Archive for Featured

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Toronto Blue Jays farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .270/.360/.450 as 17-year-old in Appy League.

Scouting Report
The Blue Jays traded for international-bonus slots and were able to avoid completely blowing out their bonus pool to sign Guerrero in 2015, instead spending in a range that only benched them from big international spending for one year instead of two. While most 17-year-old international signees spend their first pro season in the Dominican, Guerrero was advanced enough to come stateside. Not only that, but after spending time in extended spring training (and often hanging around and attentively watching Jays’ Florida State League games at night in April and May), Guerrero skipped the GCL and was sent to the Appalachian League, where he was dominant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Boston Red Sox farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, NYY, TB)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .295/.360/.475 during big-league call-up.

Scouting Report
There were evaluators who didn’t know Benintendi was a draft-eligible sophomore as the 2015 season began. They had little reason to. He was solid but unspectacular as a freshman at Arkansas (in part due to injury), showing promising on-base skills but hitting for zero power while offering what appeared to be little physical projection. He didn’t play summer ball as a rising sophomore, either, as he recovered from a leg injury. He was allowed to do upper-body strength training and little else, so Benintendi bulked up. The following spring he was dominant, whacking 35 extra-base hits, posting a 1.205 OPS against mostly SEC opponents, and rocketing up boards into the top three or four for some clubs. The Red Sox drafted him seventh overall.

Read the rest of this entry »

TAMPA, Fla. — In the fourth week of July last year, while hosting Baltimore, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman reached an agreement to send Aroldis Chapman to the Chicago Cubs. It would be the first move in a partial dismantling of the club, a rebuild in New York representing one of the rarest roster-construction projects in baseball. But Cashman, and Cubs president Theo Esptein, had to wait. They had to wait for approval from Yankees ownership.

With the framework having been agreed upon, Chapman was still a Yankee as he entered a game on July 23rd against the San Francisco Giants at Yankee Stadium. He pitched the ninth and 10th innings.

“Chapman went two-plus innings, not something normally [that occurs] if you are going to execute a trade” Cashman told FanGraphs. “[Steinbrenner] waited 72 hours to green light it as he discussed it with his family. It was not an easy decision. I was keeping Theo on hold, essentially. I told him ‘I will let you know if ownership says ‘yes’.’ I said ‘I am recommending it. We’ll see what happens.’”

Chapman was still a Yankee as the club boarded a charter flight on July 24th to play a series in Houston. When the Yankees arrived in Houston, ownership had OK’d a type of plan rarely seen in New York. In a rare tactical retreat, the Yankees traded instant gratification — the hope of sneaking into the playoffs as a Wild Card — for the delayed variety. The Yankees had passed the Stanford marshmallow experiment. For Cashman, it had taken more than a year to lobby to adopt such a strategy, an approach that some believe has positioned the Yankees for their next sustained run of excellence.

The Yankees enjoy a No. 2 ranking in Baseball America’s recently released organizational talent rankings, after ranking 17, 18, and 18 in the three previous seasons, respectively. And the Yankees should have plenty of financial flexibility in the 2018-19 offseason, with a relatively paltry sum of $70 million in guaranteed salary on the books for ’19.

“It’s not the first time I’ve suggested that,” Cashman said of retooling. “It’s the first time ownership actually agreed to do it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Meadows is Pittsburgh’s top prospect, and one of the most-promising young hitters in the game. The 21-year-old outfielder has a sweet left-handed stroke, and — according to our own Eric Longenhagen — “projects to hit for in-game power without sacrificing much contact.”

He won’t be doing so with a Josh Donaldson approach.

“A downward angle on the ball to generate backspin has always been my philosophy,” Meadows told me prior to a recent game. “That’s what I learned, and it’s what I’ve stuck with. It’s got me to where I am today.”

It’s hard to argue with the results. The Pirates drafted Meadows ninth-overall in 2013 out of a Loganville, Georgia high school, and he has an .848 OPS since signing. And while he doesn’t have a Donaldson-like strive-for-loft mindset, he certainly understands the mechanics of hitting.

“I’ve always been short to the ball, and able to keep my hands long through the zone,” said Meadows. “Different hitters have different bat paths, and different launch angles, and it’s whatever works. For me it’s about getting in a strong position, down on the ball.

“I try to use the gaps to my advantage, and if the ball takes off, it takes off. I’m not up there trying to hit home runs. I’m trying to generate backspin, and if the ball goes out, it goes out.”

Meadows has 29 home runs in 1,335 professional plate appearances, although his raw power suggests that number will grow exponentially as he matures. But again, trying to create fly balls isn’t his modus operandi. To him, well-struck singles are perfectly acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello friends. With the countdown to the season tantalizingly close to zero, it’s time to tell you what we actually think is going to happen this season. We’re not always great at this, and I don’t think you’d want us to always be great at this, because frankly, that’d be terribly boring. But we do like to conduct the thought exercise of who is going to reach the postseason, because it’s good fun and also because it helps us frame our expectations for the season.

Last season, we were able to identify seven of the 10 playoff teams successfully, though not necessarily in their correct postseason positions. Will we do as well or better this season? Only time will tell. As is often the case, some teams got the overwhelming majority of the love, and some teams got coal in their baseball stocking.
Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen published FanGraphs’ top-100 prospect list. Baseball America recently performed a similar exercise, as did Baseball Prospectus, Keith Law, MLB.com and John Sickels.

On the whole, there’s a lot of consensus among these rankings. Although the order varied, all eight of Andrew Benintendi, Dansby Swanson, Amed Rosario, Alex Reyes, Gleyber Torres, Eloy Jimenez, Yoan Moncada,  Brendan Rodgers and Austin Meadows ranked within each outlet’s top 20. Fifty-nine players made every single top 100. The point of this article, however, isn’t to celebrate those similarities, but to point out the differences. In what follows, I identify the prospects that each outlet ranks higher and lower than the “establishment,” and look at how the various outlets compare to each other. Brace yourselves for an onslaught of tables and plots.

*****

List of Lists

Firstly, here’s the consensus prospect list. I hard-coded all unranked players as having ranked 210th, since Sickels ranked just over 200 names. The “Avg. Rank” column below is a simple average of all the rankings.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Kate Preusser’s fourth and final piece as part of her month-long residency. It has been a pleasure to host her work! Missed her previous posts? You can read them here. Listen to her appearance on FanGraphs Audio here.

“What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error, but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone to see?”

–Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding

On paper, it looks like Jurickson Profar had a successful WBC stint for Team Netherlands. He batted .464 during the team’s run through the Classic, with five doubles, four RBIs, and a home run — this while also playing a passable center field, a position at which he’s never recorded a start as a professional.

But Profar’s sterling performance will be overshadowed — for him, at least — by a baserunning blunder made in the first inning of an elimination game against Puerto Rico. Andrelton Simmons led off that game with a single. Xander Bogaerts was hit by a pitch right after that. When Profar followed with another single, it could have potentially loaded the bases for the Dutch. Could have, except that Simmons had just gotten picked off trying to steal third against Yadier Molina — because, I don’t know, maybe he didn’t recognize one of the best defensive catchers in the world with his blond hair?

But back to the Profar single. Even after accounting for Simmons’ caught stealing, that single still put the Dutch in a good position, with two runners on base and just the one out. The advantage didn’t last long, however. After rounding first, Profar used the opportunity to gesture towards the Netherlands crowd — an admittedly smaller contingent than Puerto Rico’s — and was slow getting back to the bag. Yadier Molina, a tiger who has the reflexes of a cobra that’s also a member of MENSA, threw him out. Which, of course he did! Yadier Molina likes throwing people out in the same way you and I like breathing. And of course Profar was celebrating his base hit, because people celebrating base hits is what makes the WBC so delightful. As an event, it’s like NES Super Punch-Out but with actual live humans doing the taunting.

There are multiple angles of the sequence in question. Here are two of them:

The Netherlands would still go on to score that inning thanks to Wladimir Balentien’s two-run homer, but it’s hard not to note that it could have been a grand slam. Profar certainly isn’t failing to note that. As he told the Orange County Register: “I just want to put this loss on myself… I made that mistake. I think we paid for it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of weeks, we published our annual season preview series by going position by position around the league. If you missed any of the posts, they can be accessed by that helpful widget up above. Today, we’re also going to summarize the results of the series. Let’s start by diving right into the results of the ordinal ranks, which we’ll break into three tables for easier digestion. Infield first!

There’s a reason we use projected value and not just average ranking by position when talking about a team’s strength, since the margins between ranks can be deceptive. But this also gives you a decent idea of the amount of balance a team has across positions, and right away, it’s hard not to notice the Astros. Not only are they at the top of both middle-infield lists, but they’re No. 5 on the catcher list, No. 10 on the third-base list, and No. 15 on the first-base list.

Houston projects to get average or better production at every infield spot, something that can also only be claimed by the Cubs, Dodgers, and Indians, three of the very best teams in baseball. The Giants are close to joining that group, with only third base falling a little bit short, and the Blue Jays would be in this mix if they had a real first baseman.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, Cleveland made a point of locking up another one of their young core players, signing Jose Ramirez to a five-year, $26 million contract that gives him significant guaranteed income in exchange for control over his first three free-agent years. Ramirez joins Corey Kluber, Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, Yan Gomes, Carlos Carrasco, and Carlos Santana as members of the team’s core who have signed long-term deals with the club before reaching free agency, and Cleveland’s ability to get these guys signed before they get expensive is one of the reasons they were able to sign Edwin Encarnacion to be a $20 million DH this winter.

Cleveland isn’t a traditional big spender in free agency, but with so many players signed to early-career contracts, they had the flexibility to be a buyer this winter, and they took advantage of it. While they’ve done a lot of things right, this is one of the primary reasons Cleveland has built a contender out of a modest payroll and a farm system that hasn’t generally been ranked among the game’s best. The thing they’ve done very well is develop good players from guys who weren’t considered great prospects, and then get them signed long-term as soon as possible.

Read the rest of this entry »