jr. is the market’s top position player still on the shelves, No. 18 overall on our Top 50 Free Agents list. Beyond the fact that they and their agents may have aimed too high with their contractual desires in an industry still feeling the economic pinch of the COVID-19 pandemic and treating the $210 million Competitive Balance Tax threshold as a salary cap, the pair don’t have a ton of similarities beyond their availability. But like Odorizzi, Bradley could provide a clear boost to a contending team.

Bradley, who turns 31 on April 19, spent the past 10 years in the Red Sox organization after being chosen as a supplemental first-round pick out of the University of South Carolina in 2011. It took him awhile to find his footing in the majors: Since he couldn’t keep his batting average above the Mendoza Line over the course of 530 plate appearances in 2013–14, he bounced up and down between Triple-A Pawtucket and Boston and spent nearly half of 2015 on the farm as well before finally sticking around for good.

Since the start of the 2015 season, Bradley has produced at about a league-average level offensively (.247/.331/.438, 102 wRC+) and provided exceptional and often spectacular defense. His +33 DRS in center field is tied for fifth in the majors in that span, and his 19.9 UZR is sixth, though he’s somewhere around 10th or 11th on a prorated basis, depending upon the innings cutoff one chooses. Likewise, his 42 runs via Statcast’s Runs Prevented metric ranks sixth since the start of 2016. In a league where Kevin Kiermaier has dominated the defensive metrics, Bradley has just one Gold Glove to show for his efforts, but he’s nonetheless put together some enviable highlight reels. Here’s one that covers just the last eight weeks of his work:

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the low, blue-grey sky in Jupiter, the clouds rolling in low from the sea, the people crowd in the seats, white hats and dark sunglasses on, in the annual ritual of anticipation. The latest in inoffensive country-pop blaring over the speakers, the salty food spilling onto the ground — with handheld video cameras, grainy images criss-crossed by thick netting, they zoom in on the players they’re here to watch. The classic red of the jerseys is loud against the muted landscape; it makes someone like the aging slugger, whom the camera follows with interest, look even bigger and more imposing than he is. And he is, indeed, imposing, much as he has been for the last decade: the Rawlings Big Stick appearing, in his hands, to have all the heft of a piece of driftwood. He is 37 years old, with a right knee that’s gone under the knife; for now, he will not run the bases, nor take the field. He glowers, alone, waiting for his one turn at the plate.

In the rest of the dugout, the bustle: the big grins, pounding gloves. Last year, they lost the pennant. This year, they should make a run for it again. Squint and you’ll see the catcher, who, during last year’s chase, sliced his finger nearly off with a hunting knife — an injury he assures everyone will not affect his ability to throw this year. Watch carefully, and you might catch a glimpse of the prospect. He doesn’t look out of his depth: he is as solid as the slugger ever was, and his demeanor betrays no trepidation. He only has one professional season under his belt; when the slugger debuted almost 15 years ago, he was only a little kid. But he is here, and with a vacancy on the hot corner, he could make the team. It’s a long shot, of course; everyone says it’s a long shot. It was a long shot for a 20-year-old in his first professional season to climb all the way to Triple-A by year’s end, too, but he did it. The chance may be small — but there’s a chance.

The slugger swings — a long, belabored swing, well behind the pitch, and the umpire’s arm punches through the air. The inning is over. The music plays.

***

“He was like a rock,” the team doctor says. He is talking about the prospect. Before a game was even played this spring, when players were reporting and getting their physicals done, they were talking about the prospect. There is such an incongruity between the reality of this young man and what one expects out of a player only two years out of high school, and within that incongruity is space for endless imagining. How quickly he rose in only a year; how quickly might he rise given another? It is spring, and he is with the big-league club — a chance for fans to catch a glimpse, to stoke the fires of their imaginations, before he returns, presumably, to the minors. The games don’t count, but the visions they produce can endure through entire disappointing seasons. If the slugger continues to decline, if the catcher’s near-severed finger hampers him, if they can’t get anything out of third base — they can return, whenever they want, to the low clouds of a passing winter, to a promise of what could soon be. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. 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.

Tigers manager A.J. Hinch addressed the importance of being aggressive on the base paths during his Saturday morning media session. What he shared included the following, which I quoted on Twitter:

“Your WAR gets dinged whenever you get thrown out on the bases. It’s not valued. People are very aware… players are very aware of that. Winning baseball is good for your WAR too, even if it’s not quantifiable.”

Almost immediately, people began responding critically, opining that Hinch was (pun intended) off base. Feeling that more context was in order — I’d prefaced the original Tweet by noting the subject at hand — I added that Hinch also said that if you’re safe every time, you’re probably not being aggressive enough.

No matter. Commenters went on to suggest that Hinch doesn’t understand the value of an out, sometimes in a snarky, condescending manner. (On Twitter! Imagine that!)

Hinch had a second media session following the team’s workout, so I took the opportunity to bring up the minor foofaraw I’d caused at his expense. Would he like to elaborate on, and clarify, what he’d said, lest a faction of the Twitterverse continue to question his sanity? Read the rest of this entry »

Is Fernando Tatis Jr. the next Carlos Correa? The question has lingered in my mind in the wake of last week’s piece about Tatis’ already-substantial Hall of Fame chances, itself a response to the Padres’ shortstop landing a 14-year, $340 million deal at the tender age of 22. Digging into some of my previous research, I illustrated that even given the fairly slim sample sizes, the vast majority of players who perform as Tatis has through his age-21 season — whether based merely on offensive prowess or full value as estimated by WAR — are bound for the Hall of Fame.

That provocative conclusion certainly stirred the pot, perhaps even moreso than I intended, with critics offering a range of counterexamples, some of them so far off base as to be laughable (left fielder/designated hitter Joe Charboneau, AL Rookie of the Year at age 25, out of the majors by age 28), others a bit more subtle (Vern Stephens, a slugging shortstop who had some of his best years against lesser competition during World War II). The one that stuck in my mind, however was the example of Correa, whose performance through his age-21 season bore some striking similarities to that of Tatis, to the point that the pair were adjacent on multiple leaderboards. The comparison, which also includes some key differences, was still on my mind when I discussed the two shortstops and a small handful of other young players — most notably Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, and Wander Franco — during a FanGraphs Audio podcast spot with Kevin Goldstein, who had a front-row seat to the professional progress of Correa, whom the Astros drafted with the first overall pick just three months before he joined their front office.

Correa, now heading into his age-26 season as well as his final year before eligibility for free agency, has had his ups and downs at the major league level. He won AL Rookie of the Year honors in 2015 while helping the Astros to their first playoff appearance in a decade. While he’s helped Houston to four more playoff appearances, including a World Series victory in 2017 and an AL pennant two years later, he’s been an All-Star just once, mainly due to injuries that have limited him to just one season with more than 110 games played: 2016, his age-21 season, when he played 153 games and set an as-yet-unsurpassed career high in WAR, whether by FanGraphs’ measure (5.2) or that of Baseball-Reference (7.0). More on that gap, which is driven by widely divergent defensive metrics, below.

Correa did play 58 out of the Astros’ 60 games last year, but hit just .264/.326/.383, setting career lows in slugging percentage and wRC+ (98) as well as more obviously counting-dependent stats like home runs (five) and WAR (0.9 by FanGraphs, 1.8 by B-Ref). To be fair, he was hitting .301/.367/.441 (125 wRC+) through September 7 before suffering through a 5-for-44 slump from September 8-22, so it’s not like his entire season was a slog; he had a very bad fortnight. He even hit his way out of that skid, closing the season by going 5-for-14 over his final four games and then batting a sizzling .362/.455/.766 with six homers in 55 PA in the postseason. That would have lifted his season line to .282/.340/.456 if we were to add it all up. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso didn’t duplicate his stellar rookie season in 2020. There wasn’t one obvious problem to point to, though. He trimmed his strikeouts slightly. He hit the ball as hard, both in frequency and in terms of maximum exit velocity, as he did the year before. He made more contact in the strike zone, and he swung less at pitches outside the strike zone. That all sounds pretty good.

Despite all those glowing facts, there’s no way around it: Alonso was a lot worse in 2020. His BABIP dropped from .280 to .242. His slugging percentage fell by nearly 100 points. He fell off of his 2019 home run pace, but not by as much as you’d think. He lost far more doubles, though, and didn’t make up for it elsewhere. He wasn’t bad, but a 118 wRC+ out of your bat-first first baseman is par for the course rather than spectacular.

What if I told you I could explain what went haywire? You’d probably tell me I’m lying, and you wouldn’t be wrong. I can tell you what I think happened, though, and that will have to be good enough. You know how I said his contact was just as loud? It’s time to delve obnoxiously deep into that data. Read the rest of this entry »

In the weirdest year of baseball history so far, 2020 featured a gigantic playoff field introduced right as the season began, turning a 10-team postseason into a 16-team format. Changing the basic structure of awarding the sport’s championship with no advance notice would have been an odd choice in a normal season. But given the 102-game reduction in the league’s schedule and its resulting small sample size season, it kind of made sense. When the decision was made, it wasn’t a surety that there would even be a season, to the point that people would have been happy if extra-inning games were decided by closers riding ostriches and jousting.

Before the World Series was even completed, commissioner Rob Manfred expressed the league’s desire to keep the new format in a normal season. The players need to agree to changes like this, of course, and that permission wasn’t granted after all MLB offered in exchange was a universal designated hitter. One of the concerns, not officially made public, is that a playoff system that is more of crapshoot will further reduce the already eroded incentives for teams to spend money to improve their rosters. That’s hardly a shock; at the 2020 trade deadline, 10 teams already had projected playoff probabilities above 97%. Combine that with the absence of the normal advantages afforded to higher seeds, and you had a trade deadline that saw only a single team, the San Diego Padres, aggressively improve, and even their moves were almost certainly made with an eye toward 2021 and beyond.

So what is the ideal playoff system? That’s a difficult question, one that’s impossible to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. I can only answer for myself, and for me, there are a few requirements that are particularly important. Basically, I want a system in which regular-season performance matters, thus maintaining one of the core aspects of the game. I also want a playoff system that more heavily awards quality over randomness without making the result a preordained one. The more a championship is decided by randomness, the less incentive there is for teams to innovate and invest. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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.

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 the first weekend of college baseball. Remember, draft rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Jud Fabian, OF, Florida: 3G, 1-for-13, 7 K

The 2021 draft class doesn’t exactly shine when it comes to college position players, but much of that is due to the situation everyone is in, as players heading into the season don’t have much of a 2020 showing to build on; an even larger contributing factor is last year’s cancellation of the Cape Cod League, which is where most players establish their initial spot on teams’ draft boards. Fabian has been well-known to scouts since his high school days in Ocala, Florida, and after opting into college early, he put up a .232/.353/.411 line as an everyday player while just an 18-year-old freshman. The stat line says it all. There were some hitting issues, but the approach and power were there. Last season was looking like a breakout sophomore campaign, with a 1.010 OPS in 17 games before the shutdown, and he entered this year ranked eighth on The Board. But during the opening weekend against Miami, Fabian looked rusty and overmatched, and questions about his ability to make consistent contact have the potential to persist all spring.

Jaden Hill, RHP, LSU: 4 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 5 K

When you’re seen as a sure-fire single-digit pick entering the spring, there’s not much room to move up. While it will take more than four innings against a team better than Air Force to cement that view, Hill certainly impressed in his season debut. He’s a physical beast at 6-foot-4 and 235 pounds, with monstrous stuff highlighted by a fastball that frequently got into the upper 90s, a low 80s power breaking ball and a more refined changeup than had been seen in the past. Between a shoulder issue in 2019 and the pandemic last spring, Hill entered the season with fewer than 25 innings under his belt. Scouts want get past the questions about his command, but if he continues to throw strikes the way he did on Saturday, he will move up on boards despite there being little room to.

Tommy Mace, RHP, Florida: 5 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 8 K

In a normal world (whatever that means anymore), Mace would be getting ready for his first professional spring training, but a five-round draft and some aggressive posturing led to a fourth year in Florida in 2021. He’s expected to land anywhere from the comp round to the late-second in July, a range that lines up well with his current No. 62 ranking on The Board. Mace is more of a pure pitcher than someone who is going to blow away scouts with raw stuff, but in a rare opening weekend series against Miami that wasn’t a mismatch on paper, he showed an improved arsenal, led by a low-to-mid 90s fastball and a much improved breaking ball. His curve is still a bit light in terms of velo when graded against professional breakers, but he threw some real yakkers to keep the Hurricanes off balance. It will be tough for him to work his way into the first round, but the safety in the floor could get him comfortably into the seven-figure bonus range.

Matt McLain, SS, UCLA, 3 G, 5-for-11, 2 2B, 1 HR, 1 K

UCLA commits are the toughest of signs in any draft, as the Diamondbacks learned in 2018 when the 25th overall pick in the draft eschewed pro ball for the Bruins. Always seen as a player for whom the hit tool would lead the way, McLain struggled as a freshman in 2019, posting a paltry .203/.276/.355 line. But a solid showing in the Cape Cod League followed by an explosive (.397/.422/.621) if brief 13-game sophomore campaign had him entering the year as one of, if not the, top position players in the draft, including a number three ranking on The Board. While UCLA had an opening weekend to forget, dropping two of three to the San Francisco Dons, but you can’t blame McLain, who got off to a quick start at the plate. He’s on the small side, and the debate over his ability to stay at shortstop rages on, but he sure can rake. Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Yelich had a rough 2020. That’s true of all of us, of course — global pandemics have that effect. You might even argue that his year wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things. He got paid $4.6 million dollars, didn’t suffer any catastrophic injuries, and made the playoffs. On the baseball field, however, he had his worst year as a big leaguer. Was it small sample theater, or something more worrisome? Let’s dig into his brief season and hunt for signs.

The first thing that jumps out at me when looking at Yelich’s 247 plate appearances is the strikeouts. The magic of his game has always been in his ability to smash the ball — increasingly into the air as time has gone on — without disastrous contact numbers. His previous high for strikeout rate was 24.2%, as a rookie in 2013. Since then, he’d consistently kept that rate around 20% while incrementally improving his quality of contact every year. Voila — an MVP.

Let’s dig in a little more, because strikeout rate is the composite result of many inputs. First, there’s swinging and missing. Yelich has historically lived around league average when it comes to connecting on swings. Last year? Not so much:

Yes, it’s a small sample. But Yelich swung at 381 pitches in 2020, enough that we can’t completely dismiss it. He swung at 112 pitches out of the zone, again enough to worry. And let me tell you, you don’t want to be near the top of this list:

There are good hitters here, sure. The ones who are doing well are doing so on the back of their power on contact, though, and there are no MVP candidates on the list. If you’re missing that often when you chase, you’ll be striking out a ton, likely too much to make up for it elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »