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A Long Weekend of Instructional League Notes

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.

Previously: 9/20 (TEX, SD).

9/21

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 on Turning a Corner with a Pedestrian Fastball

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.

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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.

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Sunday Notes: Travis Shaw and the Brewers are Sneaky Good

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’ Big Advantage in the Wild Card Race

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.

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Zach Davies, Major League Outlier

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.

Zach Davies is an outlier.

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Batting Against Josh Hader Seems Terrible

I can tell you the instant Josh Hader made me sit up and take notice. We’re going back a week and a half, to what was, for me, a lazy Friday night. I was watching the Brewers attempt to close out the Nationals, and the Brewers held a 1-0 lead in the top of the eighth. Hader took the mound, in relief of Jimmy Nelson.

Right away, Hader attacked Trea Turner and struck him out on three pitches. It was impressive, but, ehh, Turner will strike out. The next batter was Wilmer Difo, and Hader struck him out on six pitches. It was also impressive, but, ehh, Wilmer Difo. The third batter was Daniel Murphy. Murphy has developed into a power hitter without sacrificing much at all in the way of his making contact. Murphy remains one of the premier bat-to-ball hitters in either league. With two down and the bases empty, Hader went to work.

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Andrew McCutchen, Eric Thames, and the Life of a Slump

Slumps and downturns are inevitable. They’re a part of baseball, a part of markets, a part of life. If you create a 15-day rolling wOBA chart of any player at FanGraphs, you’ll probably find a trend line that ticks up and down like the display on a heart-rate monitor. Such charts probably have a look similar to the performance of your investment portfolio. If we could create rolling, 15-day charts documenting the fortunes of our day-to-day existences, they’d have similar fluctuations, too.

While slumps are inevitable, that doesn’t mean they’re welcome. Ideally, it would be possible to minimize the troughs while extending periods of peak performance. Naturally, this of some interest to major-league clubs. Organizations have become curious about how they can reduce the length of slumps, exploring areas like rest and nutrition.

But there’s also a personal, psychological element. What leads players into slumps? Do they sense the arrival of one like an oncoming cold? And how do they dig out of it?

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Daily Prospect Notes: 8/29 & 8/30

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

8/28

Tom de Blok, RHP, Detroit (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: NR  Top 100: NR
Line: 7 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 0 R, 8 K

Notes
de Blok has been one of the more interesting stories in minor-league baseball this year. He was signed out of the Netherlands by Seattle in August of 2013, but he didn’t enjoy his time training in Arizona, some of his things were stolen, and de Blok retired during extended spring training the following year.

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Updated Top-10 Prospects Lists: NL Central

Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the National League Central. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Chicago Cubs (Preseason List)

1. Adbert Alzolay, RHP
2. Victor Caratini, C/1B
3. Oscar de la Cruz, RHP
4. Jose Albertos, RHP
5. Thomas Hatch, RHP
6. Aramis Ademan, SS
7. Alex Lange, RHP
8. Brendon Little, LHP
9. Mark Zagunis, 3B
10. D.J. Wilson, CF

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Ranking the Prospects Traded During Deadline Season

Among the prospects traded in July, Eloy Jimenez stands out. (Photo: Arturo Pardavila III)

Below is a ranking of the prospects traded this month, tiered by our Future Value scale. A reminder that there’s lots of room for argument as to how these players line up, especially within the same FV tier. If you need further explanation about FV, bang it here and here. Full writeups of the prospects are linked next to their names. If the player didn’t receive an entire post, I’ve got a brief scouting report included below. Enjoy.
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