Following the final game of the regular season, Jose Altuve told a small group of reporters that once October rolls around, “everybody starts with zero wins and zero losses, and everybody’s average is zero.”
Nearly a month later, the Astros are even-steven with the Dodgers in the World Series and Altuve’s average (.322) is farther above zero than anyone’s in the postseason (minimum 20 at bats). That’s hardly a surprise. The 27-year-old second baseman captured his third American League batting title this year, hitting a career high .346. He doesn’t consider it his biggest personal accomplishment to date.
“That would be the Silver Slugger,” Altuve told the scribes, citing an honor he was awarded last year. “With the batting title, they only care if you hit .300/.320, but the Silver Slugger is all around — doubles, triples, home runs — and I’m 5’ 5” and 160 pounds.”
His numbers have been anything but Lilliputian. Over the past four seasons, the Venezuelan spark plug has a .334/.384/.496 slash line and 254 extra-base hits. And while he leads MLB in one-base hits over that same period, it’s not as though singles are a bad thing. Read the rest of this entry »
Keston Hiura went into the 2017 draft with a compromised throwing arm and a reputation as the best pure hitter available. Downplaying the severity of the former and embracing the latter, the Milwaukee Brewers selected the University of California, Irvine, infielder with the ninth overall pick of the first round. They’re not regretting the decision. Hiura began his professional career by slashing a healthy .371/.422/.611 in 187 plate appearances between Rookie-level ball and Low-A Wisconsin.
Just as importantly, his elbow appears sound. Hiura primarily DH’d during his initial taste of pro ball, but he played second base during his stint in instructional league. He probably could have done so earlier. When I talked to him in August, the erstwhile Anteater told me that his elbow has been back to 100% for approximately a month.
Our conversation was primarily about his offensive acumen, which is spurred by a smooth right-handed stroke honed between trips to the library. Keston Wee Hing Natsuo Hiura — his father was born in California and is of Japanese descent; his mother was born in Hawaii and is of Chinese descent — majored in business economics at UC Irvine.
———
Hiura on his hitting mechanics: “I have a different swing than most people. You see people with leg kicks and you see people with toe taps, and I do both. I toe tap into a leg kick — a pretty high leg kick — and then my swing is very inside-out oriented with a high finish at the end. I also finish with both hands on the bat. That helps me get quick through the zone with some good bat speed, as well as generating power with my backside. I’m able to drive the ball to all sides of the field.
Periodically, I’ll be posting notes from in-person observations at Fall Instructional League and Arizona Fall League play. Each are essentially the scouting calendar’s dessert course, both in their timing and sometimes dubious value. I take bad fall looks with a large grain of salt as players are sometimes fatigued, disinterested, put in difficult situations purposefully so that they’ll fail, or some combination of these or other bits of important context. With that in mind here are links to past notes followed by this edition’s.
Instructional League plays is more or less complete. What follows represents my looks from the schedule’s last couple weeks. As the short season progressed, I made an effort to see teams whose minor-league complexes are located in the Phoenix Metro Area’s eastern reaches. Chronological drafts of this post were confusing, as many of these teams play against one another due to ease of travel. As such, notes in this edition are organized by team instead of date.
Colorado 2BShael Mendoza had a monster summer in the Pioneer League, slashing .362/.412/.519 while swiping 25 bases in 55 games. While Mendoza has strong hands and wrists that lead to loud contact when he squares a ball up, he has some issues that dilute the quality and amount of contact he makes. He’s often out on his front foot early or excessively and his bat isn’t in the hitting zone for very long. He’s also a fringe athlete without great actions at second base. I do think there’s some physical ability with which to work, evident in Mendoza’s power on contact, but I think there’s significant risk that his 2017 on-paper performance was a bit of a mirage.
Corey Knebel has come a long way since I first talked to him four years ago. At the time, the hard-throwing right-hander was wrapping up an Arizona Fall League season, five months after the Detroit Tigers had drafted him 39th overall out of the University of Texas.
Knebel is now 25 years old and coming off a season where he logged 39 saves and a 1.78 ERA for the Milwaukee Brewers. In January 2015, the NL Central club acquired him from the Texas Rangers, who’d earlier procured his services from the perpetually-bullpen-deficient Tigers.
According to Knebel. while some things have changed since our 2013 conversation, overs haven’t. By and large, he’s the same guy on the mound.
“I guess I’ve kind of grown into this new role,” the 6’4″ 220-lb. fastball-curveball specialist told me in September. “Other than that, I’ve just tried to perfect two pitches. I like to focus on what I know I can do. My delivery is the exact same — I’m still herky-jerky — although I don’t go from the windup anymore; I’m just straight stretch.”
There has been a velocity jump. Knebel’s heater averaged 97.8 MPH this season, up a few ticks from previous seasons. He didn’t have an explanation for why that is, but he does know one thing — it’s not because of a weighted-ball program. Read the rest of this entry »
Charlie Morton had a career year. In his first season with the Houston Astros, the 33-year-old right-hander is heading into October baseball with a record of 14-7 and a 3.62 ERA. The win total is a personal best, as are his 3.46 FIP and his 7.7 H/9.
Especially notable are his 10 strikeouts per nine innings and his 51.8% ground ball rate. The former is by far his highest, and the latter is by far his lowest. Morton was not only good during the regular season, he was also not the same pitcher he was in Pittsburgh.
“My stuff is different this year,” Morton told me on Thursday. “It’s not sinking as much — it’s harder, but it’s not sinking as much. My curve isn’t as vertical as it usually is; it’s not moving as much.
“When I was with the Pirates, from 2009-2015, I was a heavy sinker guy. I was over 60%, sinkers, and this year, against lefties, I might throw five sinkers in the whole game. My two-seam control has suffered a little bit, because I’m not throwing it as much. I’m four-seam, curveball, cutter, changeup — more of a mix. So really… it’s a balance of your identity, and of what you’re trying to do.” Read the rest of this entry »
Periodically, I’ll be posting notes from in-person observations at Fall Instructional League and the Arizona Fall League. Both are essentially the scouting calendar’s dessert course both in their timing and sometimes dubious value. I take bad fall looks with a large grain of salt as players are sometimes fatigued, disinterested, put in difficult situations purposefully so that they’ll fail, or some combination of these or other bits of important context. With that in mind here are links to past notes followed by this edition’s.
San Diego held an intrasquad game last Thursday morning that featured many of the club’s high-profile position players. Venezuelan infielder Justin Lopez has begun to grow into his rangy, 6-foot-2 frame and is taking stronger swings than he was in the spring. His levers and swing are long, causing Lopez to be late on some hittable fastballs, but he has good feel to hit for a gangly 17-year-old switch-hitter. Lopez is a graceful defender with polished actions for a teenager and can competently play either middle-infield position, though he might eventually outgrow shortstop. He turns 18 in May.
OF/1B Tirso Ornelas has also been in the midst of a physical transformation, streamlining a frame that I once thought was surely destined for first base. He spent a good amount of time in center field this summer, and while I think it’s very unlikely he plays there long term, I do like his chances of serving as a competent corner-outfield defender, probably in left field. There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Ornelas’s bat wherever he ultimately falls on the defensive spectrum but he’s very advanced in that regard, with all-fields doubles power already at age 17. On Thursday, he stayed back on a breaking ball on the outer half and hit it the opposite way for a single.
Like Ornelas, RHP Martin Carrasco is a 17-year-old from Tijuana. He doesn’t throw especially hard right now, sitting 85-88, but he has advanced fastball command and some feel for a changeup and breaking ball. He’s an intriguing, athletic teenage arm and worth following as he transitions to stateside ball.
The White Sox’ and Rangers’ instructional-league groups played each other in Surprise on Thursday afternoon. Walker Weickel, a righty drafted 55th overall by San Diego in 2012, started the game for Texas and was 91-93, touching 94, with an average curveball and fringe cutter and changeup. Weickel was released by San Diego near the end of spring training and was picked up by Texas in early April.
CF Pedro Gonzalez, who Texas received as the player to be named later in the Jonathan Lucroy trade, had a huge day. He tallied multiple extra-base hits and showed good range in center field. He’s a 45 runner from home to first, but long-legged striders like Gonzalez often take a little while longer to get to full speed. I’m optimistic about his chances of staying in center field. He had some issues around the wall/warning-track area but Gonzalez is a converted shortstop who’s been playing the outfield for only a few seasons. His frame has room for another 30 pounds or so and whatever raw power comes with it.
White Sox lefty Ian Clarkin sat in the upper 80s and touched 90 with an average curveball and changeup. He was one of the prospects sent to Chicago from the Yankees in the Frazier/Kahnle/Robertson deal. C Zack Collins, the team’s 2016 first rounder, turned on a fastball from Rangers RHP Tyler Phillips and homered to right field.
9/22
On Friday, a lone Brewers and Padres instructional-league game was straddled by a full day of amateur tournament play in the West Valley. Padres SS Luis Almanzar looked much better that day then he had in the few games I’d seen leading up to this one, hitting one ball to the warning track the opposite way and later doubling down the left-field line. I think he’s a better fit at second base than at shortstop, which means he’ll have to hit for more power than he did in the Northwest League in 2017.
Brewers 2017 first-rounder Keston Hiura played second base on Friday, notable because he spent all spring DH-ing at UC Irvine due to an elbow injury. That continued through all but three of Hiura’s final four games at the end of the pro season. I didn’t see his arm stress-tested during this game, but I thought he had the best bat speed on the field.
RHP Adrian Houser made a tune-up start ahead of Fall League play and looks to be in great physical condition. He made nine late-season starts after missing just over a year due to elbow surgery and rehab. He was up to 96 with his fastball and missing bats with a 12-6 curveball.
9/23
On Saturday, I saw Padres Cuban righty Michel Baez sit 94-97 and throw strikes with an average curveball. He lacked feel for his changeup that morning, but it’s his best secondary pitch. He alternated half-innings with Cuban lefty Adrian Morejon, who was 93-94 with an above-average breaking ball and changeup but poor command. He was a dominant on-paper strike-thrower at short-season Tri-City before struggling with walks in six starts at Low-A Fort Wayne.
Brent Suter succeeds in atypical fashion. The Milwaukee Brewers rookie throws his four-seam fastball roughly 70% of the time, and not because he lights up radar guns with it. He doesn’t. Suter’s (ahem) heater averages 86.3 mph, which is comfortably near the bottom of our velocity chart.
Nonetheless, batters have a hard time hitting it. As Jeff Zimmerman pointed out in a recent RotoGraphs piece, Suter gets a lot of swings and misses with his signature pitch despite its unhurried path to the plate. More importantly, he gets a lot of outs. In 76.2 innings this season, the deceptive southpaw has a 3.29 ERA.
Along with being sneaky fast, he is also smart. The Brewers drafted Suter out of Harvard, where he earned a degree in environmental science and public policy.
———
Suter on how he gets hitters out: “I pitch a lot with my fastball. I trust it. It has a little bit of late-cut movement to it, plus I have kind of a hunched-over delivery, so I hide the ball a little longer and get some good extension on it. I feel like my fastball kind of plays. It gets on guys a little earlier than they expect.
Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.
Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.
The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.
“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well
“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Rockies are struggling again. After winning eight of nine to re-solidify their lead in the race for the second Wild Card spot, they’ve now lost five of seven, including their last three in a row. Meanwhile, the surging Brewers have won nine of 12, closing Colorado’s lead to just a single game. Yesterday, they got shut out by Matt Moore, who has been one of the worst pitchers in baseball this year. The team’s inconsistent offense broke up for 16 runs last Saturday, but scored a grand total of 12 runs in the other five games they’ve played in the last week, and now the Brewers are nipping at their heels.
But if you look at our Playoff Odds, our algorithm still thinks the Rockies are in a pretty good spot, with a 68% chance of capturing the second Wild Card spot, versus just 16% for the Brewers. With just a one game lead, this is a pretty big discrepancy, and might seem like our projections are just wildly overrating the difference between the two teams. However, those calculations aren’t just accounting for the projected performance of the Brewers and Rockies over the next week and a half, but also taking both teams’ schedules into account. And the schedules for the two teams couldn’t be more different.
A veteran scout once described baseball to me as a “big man’s game.” When you spend some time in clubhouses, particularly around starting pitchers, that certainly seems to be an indisputable fact. Many starters are beginning to resemble tight ends or wing types in basketball.
But there are always exceptions. There are always outliers. And those cases are particularly interesting, at least to this author, because they represent instances in which a player has weathered whatever selection bias exists and found his own path to the pinnacle of the sport.
