One of the fun things about baseball, I think, is that players on opposing teams spend quite a lot of time standing next to each other and not moving very much. You don’t get this in basketball. If Dikembe Mutombo spent too much time standing still next to Michael Jordan, he was liable to find his face on a poster somewhere. Not so in football, either — the possibility for interaction is limited mostly to comings and goings on and off the field, and there’s a martial quality to the whole affair that inhibits relaxed conversation of the type you and I might have were we standing together quietly on a baseball field and not doing very much at all.

Anyway, last night I was mucking around on YouTube and found this video called “MLB Friend Joke“. This is a video title apparently conceived with a search engine, and not a human being, primarily in mind, and this is also what my friends fervently hope I am leading up to when I start sentences with phrases like “so I heard this great story about the 1940s Cincinnati Reds last night.” I watched this video because I was tired and didn’t have anything else to do.

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TEMPE, Ariz. — The center-field fence at the Angels’ spring-training home sits 420 feet away from home plate. Beyond it are craggy, red-rock hills, and nearer but still beyond the playing field, a green, aluminum batter’s eye that has a height perhaps around 30 feet.

At Angels camp last week, I asked the club’s hitting coach, Eric Hinske, if he’s experienced any “Wow,” slack-jawed moments while observing the early days of Shohei Ohtani as a major-league hitter.

All the time, Hinske says.

“He hits the ball over the batting eye like with every swing in batting practice,” Hinske said.

To get a sense of what that swing looks like at its best, here’s footage of all Ohtani’s NPB home runs:

The power — at least the BP variety — is real.

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Justin Upton hits the ball in the air. Just over 63% of his batted balls were classified either as liners or flies in 2017, the 28th-highest mark among 144 qualified hitters. His career mark of roughly 60% is nearly as high. At a time where launch angle is all the rage, the 30-year-old outfielder is doing what a middle-of-the-order hitter is expected to do. That includes output. Upton is coming off a campaign where his loft-efficient right-handed stroke produced 109 RBIs (yes, those are still counted), a .540 slugging percentage, and a 137 wRC+.

It would be inaccurate to say that J-Up is following a trend.

“I don’t try to hit the ball in the air,” Upton told me recently at the Angels’ spring camp in Tempe. “To be brutally honest with you, I’ve never in my career tried to hit the ball in the air. I’ve always tried to hit line drives, and if you just miss a line drive it becomes a deep fly ball.”

He hits a lot of deep fly balls. The lucrative contract he signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in November came on the heels of a 35-dinger explosion. The total represented a career high, but it wasn’t an anomaly. Over the past five seasons, Upton has bopped 148 home runs, 11th most during that stretch.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Ichiro Suzuki’s return to Seattle, Neil Walker’s perplexing unemployment, the unreliability of bullpens, Anthony Gose’s extremely rough start to spring training, and Kyle Jensen’s extremely hot start to spring training, then preview the 2018 Angels (20:44) with The Athletic Los Angeles’s Pedro Moura, and the 2018 Phillies (51:19) with The Athletic Philadelphia’s Meghan Montemurro.

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One year ago this month, the Seattle Mariners signed Gordon Beckham to a minor-league contract, hoping that he could jumpstart a career in decline. That didn’t happen. The 31-year-old infielder slogged his way to a .706 OPS in Triple-A, then went an uninspiring 3 for 17 after a September call-up.

Despite those doldrums — and a lackadaisical track record that has seen him slash just .239/.303/.369 over parts of nine big-league seasons — Jerry Dipoto’s club is giving him another chance. So far he’s making the best of it. Going into yesterday, Beckham had nine hits, including a home run, in 13 spring training at bats.

The University of Georgia product was refreshingly honest when I asked him to assess his career thus far.

“I would describe it as having underperformed,” admitted Beckham, who was drafted eighth overall by the White Sox in 2008. “I started off well, and did some good things for a few years, but since then I haven’t played anywhere near my capabilities. If I don’t get it right soon, I probably won’t be playing much longer.”

Beckham was equally candid when asked why he hasn’t fulfilled his potential. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Angels selected Luke Bard in December’s Rule 5 draft, they acquired a pitcher who is stylistically different than the right-hander Minnesota took in the first round of the 2012 amateur draft. The younger brother of former Red Sox flamethrower Daniel Bard is no longer looking to induce ground balls. He’s looking to blow away hitters with belt-high heaters.

He did plenty of that last year between Double-A Chattanooga and Triple-A Rochester. Armed with his new data-driven attack plan, Bard augmented his 2.76 ERA with 99 punch outs in 65.1 innings of relief work. His 13.6 K/9 far exceeded his previous personal best, which was a pedestrian 8.1 against Low-A hitters in 2015.

What prompted the change from sinkerballer to power pitcher? The 27-year-old Georgia Tech product learned that he has elite spin rate. As a result, his two-seamer is now in his back pocket and his modus operandi is four-seam explosion.

Whether or not he remains an Angel, or ends up being offered back to the Twins, remains to be seen. Either way, Bard has evolved, and he has Statcast to thank.

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Luke Bard: “I was a sinkerball pitcher all through college and for my first several years of pro ball, and I got a lot of ground balls, but I never got the swings and misses. I would see guys who didn’t throw as hard as me and go, ‘How are they getting swings and misses on their fastball?’ Then I started learning about spin rate and realized I was throwing high-spin sinkers. Read the rest of this entry »

Angels righty Shohei Ohtani, who appeared first overall on our recent top-100 prospect list, made his spring debut on Saturday at Tempe Diablo Stadium against the Milwaukee Brewers. He threw 1.1 innings, surrendered two hits (including a solo homer to Brewers OF Keon Broxton on a fastball, up), walked one, and struck out two. Ohtani was removed after he threw 31 pitches (17 for strikes) because he had reached his pitch-count limit.

Ohtani struggled to find a consistent release point during his brief outing, which is of little concern given that he barely pitched last year and this was his first spring-training appearance. A source at the game had Ohtani’s fastball ranging 91-97 mph. He threw all of his secondary pitches, the best of which was a plus to plus-plus splitter in the 84-88 mph range. He also threw one knee-buckling, change-of-pace curveball at 70 mph and a few sliders in the 79-80 mph range.

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Other pro scouting notes

Rockies SS prospect Brendan Rodgers homered in the big-league spring-training game Friday on a ball that left the bat at 102 mph. He hit a ball 105 earlier in the game.

Cleveland 1B prospect Bobby Bradley singled today on a ball that left the bat at 109.5 mph.

D-backs righty Taylor Clarke was 91-94 with an average curveball in a scrimmage against Arizona State on Wednesday.

The Los Angeles Angels aren’t responsible for any of the biggest moves of the past few days. They didn’t sign Eric Hosmer or J.D. Martinez. They didn’t trade for Jake Odorizzi. They didn’t even DFA Corey Dickerson.

That said, the Angels have taken a few steps recently towards improving their club — and, not coincidentally, towards clearing a path for Shohei Ohtani to receive playing time when he is not on the mound.

A brief review of their latest transactions:

• Traded C.J. Cron to the Tampa Bay Rays for a player to be named later.
• Signed outfielder Chris Young to a one-year deal for $2 million.
• Signed Chris Carter to a minor-league deal.

Over a series of three moves, the team essentially swapped out first-base/designated-hitter depth for outfield depth and then addressed the 1B/DH depth, too. Chris Young and C.J. Cron possess several similarities and a few obvious differences. At 34, Young is six years older than Cron. Young plays the outfield while Cron can only play first base. As for the similarities, both have been slightly above-average right-handed hitters over the last two seasons. They will earn roughly $2 million each in 2018, and both are projected as average hitters next season. For the Angels, swapping in Young for Cron has several advantages despite Cron’s youth and team control though 2020.

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The Los Angeles Angels struck gold this offseason. The addition of Zack Cozart and Ian Kinsler to a core that already included Justin Upton (re-signed to a five-year deal in November), Andrelton Simmons, and the incomparable Mike Trout has created a collection of position players few other clubs can rival. Nor does this even acknowledge the club’s greatest stroke of fortune this winter — namely, the signing of coveted two-way player Shohei Ohtani.

Understandably, the team wants to protect its new 23-year-old star. Ohtani joins a rotation composed mostly of damaged limbs. Because of the fragility present here, the Angels are going to try something novel — namely, to employ a six-man rotation. Unfortunately, it probably won’t work.

There are good reasons for a six-man rotation, and Angels’ starters meet several of the relevant criteria for experimenting with one. First of all, the club lacks a true ace. Despite having never faced a major-league batter, Ohtani is probably the club’s best pitcher. Given his unique position, however, it makes sense that the Angels wouldn’t expect him to carry the load of a No. 1 starter.

Beyond Ohtani, the Angels don’t possess a pitcher who needs to start every fifth day. Allocating five of Clayton Kershaw‘s or Corey Kluber‘s or Max Scherzer’s to another pitcher would be bad for a team trying to win baseball games. The Angels don’t have a pitcher of that class, though. That makes a six-man rotation more feasible from a competitive standpoint.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Los Angeles Angels farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. The KATOH (stats-only) statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

70 FV Prospects

Where to begin? First, it’s worth discussing why Ohtani is even included within these rankings in the first place. There’s a pretty good argument that he doesn’t belong here: he’s an MLB-ready product who probably won’t take a minor-league bus ride in his life. Nevertheless, we felt that a few facts about him merit his inclusion.

1. He’s younger than many of the players who appear throughout our lists.
2. He was an amateur international free agent literally weeks ago.
3. He’ll be providing the Angels with a prospect’s surplus value. (He’d be worth at least $250 million on the open market but will be making league minimum in 2017. So, great job, MLBPA.)
4. Because of Ohtani’s geographic location, the injury issues that made him hard to see in 2017, and the inexact nature of NPB/MLB statistical equivalencies, most of what we know about Ohtani comes from him being scouted very heavily during the last two years.

Shohei Ohtani is perhaps the most talented all-around baseball player on the planet. He is a toolsy, but volatile, prospect as a hitter with plus-plus raw power and plus speed; he could also immediately be one of the best pitchers in baseball because of the elite quality of his stuff. Teams have been on Ohtani since he was in high school. The Dodgers, Giants, Rangers, and Red Sox all pursued him during that time, and the threat that Ohtani would go to MLB right out of high school created a buzz in Japan. (This was in 2012 and 2013, during the time of soft international bonus caps. Ohtani said publicly at this time that he wanted to go right to MLB.) NPB teams (specifically the Hokkaido Fighters, who picked first overall in the 2012 draft) were forced to play chicken with Ohtani’s MLB suitors. There was risk he’d be picked up at the top of the NPB draft and just leave, but Hokkaido took him and convinced him to stay.

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