These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., 3B, Toronto Blue Jays Level: Triple-A Age: 20 Org Rank:1FV: 70 Line: 2-for-5, HR
Notes
The Blue Jays have an off day Thursday, so Guerrero will make his debut Friday at home against Oakland rather than play a road series at Lehigh Valley where I was hoping to see him this weekend, though this serves the greater, baseball-watching good. I don’t have too much to add to what we wrote for the Jays list aside from some ephemeral nuggets.
Guerrero came to camp heavy, and was visibly bigger than he was last fall. He had a strained patellar tendon last year, and an oblique strain this spring. Let’s hope these issues aren’t chronic and don’t cause him to prematurely slide down the defensive spectrum, though he’ll hit enough to render it moot even if it occurs.
After rehabbing in Dunedin to start the year, Guerrero joined Triple-A Buffalo on April 11 and took just one home plate appearance for the Bison before his promotion as they have mostly been on the road while he was with them, and had a home series against Scranton decimated by rain. The 38 games Vlad played for Buffalo were the fewest he spent at any affiliate. Pour one out for Bob Rich, Jr., I suppose — just wait until it thaws.
Notes
Like his college teammate Matt Thaiss, Smith had strong peripheral stats as an amateur but desperately needed a swing change in pro ball to hit for enough power to profile at first base. After slugging under .400 as a college hitter in the Cal League last year and looking overmatched in the Fall League, there’s been some movement in his batted ball profile early this season. After posting ground ball rates of 48.8% each of the last two seasons, Smith is lifting the ball more and his grounder rate is just 33% early on. It’s a tad too early to trust batted ball samples, but that’s a fairly striking difference. It’s still going to be a tough profile and we’re not huge Smith fans here at FanGraphs, but this might be a sign things are getting better.
Oscar De La Cruz, RHP, Chicago Cubs Level: Hi-A Age: 24 Org Rank:15FV: 40 Line: 6 IP, 5 H, 0 BB, 2 R, 8 K
Notes
This was De La Cruz’s second rehab start after returning from a PED suspension that dates back to last July. I saw one of his final spring training tune-ups, during which he was 92-94 with unusually precise command of a plus-flashing slider, and he’s only walked one batter over the two starts. His velocity has been all over the place throughout his injury-riddled career — 93-97 at his best, 88-91 at his worst — but 92-94 with command is fine. He seems like a reasonable candidate to contribute to the Cubs at some point this year, perhaps out of the bullpen if De La Cruz, who has never thrown more than 77 innings in a single season, is on some kind of innings limit.
Notes
Bolton came into some new velo last year, had a strong first half, and then was shut down with a shoulder injury and missed the rest of the year. His early-season results indicate his stuff is back, and he’s only 20 and already at Hi-A. Sinker/slider types like this sometimes don’t hold their strikeout rates as they climb, but even if Bolton becomes a No. 4/5 starter (which is how his stuff grades out on paper) that’s a steal for a sixth rounder.
Notes
Hall has been scorching since late last year. He slashed .378/.441/.500 in August and is at .365/.467/.429 so far this season. He’s continued to steal bases like he did late last summer, too. Of his 22 steals last year, 15 came in August. Hall has seven bags in 16 games so far in 2019. He’s a slash and dash type of hitter and that style of play works best against bad, lower-level defenses, which is part of why he’s got a .523 BABIP right now. That’s got to come down, but this is a strong start.
Marcell Ozuna has had a solid start to his 2019 season. Through 89 plate appearances, Ozuna has hit .256/.348/.615 (150 wRC+) with eight home runs, producing 0.6 WAR. Ozuna’s WAR total puts him in the 67th percentile among qualified hitters to begin the year; that’s not elite, though it’s certainly not bad, either.
One of the (few) fun things about small sample baseball season is the ridiculous numbers that come from it. Jay Jaffe already covered some of these blips from both the pitcher and hitter perspective, but there’s one overlapping case that, at least to me, was worth discussing in its own separate piece, the answer to the above questions, perhaps obvious given this piece’s title: Zack Greinke.
This whole idea came about when I was glancing over the Statcast leaderboards at Baseball Savant a few days ago. At the time, the default setting on the hitter numbers was just 10 batted ball events, allowing for some smaller samples to sneak their way into prominent positions on the board. But there’s no position more prominent than No. 1, and seeing Greinke leading all major league hitters in barrels per plate appearance made me chuckle. It also made me take a second look at his season stats this year.
In 13 plate appearances, Greinke has slashed .500/.545/1.300 (361 wRC+). He has hit two home runs, two doubles, and a single, all while drawing a walk without registering a single strikeout. That’s better than Barry Bonds‘ slash line after 13 plate appearances (.400/.538/.900) in 2004, when he went on to post a ridiculous 1.422 full-season OPS. Let’s marvel at that for a second while we watch Greinke’s two home runs. Read the rest of this entry »
Twenty-three months ago, I wrote about how Jon Duplantier was no longer perfect. The previous day — May 2, 2017 — he’d allowed a pair of earned runs while pitching for the Low-A Kane County Cougars. Going into that game, Arizona’s third-round pick in the 2016 draft had a 0.00 ERA in 21.1 professional innings.
He’s still perfect in MLB. Duplantier debuted with the Diamondbacks two nights ago and tossed three scoreless frames against the San Diego Padres. He did so out of the bullpen, which likely isn’t his eventual home. When assessing this past season’s Arizona Fall League performers, our own Eric Longenhagen wrote that “Duplantier was arguably the best non-Whitley pitching prospect who was a lock to start.”
The former Rice Owl isn’t ranked as high as Forrest Whitley on our 2019 Top 100 Prospects list — the Astros phenom comes in at No. 4 — but Duplantier did make the cut at No. 87. He’s Arizona’s top pitching prospect for the second year running.
On an idyllic Monday evening in SoCal, he was on top of the world. Duplantier entered with his team up 9-3 — the final was 10-3 — and his post-game quotes encapsulated his emotions perfectly. As chronicled by D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro, the 24-year-old righty described the experience as, “Sheer joy. I felt like a child and they were like, ‘Hey, go play. Run free, go play.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.
In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jon Duplantier, Carl Edwards Jr., and Sal Romano — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.
——
Jon Duplantier, Arizona Diamondbacks
“I learned my curveball in college. Rice is a big breaking ball school — at least it was when I was there — and depending on where you are, you call it a different thing. It’s a spiked curveball, but I know that at Southern Miss, they call it a Rice slider. Essentially, it’s just a concept where you’re looking for this general break. You spike the curveball, with the idea being that you want something hard, with depth.
Jon Duplantier’s spiked curveball grip
“My freshman year, I threw a slurve. The velocity on it was fine — it was 76-78 [mph] — but I would lose feel for it every now and then. When I’d lose feel for it, teams would start sitting on my heater. Read the rest of this entry »
Brian Duensing’s future in the game was tenuous when I talked to him in June 2016. Struggling with the Orioles after being cut loose by the Twins and Royals, he was on the brink of being sent to Triple-A. Moreover, he was flirting with baseball oblivion. And he knew it. As Duensing told me at the time, “If the Orioles send me back down… I don’t know what I’d do. I’d have to talk to my family.”
Thirty-three months and 125 big-league appearances later, the resilient reliever is proof that lefties really do have nine lives. His career may well be dog-eared — Duensing turned 36 last month — but he’s nonetheless still pitching.
I asked the southpaw — after first reminding him of our 2016 conversation — how that’s come to be.
“Good question,” responded Duensing, who is heading into his third season with the Chicago Cubs. “I really don’t know, to be honest. But if anything sticks out, I guess it would be that we made it to the playoffs after I ended up with Baltimore. Getting that sense of winning again kind of rejuvenated me.”
The five previous seasons had been difficult. Not only had he gone from starter to middling reliever during that stretch, he did so on a Twins team that lost 90-or-more games four times. His body was willing, but his mind wasn’t in the right place. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Arizona Diamondbacks acquired Luke Weaver in the deal that sent Paul Goldschmidt to the St. Louis Cardinals, they brought on board a 25-year-old right-hander with a crisp fastball and a plus changeup. What Weaver has lacked is a quality third option to augment his go-to offerings. While he went to his hook 12.7% of the time last year, the pitch was more of a show-me than a weapon. Improving it was a primary focus over the offseason, and it has remained one this spring.
It’s not the only pitch the former first-round pick has been working on. Weaver is also hoping to reintroduce a cutter-slider to his arsenal. The extent to which that qualifies as one or two pitches — i.e. cutter and/or slider — isn’t an easy question to answer. At least, that wasn’t the case when I sat down with Weaver a few weeks ago in D-Backs camp.
———
David Laurila: It’s been a few years since we talked about your repertoire. What’s changed since that time?
Luke Weaver: “Fastball and changeup are still my primaries, but I’ve been developing a slider, and a better curveball. Both are turning into what they want to be. I’m not trying to force them into being any specific thing — I’m just seeing what the break is doing, trusting it, and going for it. With a cutter and a curveball to go with my main two, I have four legit pitches.”
Neither Adam Jones nor Martin Maldonado, two players who signed one-year contracts over the weekend, classify as major signings in 2019, but they do have one thing in common: both contracts say a lot about where baseball is in 2019 and convey important lessons to players hoping to improve the next collective bargaining agreement.
Let me start by saying that I do feel that there’s a payroll problem in baseball. There are multiple reasons for that problem, but chief among them is that the sport’s fastest growing areas of revenue have become increasingly decoupled from the win-loss record and gate attendance of any particular team. This has had an inevitable drag on player salaries. Teams are still motivated to win baseball games, but when winning also increases revenue, it’s going to be more valuable (and likely yield higher average payrolls) than in situations when winning doesn’t.
If a thrifty (or cheap, depending on your point of view) team doesn’t derive significant benefit in revenue sharing from winning, and only sees minimal revenues of their own as a result of a good record, wins can start to become seen as a cost rather than an investment. Wins are good, but wins and more money is better. Read the rest of this entry »
Brock Burke was a relatively obscure pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays organization when I first wrote about him in 2017. He was performing well at the time — a 1.23 ERA through nine starts — but context was a mitigating factor. A blip on most prospect radar, he was facing Midwest League hitters in his third full professional season.
He’s no longer quite so obscure. Nor is he Tampa Bay property. In December, the Texas Rangers acquired the 22-year-old southpaw in the three-team trade that sent former top prospect Jurickson Profar to Oakland. His appeal to the AL West cellar dwellers was understandable. Burke fashioned a 1.95 ERA, and fanned 71 batters in 55-and-a-third innings, after earning a second-half promotion to Double-A Montgomery.
I recently asked Texas GM Jon Daniels about the deal that brought Burke to the Lone Star State.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about Profar over the years,” Daniels told me. “This winter, after a number of talks, we defined what we were looking for. Our priority was to get a young starter who was at the upper levels, and [Burke’s] had a lot of things we liked. His trajectory is really interesting — from Colorado, not a ton of development at a young age. Sometimes guys from those cold-weather states need a little time to lay a foundation.”
Daniels brought up Tyler Phillips — “He really burst onto the scene with us last year” — as another close-to-home example. A 21-year-old right-hander from New Jersey, Phillips emerged as one of the Rangers’ better pitching prospects with a stellar season in the South Atlantic League.
Boston Globe sportswriter Nick Cafardo died tragically on Thursday at the age of 62. He was a friend — Nick had countless friends throughout the baseball community — and his Sunday Baseball Notes has long been a must-read. This column is dedicated to his memory.
———
Aaron Loup has forged a solid career since being drafted by the Blue Jays out of Tulane University in 2009. The 31-year-old southpaw has made 378 relief appearances — all but four with Toronto — and put together a 3.49 ERA and a 3.49 FIP. Seven years after making his MLB debut, he’s now a member of the San Diego Padres.
Had he not changed his arm slot, he probably wouldn’t have made it to the big leagues.
“I wasn’t getting it done over the top,” admitted Loup, who dropped down in high-A. “For whatever reason, my stuff went away. It kind of sucked. My sinker flattened out. My breaking ball became a dud.”
When you’re getting hit around in the Florida State League, you listen to suggestions. Especially strong suggestions. The lefty recalls being told by then pitching coordinator Dane Johnson, “Give it a chance, because what you’re doing now isn’t working.”
When publishing our lists — in particular, the top 100 — we’re frequently asked who, among the players excluded from this year’s version, might have the best chance of appearing on next year’s version. Whose stock are we buying? This post represents our best attempt to answer all of those questions at once.
This is the second year that we’re doing this, and we have some new rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. So while we think Austin Hays might have a bounce back year and be a 50 FV again, we’re not allowed to include him here; you already know about him. We also forbid ourselves from using players who were on last year’s inaugural list. (We were right about 18 of the 63 players last year, a 29% hit rate, though we have no idea if that’s good or not, as it was our first time engaging in the exercise.) At the end of the piece, we have a list of potential high-leverage relievers who might debut this year. They’re unlikely to ever be a 50 FV or better because of their role, but they often have a sizable impact on competitive clubs, and readers seemed to like that we had that category last year.
We’ve separated this year’s players into groups or “types” to make it a little more digestible, and to give you some idea of the demographics we think pop-up guys come from, which could help you identify some of your own with THE BOARD. For players who we’ve already covered this offseason, we included a link to the team lists, where you can find a full scouting report. We touch briefly on the rest of the names in this post. Here are our picks to click:
Teenage Pitchers
Torres was young for his draft class, is a plus athlete, throws really hard, and had surprisingly sharp slider command all last summer. White looked excellent in the fall when the Rangers finally allowed their high school draftees to throw. He sat 92-94, and his changeup and breaking ball were both above-average. Pardinho and Woods Richardson are the two advanced guys in this group. Thomas is the most raw but, for a someone who hasn’t been pitching for very long, he’s already come a long way very quickly.
The “This is What They Look Like” Group
If you like big, well-made athletes, this list is for you. Rodriguez was physically mature compared to his DSL peers and also seems like a mature person. The Mariners have indicated they’re going to send him right to Low-A this year. He could be a middle-of-the-order, corner outfield power bat. Luciano was the Giants’ big 2018 July 2 signee. He already has huge raw power and looks better at short than he did as an amateur. Canario has elite bat speed. Adams was signed away from college football but is more instinctive than most two-sport athletes. Most of the stuff he needs to work on is related to getting to his power.
Advanced Young Bats with Defensive Value
This is the group that produces the likes of Vidal Brujan and Luis Urias. Edwards is a high-effort gamer with 70 speed and feel for line drive contact. Marcano isn’t as stocky and strong as X, but he too has innate feel for contact, and could be a plus middle infield defender. Perez has great all-fields contact ability and might be on an Andres Gimenez-style fast track, where he reaches Double-A at age 19 or 20. Ruiz is the worst defender on this list, but he has all-fields raw power and feel for contact. He draws Alfonso Soriano comps. Palacios is the only college prospect listed here. He had three times as many walks as strikeouts at Towson last year. Rosario controls the zone well, is fast, and is a plus defender in center field.
Corner Power Bats
Nevin will probably end up as a contact-over-power first baseman, but he might also end up with a 70 bat. He looked great against Fall League pitching despite having played very little as a pro due to injury. Lavigne had a lot of pre-draft helium and kept hitting after he signed. He has all-fields power. Apostel saw reps at first during instructs but has a good shot to stay at third. He has excellent timing and explosive hands.
College-aged Pitchers
It’s hard to imagine any of these guys rocketing into the top 50 overall. Rather, we would anticipate that they end up in the 60-100 range on next year’s list. Gilbert was a workhorse at Stetson and his velo may spike with reshaped usage. Singer should move quickly because of how advanced his command is. Lynch’s pre-draft velocity bump held throughout the summer, and he has command of several solid secondaries. Abreu spent several years in rookie ball and then had a breakout 2018, forcing Houston to 40-man him to protect him from the Rule 5. He’ll tie Dustin May for the second-highest breaking ball spin rate on THE BOARD when the Houston list goes up. We’re intrigued by what Dodgers player dev will do with an athlete like Gray. Phillips throws a ton of strikes and has a good four-pitch mix.
Bounce Back Candidates
The Dodgers have a strong track record of taking severely injured college arms who return with better stuff after a long period of inactivity. That could be Grove, their 2018 second rounder, who missed most of his sophomore and junior seasons at West Virginia. McCarthy was also hurt during his junior season and it may have obscured his true abilities. Burger is coming back from multiple Achilles ruptures, but was a strong college performer with power before his tire blew.
Catchers
We’re very excited about the current crop of minor league catchers. Naylor is athletic enough that he’s likely to improve as a defender and he has rare power for the position.
Potentially Dominant Relievers
These names lean “multi-inning” rather than “closer.” Gonsolin was a two-way player in college who has been the beneficiary of sound pitch design. He started last year but was up to 100 mph out of the bullpen the year before. He now throws a four seamer rather than a sinker and he developed a nasty splitter in 2017. He also has two good breaking balls. He has starter stuff but may break in as a reliever this year.
