The Braves are short one outfielder for at least six weeks, with Marcell Ozuna placed on the IL after injuring two fingers on his left hand while sliding into third against the Red Sox on Tuesday night. It wasn’t immediately obvious whether Ozuna would miss significant time, with manager Brian Snitker telling the press that the two-time All-Star was going back to Atlanta for tests, but with Wednesday came the news that his stay on the shelf would be a long one.

Ozuna has gotten off to a poor start in 2021, hitting .213/.288/.356 in just over 200 plate appearances, for a 79 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR — a major disappointment for a player coming off an OPS of 1.067 last season. It wouldn’t be the first time he had a bit of a letdown year after what seemed to be a breakout campaign, as was the case with his two seasons in St. Louis, but at least he hit for enough batting average then to be a league-average player in a corner outfield position.

Atlanta hasn’t received much production from Ozuna, but there were several reasons to think that his overall lines would recover. His power numbers are down from past seasons, but he’s partially compensated for that with some of the best plate discipline of his career. ZiPS thought his BABIP of .244 should have actually been more like .298 from his contact data, and Statcast saw similar underperformance, with an xBA of .268 and an xSLG of .471, both numbers more in line with his typical showing. A repeat of 2020’s 179 wRC+ was always unreasonable, but even with this early slump, his Depth Chart-projected wRC+ was still at the 123 it was back in March.

Ozuna suffered a similar injury in 2019, breaking the middle and ring fingers on his right hand while sliding during a pickoff attempt. It probably won’t assuage the worries of Braves fans that he went from an .847 OPS before that injury to a .729 OPS after returning, but I wouldn’t worry much about this limited precedent. I haven’t found much underperformance in hitters returning from broken fingers, and month-to-month play is quite volatile without any injury-based explanations involved. Short of significantly worse news, I wouldn’t be especially concerned about Ozuna after he returns, probably at or near the All-Star break. At least he can take it as consolation that he broke his fingers doing actual baseball things, unlike Zach Plesac, who suffered a broken thumb taking off his shirt.

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These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Packy Naughton, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Salt Lake Age: 25 Org Rank: TBD  FV: 40
Line: 7.2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 8 K

Notes
After he was sitting in the mid-80s in the time surrounding the 2020 shutdown, Naughton’s velocity has rebounded and he’s once again living in the 90-92 range with his tailing fastball. He’s another lefty of the east/west variety, relying on some mechanical funk, working his tailing fastball to both corners, and mixing in three secondary pitches. While Naughton locates his slider to his glove side very consistently, the same way a lot of over-achieving, soft-tossing lefties do, many of them have been a little too far away from the zone to be competitive and the pitch is average on its own. The same is true of his changeup. Naughton’s changeup execution is less consistent than is typical for pitchers who throw this hard but still end up as successful back-of-the-rotation types. He’s looking more like a depth starter than a true No. 5 at this point, but it’s good to see that his velocity has bounced back and that he’s pounding the strike zone like usual. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Games from 5/18

Terrin Vavra, MIF/CF, Baltimore Orioles
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Bowie Age: 24 Org Rank: 9  FV: 45
Line: 3-for-3, 2 BB, HR
Notes
This makes five consecutive multi-hit games for Vavra. Cursory video analysis shows no change in his swing or physicality; he’s just on an epic early-season heater and should probably be at Triple-A. The real development here is his defensive movement: After playing both middle infield spots with Colorado, he’s now also getting reps in center field with Baltimore. Those who miss and appreciate all-fields contact will love Vavra, who is very adept at hitting outside pitches to the opposite field. He projects as a good multi-positional role player. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite all the injuries the Mets are dealing with — including losing two key regulars to hamstring injuries in the same inning on Sunday and then two more players the next day — they still lead the NL East with a 20-17 record while the Braves lag behind and languish below .500 at 20-23. The latter’s hopes for a fourth straight division title have taken a significant hit over the past several days with their own losses of two starting pitchers. Mike Soroka, who had yet to appear for the team this year, underwent exploratory surgery on his inflamed right Achilles tendon on Monday, while Huascar Ynoa was diagnosed with a fracture in his right hand sustained when he punched a dugout bench in frustration on Sunday, thus interrupting a breakout season. Both will be out until at least the All-Star break, and quite possibly longer than that.

For Soroka, this is just the latest disappointment in a frustrating series of events that began last August 3. Three starts into the follow-up of a stellar rookie season in which he made the NL All-Star team and placed second in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he tore his right Achilles, sidelining him for the remainder of the 2020 campaign. The Braves hoped that he would be available to join their rotation by mid-April, but after making just one Grapefruit League appearance and several in simulated games at the team’s alternate site, he was shut down due to shoulder discomfort and wasn’t cleared to resume throwing until late April.

After experiencing renewed discomfort in his surgically repaired Achilles during his recent workouts, Soroka had an MRI, and when that proved inconclusive, he underwent an exploratory procedure and clean-up by Dr. Robert Anderson, the surgeon who performed his initial repair. Via The Athletic’s David O’Brien, Anderson will reevaluate the pitcher in two-to-four weeks, “to determine if anything else needs to be done and when he might be able to resume his rehab schedule.” Read the rest of this entry »

Building off of yesterday’s American League conference call agendas, let’s move on to the National League and see what’s on the docket for the teams of the senior circuit.

Arizona Diamondbacks

• We’re over .500 and we’re banged up. This team is better than people on the outside thought. That said, I don’t think we’ll be exceptionally busy in terms of buying this summer. We’re not catching the Padres or Dodgers, and let’s not forget about the Giants. Let’s stick to the plan and just keep getting better long-term.
• The rotation has been up-and-down, and Corbin Martin is probably the only minor league piece with a chance to contribute in that area. Let’s get some ideas going as to how we get through 162 games with depth issues in that department.
• Let’s have some initial talks about draft strategy, as we’re picking sixth. It feels like there is a four-player tier at the top of the draft, so let’s see if there’s a tier-two player we like at six, or if we should be more creative and spread the wealth a bit.
• The offense overall has been good, but our infield is not hitting. There aren’t any immediate moves to make, but it sure would be nice to see Seth Beer get off to a nice start to gauge whether he can get some at-bats up here as a Christian Walker replacement.
• We love having the presence of Eduardo Escobar and Asdrúbal Cabrera, but there should be a market for both this July, and we should be listening. Let’s focus on arms in those discussions.
• The same goes for David Peralta, even though he’s been our second best hitter and is signed for next year as well. That extra year, which is a cheap one at that ($7.5 million), should help generate some interest.

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Officially recognized or not, one team’s no-hitter is another team’s humiliation, and so the Braves were nearly doubly humbled during Sunday’s twin bill against the Diamondbacks — and at home, no less. In the opener at Truist Park, Zac Gallen held Atlanta to a lone Freddie Freeman single, while in the nightcap, Madison Bumgarner kept them completely hitless while facing the minimum number of batters. Though the Braves rebounded to beat the Cubs on Monday, they’re just 10-12 thus far, tied for third in the NL East and bearing only passing resemblance to the team that has won three straight division titles.

To be fair, until Sunday the Braves’ fortunes had been on the rise. After opening the season by sandwiching two four-game losing streaks around a four-game winning streak, they had gone 5-2 by taking two out of three from the Cubs in Chicago, splitting a two-game set with the Yankees in the Bronx, and then winning the series opener against the Diamondbacks. Even so, the team entered Sunday hitting just .228/.323/.424, and they’ve fallen to .219/.315/.407 (97 wRC+) even with Monday’s 8-7 win. They’ve managed to stretch that discouraging batting line to 4.50 runs per game, good for fifth in the NL, but on the other side of the ball, they’re allowing a league-worst 5.00 runs per game.

Sunday sticks out like a sore thumb, though, so we’ll dig into the offense first. By getting just one hit over two games of any length, the Braves became just the second team in the past 113 years to join a very short list:

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Which players are most essential to their team’s postseason odds? While that list contains many of the best players in baseball, it’s not a strict ranking of the sport’s brightest stars. When looking at who is the most irreplaceable in the short-term, there are questions beyond just how good the player in question is. It becomes a matter of marginal utility. To a team already saddled with a doomed 2021 outlook, losing a star is unfortunate — obviously very much so for the player in question — but won’t really affect their chances of making the playoffs. The Colorado Rockies could build a time machine, kidnap Ted Williams, and stick a very confused Splendid Splinter in their lineup and it still wouldn’t change their near-term fate. And the same goes for teams at the opposite end of the spectrum — you can’t tip over your house with a leaf blower.

Of course, some teams are simply better equipped to deal with these kinds of nasty surprises than others, able to rely on enviable depth to weather absences. Two such nasty surprises have happened recently and illustrate the point well, albeit in opposite directions. Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals was placed on the Injured List with shoulder inflammation after a mess of a start that saw him caught rubbing his shoulder on camera. (For more on the Strasburg injury, check out my colleague Jay Jaffe’s piece discussing what it means to Washington.) Another scare involved Mookie Betts, who took a hard, high-and-in offering from Rafael Montero directly on his forearm.

Luckily, Betts’ injury seems unlikely to sideline his for long — Dave Roberts says he expects him back later this week — but even if it had meant a longer absence, the Dodgers would have had little need to panic. Even in the worst-case scenario, where the team loses him for the rest of the season, it’s hard to derail this playoff train; the ZiPS projections have their playoff probability collapsing from 99.6% to…97.5%. A drop-off of two percentage points is a relatively minor one, smaller than the projection change if the White Sox lost Adam Eaton or the Astros had to suddenly replace Yuli Gurriel. Presumably, we have unanimous agreement that Betts is easily the most valuable player listed here.

The Nationals, on the other hand, are very reliant on their stars. Should they lose any of their key players — mainly Strasburg, Juan Soto, Trea Turner, Max Scherzer — it would nearly doom their October hopes. Soto joined Strasberg on the IL yesterday after suffering a strained left shoulder. Losing him for the duration would cause the club to miss the playoffs in 81% of the simulations in which the Nats would otherwise make it.

As steep as that sounds, from a quantitative standpoint, losing Soto isn’t the biggest possible loss in baseball in terms of playoff probability; ZiPS already sees the Nats having an uphill climb at 12.2%. The teams that have the most to lose are those with two key elements: a playoff fate that is very much undecided and and a lack of ready replacements elsewhere in the organization. So, as of Tuesday morning, here are baseball’s most irreplaceable players. The below changes in playoff odds assume a season-ending injury and the use of an in-house replacement. Just to illustrate how changeable this list is, only two of the top 10 are repeats from 2020.

Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels (-35.5%)

As the best player of his generation, Trout has a way of finishing at the top of lists, but his placement here is actually fairly unusual. He has sometimes missed this ranking completely, as the Angels have an impeccable record of building inadequate teams around their franchise player. But the AL West is open enough, and the Angels are good enough, that this is the year they really can’t afford to lose him. Trout going down would already be a huge loss even if the Angels had an extra league-average outfielder hanging around the roster. But with the likely in-house solution being to shuffle around the outfield, resulting in more playing for Juan Lagares and some combination of Scott Schebler and eventually Taylor Ward, that’s not the team’s situation.

Gerrit Cole, New York Yankees (-29.5%)

That Cole ranks so highly is not a slight on the quality of the Yankees’ starting pitching. They’re actually quite deep with interesting, talented arms who could step in if the worst should happen and they lose their ace. What is a problem is that after Cole, the Yankees have a lot of pitchers with spotty injury records. ZiPS already assumes that the team will have to turn to that depth multiple times before 2021’s final pitch is thrown. To lose the guy they want to set-and-forget at 200 innings would be a big blow. Complicating the picture is that while the Yankees are still the favorite, their slow start does matter and means that they’ve already lost a good chunk of their margin for error over the Rays, Blue Jays, and Red Sox in the division.

Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta Braves (-28.3%)

Acuña wasn’t the National League MVP in 2020, but he’s certainly the player I’d least like to lose if I owned the Atlanta Braves. All the projection systems love him for obvious reasons, but none more than ZiPS, which sees him as the only player in baseball to have non-laughable odds of becoming baseball’s first 50/50 club member. Drew Waters, Ender Inciarte, and Guillermo Heredia could replace the at-bats, but none of them have the recipe to replace the awesomesauce Acuña uses to feast on opposing pitchers.

Alex Bregman, Houston Astros (-28.1%)

Houston’s rotation depth over the last four years has descended from utopia to yikes and now the team’s offense is absolutely crucial to the Astros playing October baseball. The franchise’s offensive core may have originally been led by Jose Altuve and then Carlos Correa and George Springer, but Alex Bregman is now The Man, the hitter they can least afford to have missing from the lineup. ZiPS sees Aledmys Díaz and Abraham Toro as better-than-replacement talent, but Houston’s unlikely to run away with the division the way it has in some recent seasons, making every win crucial.

Jacob deGrom, New York Mets (-25.0%)

deGrom drops from first to fourth on the list, but that’s not due to any decline in his performance. Rather, with the Mets under new ownership, the team didn’t go into the season with five starting pitchers who looked good on paper and a roster that couldn’t withstand injuries to the rotation. This time around, the Mets actually have options. None of them could fully replace deGrom, mind you, but plenty could at least be respectable fifth starters on a good team.

Carlos Correa, Houston Astros (-24.1%)

Given Correa’s injury history, the fact that he ranks highly on a list like this should greatly concern the Astros. ZiPS sees Bregman as the clearly superior player but also sees the options after Correa as less enticing. Díaz isn’t a particularly good defensive shortstop, and Toro wouldn’t be an option at the position. Alex De Goti has interesting power but is a massive downgrade from Correa. Houston would likely have to explore a trade if misfortune befell Correa, but the team may have other needs, so that’s not a great scenario either.

Luis Robert, Chicago White Sox (-23.2%)

From a straight-up projection standpoint, Robert falls short of most of the names on this list. Just on the Sox, ZiPS thinks Lucas Giolito is a significantly more valuable player overall, at least when he’s not pitching in the morning. But if something should happen to Giolito, Chicago has spare arms to patch up the hole. If the team loses Robert, let’s just say ZiPS does not have a case of Leurymania or Engelalia. The race with the Twins is likely going to be a tight one and the Royals have shown surprising spunk. The White Sox could ill afford an injury to their center fielder.

Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins (-22.7%)

Is this the year that Byron Buxton finally stays healthy and is awesome? In just nine games, he’s already collected an impressive 1.5 WAR! Buxton will fall off from his 15-WAR pace, of course, but a lot of the scenarios in which ZiPS sees Minnesota taking down Chicago involve a solid season from Buxton. Even if his offense regressed hard toward his career 93 wRC+, the team would struggle to replace his glove, which has remained a major plus even through his various injuries.

Anthony Rendon, Los Angeles Angels (-21.8%)

To nobody’s surprise, Rendon isn’t quite the player that Mike Trout is. But the Angels have real playoff hopes, and even with the team having better replacements for injured infielders than outfielders, it would struggle to replace Rendon. Franklin Barreto’s elbow is enough to just squeeze Rendon onto this list, where he’d otherwise finish 12th, with Gleyber Torres taking the 10-spot.

Freddie Freeman, Atlanta Braves (-21.7%)

I love Pablo Sandoval, but not as my starting first baseman. Nor would Austin Riley playing first (with Johan Camargo, Orlando Arcia, and Ehire Adrianza pitching in at third) remedy the situation. Freeman’s the best first baseman in baseball, and even if the position isn’t as important as it was 40 years ago, he’s a crucial part of the lineup.

Ian Anderson was one of the better stories of the 2020 season. Entering the year as the No. 3 prospect in the Braves’ system and the No. 44 prospect in all of baseball, he was seen as a future mid-rotation starter who could help quickly. He did just that and more: Added to the rotation in late August, Anderson finished seventh in the NL Rookie of the Year voting despite making just six starts. He put up a 1.95 ERA in those outings, and while the supporting data said he wasn’t the Cy Young-level pitcher that number might suggest, he was still awfully good. He was even better in the postseason, allowing just two runs over 18 innings, striking out 24 and giving up just 11 hits.

Anderson maintained his rookie eligibility entering 2021 and earned the No. 2 ranking in Atlanta’s system (Eric Longenhagen and I discussed putting him at No. 1 ahead of Cristian Pache) and the No. 13 spot in this year’s Top 100 list. He looked like the cornerstone of a young Braves rotation that would help lead them to National League East title contention.

His first start of the year was vintage Anderson (or at least as vintage as you can get for a guy who is still a rookie), as he gave up one run over five innings and struck out seven. His next two were far from it: 11 hits and seven runs allowed over 10.1 innings. Game score is far from a perfect measure, but it’s a simple and quick look at a start, and Anderson’s game scores of 47 and 45 in his last two outings represent the two worst marks of his career. This could be a blip, or there could be some tough luck in there. But a closer look at the data shows that this is more than just a randomly-generated bad run.

When asked to evaluate a pitcher not living up to expectations, these are the first three questions I try to answer.

• Without knowing anything internally, is there anything to worry about in terms of health?
• Has the pitcher changed anything in terms of usage and location?
• Has the pitcher seen his pitch shapes change due to alterations in his mechanics or spin rate?

The Health Question

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As baseball re-adjusts to the typical rigors of a 162-game marathon, the enormity of the season looms large. The rush of new beginnings has already subsided after cresting atop pomp, circumstance, and red, white, and blue bunting. Seven months of this stuff can take a toll on the mind, because even though the gatekeepers of fun want the players to act more robotic, they’re still hopelessly human.

To break up the monotony – to prevent the edges from blurring together – life needs texture. The smoothness of everyday things, people, and feelings must be offset by secondary and tertiary characters, those who remind us what it’s like to experience things in technicolor rather than dull gray. For most of us, it’s the fun extended family member who you only see every so often, or the friend of a friend who’s always good for a chuckle.

For Ronald Acuña Jr., it’s games against the Miami Marlins. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball, minor league spring training, and big league action. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Jonathan Cannon, RHP, Georgia: 7 IP, 5 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 9 K

After throwing 11.2 scoreless innings out of the pen last spring as a freshman for Georgia, Cannon entered the year as a potential late-first round pick this summer, earning draft eligibility as a sophomore due to age. He’s had an up-and-down season, but was at his best over the weekend as he shutdown one of the top teams in the country in Vanderbilt, while throwing 75 of his 111 pitches for strikes. At 6-foot-6 and 215 pounds, Cannon has a classic starting pitcher’s frame to go with an on-line delivery and clean arm action. On the season his stats don’t impress, with a 4.35 ERA and 21 hits allowed in 20 innings, but with just three walks and 24 strikeouts, the numbers indicate an ability to locate, which is exactly what he did against the Commodores.

Cannon has decent velocity, with a fastball that averages 94 mph and touches 97, but his three-quarters arm angle produces less than desirable shape to the heater. His mid-80s slider isn’t a big breaker and his upper-80s changeup has decent fade but is a bit on the firm side. There’s nothing even bordering on nasty in the arsenal, but Cannon can locate any of his pitches in all four quadrants of the strike zone, and knows how to work outside it when looking for a chase. With continued success, he should return to those pre-season late first-round projections, and overall feels like a classic safety-over-upside pick. Read the rest of this entry »