Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Arizona Diamondbacks. 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 »

I won’t sugarcoat it for you, friends. It’s a tough time to be a major league starting pitcher. Their ligaments are under threat like never before. Their workloads aren’t far behind. For a variety of reasons, the old style of starting pitcher is quickly headed toward extinction and we’re transitioning to a new way of doing things.

That all seems like the obvious truth. But I decided to go to the data and make sure. As Malice of the Clipse (and yes, fine, Edgar Allan Poe) memorably said, “Believe half what you see, none of what you heard.” I’m not sure exactly where that leaves you, since I’m going to be telling you what I saw, but that’s an epistemological question for another day. Let me just give you the data.

So far this year, there have been 452 games, and thus 904 starts. Starters have completed 4,735 1/3 innings, or 5.24 innings per start, and they’ve thrown an average of 86.2 pitches to get there. They’ve averaged 94.1 mph with their four-seamers, yet despite all that velocity, they’ve thrown fastballs of any type just 54.9% of the time. This isn’t Opening Day starters, or anything of that nature; it’s just whoever has picked up the ball for the first pitch on each side.
Read the rest of this entry »

When Matt Waldron made his major league debut for the Padres last June 24, it was a noteworthy event. While a few position players had thrown the occasional knuckleball ast a goof after taking the mound for mop-up duty, no true pitcher had thrown one in a regular season game in two years. The last one who had done so, the Orioles’ Mickey Jannis, made just one major league appearance. Mixing his knuckler in with four other offerings, Waldron bounced between the minors and majors for a couple months before sticking around in September. Now he’s a regular part of the Padres’ rotation, and he’s having success… some of the time.

Through six starts totaling 31 innings this season, Waldron owns a 4.35 ERA (111 ERA-) and 4.06 FIP (103 FIP-), which won’t put him in contention for the Cy Young award but is respectable enough to keep him occupying a back-of-the-rotation spot. For what it’s worth, within the Padres’ rotation he’s handily outpitched both Michael King (5.00 ERA, 6.30 FIP), whom the Padres acquired from the Yankees as one of the key pieces in the Juan Soto trade, and Joe Musgrove (6.94 ERA, 6.59 FIP), who last year signed a $100 million extension.

Waldron is striking out a modest 19.7% of hitters but walking just 7.3%; his 12.4% strikeout-walk differential is second best among Padres starters behind only Dylan Cease’s 18.7%, and Waldron’s 1.16 homers per nine sits in the middle of the pack among their starting five (which also includes Yu Darvish) — and a vast improvement on his 1.67 allowed per nine at Triple-A El Paso in 2022–23. He’s done a very good job of limiting hard contact, with his 87 mph average exit velocity placing in the 78th percentile and his 33.3% hard-hit rate in the 75th percentile. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re nearly a month through the season and there’s still a jumble of teams sitting around .500 who could wind up in the playoff picture with one hot streak. That’s exactly what happened with the Twins last week. Of course, the opposite is true, too, with the Rays learning that lesson while getting swept by the White Sox.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — I’ve taken some editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

…

The Braves continue to run roughshod over the rest of baseball, sweeping the Marlins and winning a dramatic weekend series against the Guardians. They’re doing it all despite slow starts from Ronald Acuña Jr. (111 wRC+), Austin Riley (95), and Matt Olson (101). They did just get Ozzie Albies back from his toe injury earlier than expected and Marcell Ozuna continues to power the offense.

The four teams in this tier have been playing some excellent baseball recently and are separating themselves from the morass of teams below them. The Guardians still have the best record in the AL despite losing two of three to the Braves, and the Phillies have won 13 of their last 15 games, including a sweep of the Padres over the weekend.

The Dodgers had their six-game win streak snapped Sunday, but their sweep of the Nationals and series win over the Blue Jays helped put their early-season struggles behind them. A trio of rookies — Andy Pages in the outfield and Landon Knack and Gavin Stone in the rotation — have helped sure up some of the roster’s question marks. Of course, it’s hard to be worried about Los Angeles when Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani are driving the offense with MVP caliber seasons.

The Yankees split a four-game series against the surprisingly tough A’s, but then beat up on the Brewers by scoring 30 runs on Saturday and Sunday. Aaron Judge, who had been slumping to start the season, homered twice this weekend and it looks like all the adjustments that Anthony Volpe has made have helped him take a big step forward this year. New York heads into this week with a huge four-game series against the Orioles on the docket.

The Orioles had a forgettable weekend, starting with the demotion of Jackson Holliday and ending with a series loss at home to the A’s that included two Craig Kimbrel meltdowns. Meanwhile, the Mariners’ starting rotation carried them to the top of the AL West; their starters have allowed just 20 runs over their last 16 games.

The Cubs looked great in their dominant sweep of the Astros before faltering against the Red Sox, getting blown out 17-0 on Saturday and losing a heartbreaker in the ninth on Sunday night. The Brewers didn’t fare much better, splitting a four-game series with the Pirates before getting trounced by the Yankees. Still, these two teams — and the generally good play of the rest of the teams in the division — have made the NL Central one of the more compelling storylines to start the season. Chicago is hanging around despite missing Cody Bellinger, Seiya Suzuki, and a handful of pitchers, all suffering from a variety of maladies. Milwaukee has had plenty of injury issues too, and it’s enjoying a surprising breakout from Brice Turang, but its pitching staff is running pretty thin — allowing 30 runs across the last two days is evidence enough of that. These two teams will face off this weekend in a three-games series that could set the tone for how this rivalry will shape up this year.

All the teams in this huge tier are hovering around .500, sitting on the knife’s edge between competing and retooling for next year. A hot streak or a cold snap could propel them one way or the other very quickly.

The Twins are a perfect example of how quickly a team’s fortunes can change. They’ve won seven straight and have now climbed a game over .500. They’re still pretty far behind the Guardians and Royals for the division lead, but they’re now firmly in the conversation after being left in the dust over the first three weeks of the season. It helps that they faced the White Sox and Angels and have another series against the South Siders lined up this week. If they can take this momentum and start winning games against tougher opposition, they could make the AL Central race a lot more interesting.

The Royals and Tigers, who both sit above Minnesota in the AL Central standings, just battled it out over the weekend, with Detroit emerging victorious in two of the three games. It’s the pitching that’s been the most impressive for the Tigers and Royals, though they’re both struggling to score runs with any consistency. For Detroit, Riley Greene is its only young hitter producing with any consistency right now; Kerry Carpenter started strong but fell off last week, and the club is still waiting for Spencer Torkelson and Colt Keith to wake up.

The Cardinals won both of their series last week, giving them a bit of life after a sluggish start to the season. They still seem to be missing that devil magic that made them such consistent winners for most of the last two decades. They demoted Jordan Walker to Triple-A last week and their offense is last in the NL in scoring. At least their pitching staff, the focus of all their offseason energy, is much improved, with Sonny Gray continuing to look like a frontline ace.

Four of the teams in this tier had serious designs on competing for a playoff spot this year, and then there’s the Pirates, who have seriously cooled off after their hot start. The Padres have won just three of their last 11 games, and the Diamondbacks have been only slightly better than that.

The Rays had a pretty terrible week, losing two of three to the Tigers and then getting swept by the White Sox of all teams. It’s pretty easy to diagnose what’s wrong with their roster: They’ve allowed the third most runs in the AL and Randy Arozarena (47 wRC+) and Yandy Díaz (86) aren’t driving the offense right now. No amount of depth will help when the best players on your roster aren’t producing.

The Astros managed to take both games of the Mexico City series against the Rockies, but their path out of their early-season hole won’t get any easier this week; they’ve got a homestand against the league-leading Guardians and division-leading Mariners on the docket. Like Tampa Bay, Houston’s pitching staff has been a mess so far, with Ronel Blanco representing the only bright spot. Meanwhile, the Astros have one of the best offenses in the league; the problem is they’re not turning that production into scoring right now. There’s a dangerous ballclub in here somewhere that’s just waiting to strike, but Houston is running the risk of waiting too long.

If you remove the seven games the A’s played against the Guardians earlier this season, in which they went 1-6, their record against all of their other opponents would be 11-11. That’s much better than anyone could have expected, and they just split a series against the Yankees in the Bronx and won a series against the Orioles in Baltimore.

The Nationals are also outperforming expectations right now; they won series against the Dodgers and Astros a couple of weeks ago and are in line to sweep the Marlins in four games if they can win Monday night. CJ Abrams has continued his breakout from last year and is looking like the core piece for Washington to build around.

The White Sox doubled their win total on the season last weekend with their three-game sweep of the Rays. Eloy Jiménez and Andrew Benintendi sparked the offense while Erick Fedde led the pitching staff. Even the worst teams in history have to win 50-60 games in a season, so it’s not that surprising that three of those wins came in a row. Still, this roster is among the worst in franchise history and there’s very little hope on the horizon.

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

At 13-16, the Arizona Diamondbacks have started their season with something of a whimper. The biggest reason for that, in my opinion, has been the performance of Corbin Carroll, who’s gone from winning Rookie of the Year and finishing fifth in MVP voting last season to hitting just .189/.295/.236 (60 wRC+) with just one home run over 122 plate appearances. There are a couple of silver linings — he’s swiped eight bases despite his struggles and has struck out just 21 times to go along with his 15 walks — but frankly, it’s mostly been a disaster for a guy who should be playing like what he is: the most talented all-around player on the National League’s reigning pennant-winning team.

Firstly, I’ll acknowledge that Carroll perhaps overperformed last year. His batting average, slugging percentage, and wOBA were all notably higher than his expected marks, and his barrel, hard-hit, and sweet-spot rates were all in the 51st percentile or lower. Then again, his .268 xBA, .441 xSLG, and .370 xwOBA were all at or above the 65th percentile — meaning he still would’ve been solid hitter if those were his actual statistics. Moreover, with his first full season behind him, we could have reasonably expected him to improve his skills, and thus his production, as he gained experience.

So far, that hasn’t been the case. He’s been downright dreadful at the plate.

Carroll’s top-level approach is good: He’s not swinging and missing (80th percentile whiff rate) or striking out (81st percentile strikeout rate), and he’s taking his walks (84th percentile walk rate). But there’s only so much value a hitter can provide by walking and making contact if his quality of contact is abysmal, and, well, that’s pretty much the only way to describe it. His 30th-percentile barrel rate is actually his best quality of contact marker, with his percentiles for average exit velocity, hard-hit rate and sweet-spot rate all amazingly in the fourth percentile or lower. He’s basically hitting the ball with the authority of Steven Kwan and Luis Arraez; that can be totally fine for a hitter if he has the bat control that those two have (which leads to elite sweet-spot percentages), but Carroll doesn’t have that, making him punchless at the plate.

On average, Carroll is hitting the ball nearly five mph softer than he did last year. Along with that, his groundball rate has increased by nearly five percentage points. For Carroll, who has as much speed as anyone in baseball, putting the ball on the ground is far from the worst thing, but that spike in worm-killers has come at the expense of his power. Last season, he hit 25 home runs, 30 doubles and 10 triples; one homer and two doubles are his only extra-base hits this year.

When a hitter loses this much punch despite being in his early-20s, the focus, understandably, will turn to injury. Carroll has a history of scary shoulder problems, forcing him to have surgery when he was in the minors and causing him to leave a couple of games last season after painful swings. But I haven’t noticed any wincing or grimacing in the Carroll plate appearances I’ve seen this year, and he hasn’t been lifted from the lineup because of his shoulder. If there are residual issues, Carroll is keeping them private. Instead, he’s theorized that his working to cut down on strikeouts has created a deeper point of contact, which has made it harder for him to get out in front of pitches and drive them. That’s borne out in the data; his overall pull rate is down from 38.4% to 33.7%, and he’s pulling just 6.5% of fly balls compared to 27.2% last year.

This very well could be the root of his struggles: Carroll doesn’t have otherworldly raw power, so if he’s going to tap into the pop he does have — as he did last year — he’s going to need to start pulling the ball in the air again. If that means taking bigger cuts and whiffing a bit more as a result, then that’s a worthy tradeoff for him to get back to being the offensive force we know he can be.

On George Kirby and Command vs. Control

George Kirby is a fantastic pitcher, and one of my favorites to watch. The degree to which he limits walks is so unprecedented in this era that it’s almost comical. (For what it’s worth, I’m not ashamed to admit I had only so much as heard of 12 of the 24 pitchers ahead of Kirby on the list.)

It’s indisputable that Kirby has incredible control, the likes of which we haven’t seen since most pitchers were topping out at 88 mph instead of 98. If anyone breaks the 20-80 scouting scale for control, it’s Kirby. The question, though, is this: Is his command better than any pitcher since Pud Galvin retired in 1892? I would argue no.

For those unfamiliar, control is accuracy (throwing the ball in the strike zone), while command is precision (throwing the ball where you want). We’ll never know for sure where Kirby wants every pitch; there are command-based statistics that attempt to use catcher glove position to approximate, but with PitchCom allowing for more seamless communication, catchers have an easier time deking hitters who may glance back for location. But it’s hard to imagine he wants all of his sinkers where he’s putting them, even as, in fairness to him, opponents are batting just .172 against that pitch.

But they’re hitting .357 off his slider, and while Kirby’s generally able to locate it down and on the glove side, when he misses with it, he tends to leave it up and over the middle third of the plate to righties.

Pitchers aren’t robots, and even the best won’t be able to put the ball where they want all the time. Many pitchers throw the ball outside the strike zone when they miss their spots; Kirby’s misses happen within the zone. That leads to more balls in play, which makes for a more entertaining viewing experience and oftentimes a lower pitch count, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he has the best command of all time. If his command were that impeccable, considering how good his stuff is, he’d be the best pitcher in baseball by far; instead, he’s allowed nearly a hit per inning this year. Don’t get me wrong: He’s very good, one of the best starters in the league, but let’s not overrate him just because he has a lower walk rate than anyone who’s pitched since Benjamin Harrison was president.

Judge’s Hand Gives Big Inning A Head Start

In their 15-5 win on Sunday, the Yankees had a massive sixth inning that was jumpstarted in the oddest of ways. With the score knotted at four, nobody out, and Aaron Judge on first base, Alex Verdugo bounced a routine double play ball to second baseman Brice Turang, who flipped to shortstop Willy Adames, who came across the bag and fired to first. Except the ball never made it there. Instead, it deflected off the raised hand of a sliding Judge and rolled to first baseman Jake Bauers well after Verdugo reached.

BLOCKED BY JUDGE pic.twitter.com/CF7kCv4AKr

— Talkin' Yanks (@TalkinYanks) April 28, 2024

After discussion on the field, the umpires elected not to call interference on Judge, which would have resulted in a double play. Verdugo was allowed to remain at first base. The next batter, Giancarlo Stanton, popped up to Turang for the second out before the Yankees rallied for seven runs. Interference is a judgment call and thus is not reviewable, but interestingly, crew chief Andy Fletcher said after the game that he believed his crew missed the call, describing the hand raising as “an unnatural part of his slide.”

Crew chief Andy Fletcher said they missed the call on Judge’s slide.

“On the field we got together and did the best we could to come up with a correct answer. After looking at it on replay, it appears that the call was missed. It was an unnatural part of his slide.”

— Curt Hogg (@CyrtHogg) April 28, 2024

Here is the rule that Fletcher said Judge violated, per the MLB rulebook: “If, in the judgment of the umpire, a base runner willfully and deliberately interferes with a batted ball or a fielder in the act of fielding a batted ball with the obvious intent to break up a double play, the ball is dead. The umpire shall call the runner out for interference and also call out the batter-runner because of the action of his teammate.”

So, according to Fletcher, interference should have been called and Verdugo should’ve been out because Judge added an unnatural act to his slide to “willfully and deliberately” break up the double play. Except, the raised hand is a natural part of Judge’s slide. “I’ve been sliding like that for years,” he said after the game. “You can look back at any picture you want of me sliding into second base.”

Indeed, I did go back and look, and I found this 2021 video of Judge sliding into second base with his hand high above his head on a stolen base.

All Slide: The Aaron Judge Base-Stealing Story pic.twitter.com/Zau5DxKL14

— Cut4 (@Cut4) July 7, 2021

So while this perhaps is unnatural for most, it is completely natural for Judge. Maybe this is something that opponents — and umpires — should add to their scouting report on him.

Jared Jones had made just one big-league appearance when my colleague Ben Clemens wrote on April 2 that we should all get irresponsibly excited about the rookie right-hander. Little has happened to change that opinion. When Jones takes the mound this afternoon for the sixth time in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform, he will do so with a 2.79 ERA, a 3.19 FIP, and 34.8% strikeout rate. Moreover, his fastball has averaged 97.3 mph, occasionally reaching triple digits.

Following his second start, I caught up to the flame-throwing 22-year-old at PNC Park to get a first-hand account of his arsenal and development path. Among the things I learned is that he was especially raw when the Pirates drafted him 44th-overall in 2020 out of La Mirada (CA) High School.

“I didn’t know how to pitch when I signed,” Jones told me. “I just threw fastballs, and throwing hard in high school is a lot different than throwing hard in pro ball. Guys in pro ball can hit the hard fastball, especially if you don’t have anything else.”

Jones did have secondary pitches prior to getting drafted, originally a curveball “that wasn’t very good,” and then a slider that went from “just okay” as a young prep to “pretty good” by the time he’d graduated. Even so, he was admittedly more thrower than pitcher — someone whose elite arm strength allowed him to “just throw fastballs by guys.”

Velocity came naturally to the now-6-foot-1, 180-pound righty. It also came early. “I was in my sophomore year of high school when I hit 97 [mph] for the first time,” explained Jones. “I’ve been a hard thrower for a long time.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. 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, my weekly column that highlights strange and often delightful happenings from the last week of baseball. My own baseball watching was a bit stilted this week, for the best possible reason. I went to three Giants games, an exciting event made possible by cheap ticket deals, a friend’s birthday, and some last minute cancellations of non-baseball weekend plans. Two of those games were pretty awful; Blake Snell got shelled Friday night, and then Blake Snell’s replacements got shelled Wednesday afternoon.

The good news is, there’s still *so much* good baseball going on all the time that I had plenty in the tank to write about. You don’t have to look too far to find things to like about baseball these days. We’ve got new holidays, old AL Central rivals, stadium gimmicks, and pure unadulterated velocity. As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column, Ten Things (Zach inspired Will Leitch to start his own Five Things column over at MLB.com, in fact). Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout decided he was going to be more aggressive on the bases this year. Last season, Trout lamented that he missed the days when he was a true stolen base threat. It couldn’t have been easy for the former steals leader to watch the effects of the new rules play out around him. Like Mr. Incredible stuck in a dead-end office job, Trout longed for the glory days. I’d imagine that feeling was made all the more painful because he knew deep down that he still had the skills to achieve greatness.

Things are different this season. Last year, the Angels ranked last in the American League in stolen bases. This year, they rank third. They have a new manager and several new coaches. Trout is never one to spark controversy, and he hasn’t blamed any of his past managers for holding him back. Still, former Angels manager Phil Nevin made it clear he wasn’t all that interested in his players stealing last year, while new skipper Ron Washington and first base coach Bo Porter have already spoken about their team taking a more aggressive approach on the bases. Both mentioned Trout in particular, and Trout himself has confirmed that aggressive baserunning is a bigger part of the “game plan” for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become increasingly convinced that a lot of the subtle roster construction hacks some teams use to get the most out of their prospects — service time manipulation, extremely restrictive pitcher workload management, drafting by bonus demand rather than picking the best player available — are too cute by half. Sometimes it pays off, but in most cases, players are going to be good, or they’re not. They’re going to stay healthy, or they’re not. And fixating on the externalities is ultimately self-defeating.

Consider Jordan Walker. The St. Louis Cardinals, to their immense credit, brought Walker north from spring training last year. The no. 12 global prospect that offseason, Walker was only 20 at the time, and hadn’t had so much as a sniff at Triple-A. But he was athletic for his 6-foot-5 frame, which promised so much power the question was whether scouts could accurately report it before they ran out of pluses.

Did it matter that the Cardinals had an extremely crowded outfield at the time? No. Did it matter that if Walker lived up to his potential, he’d hit free agency at age 26? No. The only thing that mattered was whether he’d sink or swim. Read the rest of this entry »