Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Smith is a left-handed pitching prospect in the Los Angeles Angels system. Taken in the 18th round of the 2019 draft as a senior out of Princeton University, he is, and always has been, an intellectual player. In fact, he spends time in the offseason tutoring high schoolers preparing for the SAT, a rather unorthodox job for a minor league player. After a 25.1-inning rookie ball debut his draft year, he lost out on a key developmental season due to the pandemic but came prepared for the 2021 season with increased velocity and a hunger to perform.

That year, Smith threw 129.1 innings across four different levels. A workload like that in your first full professional season is extremely uncommon. Indeed, coming off the lost 2020 campaign, many pitchers decreased their workloads. For that reason, Smith has had a unique path. His performance was good enough to rise all the way up to Triple-A in his first full season, but his adjustment to the Pacific Coast League has been a work in progress. I spoke to him about that adjustment, its impact on his game, and his repertoire earlier this month.

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Esteban Rivera: What does your pitch mix look like right now, and how has it changed since rookie ball?

Ryan Smith: “I throw a four-seamer with slightly above-average vertical break, but the velo range has been all over the place in pro ball. In rookie ball, the average was around 92 with a couple of outings in the 95-96 range. 2021 it was up to 97-98 in spring, but mostly sat 92-95 the first couple of months, then dropped down to 91-94 in the second half. This past year, my carry was down a bit playing mostly at high altitude, and my velo was 91-93. I’m hoping for it to come back after a velo program I’m on for the winter. I think it was down after the high workload in 2021 after no innings in 2020.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals may have gotten a steal when they acquired Jacob Wallace from the Red Sox last week in exchange for Wyatt Mills. The “may have” comes with a sizable caveat, as the 24-year-old right-hander has big-time stuff, but also command issues. Pitching for the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs this year, he walked 49 batters in 56.2 innings.

Wallace is overpowering when he’s in the strike zone, though. The 100th overall pick in 2019 — he was drafted by the Rockies out of the University of Connecticut, then swapped to Boston a year later in exchange for Kevin Pillar — fanned 76 batters and allowed just 35 hits. As Tess Taruskin and Kevin Goldstein wrote last spring, “It’s not too complicated: If he can throw more strikes, he has a path to the big leagues.”

Wallace, who prior to the trade was No. 23 in our Red Sox prospect rankings with a 40 FV, discussed his overpowering arsenal and his mother-influenced interest in pitching analytics late in the season.

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David Laurila: Before we talk about your repertoire, you told me that your mother is big into analytics?

Jacob Wallace: “She reads and absorbs everything. She would tell me, ‘Oh, your FIP is this’ — all these numbers — and I’d be like, ‘Well, I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m just out there playing.’ I’d know my ERA and the other basic stuff, but not the more advanced-stats. This was back in high school. Once I got to college and started learning more… I mean, it was really cool to realize how much she had already learned.”

Laurila: I’m guessing that your mother reads FanGraphs?

Wallace: “Yeah, I would say she does. She is a director of plant operations for [Proctor & Gamble], so numbers and learning are definitely things she definitely loves.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The final installment of this week’s set of international player updates revolves around the amateur prospects who will begin to sign a month from now when the new international signing period begins on January 15. An overview of the rules that govern signing international amateurs can be found on MLB’s glossary here, while more thorough and detailed documentation can be found starting on page 287 of the CBA (forgive the 2017-21 version – the full text of the latest agreement isn’t publicly available yet), and page 38 of the Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. I pulled out portions of these documents for reference in the pieces published earlier this week and have done so again here, but I suggest readers familiarize themselves further. The international amateur arena is a procedural and ethical mess that has undergone wholesale structural changes several times during my time as a writer, most recently because of what the pandemic did to shift the timeline of each signing period.

Projected signing teams, scouting reports and tool grades on just over 30 players from the 2023 class can now be viewed over on The Board. Because the International Players tab has an apples and oranges mix of older pros from Asian leagues and soon-to-be first-year players, there is no explicit ranking on The Board, but I’ve stacked the class of anticipated 2023 signees in a table below with a ranking for reference should you need it. As has been the case with past classes, after these players sign, they will be pulled off the International Players section of The Board and warehoused in a ranking of their signing class for record-keeping purposes.

As always, the FV grade is a more important measure for readers to focus on than the ordinal rankings here. Because these players are so close in age to the younger prospects who participate in any given domestic draft, I like to use theoretical draft position as a barometer by which to grade the international amateurs. Scouting and comparing international players’ tools and athleticism to those of recent and upcoming domestic amateurs helps me to triangulate approximately where they’d go in a given draft, and assign them a FV based on that approximation. Players with a 40+ FV grade or above tend to be prospects who I think would go in the first two rounds of a draft, while the teenage 40 FV prospects are the sort I’d ballpark in the $700,000 to $1 million bonus range as draft prospects, basically the slot amounts just after the second round. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Walker is no. 8 on our Top 100 thanks largely to his bat. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote in July, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect “is one of the most exciting young hitters in the minors, with elite power potential and superlative on-paper performance at Double-A while he’s still not old enough to have a beer.” At season’s end, the 20-year-old Stone Mountain, Georgia native boasted a .306/.388/.510 slash line, with 19 home runs and a 128 wRC+.

His tool set also includes a plus arm, which this writer witnessed firsthand during an Arizona Fall League game. Fielding a ball deep in the right field corner, Walker gunned a strike to second base that had me harkening back to the days of Dwight Evans and Dave Parker. A throw I wasn’t on hand to see was arguably even more impressive. As MLB.com’s Jesse Borek reported in mid-October, Walker “cut the ball loose at 99.5 mph, a throw harder than any by a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder since Statcast began to keep track in 2015.”

Shortly after talking to Walker’s close friend and AZL teammate Masyn Winn — featured here at FanGraphs on Tuesday — I approached the organization’s top-rated prospect to talk about his two most eye-catching assets: his bat and his arm. Read the rest of this entry »

Continuing our week of updating the International Players tab over on The Board, today we’ve added the need-to-know pros from Nippon Professional Baseball, the top league in baseball-obsessed Japan. If you missed yesterday’s post surrounding Korea Baseball Organization players, you’re going to want to check that out, as lots of what is outlined there is also relevant for this batch of reports.

NPB is made up of 12 total teams split between two leagues, the Central and Pacific Leagues, with roughly half the teams concentrated in the area of the country surrounding Tokyo Bay. Now just over 70 years old, NPB essentially has one level of affiliated minor leagues (also split in two, they’re called the Eastern and Western Leagues), but allows its franchises to vary in the number of affiliates they control, which creates vast disparities in the number of minor league prospects or developmental players teams employ. The Giants and Hawks are Branch Rickey-ing this space while other teams are not.

MLB personnel tend to consider Japan at least on par with Triple-A ball in the U.S., and some (including your author) think it fits somewhere in the yawning chasm between the level of play at Triple-A and in the majors. Evidence that the latter is true: the Quad-A hitters who leave the U.S. for opportunities in Japan don’t tend to dominate the leaderboards; the best NPB players are usually Japanese. There are historical exceptions to this, but no foreign-born player has cracked the single-season top 10 of NPB position player WAR since Hector Luna in 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Warren has quietly, and quickly, emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the New York Yankees organization. An eighth-round pick in the 2020 draft out of Southwestern Louisiana University, the 22-year-old right-hander made his professional debut this year, and by June he was pitching with Double-A Somerset. On the season, he had a 3.91 ERA and a 3.74 FIP with 125 strikeouts and 119 hits allowed in 129 innings.

His best two pitches have been added to his arsenal since college. Warren’s sweeper, which spins as high as 3,000 rpm, replaced the pedestrian slider he’d thrown as an amateur; his low-to-mid 90s sinker, which helped produce a 53% ground ball rate, was developed just this past season. His physique has transformed, as well. The 6-foot-2 hurler now packs close to 200 pounds on his once-lean frame, giving him a more-projectable starter’s build.

Warren discussed his developmental strides late in the 2022 season.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. on the mound. How do you get guys out?

Will Warren: “Basically attacking the zone, knowing that the guys behind me are going to make plays. As a sinkerball guy, I’m probably going to get a lot more ground balls than strikeouts, so I rely a lot on my defense to get people out.”

Laurila: I understand that you also have a pretty good slider.

Warren: “Yes. Analytics makes it easier to look at a pitch and say, ‘Oh, I can do this, I can manipulate it this way.’ When I got drafted by the Yankees, we [developed] the slider. We tinkered with some grips, and it ended up being what it is now.”

Laurila: Is it the Yankees whirly?

Warren: “It’s the sweeper, yes. Off the top of my head, I’m going say I get like 16–18 inches of sweep. I can get it bigger, but I think that’s what it is on average. The velocity is 84–87 [mph].” Read the rest of this entry »