Less than two weeks into the 2022 season, the Braves and Dodgers crossed paths for the first time, not only rekindling the rivalry between the teams that have met in the last two National League Championship Series en route to World Series wins but also presenting the chance for their recent free agent additions Freddie Freeman and Kenley Jansen to receive some well-deserved fanfare in the presence of their old pals. Freeman figured prominently in Monday night’s game, clubbing a solo homer in his first plate appearance against his old team, furthering a strong start with his new one, while Matt Olson, the Braves’ choice to fill his sizable shoes, collected his fourth three-hit game of the young season and briefly took over the major league lead in WAR and the NL leads in batting average and on-base percentage. His team ended up on the short end of a 7-4 score, and he took an 0-for-4 on Tuesday, though the Braves evened the series in a 3-1 victory closed out by Jansen.

Few players in recent memory have been placed under the microscope as swiftly as the 28-year-old Olson. On March 13, he was still the first baseman for the A’s, though amid the team’s umpteenth teardown, multiple suitors had expressed interest in trading for him. A day later, he was suddenly the new first baseman for the Braves, as the defending champions acquired him in exchange for four players, effectively slamming the door on the Freeman era. The day after that, Olson became a franchise cornerstone himself by agreeing to an eight-year, $168 million extension. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

George Kirby, SP, Seattle Mariners
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Arkansas Age: 24 Overall Rank: 29 FV: 55
Line: 5 IP, 2H, 0R, 0BB, 8K

Notes
Kirby’s fastball sat 96-98 mph on Wednesday night, but more noteworthy was how little he threw it. He leaned much more heavily on his slider, curveball, and changeup, all of which flashed above average throughout the evening.

His increased use of those secondaries resulted in him throwing more balls than is typical of the control-specialist, but while that may have inflated his pitch count, he still kept it in check, and didn’t issue any free passes. More often than not, Kirby hit his spots and he missed bats with every offering, retiring the last 12 batters he faced in order. Read the rest of this entry »

It arrived stressfully, chaotically, and slightly late, but the 2022 season is here. And that means it’s time for one last important sabermetric ritual: the final ZiPS projected standings that will surely come back and haunt me multiple times as the season progresses.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, so there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as an initial starting point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time, as filtered by arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

Frankie Montas was a late scratch from his Saturday start and instead, on Sunday, threw in an early-morning sim game on Oakland’s backfields. Opposing scouts in attendance were from (in totality) Boston, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay.

Montas threw about 80 pitches, warming up and then working in eight-to-ten minute chunks against A’s big league hitters, with staff adding batters to the end of some innings and rolling others to stay within that window (which is commonplace in this setting). Then the whole group took a break for four or five minutes before Montas returned to the mound for another simulated inning. With no umpires, the A’s used the TrackMan pitch locations to call balls and strikes from their seating area behind the backstop; the unit began malfunctioning at the very end of his outing, but only for four pitches.

I have video of his entire outing below, and in addition to it being a topical scouting artifact given trade rumors around Montas, it is also a glimpse into big league minutiae in a quiet setting with just a few scouts, A’s staff, and player families around. You can often hear communication between A’s players and personnel around pitch type and velocity, but there’s no exposure of sensitive ops stuff, something I vetted while cutting this together.

Montas’ fastball ranged from 92–95 mph, but he was consistently pumping in a heavy 93–94 sinker. He was clearly coasting, as a big league vet of this stature should during a morning sim game, so the fact that this velo band is abnormally low for him — his fastball averaged 96 in 2021 and had been sitting close to that so far this spring — is fine. The pitch had big sinking action toward the bottom of the zone early during his outing and induced several ground balls, though hitters had an easier time elevating it later on. As the movement on his fastball dwindled throughout his outing, the length and movement of his upper-80s slider increased, and he found more consistent feel for locating it later in the sim game. At times he uses it like a bat-breaking cutter, at others as a finishing pitch out of the zone. Though it was his least consistent offering, many of his sliders were plus. Read the rest of this entry »

If you thought the Padres were done tinkering with the starting rotation, you thought wrong. On Sunday morning, San Diego agreed to a deal with the Athletics, acquiring pitchers Sean Manaea and Aaron Holiday in exchange for pitcher Adrian Martinez and infielder Euribiel Angeles.

In a season in which teams continued to be conservative at stretching out their starting pitchers, the A’s were more aggressive with the injury-prone Manaea last year. Over the short-term, that proved to be successful, as he remained healthy and threw 179 1/3 innings, his most as a professional. The plaudits aren’t just quantity; he set career-highs all over the place, from WAR (3.3) to full-season FIP (3.66) to strikeout rate (25.7%).

How did Manaea do it? The likeliest reason is velocity. No, he didn’t suddenly become Aroldis Chapman or Brusdar Graterol, but every pitcher — with the possible exception of knuckleballers — requires some level of velocity to achieve effectiveness. In Manaea’s career there’s nearly a 100-point delta in batter slugging percentage between his sinkers going 91 mph or slower (.491) and those traveling 92 mph or faster (.397). On a player-to-player comparison, I get in the neighborhood of 40 points of SLG being the norm.

Similarly, Manaea also gets a lot more strikeouts when he’s throwing harder. More than three-quarters of his career strikeouts from sinkers come from the harder ones despite less than half of his sinkers being in the category. It’s not just chicken-and-egg; this pattern existed prior to this season. Sinkers aren’t traditionally used to punch out batters, but for Manaea, they’re an important weapon. Statcast credits him with 114 strikeouts on sinkers in 2021, the third-most of the Statcast era and the most since Chris Sale had 124 in 2015 (David Price has the crown with 125 in 2014).

It’s not even that Manaea’s sinker is a particularly nasty pitch, such as a splitter in fastball’s clothing; he actually gets less break on his than the average pitcher. It’s that his deceptive delivery and his excellent control basically function as a force multiplier to his velocity, effectively reducing the distance between the mound and home plate. Even a 30-mph fastball can strike out Juan Soto if you get to determine the sliver of time he has to make a decision. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently asked a pair of prospects which of their former teammates have the best wheels, and on each occasion a 24-year-old middle infielder in the Boston Red Sox system was on the short list. One had him numero uno. The other deemed the speedster in question as being a step behind his first choice.

“Corbin Carroll, for sure,” was Ryne Nelson’s response to my question, the top pitching prospect in the Arizona Diamondbacks system naming the organization’s top position player prospect. “That dude flies.”

While that answer was anything but unexpected, is Carroll truly faster than David Hamilton, whom Nelson played with in the Cape Cod League?

“I think so,” said the righty. “I’ve never seen them together, but I have watched Corbin get from home to third in what felt like three seconds. Hamilton is definitely up there, but it seems like Corbin is the fastest player I’ve ever seen in my life. He can really burn around the bases.”

So too can Hamilton, whom Kody Clemens played with at both the University of Texas and in the independent Constellation League during the 2020 shutdown. Prior to my conversation with Nelson, the Detroit Tigers prospect had told me that Hamilton is the swiftest he’s taken the field with. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, the A’s made the biggest trade of the year when they sent Matt Olson to the Braves. This morning, they kept the momentum going and made the second-biggest trade of the year. Matt Chapman is headed to Canada in exchange for a four-prospect return:

Blue Jays deal for Matt Chapman is done. Kevin Smith, Gunnar Hoglund, Zach Logue and Kirby Snead are headed to Athletics, per source.

— Shi Davidi (@ShiDavidi) March 16, 2022

Oakland doesn’t do anything by half measures, and with Olson and Chris Bassitt out the door, the team was in competitive limbo. Toronto was in search of a new infielder after Marcus Semien left in free agency. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize the potential fit here, and the two teams were linked in trade rumors for much of the locked-out offseason.

From the Jays’ perspective, this trade gets them exactly what they wanted. After losing two of their top starting pitchers in free agency, they signed Kevin Gausman and Yusei Kikuchi to fill holes in the rotation. That still left them with a diminished offensive group, and there weren’t any obvious free agent fits to spruce things up. It may have been a coincidence, but as the Jays pursued Freddie Freeman and Kyle Schwarber, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was spotted doing third base drills, a sign of how intent the Jays were on shoehorning another hitter into their lineup, positional fit notwithstanding. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Oakland Athletics traded star first baseman Matt Olson to the defending champion Atlanta Braves (analysis of the Braves’ side of the deal, courtesy of Dan Szymborski, can be found here) for a sizable package of prospects, including two from baseball’s Top 100. Coming back to Oakland is catcher Shea Langeliers, center fielder Cristian Pache, power-armed relief prospect Ryan Cusick, and polished teenage righty Joey Estes. All four new A’s prospects have been added to the team’s prospect list, both in the article and over on The Board.

In our opinion, the best of that group is 24-year-old Shea Langeliers. Ranking 70th overall and eighth among the catching prospects on our recently published Top 100, Langeliers combines plus or better defense with a power-over-hit game when he’s at the plate as opposed to behind it. His raw power blossomed into game power during the 2021 season, and while Langeliers isn’t an especially instinctual hitter (he projects as a sub-50 bat with contact issues), he has the potential to deliver 20-plus home runs per year. He has Gold Glove potential, with great hands and mobility to go with a strong, accurate arm that shuts down the running game. He also earns raves for his catching intangibles in terms of managing the game and working with pitchers. Theoretically, he’s lined up to start the year at Triple-A, be added to the 40-man after the season, and debut in 2023. His future in Oakland is tied closely and directly to that of incumbent star Sean Murphy, who reaches his first year of arbitration in 2023. We think Langeliers’ presence makes it more likely that Murphy is traded in the next 18 months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s second stab at an offseason continues at a brisk pace with the biggest move yet this week, a blockbuster trade that sees the A’s send first baseman Matt Olson to the Braves in a five-player deal. Atlanta didn’t get off lightly, parting with outfielder Cristian Pache, catcher Shea Langeliers (who were Nos. 72 and 70, respectively, on our preseason Top 100 prospects list), and pitchers Ryan Cusick and Joey Estes to whatever the heck they’re calling the stadium in Oakland this year. (We’ll have much more on those four prospects coming later from Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein in a separate post.)

Fresh off a new collective bargaining agreement, the A’s have let it be known that they’re ready for business in no uncertain terms. While there was no obvious requirement to trade Olson quickly — he’s two full seasons away from hitting free agency — Oakland would be hard-pressed to get an even larger package than this. I’d personally like to see the franchise actually keep one of its stars past the point at which the team can get market value, but if you’re determined to trade Olson, I can’t think of a much better situation. Many teams need first base help, and with 15 designated hitter jobs now needing to be filled in the National League, help on the easier end of the defensive spectrum comes at a premium. If you want to add a first baseman in free agency, you basically have one superstar (Freddie Freeman), one good player (Anthony Rizzo), and an interesting slugger that you’re not quite sure is a full-time option at the position (Kyle Schwarber) to choose from before the talent pool becomes a waterfall. Read the rest of this entry »

Even given the lockout, the Mets have already had a banner offseason, adding three former All-Stars — Max Scherzer, Starling Marte, and Eduardo Escobar — to the roster via free agency. On Saturday, they traded for a fourth, sending pitching prospects J.T. Ginn and Adam Oller to the Athletics for 33-year-old right-hander Chris Bassitt, who made his first All-Star team in 2021, the best season of his seven-year major league career.

Originally drafted by the White Sox in 2011 and then acquired by the A’s in the December ’14 deal involving Marcus Semien and Jeff Samardzija, Bassitt is something of a late bloomer. He threw just 143.2 major league innings before undergoing Tommy John surgery in May 2016, and didn’t make it back to a major league mound until July ’18, his age-29 season. He’s been very good in parts of four seasons since then, pitching to a 3.23 ERA (76 ERA-) and 3.82 FIP (89 FIP-) in 412 innings. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, his 2.29 ERA ranked third in the American League, his 3.59 FIP 10th, and his 1.3 WAR 14th (his 2.3 bWAR was third).

Though Bassitt pitched to a 3.15 ERA and 3.34 FIP in 157.1 innings last year, his season took a terrifying turn on August 17, when a 100 mph line drive off the bat of the White Sox’s Brian Goodwin hit him on the right side of the face. He suffered facial lacerations and a displaced tripod fracture of his right cheek, the latter of which required surgery, but thankfully, he avoided a concussion or any damage to his vision. He was able to return to the A’s after missing five weeks, making two abbreviated but reassuring starts in late September.

Before the injury, Bassitt led the AL in both innings and starts, but he wound up falling 4.2 frames short of qualifying for the ERA title. Among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 0.86 homers per nine ranked third, his ERA fourth (Robbie Ray, the only one of those top four to qualify, finished at 2.84), his FIP fifth, and his 18.8% strikeout-to-walk differential 11th. His 3.3 WAR was tied for 11th among all AL pitchers regardless of innings. Read the rest of this entry »