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

Enyel De Los Santos, RHP, San Diego (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 24   Top 100: NR
Line: 7 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 8 K

Notes
The good-bodied De Los Santos, acquired from Seattle for Joaquin Benoit in November of 2015, missed bats with all three of his pitches last night, garnering swings and misses on his 92-95 mph fastball both within the strike zone and above it and with his fading changeup. De Los Santos also has a solid-average curveball that he can bend into the zone for cheap, early-count strikes the third time through the lineup, but he’s becoming more adept at burying it in the dirt when he’s ahead. He generally lives in the strike zone and is a good bet to start; the only knock I’ve heard from scouts is that the stuff plays down due to poor extension, which might explain the modest strikeout rate despite good reports on the stuff.

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“Watch a batting practice of mine and it’s real boring,” said Freddie Freeman with a smile. The Atlanta first baseman is back, and he’s playing third base right now. You’d think the change of position might be the strangest thing about him. After studying angles with the team’s infield coach Ron Washington, though, he feels like playing third won’t actually be so difficult. What’s weirder is his approach during batting practice. As both his numbers and geometry suggest, however, his unusual BP strategy makes sense for him.

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This year, we’ve seen the debut of two 24-year-old lefties who have taken their own paths to the big leagues. Jordan Montgomery in New York and Sean Newcomb in Atlanta both look like they’re dealing, but they’ve had to work to get here. Listed at 6-foot-6 and 6-foot-5, respectively, it’s worth wondering if their height has slowed down the development of their command, if it’s taken them longer to get their impressive levers in the right places. There’s some evidence that might be the case. But these two pitchers remind us that there are very few absolutes when it comes to mechanics, and that even tall pitchers are as different from each other as they are from the general population.

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All along, Sean Newcomb has been very much an individual pitching prospect. And yet, he’s also been several pitching prospects, innumerable pitching prospects. Newcomb has been one of so many young pitchers with tantalizing stuff, but just not enough control. Every single one of those pitchers has always been unique, but it’s such a familiar profile. Throwing hard is hard. Throwing different pitches hard is hard. Controlling those pitches might be the hardest thing of all. Newcomb’s always been young, so he’s always had time, but each and every one of us has been burned. We all recall that pitchers who just couldn’t make it.

After being drafted in the first round some years back by the Angels, Newcomb was good without being very good. In 2015, he missed bats, but he yielded too many walks. In 2016, he missed bats, but he yielded too many walks. Earlier in the minors in 2017, he missed bats, but he yielded too many walks. There were small signs of progress, sure, but nothing dramatic. Newcomb remained a work in progress.

Here we are now, suddenly, with Newcomb having started four games in the majors. And he’s…thrown strikes. Newcomb has left his old identity behind.

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It’s difficult to overstate how much Freddie Freeman means to the Braves. He is, at present, the face of the franchise, and rather than trade Freeman, his general manager would sooner give his right arm. It’s not just that Freeman’s the best player on the Braves — Freeman is the Braves, for all intents and purposes. Although he isn’t Mike Trout, he’s the Braves’ Mike Trout, and the Angels aren’t going to trade Mike Trout. They’re going to cherish him, feature him, build around him, promote the hell out of him. The Braves have been going through a difficult stage. Freeman’s helped to keep them marketable.

Freeman’s great. He’s gotten some amount of MVP support in three separate years. He’s long been firmly entrenched as the Braves’ everyday first baseman, and there was never really any question about that. That is, until now. As soon as Freeman got injured, the team dealt for Matt Adams. Adams started to hit well almost immediately. Now it looks like a healthy Freeman could play third base in order to keep Adams in the lineup. What’s even weirder is, I think it makes sense?

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Baseball has long been a game of tradition, and one rightful criticism of our “national pastime” has been its tendency to be slow to change. One of the most welcome enhancements of some fans’ enjoyment of the game has been the introduction of Statcast in recent years. No, it’s not for everyone, but its existence — and most of all, its availability for free to the populace — adds another avenue of potential involvement for the fan base, while also offering countless opportunities for study of any aspect of our game from a nearly infinite number of perspectives.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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The season opened with a curious experiment that saw the Cardinals playing Matt Adams in left field. Adams is a large human being who, till this year, had been a first baseman — and, well, the whole left-field experiment didn’t go particularly well. Due to Matt Carpenter’s presence at first, Adams entered the weekend with just 53 plate appearances to his name — plate appearances in which he’d hit fairly well, but without his usual power.

It’s possible that some regular playing time could get Adams back to his old ways. The Atlanta Braves will be the ones to find out, as they traded for him on Saturday to fill in for the injured Freddie Freeman. Freeman had been playing like a superstar before being hit by a pitch and fracturing his wrist.

It’s a devastating blow to a Braves team that already wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, but you can do a lot worse for a replacement than Adams.

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Well, this sucks. In the midst of a season that looked like it was going to take the Braves first baseman from one of the better hitters in baseball to one of the elite players in the game, Freddie Freeman has hit a roadblock. Or rather, been hit by one. An Aaron Loup fastball in the fifth inning of last night’s game got Freeman in the arm, and today, it’s been reported that an MRI revealed a broken wrist, which will sideline the star first baseman for at least the next couple of months.

Source: #Braves’ Freeman has a fractured left wrist. Expectation is that he will miss at least eight weeks.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) May 18, 2017

This is obviously a huge blow to the Braves, as Freeman was carrying the team on his back. Even with Freeman running a 204 wRC+ to this point, the Braves still had just a 94 wRC+, and without a real backup first baseman on the team, it’s not entirely clear who will replace him in the line-up. The Braves official site lists Jace Peterson as the team’s backup 1B, but he’s now playing third while Adonis Garcia is on the DL. Nick Markakis has played some first base before, but the team isn’t exactly overflowing with outfielders as it is, so then you’re looking at someone like Danny Santana replacing the team’s best hitter for two months.

While the Braves probably weren’t going to be contenders this year, this is a huge blow to their chances to even hang around for the rest of the summer. For a team looking to infuse some optimism into the fanbase with the opening of a new stadium, this is pretty close to the worst news they could receive.

Hopefully, for the Braves and the game’s sake, Freeman comes back to full health for the last few months of the year. Freeman’s at-bats were becoming appointment viewing, and the summer just got a little less interesting for baseball as a whole, and a lot less interesting for fans in Atlanta.

Up until last year, Freddie Freeman was an example of just how good a hitter a player could be without top-shelf power. From 2013 to 2015, he was the only player in MLB to run a 140 or better wRC+ while posting an ISO below .200. He put up the same wRC+ as David Ortiz despite being out-homered by Big Papi 102 to 59, as his .351 BABIP helped him offset the relatively lower number of balls leaving the park. With a bunch of line drives and enough walks to keep the OBP up, Freeman became about as good a hitter as one can be while hitting 20 homers a year.

Last year, though, Freeman found his power stroke, launching 34 home runs and running a .267 ISO, eighth-best in baseball. While he sacrificed a little bit of contact to get there, raising his strikeout rate to 25% in the process, he continued to torch the baseball even when it didn’t leave the field, allowing him to run a .370 BABIP that kept his BA and OBP up even while the strikeouts increased a little bit. His 152 wRC+ was the best of his career and tied him with Miguel Cabrera for the sixth-highest mark of any hitter in 2016. And after the first couple of weeks of 2017, that looks less like a career year and more like what we should start to expect from Freeman going forward.

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