The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I saw two New York-Penn League games. The first was Friday night’s matchup between the Lowell Spinners and the Staten Island Yankees; the second was Sunday afternoon’s matchup between the Tri-City Valley Cats and the Brooklyn Cyclones. Below are some notes about players from each game.

Lowell Spinners (BOS)

Noah Song, RHP, Top 100 Rank: N/A, Org Rank: 12

Song graduated from the Naval Academy this past spring with uncertainty surrounding his required military service time, which is the main reason why he wasn’t taken until the fourth round of the 2019 draft as a senior. As of this writing, Song must serve two years of active duty before being eligible to petition to serve the remainder of his time as a reservist. In late June, President Trump signed a memorandum ordering the Pentagon to develop a policy similar to the one in effect prior to 2017 that allowed Griffin Jax to pitch as part of the World Class Athlete Program and could permit athletes like Song to defer their service obligation due to what was described as a “short window of time” to compete. Though no one is certain if or how this proposal will be actioned, if it is, it looks like the Red Sox got a steal.

Song had a record-setting senior season at Navy, leading the nation in strikeouts with 161 in 94 innings pitched. He’s a lean 6-foot-4, with a simple, rhythmic, on-line delivery. He has a short arm action that sees him pinch his arm up near his ear a bit, but it is loose and he repeats it well. His fastball worked 94-97 mph on Friday with good life, showing ride through the zone and some tail. It comes out of the hand well and looks like it might play slightly above its velocity through the zone. He threw two different breaking balls. The slider was too slow, working in the low-to-mid 80s, and had horizontal tilt with proper slider action, but was a short breaker that looked a bit like a cutter at times. It touched average and, if thrown harder consistently, can sit there. He threw just one curveball and it was a 74 mph roundhouse type that was below average, though sources have indicated that they’ve seen better ones. He threw a handful of fading changeups against left-handed hitters that were average as well. Read the rest of this entry »

50 games into his major league career, Yordan Alvarez has a 183 wRC+ and has been worth 2.3 WAR. Let’s take a look at what we might be able to reasonably expect from the 22-year-old slugger moving forward. Here is how Alvarez compares to the rest of the league:

When you hit the ball hard and at a good launch angle often, and draw walks often, good things generally happen in the batter’s box. This has been true for Alvarez thus far. According to Statcast’s Erdős number calculations, among the most similar hitters to Alvarez this year are Christian Yelich, Pete Alonso, and Jorge Soler.

Of course, most of the hitters on the major league leaderboards are several years older than Alvarez. At just 22-years-old, he is currently sixth in the major leagues in barrels per plate appearance, behind such hitters as Mike Trout and Joey Gallo, and ahead of hitters like Yelich and Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger. In barrels per batted ball event, he is ninth. No one above him on either list is his age. Alvarez’s xwOBA (.420) is sixth in baseball and also better than two other young bat-first prospects with above average batted ball profiles. Juan Soto, last year’s offensive wunderkind, currently sits at .410, while Keston Hiura is at .365. Soto, who is younger than Alvarez, doesn’t hit the ball quite as hard or do so as often as Alvarez, but he draws more walks. Hiura, who about 10 months older, hits the ball harder more often, but also draws fewer walks and swings and misses more. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the four-year period from 2015 to 2018, José Altuve’s 24 wins above replacement ranked third among all position players in baseball behind only Mike Trout and Mookie Betts. His 143 wRC+ ranked 10th in the sport and his 2017 MVP win cemented his status as one of the best players in the game. After a strong start to the 2018 season, Altuve suffered a right knee injury last July that eventually required surgery in October. Although he started this season healthy, he began to slump, then hit the disabled list with a hamstring problem and stayed on the disabled list due to lingering pain in his knee. Based on this second half batting leaderboard, it appears his injury and slump are behind him:

Back in May, Jay Jaffe noted that Altuve’s stint on the injured list coincided with a rare slump for the Astros’ diminutive (obligatory height reference) second baseman. Jaffe discussed how Altuve’s results on batted balls out of the zone were much lower than in previous seasons.

Altuve’s batting average on pitches in the zone is down 57 points relative to last year and 81 points relative to his combined 2015-18 performance; even so, it’s been offset by a higher slugging percentage because of the homers. It’s his contact with pitches outside the zone where the numbers look particularly grim; removing the non-contact plate appearances, he’s 5-for-28 (.179) on such balls this year, all singles, where last year, he was 40-for-119 (.336) with a .437 slugging percentage.

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When it was completed, the Tyler White deal didn’t rock many (if any) boats. It was a minor move: The Dodgers acquired White from the Astros in exchange for Andre Scrubb, a 2019 Rule 5 eligible right-handed pitcher who had most recently been throwing in Double-A.

White has been scuffling of late, but a quick look at his offensive performance from the previous two seasons makes clear why the Dodgers find the first baseman intriguing. White’s bat has been significantly above league-average at times, even if his defensive profile limits his overall value:

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You knew it was coming. When Houston acquired Aaron Sanchez from the Blue Jays, changes to his repertoire were bound to follow. By now, the pitching preferences of the Astros organization are well known: throw your best pitch more often and ditch your worst. It’s not as simple as telling pitchers to throw more breaking balls or throw fewer fastballs, though. It’s an individualized pitching strategy based on the strengths and weaknesses of the particular pitcher. Erstwhile FanGraphs author Travis Sawchik describes how these individualized development plans are presented to new Astros in his new book, The MVP Machine, co-authored with Ben Lindbergh:

We may have expected some tweaks, but I’m not sure anyone could have expected the adjustments to have such an immediate impact for Sanchez. With the Blue Jays, he had posted a league worst 6.07 ERA with a 5.03 FIP across 23 starts. In his first start with his new team, he held the Mariners hitless over six innings, allowing just three base runners and striking out six. Will Harris, Joe Biagini (who came over from the Blue Jays in the same trade), and Chris Devenski completed the combined no-hitter after Sanchez was lifted after the sixth.

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Corbin Martin has had an eventful summer. The 23-year-old right-hander made his MLB debut in mid May, underwent Tommy John surgery in early July, and four days ago he was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks as part of the blockbuster Zack Greinke deal. Martin came into the season ranked No. 3 on our Houston Astros Top Prospects list.

He didn’t follow a traditional path to the big leagues. Primarily a centerfielder as a Cypress, Texas prep, he didn’t begin pitching in earnest until his second collegiate season. Moreover, he cemented his conversion under the midnight sun, 4,000-plus miles from home.

“When I got to [Texas] A&M, they were like, ‘Hey, we know you pitched a little in high school; do you want to try it out?,’” Martin told me prior to the second of his five big-league starts. “I was like, ‘Sure.’ At first I was kind of frustrated, because I like hitting, but I ended up running away with it.”

Baseball is said to be a marathon, not a sprint, and immediate success wasn’t in the cards. Martin pitched just 18 innings as a freshman, then struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA as a sophomore. It wasn’t until his junior year, which was preceded by a breakout summer in the Cape Cod League, that “all the pieces finally came together.”

An earlier summer-ball stint was arguably a more important stepping stone. 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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The Houston Astros needed starting pitcher help and they got it in dramatic fashion, picking up Zack Greinke from the Arizona Diamondbacks in return for pitchers J.B. Bukauskas and Corbin Martin, first baseman Seth Beer, and jack-of-all-trades Josh Rojas.

A couple of years ago, I became increasingly concerned about the continued decline in Zack Greinke’s velocity. It used to be that every spring training, Greinke would throw 86 mph and everyone would panic, and then the velocity would eventually come back. In 2018 that didn’t happen, yet Greinke’s shown every sign the last two seasons that he can navigate what could very well have been a late-career crisis, with the barest of speed bumps.

The major reason for Greinke’s survival is his multi-flavor curveball, a pitch he can throw anywhere from 66 to 74 mph and anywhere in the strike zone. The speed differences result in the pitch ranging from a traditional, looping curve to an almost full-on, Rip Sewell eephus pitch.

Just how good is his curveball? In 2017, by our pitch data, Greinke had his best-ever season with the curve, at 7.2 runs better than league average. Last year, that improved to +10.6 runs. This year, with a third of the season to go, Greinke stands at +16.4, second in baseball to Charlie Morton. At the pace he’s on, +24.6 by season’s end would put him fifth in the 18 years for which we have this data, behind only 2017 Corey Kluber, Morton, 2007 Erik Bedard, and 2003 Roy Halladay. Here is Greinke throwing his curve to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. on June 8:

Oh my.

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Just as the clock struck 4 pm Eastern, the Astros completed a significant trade with the Blue Jays, acquiring both right-handed starter Aaron Sanchez and right-handed reliever Joe Biagini in one fell swoop. As first reported by Shi Davidi of Sportsnet, the full deal looks like this:

Astros Receive:

• RHP Joe Biagini

• RHP Aaron Sanchez

• OF Cal Stevenson

Blue Jays Receive:

• OF Derek Fisher

That is quite the haul for the Astros. A trade like this kills two birds with one stone: It allows them to add depth to both the starting rotation and the bullpen, two areas of need.

The Astros’ rotation has been quite good this season, but they have lacked depth, with Brad Peacock (shoulder discomfort), Lance McCullers Jr. (Tommy John surgery), and Corbin Martin (Tommy John surgery again) currently out on the IL, and Collin McHugh relegated to the bullpen after an ineffective start. The minor league options to replace them have had varying degrees of success.

Sanchez will certainly provide depth in the Astros’ rotation, but there is the potential for him to be much more than that. He is now three years removed from his last significant run of success, having battled a combination of injuries and ineffectiveness since 2016. But what remains encouraging about the 27-year-old Sanchez, despite his abysmal 2019 performance, are his underlying metrics. He still possesses a good fastball, though it is currently a few ticks below of what it was pre-injuries. More intriguing is his curveball. The spin rate on the pitch ranks in the 94th percentile, and hitters have been held to just a .273 wOBA (.234 xwOBA) against it, all while whiffing on 37% of swings. Read the rest of this entry »