For those who enjoy the loudest, simplest, most dopamine-drenched form of baseball, today is a special day. It’s Derby day, and even better, the silly hats are not mandatory. The MLB Home Run Derby takes place at 8:00 p.m. ET at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. What the Costco-coded ballpark lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in bulk. According to Statcast’s park factors, Globe Life yields more home runs than the average park both for righties (120) and for lefties (110), so we should be in for a show. You can watch on ESPN, but if you’re a nerd – and you’re reading FanGraphs right now, so I’m sure you can do the math on this one – you’ll probably prefer the Statcast broadcast over on ESPN 2.

As in any year, there’s a laundry list of Derby-worthy players who won’t be participating, with Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Elly De La Cruz at the top. Still, this a solid sampling of swatters, and nearly every participant figures to have a legitimate shot at winning. Either we’ll have a first-time winner or Pete Alonso will take home his record-tying third title.

The field features three of the top six home run hitters in baseball this season — Gunnar Henderson, Marcell Ozuna, and José Ramírez — and two of the game’s brightest young shortstops: AL MVP candidates Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr.. It also includes three sluggers who take the Derby much more seriously than your average participant — Alonso, Henderson, and Teoscar Hernández — and two others who’ve won derbies at lower levels: Witt and Alec Bohm. Finally, there’s Adolis García, an electrifying slugger whose historic power display during the Rangers’ World Series run last season is sure to keep the crowd at full throat. In the sections below, I’ll break down all the new rules and I’ll try to make a case for why each candidate has a shot at the crown. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is a team-by-team analysis of last night’s draft activity. Remember that you can find more detailed scouting reports and tool grades for the players drafted yesterday over on The Board. The positions below are what the player was announced as, not necessarily what I have them projected as on The Board. For pitchers, I have a role designated below: starter (SP), or single-inning or multi-inning reliever (SIRP and MIRP). Read the rest of this entry »

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Josh Rojas has turned himself into a plus defender. My colleague Ben Clemens chronicled that advancement last month, citing the Mariners infielder’s improved ability to go to his left as a primary reason for his markedly-better metrics. Exactly what type of adjustments have allowed the 30-year-old third baseman to turn the proverbial corner with his glove? I happened to be in Cleveland when Seattle began a road series against the Guardians on the day Ben’s article ran, so was able to get the answer right from the horse’s mouth.

“It was a matter of adjusting what works best for me reacting to balls left and right,” Rojas told me. “It has to do with my preset. Not getting down too early, not getting down too late. Picking up contact points. Another thing that helps is knowing how the ball usually comes off guys’ bats when certain pitchers are throwing. There is constant communication between me, the pitching coaches, and Bone [infield coach Perry Hill] on what the plan is for the series.”

The preset is what I was most interested in, so I asked the erstwhile Arizona Diamondback — Rojas became a Mariner at last July’s trade deadline — if he could elaborate. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers. 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 »

Clubs have begun their pre-draft meetings, with some teams already about a week into theirs, while the last team to start them (Milwaukee, as far as I know) begins today. The number of people in draft meetings varies significantly from team to team. Some have more than 20 people in the room, others five or so. When any one person in the draft room learns something new, whether it’s from a scout buddy with another team or during a conversation with an agent or media person, the other folks in the room tend to also learn that thing. It is during this window that the dope starts to flow in a way that makes a more specific, full-round mock draft more feasible.

Below are notes I’ve compiled across the last couple of days from conversations with scouts, front office people, and agents. There isn’t intel on every single team or first round player out there in the ether right now. In spots where I’m making an educated guess based on a player’s fit with past team or decision-maker behavior, I try to make it obvious that’s what I’m doing. I let you know when rumors are coming from industry sources, while being vague enough to not burn a source. I also have some thoughts peppered in that aren’t specific to teams’ picks, but instead what the arc of the first round of this draft might look like based on the nature of this year’s class. For more info on the players below, head over to The Board for scouting reports, tool grades, and rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. 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 »

The amateur draft is this weekend and I’ve done a top-to-bottom refresh and expansion of my draft prospect rankings, which you can see on The Board. Please go read those blurbs and explore the tool grade section of The Board to get a better idea of my thoughts on the players. The goal of the draft rankings is to evaluate and rank as many of the players who are talented enough to hop onto the main section of the pro prospect lists as possible, so they can be ported over to the pro side of The Board as soon as they’re drafted. Players for whom that is true tend to start to peter out in rounds four and five of the draft as bonus slot amounts dip below $500,000. Over-slot guys are obvious exceptions. By the seventh round, we’re mostly talking about org guys who are drafted to make a team’s bonus pool puzzle fit together, or players who need significant development to truly be considered prospects. That usually means ranking about 125 players, but this year’s class is a little bit down and right now I have 100 guys on there.

Scouts and executives tend to think this is a weaker draft class. The high school hitters in this year’s crop are especially thin, while the depth in the class is in high school pitching, usually a demographic teams don’t love drafting with high picks and bonuses. There are still going to be plenty of good players in this draft, but it’s not the best year to be either a team picking at the very top (because there isn’t a generational talent or two) or a team with a lot of picks (there are fewer exciting places to put all that extra bonus money).

For example, last year’s deeper draft class had just over 60 players who I had as 40 FV or better prospects. This year, that number is just over 40. That’s almost a whole round’s worth of impact players present in one draft but not the other. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was in Phoenix for the Draft Combine, I kept running into Seaver King’s friends.

“That’s my homie,” said JJ Wetherholt, the West Virginia infielder and presumptive top-five pick. He and King played together on Team USA last summer, and Wetherholt said King was the person he’d been looking forward to seeing most at the Combine. “He’s a great kid. He’ll be funny. Good dude.”

Michael Massey, the Wake Forest right-hander and sometime pitch design experimentalist, lived with King last season and gave him a positive reference as a roommate.

“He’s fun. He’s a high-energy guy,” Massey said. “Always wants to keep the vibes up, keep everyone having fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are just too many players in baseball these days. I don’t mean that in a “contract the league” way – I think that there should be expansion, in fact. I’ll get back to that, for the record. The problem, instead, is with me. As teams have increasingly realized that the best way to get the most out of players is by giving them frequent rest, more people are playing relevant roles every year. Take the Giants, for example: The 2010 World Series team featured 19 pitchers, from Matt Cain’s 223 1/3 innings all the way down to Waldis Joaquin’s 4 2/3. This year’s Giants have already used 24 pitchers, and we haven’t even hit the All-Star break.

Back in those days, it was easy to know most of your team’s bullpen, as well as the regular starters. It was just fewer names to keep track of, fewer different styles and deliveries and permutations of facial hair. The present-day Giants have an honest-to-goodness pair of identical twins and a closer with his own light show. They have the tallest player in baseball. It’s a wildly eclectic bullpen. And I haven’t even mentioned their best pitcher yet, which is kind of my point. Ryan Walker is having a season for the ages, and he’s doing it in anonymity.

One “problem” with Walker – note: not actually a problem – is that he’s an archetype of pitchers we’ve seen before. He throws a sinker, and he throws a slider. He hides the ball well and throws hard. He misses bats, and always has: Starting in 2019, his first full season, he compiled a 28% strikeout rate in the minors. There’s nothing particularly novel or unprecedented about Walker’s game – it’s just effective.
Read the rest of this entry »