The NL West is a two-team division these days, but that wasn’t always so certain. In 2019, the Diamondbacks burst onto the scene as a potential playoff team — not the equal of the Dodgers, but a thorn in their side nonetheless. The Snakes didn’t boast the same top end as their Hollywood rivals, unless you had a wildly optimistic opinion of Ketel Marte, but they did have depth, personified by Carson Kelly, the highlight of their return for trading Paul Goldschmidt.

That 2019 season showed Kelly’s promise. In 365 plate appearances of platoon work, he compiled 1.8 WAR, combining competent work behind the plate with a 107 wRC+. That batting line was buoyed by a 13.2% walk rate and a juicy .232 ISO, neither of which seemed particularly convincing, but his central skills — good plate discipline, the ability to draw a walk, enough power to be respectable — all pointed to continued offensive competence.

The 2020 season wasn’t so kind. A .221/.265/.385 line was good for a 70 wRC+, and those flashes of light from the previous year — his walk rate and power on contact — both dipped. It was only 129 plate appearances, and it came with a .250 BABIP, so it was hardly a season he couldn’t recover from, but his swoon mirrored Arizona’s: 25–35, last in the NL West. After the Padres went nuclear this offseason and with the Giants continuing to hit on interesting players, it was easy to move on from the Diamondbacks and their bushelful of interesting but flawed players, Kelly included.

Secretly, though, Kelly’s 2020 was actually encouraging. Not the top-line numbers, mind you; those were terrible, like we talked about above. But consider: Kelly’s ISO (extra bases per at bat, if you’re unused to seeing that; it’s a measure of power) dropped from .232 to .164, and he totally deserved that. His barrel rate halved, his hard-hit rate declined precipitously, and he traded line drives and fly balls for grounders. Bad power central!
Read the rest of this entry »

With another full week of baseball on the horizon, let’s set our sights on three intriguing faceoffs. One is riddled with questions about each starter’s ability to become a true ace, another connects two former teammates who have each proven themselves as aces, and the final is between two fellas who haven’t proven much of anything yet this year.

Tuesday, April 20, 6:40 PM ET: Zac Gallen vs. Luis Castillo

For years, Gallen has embodied promise. He was, and in many ways still is, the physical form of “could be.” The Cardinals took him in the third round of the 2016 draft, and his 1.62 ERA and 2.17 FIP at High-A in 2017 showed quick returns on the their investment. Gallen made it all the way up to Triple-A by the end of the year, then was traded to Miami in December 2017 along with Sandy Alcantara and two other players in exchange for Marcell Ozuna. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sixth inning of Saturday night’s Diamondbacks-Reds game, Tim Locastro took off for second base. Acknowledging the blazing speed of the runner, Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart rushed to get into his throwing motion before even securing the baseball. Thus, Carson Fulmer’s pitch nicked off his glove and skipped to the Chase Field backstop. Locastro made it to second without a throw.

Not once in Locastro’s career has he been caught stealing, with Saturday’s stolen base representing his 28th consecutive successful attempt, a new major league record. It broke the mark set by Tim Raines, who went 27-for-27 to begin his career from 1979 to 1981 (stolen base attempts have been recorded since 1951). To mark the achievement, Locastro’s cleats were swiped (pun fully intended) by Cooperstown, where they will be displayed in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Locastro is something of a baseball enigma, one popularized by baseball YouTuber Foolish Baseball, whose video “Why Tim Locastro Should Be Your Favorite Weird Player” now has 1.1 million views. Locastro is elite — boasting a 99th percentile ability in two very niche skills: running fast and getting hit by pitches. This allows him to frequently get on base even despite a subpar 6.6% career walk rate, and immediately wreck complete havoc on the basepaths. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Musgrove came into the season viewed by many as a breakout candidate, and it’s easy to see why. The 28-year-old Pirate-turned-Padre possesses plus stuff, and the change of scenery — from Pittsburgh to his hometown of San Diego, no less — portends more success…. particularly in the won-loss column. Musgrove went a paltry 1-5 with the N.L. Central cellar-dwellers in 2020, while his new club is poised to win, per our projections, 94 games in the current campaign.

By and large, the breakout has already happened, and not solely because the 6-foot-5, 235-pound right-hander hurled the year’s first no-hitter on Friday night. His 2020 peripherals were those of a pitcher who’d turned the corner. With the caveat that it was a pandemic-shortened season, Mugrove set career-bests in ERA, FIP, and strikeout rate, and more importantly, he did so with improved pitch profiles. Per StatCast, the spin and movement of his offerings were better than they’d ever been.

I asked the righty about that in a spring-training Zoom session.

“I’m not really a big analytical guy; I’m not big on the Rapsodo numbers,” responded Musgrove. “I look at that information more as a benchmark. When I have real strong outings, or I have real poor outings, I look at the numbers to see where they’re at when I’m good, or when I’m poor. But by no means am I going home and saying, ‘I need to get 200 more RPM on my curveball,’ or ‘I need to change the spin axis on this pitch.’ I kind of just let our analytical guys coach me up a little bit on that, and offer suggestions where they can.” Read the rest of this entry »

Positional versatility has become increasingly important now that teams are carrying 13 or 14 pitchers on their rosters. That leaves benches bereft of depth, meaning that an ability to move around the diamond makes a player especially valuable — if not essential. One-dimensional non-regulars are marginal assets unless they excel in a specific area.

In the opinion of A.J. Hinch, the term “utility player” is anything but a pejorative. Moreover, everyday players who display versatility make a manager’s job easier.

“I don’t want “utility” to be explained as a negative thing,” the Tigers’ skipper told reporters recently. “A utility player has traditionally been defined as a guy who can’t play every day. And that’s not true. Some guys it is, some guys it isn’t. I caution everybody that it’s not a slight.

“When you have an everyday guy that is elite at that position, absolutely, you’re going to leave him at that position,” continued Hinch, who circled back to his Astros days and cited Alex Bregman having played short when Carlos Correa was hurt. “That’s a multiple position for an elite player.”

Hinch’s Detroit team clearly lacks the top-end talent that he had at his disposal during his Houston tenure, which suggests mixing-and-matching might be common in Motown this summer. If spring training is any indication, it might even be the M.O. Hinch has done no shortage of shuffling, and come the regular season, the likes of Jeimer Candelario, Niko Goodrum, Jonathan Schoop, and Harold Castro will be utilized as moving pieces in hopes of optimizing the lineup. Ditto Isaac Paredes, once he’s called up from the alternate site. Read the rest of this entry »

Hot takes are famously a huge part of the sports industrial complex, but here at FanGraphs, we’re not very good at them. I took a crack at some American League bold predictions yesterday, but honestly, they were pretty bland. Picking the relative fortunes of a bunch of good-but-not-great teams? Boring. A top prospect might be Rookie of the Year? Boring.

Today, I’m going a little further. If the last takes were jalapeños with some seeds removed, these are serrano peppers. I said I’d be ecstatic hitting half of my predictions from yesterday; today I’d be pleased with one in the first three (the fourth one is relatively unadventurous). As always, these aren’t my median predictions, merely corner cases that I think are being undervalued. Will they happen? Probably not. But they could, and I don’t think people are giving them enough credence. Onward! Read the rest of this entry »

Brady Singer played in the SEC for three seasons before being drafted by the Kansas City Royals, so he faced a ton of talented hitters prior to starting his professional career. Pitching for the University of Florida from 2016-2018, Singer matched up against the likes of JJ Bleday, Nick Senzel, Bryan Reynolds, and Evan White. Easy marks were few and far between.

Which of his collegiate opponents does Singer recall respecting the most? More specifically, which hitter had him laser-focused on making quality pitches, lest an errant offering result in serious damage?

“One that really stands out wasn’t in the SEC, but rather in Omaha,” Singer told me. “I believe it was the first game I pitched there, in 2017 when we went on to win the [College] World Series. It was Brendan McKay, from Louisville. When he got in the box, I knew I had to dial in. Just the bat path he had, and how he stood in the box — how he presented himself — was tough.”

McKay’s hitting future is obviously in limbo. Ostensibly still a two-way player, he pitched 49 big-league innings for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2019, and logged just 11 plate appearances. Last season, a positive COVID test and subsequent shoulder surgery squelched his opportunities to do either. McKay’s Ohtani aspirations remain — he’s taking cuts in camp as he rehabs — but what happens going forward isn’t entirely clear.

Singer was correct when he told me that McKay could “really swing it back in college.” As the record shows, the fourth-overall pick in the 2017 draft slashed a snazzy .328/.430/.536 as a Cardinal. Singer — the 18th-overall pick a year later — is another story. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley pass the halfway point of their 30-team season preview series by previewing the 2021 White Sox with James Fegan of The Athletic and the 2021 Diamondbacks (46:45) with Nick Piecoro of The Arizona Republic, plus a brief postscript on the career and retirement of Nick Markakis.

Audio intro: Parquet Courts, "Black and White"
Audio interstitial: The Hives, "Try it Again"
Audio outro: Nick Lowe, "Halfway to Paradise"

Link to Athletic article on teams developing velocity
Link to James on Kopech
Link to James on Crochet
Link to James on La Russa and team unity
Link to report about Reinsdorf and La Russa
Link to James on Vaughn
Link to James on Giolito
Link to James on Lucroy
Link to James on Cease
Link to Dan Szymborski’s bust candidates
Link to Szymborski’s breakout candidates
Link to Nick on Lovullo’s contract
Link to Jake Mailhot on Ketel Marte’s power
Link to highest-WAR seasons without an MVP vote
Link to highest-WAR careers without an MVP vote

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

I’m sure plenty of us would like to simply forget that 2020 ever happened. In this fictional world where a Men In Black neuralyzer is used to erase the memory of the last 12 months, Ketel Marte would be feeling pretty good about his previous season. 2019 was a big year for Marte. He posted a 150 wRC+ and accumulated 7.0 WAR, both easily career highs, and earned a fourth place finish in the NL MVP voting. With last year wiped clean, he’d be looking forward to building off his breakout in 2021 and establishing himself as a bonafide superstar. Instead, the memory of nearly 200 so-so plate appearances in 2020 comes flooding back and all sorts of questions about his true talent level begin to popup.

When compared to his performance prior to 2019, his 2020 season doesn’t seem all that out of place. His power output dropped back to where it was before his breakout, leading to very similar overall offensive contributions to his early career line.

Which season seems like the outlier when put into this context? Of course, it isn’t so easy as simply throwing out his 2019 and settling on a true offensive talent that falls somewhere around 5% below league average. Most of the projection systems think he’ll fall somewhere in between, with some but not all of his power returning.

Marte’s power surge in 2019 was driven by a significant increase in the number of hard hit balls he put in play in the air. He increased his average launch angle from 5.8 degrees in 2018 to 11.5 degrees in 2019. Along with making more authoritative contact more often, those hard hit balls were pulled more often, too. Every single adjustment he made resulted in greater damage when he put the ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Arizona Diamondbacks. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.