Yesterday, we explored the roster depth of the American League playoff contenders, identifying the strengths and weaknesses that might prove decisive down the stretch for the teams whose playoff odds sit above 10%. Today, we’ll do the same for the National League squads with October ambitions.

National League East

Atlanta Braves
Strengths: Atlanta’s slow and steady climb into first place has involved a considerable amount of roster management. One side effect of all the maneuvers that have gotten them where they are is significant depth. During Travis d’Arnaud’s absence, the team learned that William Contreras is a capable big league catcher. They filled their considerable outfield holes with Joc Pederson, Jorge Soler, and Adam Duvall, while Cristian Pache, who flamed out early in the season, has finally gotten hot at Triple-A Gwinnett and should be a nice September addition. The Gwinnett infield is packed with players who have big league experience, like Jason Kipnis and Ryan Goins. The return of Huascar Ynoa, with Ian Anderson not far behind, creates a sudden bevy of rotation options. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Antonio Jimenez, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
Level & Affiliate: Complex Level Age: 20 Org Rank: 26 FV: 40
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
Jimenez is an electric little lefty (he stands about 5-foot-10) with big arm speed who sits 91-95 and has a plus two-plane slider that he commands. He’ll also show you the occasional average changeup. He’s loose and athletic and has viable starter’s command, though he arguably falls short of starter projection at the moment due to the combination of his present repertoire depth and size. With starter-level command already in place, I’m betting on changeup improvement due to the looseness/athleticism and care less about how small Jimenez is. He belongs in the Rays system ranked ahead of the hard-throwing relief-only arms. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants have been one of the year’s biggest surprises, leading the National League West for a large portion of the season and holding the best record in baseball since the beginning of June. Their success is due in large part to some unexpectedly resurgent seasons from their veteran core. On Friday, San Francisco rewarded one of those veterans, signing Brandon Crawford to a two-year, $32 million contract extension.

The Tigers haven’t been nearly as good as the Giants in 2021, but they’ve played some really competitive baseball after an ugly 8-19 April. A big reason for their change in fortunes has been some excellent production from Jonathan Schoop. After signing back-to-back one-year deals with Detroit the last two seasons, the team inked him to a two-year, $15 million contract extension on August 7.

Crawford, a Bay Area native, has spent his entire career with the Giants. He was selected in the fourth round of the 2008 draft and has been a fixture at shortstop since his major league debut in 2011. He’s the franchise leader in games played at at the position and was a key contributor to two World Series championships in 2012 and ’14. After the 2015 season, he signed a six-year, $75 million contract extension that would have expired at the end of this season. This new extension guarantees that Crawford remains a single-franchise player at least through his age-36 season, a feat that’s become increasingly rare in today’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the San Francisco Giants’ wildly improbable 2021 season, the story of their pitching success (they have the third-best ERA and fourth-best FIP in baseball) has centered on a group of revitalized veterans, namely Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, Johnny Cueto and Alex Wood, who have pitched better than ever, or at least better than they have in years. The shine on that group has begun to fade in recent weeks, however: the staff ace, Gausman, had a rough July and DeSclafani has struggled recently and now finds himself on the Injured List. Enter Logan Webb, a pitcher much their junior, who couldn’t have picked a better time to get his first taste of big league success.

A fourth round pick back in 2014, Webb moved methodically through a Giants farm system that was struggling to develop starting pitching. Even with the blockades of a 2016 Tommy John Surgery and a 2019 PED suspension, Webb still made his debut in 2019 at 22 years old, making him the youngest Giants starter to debut since Madison Bumgarner did so at age 20 in 2009.

Now 24, Webb is sustaining a high-level of performance in the midst of a pennant race that has the Giants gripping tightly to first place in a stout NL West. He currently boasts an ERA (3.33) more than two runs better than his career mark prior to the season (5.36). He also has the best ERA and FIP in the rotation since July 1 and has given up two runs or fewer in his last eight starts — half of which came against the vaunted Dodgers (three times) and Astros:

Read the rest of this entry »

What a ride this year’s deadline was. All told, we had 75 prospects move in the last month. They are ranked below, with brief scouting reports written by me and Kevin Goldstein. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below. I’ve moved all of the players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates. Our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline.

A couple of quick notes before I get to the rankings. We’ve included a few post-prospect players here (those marked in blue) so you can get an idea of where we value them now as opposed to where we had them at their prospect peak. Those players, as well as the Compensatory pick the Rockies will receive after they extend Trevor Story a qualifying offer and he signs elsewhere, are highlighted below. We had closer to 40 prospects (and 23 Players to be Named Later) traded last year, with the PTBNL number inflated by 2020’s COVID-related transaction rules. The backfields are not well-represented here, with just four prospects who have yet to play in full-season ball. Two of those are currently in the DSL and have no official domestic pro experience, though Alberto Ciprian has played stateside for instructs/extended spring training. Now on to the rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

This deadline had its share of earthquakes, but it also featured smaller aftershocks, as teams improved their depth or addressed smaller, specific needs. So let’s run down some of the deals that might get buried by the higher-Richter scale shakes of the likes of Max Scherzer and Kris Bryant.

The Houston Astros acquired pitcher Phil Maton and catcher Yainer Diaz from the Cleveland Guardians for center fielder Myles Straw

This trade is actually a slightly unusual one, as the team in the playoff shot — it’s not Cleveland — is the one giving up the best player. Straw’s offensive profile will likely prevent him from being an actual star at any point, but he’s fast, plays enough defense, and gets on-base at a respectable enough level to be an average or even better starter in center; he’s already hit the 2-WAR threshold, after all. UZR, our defensive input for WAR, has him at +6.6 runs, while OAA has him at +5 runs and DRS has him at +2. I don’t think I’d ever play him except in a pinch, but Straw’s theoretical ability to at least stand at second or short in an emergency has some additional value, too. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West has been a slugging match all year. The Giants have the best record in baseball. The Dodgers are hot on their heels and just added two All-Stars to go for the division title, with the Padres in hot pursuit. San Francisco wasn’t going to take that lying down, though. As Jeff Passan first reported, the team has acquired Kris Bryant from the Cubs in exchange for two prospects, Alexander Canario and Caleb Kilian.

Bryant has been a hotly rumored deadline chip for seemingly forever; as soon as the Cubs hit a rough patch in the standings, they announced their intentions to sell off pieces that weren’t controllable past 2021, with him, Anthony Rizzo, and Javier Báez the obvious candidates for a move. All three have now been dealt to contenders, and for my money, Bryant is the best player of the three. He’ll slot into San Francisco’s roster all over the place, one of the perks of trading for him; he plays all four corner spots capably and has even started 10 games in center as the Cubs dealt with injury and ineptitude in the outfield. He’s not going to win a Gold Glove out there anytime soon — and the less said about his two innings at shortstop, the better — but if you’re looking to squeeze Bryant’s bat into the lineup, there are any number of possibilities.

That bat is the reason San Francisco made this trade. Rumors of Bryant’s demise were greatly exaggerated; he had an absolutely abysmal 2020, playing in only 34 games and compiling easily the worst line of his career, but he’s been back to his old tricks in 2021. That game is power and walks, and it’s worked to the tune of a .267/.358/.503 slash line, an on-base-light approximation of his career line.
Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Gallo is a Yankee, Eduardo Escobar is a Brewer, and Starling Marte will finish his season in Oakland. It’s already been a fast-paced trade season, and there are still a lot of deals that could be done before Friday’s deadline. But as I noted in a piece on Wednesday that looked at the most impactful players on the IL for American League contenders, there are top-flight pitchers and hitters who are not going to be traded but are waiting in the wings. Today I want to look at the NL side of things.

As a reminder, I calculated team injury impact to date this season by looking at the injury ledger data from Baseball Prospectus to determine each team’s injury impact to date in FanGraphs WAR compared to preseason projections. Additionally, while most of the teams I identified as contending had at least one impactful player on the IL, one did not; I’ll still spend some time on the Padres, but they will need to look to the trade market for reinforcements.

Finally, the cutoff for contending is defined as having playoff odds greater than 30%. I’m sure that will frustrate some Philadelphia and Atlanta fans who believe their teams still have a chance to chase down the Mets. For what it’s worth, the Braves are hoping that Ian Anderson and Drew Smyly can return to throw meaningful innings and that Travis d’Arnaud will return to catch them. The Phillies have zero projected position player WAR on the IL at the moment, although starting pitcher Zach Eflin’s return from the 10-day IL should bolster the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Wilson has received mixed reviews since he was drafted 15th overall by the Los Angeles Angels out of North Carolina State University in 2019. He’s also changed organizations. The 23-year-old (as of earlier this week) shortstop was traded to San Francisco that same winter as part of a budget-driven deal centered around the contract of Zack Cozart. With just 46 professional games under his belt, Wilson came into the current campaign No. 11 on our Giants Top Prospects list.

The mixed reviews have included assessments that begged for clarification.

When I spoke with Wilson a week ago, I shared that I’d read that his swing is short, and also that it has changed. I’d also seen that he doesn’t project to hit for power, yet he’d put up solid home run numbers in college. Moreover, he already has double-digit dingers this season between High-A Eugene and Double-A Richmond.

Could he share his thoughts on the above?

“A lot of the projection stuff is up to interpretation,” replied Wilson, who received his promotion on July 6. “I feel like I’ve done a pretty good job of hitting for power. I hit a lot of doubles, and I’ve hit more home runs than I think a lot of people have projected. That’s always a good thing.”

Asked why he’s shown more power than many expected, the Kings Mountain, North Carolina native provided a rock solid — if not somewhat unexpected — answer. Read the rest of this entry »

For the full introduction to the Replacement-Level Killers series, follow the link above. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the July 30 deadline, and in this two-position batch in particular, I don’t get the sense that any of these teams have these positions atop their shopping lists. With catchers in particular, framing and the less-quantifiable aspects of knowing a pitching staff make it easier for teams to talk themselves out of changing things up unless an injury situation has compromised their depth.

Note that all individual stats in this article are through July 18, but the won-loss records and Playoff Odds include games of July 19. Read the rest of this entry »