Cleveland has received a lot of plaudits for this year’s draft class, with multiple publications giving it plus-plus grades. Top-to-bottom quality is the primary reason for the praise. On the first day of a truncated five-round draft, the club selected high school shortstop Carson Tucker 23rd overall, then tabbed Auburn University right-hander Tanner Burns with a Competitive Balance pick. The following day’s selections were Florida International left-hander Logan Allen (second round), prep outfielder Petey Halpin (third), prep shortstop Milan Tolentino (fourth), and Vanderbilt right-hander Mason Hickman (fifth).

Orchestrating those selections was Scott Barnsby, who serves as Cleveland’s director of amateur scouting. Barnsby shared his perspective on this year’s unique draft, including the players he brought on board (and one he didn’t), as well as the challenges of scouting in a pandemic.

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David Laurila: How unique was this year’s draft?

Scott Barnsby: “First, we do everything we can to extend the timeline, to get to know these players as well as we possibly can. That starts as soon as the previous year’s draft is over. But the springs are really important, because we continue to develop relationships with the players and see how they’ve progressed from the fall and winter. We didn’t have that opportunity this year. It was unique in that sense.

“We obviously didn’t have a choice, because we were dealing with the pandemic and had to make adjustments, but it was pretty incredible to see how the staff came together. The one thing they kept saying was, ‘Hey, how can I help? What can I do to to get us to where we need to be in June?’ That’s the collaborative effort we always talk about. But it was still challenging. The majority of our work was done remotely, and we felt like there were gaps in the information we had, [both] on and off the field. We tried to do our best to to close those gaps.

“We held weekly meetings. There was daily work being done to prepare, but there were weekly check-ins starting a couple months prior to the draft to make sure that we were squared away on draft day. So while there were some challenges, it felt like it came together. And obviously, with five rounds we were really able to prioritize our time. Would we have liked more? We did the most with what we had.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m wading into the gaming and streaming space with Yeoman’s Work, a lo-fi, multimedia presentation that follows my pursuit of a championship in the baseball simulator, Diamond Mind Baseball, paired with single-camera footage from my baseball video archives. Below is Episode 4, which features my series against Bryan Nelson and the last place Des Moines Drillers. In this episode, I play with my newly-acquired bullpen, including two-way player Michael Lorenzen, and start a two-month tightrope walk in pursuit of a playoff spot.

Video archive footage and discussion this week starts with Dustin May’s second-ever pro outing, and also includes chronological open-side footage of Trent Grisham and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., along with my brief thoughts on their progression.

Both DMB’s gameplay and most of my video archive are very quiet, low-sensory experiences without music or much crowd noise, and I think this will appeal to those of you who enjoy Baseball Sounds, as they are front and center in the footage. If this tone appeals to you, my “musical influences” in this department (i.e. the non-FanGraphs Twitch streams I watch on my own time) are Kenji Egashira’s and Luis Scott-Vargas’ live Magic: The Gathering content, Kate Stark’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds streams, and Kathleen De Vere’s pirate radio show, Brave New Faves. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

After strike-throwing hiccups (the percentage of pitches he threw in the zone dropped from 53% to 47%) contributed to a 2019 that was relatively pedestrian by his standards, Aaron Nola has come out of the gate red-hot in 2020. He’s getting ahead of hitters — his first-pitch strike percentage (68%) is sixth among qualified starters — and then finishing them, inducing a comfortably career-high 15.6% swinging strike rate, which is also sixth among qualified starters. Nola has now punched out an incredible 29 of the 68 hitters he’s faced this year and is one of just three starters who has fanned more than 40% of opponents (Trevor Bauer and Shane Bieber are the others).

Nola has done most of this damage with his changeup, which he is using much more than at any point in his career, calling on the cambio a whopping 30% of the time after using it at about a 16% clip in prior years. The changeup itself doesn’t appear to be any different than in the past, as its movement profile is similar to his career-best 2018 campaign (it had a little less sink in 2019). Nola’s release point is perhaps a little more consistent than last year, when he was getting underneath more changeups (hence less sink) and missing badly to his arm side, but unless something tactile about his release has changed (which is difficult to detect without the aid of a high-speed camera), the pitch appears to be the same. He’s just throwing it more (including to righties) and locating it more consistently, which Nola told the Philadelphia Inquirer he aimed to do back in February. Read the rest of this entry »

Three 19-year-old pitchers rank prominently on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list. Simeon Woods Richardson is most notable, at No. 2, while Adam Kloffenstein and Kendall Williams are 12th and 13th respectively. Right-handers all, each possesses a high ceiling, yet is years away from progressing to the big-league level.

Their developmental situations are currently quite different. Woods Richardson is in Toronto’s 60-man player pool, and thus is at the club’s alternative training site. Kloffenstein is playing independent ball back home in Texas. Williams is also home, but doing the bulk of his throwing in side sessions, relying on a Rapsodo rather than the reactions of opposing hitters to gauge his progress.

I recently asked Blue Jays farm director Gil Kim how the organization is handling player development sans a minor-league season. Prefacing his answer by saying the top priority is ensuring the health and safety of all involved, he said there are a lot of Zoom calls, and that each player has a small support staff that checks in on a regular basis. A show-your-work component exists within many of the exchanges. Player plans being paramount, videos of the work being done are being shared. As Kim explained, “There’s more of a technical and mechanical focus for a lot of those players, especially the younger guys who are not at the alternate training site right now.”

In that respect, Woods Richardson is fortunate. Read the rest of this entry »

Except for a few who were plucked from the Mexican League, signing bonus info for all 1,300-ish players I consider to be prospects can now be found on The Board for your research, reference, and perusal.

The current chronological and structural limitations of The Board leave two holes in today’s chunk. First, this is not yet a comprehensive historical record of signing bonuses. That’s a possible long-term feature — one that will require some retroactive Board-building — but for now, there are some important flashpoint bonuses from recent drafts (Brady Aiken’s, Mark Appel’s) or deals that illuminate important and consequential trends in the amateur market (Stephen Strasburg’s, Josh Bell’s) you can’t view in the same space as recent pillars.

Second, for the time being, as players graduate, they’ll take their bonus amounts with them. This violates a “don’t take information away from readers” principle I try to adhere to and makes it more important to eventually build a catalog of this stuff that can be easily sortable, searchable, and compared to the current prospect environment.

In addition to the new info, I’ve made a few changes to the rankings on the pro side of The Board based on big league action. Without any minor league games or a reliable way to source info from the offsite camps, the big leagues are where changes are most visible right now. Scouts from other teams are not currently allowed at the alternate sites, and teams do not yet have a campsite data-sharing agreement in place. As a result, any dope coming from the campsites is coming from internal team sources, which creates an incentive/objectivity issue for prospect writers. Sources are also harder to protect because few personnel have camp access. With all that in mind, let’s touch on today’s changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of a wide-ranging interview — the conversation took place on July 26 — with Seattle Mariners farm director Andy McKay. Part One can be found here.

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David Laurila: Given your background, do your player-development philosophies differ from most people in your role?

Andy McKay: “I don’t know, because I don’t spend a ton of time evaluating the others. I just know that my background as a teacher, and a mental-skills coach, is something that kind of sits in the middle of our department. Everything is important. What I mean by that is, you can make or break a player in the weight room, the training room, the batting cage, in a bullpen. You can make or break them with nutrition. All of those things are critical, and the mental skills component is what allows them to actually surface during competition. The fact that my background is heavy in mental skills, we probably prioritize that a little differently than most.”

Laurila: How does that mesh with your reliance on data?

McKay: “It’s a need for clarity. Mental skills should completely embrace tech. Why would we want to coach players with opinions when we can do it with evidence? What will better allow a player to be more confident, my opinion or evidence — you know, clarity or wishy-washy verbiage? So the two have melded very well together. Ultimately, we want to be the best in baseball at telling the truth. We want that to be our competitive advantage. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy McKay oversees one of the best farm systems in the game. Seattle’s Director of Player Development does so with a sports-psychology background — McKay has an MBA in Organizational Behavior Studies — as well as a deep appreciation for data and technology. The former college coach is anything but old school when it comes to developing young talent. Case in point: Mariners prospects have their regularly-revisited player plans put together not by coaches, but by analysts.

In Part One of a wide-ranging interview, McKay addresses several of his philosophies, as well as how the Mariners are approaching development without a minor league season.

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David Laurila: We’re talking on July 26, 2020. What is the state of the Mariners farm system right now?

Andy McKay: “We’re really excited about where we’re at, both in terms of our department — the people we’re employing, and the process we’ve created — and the players we have in our system. Those things are moving along at a really good clip. We’re continuing to move the needle forward, even through COVID-19.”

Laurila: How exactly are you moving forward with no minor league season?

McKay: “We made the decision to turn our taxi squad into a very heavy prospect-based camp. If you look at who is down in Tacoma right now… not to mention we had, I think, four players make their major league debuts yesterday. We’re the youngest team in the big leagues. So we have the 10-week program going on, like all the other clubs, and then we’ve got things going on individually, all over the country with our players. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m biased, but I think summer in Vancouver can be one of the most beautiful seasons anywhere in the world. The rainforest, having spent the autumn, winter, and spring growing lush under the cover of clouds and rain, shines rich green under the sun, illuminated by the light coming off the ocean. It’s hot, but not overwhelmingly so. On some days, you can look out over the water and see the spout of a humpback whale or the dark, swift-moving fins of a transient orca pod. And at sunset, the bright place where the sky and the ocean meet seem to go on forever.

In the summer of 2017, fires engulfed the Pacific Northwest. There was record heat; record time passed between rainfalls. I spent that summer working in a basement shop, bitter and sad, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase at the end of every day, I would often see a sky choked thick with ash and smoke, the sun swollen and red. Everything that was normally so vibrant was cast over with a dull haze. It was sometimes difficult to breathe. I thought, at the time, that it seemed apocalyptic: the reality of climate change clearly visible above me, around me, hanging in the air itself.

That was the summer Nate Pearson came to town.

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The Vancouver Canadians are the Blue Jays’ short-season affiliate, playing in the Northwest League. Baseball has a long, diverse history in Vancouver, though the city isn’t exactly baseball-crazy. Back when the Canadians were a Triple-A franchise, affiliated most recently with the A’s, there were some pretty lean years in terms of attendance and interest. But a renovation of their ballpark, the 68-year-old Nat Bailey Stadium, and affiliation with the recently-successful Blue Jays has made the franchise one of the healthiest and most well-attended in the minor leagues. The banners around the stadium show some of the Canadians alumni who are currently successful major leaguers — Kevin Pillar, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard, to name a few.

They show, too, the legends who visited and played in Vancouver in days long gone: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who came north on barnstorming trips. Though thoroughly renovated for the demands of a 21st-century baseball team, the Nat is deliberate in making you feel its history. A little museum is tucked into the concourse under the grandstand; the tall wooden scoreboard is a replica of the original, salvaged from the remains of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »