Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth 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 »
One of the most frequent questions I receive about ZiPS is folks wondering how the long-term projections for X hitter or Y pitcher have changed compared to what they were preseason. Since we’re right around the midpoint of the season, this is a good time to review just how the first half of the 2024 season has shifted expectations for individual players. The methodology I’m using is simple: comparing the current 2025-2029 WAR projections versus the 2025-2029 WAR projections as predicted at the start of the season. I’ve only included good prospects and players who are currently relevant to the majors (or injured) so we don’t get a bunch of random Double-A pitchers who are slightly more or less below replacement level than they used to be gumming things up. I’m also not including the pitchers who’d be on the list because of season-ending injuries; a list of 15 pitchers who have worse long-term outlooks because they’re out for the season with Tommy John surgery or thoracic outlet syndrome isn’t particularly interesting.
Since I’m such a cheerful and upbeat fellow, let’s start with the gainers. I’m also including each player’s updated top three comps, because comps are fun, even if the individual players listed don’t really mean a lot to the projection. At the very least, it contextualizes expectations in a non-WAR manner: Read the rest of this entry »
For the past two-plus years, the Phillies have been one of the most successful teams in baseball. They’ve been to the World Series once and nearly made it back again last year. They’re sixth in the league in wins over that span and are within hailing distance of everyone other than the Dodgers and Braves. They have the best record in baseball this year, and it’s hardly smoke and mirrors; they’re playing .655 baseball with the run differential of a .654 team.
How do they do it? Their approach is strikingly simple. First, get a group of good pitchers. Zack Wheeler and Aaron Nola form one of the best duos in the majors. Ranger Suárez is underrated, though less so after a banner first half. Cristopher Sánchez has been a revelation. The bullpen has been elite for this entire run. Simply put, the team doesn’t allow many runs.
The second part of Philadelphia’s winning formula is to have some burly power hitters smash dingers. Kyle Schwarber has hit 110 homers since the start of 2022, second only to Aaron Judge. Bryce Harper has missed time with injury, but he’s been one of the best in the game when healthy. The rest of Philadelphia’s attack is a bunch of complementary pieces (maybe that sells Trea Turner short, but I’m working an angle here) meant to help the boppers out.
Over the next few weeks, that proven formula is going to be severely tested. Last Thursday night, both Harper and Schwarber sustained fluke injuries. First, Schwarber planted awkwardly on a throw from the outfield and strained his groin. Calling it a fluke might not go far enough – this was only his third time in the field this year, as he usually handles DH duties. It wasn’t a contact injury, just an awkward step on a routine play.
Schwarber departed the game in the eighth inning. In the ninth, Harper grounded out to end the game. He felt his hamstring tighten up as he ran to first base. He was diagnosed with a strained hamstring, and both he and Schwarber hit the IL before the next day’s games.
First, the bad news. The Phillies are going to have to make the approach they’ve used to such good effect work without one of its key components. Harper and Schwarber have both been instrumental to Philadelphia’s recent run of success. This year, they’ve been the team’s best two hitters, give or take Turner’s abbreviated season. They’ve contributed 37 homers and an aggregate 150 wRC+. They’ve been worth 5.7 WAR, and that despite the positional adjustments that likely understate the value of first basemen and DHs.
Here’s an easy way to think about how the Phillies will look without their stars: So far this year, they’ve won 55 games and lost 29, a .655 winning percentage. Now, let’s subtract the 5.7 wins between Harper and Schwarber and replacement level, and add those games to the loss column instead. Now they’d be a .587 baseball team. That’s a .068 drop in winning percentage, a significant gap.
That sounds pretty dire, particularly given that Harper and Schwarber don’t occupy roles that are easily replaced. The only other obvious DH on the roster is Nick Castellanos, and he’s no Schwarber. There’s no obvious first base replacement, either – Kody Clemens has played in each of the three games since Harper’s injury, but that’s more by necessity than design. His natural position is second base, and he’s played a utility role in recent years.
While the Phillies pitching staff is almost comically deep, the same can’t be said about their position players. Johan Rojas is back in the lineup as a frequent starter with Castellanos now out of the field, but he had been demoted to Triple-A on the back of a dreadful offensive start. Clemens has been injured himself. David Dahl is getting big at-bats for the team. Whit Merrifield is hitting .193/.273/.289 and will be playing much more to make the various positional permutations work. The Phillies have a 101 wRC+ if you exclude their two injured stars. This went from a fearsome lineup to a middling one overnight.
There’s good news for Philly fans, though. First, neither injury appears to be serious. The Athletic’s Matt Gelb reported that both players could at least theoretically miss the minimum 10 days with their injuries. Manager Rob Thomson said that he thought both players could be back before the All-Star break. Sure, having an average offense instead of a great one is a big problem should their injuries linger and cause them to miss the rest of the season, but if both Harper and Schwarber return on July 8, the team is only looking at six more games without their services. They’ve already gone 2-1 in their three games since the injuries.
Remember that 68-point drop in winning percentage? That comes out to a difference of 0.4 wins over a six-game stretch. Playing without your offensive core is a blow, but baseball is a game driven heavily by randomness. Over six games, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. No single player matters that much in the short run. No two players do, even.
I think that both Harper and Schwarber will get slightly more time to rest, though, which brings me to my second reason the Phillies don’t need to be excessively worried about these injuries. The All-Star break starts on July 15 and stretches for four days. Leave both players on the IL until then, and they could get a full 20 days to recuperate without missing an excessive number of games. The Phillies will only play six games between July 8 and July 18; it’s a relatively good time to have your best hitters on the shelf.
Will that cost the team another 0.4 wins in expectation? Sure, I suppose, though I think the actual amount is slightly less than that; Clemens appears at least a little better than replacement level to me. More important than exactly how many wins it costs them, though, is their current position in the standings. The Phillies are up eight games on the Braves. We give them an 81.5% chance of winning their division even after accounting for the dip in playing time for Harper and Schwarber. It’s never great to play with a diminished group, but these games don’t have the same import as they would if the team were locked in a tight divisional race.
When you think about it that way, a rest until July 19 starts to make a lot more sense. It’s highly unlikely that missing two hitters for six games will put Philadelphia’s season on a downward trajectory. The real fear here is some kind of injury recurrence. Soft tissue injuries are prone to re-aggravation, and both Harper and Schwarber have battled injuries in the past, though never of this exact type.
Part of the benefit of roaring out to an early divisional lead is that you can take a pragmatic approach to the rest of the year. Harper is notoriously competitive, and I’m sure he wants to come back as soon as is feasible. His return from elbow surgery in 2023 took less than six months, shorter than even the most optimistic recovery timetable predicted. But now is a good time to be prudent, because one week of games isn’t going to change the team’s season, but a month or two without Harper and Schwarber might.
If I were the Phillies, I’d stick to the more conservative recovery timeline regardless of what happens in the next week. If they’re particularly worried about getting caught by the Braves, though, they could always wait to see the outcome of their series in Atlanta this weekend before making any decisions. If they get swept and neither player experiences any setbacks in their injury recovery, maybe plugging Harper and Schwarber in for those last six pre-break games will become an attractive proposition.
Regardless of exactly how they manage things, though, the Phillies are surely breathing a sigh of relief. Without their two anchor hitters, the team really would look different. The success of their model depends on Harper being a superstar and Schwarber providing valuable offensive backing. For a day, that model got washed away and replaced with the unknown. What if one or even both of these strains were serious? What if something tore? It’s hard to imagine how the team would remake itself without these two, but luckily, it appears that we won’t have to find out for more than a few weeks.
Takeya Nakamura is atypical among NPB hitters. The 40-year-old Seibu Lions infielder not only has 478 career home runs — ninth-most in Japan’s top league — he has fanned 2,118 times. Ingloriously, that is the highest strikeout total in Japanese baseball history.
How is the Adam Dunn-like slugger looked upon in a baseball culture that favors contact over power? I asked that question to Toronto Blue Jays southpaw Yusei Kikuchi, who played alongside Nakamura with the Seibu Lions for eight seasons.
“He’s a former teammate of mine and I really respect him as a player and a human being,” said Kikuchi through translator Yusuke Oshima. “There aren’t a lot of hitters with pop over there. I think those kind of players should be more respected in Japan, because it’s natural for home run hitters to strike out a lot. It’s a tradeoff. He’s said that he’s not worried about it. People should be more open-minded when it comes to those things.”
Kikuchi added that there aren’t a lot of hitters like Nakamura in Japan because “coaches over there tend to frown upon striking out a lot.” Moreover, the statistical categories that are valued most are hits, batting average, runs scored, and RBIs. Pitchers are viewed in a traditionally-similar manner. Much as it once was stateside, wins are what matter most. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth 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 »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.
1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.
That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. Read the rest of this entry »
By June of 2013, Baltimore’s beat writers had established their favorite in-season stat to track: Manny Machado’s rapidly rising doubles count.
Machado was in the midst of his first full season in the majors and on pace to make a run for the single-season doubles record. He finished the season with 51 (a several-way tie for 51st all-time), but in the moment, he represented a rookie with sky high potential, standing in the shadow of a mountain representing his own potential peak.
As he dumped double after double into the outfield, Orioles broadcasters noted for fans that the 20-year-old Machado was still developing physically, so his power tool was poised to level up as his career progressed, and when it did, some portion of those 51 two-baggers would convert to round-trippers. The Doubles to Dingers developmental arc is a real phenomenon. After hitting a double once every 14 plate appearances and a home run once every 50 in 2013, Machado followed up that performance in ’14 by doubling just once every 25 PA while upping his homer rate to once every 30. More recently, the current Baltimore broadcast booth has applied the Doubles to Dingers arc to Gunnar Henderson, another promising second-year player on the left side of the Orioles’ infield. However, as Henderson has increased his home run rate in his second full season by over 50%, his doubles rate has held steady, suggesting he’s leveled up his hit tool alongside the power surge, which doesn’t quite fit this narrative arc.
So which players have best exemplified the Double to Dingers storyline, and how did their stories play out afterward? We don’t need to rely on broadcasters, who have a tendency to fuel fan optimism, because this is extremely quantifiable. To identify players on this path, I started the search in 1988 and looked only at players who at the time had three or fewer seasons of at least 100 PA in the majors. I compared their ratio of dingers to doubles during the season in question to their career ratio for all seasons prior. Only samples of at least 300 PA were considered when calculating the ratio. Players also needed to be hitting doubles in at least 4% of their PAs prior to unlocking the next level of power, and after leveling up, their new homer rate should settle in above 2% of PAs (thresholds chosen are round numbers at or just below league average because this really only matters for hitters producing at a baseline level of competency in both key categories). To further ensure that the change in their dingers-to-doubles ratio is caused by a somewhat proportional change to the frequency of both doubles and dingers, their homer rate needed to increase by at least half a percent; likewise, their doubles rate must have decreased by at least half a percent. Read the rest of this entry »
This week marks the halfway point of the 2024 regular season. We’re out of silly sample size season now, having moved on to wondering which teams will add at the deadline and which will start building for tomorrow. Season-long leaderboards are populated with the best players in the league, just like you’d expert. The White Sox and Rockies are awful; the Yankees and Dodgers are great. Plenty of this season has gone according to plan.
Not everything has, though. The Blue Jays and Cubs didn’t get off to the starts they hoped for. On the other side of the coin, the Phillies and Guardians have both exceeded expectations by a mile. Perhaps not coincidentally, both teams have gotten superb performances from their relief corps all season. It’s largely the usual suspects: Emmanuel Clase is one of the best closers of the decade, while the Phillies had the best bullpen projection in the sport coming into the season. But it’s not exclusively the usual suspects. Case in point, or perhaps I should say Cade in point: Cade Smith.
If you’re not a Guardians fan, you might not know who Cade Smith is, and I can hardly blame you. He made his major league debut this season after a solid 2023 campaign during which he compiled a 4.02 ERA (3.42 FIP) and struck out 35% of opposing batters. He struggled to control his walks and Triple-A hitters touched him up for six homers (20% HR/FB), but all told, it was a good year. He broke camp with the big league team; those same power rankings that liked the Phillies so much had Smith down for 61 innings of work as a middle reliever. Read the rest of this entry »
The two of us were part of the FanGraphs contingent in Phoenix for the 2024 MLB Draft Combine last week. The first half of the week consisted of showcase events like batting practice, infield and outfield drills, and a game featuring many of the high schoolers in attendance. The back half of the week consisted of athletic and biometric testing, including the 30-yard dash.
Below are scouting notes for some of our favorite hitters from the event. Major League Baseball distributes a list of the top performers in several of the athletic tests to the media, but doesn’t share complete data. Eric recorded the electronic 30-yard times by hand as they unfolded; at the very bottom of the post is a complete list of those times, save for the couple he missed while he was schmoozing, eating, etc. (Update: Arnold Abernathy’s time has been added) We’ll have a post highlighting Combine pitchers, as well as a draft ranking update, to follow. The players aren’t listed in any particular order; our initials appear at the end of the blurbs we wrote. Read the rest of this entry »
No. 2 is Jeremiah Estrada, a small (6-foot-1) right-hander whom the Padres plucked off the waiver wire last November. In his previous MLB experience — 16 1/3 innings over parts of two seasons with the Cubs — Estrada struck out 21 batters and walked 15 while allowing 10 earned runs, including five home runs. This year, Estrada has 48 strikeouts against 10 walks in 26 1/3 innings. His 43.6 K% is not only second in the league this year, it would be one of the 20 best all-time if he keeps it up for the rest of the season.
