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

Juan Corniel, SS, Arizona Diamondbacks
Level & Affiliate: Complex Level Age: 18 Org Rank: TBD FV: TBD
Line: 3-for-5, 3 RBI, R

Notes
Corniel has been one of the Extended Spring standouts in Arizona. At a projectable 6-foot-1 or so, he’s an amalgam of twitch, athleticism, and body projection right now. He has the athleticism and actions to play shortstop but doesn’t yet have sentient control of his body. Offensively, the switch-hitting Corniel has swings that are fairly short to the ball but still explosive. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday night’s game between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers was Joc Pederson’s first trip back to Dodger Stadium since the team won the World Series in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. The Cubs starting left fielder received his ring before the game. It was a beautiful ceremony. It was a show of strength. It was the Dodgers best moment all night.

The Dodgers were understandably favorites going into the game, with a -250 line in Vegas. The Cubs were the underdogs at +200 and while I’m not really a gambler, those odds seemed a bit light. Toeing the mound for the Cubs was Zach Davies, fresh on the heels of a 10-2 drubbing by the Marlins that saw him leave the game after six innings pitched, seven hits, three walks and eight earned runs. Walker Buehler was the Dodgers starter, in search of his 24th straight start without a loss.

Baseball is a funny game.

And this was something of a funny no-hitter. The 2021 Dodgers are the first team to be no-hit the year after winning the World Series since the 2013 Giants were no hit by Homer Bailey, then of the Cincinnati Reds. Interestingly, while the 2020 Dodgers were not no-hit, the club’s previous two championship teams were the year they won it all. The 1988 Dodgers won the World Series, but before Kirk Gibson hit that epic home run, the team fell to the Reds’ in Tom Browning’s perfect game on September 16, 1988. The 1981 Dodgers team was no-hit by the Houston Astros Nolan Ryan on their way to a World Series Championship. Perhaps, then, the Dodgers shouldn’t worry too much about being no-hit in the regular season, though you can forgive their fans for feeling some concern today despite that history. Read the rest of this entry »

The bullpen can be a weird place. While lineups and rotations across the big leagues have some degree of stability (albeit one threatened by recent spikes in injury rates), the amount of roster turnover in bullpens varies greatly. It’s a place where former failed starters and pitchers trying to get one last chance at the big leagues often find a home. Tyler Matzek and Daniel Bard were the latest reclamation projects turned into high-leverage relief pitchers when they returned to form last season. For Bard, it had been a full seven seasons since his last appearances in a big league game (2013 with the Red Sox). His performance earned him 2020 Comeback Player of the Year honors in the National League and a $2.9 million one-year deal to return in 2021 as the Rockies’ closer.

Is this unusual? Bard’s story certainly is, but it’s pretty typical for teams to pan for gold via non-roster invitees to spring training. Spring training rosters are limited to 75 players; teams will almost always fill this with the entirety of their 40-man roster supplemented by minor league players close to big league action and a handful of NRIs competing for a spot on the roster. Most NRIs don’t pan out and are either released or end up in the minor leagues, but occasionally they suit up for Opening Day.

Rex Brothers falls into this category. Now in his third attempt to recapture his form as the Rockies’ setup man and closer from 2011-15, Brothers looks like he’s figured some things out with the Cubs. Heading into yesterday, he’d made 28 appearances for a total of 24.1 innings (all stats are as of June 23). Those figures are the highest totals for Brothers since the 2014 season. In those innings he’s struck out 40 batters, leading to a career-best 38.5 K% and K-BB% of 25%. That K-BB% is good for 31st out of 200 relievers with at least 20 innings pitched. So far it certainly reads like a success story for the Cubs.

Brothers is no spring chicken (2021 is his age-33 season) but he has logged relatively few innings (293.2 total at the major league level and only 51.1 over the last five seasons), which may inspire some optimism that he has more left in the tank than his age would suggest. But the question remains as to whether he has staying power in the Cubs’ bullpen. I made mention of Bard and Matzek earlier. Matzek reappeared last season as a reliever for the Braves after a brief stint as a starting pitcher for the Rockies (the team that drafted him) back in 2014-15. His performance has regressed from his resurgent 2020, but Matzek has managed to keep his successful run going with an ERA of 3.33 and a FIP of 2.98 in ‘21. Bard has similarly maintained form. Matzek and Bard represent the high point for these kinds of reclamation projects. While unlikely, it’s far from unprecedented.

But let’s get back to Brothers. A reliever his whole career, he has relied primarily on a two-pitch mix of a four-seam fastball and a slider. His best pitch is his four-seamer, which he uses about two-thirds of the time; it tops out around 97. According to Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic, Brothers played through shoulder pain in Colorado, which he admits was a mistake. The shoulder ailment eventually led to surgery following his 2016 release from the Cubs, who had acquired him from the Rockies in ‘15. His road back to the majors has taken time. As is the case for many pitchers who go through injuries, his mechanics took a turn for the worse as his body compensated for the weak throwing shoulder. His first crack at a comeback was granted by the Atlanta Braves where he bounced back and forth between the majors and the Braves’ Double- and Triple-A affiliates. Never a strength for Brothers, his lack of control was at the heart of his struggles to get back to baseball’s highest level. He put it together briefly in 2017 when he pitched 23.2 innings for a 3.66 FIP but an awful 7.23 ERA. In 2018, however, Brothers walked 44 batters in 40.2 innings, including a whopping 17 wild pitches during that span. He faced a mere two batters at the major league level and walked both of them.

Another opportunity in 2019 with the Yankees followed by time with the Cubs in ‘20 yielded similar results: Brothers could not throw strikes consistently enough. He credits time working on his mechanics at the alternate site last season for his improved control. Look at the following GIFs. The first one is from 2020 and the second from ‘21. Notice how last season he was reaching his throwing arm down below his waist; this season his arm action is much shorter and more compact in comparison.

In his interview with The Athletic, Brothers expressed the impact his arm action also had on his lower half, stating, “My knee started caving towards home plate, which was forcing me down the mound way too soon. It was an inconsistent release point, and I was just feeling bad.”

Statcast captures pitcher release points with every pitch. Looking at Brothers’ pitch data from the last two seasons, there’s evidence that the improvements in his delivery have helped him find consistency in his release point. The chart below shows pitch release locations for the 2020 and ‘21 seasons.

The release point distribution is quite different for the two seasons. The standard deviation for release point of his pitches in 2020 was 0.266 feet in the X direction and 0.103 feet in the Z direction; in ‘21, the standard deviation decreased significantly to .186 and .076. This holds true for both fastballs and sliders. He’s thrown over five times as many pitches this season, but even taking a random sample of data of the same size (74 pitches) as his data from 2020 the improvement in consistency is still evident.

Let’s be clear, Brothers still carries a BB/9 rate in excess of 5.00, but his propensity for strikeouts makes that number more palatable. Improving his release point seems to have allowed him to regain enough control to effectively leverage his strikeout ability. Brothers has thrown 36.6% of his pitches in the strike zone this season, tied for 12th lowest among relievers with at least 20 innings pitched. During his most effective seasons in Colorado (2011-13), he threw 44.9% of his pitches in the strike zone. He’s also allowing way more fly balls now (46.8% this season) than his days in Colorado (average of 32.6% from 2011-13), which has been detrimental to his home run rate (1.11 HR/9 allowed this season) although he’s right around league average. This season’s version of Brothers is a tad less effective than his younger self, but his 3.57 FIP makes him an above average reliever and a reliable left-handed option for the Cubs.

The Cubs have the fourth best bullpen in the majors by WAR at 3.2. Outside of Craig Kimbrel, who is also having a resurgent season, their relievers are not hyped prospects or big name free agent signings. It seems that the front office and coaching staff have found the ability to make the most of the pieces they have. Working with Brothers to rekindle some of the success he had early in his career is just an example of how many of the Cubs’ relievers are churning out career-best performances.

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 Cubs won the NL Central, but they did it in a fairly unusual way, getting minimal contributions from Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, and Javier Báez. In 151 combined games, their trio of stars combined for a mere 1.6 WAR, mostly coming from Rizzo (1.0); back when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, Bryant alone racked up nearly eight wins. Last season, players like Ian Happ and Willson Contreras were the ones who propelled the team to October baseball, not the old core.

With Báez, Bryant, and Rizzo all set to enter free agency this offseason, the Cubs, as in many a heist movie, hoped to bring back the old crew for one last big score in 2021. But unlike many good yarns about high-stakes thievery, the Cubs largely ignored the supporting cast. The studio had cut the budget, an obvious necessity what with the Cubs playing in a tiny, small-market city, boasting merely the fourth-best attendance in baseball in 2019, and the reality that no owner in baseball history has ever made money. Yu Darvish was off to film a high-budget action movie in San Diego; the only primary member of the 2019 rotation still on the roster in ’21 is Kyle Hendricks.

Without much in the way of new blood, they needed their old core to shine one last time. And luckily for the Cubs, this is largely what has happened. In a similar number of games as the 2020 season, our troika of protagonists has combined for 4.8 WAR, tripling their contribution from the prior season. With the addition of Nolan Arenado, the Cardinals got most of the preseason NL Central ink but the Cubs have been more impressive at the box office. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here. Today’s notes feature thoughts on three college hitters who played in the NCAA Regionals, as well as three pitching prospects currently in the big leagues.

Reed Trimble, CF, Southern Miss
Draft Class: 2021  Age: 21
Regional Line: 14-for-25, 4 HR

Notes
When I named Trimble one of Conference USA’s top prospects in a tournament preview post from a couple weeks ago, I made a mistake with respect to his draft eligibility. He’s indeed a (COVID) freshman, but his 21st birthday was Sunday, so he’s a draft-eligible freshman. Trimble hit .345/.414/.638 this year, and the Southern Miss schedule was no cakewalk even though they’re a mid-major. It included 12 games against eventual regional host and top-16 team Louisiana Tech, as well as games against Mississippi State, Alabama, Florida State and Ole Miss, and four against South Alabama, who made a deep regional run. Read the rest of this entry »

Adbert Alzolay has been one of the few pleasant surprises for the Cubs this season. Through his first two major league stints across 2019 and ’20, he walked 15% of the batters he faced in 33.2 innings of work, most of which was in the starting rotation. Even when striking out 28.6% of opposing hitters, handing out free passes at such a high rate is not a sustainable way of working through a lineup and keeping runs off the scoreboard and without the aid of a .263 BABIP in those 33.2 innings, Alzolay’s results would have been even more concerning. Meanwhile the Cubs, after years of contending and struggling to develop pitchers internally, were bereft of exciting arms on the right side of the aging curve. This past offseason, ownership refused to spend in any meaningful way and the club was forced to ship out Cy Young candidate Yu Darvish for Zach Davies and a few prospects in the low minors. They did sign Jake Arrieta to a $6.5 million deal coming off a disappointing stint with the Phillies, but that signing represented Chicago’s most significant investment in pitching this offseason. These moves and circumstances meant that Alzolay would need to take a big step forward in 2021 if the Cubs wanted to remain competitive with the Cardinals and Brewers in what seemed to be a winnable AL Central.

But expecting Alzolay to make a substantial leap in terms of his control took some wishful thinking if you were scouting the statline. At his last stop in Triple-A in 2019, Alzolay walked 11% of batters in 65.1 innings. That figure is obviously better than the 15% he posted in his first innings in the majors, but it would still be a below average rate and that was while facing worse competition. For Alzolay to even have an average walk rate, he would have to cut his 2019 Triple-A rate by at least 20%, all while facing better competition. The odds were certainly not in his favor.

Miraculously, he has made the necessary adjustment. In 49.2 innings in 2021, Alzolay is now walking only 5.2% of batters in an environment where the league average is about 9%. Not only has he shaved his previous major-league rate by two thirds, but his 2021 mark now represents an elite figure, one that’s in the 88th percentile of all pitchers per Baseball Savant. Better yet, he has barely sacrificed any strikeouts. As I said in the introduction, Alzolay had a career 28.6% strikeout rate coming into 2021. This season, that rate is still a well-above average at 26.3%, especially relative to other starting pitchers. He has also increased the rate at which he induces groundballs (38.3% prior to this season, 45.7% in 2021), which should offset some of the strikeouts he has lost as he tries to hone his command. All of this has culminated in a 3.81 ERA through nine starts despite a bloated 20% HR/FB rate, the latter figure driving the massive difference between his FIP (4.21) and xFIP (a sterling 3.41). Read the rest of this entry »

Javier Báez and Will Craig were the main protagonists in the tragicomedy that took place in Pittsburgh on Thursday. In a re-scripting of Merkle’s Boner, “El Mago” was cast as the hero, while the rookie first baseman co-starred as the unwitting villain. Given their respective roles, it’s understandable that they’ve received the lion’s share of attention for what transpired.

A supporting actor deserves his own acclaim. Largely overlooked — but no less important — were the actions of Willson Contreras. Had the Chicago catcher not made a mad dash toward home plate, panic and mayhem wouldn’t have entered the equation. Craig would have simply tagged Báez, relegating the latter’s amusing backpedal to a quickly-forgotten, footnote.

I brought that up to Pirates manager Derek Shelton on Friday.

“Yeah, I mean the one thing Contreras did was, he never gave up on the play,” responded Shelton. “He continued to run, and that was an important factor. He just continued to play, and finish the play. Unfortunately, it turned out against us.”

His thoughts on his ball club’s turning a routine play into Theatre of the Absurd?

“Move on from it,” said Shelton. “If we could all live our lives without making any mistakes, it would be really fun. But that doesn’t happen. Move on.”

Brandon Hyde and Will Venable have moved on from Chicago, where they
shared a clubhouse with Baez and Contreras as members of the Cubs coaching staff. I reached out to both for their perspectives on what will likely go down as the season’s craziest play. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs’ 2021 schedule came out, I circled May 17-20. That otherwise unremarkable four-game series with the Nationals would mark the return of 2016 World Series heroes Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber to Wrigley Field. I knew they would receive an epic welcome from fans and I felt like I needed to be part of it.

The Cubs are pretty far removed from the juggernaut that won 103 games on the way to the team’s first championship in 108 years. While a relatively weak division means it’s certainly possible they could go on a run that would keep Jed Hoyer’s front office from being sellers at the deadline, it is far from guaranteed. Our playoff odds give the Cubs a 35.1% chance of making the postseason. It has left me looking for those moments of joy that fall short of the ultimate goal of hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy at the end of the season but are still meaningful.

It occurred to me that I am far from the only fan looking for moments to celebrate beyond the expectation of playing in October. So I started looking for all of the silver linings to 2021’s cloudiest seasons. I identified all of the teams with less than a 20% chance to make the playoffs per our odds, then dug into the prospect lists, record books and clubhouse storylines to see what I might circle on the calendar for the sport’s less fortunate faithful. So here they are, a few moments of joy for the fanbases that may still be holding out hope that their team will channel its inner 2019 Nationals, but suspect they won’t. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s what struck me as notable. Today, I’ll take a look at the American League, with a National League post to follow next week. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »