Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.

Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.

“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”

The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »

By most measures, the Rafael Devers trade happened suddenly. It came without advance notice of his availability, and the Red Sox reportedly weren’t shopping him around. Immediately, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis trade in the NBA, because hardly ever in our scoops-driven media landscape, where even the tiniest rumor is treated as currency, does a transaction involving a superstar catch us by surprise.

And yet, now that the shock has worn off, trading Devers feels like a logical outcome to the saga that began in March, when the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base without giving the incumbent a heads up. The details of the ensuing rift have been covered at great length, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. A lot of the reporting since the trade has described the situation in Boston as untenable, and the damage done to the relationship between Devers and the team as irreparable. But based on how badly the Red Sox botched their initial response to the conflict, and then kept bungling their subsequent attempts at reconciliation, from my perspective, it seems like they didn’t make repairing it much of a priority.

We’ll tackle your questions about the Devers trade and so much more in this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. But first, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Though he’s only 32 years old and in his 12th major league season, Mookie Betts has already done enough to secure a spot in the Hall of Fame. He’s made eight All-Star teams, won six Gold Gloves as a right fielder, taken home an MVP award while finishing second three times, and helped his teams to three championships. (He’s the only active position player with three rings) He already ranks eighth among right fielders in JAWS, and is fourth in seven-year peak score, behind only Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Henry Aaron. Like all the great ones, he’s hardly content to rest on his laurels. Not only is he in the midst of his third straight season making substantial contributions to the Dodgers’ middle infield, but he’s emerged as a star-caliber shortstop in a mid-career move that lacks a modern parallel.

“For me he’s a grade and a half better at that position than he was last year,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts over Memorial Day Weekend, during the team’s trip to Citi Field. “He looks like a major league shortstop now, where last year there were times I didn’t feel that way. But I think he’s a guy that loves a challenge and he’s really realized that challenge and keeps getting better each night.”

Asked to elaborate on what has changed for Betts, Roberts said, “Repetitions, confidence, he’s had a lot of different plays that he’s been able to see in games — but I think [the biggest difference] is confidence. He’s just a better defender right now.” Read the rest of this entry »

As you might have heard, the Red Sox traded Rafael Devers to the Giants earlier this week. In my breakdown of the deal, I ranked the players headed to Boston in the order of my interest in them: James Tibbs III, Kyle Harrison, Jose Bello, and lastly Jordan Hicks, though that’s contract-related, as I think he’s probably the best current player of the four. The next day, someone in my chat asked me why I preferred Tibbs to Harrison – was I particularly high on Tibbs, or particularly low on Harrison? After all, Harrison was a consensus top 50 prospect only a year ago, while Tibbs took his first Double-A at-bats this week.

My initial answer was that I saw Harrison several times last year, and he didn’t really do it for me. Combine that with his uninspiring results and the fact that other prospects had squeezed him out of the Giants rotation, and I preferred Tibbs. Since neither guy is clearly ready to dominate the major leagues right now, give me the higher-variance unknown quantity.

When I stopped to think about it later, though, I decided that my answer wasn’t good enough. Right now, I’m knee-deep in spreadsheets, linear regressions, non-linear regressions, projections, scouting reports, basically every type of baseball data out there as I do some initial work on our annual Trade Value Series, which will run next month. I have tons of prospect data stored up. I even looked into how prospect grades translate into major league players earlier this year. Rather than try to re-evaluate Harrison based more or less on vibes and ERA, I decided to apply a bit of analytical rigor now that I wasn’t writing for a deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Fried is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Now in his ninth big league season, and his first with the New York Yankees after eight with the Atlanta Braves, the 31-year-old southpaw is 9-2 with a 1.89 ERA over 95 innings. His career marks are impressive as well. Since debuting in August 2017, Fried has a 2.96 ERA and 3.25 FIP to go with a sparkling 82-38 record. His .683 winning percentage ranks behind only Clayton Kershaw (.695) among active pitchers with at least 100 decisions.

When our 2015 Atlanta Braves Top Prospect list was published in January of that year, Fried was coming off a 2014 season that saw him miss the first three months with forearm soreness and throw just 10 2/3 innings in the low minors before undergoing Tommy John surgery in July. Acquired by Atlanta from the San Diego Padres shortly before our list went up, the seventh overall pick in the 2012 draft was ranked third in the Braves system by Kiley McDaniel, then our lead prospect analyst.

What did Fried’s 2015 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Fried to respond to it.

———

“The 6-foot-4, 185 pound lefty was half of what may have been the best one-two punch in high school baseball history, with Nationals top prospect RHP Lucas Giolito at Harvard Westlake High School in 2012.”

“It was definitely a good little thing,” replied Fried. “It didn’t mention that Jack Flaherty was in there, too. He was probably a better performer in high school than both of us. His stats blew mine and Lucas’ out of the water.”

“Scouts were concerned going into the 2012 draft spring about the unusually high volume of pitches with limited down time on the high school’s pitching program.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Two months ago, I checked in on Oneil Cruz, the center fielder. Things weren’t exactly going well. The Pirates shifted Cruz from shortstop to center at the end of the 2024 season, and the early returns were so discouraging I felt the need to write about the experiment just 17 games into the 2025 season. Here’s where the numbers stood at that point:

Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop.

There’s great news, though. Last week, reader AJ wrote into our newly introduced mailbag to ask for an update, because Cruz’s stats look totally different now. I decided the turnaround was worthy of a full article instead of a few paragraphs. I’ve broken everything down with my first article as the dividing line. There’s a chasm between Cruz’s first 17 games and his last 48.

Deserved Runs Prevented is inherently more conservative than the other defensive metrics, but all of the advanced numbers agree Cruz has completely turned things around over the past two months. He hasn’t just stopped racking up negative numbers, he’s dug himself all the way out, grading as a net positive in every metric except Defensive Runs Saved. Over the past two months, they pretty clearly see him as one of the better defenders in the league. Put that together with career-best hitting and baserunning numbers, and Cruz is on pace for a career year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night in Los Angeles, Shohei Ohtani made his first major league start for the Dodgers. For any other starter signed before the 2024 season, that would be a disastrous sentence to type. Ohtani, of course, became the charter member of the 50/50 club, won the National League MVP, and then helped his team win the World Series. But he came to the Dodgers to hit and pitch, not just to play DH, and last night marked a key step in that process, his first game action as he rehabs from a 2023 elbow surgery.

I watched every pitch of Ohtani’s one-inning outing to compile a report. Obviously, these are the observations of a data analyst, not a scout. I’ve supplemented them with the Statcast and pitch model data generated overnight. I’m not the type to ignore the numbers, but realistically speaking, 28 pitches isn’t enough for a real sample, so the data is more supporting than primary. I’ll start with my first impressions, walk through each of the four pitch types Ohtani threw, and then share some general conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Look, I’ll just get right to it:

The San Francisco Giants are acquiring Rafael Devers from the Boston Red Sox for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison and more, according to sources familiar with the deal.

— Robert Murray (@ByRobertMurray) June 15, 2025

That’s the kind of blockbuster you don’t see every day. Rafael Devers is the best healthy Red Sox hitter. The Sox are above .500 and in the thick of the AL playoff hunt. They’re desperate for offense – though they came into the year with more hitters than spots, injuries to Alex Bregman, Triston Casas, Wilyer Abreu, and Masataka Yoshida have left them scrambling for depth. Abraham Toro has been batting high in the order of late. Romy Gonzalez is their backup DH. And they just traded their starting DH – hitting .271/.400/494, good for 14 home runs and a 145 wRC+ – for salary relief? We’re going to need a deeper dive.

Let’s start with the return. The Sox sent Devers and his entire contract – 10 years and $313.5 million at time of signing, with about $250 million and 8.5 years left on it today – to the Giants. In exchange, they got a wide mixture of players. There’s a major leaguer, Jordan Hicks. There’s a recently graduated prospect, Kyle Harrison. There’s a well-regarded hitting prospect, James Tibbs III. There’s another, further away prospect, pitcher Jose Bello. Finally, there’s that sweet, sweet financial flexibility, something the Sox are no stranger to.

If you look at baseball completely in the abstract, with bean-counting surplus value as your only guiding light for evaluating a trade, this one looks reasonable enough. Devers is under contract for a lot of years at a lot of dollars per year, and projection systems consistently think that he’ll generate low WAR totals for his salary in the back half of his deal. Harrison was a top 25 prospect not so long ago. Tibbs was a first round draft pick last year. Bello is an interesting lottery ticket. Hicks – okay, Hicks might have been a salary offset. But the point is, it’s likely that if all you care about is WAR accrued per dollar spent, the Sox come out ahead on this deal for most reasonable models of surplus value. Read the rest of this entry »

Jake Mangum is impressing as a 29-year-old rookie. Seven years after being drafted by the New York Mets out of Mississippi State University following four collegiate seasons, the switch-hitting outfielder has slashed .303/.346/.370 with a 109 wRC+ over 128 plate appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays. Moreover, Mangum has swiped 10 bags without being caught.

His path to pro ball included being bypassed in the draft out of high school, then opting not to sign after being a low-round pick following his sophomore and junior seasons. One of the teams that called his name didn’t make an offer so much as wish him well. “Good luck with school next year,” was their message to the high-average, low-power Bulldog.

Mangum went to finish his college career with a .357/.420/.457 slash line, as well as a Southeastern Conference-record 383 hits. He also finished with a degree in business administration — although that’s not something he expects to take advantage of down the road. Paying days have a shelf life, but he plans to “stay around the game forever.”

A lack of balls over fences contributed heavily to the limited interest he received from scouts. When he finally inked a contract, the 2019 fourth-rounder had gone deep just five times in 1,200 plate appearances.

“It was always the power piece,” explained Mangum, whose ledger now includes 24 home runs in the minors and one in the majors. “They just didn’t see it playing in professional baseball, my not having enough power. I’m stronger now, but to be honest with you, I don’t try to hit home runs. I try to hit for a high average and help the team with good defense and base running.”

Kevin Cash sees Mangum’s skillset as old-school. Read the rest of this entry »