We have a sizable collection of players to talk about this week because the two of us have been busy wrapping up our summer looks at the 2020 Draft class over the last couple weeks. This equates to every prospect added to or moved on THE BOARD since the Trade Deadline.

Top 100 Changes
We had two players enter the 50 FV tier in Diamondbacks SS Geraldo Perdomo and Padres C Luis Campusano. Perdomo is in the “Advanced Baseball Skills” player bucket with players like Vidal Brujan, Brayan Rocchio and Xavier Edwards. He’s added visible power since first arriving in the States and had as many walks as strikeouts at Low-A before he was promoted to the Cal League, which has been Campusano’s stomping ground all summer. He’s still not a great catcher but he does have an impact arm, big power, and he’s a good enough athlete that we’re optimistic he’ll both catch and make the necessary adjustments to get to his power in games down the line.

We also moved a D-back and a Padre down in RHP Taylor Widener and 1B Tirso Ornelas. Widener has been very homer prone at Triple-A a year after leading the minors in K’s. His fastball has natural cut rather than ride and while we still like him as a rotation piece, there’s a chance he continues to be very susceptible to the long ball. Ornelas has dealt with injury and swing issues.

On Aristides Aquino
Aristides Aquino was a 50 FV on the 2017 Reds list; at the time, he was a traditional right field profile with big power undermined by the strikeout issues that would eventually cause his performance to tank so badly that he became a minor league free agent. A swing change visually similar to the one Justin Turner made before his breakout (Reds hitting coach Turner Ward comes from the Dodgers) is evident here, so we’re cautiously optimistic Aquino will be a productive role player, but we don’t think he’ll keep up a star’s pace. Read the rest of this entry »

As Mike Trout celebrates his 28th birthday today, he’s arguably the greatest baseball player of all time at his age. The case is a fairly easy one to make. Here’s what our Leaderboards look like for all players through their age-27 season.

Trout is at the very top, and by the end of the season, he’s projected to add another 2.7 WAR to bolster his lead. Right now, the gap between Trout and 10th-place Eddie Collins is the same as the gap between Collins and 54th-ranked Joe Torre. To calculate WAR, we know the run-values of many of the plays on the field. We know how many runs a single, a walk, and a homer are worth, and we can make those determinations based on the ballpark they are hitting in and the run-scoring environment at the time in order to compare players across eras. We do the same for stolen bases and extra bases taken and look at a player’s value on defense. We can put in all that information and determine that Trout is the best player this game has ever seen through a 27-year-old season. He’s already 52nd among position players all time, and a solid finish to this season and an average Trout season in 2020 might put him in the top 30. Read the rest of this entry »

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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When Jay wrote up the Martín Maldonado deal earlier, he called it “a minor move.” This deal, which sends Max Stassi to the Angels in exchange for minor-league outfielders Rainier Rivas and Raider Uceta, is the minor move attendant to that minor move.

With Maldonado in-house, the Astros simply didn’t have room for the 28-year-old Stassi, and so some sort of deal for his services was inevitable. This is that deal. Angels catching has been bad this year, what with Jonathan Lucroy out with a broken nose (and not playing terribly well before that), and Kevan Smith and Dustin Garneau, while pulling hard, not coming up with much but air against their oars. Smith, with his 105 wRC+, has been the bright spot, but he’s 31 and trending down in July after a strong May and June. Stassi isn’t anything to write home about with the bat either, but he’s got a good reputation with the glove and, unlike Lucroy, is under control until 2022. That’ll have to do until the Angels figure out how to develop a catcher (Jack Kruger, their best catching prospect, is still in Double-A).

Going back to Houston are two rookie-league outfielders: Rivas (18, in his second rookie league season and first stateside) and Uceta (18, ditto). Neither were listed among the Angels’ top 31 prospects, but Eric, who’s seen them in Arizona, reports both as big-bodied guys (particularly Uceta) with little physical projection and reasonably powerful bats. Uceta is unlikely to be able to stay in the outfield long-term, and Rivas is likely destined for a corner spot if he does. Both are about 35 FV organizational types. These are the kinds of prospects you get when you’re trying to trade for Max Stassi. They could make the majors, but they probably won’t, and if they will we probably won’t know about it for another year or two. At least the Angels still have Mike Trout.

The list of batters who go down in the count 0-1 least often mostly makes sense. Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger are in the top five, due to a combination of their sterling batting eyes and pitchers staying away from them. Justin Smoak, Mike Moustakas, and Anthony Rizzo comprise the rest of the top five, and even if they don’t quite have the fearsome power of Bellinger and Trout, they have enough power that pitchers often pitch them carefully. Smoak has the lowest ISO of the five at .205. Pitchers are being rationally cautious.

Number six on the list will make you question what you think you know about first strike rate. David Fletcher, the Angels infielder, is number six, and he couldn’t look any more different than the guys ahead of him. I don’t mean physically, though that’s true as well — at 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, Fletcher isn’t an imposing power presence. No, what I mean is that Fletcher plays baseball in a style that can best be described as a throwback. Not only that, he’s succeeding, putting together a second consecutive solid major league season despite a game that would look more at home in the 1980s than in 2019.

If Tyler O’Neill is one extreme of the game, David Fletcher is the other. Think of a stereotype about baseball in 2019, and Fletcher probably defies it. Strikeout rates inexorably on the rise? Fletcher is striking out 8.3% of the time this year, the lowest rate among qualified hitters. Big swings and big whiffs? Fletcher makes contact on a dizzying 92.1% of his swings. The world gone mad for home runs and power? Fletcher’s .126 ISO is 12th-lowest in baseball this year, and that comes largely from his 20 doubles; he hits home runs on 5.6% of his fly balls, the sixth-lowest rate in the majors.

It’s easy to read the headlines in 2019, to see Pete Alonso hitting balls to Andromeda and Christian Yelich crushing home runs on nearly a third of his fly balls, and think that the only way to succeed in baseball is via home runs. There’s some truth to that, honestly — as pitchers throw harder and harder, stringing together a series of hits gets increasingly challenging, and a home run lets the offense skip all of that. That’s not a rule, though — it’s merely the path of least resistance. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the picture that got me interested in what Mike Trout had been up to between the end of April and the beginning of May, 2019:

I thought a big red circle would be gauche, so I’ll write this out: Starting on April 19, the rate at which Trout saw sliders (as a percentage of all pitches seen, and as measured by Pitch Info) rose from 8.7% over the 15 games preceding that date to an astonishing 30.9% over the 15 games preceding May 11. That’s the highest such number ever observed during Trout’s eight-season career. No other period even comes close. Over the course of his career, in fact, Trout has seen sliders less than half as often (15.0%) as he did over that 15-game stretch at the beginning of May.

To some extent, this is a consequence of the schedule. Slider use is up league-wide again this year, to 18.4% from last year’s 16.9%, and from 13.7% just five years ago. Thus, my first theory of the case — the case, here, being why Trout was suddenly seeing so many more sliders than he ever had before — was that Trout had just run into a series of teams that happened to be at the leading end of the league-wide rush away from fastballs and toward sliders. In other words, that this was just a bit of random chance. Could happen to anyone. And indeed, the seven teams Trout’s Angels faced during the period from April 19 to May 11 are throwing more sliders than the league as a whole this season:

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Shohei Ohtani is a fascinating player. He’s perhaps slightly less fascinating this season while he is only hitting and not pitching as well, as he did in his first campaign. Although the fact that pitching can be taken away from him for a season and he can still be a useful baseball player is still pretty incredible. On the season, Ohtani is hitting .281/.350/.512, good for a 131 wRC+ in 137 plate appearances. Last night, Ohtani added the latest interesting wrinkle to his career by hitting for the cycle.

Here’s the first plate appearance of the game, in which Ohtani hit a three-run homer.

While the triple is the most difficult part of the cycle, the home run is the most important in terms of its impact on the field. This was particularly true last night, as Ohtani’s homer put the Angels up 3-0, increasing the team’s win probability by 18% as the biggest play of the game. The next time Ohtani came up, he hit a double. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine being a pitcher who has to face the Angels this year. It’s not hard to figure out which batter you most need to prepare for. When the Angels played the Cubs last night, Albert Pujols batted third, which is a lot less imposing in 2019 than it was in 2008. Shohei Ohtani had the night off, which meant that Tommy La Stella was the best non-Trout bat in the lineup. He’s having a good year, as Jay Jaffe noted, but unfortunately for him, he’s still Tommy La Stella. Cesar Puello batted fifth, and hey, good for him. Still, though — the scouting report was probably just Mike Trout written in various fonts over and over again.

It’s safe to say that every game the Angels play, the opposing team has spent a lot of time trying to work out a way to get Trout out. Los Angeles has a robust 109 wRC+ this year among non-pitchers, which sounds good until you realize that non-Trout Angels have a 100 wRC+. The team is scuffling — two games below .500 in a division where you might need 100 wins to topple the Astros, and potentially a little lucky to be there given their BaseRuns record. The pitching staff is essentially made of duct tape and fervent prayers — Ty Buttrey leads the staff in both fWAR and RA/9 WAR, and their starting rotation looks like a horror story told to kids to keep them from becoming Angels fans.

Amidst this chaos, this unending deluge of mediocrity, Mike Trout is putting together another masterpiece of a season. It’s boring to say, almost — his 180 wRC+ is both the fourth-highest in baseball and the lowest Trout has recorded in the last three years. Being one of the best players in baseball is old hat for him. Still, he’s improving his craft incrementally, slowly shoring up weaknesses and adding to strengths. His unintentional walk rate, a gaudy 19%, is the highest of his career. His strikeout rate, a minuscule 16%, has never been lower. Trout’s 2019 might be the best he’s ever hit, a crazy thing to say about undoubtedly the best player in baseball.

Baseball is largely a game of failure and limitations, which makes talking about Trout’s plate discipline feel somewhat surreal. Consider this — Trout has started making contact with basically everything he swings at in the strike zone. His zone contact rate of 94.9% is sixth in baseball and the highest of his career. That’s strange, because for the most part, guys who make contact with everything are contact hitters who sacrifice power to put the ball in play. David Fletcher and his .137 ISO top the list.

This makes a rough kind of sense — hitting everything you swing at in the strike zone means you are probably putting some tough pitches in play, and cutting down on your swing to make more contact means those swings generally have less behind them. That, at least, is the logic that constrains mortals. Mike Trout started hitting everything in the strike zone, and he’s still slugging .600. That slugging percentage might be selling Trout short — he has the highest xSLG (a Baseball Savant statistic that predicts slugging percentage from angle and speed of hits) of his career, a gaudy .643.

What does making contact with every pitch in the strike zone look like? Well, in 2018, Trout was great, but he was great while being only very good against high and outside pitches. Take a look at the upper righthand corner of this chart, the percentage of swings he made contact on by zone in 2018:

Pitchers know about this marginal weakness, and they do their best to exploit it. The book on Trout is to get him high and away. Take a look at where pitchers are attacking him in 2019:

That’s good pitching right there. Find out where a hitter is most likely to get bad results, and aim for that spot. Maybe their focal point is a little too low, but the general idea of throwing away is certainly easy to see. Major league pitchers are tremendously skilled, and they spend countless hours perfecting their craft. That should work out to their advantage, right? Well, bad news, pitchers — this is Mike Trout we’re talking about here. Look at his contact rate in 2019:

It would be one thing to protect a weak point in your swing with some defensive hacks. Plenty of good hitters punch outside pitches the other way, sacrificing power for contact on pitches that are hard to drive. Again, though, Mike Trout isn’t “plenty of good hitters.” He’s the best hitter in baseball. Trout is punishing outside and high pitches in 2019, doing a tremendous amount of damage when he puts the ball in play:

You’re reading this chart right — Trout is now getting his greatest production on balls in play in the very part of the strike zone where pitchers are attacking him most. That, in a nutshell, is what pitching to Trout is like. You might think you’re attacking a weakness, doing your research to put yourself in an advantageous position. Trout’s better at adapting than you are; he’s better than everyone. He reacts to your changes faster than he can be solved.

Pitch location isn’t the only part of Trout’s plate discipline pitchers have focused on this year. They’ve changed how they attack him on the first pitch of a plate appearance, and Trout is yet again using that to his advantage. For years, the book on Trout was that he was patient on the first pitch to the point of somnolence; he basically never swung at first-pitch breaking balls, for instance. Over the past few years, Trout has turned this trend around, becoming increasingly aggressive on the first pitch — he swung at 19.7% of first pitches in 2017 and 18.3% in 2018, the two highest rates of his career.

To combat this trend, pitchers are going out of the zone on first pitches more than they ever have. Trout is seeing strikes on 47% of first pitches, down from his career average of 55% and below the major league average of 51%. This adjustment was largely out of self-preservation. Trout slugged 1.061 with a .485 batting average when he put the first pitch into play last year. He hit five home runs on first pitches, a career high. Sticking with get-me-over first pitch fastballs was no longer an option.

In classic Trout fashion, though, he’s turned pitchers’ adjustments into another tool in his tool belt. Now that pitchers throw him fewer first-pitch strikes, he’s simply swinging less. He’s down to a 17% swing rate on first pitches this year while still swinging at 27% of pitches in the zone. He’s also missing less — he’s swung and missed at five first pitches this year, a 2% rate that would be his lowest since 2015, the last year of his extreme passivity on first pitches. Between this improved swing discipline and pitchers avoiding the zone like the plague, Trout is falling behind in the count 52.9% of the time this year, a career low and 5.2% below last year’s level.

2019 is arguably Mike Trout’s finest batting season so far. His xwOBA of .473 is the highest it’s ever been and 30 points higher than his wOBA, suggesting that he’s been unlucky this year to put up “only” a 180 wRC+, the third-highest of his career. He has the highest walk rate in baseball and a strikeout rate in the lowest 21% of qualified batters. He’s getting on base at the highest rate in his career despite the lowest BABIP in his career (excluding his brief 2011). The two changes pitchers have made to how they approach him this year sure don’t seem to have worked.

Pitchers will try to make other adjustments. They’ll start challenging him in the strike zone more on the first pitch — maybe with offspeed pitches, something that pitchers mostly haven’t tried yet. They’ll aim inside, where Trout’s power is down this year. They’ll continue to hunt holes in his game, small edges that they can use to blunt Trout’s effectiveness.

But until I see some evidence to the contrary, I don’t think it will matter. Pitchers can adjust all they want, try any gambit they’d like. For the most part, it seems like adjusting to beat Trout only plays into his hands. Someday, Mike Trout will grow old. He’ll slow down, get worse at recognizing pitches, stop instilling terror into opposing pitchers the way he does now. That day still feels infinitely far off, though. For now, he’s three steps ahead, putting up unreal numbers while shrugging off regression. Pitchers can plan all they want. Trout won’t stop laughing his way around the bases any time soon.

Just as we all predicted in spring training, Tommy La Stella has taken over the Angels’ lead in home runs, surpassing Mike Trout. Wait, what?

You’re forgiven if you haven’t been paying much attention to the Angels, who are 20-22, haven’t been more than a game above .500 all season, and are now more than a month removed from their last time at that plateau. Trout was impossibly hot to start the season, but he cooled off, and Shohei Ohtani only made his 2019 debut last week, albeit without the novelty of double duty due to his Tommy John surgery. The Ohtani-less rotation has been dead-last dreadful, with practically everybody carrying ERAs and FIPs in the 5.00s, 6.00s, and 7.00s, or else on the injured list, and there’s been no heroic career turnaround for Matt Harvey, to say the least. Albert Pujols just passed the 2,000 RBI milestone, but he’s a shadow of his former self, and who cares about RBI, right?

Into this less-than-compelling spotlight has stepped La Stella, a 30-year-old lefty-swinging infielder who entered this season best known for his pinch-hitting prowess (.278/.397/.386 in 193 PA) and the Cubs’ gentle handling of his mid-2016 walkabout, the kind of thing that could have ended his career. The Angels acquired him last November 29 in exchange for a player to be named later (lefty reliever Conor Lillis-White) who has yet to throw a competitive inning in 2019, and are paying him all of $1.35 million. In our preseason Positional Power Rankings, we forecast La Stella to receive just 77 plate appearances as the Angels’ second baseman behind David Fletcher, with another 105 at third base behind Zack Cozart, and 14 at designated hitter. Given that he’d hit just 10 homers and produced a 96 wRC+ (.264/.345/.366) and 2.0 WAR in 947 career plate appearances — including just one homer and an 86 wRC+ in 192 PA last year — he wasn’t on anybody’s radar as a potential impact player.

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It’s amazing to write about baseball through the lens of a singular player like Mike Trout. The sheer totality of his excellence is fun in a way that just wouldn’t be true if you looked at all of his skills individually. Trout is an above-average outfielder, sure, but that isn’t all that fun by itself. He has great plate discipline — so too, though, does 2019 Jason Heyward, and he doesn’t spark the same kind of joy as Trout. No, the fun is that there’s basically no category you can come up with where Mike Trout isn’t good.

This got me to thinking: would it be fun to have a player who was like Trout, except not to quite the same degree? I don’t mean in the broad player value sense — in a way, every player in baseball is just a worse version of Trout. No, I mean someone who’s good at everything across the board in the same way that Trout is — just, a little less.

Trout hits for power, so our mystery player will need to hit for good (but sub-Troutian) power. Scratch both Joey Gallo and Jose Altuve from the list. They have to have an excellent eye at the plate and be judicious with their swings; sorry, Javier Baez, but the ride ends for you here. They need to be an above average baserunner, but not the best of the best — J.D. Martinez and Trea Turner both fall at this hurdle.

To work out this highly unscientific study, I started with stats from 2017-present for everyone who qualified for the batting title in at least one of the three years. This lets me cast a wide net without picking up someone whose prime isn’t happening now. First, I looked for players who were worse than Trout in a few categories: ISO, OBP, SLG, BsR/PA, BB%, and K%. (At this point in the search, I learned that Trout has a higher ISO than Aaron Judge, and I mean, wow.) Read the rest of this entry »