I just returned from a 10-day trip to Florida that began in the Tampa area, progressed through the southwest part of the state, and ended in Jupiter and West Palm Beach. During the trip, I saw a mix of extended spring training, Florida State League and amateur baseball, though there were times when I passed on the latter in order to see more games. For instance, the first morning I woke up in the Tampa area I could have headed north to Gainesville for part of the University of Tennessee at Florida series, but that would have meant driving five hours round trip and giving up an extended/FSL double up on at least one of those days, and probably two of them.

Instead I stayed in town and saw five games during my first three days away. I spent my first morning at Blue Jays extended spring training watching them play the Tigers. While a few guys from Detroit’s extended group are mentioned on the Tigers prospect list (the younger Wilmer Fenelon, Iverson Leonardo, J.D. McLaughlin), the lone new player who I’d like to call attention to is switch-hitting SS/3B Abel Bastidas, who won’t turn 19 until November. Bastidas has a well-composed 6-foot-2 frame, and he showed some pretty advanced pitch recognition in just a few at-bats, making a mid-flight adjustment to a couple of offspeed pitches, showing at least average bat speed, and laying down average run times. I didn’t see enough defensively to have a real opinion about Bastidas’ ability to play shortstop, but this is a well-rounded, projectable, switch-hitting infielder who everyone should be keyed-in on during the extended/Complex League period.

Eric Pardinho started the game for Toronto and sat 90-91 mph with below-average secondary stuff. It’s nice that he’s healthy and pitching but it’s fine to move on from considering him a prospect at this point. Similarly (I’m getting the bad news out of the way here), I left Florida highly skeptical of shortstop Manuel Beltre, who signed with Toronto for $2.35 million in 2021. Lauded for his drive and grit, there isn’t much in the way of tools here. Read the rest of this entry »

When Alek Manoah takes the mound against the Boston Red Sox this afternoon, he’ll do so with an early-career track record befitting one of baseball’s best young pitchers. Since making his major league debut last May, the 24-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander has allowed just 89 hits, with 145 strikeouts, in 129-and-two-thirds innings. Moreover, he augments a 12-2 won-lost record — as a team, Toronto has won all but four of his 23 career starts — with a 3.05 ERA and a 3.78 FIP.

And you probably don’t want to crowd the plate against the 6-foot-6, 260-pound hurler. Manoah, whom the Blue Jays drafted 11th overall in 2019 out of West Virginia University, led all AL pitchers last year with 16 HBPs. A gentle giant off the field, he takes no prisoners between the white lines.

Manoah talked about his repertoire — primarily his slider and his two-seamer — when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park last week.

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David Laurila: What do you know about your pitches that you didn’t when you first signed?

Alek Manoah: “I always knew the sinker was pretty good, just based off the hitters’ feedback. But now, understanding the numbers a little bit, it’s how drastically different it is from my four-seam. That and how it plays with my changeup. I think that would be the biggest thing.” Read the rest of this entry »

Peter Gammons didn’t invent the Sunday notes column, but few would dispute that he perfected it. The 77-year-old sportswriter-turned-TV-analyst did so at The Boston Globe, where he began a career that has seen him become the world’s most-influential baseball columnist. To say that Gammons has been an influence on the column you are currently reading would be an understatement.

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Gammons for years, yet had never asked him about the genesis of his own Sunday column. Chatting with him at Fenway Park earlier this week, I decided to change that.

“I loved the notion of the notes column, and how Dick Young used it,” Gammons said of the late New York-based sportswriter. “I always thought there should be one for every sport. Bob Ryan and I talked about it when we were both interns, in 1968. I’ve always loved the minor leagues, and in 1970 — 1969 was my first full year with the Globe —I asked, ‘Can I write a notes column on the minor leagues?’ The Globe people said fine. This was for the Sunday paper.”

Gammons recalled writing about Bob Montgomery, who came up through the Boston system before catching for them for 10 big-league seasons. (Later a TV analyst on Red Sox games, Montgomery has the distinction of being the last player for any team to come to the plate without a batting helmet.)

In typical Gammons fashion, the other player he mentioned having covered in his nascent notes days was equal parts obscure and interesting. Calling him “a minor league legend as a hitter,” and citing his .300 big-league batting average, Gammons name-checked Chris Coletta. 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 »

Hagen Danner has had a unique ride in our rankings. The 2017 second-round draft pick was No. 31 on our 2019 Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list, and after falling off completely in 2020 and ’21, he’s now a helium-filled No.14 on our ’22 edition. A position change has fueled the ascent; previously a catcher, Danner was moved to the mound in the months preceding the 2020 shutdown.

Last season saw the 23-year-old right-hander emerge as a shutdown reliever. Pitching against professional hitters for the first time, Danner logged a 2.02 ERA with 42 strikeouts in 35.2 innings with High-A Vancouver. Moreover, those numbers came courtesy of a power arsenal that has prompted our own Eric Longenhagen to proclaim that the Huntington Beach High School product is “on the fast track.”

Danner discussed his conversion — which wasn’t exactly a conversion — and the heater/slutter/curveball combination that he takes with him to the mound, following a spring-training outing against the Pittsburgh Pirates. He proceeded to break camp with the Double-A New Hampshire Fisher Cats.

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David Laurila: You were a two-way player in high school. How much did you actually understand pitching at that time?

Hagen Danner: “A lot. It was my main position until senior year, at which time I decided to just swing the bat. That allowed me to get drafted as a hitter and let me try to live out my dream of being a hitter in the big leagues. When that wasn’t going right, it was an easy transition.”

Laurila: You were drafted as a catcher. Why that position?

Danner: “It was what I played in high school when I wasn’t pitching, although I also was a third baseman. I guess it was better [draft-wise] to be as a power-hitting catcher. It helped being able to play defense behind the plate, too.”

Laurila: Do you feel that you had potential as a hitter? There was a lot of swing-and-miss to your game, but you did have a [.409] OBP as a 19-year-old in rookie ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Gausman had a career year with the San Francisco Giants last season. Pitching a personal-best 192 innings, the 31-year-old right-hander won 14 of 20 decisions while logging 227 strikeouts with a 2.81 ERA and a 3.00 FIP. Buoyed by that performance, he was bestowed a five-year, $110M contract by the Toronto Blue Jays, who inked him to a free-agent deal in December.

Gausman’s Giants experience was as educational as it was successful. Signed to a less-lucrative free-agent deal with San Francisco prior to the 2020 season, the LSU product embraced not only his new surroundings, but also the organization’s pitching development process.

“Their big thing over there is pitching to your strengths, and we’d do things to kind of teach ourselves what we’re good at,” explained Gausman, who’d previously pitched for the Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves, and Cincinnati Reds. “For me, it was pitching up in the zone. My bullpens would be focused on strings up in the zone, trying to throw above them, and then on splits down in the zone.”

Brian Bannister, who Gausman called one of the best pitching minds he’s ever been around, played an important role. The righty pointed to Bannister’s knowledge of how grips work for each individual pitcher, how an arm path works, and “what you can do to manipulate a ball.” Gausman wasn’t the only beneficiary. San Francisco’s Director of Pitching also helped Anthony DeSclafani have a career year. 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 »

If I told you that two contending teams swapped major leaguers, you’d probably have an idea of what that looks like. Maybe a reliever and a fourth outfielder changed hands, or something like that. The Blue Jays and the White Sox didn’t do that, though; they swapped catchers, as Jeff Passan first reported:

The Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays are in agreement on a trade that will send catcher Zack Collins to the Blue Jays in exchange for catcher Reese McGuire, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 3, 2022

But even though both Reese McGuire and Zack Collins play catcher, they do so in very different ways. Amusingly, as we at FanGraphs work through our Positional Power Rankings, Collins is essentially positionless power. His home run totals in the minors and batted ball metrics in the majors tell a consistent story; if he can figure out a way to limit his strikeouts, he’ll be a fearsome hitter.

In a previous era, that might have secured him a starting catching role. But our newfound understanding of the value of receiving has exposed Collins as one of the worst defenders at the position — one who was worth a ghastly 14 runs below average in only 506 innings of catching last year. It’s not an easy skill to show with a GIF or two, and that sounds like a ton of runs to surrender in such a short time. But that matches up with the eye test, and the Blue Jays will likely use Collins mainly as a first baseman and DH.
Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Ridings strikes an imposing figure on the mound. He also misses a lot of bats. Straddling the rubber at 6-foot-8, 225 pounds, the 26-year-old right-handed reliever is coming off a season where he recorded 42 strikeouts in 29 minor-league innings, and another seven in a five-inning cup of coffee with the New York Yankees. Moreover, he allowed just 20 hits and six walks in the 34 cumulative frames.

Drafted out of Division-III Haverford College by the Chicago Cubs in 2016 — the Yankees are his third organization — Ridings comes out of the bullpen with an attack-dog mindset.

“Right now, I’m the guy that wants to blow doors off,” explained Ridings, whom New York signed in January 2021 after he was released by the Kansas City Royals. “I’m trying to strike out as many guys as humanly possible.”

The 18% swinging strike rate that Eric Longenhagen noted when writing up Ridings for our 2022 Yankees Top Prospect list — the righty is No. 21 in those rankings — comes courtesy of three-pitch mix. A heater that sits mid-to-high 90s and tops out in triple digits is his bread-and-butter, and a slider he began throwing in spring training of last year is his best secondary. A knuckle-curve rounds out his repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday morning, the Blue Jays and Rockies agreed to a trade sending Randal Grichuk and cash considerations to Colorado, with Raimel Tapia and minor league infielder Adrian Pinto joining Toronto. Rob Gillies of The Associated Press reports that the amount of cash is just over $9.7 million, which accounts for nearly half of the remaining salary on Grichuk’s five-year contract. With this move, the Blue Jays get the left-handed outfielder they had been searching for, and the Rockies get another power hitter to plug into the middle of their lineup.

Grichuk signed that five-year extension (worth $52 million) after putting up 2.1 WAR in 2018, his first season in Toronto. He blasted 31 home runs the next year, but that power was the only positive aspect of his approach at the plate. Over the last three years, his offensive output has been nine percent below league average, and that’s despite an ISO that sits a hair above .200. His biggest issue has been getting on base at a regular clip. His walk rate has been remarkably consistent, sitting around 5.8% over the last six years, though it dipped to its lowest point since his rookie season last year. With a batted-ball profile focused on fly ball contact, his BABIP isn’t much better.

In the field, Grichuk has been a solid defender across all three outfield positions. Splitting his time between center and right field over the last few years, the advanced defensive metrics rate his work in the corner a little higher than up the middle. All three metrics were disappointed in his ability to cover enough ground in the field as the Blue Jays’ full-time center fielder in 2020. But moved over to right in ’21, he graded out as one of the better fielders at the position on a per-inning basis, accumulating 6 DRS and 5.5 UZR in just 330.1 innings. Read the rest of this entry »