Mitchell Kilkenny is quietly having a stupendous season. A second-round pick by the Colorado Rockies in 2018 out of Texas A&M, the 24-year-old right-hander boasts a 1.47 ERA over eight starts with the Low-A Fresno Grizzlies and the Spokane Indians. Moreover, he’s fanned 54 batters and issued just five free passes in 43 innings.

His plus command is a much-needed asset. Kilkenny is more finesse than power, his fastball ranging from the upper 80s to the low 90s. At least for now. Kilkenny threw harder as a collegian, but then came Tommy John surgery shortly after he was drafted, and last year’s cancelled minor-league season only muddied the waters. No matter. He fully expects his velocity to tick back up in time, and even if that doesn’t happen, his ability to mix, match and tunnel two- and four-seam fastballs, a slider, a curveball, and a changeup has proven to be plenty effective. As Kilkenny put it, “I might not be bright and flashy, but I’m having success.”

Prior to matriculating at Texas A&M where he double-majored in Renewable Natural Resources and Forestry, he excelled in English class at Houston Christian High School.

“My one fun fact is that I won two awards in creative writing contests,” Kilkenny told me. “One was for a class project where we were to write to a favorite author of ours. I picked Bill Watterson, for Calvin and Hobbes, because that was my favorite comic growing up, I love Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, it was just a little piece about what the author had given me, which was some of the insights you can get out of a simple comic.” Read the rest of this entry »

After losing Gerrit Cole in free agency after the 2019 World Series and Justin Verlander to a torn UCL just six innings into the season, the Astros found themselves in desperate need of pitching help last year. Zack Greinke helped fill the void left by Charlie Morton’s departure, and Lance McCullers Jr. returned after missing all of 2019, but besides those two pitchers, there were more questions than answers in Houston’s rotation.

Insert a quintet of young pitchers with varying degrees of experience: Framber Valdez (107.2 MLB innings to his name), José Urquidy (41 MLB innings and a stellar upper-minors track record), and three pitchers with a lot of blank space on their résumés in Cristian Javier, Enoli Paredes, and Luis Garcia. With the help of these five and some clever piggybacking, the Astros overcame a mediocre regular-season record to oust Minnesota in the wild-card round and Oakland in the ALDS before falling to Tampa Bay in the ALCS.

Of that group, I want to focus on Garcia, for two reasons. First, he is the team’s current leader in pitching WAR, narrowly edging out Greinke, with a 2.82 ERA supported by a 28.1% strikeout rate and 7.7% walk rate. Second, his rise to the big-league club was the most surprising of the five guys I mentioned above. He signed with Houston out of Venezuela at age 20 (which is old for an international amateur) for a mere $20,000. He had not pitched above high-A before his MLB call-up, though he did dominate the opposition at every level. In 2019, he saw a velocity bump and struck out almost 36% of the hitters he faced in 43 innings pitched at low-A, then whiffed 39.4% of batters he faced in 65.2 innings one level up.

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Chas McCormick has already exceeded expectations. A 21st-round pick in the 2017 draft out of Division II Millersville University, the 26-year-old outfielder is getting semi-regular playing time with the Houston Astros, and he’s been sneaky good. His .226 batting average is nothing to write home about, but his 114 wRC+ and 0.5 WAR (as of Sunday night) are those of a rookie contributing to MLB’s highest-scoring team. That couldn’t have been predicted a few years ago — or even a few months ago. Coming into the current campaign, the West Chester, Pennsylvania native was No. 18 on our Astros Top Prospects list.

McCormick discussed his underdog-makes-good story when Houston visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: In many ways, you’re a classic overachiever. What is your background in that respect?

Chas McCormick: “When I was younger, like high school — even before — and maybe a little bit of college, I was never the best. If I had to try out for a team… I wasn’t very good at tryouts. I got cut from some summer-ball teams because I wasn’t the fastest player, I didn’t have the strongest arm, I didn’t hit the ball the farthest. I wasn’t the biggest guy, either. That’s why I really didn’t get Division 1 looks, just a couple Division II, Division III. But the more I played, especially in college, the more people realized that I was a gamer. I wouldn’t take batting practice and have scouts saying, ‘Wow, he’s putting on a show,’ it was more, ‘You’ve got to watch this kid play nine innings.’”

Laurila: When did you realize you had a legitimate shot to play pro ball?

McCormick: “Not in high school. I was thinking about playing basketball in college — or baseball — but again, just Division II, Division III. I wasn’t really on anyone’s radar. So out of high school, I wasn’t really thinking about pro baseball at all. Then I got to college, and that was [as] a pitcher. I was a little erratic and didn’t throw strikes very well, so that ended quickly.

“Anyway, freshman year, an outfielder got hurt and I ended up starting. I played really well — I batted leadoff a couple times and hit close to .340 — but I still didn’t think I could play pro ball because I didn’t really have the power. Then I ended up hitting some home runs in my sophomore year, and had a good average as well — I hit around .350. So after my sophomore year, I was like, ‘You know what? Maybe I could play professional baseball.’”

Laurila: You then didn’t get drafted after your junior year. Read the rest of this entry »

Braxton Roxby was an unpolished gem when the Cincinnati Reds signed him as a non-drafted free agent last summer. A 6-foot-3, 235-pound right-hander, Roxby possessed projectable stuff, but his resume was anything but shiny. In three collegiate seasons with the Division-II Pittsburgh-Johnstown Mountain Cats, he logged a 7.31 ERA. Moreover, that number was 9.68 in his junior year.

Then came Kyle Boddy and the Reds pitching-development machine.

In what is shaping up as one of the best underdog stories in recent memory, Roxby has been shoving in his first professional season. Pitching in a relief role for the High-A Dayton Dragons, the 22-year-old hurler has surrendered just four hits and one run in 16 innings. He’s punched out 28 batters.

How he ended up signing with Cincinnati is a story in itself. Roxby talked to 20-plus teams after being bypassed in last year’s truncated draft, and the tenors of the conversations were largely the same… with one notable exception.

“The Reds were the only team to take it a step above,” said Roxby, who majored in Civil Engineering at Pittsburgh Johnstown. “They had me on a Zoom meeting — [Director of Pitching] Kyle Boddy and [Assistant Pitching Coach] Eric Jagers were both on there — and they had video breaking down my mechanics, as well as the analytics of my pitches and how I can use them better. That made it hard not to choose them.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Smith has quietly been a good pitcher for a long time. Now 37 years old and playing for his sixth team, the Houston Astros reliever has a 3.06 ERA over 14 big-league seasons. Moreover, his 804 appearances are the most of any active hurler — and that’s not even the eye-catching part. Smith recently moved ahead of Walter Johnson into 49th place on the all-time list, with another legend in his sights. Next up is Nolan Ryan, who logged 807 career outings.

I asked Smith about his ascent in the pitching-appearances category. Could he have imagined this when he debuted with the New York Mets in 2007?

“When I first got called up, I was just trying to figure out what the heck pitching in the big leagues was, “said Smith, who’d been drafted out of Wright State University the previous year. “That offseason, I wrote out some goals and things I needed to get better at, and I was able to accomplish them. At that point I felt like I could do it for a long time. But there’s so much luck in this game. Your health, right? Pedro Martinez was on the team, and everybody would wish him good luck. He’d be, ‘No, wish me good health. If I’m healthy, I’ll be good.’ That really resonated with me. Being able to answer the call is what it’s about, especially when you’re a reliever. You want to be able to post as many days as you can.”

Right now he’s on the shelf. Smith went on the 10-day IL earlier this week, his return date uncertain. The sidearmer told me that everything is structurally sound, yet his forearm had been “grabbing” him (Astros manager Dusty Baker has reportedly referred to it as “elbow soreness”). Read the rest of this entry »

This past Tuesday’s slate of games provided us with a cluster of enjoyable home runs. Among them were Shohei Ohtani’s longest career home run (an estimated 470-foot blast); Ke’Bryan Hayes inadvertently missing first base and having his third bomb of the year overturned; and a fly ball off the bat of Carlos Correa that just (and I mean just) cleared the Green Monster.

Correa’s home run, the shortest of the season so far, was struck at a launch angle of 49 degrees and traveled an estimated 310 feet; it’s one of only four (over-the-fence) home runs hit since 2015 with a launch angle that high or higher. There have been several homers hit 310 feet or less, but the lion’s share of them have been the inside-the-park variety. Here’s the list of impressively short out-of-the-park home runs:

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Like many of you, I spent a good portion of Memorial Day watching baseball. I started with the Rays and Yankees, and was watching the YES Network feed when rookie shortstop Taylor Walls stepped to the plate. Immediately, the broadcast went to a graphic of who the Rays elected not to call up after they traded Willy Adames to the Brewers: Wander Franco, universally seen as the best prospect in the game, and the red-hot Vidal Bruján. It was a nice little troll, but while so much attention is deservedly paid to the Franco and Jarred Kelenic types before and after they debut, not every rookie has the same kind of prospect pedigree. With that in mind, here are nine prospects who aren’t getting the same kind of hype but are performing at a level that might earn them a big-league look this year. Read the rest of this entry »

In past iterations of this column, a combination of pressing narratives and fatigue with certain pitchers and their respective teams, or a straight up lack of interesting matchups have forced us to get creative. Not so this week, where the first three days of the week each feature games with giant WATCH ME signs stapled to their probable pitchers. Beginning with the Padres-Brewers series, the final week of May has gifted us some undeniably fun fixtures.

Monday, May 24, 7:40 PM ET: Blake Snell vs. Brandon Woodruff

In his first year in San Diego, Blake Snell seems to be learning his new city using a method that many non-pitchers find helpful: a lot of walks. Snell has already issued 25 walks in 40.1 innings (13.7 BB%) and allowed hitters to reach base at a clip comfortably above the league average. The former Ray has a .330 on-base percentage against him, while the rest of the league is at .313. Read the rest of this entry »

This week kicks off with two exciting players who should leave a huge impact on the sport over the next decade, and concludes with two who left their fingerprints all over the last one.

Monday, May 3, 9:38 PM ET: Tyler Glasnow vs. Shohei Ohtani

Outside of a deGrom-Ohtani matchup (which, All-Star Game, if you’re listening…) you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more exciting combination of starting pitchers. Tyler Glasnow, a pitcher who’s been abandoned by consistency at times in the past, is turning his question marks into periods. The looming issue with Glasnow was always when, not if, his strikeout numbers would reach kick-ass status. Like many of his fellow right-handed power pitchers, getting out of Pittsburgh was a great start. In his first full season with Tampa – albeit in just 12 starts – Glasnow made it over the 30% K-rate hump for the first time. His second full season with the Rays ended with a 38.2 K% and a trip to the World Series. This season, he’s still climbing, and hitters are getting completely neutralized.

Notching 10 or more strikeouts in three of his last four starts, including a career-high 14 on April 12 against the Rangers, Glasnow’s strikeout percentage is a robust 39.2%. With Blake Snell and Charlie Morton out of the picture, Glasnow is still bulldozing everything in his path, and he’s on an immaculate pace.

The most elementary reasons for that? Rather than going all in on fastballs and curveballs – pitches he threw a combined 95.4% of the time last season – Glasnow has scaled back the curve and introduced a slider-cutter hybrid. He’s spoken about the increased confidence that came from working with Tampa Bay’s coaching staff and their support, stating that they instructed him to “out stuff” guys rather than trying to dot the corner. When he only had two pitches though, his stuff was too predictable. Enter the “slutter,” a pitch that Glasnow admits has made things easier on him, which I’m sure he and his Boy Meets World good looks really needed. Read the rest of this entry »