Yesterday, I noticed some odd prospects trending in FanGraphs’ player search bar and, as I often do, I Googled those players to see why that might be. It’s often due to a call-up, trade, or injury, but in this case I found that some young players like Luisangel Acuna were being searched on the site because their autographs are part of a new baseball card set that came out earlier in the week: Bowman Chrome 2020.
I don’t collect baseball cards anymore but I still frequent two local shops that sell board and trading card games (which I do play) in addition to sports cards. During a trip (with a scout, ironically) to one of them last year, I found the shop owner and a customer deep in discussion about the prospects in last year’s Bowman set, a conversation that included mention of how expensive Wander Franco’s cards had become, and how sought after Jasson Dominguez’s first card was likely to be in 2020. I asked, “What is it that’s driving card prices for some of the prospects who most people have never seen play and who a lot of casual fans have never heard of?” to which the customer responded, “Their stats.” Read the rest of this entry »
Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.
I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West. Below is my assessment of the AL Central, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.
Jonathan Stiever’s promotion was instructive because we got to see his velocity coming off of the forearm soreness that ended his spring. He sat 91-94, which is a little below his peak 2019 breakout when he would touch 6’s and 7’s. His changeup looked good, though, and it was a stabilizing force during a jittery first start. He’ll need to locate his slider more consistently for it to be effective, and the same goes for his heater if it’s going to live around 93. Stiever also incorporated his secondary stuff more often in his second outing — that’s probably the long-term strategy if this is where his fastball velocity is going to live.
You’re probably aware that Garrett Crochet made his major league debut over the weekend, becoming the first 2020 draftee to reach the majors and the first since Mike Leake to skip the minors entirely. He made just one pre-draft start this spring sandwiched between a February injury and March’s shutdown, so he was barely seen by teams this year, if at all, which is why some clubs were hesitant to draft him early in the first round. I’ve updated The Board to include his pitch data now that I have it, but neither his Future Value nor ranking has changed yet (45 FV is a late-inning reliever). He currently has the hardest fastball in baseball, and Crochet joins Zack Burdi and Codi Heuer as White Sox rookie relievers who have among the top 20 fastest heaters in the game. He’s yet another weapon in a bullpen that I consider dangerous enough to carry the Pale Hose deep into October. Read the rest of this entry »
Guest: Do you think Stiever is more likely to hang on as a starter beyond this season or is his stuff better suited as a reliever?
12:05
Eric A Longenhagen: Still probably a starter long term. Tough to see him enjoying enough of a velo bump out of the bullpen to be a late-inning weapon, and unless he’s a late-inning weapon he’d be more valuable as a 4/5th starter than any other kind of reliever
12:05
Larry Jones: What’s your opinion on Padres number 8 prospect Yeison Santana? Do you believe his bat will be able to play at the major league level?
Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball on the pro side and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.
I started with the National League East; below is my look at the American League West, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.
A rash of injuries has necessitated several pitching prospect promotions in Houston. Cristian Javier (ranked second in org) and Brandon Bielak (fifth) have been up the longest, and both have struggled in unexpected ways. Bielak, who threw lots of strikes in the minors, has wrestled with walks. He might be nibbling with his fastball because it’s getting crushed to the tune of a 90% in-zone contact rate and a .674 xSLG according to Baseball Savant. He’s been bullpenned for now, but I still consider him a likely No. 4/5 starter (45 FV), albeit one who probably has to pitch more heavily off his secondary stuff. Even though he’s walked more hitters than usual, Bielak has still shown a consistent ability to execute his changeup and breaking balls to good locations, especially against lefties.
Javier’s walk rate is actually better than usual, but he hasn’t missed bats at anything resembling his career norm, and a whopping nine of the 27 hits he’s surrendered this year have been home runs. That home run rate will likely regress across a larger sample, but if Javier is going to keep starting then he still needs to find a better way to deal with left-handed hitters because his splits have been pretty extreme. Because of an off day, Houston opted to skip Javier’s turn in the rotation over the weekend and use him out of the bullpen, where he had five strikeouts in two innings. I think he’s a candidate to move the ‘pen during the playoffs, and potentially long-term, and he projects as a high-leverage reliever if he does. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning, let’s dive right into it.
12:07
Eric A Longenhagen: ah, let me tweet a link i guess….
12:07
Matt: How would you rank: Tatis, Acuna, Bellinger, Soto going forward? Ignoring contracts
12:08
Eric A Longenhagen: the way you have them listed.
12:08
Philip: I know teams are especially secretive about what’s going on in alternate site but have you heard anything that would make you change a prospects ranking in either direction?
12:09
Eric A Longenhagen: Some. I moved up Rafael Marchan based on how he’s looked in camp, but I’ve seen that on video myself which is why I felt comfortable moving him already. Other teams video from the camp wasn’t published like Philly’s has been which means any opinions coming from camp are from the team in question, which should be heavily scrutinized because of their incentive to say their players are good.
Early this morning, the Padres and Indians officially consummated a much-rumored deal surrounding starter Mike Clevinger, one significant enough to demand multiple pieces of analysis, the prospect-centric slice of which I’ll serve you here. The broad strokes analysis of Cleveland’s prospect package is that in addition to the big league pieces they received, they added 20-year-old shortstop Gabriel Arias, yet another candidate to be the club’s long-term shortstop in the event that Francisco Lindor is either traded or leaves in free agency, and two other prospects, Joey Cantillo and Owen Miller, who fit archetypes that the org has often targeted and developed well.
He doesn’t have the highest ceiling of the group (Arias does), but I think Joey Cantillo is the best prospect in the trade. He entered 2020 coming off a breakout 2019 during which, at age 19, he struck out 144 hitters in 111 combined innings at Low-A Fort Wayne and Hi-A Lake Elsinore. It was a meteoric rise for a teenager who was less than two years removed from being a 16th round pick ($300,000 signing bonus) out of a high school in Hawaii, and Cantillo’s strikeout totals were especially confounding because he doesn’t throw all that hard, only living in the 87-90 range, touching 92. How does he do it? This piece has some specifics about how a fastball with below-average velocity can still miss bats in the strike zone. Cantillo also has an impact changeup. From his scouting report on The Board, where you can already see how the new Indians prospects rank in the system:
Not only does it have bat-missing movement but Cantillo’s arm speed really sells hitters on the notion that they’re getting a fastball; A-ball bats flailed at it in 2019. The carry on his fastball enables Cantillo to compete for swinging strikes in the zone, and that, plus his ability to throw lots of competitively-located changeups mean he can work back into any count. His breaking ball usage is ahead of its quality, something that might change if Cantillo does start throwing harder and adds power to his curve. The breaking ball and development of velo are now the two variables driving Cantillo’s potential future FV movement, but for now I think he has the tools to go right at hitters and be a No. 4/5 starter.
Sunday’s seven-player deal between the Mariners and Padres was the deadline’s biggest trade so far, impacting this year’s playoff race and both teams’ roster construction for years to come. While the most immediate effects will be seen in San Diego, the Mariners continued to collect talented, young players with their spyglass fixed on a long-term rebuild by acquiring Taylor Trammell, Ty France, Andres Muñoz and Luis Torrens (covered here) in a trade centered around catcher Austin Nola.
The headline prospect of the package is Trammell, a 23-year-old 50 FV prospect (meaning I expect him to be a an everyday player who generates around 2 to 2.5 annual WAR — commensurate with a good everyday player — over the course of his pre-free agency seasons) who was with San Diego’s big league club throughout spring training, then played during summer camp intrasquads, and has since been at the Padres’ alternate training site at the University of San Diego. Trammell spent all of 2019 at Double-A, albeit with two different orgs because he was also part of last year’s massive, three-team Trevor Bauer deadline deal that sent Trammell from Cincinnati to San Diego; Seattle is his third organization in 13 months.
Trammell is ranked toward the top of the 50 FV tier of prospects, 68th in all of baseball, because a) he’s fairly close to the big leagues and b) he has a few core attributes that I consider especially important. Chiefly, Trammell has a good idea of the strike zone, and he’s a good athlete who has good on-field makeup/competitiveness. I know the latter two sound hokey and perhaps antiquated, but they do drive some of my thinking related to prospect floor or certainty because, anecdotally, I think good athletes who try hard tend to turn into good players.
A career .270/.363/.406 hitter, Trammell has the ball/strike recognition (12% career walk rate) and contact potential to one day be a leadoff man. I say contact potential because I don’t think his bat is quite as polished as it appeared to be at the lower levels. He’s a short-levered hitter who can turn on pitches on the inner third of the plate, and he grinds out long, tough at-bats, but while Trammell has some all-fields spray ability, he struggled with velocity up and away from him during the spring and summer intrasquads. To my eye, he has done some tinkering with his hitting footwork, which may have been an attempt to tease out more in-game power, though I’m skeptical that will ever be part of the profile. I think a contact/on base-oriented approach fits best with Trammell’s swing and physical ability, though admittedly punting on his power potential (those Futures Game rockets he hit a few years ago were highly unusual) caps his ceiling. It’s tough to be an impact player without thump, which is part of why I have a solid regular FV on Trammell rather than a big, star-level one. Read the rest of this entry »
In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, and which to protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like internal player redundancy, as well as other variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or is deep into his arbitration years, and if there are other freely-available alternatives to a team’s current talent, which happens a lot at certain positions, like toward the bottom of bullpen barrels and with first base-only types.
Teams with both an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2021 and many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that the team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. This exercise can be done by using the RosterResource pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the payroll tab), then weighing the December ’20 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.
Teams seem to be getting better at preparing for this ahead of time. In my opinion, this year has fewer situations that can be leveraged by rebuilding clubs in the way, for instance, the Rangers were able to pluck Nick Solak from Tampa Bay last year. Nevertheless, here is a rundown of the (mostly) contending teams with some prospect overage that I think is worth discussing on Ops Zoom calls.
Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day injured list. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins (like Mike Tauchman of the Yankees), they have to cut someone to make room. Read the rest of this entry »
Because they have had so many pitcher injuries, it was a bit of a surprise to see the Rays make a trade for an outfielder, let alone one who hasn’t been able to crack the starting lineup on a last place Royals team. But today, the Royals sent Brett Phillips to the Rays for prospect Lucius Fox.
It’s hard to say what Phillips will bring because he hasn’t been given much of a chance to do anything in Kansas City. Only twice this month has he gotten more than two plate appearances in a game, leaving us with an insufficient 2020 sample to evaluate him. He has historically struggled to make consistent contact in games but plays the outfield well and has elite arm strength. He appears to have slightly altered his swing this year, changing where his hands begin and how early his leg kick starts, but because he has barely played I don’t know if this has made a difference on the contact end of things. I still have him as a fifth outfielder type.
Phillips is not an easy roster fit for Tampa Bay. He is on the 40-man, so this move does not help to clear the small 40-man crunch the Rays will deal with as the Rule 5 roster deadline approaches, and Phillips has no options left. He’ll be on an active roster with several other outfielders who run well and have big arms, Phillips’ two most notable traits. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re a week from the Trade Deadline and still, almost all of the available information on pro prospects is limited to the big league level. That’s where I’ve been focusing my attention, with new player opinions then reflected on The Board, to which I made the following updates over the weekend.
Entering the 100
Padres infielder Jake Cronenworth becomes the first 2020 Pick to Click to, well, click. He moves into the top 100, ranked 93rd. At 26.6 years old, he becomes the oldest player on the hundred, pacing A’s catcher Sean Murphy by about seven months. Most of his pre-season scouting report holds water except that Cronenworth suddenly has relevant pop. He hit a ball 110 mph this year, up from a max of 106 mph last season in the minors. He now looks like an everyday player at a premium position rather than a super utility type, so he slots into the top 100 ahead of similar players who are a couple years away (like Brayan Rocchio) but behind players who are either there or who are close but much younger (like Washington infielder Luis García).
Cleveland righty Triston McKenzie made his big league debut in what was his first competitive game since 2018 due to multiple injuries and the global pandemic. Not only is he healthy, but McKenzie is throwing harder. His fastball lived in the 90-93 range in 2018 and was 90-94 this spring as he prepared for the season. He’s now living in the 93-96 range and leaned on the heater in big spots during his debut, shaking off Roberto Pérez to get to it. Hopes that McKenzie would eventually develop a third pitch have more than come to fruition, as both his slider and changeup have evolved to complement the fastball/curveball combo that headlines his arsenal.
So how about Dane Dunning? The 25-year-old, who debuted last week, also had not pitched since 2018, with his layoff due to Tommy John surgery. His stuff looked as it did pre-surgery, with the fastball in the 91-94 range, and both breaking balls effective. Read the rest of this entry »
