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 »

I wanted to pass along scouting notes from spring training games, especially ones that will shape the coming org lists and concern players who are outside the scope of my work but are relevant to the public interest. I’m going to start with observations from big league games and then move into notes from my amateur looks. One important caveat, especially where the big league looks are concerned, is the possibility of players still being rusty. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Tabor is well-regarded primarily because of his fastball and his changeup. The latter, which he throws with a Vulcan-like grip, is his best pitch. The former, which gets solid ride but lacks plus velocity, is delivered with above-average command. Last year, the 21-year-old right-hander walked 16 batters, fanned 101, and logged a 2.93 ERA over 95.1 innings with the low-A Kane County Cougars. Bumped up two slots following Monday’s Starling Marte trade, Tabor currently ranks 11th on our Arizona Diamondbacks Top Prospects List.

His slider, a pitch he didn’t throw in games two summers ago, has become an important weapon for the 2017 third-round pick. Tabor credits Carson Cross with spurring its development. The two were together at PowerHouse Sports New Hampshire shortly before Cross took a job in the Milwaukee Brewers organization last February.

At the time, Tabor was a two-pitch pitcher. A third was needed, and to that purpose he was at wit’s end.

“Mentally, I was just so screwed up,” the Westford, Massachusetts native admitted. “I had pretty much convinced myself that I could never throw a good slider. I’d messed around with a lot of things, but it was still loopy and popped out of my hand. In high school, I could just flip that shit over and it was going to buckle knees, but up here they’ll sit on it and hit it 350 feet. I knew that I needed to make it harder, with more of a cutter-ish shape, so I approached Carson.”

Cross had thrown an effective slider at the University of Connecticut and later at the lower levels of the St. Louis Cardinals system. Moreover, he’d recently developed a strong interest in pitch design. He was just the tutor Tabor needed. Read the rest of this entry »

Ethan Hankins has one of the highest ceilings in Cleveland’s pitching pipeline. The 6-foot-6 right-hander possesses a first-round pedigree — he went 35th overall in 2018 — and a heater that sits mid-90s with late life. Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked him 15th in Cleveland’s system last year. Moreover, he’s wise beyond his years. Still just 19 years old, Hankins is studious enough about his craft that he could reasonably be referred to as a pitching nerd.

Hankins split his first full professional campaign between Short-season Mahoning Valley and Low-A Lake County, logging a 2.55 ERA and fanning 71 batters in 60 innings. No less impressive are the strides he’s continued to make between the ears. The former Forsythe, Georgia prep may have bypassed Vanderbilt University to sign with the Indians, but his quest for knowledge has by no means waned. Influenced heavily by his off-season experiences at Full Count Baseball, it continues unabated.

Hankins discussed his cerebral approach, and the improvements he’s made to his repertoire, late in the 2019 season.

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David Laurila: Is pitching more of an art, or more of a science?

Ethan Hankins: “The game we’re playing right now, with all the analytical stuff we have access to, and use — especially with the Indians — it’s starting to become more of a science. I feel like it used to be more an art. Even a few years ago. But it’s been growing into something that can be called a science, because of the average velocities, the spin efficiencies, true spin, 2D spin, 3D spin. There are all of these numbers that can be beneficial if you know how to use them in the right way.“

Laurila: It sounds like you lean science.

Hankins: “Yes, but that’s not because the Indians have thrown it in my face. It’s because I’ve taken to learning how these numbers can benefit you. Granted, the Indians help a lot. They obviously have all of this knowledge. But not everybody uses it. We don’t get pressured to use it.”

Laurila: How do you use it?

Hankins: “There are a million different ways that… oh gosh. I’d say that I’m using it to develop my offspeed, more than anything. My curveball has made a huge jump over the past year. I don’t credit that solely to the Rapsodo, or any of the other technology we have access to, but that does give you a lot of insight. It tells you, ‘This is where you are.’ From there, you’re able to say, ‘OK, I want to be here; I want this pitch to have this much efficiency. This is the direction I want.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Wichita’s windy season is said to last from early February to late May, when the gusts change from frigid blasts to hot breaths. The windiest day of the year is historically April 4; a day when hairdos and stacks of loose papers must stand strong against gales blustering at an average of 13 mph.

Occasionally, there will be a spike in velocity that knocks out the power or rolls back a tin roof or tries to tear the awning off of the Valero gas station on Caulfield and Kemp. A fire inspector once cast a wary eye on the 1916 Wichita Fair and Exposition, concerned, per the The Wichita Daily Eagle on October 22, that the flammable structures of the event created a great risk of conflagration due to the “high, dry winds we have in the fall,” his fears rooted in both science and the fact that this very thing had happened the previous year.

So in Wichita, they are aware of the wind. They know that it blows, that it carries the cold and the heat of the plains, and that it occasionally bends a gas station in half. They do not all understand why it is the name of the town’s new Triple-A franchise, the Wichita Wind Surge, an affiliate of the Miami Marlins.

“I guess it’s windy here,” says Wichita resident Eric Pierce, “but… wind’s kind of everywhere.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, we published a piece detailing how MLB’s proposal to reimagine the minor leagues would alter in-person access to professional baseball across the country. We were interested in how many people would lose their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person, or see that access shift from the minor leagues to more expensive major league parks. To arrive at those numbers:

[W]e took the geographical center of each ZCTA (a close relative of ZIP Codes used by the Census Bureau). We calculated the distance as the crow flies from each ZCTA to each ballpark in America, both in 2019 and in MLB’s proposed new landscape. From there, we took the minimum of all of those distances for each ZCTA. That gave us the shortest distance to baseball for each geographical center. We then matched the distance with the population of each area.

In the piece, we acknowledged the limitations of linear distance. It doesn’t account for natural barriers, like say, mountains or lakes, or things like the placement of roads. And, as several folks pointed out on twitter and in the comments, not all road conditions are created equally. How long it takes to drive 50 miles in the Washington D.C. metro area varies widely from how long that same distance takes in rural Montana. What’s more, residents of those respective areas likely view a 50 mile drive differently; if you have to travel a ways to go grocery shopping, your understanding of how burdensome a 100 mile drive to your “local” minor league ballpark is probably different than it is for someone who lives in a place with a meaningful rush hour and amenities that are closer at hand. So while linear distance is a good approximation of how the access landscape would change in the new minor leagues, we wanted to take a stab at being a bit more precise. Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Corry dominated in his second full professional season. Pitching for the Augusta GreenJackets, the 2017 third-round pick had both the lowest ERA (1.76) and the most strikeouts (172) of any pitcher at the A-ball level. Moreover, at age 20, he allowed just 73 hits in 122.2 innings. Rightly honored as the South Atlantic League Pitcher of the Year, the lefty will head into 2020 ranked No. 11 on our San Francisco Giants Top Prospects list.

The Alpine, Utah native attributes his breakout to a better understanding of the art of pitching. A lot of the credit for that goes to a fellow southpaw who was more guile than power during his playing days.

“My pitching coach this year was Clay Rapada,” explained Corry. “I call him — in funny terms, but seriously, too — ‘My saving grace.’ He’s the coach I not only wanted, but the coach I needed. He taught me things that I’ll cherish for the rest of my career.”

Pupil and mentor have little in common when it comes to raw ability. According to Corry, that’s why the former big-league reliever’s lessons were so valuable. Read the rest of this entry »