Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the San Diego Padres farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. I tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium defensive positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.

This is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the Padres farm system. I like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in my reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players in Arizona and Florida allows me to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. However, this approach has led to some situations where outdated analysis (or no analysis at all) was all that existed for players who had already debuted in the majors. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system will allow this time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players as they draft, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be a full Padres prospect list that includes Robby Snelling and Braden Nett and all of the other prospects in the system who appear to be at least another season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Kala’i Rosario won the Arizona Fall League’s Home Run Derby this past November, and he did so in impressive fashion. Not only did the 21-year-old Minnesota Twins outfield prospect pummel a total of 25 baseballs over the fence at Mesa’s Sloan Park, the longest of them traveled a power hitter-ish 465 feet. By and large, that is what Rosario’s game is all about. As Eric Longenhagen pointed out last summer, the 6-foot, 212-pound Papaikou, Hawaii native had previously won the 2019 Area Code Games Home Run Derby and he “swings with incredible force and has big raw power for his age.”

Rosario’s setup in the box stood out to me as much as his ability to bludgeon baseballs when I watched him capture the AFL’s derby crown. The right-handed hitter not only had his feet spread wide, he had next to no stride. I asked him about that following his finals victory over Toronto Blue Jays infield prospect Damiano Palmegiani.

“Tonight my setup was a little different, but in games I usually do a small stride, so it wasn’t a big difference,” Rosario told me. “I have power already, so I don’t lock into my coil too much. When I get into the box I kind of preset everything, and from there it’s just letting my hands do the work.”

Improving his contact skills is both a goal and a necessity for the slugger. Rosario had a 29.6% strikeout rate to go with his .252/.364/.467 slash line and 21 home runs in 530 plate appearances with High-A Cedar Rapids. As Longenhagen also opined in his midseason writeup, Rosario’s “high-effort swing has zero precision.” Widening out and shortening up have been part of his effort to alleviate that issue. Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, this is the clickbaitiest headline I could think of for this premise. It’s the first week of January, the free agent market has seized up due to lack of routine maintenance, and the sun hasn’t come out since the Aquaman sequel was released, perhaps as divine punishment for humanity’s crimes. So let’s find pizazz where we can.

Though in all honesty, it shouldn’t be that difficult, because Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. are pretty exciting all on their own. We just saw a Rookie of the Year campaign from the former and a breakout season from the latter. Here’s something that might sound like hyperbole, but really isn’t: Both players are on a Hall of Fame track now. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my 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 »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Last year, I noted in this space that I had to double-check the Diamondbacks’ ZiPS projections, as the computer seemed surprisingly optimistic about Arizona’s outlook. It turned out to be a little too optimistic, though I was wrong about the relative strength of the Giants and Padres, who both finished below the Snakes in the standings (though you can quibble about how good the Padres actually were in 2023).

Naturally, since ZiPS had a sunny view of Arizona then, it’s certainly not going to be less sunny now that a lot of the things the system liked have came to pass. Looking at the 2024 projections as a whole, they actually feels very Cardinals-y, and not in the sense of the 2023 Cardinals. The projections from top to bottom are quite steady, in the manner of a good Cards team, with a lot of positional flexibility on the roster and a solidly above-average projected defense from bow to stern. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

For a very long time, the Cardinals were one of the safest bets in baseball. They’ve rarely been a juggernaut in recent decades, but they almost never had disastrous seasons and could almost always be counted on to end up with somewhere between 87 and 92 wins no matter what kind of shenanigans took place during the season.

Then 2023 happened. After posting just one season below .500 in the 21st century, the Cardinals finished with 91 losses, their worst showing since 1990, which was also the last time they finished in last place in the division. Back then, the team quickly recovered and immediately got back to a winning record, though it didn’t make the playoffs again until 1996. Read the rest of this entry »

This year I had the honor of filling out a Hall of Fame ballot for the fourth time, and as was the case with the previous three, I’m taking the time to explain my reasoning. This is something that I feel every voter should do. Filling out a ballot is a privilege that demands not only due diligence, but also transparency. That said, let’s cut to the chase.

My checkmarks went next to the names of 10 players — the maximum number allowed — seven of whom are holdovers from last year, and three of whom are new to the ballot. In alphabetical order, my votes went to Bobby Abreu, Carlos Beltrán, Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, Joe Mauer, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, Chase Utley, and Billy Wagner.

Yes, Andruw Jones’s name is missing from that list. No, I am not particularly pleased by his non-inclusion. The erstwhile Atlanta Braves star had received my vote three times prior, and in a perfect world he would have again this year. But it’s not a perfect world. Again, only 10 checkmarks are allowed, and with three worthy newcomers joining eight holdovers from last year’s ballot, someone had to draw the short stick. Ultimately, I decided it would be Jones.

Who might I have dropped instead? That’s a question that would require more words to answer adequately than I have room for in this column, but I will say that a certain amount of strategic thinking went into the decision. As my esteemed colleague Jay Jaffe can attest, any thoughts of my omitting Gary Sheffield (currently polling at 71.9%) were dispelled with a reminder that this is his last year on the ballot. While the likelihood of Sheffield’s reaching the required 75% threshold isn’t high, it’s also not impossible. Conversely, Jones (currently at 62.5%, a few percentage points better than last year), has three more years of eligibility left beyond this cycle. I am likely to resume voting for him 12 months from now. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2023, I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within the game. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came via an assortment of Q&As, feature stories, and the Talks Hitting series. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

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“Mike came over to me and said that they were probably going to take Gausman, because they needed a college pitcher who was going to be quick to the big leagues..… We thought Buxton was going to be our guy. That was how we ranked them. We had Gausman after Mike [Zunino], but we had Buxton ahead of both of them.” — Tom McNamara, former Seattle Mariners scouting director

“Victor [Martinez] would go up there and call his shot,. He would say, ‘I’m going to sit on a breaking ball here,’ then he’d spit on two fastballs and when they hung a breaking ball he would hit it into the bullpen. He was really fun to watch hit, because he was playing chess up there a lot of times.” — Josh Barfield, Arizona Diamondbacks farm director

“There are indicators with the advent of Statcast and ball tracking that are even more predictive of the underlying metrics, which are more predictive than traditional rate statistics. That’s on a year over year. But when you look at multi-year models, players change and projection comes into play. That’s where the art comes into play.” — Randy Flores, St. Louis Cardinals scouting director

“Every morning Josh wakes up, and in his Slack channel is a major-league pitcher that has a game plan attached to it. It’s a little bit of an exercise that we do with him. He’s recreating what it feels like to prepare that day… If we’re facing [Framber] Valdez, or facing [Gerrit] Cole, what angles do I want to set up? Where are my eyes? What is the discipline in my eyes that day?” —Donny Ecker, Texas Rangers bench coach/offensive coordinator Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“What if I voted for Bartolo Colon?” The thought crossed my mind on more than one occasion as I counted the number of candidates I intended to vote for on my 2024 Hall of Fame ballot on my fingers. Last year, I only voted for seven, which felt uncharacteristically stingy given the history of my advocacy. In the weeks and days leading up to my putting pen to paper, this time I had nine in mind. Why not top it off to a nice round number?

I’ll take you through my process in answering this pressing question soon enough. This is my fourth year with an actual ballot, but filling one out hardly feels like old hat, even with 23 years of analyzing Hall of Fame elections under my belt, and 21 years of doing so while armed with the system that became JAWS (the official 20th anniversary of the metric’s introduction is next week). While so many mentors, peers, and colleagues have come and gone in this racket, I’m grateful to have stuck around long enough to have earned the right to vote, and it’s a privilege I look forward to, even with the heightened scrutiny that comes with it. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Bartolo Colon could throw strikes. At the outset of his 21-year major league career, Colon blew 100-mph fastballs by hitters, and within a couple years showed off top-of-the-rotation form. Over a decade and more than half a dozen teams later, following a controversial arm surgery, Colon’s ability to locate his sinker to both sides of the plate with precision gained him greater renown. In one 2012 start, he threw 38 consecutive strikes.

Indeed, it was the second act of his career — or was it the third, or even the fourth? — during which Colon became an unlikely cult favorite. The Dominican-born righty had listed at 5-foot-10, 185 pounds while in the minors, but his biggest contract extension had a weight clause centered at 225 pounds. After suffering a torn rotator cuff at the tail end of his Cy Young Award-winning 2005 season, he spent nearly half a decade knocking around before undergoing experimental injections of fat and stem cells into his shoulder and elbow, and by the time he reemerged in his late 30s, he was officially listed at 285 pounds. His everyman build made him more relatable, but it camouflaged an exceptional athleticism. “Big Sexy” — the nickname given to him by teammate Noah Syndergaard, and later the title of his 2020 autobiography — could field his position with enough flair to execute a behind-the-back throw. He could high-kick like a Rockette, and do splits like a ballerina. “One of the stereotypes of Bartolo is because he has an atypical body type for a pitcher, he is not in shape,” said Cleveland GM Mark Shapiro in 2004. “But this guy is amazingly strong. He’s like [former Houston Oiler running back] Earl Campbell from the waist down. He is a strong, strong man, and that core strength is what it’s all about.” Read the rest of this entry »