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 »

The start of a new prospect list cycle provides a nice, natural time for a sweeping update of my analysis around the international prospects I think readers should know about. Some international pros have already inked free agent deals this offseason, while others have created great anticipation for an eventual move to MLB. In a month, a new class of international amateur players will begin to sign. This week, the International Players tab on The Board will be updated with new scouting reports and information concerning the various segments of the international player population, largely surrounding pro players in Asia and the contingent of teenagers mostly from Latin America who will sign in January. We’re going to publish these in batches throughout the week, with a focus on KBO players today, Japanese players thereafter, and international amateurs at the end of the week. Because they’ve already signed, we’ve also pushed info on Japanese pros Masataka Yoshida and Kodai Senga to The Board; the write-ups you’ll find there are my evaluations, and they each have their own transaction analysis article up at the site as well (I wrote Senga’s, while Justin Choi penned Yoshida’s).

This market is important because players coming to the U.S. from Asian leagues, including many whose pro careers began as MLB minor leaguers, often make an impact on big league contending teams. Chris Flexen 플렉센, Miles Mikolas, Brooks Raley 레일리, Yusei Kikuchi, Yu Darvish, Robert Suarez, Nick Martinez, Ha-Seong Kim 김하성, Pierce Johnson, Darin Ruf 러프, and Joely Rodríguez all either got their starts or made a stop in a top Asian pro league, and all were on an MLB playoff roster this season. The data generated by these leagues and warehoused online (including KBO stats here at FanGraphs), combined with my access to video analysis tools like Synergy Sports, and some time spent on the phone with baseball ops and scouting folks who cover (or are part of) international teams, means I can give readers a lay of the land in this space. Read the rest of this entry »

Masyn Winn has a high ceiling as a position player. Rated the best athlete in the St. Louis system by Baseball America, the 20-year-old shortstop is No. 2 in our Cardinals prospects rankings and No. 55 in our Top 100. Drafted 54th overall in 2020 out of Kingwood (Tex.) High School, Winn is coming off of a season where he slashed .283/.364/.468 with 12 home runs and 43 stolen bases between High-A Peoria and Double-A Springfield. His summer included an appearance in the 2022 All-Star Futures Game.

He could very well be a pitcher… or a two-way player. As our lead prospect evaluator Eric Longenhagen explained back in July, Winn “was a two-way amateur with huge arm strength,” and while no one was projecting him as the next Shohei Ohtani — a unicorn, he’s not — there is no denying his unique skillset. Winn had a throw from shortstop clocked at 100.5 mph during the Futures Game.

Winn discussed his pitching background and the possibility of him one day returning to the mound during his October/November stint in the Arizona Fall League.

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David Laurila: I’m especially interested in your positional background. Why are you an infielder now, and not a pitcher?

Masyn Winn: “I’m not a pitcher because the Cardinals and I decided that’s the easier route to go. Hitting… I mean, it’s a lot easier to pick the glove back up and go back on the mound than it is to pick a bat back up. In our thought process, if I make it as a hitter, that’s fantastic. If not, I’ll just fall back to pitching. I think that’s a good plan because of how hard hitting is. Taking a couple years off and then trying to go back to it would be a little tough.”

Laurila: When was the decision made?

Winn: “I ended up throwing one inning at the end of last year. We were going to do a throwing program the last six weeks or so, but I ended up tweaking my arm a little bit, so during the offseason we decided to shut it down and just focus on hitting.” Read the rest of this entry »

After being cancelled last offseason due to the lockout, on Wednesday, the 2022 Rule 5 Draft was completed in San Diego, with 15 players selected during the Major League phase. Below are our thoughts on those players; the numbers you see in parentheses are the 40-man roster counts that were recited by each team during the draft roll call. Remember that you can venture over to The Board for more information about several of these guys.

But first, our annual refresher on the Rule 5 Draft’s complex rules. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger are eligible for selection after five years of minor league service if their parent club has not yet added them to the team’s 40-man roster; for players who signed at age 19 or older, the timeline is four years. Teams with the worst win/loss record from the previous season pick first, and those that select a player must not only (a) pay said player’s former club $100,000, but also (b) keep the player on their 25-man active roster throughout the entirety of the following season, with a couple of exceptions, mostly involving the injured list. If a selected player doesn’t make his new team’s active roster, he is offered back to his former team for half of the initial fee. After the player’s first year on the roster, he can be optioned back to the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

The 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Here we’ve endeavored to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

The 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Here I endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Tuesday’s 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Over the next few days, we’ll endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Sabol has versatility, Pittsburgh ties, and a bat that could be providing thump to the Pirates’ lineup in the not-too-distant future. A left-handed-hitting catcher who also plays the outfield and first base, Sabol, 24, is coming off a season where he slashed .284/.363/.497 with 19 home runs between Double-A Altoona and Triple-A Indianapolis. The seventh-round selection in the 2019 draft has other notable qualities, as well. Along with being a stat nerd, the former University of Southern California Trojan has an engaging personality that promises to make him a fan favorite if he reaches the majors.

Sabol, who is Rule 5 eligible, talked about his multi-faceted game and his connections to the city he hopes to soon play in during his recent stint with the Arizona Fall League’s Surprise Saguaros.

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David Laurila: I understand that you play multiple positions and have put up some good offensive numbers. How do you see yourself?

Blake Sabol: “Defensively, I kind of consider myself a Swiss Army Knife. I’m primarily a catcher, but I can be in the outfield and have also been taking some ground balls at first base. I’m hoping to be like a three-level player.

“With the bat, I’ve had a couple of good seasons under my belt — I’ve been able to hit for power and have a good OPS — so I feel I can impact the game that way. I think I can help a big league team. Instead of having a guy who is only a catcher, maybe just a backup catcher, I can be playing multiple spots, or even be in the lineup as a DH.”

Laurila: Your goal isn’t to be a starting catcher in the big leagues?

Sabol: “My goal is ultimately to be in the big leagues, anyway, anyhow. I mean, I would love to be a catcher. There’s a lot of value there, and I think I could do it. But ideally, and I’ve talked with Henry Davis about this, even if we’re splitting games behind the plate, I can go in the outfield or be a first baseman. I just want to be in the lineup as much as possible.” Read the rest of this entry »