Baseballs are flying in the major leagues this season. Due to a few irregularities on the outer surface of the ball, everything hit in the air is carrying much farther, all else being equal, than at any point in the game’s history. Home runs are up 15% from 2018 and hitters are on pace to shatter the league’s record for dingers in a season.

As many of you also know, Triple-A teams are playing with the same ball. Previously, all minor league teams used a different, less expensive model, one with a flight pattern that more closely resembles the pre-2015 major league pelota. This year, while all other levels still play with the cheaper model, Triple-A teams are using the big league ball. As you’d expect, the home run rates from Double-A on down look very similar to how they did last year. As you’d also expect, the Triple-A home run rate has exploded:

Much has been written about the ball this year: why it’s different, how different it is, how it’s playing in Triple-A, how the league is addressing the controversy, whether or not this is any good for the sport. There seems to be a gap in there though: How are teams themselves responding to the upheaval generated by the ball?

In some sense, the response has been relatively muted. As the year has gone on, we’ve seen individual players like Justin Verlander and retired pitcher Brandon McCarthy express frustration. Other pitchers have clearly noticed, and some of them have been snarky on Twitter, but hurlers have by and large gritted their teeth and kept their heads down.

Similarly, if any teams have expressed concern to the league, they’ve done so very quietly. There’s no outward evidence of any support or derision toward the ball, and front offices have appeared mostly to have noticed and tried to adjust on the fly. In one early-season conversation with a baseball operations analyst, I asked if he or anyone with the team was doing any testing on the ball; he said no, and that he was just waiting for the next Rob Arthur article like everybody else.

In part, that may be because the ball hasn’t redirected the game’s trajectory much. Generally speaking, the trends exacerbated by the 2019 ball — more homers, fewer stolen base attempts, and so on — are just an extension of where the game was already heading. While this year’s ball is extreme, we’ve seen several alterations to the ball’s drag since 2015, most of which have boosted home run totals. Additionally, teams have been trying to get their personnel to hit more balls in the air for years now. The new ball may reward that approach more now than in previous seasons, but it hasn’t significantly altered how hitters go about their work.

More interesting is how teams are coping at the Triple-A level, where we’re seeing a much more dramatic change in gameplay. Jeff Manto, Baltimore’s Coordinator of Minor League Hitting, has noticed that batters are responding to the obvious incentives right now: “The hitters know what’s going on. They all see the ball flying and they want to be part of it. The approach right now is to let it fly.”

That’s resulted in a lot of very similar looking swings. “It’s hard to get guys to be pure mechanical hitters right now,” says Manto. “It’s a high risk, high reward swing, and guys are going for it. There’s certainly no more two-strike swing anymore.” For Manto, his concern is not so much that hitters are trying to put the ball in the air more often. Rather, it’s that the swing equips hitters to only do one thing — and future ball adjustments may leave them unprepared for a more normal home run environment. “The ability to hit every type of pitch and pitcher, that’s what makes a great hitter. At some point the ball’s going to come back to normal.”

In one sense, the ball has actually been helpful for teams. One executive I spoke with said it’s now easier to project a player’s raw power. “You would see players get called up from the minors and show much more power in the major leagues,” he said. “Batting practice is (one) way to evaluate a player’s raw power and I would have to mentally add 10-15 feet to a ball’s distance prior to the switch to the major league ball.”

One surprise was that pushback on the ball was basically a partisan issue. “I’m a pitching coach so you can imagine how I feel about today’s baseball,” said one minor league coach who preferred not to elaborate from there. While most of those I spoke with guessed that the ball would eventually return to a more traditional flight pattern, the hitters didn’t seem to be in any hurry: “You know, as a hitter, I love seeing the ball fly out of the ballpark,” said Manto, who played nine years in the big leagues as an infielder.

Clubs are also responding by handling Triple-A a bit differently as a developmental level. Some organizations already make limited use of Triple-A as a proving ground, preferring to use that team as a taxi squad for the big league club and a home for quad-A type prospects. But a few teams seem to be leery of letting their struggling pitchers take too many lumps.

This is especially significant for teams with affiliates in the Pacific Coast League, where half the circuit either plays at altitude, in a bandbox, or both. The Mariners, for example, sent struggling starters Justus Sheffield and Nabil Crismatt back to Double-A instead of letting them get whacked around in Tacoma, and have promoted a couple of pitchers directly from Arkansas to the big league club this season. The Nationals also regularly shuttle arms from Double-A to the majors, though the logistical hurdles of having their Triple-A team 3,000 miles away in Fresno has influenced that pattern as well.

Still, you can expect this trend to accelerate in future seasons. A National League analyst said that he expects any major shifts in how teams use their Triple-A affiliates to become more apparent next season. “This year, guys got their assignments before we knew something was different with the ball,” he explained. “It’s hard to send a guy back to Double-A just for that, but next year, you might see more arms jump from Double-A to the majors.”

For this analyst, the ball has made it tougher to evaluate the level. “You get guys where there are no major changes in their peripherals, and they’re doubling their home run totals. How do you evaluate that?”

Others just wanted a bit more predictability. “The biggest thing I would prefer would be to avoid large fluctuations in changes to how the ball acts,” said an American League executive who preferred to speak off the record. He also wanted to see more transparency going forward: “If changes are going to be made, make the public aware of any changes of time. So if we go down the route of ‘deadening’ the ball at some point, give teams and the public knowledge of that well in advance.”

Of course, predictability doesn’t mean a return to the past. Asked about what kind of ball he’d like to see in play, the aforementioned executive was sanguine: “I don’t have a major preference. I don’t mind the three true outcomes type shift. I personally think strikeouts and homers are some of the most entertaining plays in baseball.”

Whatever everyone’s opinion on the new ball, a few things are clear: it’s a topic of discussion, and it is changing how analysts and executives operate. It’s also not a discussion that’s losing momentum. As I was wrapping up this article, I got a text from a source I had spoken with earlier in the day:

“We’re literally talking about the difficulties evaluating Triple-A hitters right now.”

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Tonight, 21-year-old Dustin May is set to bring his flaming red hair to Dodger Stadium when he makes his major league debut against the Padres. Every prospect’s journey to the bigs is unique, but they start in similar places, on amateur fields, often under the watchful eye of scouts. May’s path is especially familiar to me; though I was far from the only person in the Dodgers organization involved, I was the scout who signed him.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t especially enamored with May the first time I saw him pitch. It was a little more than four years ago to the day, at the annual Texas Scouts Association showcase game on a characteristically hot July day in San Antonio. May pitched one of the later innings of the day; he worked in the upper-80s with his fastball and threw a sharp upper-70s slurve with good spin. While he pitched well against the high school competition he faced, his stuff didn’t stand out among a crowd of intriguing 2016 high school draft prospects that included players such as Forrest Whitley, Hudson Potts, and Kyle Muller.

Still, May’s prospect status continued to rise at a relatively quick pace following that initial outing. After a solid performance in two separate appearances during the fall of his senior year, he was planted firmly among the list of “must see early” players – a list commonly populated by projectable high schoolers who might make a jump during the springtime. May, who was an ultra-skinny 6-foot-6 with a quick arm, fit the bill well.

By time his senior spring rolled around, May’s velocity had crept up from where it was during my first look. Touching 94 and routinely working in the low-90s with life, he began to morph into a prospect who didn’t seem as far away as he had a few months before. To go along with the increased fastball velocity, the breaking ball, which had always spun well but often got sweepy and had slurvy shape to it, began to develop into more of a true slider.

As an area scout, my responsibility was to gather as much information as I could so the scouting department could make the best decisions possible when choosing among hundreds of options during the draft. It was no different with May. I spent the spring speaking with his coaches, teammates, and teachers, to the college coaches who had recruited him, and advisers who were assisting his family in the process. May was selected in the third round of the 2016 draft as a projectable high school righty with the makings of two pitches that projected to potentially be plus in the future. He was given a $997,500 signing bonus and went straight to work in the AZL.

Between then and now, May has thrown just over 400 innings in the minor leagues, showcasing advanced command and inducing groundballs at an above-average clip. He now works with a four-pitch mix, highlighted by a plus low-90s cutter he added last year. His sinker, which has averaged 95 mph and touched 99, would be among the hardest sinkers major league starters throw. His curveball would be among the highest average spin breaking balls of any major league starter as well. His changeup, still a work in progress, is thrown just over 8% of the time and flashes average.

Beyond being a part of May’s signing process, I also served as one of his coaches – first during Fall Instructional League in 2016, and then again at the end of the 2017 season in his brief but impressive stint in the Cal League. I vividly remember having a conversation with him during instructs after a two-inning outing. He was told to only throw fastballs and changeups during his second inning of work in order to gain reps throwing the changeup, which was developmentally behind his breaking ball. May threw a total of 24 pitches in his two innings – 12 fastballs, 12 changeups. After the outing, he was asked if he intentionally threw the exact same number of each pitch, and if he was aware he could have utilized his breaking ball in his first inning of work. His response was succinct. He explained that he didn’t know it was an exact 50-50 usage split, but that he’d known he could use the breaking ball and decided not to. When asked for his rationale, he said he knew he needed a changeup to get big league hitters out. The coaches who observed this discussion nodded in approval. It’s rare for a teenager to possess the sort of foresight and maturity present in May’s response, one that suggests not only an awareness of what the exercise is intended to achieve in the moment, but also of the purpose it is meant to serve years down the road. It was then that I fully realized that May’s mental makeup would be a strength as his professional career continued.

Coming into the 2019 season, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked May second in the Dodgers system and 21st overall, earning a 55 FV and a report that heralded him as a near-complete prospect, only missing a changeup to round out his arsenal. Their report on May detailed the strength of his curveball and his curls:

May’s flamboyant ginger curls and Bronson Arroyo-esque leg kick are maybe the third and fourth most visually captivating aspects of his on-mound presence once you’ve gotten a look at his stuff. His mid-90s fastball plays up due to great extension, and further incorporation of a running two-seamer has given May’s heater enough tail to miss bats in the strike zone. His vertically-breaking slider (May calls it a slider, but it has curveball shape) has one of the better spin rates in the minors and enough vertical depth to miss bats against both left and right-handed hitters. It’s May’s out pitch, but he also has a developing cutter and its movement is a great foil for his two-seamer. After trying several different changeup grips in 2017, it seems like May is still searching for a good cambio, but his fastball and breaking ball command should suffice against lefties for now.

In 79.1 innings in Double-A this year, May produced a 3.18 FIP, a 19.8% K-BB%, and a 50.5% ground-ball rate. He earned a promotion to Triple-A, an invite to the Futures Game in Cleveland, and a 60 FV, moving closer to fulfilling the promise that had Eric and Kiley describe him as, “what was once a prospect with mid-rotation upside has become one with mid-rotation likelihood.” May is now ranked as the No. 1 prospect in the Dodgers system and eighth overall in baseball on THE BOARD.

Now, after a trade deadline that saw Los Angeles decline to make a significant pitching acquisition, May is getting the call. He’s a young pitcher with a unique combination of a high floor and a high ceiling. There’s a strong likelihood that he is a mid-rotation starter – a plus athlete who throws four pitches for strikes and has never had a major arm injury – and the chance that he continues to refine his arsenal and becomes someone featured at or near the top of a major league rotation. He’ll likely contend for a playoff roster spot on the 2019 Dodgers team, and figures to be featured in the rotation beginning in 2020 and moving forward. His path to the bigs might be complete, but his journey is just beginning.

The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
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As soon as I finish this piece, I’m going to get ice cream. There’s a soft serve frozen yogurt place owned by a surprisingly fastidious stoner about a mile from my house, and I go there once or twice a week. If I told you there are 10 rotating flavors, with chocolate and vanilla as constants, how long do you think it would take you to learn what I like by watching me fill my bowl (there are all sorts of bowl-packing jokes on the store’s signage)? How many times would I need to go in there and pull that soft serve lever before you’d know that vanilla is actually pretty high on my pref list, and that only a few things, like coconut or coffee, will pull me away from it? Or that I avoid all of the fruit flavors?

How long before we can start to identify team regime patterns in player acquisition, and start talking about team preferences with confidence, the way we do when we say that progressive clubs look for common arm slots and hand positions, or fastballs that spin? The current Marlins regime has basically now been in place since the fall of 2017, when Gary Denbo was brought in as Vice President of Scouting and Development. Miami has made a lot of seller’s trades during that year and a half, and they clearly have a type, especially when you look at their amateur acquisitions. Yesterday, that type came further into focus after a deadline deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Here’s the trade:

Marlins get:
SS Jazz Chisholm

Diamondbacks get:
RHP Zac Gallen

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There are always a few deadline trades made for clerical reasons rather than with a pennant race in mind. This is one of them:

Rangers get:
RHP Nate Jones
$1 million in international bonus space
Cash

White Sox get:
RHP Joseph Jarneski
RHP Ray Castro

The oft-injured Jones, who has a 2020 team option and a mutual option for 2021, will be on the shelf for the rest of 2019 due to forearm surgery performed in late May. It’s possible that a surprisingly competitive Rangers club will keep Jones around in the hopes that his stuff returns from yet another injury. More likely, Texas’ 40-man situation will lead them to decline his option. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night’s three-way trade between the Padres, Indians, and Reds, which was headlined by two mercurial big leaguers, also featured the movement of several notable prospects, including two from our Top 100 (sort of) in left fielder Taylor Trammell, who comes in at No. 31 overall, and left-handed pitcher Logan Allen, who is No. 110. As I move through the trade, talking about the young pieces used to headline, balance, and sweeten this deal to completion, I’ll remind you of who the team gave up to acquire the prospect. I’ll touch on some big league stuff throughout the piece because three-way deals make it hard to isolate analysis to just the prospects, but there’s also analysis that focuses on the major leaguers — including the Reds’ return, which I ignore because they only received a big leaguer — from Dan right here. Let’s begin by looking at the best prospect included in the trade.

Padres acquired
LF Taylor Trammell (55 FV)

Padres traded
OF Franmil Reyes
LHP Logan Allen (50 FV)
3B Victor Nova (35+ FV)

Trammell becomes our fourth-ranked prospect in a Padres system that we have rated as the second best in baseball; this deal helps San Diego close the gap between itself and No. 1 ranked Tampa Bay by about $20 million.

We like Trammell a lot, even though we moved him down from a 60 to a 55 FV in a recent update to THE BOARD. Until a slight (and ultimately unconcerning) downturn this season, Trammell had been a consistent statistical performer, which is atypical of most two-sport high school prospects (he was an electric high school running back and could have played college football) who often come to the pro game with an unrefined feel to hit. He’s a scowling, intense guy who plays with focus and effort. Across four pro seasons, Trammell has hit .273/.367/.408, amassing 112 extra-base hits and 107 stolen bases (76% success rate) in just shy of 400 career games. He’s a plus-plus runner who could be an elite defender in left field due to his range (his arm is comfortably below average, which is part of why we have him projected to left) and whose combination of speed and ball/strike recognition will likely make him a dynamic offensive catalyst at the top of a lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

Bo Bichette was ahead of his time. When he first hit the national scouting radar on the summer showcase circuit after his high school junior season, it was before the fly ball revolution had fully penetrated the big leagues. The 2016 draft class included a number of players who would be looked at differently just a few years later, as front offices saw the value of a big leg kick and an uppercut, high-intent swing (when it came with tools and performance). Bichette, Kyle Lewis, Alex Kirilloff, and Joe Rizzo all come to mind, with a number of others partially-qualifying like Josh Lowe, Will Benson, and Pete Alonso.

I remember talking with some scouts in 2015 who only got on Bichette, Kiriloff, and Rizzo at end of a summer of positive performance because their swings were of the aforementioned type, the kind scouts didn’t want to like until it was proven that they should.

Bichette got the short end of the stick even from this group, despite having the most defensive value, a pro lineage from his father Dante, solid game performance, and close to, if not as much raw power as all of them. Lowe went 10th, Lewis went 11th, Benson went 14th, Kiriloff went 15th, Rizzo went 50th, Jones went 55th, and Alonso went 64th; Bichette went 66th.

The other variable was the career of Bichette’s little brother, Dante Jr., whom the Yankees took 51st overall in 2011. Dante had a similar-looking swing and similarly solid amateur performance; he played the infield and by draft day 2016 was in Double-A, one full season of plate appearances from being out of baseball. Just 12 months after Bo Bichette’s draft free fall, scouts still pointed to Dante Jr.’s career and Bo’s loud swing mechanics as the reasons they missed on Bo so badly. Here’s video of Bichette playing in a high school tournament that was held at the Blue Jays spring training facility near his home:

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Teams have been smiling at each another and making their fair share of prolonged eye contact, but the trade deadline tension had yielded little in the way of actual consummation until Saturday’s A’s and Royals trade that sent veteran lefty reliever Jake Diekman to Oakland for two prospects. Here’s the deal:

Oakland gets:

LHP Jake Diekman

Kansas City gets:

RHP Ismael Aquino
CF Dairon Blanco

Diekman, who has struck out 33.5% of opposing hitters and has a 3.37 FIP across 41.2 innings this year, immediately becomes the best lefty in Oakland’s bullpen, surpassing cutter/curveball/command lefty Ryan Buchter (who was also acquired from Kansas City via trade last year), and strike-throwing Taiwanese depth piece, Wei-Chung Wang. That’s less a knock on either of those two, and more to do with Diekman, who has been good with uncommon consistency for a reliever throughout his seven-year big league career. Read the rest of this entry »