In the spring of 2015, Kris Bryant was coming off a historic minor league season. Splitting the year between Double- and Triple-A, Bryant hit .325/.438/.661 with 43 homers and a 192 wRC+. He then hit .425/.477/1.175 in spring training. But he didn’t make the Cubs’ Opening Day roster. Mike Olt, who had also spent some time in Triple-A in 2014, hit a good .302/.348/.545 in Iowa before posting an ugly .160/.248/.356 line in half a season with the Cubs; he started at third base ahead of Bryant. Olt was hit on his wrist by a pitch on Saturday, April 11, and didn’t start any games the next week. On April 17, with 171 days left in the season (exactly one day short of the 172 Bryant would need for a full year of service time), Olt hit the Disabled List with a hairline fracture and Bryant made his debut.

Due to the obvious attempt by the Cubs to manipulate his service time, ensuring he would not reach free agency until after the 2021 season, Bryant filed a grievance to recoup that lost day. According to Jeff Passan, Bryant has lost that grievance and will not become a free agent at the end of this season, having instead to wait an additional year. The ruling will be made public in a week, per Passan. While we don’t yet know the arbitrator’s exact reasoning, it’s hard not to see a decision in the Cubs’ favor as much else than a tacit approval of baseball teams keeping otherwise ready players in the minors for a few weeks at the beginning of the season in order to gain another year of team control. Bryant was the ideal player to file a grievance for service time manipulation, given his track record in the minors, his great spring, and lack of decent options ahead of him on the depth chart. If he can’t win, then who can?

The arbitrator may well have warned teams that while there was no real precedent to award Bryant his lost day, future cases might be decided differently; we’ll have to wait for the decision to be made public to know for sure. But even if that’s the case, the practical effect of such a decision is minimal given that the current CBA expires at the end of the 2021 season. The decision is a reminder that while service time manipulation is against the spirit of the CBA, proving such violations is extremely difficult. What’s more, the changes needed to curb the practice will have to be far more explicit in the next CBA. Service time manipulation like Bryant’s aren’t especially common and affect only a handful of players every year. But those it does effect tend to be among the game’s best young players, kept in the minors for reasons that have nothing to so with their ability. And the practice represents part of a larger issue involving the time it takes to get to free agency and the pay players receive before they get there. Read the rest of this entry »

Making sense of Mookie Betts trade rumors can be a frustrating task. Betts is one of the best players in baseball, perhaps second-best to only Mike Trout. Every single team in baseball should love to have Mookie Betts on their team. A club competing for a playoff spot is even more ideal, or a team whose playoff odds without Betts are just so-so, but that with him head well north of 50%. It would also be helpful if that team had plentiful financial resources and could easily absorb Betts’ expensive (but still a bargain given the production) $27 million salary next season. The Boston Red Sox are basically the perfect for Mookie Betts, but they might trade him anyway.

Back in November, Ben Clemens made the case for the Red Sox keeping Betts, while I recently did a pro/con list for ESPN weighing the merits of trading four different stars, including Betts. Clemens focused on the baseball logic of the move, which revolves around getting worse now by trading Betts but improving in the future with the addition of prospects. Clemens shot through that argument by showing that Boston’s playoff chances over the next four seasons were actually worse by trading Betts for prospects. As a practical matter, Clemens compared a potential Betts deal to Paul Goldschmidt’s trade to the Cardinals a year ago. There are a few differences that we’ll get to later, but let’s first focus on their similarities using a rumored trade package. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. 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 the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

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.

Editor’s Note: Rony Garcia, a Tigers’ Rule 5 selection from the most recent draft, has been added to this list at No. 31.

Shao-Ching Chiang, a minor league free agent signing, was added to the list at No. 27.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Younger Bats
Manuel Sequera, SS
Abelardo Lopez, OF
Pedro Martinez Jr., 3B
Alvaro Gonzalez, SS

Other than Sequera, this group is comprised of more of those bigger, stronger teenage corner types. Sequera has a shot to stay at short and grow into some pop. Lopez is a corner power bat who signed for about three quarters of a million in July, along with Sequera. This Pedro Martinez, like the Cubs’ Pedro Martinez (no relation), has a medium build and average tools. Gonzalez is the shortstop version of this, with less present pop.

Relief Types
Marco Jimenez, RHP
Anthony Castro, RHP
Hugh Smith, RHP
Max Green, LHP
Daniele Di Monte, RHP
Wilmer Fenelon, RHP
Isrrael De La Cruz, RHP
Gio Arriera, RHP

Jimenez, 21, has mid-90s fastball/slider reliever projection. Castro throws hard and is built like he might pitch forever, but his heater has natural cut and gets hit when he misses his spot, which is often. He could be a fastball-heavy “look” reliever. Smith is 6-foot-10, he touches 96, and has fringe secondaries. Green is a lefty up to 97 with a slow but very deep curveball. Di Monte is an Italian 17-year-old with a low-90s fastball and average curveball. His vertical arm slot creates big carry on his heater. Fenelon was the hardest-throwing Tigers DSL arm, and was up to 96 and sitting 91-93 as an 18-year old with a stronger current build than most teens. It was his second DSL year. De La Cruz is a converted outfielder with big spin on a low-90s heater. Arriera is 21; he’s the club’s fourth rounder from 2017. He was up to 96 as a starter last year

Mature-framed Power Bats and Upper-Level Tweeners
Jose Azocar, CF
Nick Ames, OF
Derek Hill, CF
Lazaro Benitez, RF
Jacob Robson, CF

Azocar, Hill, and Robson all have bench outfield ceilings. Azocar, 23, has the best chance to grab hold of a bench role. Ames is a giant (6-foot-3, 240) who has had big power since high school. He’s explosive but not very athletic. Benitez was 20 in the DSL but hit the ball hard.

System Overview

The Tigers system has been on an upswing over the last few years as the team has committed fully to a rebuild and started to stockpile prospects rather than aggressively move them for big leaguers, as Detroit did during the Dave Dombrowski era. Until recently, the Tigers were regarded as one of the more traditional scouting and player development operations in baseball, but we’ve seen and heard of some progress in these areas — specifically the use of high-speed video and pitch design — with Casey Mize seeming to benefit most particularly. We liked their mostly-college 2019 draft crop, headlined by Riley Greene, while Mize was an easy 1-1 in 2018, and the top players in their recent J2 classes (Campos, De La Cruz, Reyes) have all shown solid returns thus far.

When you combine this acquisition momentum with the team holding the first overall pick in June (another 50 or 55 FV), the fact that trades will likely only add to the list at this point, and a farm that already ranked eighth for us at the end of the 2019 season, there’s plenty of reason for hope in Detroit. It’s a hell of a drug but a necessary one in this case, because Matthew Boyd (who isn’t a free agent until 2022) may be the only slam-dunk core piece currently on the big league roster.

Nicholas Castellanos is not the last domino to fall in free agency, but he’s pretty close to the end of the line. After Josh Donaldson signed with the Twins and Marcell Ozuna settled for a one-year deal with the Braves, Castellanos was the next logical domino. And while the Cincinnati Reds appeared to have their outfield slots spoken for after signing Shogo Akiyama, theirs was also an outfield brimming with question marks regarding health, playing time, and performance. The Reds needed to go further to solidify their plan to compete in 2020. The result is a four-year deal worth $64 million with an opt-out after the first and second year, with C. Trent Rosencrans, Ken Rosenthal, Jon Heyman, and Jeff Passan reporting the various details.

It’s been a few months, but the contract is fairly close to the four-year, $56 million deal the crowd and Kiley McDaniel predicted as part of our Top 50 Free Agents list. Yasiel Puig and Brock Holt are the only remaining unsigned players on the entire list. The opt-outs do add value to Castellanos’ contract, but this contract is paying for a relatively optimistic view of Castellanos to begin with. The contract comes in sharp contrast to the one-year deal that Marcell Ozuna just signed, particularly given the opt-out. Ozuna is just one year older than Castellanos, but given the limited number of suitors for corner outfielders, one team having a strong, negative impression of Ozuna, or a potentially positive view of Castellanos, could have had a significant affect on the negotiations. That Ozuna came burdened with a qualifying offer and its attendant draft pick penalty might have been just enough to separate the two players; the pick the Braves surrendered was a late-third-rounder due to signing Will Smith earlier in free agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Derek Jeter and Larry Walker have punched their tickets to Cooperstown, and this year’s Hall of Fame election is in the books, but before the circus leaves town, it’s time engage in my seventh annual attempt to gaze into the crystal ball to see what the next five elections will hold. As I note annually, this exercise requires some amount of imagination and speculation, and while it’s grounded in my research into the candidates and the history and mechanics of the voting, the changes to the process that have occurred during the time I’ve been conducting this exercise raise the question of how valuable that history is from a prognostication standpoint. It’s tough to get a fix on the horizon when the earth keeps shaking.

Make no mistake: when it comes to the BBWAA’s voting patterns and process over the past seven years, the earth has moved. The writers’ streak of electing multiple candidates for seven consecutive years is unprecedented, as is the surge of 22 honorees in that span. We’ve had three quartets elected over the past six years, compared to two (plus the original quintet) over the previous 78 years. All of this has happened amid changes to both the terrain and the rules. A logjam of qualified candidates unprecedented in modern voting history contributed to the Hall unilaterally truncating candidacies from 15 years to 10 via a 2014 rule change, less to clean up the ballots than to move the intractable debate over PED-related candidates out of the spotlight. With the BBWAA’s subsequent proposals to adjust the longstanding 10-slot rule and to publish every ballot both rejected by the Hall’s board of directors, voters have responded by setting and breaking records for slots used per ballot, percentage of ballots filled to the max, percentage of ballots revealed to the public either before or after the election, and the highest share of the votes for a given candidate. It’s been a wild ride. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The Giants’ lineup won’t be mistaken for a great (or even good) one, but it’s not really all that bad. Sure, many of the contributors are on the wrong side of 30 — even last year’s surprise contributor Mike Yastrzemski will turn 30 before the end of the season — but that’s balanced by the fact that the majority underperformed expectations in 2019. That shouldn’t be taken as good news, as players who underperform see their expectations drop, but it’s still a silver lining — the offense probably wasn’t as inept as it appeared last year.

Also of value is the fact that the team’s position players are generally average-or-better defensively. Among them is Buster Posey, who still is a plus despite his offensive decline. ZiPS isn’t projecting a return to prime form with the wood for the backstop, but Posey is one of the better defensive catchers of this generation, and there’s still some value to be had there. I’m both curious and dreading to see how the writers consider and value Posey’s defense when he becomes Hall-eligible; I’m fairly certain I’ll check his box, but it’s hard to say how the other 400 or so votes will go. Read the rest of this entry »

Julio Rodriquez has what it takes to become the face of a franchise. Nineteen years old and seemingly on a fast track to Seattle, the top prospect in the Mariners system possesses more than upper-echelon talent. He’s also blessed with a healthy dose of character and charisma. More on that in a moment.

Rodriguez currently sits 44th on The Board, and there’s a decent chance he’ll climb significantly from that slot in the not-too-distant future. MLB Pipeline has him at No. 18, while Baseball America is even more bullish on the tools Dominican-born outfielder. BA ranks Rodriquez as the eighth-best prospect in the game.

The numbers he put up last year between low-A West Virginia and high-A Modesto are eye-opening. In 367 plate appearances, Rodriguez slashed .326/.390/.540, with a dozen home runs. Keep in mind that he did this as an 18-year-old in his first season stateside. A year earlier, he was a precocious 17 and punishing pitchers in the Dominican Summer League.

Rodriguez is listed at 6’ 4”, 225, and Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto expects his right-handed stroke to propel plenty of baseballs over fences in years to come. Just as importantly, Dipoto sees a well-rounded skill set that is augmented by drive and desire.

“I don’t think he’s even scratched the surface of what he’s capable of from a power perspective,” opined Dipoto. “And he’s committed to improving in the areas you can really control, like defense and base running — the small nuances of the game.”

And then there is the aforementioned character and charisma. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

As I noted yesterday, the Twins look a lot like a classic Cardinals team in that there are no real superstars but very few real weaknesses, making the chances of an actually lousy season quite small. In fact, the Twins might be a better Cardinals team than the 2020 Cardinals, as there are holes here, starting in the outfield.

No doubt elbow issues played a role in his down season, but Tyler O’Neill’s 2018 Beast Mode was basically missing in 2019 and as a result, his projection drop-off is massive, to the extent that ZiPS is no longer confident he’ll be a league-average corner outfielder. O’Neill’s contact numbers have been absolutely abysmal in the majors, and his 58.6% career contact rate and 21.4% swinging strike rate would be uncomfortably worse than the entire 2019 leaderboards. For reference, the last-place qualifier in contact rate in 2019 was Franmil Reyes at 65.4%. That’s troubling; to get to his pedestrian .258/.307/.454 line in St. Louis so far, O’Neill has had to maintain a .376 BABIP. That isn’t sustainable.

ZiPS sees Tommy Edman, who will see significant time in the outfield, as above-average overall, though regressing a bit from a surprising rookie campaign. He’s not likely to add enough defense to be valuable in an outfield corner, however. ZiPS is over Dexter Fowler, but does see Harrison Bader having a better offensive season, though it still amounts to a worse projection than the one he received entering 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

Sam Mondry-Cohen was between his junior and senior years at the University of Pennsylvania when he first began working with the Washington Nationals. He’s come a long way since then. An unpaid intern for six week in the summer of 2009, Mondry-Cohen now holds the title of Assistant General Manager, Baseball Research & Development.

His initial front office experience was the epitome of humble. The Nationals didn’t even have an actual internship program at the time. As Mondry-Cohen explained it, “They were basically there to babysit me. I don’t know that anyone was really looking for any work product.”

What they got was a second sabermetric voice at a time when analytics had yet to become mainstream. Mondry-Cohen may have been majoring in English at Penn — African-American literature was his main focus — but he was an avaricious reader of FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus. He’d devoured The Book. In short, he was a nerd-in-training.

“I had the vocabulary, and a way of looking at the game, that wasn’t common back then,” recalled Mondry-Cohen. “The Nationals didn’t have an analytics department or an R&D department. They didn’t have any data analysts. Adam Cromie, who went on to become the assistant GM, was the Assistant Director of Baseball Operations. He was the one who appreciated my world view of baseball, and he did assign me a few projects.” Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

In my opinion, closing the deal with Josh Donaldson salvaged the Twins’ offseason. The team didn’t make any big moves last winter, disappointingly starting 2019 with a lower payroll than in 2018, but it did make several lower-key additions. With the Indians engaged in crippling levels of inaction, the Twins were able to “steal a march” on Cleveland and surprise them from behind. Minnesota had a quieter winter in the early going of this year and my worry — from their point of view that is — was that the Twins might enabling the White Sox to do to them in 2020 what they did to Cleveland in 2019.

Adding Donaldson, and moving Miguel Sanó to first, closes up the final hole in the starting lineup. Now, the Twins lineup resembles a classic Cardinals lineup, in the very best sense. There are no superstars — not even Donaldson — but the lineup is stacked, with every single starter projected to be at least league average. And there might be some upside remaining in Byron Buxton and Sanó. Like the best St. Louis teams, ZiPS sees the Twins as having ample backup plans at most positions, with Willians Astudillo, Marwin Gonzalez, Alex Avila, and even Jake Cave and Tomás Telis/Ryan Jeffers as more-than-capable fill-ins.

I’m very happy to see that ZiPS, like Steamer, has become a true disciple of Luis Arraez. His 2019 projection of .268/.309/.354 was more than respectable for a player who only had a couple months of Double-A experience and who was on the edges of prospect status. Arraez blew through that quickly, hitting .344/.409/.401 in the minors and .334/.399/.439 in 92 major league games. And remember, the offensive explosion in the minors was home run related, something that didn’t much benefit Arraez, who had all of six professional homers when the Twins called him up (and none in 2019). I didn’t have an American League Rookie of the Year vote, but Arraez would have been either second or third on my ballot. I’m know it’s likely that ZiPS is projecting Arraez to lead the league in batting average, but so be it; I don’t put my thumb on the scale.

Pitchers

While I love the Donaldson signing, I would much rather have seen them sign the Josh Donaldson of pitching. The top of the rotation is solid, with José Berríos and Jake Odorizzi, and Rich Hill and Homer Bailey aren’t bad pickups, especially as the team waits for Michael Pineada to come back from suspension, but there are too many interesting question marks behind Berríos and Odorizzi. That’s a more palatable situation for a rebuilding team than a contending one. The Twins are still one, possibly two pitchers away from me feeling comfortable with their roster. The rotation is unlikely to be a disaster because they also project to have a lot of reasonable back-end options, but the whole complexion of this group changes with Zack Wheeler or Hyun-Jin Ryu in there.

The bullpen looks a lot like the offense in that there’s nobody really dominant apart from Taylor Rogers, but it’s not really weak anywhere either. ZiPS likes a lot of the team’s Triple-A bound relievers, with pitchers like Ryne Harper, Danny Coulombe, Andrew Vasquez, Blaine Hardy, and Cody Stashak all having the potential to add real value to the parent club if needed.

Prospects

While ZiPS still sees Royce Lewis ending up with more career WAR than Nick Gordon, that gap is much narrower than scouts’ perceptions of the two middle infielders would suggest. ZiPS thinks Lewis has a lot more upside than Gordon, but also a fairly large chance of being a total bust; ZiPS translates his 2019 minor league performance at .193/.234/.305, coming off a .228/.276/.339 translation in 2018. ZiPS thinks Gordon is a safer bet, but doesn’t see a great deal of upside, pegging him basically as a one-win starter for most of his career. Given where the Twins are right now, if they can land a real difference-maker on the mound with a package centered around Lewis or Alex Kirilloff, I would pull that trigger in an instant.

ZiPS is more optimistic about the pitching prospects. Both Brusdar Graterol and Lewis Thorpe received projections suggesting they could pitch right now in the majors without the least bit of embarrassment, forming part of the Twins’ ample supply of third-through-fifth starters. And if you’re looking for some interesting names of the fringe prospect variety, ZiPS gives a better than 50/50 shot that either Griffin Jax or Bailey Ober have at least one league-average season as a starter in the majors. Now, I’d be skeptical of Ober until he passes the Triple-A test — he looks like an NBA power forward with a fastball that’s maybe better than Jered Weaver’s — but I like giving players who don’t fit the mold but play well every opportunity to pass or fail on merit.

One pedantic note for 2020: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth charts playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned, players who will miss 2020 due to injury, and players who were released in 2019. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in June to form a ska-cowpunk Luxembourgian bubblegum pop-death metal band, he’s still listed here intentionally.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

ZiPS is agnostic about future playing time by design. For more information about ZiPS, please refer to this article.