Josh James has been a Fringe Five favorite this season. He’s also been a shooting star. The 25-year-old hurler began the year in Double-A, and he’s finishing it with aplomb in Houston. Since debuting with the Astros on September 1, James has punched out 27 batters, and allowed just 14 hits and six runs, in 21 innings of work.

His ascent has come as a surprise. A 34th-round pick out of Western Oklahoma State University in 2014, James went unmentioned in our preseason Astros Top Prospects list (ergo his eligibility to take up residence in the aforementioned Carson Cistulli column).

Every bit as surprising was the righty’s response when I asked him how he goes about attacking hitters.

“To be honest, I’m still trying to figure that out,” James told me on the heels of his rock-solid MLB debut. “A couple of years ago I was a low-90s guy and mixed up pitches. I’d throw curveballs in 0-0 counts, work backwards. All that stuff. Now the velo is up a little higher, so I can throw more fastballs and attack the zone a little more.”

The velocity jump is real. James’ four-seam heater has averaged a tick over 97 MPH since his call up, and he’s been told that he touched 101 earlier this summer. Getting a good night’s sleep has helped breathe more life into his arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

There are expected to be a number of managerial openings this offseason, with no shortage of candidates in line to replace those being jettisoned (or leaving of their own volition). And while there has been a recent trend of hiring young — no previous experience necessary! — a handful of former MLB managers will certainly be considered. Fredi Gonzalez is among them.

Currently the third-base coach for the Marlins, Gonzalez has had a pair of mostly successful stints as a big-league skipper. The 54-year-old native of Cuba was at the helm in Miami from 2007 to -10, and in Atlanta from 2011 to -16. Under his leadership, the Braves had back-to-back 94- and 96-win seasons before things went south.

Gonzalez has grown a lot since he was named to replace Bobby Cox following the 2010 season. In December of that year, an interview I did with him for Baseball Prospectus led with the following: “Fredi Gonzalez is no stat geek — at least not yet — but he clearly recognizes the importance of data.”

Eight years later, that recognition has increased exponentially. Gonzalez still trusts his gut — every experienced manager and coach does, to a certain extent — but he’s smart enough to have evolved with the game. Baseball is embracing analytics more and more, and so is Fredi Gonzalez.

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Fredi Gonzalez: “I think a lot differently now than I did back then. I remember we talked about sacrifice bunting. I’ve kind of gone away from that line of thinking. We’re a National League team — I’ve always been in the National League — and while I think the pitcher is more productive when he can bunt a guy over, that’s usually not the case for a position player. I’ve changed my mind on that.

“I’ve changed my mind on closers. I was spoiled when I first came up, because I had Craig Kimbrel. It was easy to plan out my ninth-inning strategy. Now I’m starting to question why you’d spend a large amount of your payroll a guy who is only going to pitch 80 innings. I still believe that the ninth inning is the ninth inning — it’s still a special inning — but I also believe in putting guys in spots to be successful. If there are two or three left-handed hitters coming up in the ninth, you can use your left-hander there. It doesn’t necessarily have to be your closer.

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After part one of this series, many of you began debating whether, under Major League Rule 21(a), tanking — that is, deliberately conceding a season for the purposes of experiencing success in later seasons — was barred by the same Rule which bars deliberately losing a game. I’d like to address that matter here.

To refresh our memories, Rule 21(a) says this:

(a) MISCONDUCT IN PLAYING BASEBALL. Any player or person connected with a Club who shall promise or agree to lose, or to attempt to lose, or to fail to give his best efforts towards the winning of any baseball game with which he is or may be in any way concerned, or who shall intentionally lose or attempt to lose, or intentionally fail to give his best efforts towards the winning of any such baseball game, or who shall solicit or attempt to induce any player or person connected with a Club to lose or attempt to lose, or to fail to give his best efforts towards the winning of any baseball game with which such other player or person is or may be in any way concerned, or who, being solicited by any person, shall fail to inform the Commissioner (in the case of a player or person associated with a Major League Club) or the President of the Minor League Association (in the case of a player or person associated with an independent Minor League Club) immediately of such solicitation, and of all facts and circumstances connected therewith, shall be declared permanently ineligible.

To understand this in context, imagine (if you will) a scenario in which the 2018 Baltimore Orioles made a deal with the Devil at the All-Star break. As part of that deal, the Orioles agreed to voluntarily lose 90% of their games in the second half of the season. In exchange, Mephistopheles would agree to give the Orioles 95 wins and a playoff berth in 2021.

On the one hand, that would appear to violate the Rules, right? Indeed, we established last time that a team (including its front office, not just the players) can’t try to lose on purpose. On the other hand, this deal with the Devil isn’t all that different, practically speaking, from the efforts by a club to sell off assets at the trade deadline, is it? By trading Manny Machado, the Orioles made themselves deliberately worse — and less likely to win games in the second half — in hopes of winning in the future. But then, that can’t be right, because front offices don’t get barred from strip-mining their rosters in search of prospect gold.

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Last in war, last in peace, and last in the National League: the Marlins were the first NL team to be eliminated from postseason contention in 2018. And while they technically possessed some chance of qualifying for the playoffs as late as September, a reasonable observer would have mentally dismissed this year’s club sometime around the Giancarlo Stanton trade back in December of 2017.

The Setup

The death of Jose Fernandez was a tragic loss for his family, his friends, and the world of baseball generally — and it’s hard to tell the story of the Marlins on the field without noting the impact of his absence. But even as Fernandez’s death has presented a major obstacle for the team’s success on the mound, it doesn’t explain why the organization has had so much trouble developing other young starting pitchers. The 2017 Marlins were good enough to hang around the edges of the Wild Card race, but they never really had that look of a contender and trading the team’s only top prospect, Luis Castillo, to acquire Dan Straily before 2017 was yet another short-sighted organizational move.

Towards the end of the 2017 season, MLB officially approved the sale of the Marlins to a group led by Bruce Sherman, mercifully ending Jeff Loria’s reign of terrible, during which he somehow made Frank McCourt or the Wilpons look like model owners by comparison. Derek Jeter’s 4% stake bought him a job as the CEO of the Marlins, a honeymoon that didn’t last for even the initial press conference, as the future Hall-of-Fame shortstop warned that there would be some unpopular moves. And in Marlins Land, “unpopular moves” indicates a fire sale.

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Mike Clevinger has been channeling Trevor Bauer. Not just in terms of effectiveness — the long-maned righty has a 3.11 ERA and a 9.3 strikeout rate — but also with competitiveness and ingenuity. While the Cleveland Indians teammates aren’t exactly two peas in a pod, Clevinger is certainly being influenced by his mad scientist of a rotation mate.

“He’s a wealth of knowledge, and a really good resource, especially with our new cameras and stuff like that,” Clevinger said of Bauer, who uses 2,000-frames-per-second video to parse the movement and spin of pitches. “We have the same mindsets and goals on the mound. It’s never going to be a completed process. For us, it’s always going to be ‘What’s the next step? What’s the next move to get better? What’s the next level to take it to?’ Throw harder. Make it nastier.”

An 80-MPH slider is one of Clevinger’s nastiest pitches, and while Bauer didn’t play a role in its development, he has broken down its nuts and bolts. Read the rest of this entry »

Bobby Wilson has caught for 16 seasons — nine of them at the big league level — so he knows pitching like the back of his hand. Particularly on the defensive side of the ball. With a .577 OPS in exactly 1,000 MLB plate appearances, the 35-year-old hasn’t exactly been an offensive juggernaut. But his stick isn’t why the Chicago Cubs acquired him from the Minnesota Twins this past Thursday. They picked him up for his receiving skills and his ability to work with a staff.

The quality and style of pitching he’s seeing today aren’t the same as what they were when he inked his first professional contract in 2002.

“The game is ever evolving, ever changing,” Wilson told me a few weeks ago. “I’ve seen it go from more sinker-slider to elevated fastballs with a curveball off of that. But what really stands out is the spike in velocity. There’s almost no one in this league right now who is a comfortable at bat.”

In his opinion, increased octane has made a marked impact on how hitters are being attacked.

“If you have velocity, you can miss spots a little more frequently, whereas before you had to pitch,” opined Wilson. “You can’t miss spots throwing 88-90. If you’re 95-100 , you can miss your location and still have a chance of missing a barrel. Even without a lot of movement. Because of that, a lot of guys are going to four-seam, straight fastballs that are elevated, instead of a ball that’s sinking.”

But as the veteran catcher said, the game is ever evolving. He’s now starting to see more high heat in the nether regions of the zone, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Kyle Barraclough, Andrew Miller, and Dan Straily — on how they learned and/or developed their sliders.

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Kyle Barraclough, Miami Marlins

“I’ve thrown it since my sophomore year of high school. One day my coach grabbed me and said, ‘Hey, you want to throw a slider?’ He showed me a grip and was like, ‘Throw it like a fastball, and at the very end kind of just focus on staying down through your middle finger.’

“I couldn’t really throw a curveball, to be honest with you. I didn’t know much about pitching at that point — I played multiple sports until my senior year — and it just never came naturally to me. The slider kind of popped up out of nowhere. It was basically, ‘Let the grip do what it’s going to do,’ and that worked for me.

“When I got to college — I don’t know if it was from trying to be too fine with it, or from not being as aggressive through the ball — but it kind of got a little loopier. Then I got to pro ball and it kind of stayed that way.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Bubba Thompson, CF, Texas Rangers
Level: Low-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 5   FV: 45
Line: 4-for-6, HR

Notes
Were Bubba Thompson wrapping up his season with poor numbers, I’d be excusing it based on context. A multi-sport high-school athlete who had focused solely on baseball for just one year, Thompson also had his reps limited, after he signed last summer, due to nagging lower-body issues. I expected him to hang back in extended spring training and then head to Spokane in June. Instead, after a month in extended, Thompson was pushed by Texas to a full-season affiliate as a 19-year-old. He’s hitting .295/.350/.460 with 28 extra-base hits in 323 PAz and 28 steals in 35 attempts. He’s projects as a center fielder with power.

Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Mark Vientos, 3B, New York Mets
Level: Appy   Age: 18   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 3-for-3, 2B, BB

Notes
The Mets have made effectual changes to Mark Vientos’s swing since he signed. His stance has opened up and his hands set up in a way that has enabled him to lift the ball better than he did in high school, especially pitches on the inner half. His hands are more alive and powerful than they were a year ago, and Vientos has launched balls out the other way even when he doesn’t fully square them up. His size/build might eventually cause a tumble down the defensive spectrum (he’s been projected off of shortstop to, at least, third base since he was a high-school underclassman), which would mean power alone won’t be enough to enable him to profile. His early-career contact rates are positive, especially considering Vientos doesn’t turn 19 until December.

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