The recent promotions of Kris Bryant, Addison Russell and Carlos Rodon have created a good deal of buzz these past couple of weeks. Deservingly so. Kiley McDaniel ranked the trio first, third and eighth respectively in his pre-season rankings. Any time a prospect of that caliber gets called up to the big leagues, it’s certainly newsworthy.

But there was another promising, young prospect who recently got the call. But his debut was somewhat overshadowed — at least outside of the New York region — by Russell and Rodon, who both debuted on the same day. As you probably guessed by the title of this piece, that player is 24-year-old Mets catcher, Kevin Plawecki.

Plawecki got the call to replace Travis d’Arnaud, who broke his finger after taking a pitch on the hand. d’Arnaud’s expected to miss at least the next month, but that timeline could easily grow longer given the unpredictable nature of hand injuries. Plawecki — and not the objectively handsome, yet offensively challenged, Anthony Recker — will pick up the lion’s share of playing time in d’Arnaud’s absence, meaning Plawecki will play a crucial role for the surprisingly-competitive Mets.

Plawecki may not have the cachet of the other guys who got called up over the last couple of weeks, but he’s a pretty well-regarded prospect in his own right. A supplemental first round pick in 2012, Plawecki placed 40th on Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list last winter, and landed in the middle of just about every top 100 list out there. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as we were all finally getting over our Kris Bryant Day hangovers, the Cubs gave us something else to celebrate. As you’ve likely heard by now, the Cubs summoned Addison Russell to the major leagues yesterday. He started at second base last night, and went 0-5 in his big league debut.

Russell’s promotion came as something of a surprise. Although he’s a very talented player, and is one of the most highly-regarded prospects in the game, he’s had very little exposure to high-minors pitching. He’s played all of 77 games above A-Ball, and only 14 of those games came in Triple-A. Due to this relative lack experience, most anticipated that Russell wouldn’t make it to the majors until late 2015, if not sometime 2016. Yet here we are. It’s April 22nd and Russell is playing major league baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Four weeks after he hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy at MetLife Staduim in February of 2014, Russell Wilson reported to Surprise Arizona to participate in spring training with the Texas Rangers. Although the Rangers technically hold the rights to Wilson as a baseball player, he didn’t actually appear in any spring training games, and returned home after taking a few grounders and batting practice swings. Wilson made an appearance at the Rangers spring training complex this year as well.

Wilson’s spring training attendance was little more than a publicity stunt, but there was a time when he was a fairly well-regarded baseball player. After his junior season at North Carolina State, the Colorado Rockies drafted him as a second basemen in the 4th round of the 2010 amateur draft. Before he joined the Seattle Seahawks in 2012, he spent parts of two seasons in the Rockies organization, where he recorded 379 plate appearances between two levels of A-ball.

Up to this point, Wilson’s stint as a professional baseball player has been just an interesting footnote. But in a recent interview with Bryant Gumbel, Wilson hinted that he’d be open to playing both sports simultaneously — a la Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan. Regardless of what he said in the interview, I find it hard to believe that Wilson will actually try to pull this off. He’s one of the better quarterbacks in the NFL, and has played in two consecutive Super Bowls. Would he really compromise his football career just to see if he might be able to succeed at baseball too? Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Kris Bryant Day!

Kris Bryant is finally free. After spending his obligatory two weeks in the minors, the highly-touted slugger has been summoned to the major leagues. He’ll slot into the Cubs lineup today, and will be playing third base, putting an end to the much-maligned Mike Olt era in Chicago.

By now, you’re probably well familiar with Bryant’s prospect pedigree. After three monster seasons at the University of San Diego, the Cubs took Bryant with the 2nd overall pick in 2013, right behind Mark Appel. Bryant made quick work of the minor leagues, destroying opposing pitchers to the tune of .330/.429/.662 in his year and a half in the minors. Bryant was a highly-touted prospect dating back to his college days, but his prospect status ticked up to elite following his 2014 performance. He hit .325/.438/.661 between Double-A and Triple-A last year, and belted a whopping 43 homers along the way — the most of any player in affiliated baseball.

Unsurprisingly, KATOH’s all over him. My system forecasts the slugger for a remarkable 16 WAR through age-28, which was the 2nd most of any prospect last winter; Only Joc Pederson earned a higher projection. Here are the probabilities my system spits out for Bryant through age-28. Read the rest of this entry »

Oakland A’s first baseman/left fielder Mark Canha is off to a fine start to the 2015 season. Through the year’s first week and a half, he’s hitting a solid .333/.353/.515, and leads all rookies with 11 hits. This is obviously a teeny tiny sample, and we all know better than to read too much into seven games. But even so, an excellent performance from a previously unknown player is a little hard to ignore, especially after his six homers and .297/.342/.635 batting line from spring training. The A’s have to be happy with the return they’ve gotten on their rule 5 choice so far.

Although this is his first taste of big league action, Canha’s no youngster. He turned 26 this past February, and has been playing professionally since 2010, when the Marlins drafted him in the seventh round out of the University of California. Although he started out as a 21-year-old in short-season ball, Canha moved through the Marlins system relatively slowly. He spent a full year at each minor league level, so he’s just now making it to the big leagues.

Canha’s slow climb up the minor league ladder wasn’t due to a lack of hitting. His wRC+s from 2010-2014 were 139, 144, 128, 141 and 131. He’s never hit worse than his league’s average, nor has he come particularly close. But, year after year, the Marlins chose to let Canha mash as an old-for-his-league slugger instead of challenging him with more polished pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote a piece looking at minor league players who saw stark decreases in the number of pitches they saw inside the strike zone. My analysis was inspired by recent research by Rob Arthur that suggested drops in Zone% can be early predictors of a breakout. Essentially, Arthur found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. By his theory, a pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitchers change their approach, it’s often because the hitter’s gotten more talented.

One of the hitters who jumped to the top of my list was Richard Shaffer, a third baseman in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Shaffer spent the entire 2014 season in Double-A Montgomery, where he hit an uninspiring .222/.318/.440. Although he hit for a good amount of power last year, the rest of his game left a lot to be desires. KATOH wasn’t thrilled with this lack-luster season — especially his elevated strikeout rate– and gave him just a 50% chance of even reaching the major leagues. Here’s a look at my system’s full break-down of Shaffer’s odds.

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Recently, I put together a calculator for my own personal use — and perhaps, eventually, the use of this site’s readers — that helps to translate (roughly) a batting prospect’s individual tool grades into wins. Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel already provided something along these lines for Overall Future Value back in September by means of a chart, of which this is an excerpt:

Even for those of us unfamiliar with the parlance of scouting, this is fairly intuitive. A player who receives a 50 FV grade is regarded as an average player. An average player, in statistical terms, is one who produces roughly two wins over the course of a full season. It follows, then, that a player who receives a 50 FV is one we might reasonably expect to produce about 2.0 WAR in a season at the height of his talents. Players who receive better grades than a 50 are likely, by some order of magnitude, to produce more than 2.0 WAR; worse grades than a 50, less than 2.0 WAR.

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Last May, Rob Arthur of Baseball of Prospectus unveiled new research implying that PITCHf/x data can be used to forecast hitter performance. Essentially, he found that hitters who saw fewer pitches down the heart of the plate late in the year often outperformed their projections the following season. The theory behind this phenomenon is pretty straightforward. A pitcher knows a good hitter when he sees one, and chooses to approach him with caution. So when pitcher’s change their approach, it’s often an early indicator of improved talent from a hitter.

This finding gives us yet another tool to use in forecasting hitter performance. As great as statistical projections are, they can sometimes be a bit slow to recognize a breakout when it happens. Simply put, it’s not easy to identify the one breakout from the sea of small sample size flukes. However, Arthur’s research hints that incorporating pitch locations can help us get ahead of the curve.

This past January, Eno Sarris wrote a piece for JABO where he applied Arthur’s findings to 2014 data in an attempt to identify breakout candidates for 2015. Eno noted that this type of analysis is most useful for players who are relatively new to the league. For this reason, he limited his analysis to hitters with fewer than 800 big plate appearances.

I decided to dig a little deeper. To my knowledge, all applications of Arthur’s research have looked exclusively at big league hitters. However, in what follows, I make my best attempt at expanding this practice to hitters in the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the champion San Francisco Giants. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not San Francisco’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Giants system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the San Francisco system by projected WAR. To in this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

t4. Clayton Blackburn, RHP (Profile)

Blackburn is projected as a reliever here. That’s not the capacity in which he’s made the vast majority of his minor-league starts, nor is it the role he’s likely to assume this year at either Double- or Triple-A. It is the role in which he made all six of his Arizona Fall League appearances, however, and that might be what’s influencing Steamer here. It matters with regard to the projection because it renders the rate stats more attractive but the overall WAR figure less so. It matters less, however, because Blackburn’s promotion to the majors isn’t imminent. In either case, he’s something slightly better than replacement level.

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Following a stupid .451/.491/.804 performance in the Grapefruit League, the hype surrounding Red Sox outfielder Mookie Betts is through the roof. Scouts are all but penciling him into July’s All-Star lineup, and some of Betts’s peers have even gone as far as to compare him to Andrew McCutchen. And wouldn’t you know it, Betts opened the 2015 season by going 2-4 with a homer and a walk on opening day. Mookie-mania is upon us.

Here at FanGraphs, we’ve been on the Betts bandwagon for a while. Carson Cistulli’s been tracking Betts since July 2013, when he made his first appearance on one of his fringe five lists. An undersized 5th round draft pick with excellent stats, Betts was exactly the type of prospect who endears himself to prospect enthusiasts whose heads are buried in spreadsheets. At that point, Betts was merely a little-known A-Baller with an unusual name.

But last year, Betts took his act to Double-A, and kept right on hitting. He put up a 177 wRC+ in two months in Double-A, and followed it up with a 158 mark in Triple-A. The 5-9 second baseman with the funny name was starting to look like a bona fide prospect, and it was happening in a hurry.

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