Archive for Featured

J.D. Martinez is a thoughtful baseball player who has made major changes to his swing mechanics. As much as writing is what gets me out of bed on Monday mornings, it seems a shame to sully this one with too much of my own clumsy verbiage. So what follows is just J.D. Martinez, running us through the myriad realizations and swing changes he’s made since he was once a struggling Astro. Of course, there are a few edits and moving pictures.

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I already chatted for nearly six hours during last night’s picks, wrote a bunch of mock drafts and, with the help of David Appelman, made a Sortable Draft Board full of the top players with tools, reports, video and where they were taken last night, but I thought I should drop in and give some thoughts on last night’s first two rounds of the draft.

The top-11 picks went pretty much as expected, with those players all projected there in some order. Husky Canadian prep 1B Josh Naylor crashed the party, jumping from late first-round expectations to 12th overall, which was the first big surprise of the night, similar to what Kodi Medeiros did last year with the Brewers. Often, what fans will term a “reach” or “overdraft” is a team deciding they want a player and realizing he won’t be at the next pick. I support this idea from the team’s side, especially if you can save some money, because when we look back at the draft in 10 years, we won’t say “this guy wasn’t a good value here,” we’ll either say he was good or he wasn’t. Don’t forget that rankings and mock drafts are a guide, not the correct answer. When you can’t trade picks, you take the guy you want and sometimes it’ll look like this.

The rest of the first round was composed of names I had projected in that range or ranked within my top 50-60 players, except for the Orioles at pick 36 with Ryan Mountcastle, whom I heard last week had some people looking at him in the second round. Mountcastle is a unique player with above-average bat speed, bat control, raw power and speed to go with a projectable frame and a long track record of hitting, so he clearly checks a lot of boxes. His swing is a little awkward, he didn’t hit for power in games this spring and scouts think he might be a left fielder, but you can clearly see why teams would be on him with a high pick and I’m betting the Orioles wouldn’t have gotten him with their next pick.

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The Mets have, theoretically, too many starting pitchers. With top prospect Noah Syndergaard forcing his way into the rotation, the team experimented with a six-man rotation for a week, but has now reverted back to the standard five-man grouping, with Dillon Gee heading to the bullpen as a result. Gee is not particularly happy with this arrangement, and voiced his displeasure with the situation over the weekend.

“I’m almost at the point now where I just don’t even care anymore,” Gee said. “I mean, I’m kind of just over it all. I’ll do the best I can out of the pen now.”

…

Later, Gee was asked if he would have preferred being traded. “I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a G.M., so I don’t know. I mean — I don’t know. I’m done trying to figure out this whole situation.”

But even with Gee demoted to the bullpen, the Mets still have too many pitchers. Beyond their three young studs in Matt Harvey, Jacob DeGrom, and the aforementioned Syndergaard, they also have Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese, both of whom are inoffensive back-end innings-eaters. With the first three guys locked in on talent and the latter two unlikely to get dumped for payroll reasons — Colon makes $11 million this year, while Niese is making $7 million and is due another $9 million next year — the Mets rotation remains full, even without considering pitching prospect Steven Matz, who is excelling down in Triple-A. Matz’s performances are forcing the team to consider promoting him sooner than later, even if they don’t have an obvious opening for him at the moment.

But despite the fact that there isn’t really a job opening for a starting pitcher in Queens, it’s become increasingly popular to suggest that the Mets are playing the Super Two game, holding Matz down to prevent him from reaching arbitration a year earlier, and keeping his future earnings down in the process. Joel Sherman, in this morning’s New York Post:

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The normal caveats apply. What follows represents a series of educated guesses. Crazy rumors were flying all over the board last night and early today. This may or may not prove I’m an idiot and/or this whole process is stupid. I opted to leave the embedded videos out of this mock, but for video on every player mentioned, tool grades and all kinds of other info, see the Sortable Draft Board.

1. D’Backs – Dansby Swanson, SS, Vanderbilt

I’m told this will be the pick, but there was discussion of Tyler Stephenson, Garrett Whitley and Tyler Jay as recently as yesterday.

2. Astros – Alex Bregman, SS, LSU

This one is still a toss-up between Bregman and Rodgers, with an outside shot of a target from 5 going here to save money to pay Daz Cameron at 37.

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As most baseball fans are by now aware, a fan at Friday night’s game between the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox was seriously injured after being struck in the head when a fragment of a broken bat flew into the stands. Although initial reports suggested the woman had suffered “life-threatening” injuries, it fortunately now appears that she is expected to survive the incident.

Nevertheless, the severity of Friday’s accident has brought renewed calls for Major League Baseball to take greater steps to help protect fans from similar injuries in the future. Although broken bats and foul balls at MLB games have only resulted in one documented fan fatality in history, a recent study estimated that approximately 1,750 fans are injured by foul balls alone each year.

As a result, various observers are calling on MLB to require that teams install more extensive netting to protect fans sitting close to the field from flying objects. At the same time, others have urged a more cautious approach, suggesting that additional netting will detract from the fan experience, and that ticket buyers can rationally weigh the pros and cons of sitting in exposed seats.

While there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the issue, all too often these debates overlook an important legal reason that helps explain why MLB hasn’t done more to protect its fans from these sorts of injuries. Under what is known as the “Baseball Rule,” courts have historically held that professional baseball teams are not legally liable for any injuries fans that may sustain after being hit by a foul ball or broken bat.

Until this rule changes, there will be little financial motive for MLB to install additional netting to protect fans sitting in the closest proximity to the field.

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Major League Baseball might be incredibly healthy in terms of attendance, television ratings, and finances, but the league has a perception problem that will not go away anytime soon. Baseball’s biggest challenge is, and always likely will be, creating new fans. This is not a challenge unique to baseball or sports in general. All sports continue efforts to draw in new fans just like Coke and Pepsi use marketing campaigns to lure in a new generation of soda drinkers. Rob Manfred has made one of his goals to increase childhood participation in baseball as he believes that children who play baseball turn into baseball fans as adults, continuing the generational chain that has allowed baseball to thrive for more than a century.

While getting more youths to participate in baseball is hardly the only initiative MLB will undertake to grow the sport, getting new fans to attend games is very important for baseball’s future. The Angels’ most recent public-relations mistake, discouraging fans from lower socioeconomic levels from attending because they do not spend as much as other fans once they get to games, is a shortsighted strategy that could hurt baseball in the long run.

In his story for the OC Register, Pedro Moura discussed the Angels’ declining attendance with Robert Alvarado, a Vice President with the team. Alvarado dismissed targeting fans looking to pay for lower-priced seats because they do not make as many purchases once they are inside the stadium. This somewhat callous disregard for “discount buyers,” as Alvarado calls them, might work for short-term revenue, but the team has seen one of the bigger drops in attendance in MLB and the plan is a questionable one long-term.

Since we looked at attendance last month, there have not been too many big changes at the top or bottom of attendance rankings. The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees are still the highest-drawing teams, and the Cleveland Indians, rebounding on the field and in attendance, passed the Tampa Bay Rays in seasonal attendance over the past month. The Angels do boast decent numbers compared to all teams. (All attendance numbers below from Baseball Reference.)

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I haven’t been one to do too many mock drafts if the information doesn’t support it. I won’t just brazenly move around names with little justification in a bid for clicks every few days. I have enough info to change enough picks now for a worthwhile read, but I’m going to do a full mock draft on Monday with the supplemental rounds and the back half of the first round, as things will be much easier to project then (although still not easy).

Clubs have told me they aren’t even discussing medical and signability info openly in their rooms until later today or this weekend and some teams in the back half of the first round haven’t even started stacking the board for their first-round pick yet, instead focusing on lower picks and positional rankings. I’ll have a much better feel for the picks beyond the top dozen on Monday, so it would be foolish to throw darts for those picks now only to reorder everything in a few days. If you’re desperate for what I think about those picks now, combine the notes below with my previous mock draft and the sortable draft board, that I updated just moments ago with the information below.

Since teams aren’t talking medical and signability info and the consensus is that the reasonably predictable part of the draft is the top 10-12 picks, that means some certainty about the injured pitchers could help shed some light on those later picks.

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On July 4th, you’re likely going to be pressured into exuding every bit of patriotism you can muster, and perhaps you’ll spend the evening watching things explode in the sky. On July 5th, we’d like to offer those of you in the Washington D.C. area a chance to celebrate America in a different way; talking baseball and drinking beer.

On that Sunday evening, from 6 pm to 9 pm, we’re hosting a gathering at The RFD Bar. The event will be a mix of hanging out, along with a couple of formal Q&As, including:

General baseball discussion with SiriusXM’s Mike Ferrin, BrooksBaseball founder Dan Brooks, and myself.

Washington Nationals discussion with members of their front office.

The cost of the event is just $10, and that includes a ticket for one free drink at the bar. The private room we’ve reserved can comfortably hold roughly 100 people, so I’d strongly suggest buying your tickets sooner than later, as the odds of a sellout are pretty high. We’ve always enjoyed doing these events, and look forward to hanging out with all of you guys in a month’s time.

To the extent that most fans pay any attention to legal issues relating to Major League Baseball, they are typically aware that MLB is somehow immune from antitrust law. How exactly this came to be, however, is often less well understood. And in many cases, fans may not have a firm grasp on precisely how this antitrust exemption actually affects MLB’s operations.

Having written a bit on the topic, I thought I’d begin an occasional series of posts examining baseball’s antitrust exemption to help clarify some misconceptions regarding what is admittedly a rather peculiar legal doctrine. This first post will recount the history of baseball’s exemption, dating back to its creation in 1922. Future posts will consider the current scope of the exemption – i.e., what it does and does not cover today – as well as the practical effect that the exemption has on the league.

Although some fans mistakenly think Congress granted baseball its antitrust exemption, the immunity really results from a nearly 100-year-old decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in a lawsuit arising out of the last on-field challenge to the American and National leagues’ dominance over the sport. Back in 1914 and 1915, the Federal League of Professional Baseball Clubs tried to establish itself as a third major league by signing roughly 50 major league players away from their then-current teams – the most notable of which was probably Hall-of-Fame shortstop Joe Tinker. Read the rest of this entry »