Matt Seelinger has taken an atypical path to the doorstep of the big leagues. Drafted in the 28th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Division-III Farmingdale State College in 2017, the 30-year-old right-hander subsequently played in the Tampa Bay Rays, San Francisco Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies organizations before getting released and hooking on with the Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks before the 2024 season. His fortunes turned last summer. The Detroit Tigers signed Seelinger in late June, and since returning to affiliated ball he has logged a 1.26 ERA and a 38.4% strikeout rate over 29 relief appearances between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. So far this season, the Westbury, New York native has a 4-0 record to go with a 0.57 ERA and a 30.9% strikeout rate over nine appearances, the last five of them with the Mud Hens.

His signature pitch is every bit as notable as his late-bloomer success. Seelinger’s repertoire includes a four-seam fastball and a cutter/slider, but it is his unique offering with an unorthodox grip that most stands out. Seelinger shared the story behind it when Toledo visited Triple-A Worcester last week.

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David Laurila: You throw a unique pitch. What exactly is it?

Matt Seelinger: “So, it was coined on Long Island, where I’m from. It’s called a knuckle drop. Basically, what I do is take a four-seam fastball grip and flip it so that the horseshoe is on the inside. I take my two fingers — my pointer finger and my middle finger — and bend them. I take the top lace, and put them on the bottom of it. I put my ring finger and pinky on the seams. The thumb, I try to get underneath as much as possible, although thumb placement isn’t as big of deal as long as it’s not too high up on the ball. From there, I throw it just like a fastball, only I’m pushing it out.”

Laurila: The bent fingers are straightening as you’re releasing the ball… Read the rest of this entry »

Once all the blurbs for a prospect list have been written, I comb back through the giant spreadsheet that populates what readers see on The Board and double check its many fields for errors and inconsistencies. Two data points I’ve kept manually since 2017 are the heights and weights of the prospects who have passed through that space. At times, this has felt nonsensical — there are heights and weights on our player pages, and they could easily be pulled into the machinery that pumps out the tables that accompany the write-ups you see on our lists. But players’ measurables, especially in the minors, are often obviously wrong, and so for a little over a half decade, I’ve used my own judgment to make manual adjustments in cases when what is listed is clearly incorrect.

This has mostly meant manually adjusting players’ weights as they’ve gotten older and bigger, because even when players are on big league rosters, there is sometimes radical imprecision around their actual specs. When it comes to heights, however, I’ve overwhelmingly deferred to those on minor league player pages unless there was an egregious under-reporting (I think Oneil Cruz was the last one I manually fudged). Once the 2023 minor league season began, my pre-publication checks revealed a strange pattern: Many minor league players, mostly hitters, were suddenly listed on minor league player pages as being one or two inches shorter than my previous records indicated, and some of them had shrunk by as many as four inches.

While incorrect heights and weights are prevalent, widespread change to them across the entire player population was strange and struck me as probably having a cause. I’m going to show you the list of changes to players’ heights and go over potential explanations for how and why this has happened (and why so many heights were wrong in the first place), but first let’s talk about why this is an important detail. Read the rest of this entry »

Of all the things that happened in baseball this weekend, the only one I cared about was a Double-A game between the Chattanooga Lookouts and the Rocket City Trash Pandas. Now, I know what you’re thinking. If an April Double-A game is worth caring about at all, it must be a real doozy. To have it overshadow a weekend of MLB action — the Rays went to 9-0, Jordan Walker tied Ted Williams’ record for longest career-opening hitting streak, Oneil Cruz got hurt — well surely I must be exaggerating.

Try this on for size: The Trash Pandas led 3–0 heading into the seventh and final inning of the game, having not allowed a hit. They went on to lose that game 7–5, still not having allowed a hit. “You can’t predict baseball” is a bit of a cliché; baseball has been around for more than 150 years. All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. But allowing seven runs while preserving a no-hitter? That’s worthy of detailed examination. Read the rest of this entry »

If Oakland Coliseum is indeed “baseball’s last dive bar,” as has often been asserted, then it must have one hell of a booking manager. Let’s not forget, after all, that this dive bar has a stage. And yes, that stage may be a bit far from the audience, and sure, it is housed in a hulking cement behemoth that shares a BART station with the airport, and fine, it might be subject to the occasional rodent or plumbing issue. But it still draws the same big names as other, glitzier venues. The Coliseum’s dinginess might generate headlines, but lately I’ve been struck more by the unique backdrop it offers attendees for seeing the major’s biggest names.

When I used this metaphor to describe my experience at an August 9 Shohei Ohtani start at the Coliseum, a friend likened it to seeing Metallica play an unannounced show a few years ago at The Metro, a venue just a stone’s throw up Clark Street from Wrigley Field, with a capacity of 1,100. You may remember this early-August Ohtani outing: one of those Tungsten Arm games – unremarkable but for the home run he launched into the right field bleachers and the win he secured, allowing him to reach the Babe Ruth milestone of recording 10 wins and 10 home runs in a season, though Ohtani’s home run total for the season had long eclipsed Ruth’s. The vastness of the stands only emphasized how few people I was sharing my baseball viewing experience with.

The next day, I followed up that major league masterclass with a Low-A day game in the uncovered San Jose grandstand, watching a teenager struggle to throw strikes under the blazing sun. If Ohtani at the Coliseum is Metallica at the Metro, then this game, where I went to watch prospects from the San Francisco Giants organziation, was sitting in on a garage band rehearsal. Low-A is an altogether different brand of baseball, where tweaks are made every day – sometimes even mid-game – in the hopes of tapping into young players’ potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Unionizing a workplace isn’t as simple as buying a bullhorn and stamping out some buttons, though both are obviously essential steps in the process. It requires huge amounts of organizing effort, cajoling, and, unfortunately, paperwork.

Last week, the MLBPA announced that it had sent out authorization cards to thousands of minor league players; if a majority of players give the union consent to negotiate on their behalf, federal labor law will require MLB to negotiate collectively with those players over pay and working conditions. Tuesday, the MLBPA announced that a majority of minor league players had signed and returned those cards, and sent a letter to the league asking for recognition.

The hardest thing to do in sports is hit a baseball, but following the internecine contours of collective bargaining procedure has to be up there on the list. So let’s trace out the next few steps in a process that will likely take months, if not years, to complete. And since minor league ballplayers are merely one of many groups undertaking high-profile unionization efforts these days, knowing how this works might help you impress people the next time, say, the Starbucks union comes up at a party. (I need to start going to cooler parties.) Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Fransoso is a great fit for a Mariners player-development machine that thrives with a process-based philosophy. Seattle boasts one of the top farm systems in the game, and Fransoso, a 31-year-old University of Maine graduate who played multiple professional seasons, is an up-and-coming hitting instructor who is fully-invested in that approach. His tutelage has thus far been at the lower rungs of the minors: He spent last season working with many of the organization’s best position-player prospects in the Arizona Complex League, and this year, he’ll be the hitting coach at low-A Modesto.

Earlier this month, Fransoso discussed the Mariners’ developmental philosophy and the some of the young hitters he’s been helping to hone.

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David Laurila: You joined the organization in November 2019. What were the conversations like during, and immediately following, the hiring process?

Michael Fransoso: “Very process-based. Andy McKay was our farm director, and everything kind of flows through him. He’s very process-based, and also big into the mental game. That was huge. I felt like all of my conversations with the hitting department aligned. Everybody was on the same page in terms of the Mariners’ process — how we want to develop hitters — and they were able to deliver that message to me in a clear way. Really, it’s about dominating the zone.”

Laurila: I think it’s safe to say that all teams want their hitters to dominate the zone. What is the actual process?

Fransoso: “When you hear ‘dominate the strike zone,’ you might think it means ‘swing at strikes and take balls,’ but it’s not that simple. We want it to be simple, but hitting isn’t simple. Dominating the zone is more of a mindset. It’s also an individual approach to manage that hitter-pitcher matchup. When you break it down, the only thing a hitter controls is whether we swing at that pitch. We don’t have control over what the pitcher throws, how hard he’s throwing, or the break. We don’t even control whether it’s a ball or strike, because that’s up to the umpire. Read the rest of this entry »

Major league baseball remains in a holding pattern. There’s a lockout, the two sides are intermittently negotiating, and nothing can happen until they reach an agreement. That’s major league baseball, though, not all of baseball, and some interesting economic shenanigans are afoot across the minors.

As Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper reported last week, Endeavor Group Holdings is purchasing nine minor league baseball teams: the Gwinnett Stripers, Mississippi Braves, Rome Braves, Augusta GreenJackets, Iowa Cubs, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, Memphis Redbirds, Hudson Valley Renegades, and San Jose Giants; The Athletic’s Daniel Kaplan and Evan Drellich first reported the possibility in October. These transactions aren’t yet final, but they’re very likely to be approved, which will make Endeavor (via new subsidiary Diamond Baseball Holdings) the largest MiLB owner.

Endeavor, a publicly traded company partially owned by private equity group Silver Lake Partners, is already in the business of sports, though not specifically minor league baseball. They own a little bit of everything, from agencies to sports organizations. Their marquee holding is the UFC, but seriously, the list is endless: Professional Bull Riding, Euroleague Basketball, the IMG Academy that turns out baseball prospects, the Madrid Open, the William Morris Endeavor agency. It’s a broad portfolio, much of which is made up of directly-sports-related operations; an arm of the company also sells media rights for the Olympics.
Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Bobby Witt Jr., SS, Kansas City Royals
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Omaha Age: 21 Org Rank: 1 FV: 60
Line: 1-for-4, HR, BB, 2 K

Notes
Witt’s ninth-inning dinger on Thursday was his 32nd of the year, the third-most of any minor leaguer this season. Only seven guys have hit at least 30 homers in the minors in 2021, and in comparing Witt to the others in that group, it’s impossible not to notice his impressive and rare combination of speed and power. Of those seven power hitters, Witt is the only one to match his 30-plus homers with 30-plus doubles, and his 24 steals amount to quadruple the second-highest mark on the list (Andy Pages‘ six). He also has the highest average and more hits than anyone in that elite group, and his strikeout rate is the third lowest of the bunch, which may help calm the nerves of those concerned about his swing-and miss-potential. If he can improve upon his walk rate, his already-high profile could be boosted even further. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Johan Rojas, CF, Philadelphia Phillies
Level & Affiliate: High-A Jersey Shore Age: 21 Org Rank: 9 FV: 45
Line: 2-for-4, HR, 3 SB, K

Notes
Rojas was called up to High-A at the beginning of the month and has gone 12 for 30, slashing .400/.486/.633 since the promotion. He hit his second home run at the new level on Thursday, taking advantage of a hanging breaking ball and sending it over the left field fence. But perhaps most notable on Thursday were his three steals (two of second base and one of third). He hadn’t yet put his wheels on display at the higher level, stealing just one High-A bag prior to last night’s contest, but his speed was a prominent part of his pre-promotion profile; Rojas’ 25 swipes placed him within the top 20 base stealers in all of Low-A this season. Rojas’ plate discipline has long been a question, but his walk rate has been higher in 2021 than in previous seasons and for what it’s worth, he’s walked more than he’s struck out at High-A so far, meaning there’s reason to believe his power/speed combo could be bolstered with a more mature approach as he continues to develop. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Robert Hassell III, CF, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: High-A Fort Wayne Age: 20 Org Rank: 4 (72 overall) FV: 50
Line: 3-for-6, 3 HR, 3 K

Notes
On Wednesday night, true to his name, Hassell worked in threes. In his third game since his promotion from Low-A (where he had the third most hits and third highest average on the season), the lefty provided both homers and strikeouts in triplicate. But contrary to last night’s line, the 2020 first-rounder’s season has been characterized neither by excessive power nor a concerning K-rate; he slashed .323/.415/.482 at Low-A with a 138 wRC+, maintaining walk and strikeout rates both in the mid-teens.

While the Wednesday whiffs represent an unconcerning blip in an approach that has otherwise proven far more advanced than his age would let on (he just turned 20 a few weeks ago), the dingers — his first, second, and third at High-A — were a glimpse at the type of power that would be a welcome addition to Hassell’s profile, if he’s able to sustain it. Over the course of the night, he demonstrated his ability to hit balls out to both left and right field, and against both left- and right-handed pitchers.

Read the rest of this entry »