I’ve said it before but could stand to say it again: prospect rankings don’t have a long shelf life.  Usually, players ranked in the offseason don’t change much over that offseason, or at least we don’t have a chance to see any changes since they normally aren’t playing organized ball.  Every now and then a player with limited information (like a Cuban defector that signed late in the season) will go to a winter league and we’ll learn more, but most times, players look mostly the same in the fall/winter leagues, or more often a tired version of themselves.

This means that updating prospect rankings before we have a nice sample of regular season games to judge by (say, late April), seems pretty foolish.  The two mitigating factors in the case of my rankings is that I started ranking players before instructional league and the Arizona Fall League started and I also did draft rankings, which are constantly in flux.

I was on the road 17 of the last 18 days, seeing July 2nd prospects (recap here), draft prospects and minor league prospects.  I’ll take this chance to provide some updates to my draft rankings from September and below that, some players that looked to have improved at the AFL, particularly those from clubs whose prospects I’ve already ranked.

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

As the entire internet seems to know, Arizona Fall League kicked off yesterday and I scooted over to Salt River Fields at Talking Stick for the nightcap that featured an Archie Bradley v. Tyler Glasnow pitching matchup.

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Chase Anderson started out with a curveball, back when he was barely a teen. But the young Diamondback starter was told to shelve it, found a changeup, and the rest is history. Except that it looks like he has two changeups, which is even more fun than one.

“My curve ball when I was younger was a better pitch than my changeup,” said Anderson before a game with the Giants in early September. “But I learned my changeup when I was 13 and threw it more because it was easier on my arm as a kid,” Anderson continued before admitting that, yeah, his dad told him to stop throwing the curve.

The curve has been a great pitch for Anderson this year (“my equalizer”), mostly because it gives him another option when his fastball command is gone. “My fastball command has been spotty in certain starts, but the curveball I’ve been able to throw for strikes to get ahead,” said Anderson.

He’s been just as likely to throw his curve as his sinker on the first pitch this year. “It’s a really good 0-0 pitch to get you over and get strike one and get ahead,” he admitted. The change is a better swing and miss pitch because “They can see the curveball, but the changeup is hard to see, looks like a fastball and then it’s slower, messes with your depth perception,” the pitcher pointed out. “Curveballs they can see out of your hand unless it’s Clayton Kershaw’s and you can’t see it at all.”

And so Anderson works to get ahead so he can use the change and curve to put batters away. Sometimes, he uses the changeup to get ahead, but he wants to be careful about how often he does so. “You have to learn to have confidence to spot a 2-0 or 3-1 heater — if you throw a 3-1 changeup in the first inning, they’ll know you go to your changeup when you’re behind in the count,” Anderson said. “You don’t want to get into patterns.” It’s either fastball or change in 2-0 counts, but Anderson has only thrown two 3-0 changes all year. (Maybe he could consider throwing a few more. Maybe even a lot more.)

About those 2-0 changeups. They look a bit different than his 0-2 changeups. Anderson changes his change depending on the count. “I almost throw two changeups — a strike changeup and a strikeout changeup,” Anderson said, adding that the two-strike pitch comes with “more pronation.”

If that seems surprising, maybe it shouldn’t be. Pronation is key to great changeups, and he’s been throwing the change forever. If there are ‘inside of the ball’ and ‘outside of the ball’ pitchers as Gavin Floyd suggested, Anderson knows which group is his: “I’m an inside of the ball guy.”

What does that extra pronation do to the pitch? Here are his changeups in buckets depending on how many strikes the count started with:

Looks like pronating more led to more drop on the pitch, and slightly more horizontal movement. Here are two changeups at the extremes of those ranges — the get-me-over on the left, and a two-strike diver and darter on the right. The two-striker moved six and half inches more horizontally, and dropped three and a half inches more vertically.

Almost — but not quite — two different pitches, no?

Chase Anderson still has to work on fastball command, though he thinks it could be about confidence. “I think it’s a mental thing, you try to make the perfect pitch instead of letting the pitch do what it’s going to do,” he said about occasional bouts of homeritis brought on by getting into hitter’s counts.

But even when his fastball isn’t quite there, he has good command of a big breaker, and two changeups. That’s usually enough. “If you have a three pitch mix, and you can locate one or two — somedays three — you can do well,” said Anderson.

Evaluating The Prospects: Texas Rangers, Colorado Rockies, Arizona Diamondbacks & Minnesota Twins

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

The Diamondbacks have a solid system fronted by three right-handed starting pitchers that could all be factors in Arizona by the end of 2015.  The system has added depth with recent trades and solid drafts, but most of the top talent is in the upper levels, so Arizona will need to continue restocking the farm to have a continuous pipeline.

Here’s the primer for the series and a disclaimer about how we don’t really know anything.  See the links above for the two previous installments in this series and another series about how I evaluate, including four part on the ever-complicated hit tool, with more installments in that series coming soon.

Most of what you need to know for this list is at the above links, but I should add that the risk ratings are relative to their position, so average (3) risk for a pitcher is riskier than average risk (3) for a hitter, due injury/attrition being more common. I’d also take a 60 Future Value hitter over a 60 FV pitcher for the same reasons. Also, risk encompasses a dozen different things and I mention the important components of it for each player in the report.  The upside line for hitters is the realistic best-case scenario (in general, a notch better than the projected tools) and the Future Value encompasses this upside along with the risk rating for one overall rating number.

Below, I’ve included a quick ranking of the growth assets that Arizona has in the majors that aren’t eligible for the list and Dave Cameron shares some general thoughts on the organization. Scroll further down to see Carson Cistulli’s fringe prospect favorite and my first stab at an emoji scouting report. The next team up in the series, working from the bottom of the standings on up, is the Minnesota Twins.

Big League Growth Assets
1. A.J. Pollock, CF, Age 26
2. Chase Anderson, RHP, Age 26
3. Patrick Corbin, LHP, Age 25
4. Chris Owings, SS, Age 23
5. Didi Gregorius, SS, Age 24
6. Randall Delgado, RHP, Age 24

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Nobody could ever accuse Kevin Towers of being anything less than bold. Few teams have been as interesting as the Arizona Diamondbacks over the last few years. Setting aside the quality of his moves, the sheer volume and often puzzling circumstances surrounding them garnered Arizona more headlines than such a middling team typically deserves.

His moves cut against the grain of prizing young, cheap talent and instead focused on a loose set of criteria, most of which was derived from the ability to play above one’s tools. It didn’t make the team better but it sure spilled a lot of ink. The problem is a simple one: a general manager’s job is to win and make money for the club, not generate think-pieces and schadenfreude. The Diamondbacks didn’t win and now Towers is out as the general manager, with the search for his replacement beginning in earnest (the list of candidates is as long as your arm.)

The Diamondbacks team  Towers inherited wasn’t a world beater, though it did claim the 2011 National League West crown. One could convincingly argue that the franchise is actually in worse shape now compared to Towers’ first day on the job. What exactly has the outgoing general manager left the next person to fill his chair? More than you might think.

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One thing we know almost for certain: the Diamondbacks hit Andrew McCutchen intentionally, as revenge for the Pirates knocking out Paul Goldschmidt. One thing people believe, that might or might not be true: McCutchen’s rib injury is related to the beanball. McCutchen figures it’s not a coincidence; his manager, on the other hand, thinks linking the two is a “conspiracy theory”. Whatever the case, the Diamondbacks are receiving attention in August, their philosophy being brought back into the spotlight. And Tony La Russa, who works for the organization now, has spoken up in response to the media criticism:

“I don’t see where the Diamondbacks should catch all this (expletive) they’re catching,” La Russa said.
[…]
The crux of his argument lies in what he believes to be the Pirates’ pitching philosophy. They don’t just pitch inside, La Russa said. They pitch up and in. And by choosing to do so, they have to live with the consequences.

La Russa doesn’t think his team is the offender it’s portrayed as. He thinks the Diamondbacks are being broadly perceived unfairly, and if you look past their own quotes and look instead at the numbers, you can see where La Russa might be on to something. People like to think of the Diamondbacks as one thing, but in reality, their issue is less about the pitches, and more about the things they say.

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The last time Clayton Kershaw allowed a run, his team was trailing the Giants in the National League West by seven and a half games. The Dodgers have since caught up, in part because of the whole thing where Clayton Kershaw hasn’t allowed any runs, and for as much as this is a particularly pitcher-friendly era for the game, Kershaw these days has achieved a basically impossible level, standing out from the group of pitchers standing out from the rest of the pitchers. If the best pitchers get strikeouts while limiting walks and homers, 2014 Kershaw has been just about perfect, improving from a Cy Young campaign that was his second in three years.

It is absolute silliness that Clayton Kershaw owns a 1.85 ERA. I’ll note also, for good measure, he hasn’t allowed a single unearned run. It is additional absolute silliness that Kershaw is one start away from possessing a 1.16 ERA. Through 13 starts, he’s allowed 18 runs, but in 12 of those starts, he’s allowed a combined 11 runs. On May 17, Kershaw allowed 39% of his runs in 8% of his appearances, getting yanked in the second inning. Kershaw entered that game with a 1.74 ERA. Since that game, he’s posted a 0.97 ERA. That was a start that didn’t at all fit the greater pattern, so it makes you wonder: how did it happen? How did Clayton Kershaw get bombed by the Diamondbacks in the middle of May?

Let’s take a look. If nothing else, this post reveals what an actually mortal Clayton Kershaw can look like. It is an increasingly unfamiliar image.

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The Yankees just pulled a rare feat by trading Vidal Nuno to the Diamondbacks for Brandon McCarthy. Only once in the last five years has a team traded for a pitcher whose results were so out of whack with their process and peripherals. Of course, that was when the Dodgers traded a player to be named later to the Phillies for Joe Blanton in 2012, but the Yankees have a few reasons to believe that this will turn out better for them than that trade did for the Dodgers.

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It’s fairly safe to say that Arizona manager Kirk Gibson doesn’t care for Ryan Braun that much. Braun torched Gibson’s Diamondbacks in the 2011 LCS, just before Braun was found to have been taking some form of PEDs. The suspension, repeal fiasco, and Braun’s name coming up in the Biogenesis scandal never sat right with Gibson and he’s been a vocal critic ever since.

This fact and this fact alone could be the reason D-Backs reliever Evan Marshall threw at Ryan Braun twice in a row, hitting him the second time and earning an ejection. It could have been compounded by the fact that Brewers starter Kyle Lohse hit two batters himself earlier in the game. It could have to do with the two batters that were hit the night before. There could be a lot of reasons for it, but one thing is clear; the Diamondbacks playing tough-guy baseball was a bad move as far as the numbers go and ended up costing them the game in this case. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re a pitcher? You need a change-up.

That automatic response seems reasonable enough given the state of modern pitching analysis. You’ve probably heard it plenty of times about pitchers like Justin Masterson or Chris Archer. After all, the change breaks away from opposite-handed hitters and helps pitchers neutralize platoon threats.

But you know what? There’s another pitch that breaks away from opposite-handed hitters: the two-seamer or the sinker, whatever you want to call it. And yet lefties love sinkers from righties. So why do two pitches with similar movement have such different results?

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