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Below are some changes we made to The BOARD in the past week, with our reasons for doing so. All hail the BOARD.

Moved Up

Ronny Mauricio, SS, New York Mets:
We got some immediate feedback on Monday’s sweeping update, which included more industry interest in Mauricio. The average major league swinging strike rate is 11%. Mauricio has a 12% swinging strike rate, and is a switch-hitting, 6-foot-4 teenager facing full-season pitching. It’s common for lanky teenagers to struggle with contact as they grow into their frames, but Mauricio hasn’t had that issue so far.

Oneil Cruz, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates:
One of us was sent Cruz’s minor league exit velocities and they’re shockingly close to what Yordan Alvarez’s have been in the big leagues. Of course, there remains great uncertainty about where Cruz will end up on defense, and hitters this size (Cruz is listed at 6-foot-7) are swing and miss risks, but this is a freakish, elite power-hitting talent.

Marco Luciano, SS, San Francisco Giants:
This guy has No. 1 overall prospect potential as a shortstop with 70 or better raw power. He belongs up near Bobby Witt, who is older but might also be a plus shortstop while we’re still not sure if Luciano will stay there.

George Valera, OF, Cleveland Indians:
Valera is torching the Penn League at 18 and a half years old, and we’re not sure any high school hitter in this year’s draft class would be able to do it. His defensive instincts give him a shot to stay in center field despite middling raw speed, and his swing should allow him to get to all of his raw power, so it becomes less important that his body is projectable. He would have been fifth on our 2019 draft board were he playing at a high school somewhere in the U.S., so he’s now slotted in the between JJ Bleday and C.J. Abrams on our overall list. Read the rest of this entry »

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We all know factors beyond talent — be it contract length or value, a team’s competitive window, or a player’s social fit within the org, among others — have an impact on how trades balance and are agreed upon. Just being mindful that these factors exist, and that we’re not always privy to them, can help us to square what we perceive to be a context-free gap in the talents exchanged. But can we bridge what is, based on our evaluations, a sizable gap in this weekend’s Rangers and Rays prospect-for-prospect trade?

Rangers get:

2B Nick Solak, 50 FV, No. 93 overall prospect

Rays get:

RHP Peter Fairbanks, 40 FV

This deal looks very good for Texas in a vacuum based on our evaluations. Kiley and I both think Solak, who is a career .290/.382/.453 hitter in the minors and has raked since his freshman year at Louisville, is going to be an average everyday second baseman, while Fairbanks is a 25-year-old reliever who has had two Tommy John surgeries, a demographic we rarely rank at all. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent the July 4th weekend in Cape Cod this year, which is far from the worst place to be for that holiday. Beyond the pleasant weather and plentiful beaches there was, of course, lots of baseball being played in the prestigious Cape Code League. Below are some of my observations of a few of the college players I saw.

Harwich Mariners
Daniel Cabrera, OF, LSU

Cabrera opened a lot of eyes as a freshman in Baton Rouge, hitting .315/.405/.525 with 36 strikeouts against 34 walks in 63 games. He followed up with a sophomore campaign that saw him hit 12 home runs but also decrease his walks (24) and increase his strikeouts (54) in 59 games. He steps into this 2019 Cape Cod League campaign ranked 21st on THE BOARD for the 2020 draft.

Cabrera has a smooth and polished left-handed swing with a good path to the ball. He gets into his back hip well and transfers weight quickly, and has a handsy, athletic-looking swing. In my look, he showed solid average bat speed and an aggressive, pull-oriented approach geared for power. Cabrera’s aggressiveness was a negative in this look – he expanded the zone on several occasions against pitchers with below average fastballs – enough so that I think there’s a chance it holds him back from reaching his peak potential hit tool. A swing like Cabrera’s could project as one of an above average hitter, but I think he settles more in the 45-grade hit range with a propensity to swing and miss. However, the power should play at least average and I would be comfortable projecting more. It is likely more 55-grade power than anything above it, but the ball jumps off his bat and his hands’ quickness should allow him to jump on hittable pitches and drive them more often than not. Read the rest of this entry »

The two of us recorded a podcast during which we combed through our Futures Game notes. This announced update to THE BOARD is that discussion made real on the site. All of the guys with new FVs are noted below, along with brief notes on why their FVs changed. If a player moved within their FV tier, there is a stock up or stock down arrow on THE BOARD. The updates noted here don’t include players who have been added to our rankings and went from 35 FV to 35+ FV, since that happens pretty often. We’re also fully updated to reflect recent trades. Lastly, if you’d like to see who is set to graduate from the list next, check the right sidebar on the FG Prospects homepage. And remember to follow @FG_prospects on Twitter for live BOARD updates.

Moved Up

Jo Adell, CF, Angels and Bo Bichette, INF, Toronto Blue Jays (60 FV to 65 FV):
Both move up due to increased confidence that they’ll be stars, with the ZiPS updates Kiley received for the Trade Value Series also helping. Adell seems fully recovered from a scary ankle and hamstring injury suffered during spring training, and he’s hitting .376/.442/.673 as a 20-year-old at Double-A. Bichette has a 116 wRC+ as a 21-year-old at Triple-A and Toronto seems inclined to leave him at shortstop.

Yordan Alvarez, DH, Astros (50 FV to 55 FV):
Alvarez is generating huge power with ease and comfort. Houston’s handling of his playing time while the team was in Colorado is an indication that he’ll offer no defensive value while his skillset is that of an older player, but his offensive tools are a cut above some of this year’s more productive DHs.

Drew Waters, CF, Braves (50 FV to 55 FV):
Waters continues to rake as a young-for-the-league, up-the-middle prospect, and while the .459 BABIP isn’t sustainable, scouts are split on him vs. Cristian Pache long-term, so they’re a little closer on our list now.

Nate Pearson, RHP, Blue Jays (50 FV to 55 FV):
Pearson belongs in the same FV tier as Sixto Sanchez as they each have monster stuff, questionable builds, and no track record of pitching for a full season. Read the rest of this entry »

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UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 18

This is the 18th episode of a sorta weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men.

This episode is a little about next week’s Trade Value Rankings, but is mostly about last weekend’s Futures Game and what the guys thought about each player in terms of their prospect stock moving up or down based on this look.

2:08 – Eric leads us into a discussion of the prospects on next week’s Trade Value Rankings
12:35 – They begin the Futures Game notes with the AL Hitters (first catchers, then infielders, then outfielders)
43:40 – They then move on to the NL Hitters (first catchers, then infielders, then outfielders)
1:03:29 – Then they move to pitching, starting with the AL Pitchers, going in order of appearance in the game
1:14:17 – Then they finish with the NL Pitchers, going in order of appearance as well

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hour 25 min play time.)

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12:16

Kiley McDaniel: the most interesting pitch in slo-mo was the changeup/screwball of Grayson Rodriguez of the Orioles, as seen in this tweet:   FanGraphs Prospects @FG_Prospects   Going through our high-speed video of every pitcher from the Futures Game and the thing that stood out the most was how much Orioles RHP Grayson Rodriguez pronates/turns over his changeup, We haven’t seen a guy do it this well before, looks more like a screwball than a changeup. 10 Jul 2019

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How would you adjust your pre-draft evaluation of a high school pitcher if you knew he couldn’t pass a physical? That is what teams needed to decide about White Sox righty Dylan Cease, who after a surgery, a year of rehab, and four years of development, will make his first big league start today.

Some version of this scenario occurs almost annually: High school pitcher throws hard during his showcase summer, becomes very famous, comes out the following spring throwing even harder, then breaks. In Cease’s case, he was 93-96 and touching 98 during showcases, then touching 100 early the following spring before he was shut down with an elbow injury that would, as teams knew ahead of the draft, eventually require surgery.

For some teams, the injury shut the door on Cease as an option entirely. He was a Vanderbilt commit whose long arm action some teams had already feared increased his risk of injury, or at least might impede his ability to develop command and a changeup, and funnel him toward a bullpen role.

But Cease also had among the 2014 draft’s best velocity and breaking ball combination. The Cubs properly assessed his signability, and after cutting an underslot deal with Kyle Schwarber for $1.5 million at pick No. 4, they suddenly had a bunch of extra bonus pool money to play with. They ended up signing three high school pitchers to overslot bonuses — Cease, Justin Steele and Carson Sands — and cutting underslot deals of varying amounts at every other pick in the first 10 rounds.

Cease signed for $1.5 million, which was the slot value of that draft’s 38th pick and is around where high school pitchers with this kind of stuff, albeit healthy ones, typically come off the board these days. It took a fortuitous intersection of several variables: Cease’s talent, the Cubs optimistic evaluation of it and his signability, the opportunity created by the underslot deal with Schwarber, and a level of comfort in taking an injured player aided by risk diversification in the other overslot high schoolers. The high school pitching crop in 2014 was wild, and a few of those players probably contributed to the current reticence to pick a similar guy very early. Read the rest of this entry »