Nick Frasso has a high-octane heater and an intriguing ceiling. Acquired by the Los Angeles Dodgers from the Toronto Blue Jays at this summer’s trade deadline, the 23-year-old right-hander was described by Eric Longenhagen prior to the season as “an uncommon sort of prospect,” a projectable hurler who’d had a velocity spike before undergoing Tommy John surgery shortly after being selected 106th overall in the 2020 draft.

Loyola Marymount University product has only elevated his profile since returning to the mound in mid-May. Featuring a fastball with more juice than the one he displayed pre-injury, he logged a 1.83 ERA with 76 strikeouts and just 33 hits allowed in 54 innings. Moreover, he did so while climbing from Low-A to Double-A in three months time.

Frasso — No. 20 on our Dodgers prospect rankings, with a 40+ FV — sat down to discuss his repertoire, and recent change of scenery, following an August outing with the High-A Great Lakes Loons.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your early-career development. What do you know now that you didn’t when you signed your first professional contract?

Nick Frasso: “My last year in college is when we finally got a TrackMan at our school and as that was the COVID year, I didn’t even get to use it a ton. It wasn’t until I jumped into pro ball that I really got access to all the analytical stuff — the metrics that allowed me to see what my pitches do, what works better in certain situations, and stuff like that. I’ve kind of gone from there.”

Laurila: I was at last night’s [August 16] game and saw you hit triple digits a couple of times. How does your fastball profile outside of the velocity? Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries are always unwelcome, but the pumpkin spice season is perhaps the most unfortunate time of year to lose a player to one. A surprise malady at this point in the season can shut a player out of some, if not all, of the postseason, and with no ability to make trades and playoff eligibility freezing at the beginning of September, it’s especially challenging to fill holes on the big league roster. This weekend featured some particularly bad injury news for playoff teams, as a number of players who can’t be easily replaced saw their postseason outlook take a turn for the worse.

Let’s take stock of what these injuries might mean come October, beginning with the Tampa Bay Rays, who got the worst bit of news. Shane Baz needs Tommy John surgery, and since we’re so late in the season, 2023 is off the table for his return as well. Until this setback, Baz’s recovery from his most recent elbow problem seemed to be going well, and the team had held out hope that they’d be able to get him up to speed enough to at least pitch in relief. With Baz out, the Rays will have to rely more on Tyler Glasnow, who is expected to be activated on Wednesday in his return from a Tommy John surgery of his own.

The bad news in Tampa didn’t stop with Baz. Brandon Lowe’s back problems have ended his 2022 season early. While (hopefully) not as significant as Baz’s injury, Lowe has struggled with back pain for most of the season and recently had a cortisone injection. As with Baz, the hope had been to get him back on the roster in time for the playoffs. Even with his struggles this year, which were due in large part to the aforementioned injury, ZiPS still thinks Lowe’s bat has the most upside of nearly anyone on the team, and the Rays will take a small but significant hit in the postseason projections in his absence. Without Baz and Lowe, ZiPS thinks of the Rays as a .547 team rather than a .553 one, with their solid depth keeping things from being far worse. The full version of ZiPS projects Lowe’s primary replacement, Jonathan Aranda, at a 105 wRC+ for the rest of the season, a significant bump from his 90 wRC+ projection before the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Trayce Thompson may not be the most accomplished professional athlete in his family — not when father Mychal Thompson and older brother Klay Thompson have six NBA titles and five All-Star selections between them — but for the first time in six years, he’s making significant noise of his own at the major league level. Now on his second stint with the Dodgers, the 31-year-old Thompson is in the midst of a modest breakout, one that could have ramifications for Los Angeles’ roster in October and beyond.

A night after the Dodgers clinched their ninth NL West title in 10 years, Thompson started in right field in place of Mookie Betts and followed a solo homer by Will Smith with one of his own, a 445-foot shot off Zach Davies. That tied the game at 2–2, though Los Angeles eventually lost in extra innings.

The homer was Thompson’s 10th of the season in just 205 plate appearances; he’s the eighth Dodger to reach double digits. Even with a September slump, the well-traveled outfielder has the highest wRC+ of any Dodger since the All-Star break and is tied for third in WAR, behind or alongside three players who are going to wind up somewhere on MVP ballots:

That’s pretty lofty company for a player who’s on his third organization and fourth team (including affiliates) this season. Thompson is yet another reminder of the Dodgers’ ability to find diamonds in the rough and turn them into championship-caliber cogs, a facet of their organization that’s been as essential as their player development pipeline. Turner was in his age-29 season when he became a mainstay in 2014, Taylor in his age-26 season in ’17, and Muncy in his age-27 season in ’18. Despite their staggered starts, they’re three of the Dodgers’ five most valuable position players since Dave Roberts took over as manager in 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I took a look at a few starters who have changed their pitch mix after being traded halfway through this season. Today, I’m finishing the set. Here are the relievers who have changed their pitch selection the most in the month after joining new teams. One note: since relievers throw fewer pitches, the variability in their mix is greater; a few extra sliders to get the feel for them in a random game can tip the percentages meaningfully. I’m focusing on five relievers who made interesting changes, but you could add others to the list.

Lou Trivino, New York Yankees

The Change: -12% Four-Seamer, -6% Changeup, +8% Cutter, +14% Slider
Trivino is a rarity, a legitimate five-pitch reliever. He’s thrown his changeup, slider, sinker, cutter, and four-seamer each at least 10% of the time this year, and mixed in an occasional curveball for good measure. The Yankees are working to change that.

Since donning pinstripes, Trivino is down to three pitches he uses at least 10% of the time: sinker, slider, cutter. His slider is new this year, one of the sweeping types that are all the rage these days, and he’d already taken to the pitch in Oakland, using it nearly 20% of the time. He’s using it even more in New York; a third of the pitches he’s thrown as a Yankee have been sliders. Read the rest of this entry »

The top prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers system lost one of his baseball “brothers” a month ago. Not literally — Alex De Jesus is alive and well — but rather by dint of a trade-deadline deal. A 20-year-old infielder who’d been playing with the High-A Great Lakes Loons, De Jesus went to the Toronto Blue Jays organization, along with Mitch White, in exchange for Moises Brito and Nick Frasso.

Shortly after the trade, I asked Diego Cartaya what it’s like to have a teammate who is also a close friend leave the organization.

“It’s not easy, but I’m kind of happy for him,” replied Cartaya, who along with being L.A.’s top prospect is No. 31 in our MLB prospect rankings. “He’s going to get a better opportunity with Toronto, so we’re pretty excited for him. But it’s hard. As teammates, we spend more time together than we do with our families. He’s just like my brother.”

Cartaya’s real family is in Venezuela, and it was his father who initially taught him how to hit. The tutoring he’s received since entering pro ball at age 16 has resulted in occasional tweaks, both to his stance and his swing. Cartaya told me that he used to be “more of a big launch-angle guy,” but now has a flatter swing. Upon hearing that, I noted that the home run I’d seen him hit the previous night was more of a line drive than a moonshot. Read the rest of this entry »

With Tuesday night’s 4–3 win over the Mets at Citi Field, the Dodgers notched their 90th victory of the season, the second time in the last seven years that the team reached 90 wins before the end of August. Even with a subsequent pair of losses on Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon, the Dodgers once again have a shot not just at 100 wins (a plateau they’ve reached four times in six full seasons under manager Dave Roberts) or even 106 (a franchise record set in 2019 and matched last year), but also at the 2001 Mariners’ expansion-era record of 116 wins, though admittedly their odds for that one grew longer this week.

The Dodgers enter Friday with an 18-game lead over the Padres in the NL West and a magic number of 14 (and can quickly shrink the latter with their series in San Diego this weekend). Despite their series loss in New York, they’re still seven games ahead of the Mets (84–48) in the race for the NL’s best record and thus the top seed in the expanded postseason. Our Playoff Odds project them to finish with 109 wins, which would be the majors’ highest total since the aforementioned Mariners. Via our Odds distribution, they have a 62.1% chance of winning at least 109, though after their back-to-back losses, their chances of winning 116 or more games are down to 1.1%.

Earlier this year, it was the Yankees who were on pace to top 116 wins, but their 13–13 July snuffed that dream out, and a 10–18 August has put even a 100-win season in doubt. The Dodgers, who briefly slipped into second place in the NL West on June 17, when they were 39–24, had a lead of just 1.5 games over the Padres as recently as June 29. They’ve gone 45–12 (.789) since that date, with separate winning streaks of seven, eight, and 12 games. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — It’s not as though Jacob deGrom hadn’t faced strong offenses in his first five starts upon returning from four months on the shelf due to a stress reaction in his right scapula. He’d twice gone up against the Braves, who rank second in the National League in scoring and who remain hot on the Mets’ tail in the NL East, as well as the Phillies, who rank fifth in scoring. On Wednesday night, in a playoff-like atmosphere at Citi Field, deGrom passed his toughest test since returning, holding the Dodgers — who lead the majors in scoring (5.36 runs per game) and wRC+ (121) — to just one run on three hits in a 2-1 victory completed in just two hours and 19 minutes.

deGrom struck out nine while matching his season high of 25 swings and misses. He’s been so dominant in his limited 2022 action that it rated as noteworthy that he surrendered a walk and a homer in the same game; he had allowed just two of each against the 103 batters he’d faced thus far (1.9%), that while striking out 46 (44.7%). More on his insane numbers further below.

deGrom got the walk out of the way almost immediately, issuing a five-pitch pass to Trea Turner, the Dodgers’ second hitter, in the top of the first inning. He didn’t get to another three-ball count until his seventh and final inning, and didn’t allow a hit until Justin Turner singled past a diving Francisco Lindor with one out in the fifth. That one ultimately didn’t do any damage, but a hanging slider to Mookie Betts to lead off the sixth inning was another matter. Betts drilled it 415 feet to left-center for his 32nd homer of the season and his fifth in his past five starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch White brought a new-ish slider to Toronto when the Blue Jays acquired him at this year’s trade deadline. He also brought a nerdy approach to pitching. That should come as no surprise. The 27-year-old right-hander had pitched in the Los Angeles Dodgers system since being selected in the second round of the 2016 draft out of Santa Clara University.

White also had a big-league resume when he changed organizations. Having debuted with the Dodgers in August of 2020’s COVID-truncated campaign, he had 105-and-two-thirds innings under his belt when the four-player swap occurred. Since coming to Toronto, White has a 5.89 ERA over four starts.

White discussed his new and old sliders, and the blister issues that have dogged his career, when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park last week.

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On his path to the big leagues and dealing with blisters:
“A lot of it was staying healthy. I’ve had a few things go on every year, whether it was blisters or some back stuff. I had a broken toe at one point. Right now, I have this little guy [blister]. The slider really puts a lot of pressure there because I’m trying to get to the side of the ball and spin it, and for whatever reason, I guess my skin is soft. I’ve had to learn how to manage that stuff in between outings. Read the rest of this entry »

To these eyes and those of others, the novelty of position players pitching in blowouts has worn off, but even so, the phenomenon has taken on a new twist. Whereas it has become almost routine for a team that’s getting pasted to call upon a reserve position player to close things out rather than waste a real pitcher, this season we’ve seen an unprecedented number of position players finishing games for the teams that are doing the pasting. In fact, earlier this week we saw a team do so on back-to-back nights, when Dodgers infielder Hanser Alberto nailed down 10-1 and 12-6 victories over the Brewers on Tuesday and Wednesday. Talk about adding insult to injury.

The 29-year-old Alberto is a light-hitting utilityman who during a seven-year career with four teams has played every position but catcher and center field. This year, he’s hitting .246/.258/.373 with two homers in 128 PA for the majors’ most dominant team, becoming something of a fan favorite for his role in keeping the Dodgers loose with his dugout dancing, towel-waving, and general good vibes-spreading.

Hanser Alberto might be my new favorite player??? pic.twitter.com/3Aa3kXkZzb

— Blake Harris (@BlakeHHarris) April 20, 2022

This is hilarious pic.twitter.com/R9STiFWCOv

— kimberly ? (@kimballzzzzz) August 24, 2022

Alberto came to the Dodgers with a smidgen of mound work on his resumé. He made his first pitching appearance with the Orioles on April 7, 2019, allowing two runs in the ninth inning of a game they lost to the Yankees 15-3; Austin Romine took him deep. He pitched again on April 20 of last year with the Royals; with the Rays ahead 14-7, he relieved a struggling Greg Holland and got the final out. Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago, everything was coming up Cody Bellinger’s way. The NL Rookie of the Year in 2017, he broke out in a big way in ’19, smashing 47 home runs with an OPS over 1.000 and edging out Christian Yelich for his first (and only) MVP hardware. Bellinger had even taken to playing excellent defense in center field, not something typically on the curriculum vitae for a young first baseman. Entering his age-24 season, everyone expected that he’d be a star for the next decade or so and a building block for the Dodgers as players like Corey Seager were approaching free agency.

The ZiPS projection system, known for being the grumpy devil’s advocate as most such systems are, didn’t see any particular reason for concern, either. If you wanted Los Angeles to sign Bellinger to a lucrative contract extension, guaranteeing he wore Dodger blue for a long time, you had a loyal friend in ZiPS:

In rest-of-career WAR, Bellinger ranked third among position players, behind just Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña Jr.

Now, if this were a comedy movie, this is the point in the trailer at which you hear the record scratch, the narrator describes the humorous change of fortune, and then the music changes to an upbeat pop hit song with clips of how Bellinger gets back everything he lost and learns about the incredible power of friendship. But it’s not. Since that NL MVP season, he has hit .200/.271/.380 in over 1,000 plate appearances, only finishing above replacement level by virtue of the fact that he at least still remembers how to play defense. This is less Pixar and more Darren Aronofsky. Read the rest of this entry »