Episode 572
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses some early-round selections in baseball’s amateur draft, the particular futures of some collegiate second baseman, and also baseball-player makeup versus regular-person makeup.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 1 min play time.)

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Last year’s first-overall draft pick, left-hander Brady Aiken, didn’t come to terms with the Astros because of a difference regarding what the physical showed about the condition of his elbow, despite being healthy at the time. Aiken went to IMG’s Post-Grad team this spring, but only threw a handful of pitches before he left his first game with an elbow injury, eventually leading to Tommy John surgery weeks later.

Since the failure of Aiken and Houston to reach an agreement, there’s been lots of buzz as to what the latter saw in that physical, since they’re the only team to have seen it. The most common rumors are unusual situations with the size of Aiken’s UCL, the blood flow to that area and the bone structure around the elbow.  His draft stock for next week’s draft ranges anywhere from the middle of the first round to the middle of the second round, depending on how much truth there is to these rumors.

A few days ago, the Aiken camp made his medical information available to teams, but with a very rare set of conditions about who can see it. Sources indicate the information is available only to GM-level personnel or higher (who can then distribute it to other decision-makers within the team) and the GM has to make a specific request with Aiken’s camp to see it, which the Aiken camp then has accept.

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Episode 566
Michael Matuella is both (a) a junior right-hander at Duke and also (b) among the upcoming amateur draft’s likely first-round selections. Lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel spoke with him — regarding his recovery from a recent Tommy John procedure, among other topics — for this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 31 min play time.)

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The Blue Jays’ farm got stronger last week, as last summer’s first-round pick, right-hander Jeff Hoffman, made his pro debut for High-A Dunedin. Hoffman was in the mix to go #1 overall last year until he underwent Tommy John surgery just before the draft and slid to ninth overall. The 6-foot-4 righty has the size and athleticism to support his frontline starter stuff, which was already back in his first regular season after surgery.

Fastball – 65/75

Hoffman came out establishing his fastball and showed his premium arm speed, sitting 95-98 and touching 99 mph early on. The pitch had life up in the zone and, when located down, the heater had good run and sink. It’s a heavy pitch that has the ability to swallow up opposing hitters’ barrels. In the second inning, Hoffman was leaving the pitch up and out over the plate, causing it straighten out. He was hit hard and loud that inning, but that was the only bump in the road.

Hoffman allowed four runs on four hits that inning, but put up zeros in the other four innings, scattering another four hits. He also showed the ability to hold his premium velocity while working out of the stretch, sitting 93-97 mph. The fastball command was better than I anticipated, as well. Even though he was getting squeezed a bit, Hoffman was regularly working the fastball to both corners and moving it up and down in the zone. Fastball command is usually one of the last traits to return after an injury like his, so it’s an encouraging sign to see glimpses of it this early.

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With the amateur draft just around the corner, I thought it would be worthwhile to check in on some of the players selected early on in last year’s amateur draft. At this point, most of these players have something close to a year’s worth of games under their belts. Obviously, all these players remain very much at the beginning part of their respective careers, and still have plenty of developing left to do. Their futures are far from set in stone. Still, their stats from the last calendar year should be able to give us a general sense of how good they are now and, by extension, how good they might ultimately become.

Let’s set the pitchers aside for now, and start off by looking at the first eight hitters taken in the first round last year. I’ll certainly take a closer look at some of these players in the future once they have larger bodies of professional experience against more advanced pitching. This is especially true of the ones who are performing well, and will likely be knocking on the door of the big leagues in the next year or so.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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I wrote yesterday about the how the shelf life of draft rankings affects the finished product, using my “guy” from this year’s draft, Vanderbilt righty Carson Fulmer, as an example of a guy typically under-appreciated by this process. My history of scouting Fulmer goes back four years to his high school days, but my history of zeroing in on this type of pitcher goes back eight years.

Taking a Page from Wall Street

Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan came out in 2007 and I read it toward the end of that year. Taleb made a lot of money during the stock market crash in 1987 and again during the financial crisis that started in 2007, a crisis he predicted in The Black Swan. The way he made his money is the underpinning of the book: better understanding how very rare events happen.

The human brain simplifies complex situations, which can often help us and conserve energy, but also makes us vulnerable when a seemingly unimportant piece of information is smoothed over by many individuals. Taleb names the unlikely event that few see coming a Black Swan, referring to the collective surprise exhibited when a black version of the (presumed exclusively) white bird was found in another part of the world.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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Before beginning in earnest, it’s essential or nearly essential for the reader to know that this post for FanGraphs.com on the internet relies on an improbable set of assumptions. One of those assumptions is this: that you (the reader) are a member of a major-league front office. Another is this: that you’ve solicited me, the author — a person who lives in rural New Hampshire and possesses only a basic reading-level command of Spanish — that you’ve solicited me to recommend some Mexican League players who might find some success in the majors. A third assumption is this: that you’re entirely comfortable with the knowledge that I’ve seen only a couple of these players in person — and even then it was at a spring-training game in Mexico City’s new facility while consuming a number of tall beers with British illustrator/dipsomaniac Craig Robinson.

Weirder things have probably happened than the scenario I’ve laid out above, but almost all of them have been confined to parties hosted by Silvio Berlusconi. What, then, is the purpose of this post? Mostly just to become acquainted with the most interesting (and generally young) talents in the Mexican League (or LMB).

It’s probably best to address first this question — namely, what sort of talent the LMB has produced in the past that has gone on to success in the American major leagues. The answer, broadly speaking, is that it has produced notable talent. Joakim Soria and Fernando Valenzuela, for example, both pitched in the LMB before ever making an appearance in the majors. Baseball’s current top pitching prospect, Julio Urias, was employed by the Diablos Rojos of Mexico City before that club and the Dodgers reached an agreement for him to move to the latter team. In a lower profile but still relevant instance, Houston acquired two other players from Mexico City: Japhet Amador and Leo Heras. The former was compelled to return to Mexico when his wife became ill, but Heras remains in the Astros system at the Double-A level, where he’s exhibited promising plate discipline and speed. These examples skew decidedly anecdotal, but the idea with them isn’t to supply anything like an exhaustive study, but rather merely to illustrate that a player from the LMB has ever once succeeded in the majors.

Always it’s best to complement any sort of endeavor such as this one with observational evidence. Owing to the author’s geographical constraints and also the paucity of video available for the LMB, however, that’s not really an option. In any case, one can reach some basic assumptions about a player’s talent level by considering certain relevant information and weighting it responsibly.

This sort of information, for example:

Age
Younger players are obviously more likely to improve — or at least not decline. Also, with regard to the LMB, specifically, one finds that the average age is on the older side — nearly 31 for batters and 29 for pitchers. For the purposes of this post, I’ve considered only those players who are 27 or younger.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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