Last week, I took a look at the fascinating race for the American League Rookie of the Year award, where four of our top five preseason prospects who have made their major league debuts — three of them on Opening Day — are making for a packed and compelling competition. In the National League, the race is just as crowded, though there isn’t a clear-cut favorite. And while the race in the AL is filled with top prospects, there are far more surprises and underdogs in the NL.

Before we get into the details, here’s some important context from that previous article:

When Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association signed a new Collective Bargaining Agreement this offseason, it included some interesting provisions designed to combat service time manipulation. Top prospects who finish first or second in Rookie of the Year voting will automatically gain a full year of service time regardless of when they’re called up, and teams that promote top prospects early enough for them to gain a full year of service will be eligible to earn extra draft picks if those players go on to finish in the top three in Rookie of the Year voting or the top five in MVP or Cy Young voting. The goal was to incentivize teams to call up their best young players when they’re ready, rather than keeping them in the minor leagues to gain an extra year of team control. So far, the rule changes seem to have had their intended effect: three of our top five preseason prospects, and 11 of our top 50, earned an Opening Day roster spot out of spring training.

Of those 11 top 50 prospects who started off the season in the major leagues, just five of them were in the National League. The highest-ranked player in that group was CJ Abrams (15), with the four others falling below 30th on our preseason list. That’s not to say that there’s a lack of highly regarded prospects making their debuts in the senior circuit; there have been a few more big call-ups since Opening Day, including our No. 8 prospect, Oneil Cruz, just a few days ago. Still, the differences between the two leagues are stark when you pull up the rookie leaderboards.

With that in mind, here are the best rookie performers in the NL through June 22:

Where the AL had a trio of top prospects leading the way, the NL has seven players firmly in front with plenty of others close behind. In that group, just Alek Thomas was ranked on our preseason top 100; the others were a mix of the unheralded, the very young, or those who had already lost their prospect sheen. Read the rest of this entry »

You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

I’m touching up prospect lists using the same complex-based clustering as usual, incorporating notes from my in-person looks, sourced data, and the opinions of pro scouts. First up is the group of teams based in Scottsdale, with a focus on the Giants due to their status as contenders, making them the team most likely to be motivated to part with prospects between now and the trade deadline. Players whose Future Value grade changed have an “Up” or “Down” arrow in the “Trend” column on The Board.

Arizona Diamondbacks

I didn’t make many changes to Arizona’s list. Small-school righty Brandon Pfaadt leapfrogs former tiermates Blake Walston and Ryne Nelson, and moves into the Top 100. He’s throwing a tick harder than last year and working with three above-average (or better) pitches at Double-A Amarillo now that his changeup has taken a step forward. While he’s a below-average 2B/3B, recent debutant Buddy Kennedy has hit enough to be considered a righty-hitting 1-WAR role-player type, à la Mike Brosseau. Jose Curpa and Christian Montes De Oca have been added to the org list; their reports can be found on The Board. I also considered adding hard-throwing youngsters Rael Santos and Diomede Sierra (each 20-21 years old and sitting 94 mph), but they’ve been too walk-prone for that. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like almost yesterday when, amidst the lockout’s flurry of recriminations and constantly shifting arbitrary deadlines, we weren’t quite sure if there was even going to be a 2022 season at all. But Opening Day arrived after a short delay, and now we’re just about a third of the way through the season. The trade deadline is just two months out and as we saw last year, the elimination of the August waiver-trade period served to increase the stakes. While we don’t know the exact contours of what the pennant races will look like or which destinations make the most sense for potential trade candidates, the basic outlines of the season have been drawn. Short of some major surprises, we can start speculating about a few of the more interesting players likely to be available.

Juan Soto, Washington Nationals

The official position of the Washington Nationals is that they aren’t trading Juan Soto, no way, no how. I’m not sure I actually believe them. Soto will be a free agent after the 2024 season and has already turned down a 13-year, $350 million extension offer from the team. Plus, the longer they hang onto him, the less mega of a mega-package they’re likely to net in return for their superstar. It’s tempting to compare Soto’s situation with Bryce Harper’s, but as he approached free agency, the Nationals were fielding a team they had reason to think was competitive. This year’s squad is looking up at the Reds, and the farm system doesn’t have anywhere near the talent needed to quickly salvage the situation. The possibility of a sale and Soto’s age complicate the calculus – if Washington was able to convince him to stick around, he’s young enough that he’s likely to still be very good the next time they are. Soto isn’t posting his normal numbers, but ZiPS sees little reason to worry; it thinks that Soto’s hit data should have resulted in a BABIP closer to .320 and a slugging percentage well in excess of .500, similar to his xBA and xSLG. It would stink for Nationals fans, and putting together a deal worthy of netting Soto is its own challenge, but a trade could be a possibility come August. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I discussed some of the young, pre-free agency players who teams should be trying to sign to long-term contract extensions. I hadn’t been planning for there to be a part two, but you guys had so many additional players you wanted to talk about, and I can’t remember the last time I got more DMs about a piece than that one — well, about a piece for which everyone isn’t mad at me, at least!

So, let’s oil up and turn the crank on the ol’ ZiPS-o-Matic and get this projection mill hopping for seven more players.

Walker Buehler, Los Angeles Dodgers: Eight years, $204 million

Buehler is currently in the second and final year of an extension with the Dodgers that pays him $4 million a year. His next deal will be a tad more pricey. Clayton Kershaw is still around in Dodger blue, but his injury history and mild decline resulted in 2021 being the year that Buehler became The Man in the rotation, reducing Kershaw to the role of deuteragonist. And while Los Angeles still has a rocking rotation, the depth isn’t quite what it was in recent years, so there should be more than slight concern that the franchise’s most valuable pitcher is unsigned. With Buehler two years from free agency, the Dodgers aren’t likely to get any massive discounts, but this is the best time to sign him if you don’t want to pay him Gerrit Cole money later. The Dodgers don’t necessarily have to stop at this figure, either; what’s the fun of being wealthy if you don’t use that cash to pay for cool things?

There may be some concern in some places about the dropoff in Buehler’s strikeout rate, but while strikeout rate changes do tend to stick very quickly, they stick far more when the underlying stats support the drop-off than when they don’t. In this case, the contact rates and swinging-strike rates haven’t worsened at all, nor has his velocity fallen off a cliff, suggesting that it’s a blip rather than a plunge. You can make a similar argument for the Dodgers signing Julio Urías to an extension, likely for a significantly lesser haul, but given the workload Buehler has shown he can handle, he’d be my priority. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year’s National League West race was a doozy, with the 107-win Giants outpacing the 106-win Dodgers, but this year’s race is shaping up to be an interesting one for a different reason. Through Sunday, all five teams owned winning percentages of .500 or better, though Monday’s loss by the Rockies (17-18), part of a 1-7 skid, upset that arrangement. Even so, it’s an impressively strong division headed by the Dodgers (22-12), with the Padres (22-13) and Giants (21-14) close behind, and the Diamondbacks (18-18) and Rockies playing quite respectably, and much improved over last season.

The biggest surprise of the bunch is the Diamondbacks, who just last year tied the Orioles for the majors’ worst record at 52-110 and finished a honkin’ 55 games out of first place. The team did not have a high-impact offseason; the only free agents the Diamondbacks signed to major league deals were starter Zach Davies and relievers Mark Melancon and Ian Kennedy, with Melancon’s two-year deal the only one stretching beyond 2022. They weren’t exactly big players in the trade market, either, with Sergio Alcántara and Jordan Luplow representing their highest-profile acquisitions. That pair has combined for 103 plate appearances and 0.1 WAR, and Alcántara was DFA’d and lost to the Padres via waivers earlier this month. Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks and Rangers made a minor deal on Opening Day, with Texas sending upper-level infielder Yonny Hernandez to Arizona for low-level center field speedster Jeferson Espinal. Arizona desperately needs big league infield help with Nick Ahmed (shoulder) and Josh Rojas (oblique) starting the year on the injured list. They traded cash to Chicago for upper-level infielder Sergio Alcántara a few days ago and now add the plucky Hernandez, who was squeezed out of Texas by the additions of Corey Seager and Marcus Semien from above, and by the bevy of prospects (among them Ezequiel Duran, Josh Smith, and Davis Wendzel) who are either on, or are soon-to-be-on, the 40-man from below. Read the rest of this entry »

Frankie Montas was a late scratch from his Saturday start and instead, on Sunday, threw in an early-morning sim game on Oakland’s backfields. Opposing scouts in attendance were from (in totality) Boston, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay.

Montas threw about 80 pitches, warming up and then working in eight-to-ten minute chunks against A’s big league hitters, with staff adding batters to the end of some innings and rolling others to stay within that window (which is commonplace in this setting). Then the whole group took a break for four or five minutes before Montas returned to the mound for another simulated inning. With no umpires, the A’s used the TrackMan pitch locations to call balls and strikes from their seating area behind the backstop; the unit began malfunctioning at the very end of his outing, but only for four pitches.

I have video of his entire outing below, and in addition to it being a topical scouting artifact given trade rumors around Montas, it is also a glimpse into big league minutiae in a quiet setting with just a few scouts, A’s staff, and player families around. You can often hear communication between A’s players and personnel around pitch type and velocity, but there’s no exposure of sensitive ops stuff, something I vetted while cutting this together.

Montas’ fastball ranged from 92–95 mph, but he was consistently pumping in a heavy 93–94 sinker. He was clearly coasting, as a big league vet of this stature should during a morning sim game, so the fact that this velo band is abnormally low for him — his fastball averaged 96 in 2021 and had been sitting close to that so far this spring — is fine. The pitch had big sinking action toward the bottom of the zone early during his outing and induced several ground balls, though hitters had an easier time elevating it later on. As the movement on his fastball dwindled throughout his outing, the length and movement of his upper-80s slider increased, and he found more consistent feel for locating it later in the sim game. At times he uses it like a bat-breaking cutter, at others as a finishing pitch out of the zone. Though it was his least consistent offering, many of his sliders were plus. Read the rest of this entry »

The free-agent signing bonanza might have come to an end, but that doesn’t mean that this compressed offseason doesn’t have anything left on the transaction front. On Sunday night, the Diamondbacks and Ketel Marte agreed to terms on a five-year extension worth $76 million that could keep him in Arizona through 2028 thanks to a team option.

Articles like this generally contemplate the player who just signed the extension, and we’ll definitely get to that, but the contract sounds so light on the surface that I think we should talk about that first. There’s one obvious reason that the total guarantee doesn’t jump off the page: Marte was already under contract through 2024 thanks to an extension he signed before the 2018 season. He signed that one only 1,000 plate appearances into his career, and it was quite team-friendly: five years and $24 million, with $11 million and $13 million team options tacked on to the end. He broke out in 2019 with a 7-WAR season, which made him one of the most underpaid players in the game.

Those club options are no more, because Arizona ripped them up to sign Marte’s new contract. He’ll receive the $8.4 million he was due this year and then another $76 million from ’23 to ’27. But since the Diamondbacks were certain to pick up those options, we can think of this deal as a three-year extension worth $52 million starting after the last option year.
Read the rest of this entry »

While titans of industry like Matt Olson, Nelson Cruz, and Josh Donaldson were changing teams, a few other things happened in the baseball world. For example: Sean Doolittle, Brad Hand, Ian Kennedy, and Chad Kuhl all found new teams. Sure, they weren’t the headliners of the last few days, but they’re all interesting in their own way. Let’s run down these signings alphabetically and maybe tell a joke or two while doing so.

Nationals Sign Sean Doolittle

When the Nationals traded for Sean Doolittle in 2017, he brought much-needed bullpen stability to an already-competitive team. Things aren’t quite the same for either side in their reunion. Doolittle had a down 2020, then signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with the Reds. With Cincinnati out of the running and Doolittle losing high-leverage opportunities, they put him on waivers, and he finished his season as a middle reliever in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

Don Mattingly had 2,153 hits, 222 home runs, a .361 wOBA, a 124 wRC+, and 40.7 WAR. Statistically, the New York Yankees legend is similar to a Minnesota Twins legend who a few months ago was voted into the Hall of Fame by the Golden Days Committee. Tony Oliva had 1,917 hits, 220 home runs, a .365 wOBA, a 129 wRC+, and 40.7 WAR.

And then there is Brian Giles, who received nary a vote in his lone year on the BBWAA ballot, and quite possibly will never appear on an era-committee ballot. Perennially flying under the radar while playing in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and San Diego, the underrated slugger had 1,897 hits, 287 home runs, a .388 wOBA, a 136 wRC+, and 54.8 WAR.

What about peak, you might be wondering? Giles was better there, too.

Mattingly had a six-year peak before back injuries began eroding his skills. Over that stretch, he logged a .388 wOBA, a 143 wRC+, and 31.7 WAR. Meanwhile, Oliva and Giles had seven-year peaks that produced these numbers: Read the rest of this entry »