Every now and again I’ll conduct an interview that falls through the cracks. For one reason or another, the audio file ends up on the back burner long enough that its timeliness evaporates. Due to my neglect — and often to my consternation — the conversation never sees the light of day.

There are notable exceptions. Jordan Weems will reportedly be on Oakland’s Opening Day roster. In 2017 spring training, I’d talked to the then-24-year-old about his recent conversion from catcher to pitcher. He was in the Red Sox organization at the time, and while it was an interesting story… again, sometimes things fall through the cracks.

Fortunately I kept the audio, because it’s an even better story now. Nine years after Weems was drafted as a catcher out of a Columbus, Georgia high school, and seven months after he signed with the A’s as a minor-league free agent, he’s poised to make his major league debut as a reliever.

Weems was well south of the Mendoza line when his position player days ended midway through the 2016 season. The 2011 third round pick had a .119/.241/.134 line with Double-A Portland, and his OPS over 1,180 professional plate appearances was a paltry .568. He knew that his career was in peril, but at the same time, he wasn’t expecting a move to the mound. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan O’Rourke experienced life in the big leagues. The recently-retired left-hander appeared in 54 games with the Minnesota Twins between the 2015 -2016 seasons, and in two with the New York Mets last year. But the bulk of his career was spent in the minors. A 13th-round pick by the Twins in 2010 out of Merrimack College, O’Rourke toiled down on the farm in each of his 10 professional campaigns.

He experienced a lot. The minor leagues are an adventure, and while often fun, they are by no means a bed of roses. The pay is bad, the travel and accommodations are arduous, and for the vast majority of players, crushed dreams are inevitable. Moreover, success and failure aren’t always dictated by talent alone.

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David Laurila: How would you describe professional baseball at the minor-league level?

Ryan O’Rourke: “Now that I can look at it from a helicopter point of view, I’d say that it’s a crapshoot in the truest sense of that word. If you don’t end up with the right organization, and your development isn’t a priority, your path to the big leagues is so much more difficult than it already is.

“I was fortunate to be with the Twins, who were very good about taking care of people, but I’ve heard horror stories from other teams. If you’re a nobody — anyone outside the 10th round is probably a nobody — and don’t show promise right away… let’s just say that guys who get big money in rounds one through 10 are given countless opportunities over someone who may have deserved it more.

“That’s the sad nature of the minor leagues, which, from a business standpoint, I do understand. If you gave one guy $400,000 and another guy $4,000, it’s obvious who you’re keeping. And sometimes it’s a matter of a coach liking you or not. Sometimes you’re cut because you didn’t impress one guy.”

Laurila: How much jealousy and resentment is there of high-round guys? For instance, Byron Buxton is a talented player but he also got a $6 million signing bonus. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, conflicting reports regarding the state of Major League Baseball’s ongoing effort to contract and realign the minor leagues surfaced. While Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper and the Associated Press both reported that MLB is nearing an agreement with Minor League Baseball that would result in the loss of 42 affiliated teams, MiLB countered with a statement disputing the accuracy of the reports. Regardless of exactly where things stand in the negotiations, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic endangering the entirety of the 2020 minor league season, some thinning of the herd appears likely.

While I’ve lived in New York City for 25 years and attended hundreds of Yankees games and dozens of Mets games in both recreational and professional capacities, I grew up on minor league baseball, primarily in Salt Lake City, where I lived from 1973-88 (and where my parents still reside), and Walla Walla, Washington, where my paternal grandparents lived and where I visited for several summers in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Thus I’m all too familiar with the pain that comes from a city losing its minor league affiliate — and two of the 42 teams reportedly on the chopping block hit close to home, both my current one and the one of my youth.

When I began attending games circa 1977-78, the Salt Lake Gulls were the Triple-A affiliate of the California Angels, and part of the storied, high-scoring Pacific Coast League. They featured future big leaguers like Willie Aikens, Rance Mulliniks, and Dickie Thon, all of whom Angels general manager Buzzie Bavasi made sure to trade away for aging veterans (not without some success), a pattern that continued through the remainder of the two teams’ relationship. While I had no affinity for the big club, I enjoyed following the careers of the aforementioned players and their successors, like Tom Brunansky and Brian Harper, as they fanned out across the majors.

My father would take my brother and me to a few Gulls games each year — often against the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple-A team and therefore of considerable interest in our household — and highlights from those games still stick out, particularly from 1979, the year they won the PCL championship. In one game we attended, Ike Hampton, a catcher-turned-designated hitter who clubbed 30 home runs for the Gulls that year, bookended a 17-inning epic with a pair of homers, though I was safely tucked in bed by the time the latter landed. In another game, Floyd Rayford, a third baseman whom Earl Weaver later used as a backup catcher, mashed a dramatic eighth-inning three-run homer that turned a 4-2 deficit into a 5-4 lead, creating pandemonium; we could have turned cartwheels all the way home. Once my fascination with baseball statistics had begun, I’d pore over the Gulls’ daily box scores and update a hand-kept stat sheet, annexing my mother’s pocket calculator to figure out batting averages and ERAs. A few years later, I’d even apply rudimentary Bill James formulas to calculate runs created, though this involved some guesstimation when it came to counting walks via a standard four-numbered box score (AB R H BI). Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Zimmermann stood out in Orioles camp this spring. That wasn’t entirely by accident. The 25-year-old left-hander had begun opening eyes last season, and he reported to Sarasota having visited Driveline over the winter. No wheels were reinvented during his week at the Seattle-area facility, but his mechanics did undergo some fine-tuning. And not from scratch; Zimmermann had already started down that road thanks to Baltimore pitching coordinator Chris Holt.

Last year was Holt’s first with the Orioles, and Zimmermann was fairly new himself. The Baltimore native joined the organization in July of 2018, coming over as part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Kevin Gausman to Atlanta. The Braves had taken Zimmermann in the fifth round of the 2017 draft out of the University of Mount Olive, where he earned a degree in business management.

Asked about his course of study, Zimmermann told me that he considers himself a good problem solver, and if baseball didn’t work out he’d have laid the foundation for a career in project management. Analogy in mind, I posited that being a pitcher tends to lend itself to problem solving.

“Hopefully not, but yes,” responded Zimmermann, who logged a 3.60 ERA in 140 innings last year between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. “That’s one way to look at it, but I prefer to see it more as critical thinking and processing things in the moment. When you’re on the mound, you don’t really think in an analytical way; it comes across more as intuition. But you are creating a strategy for certain hitters, and whatnot, before the game. That follows along the lines of problem solving.”

The juxtaposition — intuition on one side, critical thinking on the other — prompted me to ask if he considers pitching to be more of an art, or more of a science? Read the rest of this entry »

When Eric Longehagen and Kiley McDaniel blurbed Sam Delaplane last March, they called the Seattle Mariners pitching prospect “an interesting sleeper.” Pointing to his eye-popping strikeout numbers in Low-A, they went on to suggest that Delaplane — unranked despite the platitudes — “might get pushed quickly.”

Delaplane proceeded to prove our scouting duo correct. Following 21 relief outings in Hi-A Modesto, the righty ascended to Arkansas, where he flat out shoved against Texas League hitters. In 37 Double-A innings, Delaplane fanned 58 while allowing just 13 hits. His ERA was a microscopic 0.49.

Flash back six years. In order to compete collegiately, the San Jose native had to travel 2,400 miles — and not to a baseball hotbed. The lone offer Delaplane received coming out of high school was from Eastern Michigan University; the low-profile program was coming off of consecutive losing records in the Mid-American Conference.

Delaplane spent four years at Eastern, earning a degree in marketing. Sold mostly on the promise of his strong senior season — a 3.27 ERA and first-team All-MAC honors — Seattle selected Delaplane in the 23rd round of the 2017 draft.

His most-lethal weapon had yet to evolve and blossom. It wasn’t until after Delaplane got into pro ball that he “flipped the switch” and turned a hook into what Longenhagen described as a “power, Brad Lidge-style slider with late, downward movement.”

Defining Delaplane’s best offering is a matter of semantics. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the many significant repercussions of yesterday’s agreement between the MLBPA and MLB in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic were alterations to the amateur talent acquisition processes, changes that will have both immediate and long-term effects on all stakeholders (owners, players, people in scouting, agents, college coaches and staff, international trainers, etc.) in that arena. Last night, after the details of the agreement were reported by Jeff Passan of ESPN and Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic, I spoke with several of those stakeholders for their immediate thoughts and reactions.

The splashy news, and the detail of yesterday’s agreement that will impact team personnel and the player population soonest, is the soft rescheduling of the 2020 draft — the specific date will be determined by MLB, but it will occur by “late-July” — and the straight razor shave it was given by the owners and player’s union, cutting the 2020 draft to five rounds with the option to trim the 2021 draft to 20 rounds, down from the usual 40. MLB can choose to add rounds to the draft if they wish, and a few people in scouting told me they thought it was a real possibility that MLB will, though there’s no clear financial incentive for them to do so.

MLB can also delay the start of the 2020-2021 international signing period, which typically begins on July 2, to as late as January 2021, and can also push the following period by six months so that it spans the 2022 calendar.

While these developments raise some obvious other questions (such as if and where 35 rounds worth of players end up playing baseball again), the two most significant conclusions drawn by many of my sources in baseball were that the trimming of the draft is a convenient opportunity for MLB to shed rostered players in advance of minor league contraction, and that the new flexible start date for the IFA period is another precursor to an international draft.

The seemingly imminent affiliate contractions means teams will soon need fewer minor leaguers, and cost-conscious MLB, ever seeking to save money where it can, is taking what industry people consider a shrewd and opportunistic approach to the culling of minor league rosters at a time when there’s a convenient pseudo-reason to do it now that their 2020 revenues have been dashed by a pandemic. Why draft and sign 40 rounds worth of players who may not play this summer because of a global health crisis when many will be released next spring after a significant portion of the minor leagues is contracted? Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday night, the day before MLB shuttered spring training and delayed the start to its season, I was texting with a baseball operations employee in a National League front office. We discussed the likelihood of cancellations, the chaos that would inevitably follow, and the repercussions for players and teams. At one point in the conversation he speculated, “minor leaguers will be absolutely shafted.”

It appears that he was right. With one notable exception, minor leaguers, already unpaid during spring training and the offseason, will not collect paychecks for any games missed due to the spread of COVID-19. So far only one team, the Tampa Bay Rays, has announced plans to pay their minor league players during the delay. While not covering anyone’s salary directly, the club plans to give everyone $800 to help with expenses while they’re unable to play ball. It’s a step in the right direction, even if $800 is considerably less than the monthly salaries these players were set to earn before the disruption.

Still, it’s money that players elsewhere around the league would love to have. Most minor leaguers were just weeks away from solidifying their in-season accommodations, and now find themselves without a place to go or a buck to pay for it once they arrive. The situation has caused affected players considerable distress.

“It sucks,” says one pitcher in a National League farm system who, like other players interviewed for this piece, preferred to remain anonymous. “I’m fortunate enough that I can come home and live with my parents and not pay any rent. But I have a lot of teammates who either have a kid or are married and don’t have the opportunity to go home and have their parents pay for everything.” Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Gilbert has all the makings of a quality big-league starter. Drafted 14th overall by the Seattle Mariners in 2018, the 22-year-old right-hander pairs plus stuff with a classic pitcher’s build. Moreover, he’s studious about his craft. The Stetson University product has embraced technology since signing — this per a Mariners executive I spoke to — and he’s using it to better understand, and help fine-tune, his arsenal.

Gilbert debuted professionally last season and went on to excel at three levels. Topping out at Double-A Arkansas, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound hurler logged a 2.13 ERA with 165 strikeouts in 135 innings. Displaying good command, he issued just 33 free passes.

Gilbert — No. 45 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list — discussed his four-pitch mix, as well as the extension and ride that help his heater play up, late last week.

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David Laurila: To start, can you give a self-scouting report?

Logan Gilbert: “I try to get ahead with the fastball. Everything for me is getting into good counts, because of how that plays better. I’ve seen the averages — how they change based on the counts — so I go right at guys. But I can also land a curveball, which for me is a big, slow curveball. I also have a harder slider that I used for strikeouts a lot last year; I used it for put-aways. I’ll also mix in a changeup. That’s kind of a fourth pitch, kind of a weak-contact pitch to give lefties a different look.”

Laurila: I understand that your velocity was down for a period of time at Stetson.

Gilbert: “It went down a little my junior year [2018], but last year it was pretty good for the most part. This spring it’s been pretty good again. Last game I was sitting around 94 [mph] for my two innings. In college, I was around 90, so it’s come back up.”

Laurila: Is velocity important to you? Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Lodolo went into last year’s draft rated as the top pitching prospect in a pool heavily populated by position players. Subsequently selected seventh overall by the Cincinnati Reds, the left-hander out of Texas Christian University now enters his first full professional season as a potential, if not probable, fast-mover. In big league camp despite a dearth of experience, Lodolo has impressed with both his arm and his demeanor. More on the latter in a moment.

Lodolo is ranked No. 92 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, with pitchability perhaps his greatest attribute. He’s not your prototypical flamethrower — his heater sits 93-95 and touches 96 — but is rather a craftsman-in-the making. He’s also silky smooth. As Eric Longenhagen wrote in Lodolo’s scouting summary, the 6-foot-6, 195 pound southpaw’s “frame is ideal, his delivery elegant and repeatable.”

On Tuesday, I asked Lodolo for a self-scouting report. His response came as anything but a surprise.

“I’m obviously a guy who attacks the zone,” said Lodolo, who turned 22 last month. “I move my fastball in and out really well. I’ll pretty much throw anything for a strike, whenever in the count. I don’t think of myself as a power pitcher, although [power] is something I do kind of have. Luckily. I’ll use that to my advantage — for instance when I work up in the zone — but for the most the part, I take pride in my command, and in limiting free bases.”

He didn’t give up any freebies in his first taste of professional action. In 18 1/3 innings between Rookie-level Billings and Low-A Dayton, Lodolo didn’t issue a single walk. He fanned 30, and surrendered 18 hits. Read the rest of this entry »

A quote from Eric Longenhagen is a good way to lead an article on Nolan Jones. Our resident prospect guru wrote the following about Jones, who ranks No. 54 on our recently-released 2020 Top 100 Prospects list:

“Jones is a giant corner infielder with among the best eyes for the strike zone in the minors and some of the most impressive raw power, as well.”

Those platitudes are largely backed up by the numbers. Cleveland’s second-round pick in the 2016 draft stands an imposing 6-foot-4, 220 pounds, and his OBP as a professional is an impressive .409. Pairing those attributes with his preponderance of power, Jones projects to have — again per Longenhagen — “among the highest three true outcomes percentages in the big leagues.”

Jones has a solid understanding of his strengths, and a pretty good idea of what he needs to improve upon. And he’s already made some meaningful adjustments since being selected 55th overall out of Philadelphia’s Holy Ghost Prep. In an effort to make his bat path more efficient, Jones has tweaked both his stance and where he holds his hands. The kinetic chain being what it is, one feeds into the other. Read the rest of this entry »