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 »

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.

For the second time this month, catcher Martín Maldonado has been traded, and for the second time in just over a year, he’ll join the Astros. The well-traveled backstop, who began this season filling in for the injured Salvador Perez as the Royals’ starter, played just four games with the Cubs after being acquired on July 15.

Astros get:

C Martín Maldonado

Cubs get:

IF/OF Tony Kemp

It’s fair to say that Maldonado, who turns 33 on August 16 and has also spent time with the Brewers (2011-16) and Angels (2017-18), is a consistent hitter — consistently subpar. He’s batting .217/.285/.349 in 276 plate appearances this year, with six homers and a 72 wRC+; that line bears an uncanny resemblance to his career one (.219/.288/.350, 72 WRC+). He actually went hitless (0-for-11 with two walks) in his brief Chicago stint, which began when the Cubs obtained him from the Royals on July 15, complementing their placement of Willson Contreras on the injured list due to a right arch strain. Contreras has since returned, and with young Victor Caratini serving as a useful backup, there wasn’t room for Maldonado. Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a weird season thus far for Justin Verlander. On the one hand, the 36-year-old righty has enjoyed dominant stretches and generally pitched well enough to put himself in the conversation for another All-Star appearance (perhaps even a start) and that elusive second Cy Young Award, all while advancing his case for eventual election to the Hall of Fame. On the other hand, he’s struggling to keep the ball in the park like never before — but then, that describes most pitchers in a year of record-setting home run rates. The combination has created some very unusual, extreme statistics

On Sunday, Verlander threw seven strong innings against the Yankees in the Bronx, allowing just four hits, two walks, and three runs while striking out nine. The runs all came via a three-run homer by DJ LeMahieu, but the blast was of trivial importance, hit at a time when the Astros owned a commanding 9-0 lead. The trivia was shared by both teams. It was the 26th straight game in which the Yankees homered, a franchise record and one short of the major league record, held by the 2002 Rangers. It was also the first time since April 15, 2017 — back when he was still a Tiger — that Verlander had surrendered a three-run homer.

I’ll get back to the home runs momentarily. The Astros’ 9-4 win gave Verlander his 10th victory of the season and the 214th of his career; he’s second among active pitchers behind only CC Sabathia, who claimed his 250th win last week. His 142 strikeouts trail only teammate Gerrit Cole for the league lead, while his 2.67 ERA is good for fourth. However, because he’s served up 21 homers in 114.2 innings — a career-high 1.65 per nine — his FIP is a less-impressive 3.77, and his ERA-FIP differential of -1.10 ranks third in the AL. Depending upon one’s choice of pitching value metrics, he either looks like a Cy hopeful (second in bWAR at 3.8) or just a solid All-Star candidate (tied for ninth in fWAR at 2.5). Read the rest of this entry »

Because his name is right there in the title of the piece, I won’t ask you to play that little game where I give you two anonymized batting lines and ask you to guess who they are, only to reveal that one is Yuli Gurriel and the other is the re-animated corpse of Ike Van Zandt or something like that. I’ll just give you two batting lines, both from Gurriel, and ask you to note the difference in quality between the two:

That 47-point drop in wOBA doesn’t really give you a sense of relative performance, so let me put this another way: Gurriel’s wOBA from 2016-18 fell into the 38th percentile among players with as many plate appearances over that span. Fine but hardly exceptional. His wOBA this year — again only among those players with as many trips to the plate — falls into the third percentile. Only José Ramírez (with a .262 wOBA) and Starlin Castro (.249) have done worse.

Curiously, though, Gurriel’s walk rate and strikeout rate have both improved — albeit modestly — even as his overall performance has suffered. Little else about his plate discipline numbers seems much different this year than last, either. Gurriel’s swing rate last year was 50.3%, and this year it’s 49.1%. Last year, he made contact 85.9% of the time. This year, he’s improved to 87.1%. The numbers don’t change much when you look inside or outside of the strike zone, either, and where they do change it’s often for the better. So what’s going on? I think a clue is in the kinds of strikeouts he’s getting. Here’s a chart that shows Gurriel’s swing rates on all the pitches he saw with two strikes from 2016-2018:

And here is that same chart, but from this season:

I’ll save you the effort of adding up the swing rates on all the pitches inside the strike zone and tell you that from 2016-18, Gurriel saw 348 pitches in the zone with two strikes and swung at almost all of them: 330, or 95%. Most of those were fastballs. Some of the time, he struck out. Other times, he made hard contact. This year, by contrast, Gurriel has swung at 63 of 71 such pitches, or 89%. That six-point drop might not seem like a huge deal, but it’s meant that a whopping 39% of Gurriel’s strikeouts this year have been looking, which is by far the highest figure of his four-year career (his career mark is 23.2%, and last year’s 29% figure was by 11 points a career high). It’s also meant that Gurriel has made less contact when behind in the count this year than ever before.

I’m not sure what to ascribe these changes to. One possibility could be a general discomfort at being called upon to play around the diamond more often due to injuries to George Springer, Carlos Correa, and José Altuve. On its face, that argument doesn’t make much sense: Gurriel played 46 games away from first base even last season, and put up perfectly acceptable offensive numbers, and he’s moved around the infield since his Cuban playing days. Perhaps, though, this season’s situation is different. This year, Gurriel is fielding different positions not because it’s the best matchup given the Astros’ opponents but because A.J. Hinch has to play him there due to injury. That could mean Gurriel is being put into game situations in which he’s not comfortable and to which he hasn’t been exposed before. And he’s perhaps thinking just a little bit too hard about what he has to produce there while his talented teammates recover from injury.

If that’s true, it could explain other changes to Gurriel’s game as well. Prior to 2019, Gurriels’ average launch angle sat right around 10 degrees, but that average masked a distribution that showed that about a quarter of his hits went straight forward on a line (a zero degree launch angle) while another quarter left the bat at about 20 degrees — just enough to get over the heads of the infielders and drop in for hits. This year, his average launch angle has increased — to 15.4 degrees — while the range of angles at which he hits the ball has narrowed. Almost gone are the balls hit straight on a line, and significantly diminished are the 20 degree knocks. More and more of Gurriel’s hits, as a percentage, are coming in that dangerous middle zone where balls in play are somewhat more likely to turn into outs. As a consequence, Gurriel’s .264 BABIP this season is the lowest of his career, even as his hard-hit and contact rates have stayed level.

Whatever the cause, things can really only go up from here: Gurriel’s -0.4 WAR is among the 10 worst in the league among qualified players. And there are, despite the poor results, a lot of things going right for Gurriel. His hard-hit rate, contact rate, strikeout rate, and walk rate suggest that his eye at the plate and his ability to do damage to the ball when he makes contact are all working just fine. Perhaps he is trying to lift the ball a little more than is necessary to do damage at the plate, and perhaps that approach — combined with a newfound passivity possibly born of a little bit of overthinking — has turned Gurriel’s performance this year on its head. If that’s the case, it can be remedied: Gurriel’s wOBA has been as low as this before and still rebounded:

With a little perseverance, then — and perhaps a few more swings on strikes in the zone — he could be back to normal for the stretch run. And if this run of poor performance is the result of Gurriel trying to do a little too much at the plate? Well, maybe it’s all right to relax a little bit. All the evidence suggests that he and the Astros are going to be just fine.

Owners of the majors’ fourth-best record (37-20) and second-best run differential (+92), the Astros have been humming along in typical powerhouse fashion, but a recent rash of injuries is testing their depth. In a 15-day span they sent Jose Altuve, Collin McHugh, George Springer, Max Stassi, and Aledmys Diaz to the injured list, all for comparatively mundane-sounding injuries to muscles and joints. On Wednesday they gave us something new, namely the news that Carlos Correa had suffered a fractured rib while receiving a massage at his home, which will sideline him for four to six weeks.

It’s a bizarre injury worthy of a Jayson Stark column, and one that set off speculation as to its veracity, to say nothing of the jokes. Unlike the Mets’ handling of Yoenis Cespedes’ recent eyebrow-raising ankle fractures, which the outfielder suffered on his ranch, the Astros gave no hint that Correa’s injury was the result of any mischief. Via The Athletic’s Jake Kaplan:

“Players do a lot of things outside of the field that we’re never aware of or not aware of. Everybody’s trying to get better in their own way, and I’m sure he was receiving treatment for specific reasons,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened that way, but we’re concerned right now mostly about getting him back. He’s going to have to rest for a little bit, let the bones heal and get back to doing the physical activity that will help him be back on the field.”

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