NEW YORK — On Tuesday afternoon, Gerrit Cole donned the pinstripes and took the mound at Yankee Stadium, not for his long-awaited season debut, but for a key milestone in his rehab: his first live batting practice session since a bout of nerve inflammation in his right elbow sidelined him in mid-March. The reigning AL Cy Young winner is still at least a few weeks away from returning, but in his absence — and in the face of considerable uncertainty given last year’s performances — his fellow starters have stepped up to help the Yankees into the AL East lead and the American League’s best record.

In front of an empty ballpark but an audience of teammates, coaches, and media, Cole — who eschewed his batting practice jersey in favor of the real thing “because I miss it” — faced teammates Jahmai Jones (a righty) and Oswaldo Cabrera (a switch-hitter batting lefty) from behind an L-screen. He threw 22 pitches, working through his full five-pitch arsenal, and by his own admission, the adrenaline from the setting led him to push his velocity to 96 mph, a point where pitching coach Matt Blake told him to back off. “Matt yelled at me, so I had to throw it like 90 a few times to even it back out,” he quipped afterwards.

“To me, he looked very much in control, with easy velocity,” said manager Aaron Boone of Cole’s session. The ace is eligible to come off the 60-day injured list later this month, but his rehab isn’t far enough for that to be realistic. As for a return in June, Boone indicated that it was a possibility, “but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.” Assuming Cole’s recovery from the session goes as planned, he’ll probably throw a couple more BP sessions before heading out on a rehab assignment, which given the math of building up a pitch count points to a late June return. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid all the (mostly Gunnar Henderson-related, as I understand it) Orioles hoopla, John Means has a chance to do something unusual in his start later today against the Cardinals. Means is the only starting pitcher this season to make it through his first three outings without walking a batter.

That might not sound like much to all you folks who walked barefoot in the snow — uphill, both ways — to see Christy Mathewson shut out the Louisville Trench Foots every three days, way back when. But it’s pretty impressive by modern standards. Only four other starters — Mitchell Parker, Sonny Gray, Corbin Burnes, and Shota Imanaga — even made it through their first two starts without giving up a free pass in 2024. And if Means continues according to form this afternoon, he’ll join a surprisingly small group of pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about a month and a half into the minor league season, a reasonable time for a Top 100 update, albeit one with a relatively light touch. The purpose of this update is to pluck the low-hanging fruit, to polish and reshape the list rather than tear down the one from February. Much of the country is chilly or rainy in April and early May, and it can take time for players (hitters especially) to get going. Young players are also changing all the time, which often includes adjustments to their first taste of failure.

You can see the updated list in its entirety here. Below, I’ve highlighted some individual players. I touch on how everyone who is a 60 FV prospect or better has performed so far this year, as well as which players have moved up the list in a meaningful way. There are many cases in which the order of the list changed but the player’s overall grade and evaluation did not. If a pitcher is hurt and slid to the back of their FV tier (as with River Ryan, Ricky Tiedemann, Kyle Hurt and Chase Hampton), or if guys are stacked differently due to syllogistic reasoning (such as former back-of-the-list starter Christian Scott racing past similar talents who are in, say, Double-A), then I don’t address that individual move. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s wrong with Edwin Díaz? In a single GIF, this is what’s wrong with Edwin Díaz:

I don’t want to tell him how to pitch, because he’s Edwin Díaz and I’m an anonymous person on the internet. But putting a slider right in Josh Bell’s nitro zone is not a great way to approach a high-leverage at-bat. Bell put a good swing on it, which was hardly a given, but Díaz put himself into that situation and paid the price for it.

On a superficial level, there’s not a lot of uncertainty over what’s wrong. During the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Díaz tore his patellar tendon, and then he missed the entirety of the season recovering from surgery that repaired that tendon. He’s back on the mound, but he’s clearly not the same pitcher that he was in his dominant 2022 season.
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The Houston Astros are in an unfamiliar situation: five games under .500 with Memorial Day approaching in the distance like a looming mountain out an airplane window. And they’ve won nine of their past 11 to even get that close.

The Astros have had their ups and downs during their ongoing run of seven straight ALCS appearances, including a season in which they finished under .500 but came within a game of making the World Series anyway. But barring another pandemic — which might well happen if you jokers keep drinking unpasteurized milk — that isn’t going to cut it in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Weems was in his 10th professional season when he was featured here at FanGraphs for the first, and heretofore only, time in July 2020. His story was one of resilience, but also of change. Then 27 years old, Weems was a converted catcher soon to make his big-league debut as a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. Drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2011 out of Columbus (GA) High School in 2011, he moved to the mound five years later after dwelling in Mendoza-line territory while wearing the tools of ignorance.

Weems is now in his third season with the Washington Nationals, and by and large he’s forged a decent career as a reliever. The 6-foot-4 right-hander has made 118 appearances at baseball’s highest level, and his numbers include 140 strikeouts in 130 innings. The first of his Ks came against Trevor Story, the first batter he faced while toeing a big-league rubber.

I recently asked the personable hurler if he ever thinks about that initial punch out.

“Absolutely,” replied Weems, who has a 3.94 ERA over 16 innings in the current campaign. “You have to kind of stay where your feet are in this game — what you did in the past is in your past — but at the same time, if you’d have told me early on in my [professional] career that I’d be a pitcher in the big leagues, I would have laughed. Looking back, what I’ve done is pretty cool.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. 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 »

The phrase outer space has been around since 1842, but I’ve always thought that it’s a strange one. Space is the catchall word we use for any empty area. It’s a little bit silly that someone looked up at the unknowable vastness of the universe and decided to refer to it in the same way you’d describe a spare bedroom to a friend who needs a place to crash. Either way, there’s plenty of space out there. There’s space between planets and space between galaxies. Cosmic voids, the vast empty spaces between gravitationally linked galaxies, make up more than 80% of the universe.

Saturday was Space Night at LECOM Park in Bradenton, Florida. While Paul Skenes was dazzling a packed house in Pittsburgh, the Bradenton Marauders, the Pirates’ Low-A affiliate, held a stargazing session after the game and played “Space Oddity,” “Man in the Moon,” and “Mr. Spaceman” over the PA between innings. Staff members wore NASA flight suits. On the field, the Marauders overcame a two-run deficit to beat the Port St. Lucie Mets, 4-3, extending their winning streak to nine games. Also on the field: a turtle.

In the top of the second inning, with a 1-2 count on leadoff batter Yohairo Cuevas, the home plate umpire called time out and turned his head toward left field. It took a while for the rest of the heads in the park to follow, but when they did, they were rewarded with a show. A turtle roughly the size of home plate walked into left field as a defensive replacement. The human outfielders wanted no part it. Center fielder Sergio Campana gently pushed his teammates toward the turtle, and as they cautiously approached it, the turtle started hauling shell toward center field. Left fielder Esmerlyn Valdez waved to the bullpen for help. Eventually, reliever Magdiel Cotto jogged out, hoisted the creature from behind, and hauled it back to the bullpen. The whole saga lasted just over a minute, or as Reptiles Magazine put it, “Turtle’s Minor League Debut Short-Lived.” Read the rest of this entry »

Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. 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 »