I’ve always been a huge Darin Ruf fan, so getting to write about his 2021 success is a little bit more meaningful to me than it would be for almost any other player. Ruf is the last player I remember my grandfather singling out before he passed away, with the thought that Ruf, then a young prospect in the Phillies system, had the potential to be a productive big leaguer for our favorite team.

That was nine years ago. The Phillies promoted Ruf in late 2012 for his first cup of major league coffee, but he never amassed more than 297 plate appearances in any season for them. The bat was decent — Ruf posted a 105 wRC+ over 833 plate appearances, including a 125 wRC+ during his 2013 rookie season — but poor defensive numbers kept him barely above replacement-level in almost 300 games with Philadelphia. He was traded to the Dodgers in November of 2016, and even before he had an opportunity to make his organizational debut, Ruf’s contract was purchased by the Samsung Lions of the KBO. For three years, he raked in Asia, earning himself a minor league deal with the Giants for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. (I was pretty excited.) A year later, he’s now the best hitter on a playoff-bound team (Kris Bryant is a notable omission from this list — he has a 119 wRC+ in 128 plate appearances with the Giants so far):

It’s no secret that the Giants have been receiving incredible production across their entire lineup. Their position players have posted a collective 113 wRC+ this season, a figure that ranks second in the majors among teams’ non-pitchers. But even in a lineup filled with players having above-average offensive seasons, Ruf stands out with his .279/.401/.544 slashline and 155 wRC+. That wRC+ ranks seventh in the majors among players with at least 250 plate appearances overall, sandwiched between Juan Soto (156) and Shohei Ohtani (154). That’s pretty phenomenal company, and it inspires two obvious questions. First, how did Ruf become one of the best hitters in baseball, at least this season? And, of course, how sustainable is this? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s already September, and maybe you’re still processing that fact. I’ll do you one better by pointing out that the Dodgers and Giants are about to play each other for the final time in the regular season. This is the earliest in the year that these rivals’ last series has occurred since way back in 1968, when Willie Mays and Don Drysdale were fixtures of the rivalry.

With Los Angeles and San Francisco tied atop the division and both teams on pace for 100 wins for the first time since 1962, I thought it prudent to break down what we might expect in this big weekend series.

The Series So Far

The Dodgers and Giants have split their 16 games so far (with San Francisco winning five of the last seven), featuring stellar pitching, unlikely heroes, home run robberies and blown saves. A four-game series in mid-July was full of drama, including Tyler Rogers giving up a walk-off homer to Will Smith, his second three-run outing against the Dodgers this season.

The very next night — actually the next two nights — it was Kenley Jansen who was handed a ninth-inning lead but walked off to a booing home crowd both times after giving up seven combined runs.

That’s just how this series has gone; no lead is safe from a disaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we explored the roster depth of the American League playoff contenders, identifying the strengths and weaknesses that might prove decisive down the stretch for the teams whose playoff odds sit above 10%. Today, we’ll do the same for the National League squads with October ambitions.

National League East

Atlanta Braves
Strengths: Atlanta’s slow and steady climb into first place has involved a considerable amount of roster management. One side effect of all the maneuvers that have gotten them where they are is significant depth. During Travis d’Arnaud’s absence, the team learned that William Contreras is a capable big league catcher. They filled their considerable outfield holes with Joc Pederson, Jorge Soler, and Adam Duvall, while Cristian Pache, who flamed out early in the season, has finally gotten hot at Triple-A Gwinnett and should be a nice September addition. The Gwinnett infield is packed with players who have big league experience, like Jason Kipnis and Ryan Goins. The return of Huascar Ynoa, with Ian Anderson not far behind, creates a sudden bevy of rotation options. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Antonio Jimenez, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
Level & Affiliate: Complex Level Age: 20 Org Rank: 26 FV: 40
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
Jimenez is an electric little lefty (he stands about 5-foot-10) with big arm speed who sits 91-95 and has a plus two-plane slider that he commands. He’ll also show you the occasional average changeup. He’s loose and athletic and has viable starter’s command, though he arguably falls short of starter projection at the moment due to the combination of his present repertoire depth and size. With starter-level command already in place, I’m betting on changeup improvement due to the looseness/athleticism and care less about how small Jimenez is. He belongs in the Rays system ranked ahead of the hard-throwing relief-only arms. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants have been one of the year’s biggest surprises, leading the National League West for a large portion of the season and holding the best record in baseball since the beginning of June. Their success is due in large part to some unexpectedly resurgent seasons from their veteran core. On Friday, San Francisco rewarded one of those veterans, signing Brandon Crawford to a two-year, $32 million contract extension.

The Tigers haven’t been nearly as good as the Giants in 2021, but they’ve played some really competitive baseball after an ugly 8-19 April. A big reason for their change in fortunes has been some excellent production from Jonathan Schoop. After signing back-to-back one-year deals with Detroit the last two seasons, the team inked him to a two-year, $15 million contract extension on August 7.

Crawford, a Bay Area native, has spent his entire career with the Giants. He was selected in the fourth round of the 2008 draft and has been a fixture at shortstop since his major league debut in 2011. He’s the franchise leader in games played at at the position and was a key contributor to two World Series championships in 2012 and ’14. After the 2015 season, he signed a six-year, $75 million contract extension that would have expired at the end of this season. This new extension guarantees that Crawford remains a single-franchise player at least through his age-36 season, a feat that’s become increasingly rare in today’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

For much of the San Francisco Giants’ wildly improbable 2021 season, the story of their pitching success (they have the third-best ERA and fourth-best FIP in baseball) has centered on a group of revitalized veterans, namely Kevin Gausman, Anthony DeSclafani, Johnny Cueto and Alex Wood, who have pitched better than ever, or at least better than they have in years. The shine on that group has begun to fade in recent weeks, however: the staff ace, Gausman, had a rough July and DeSclafani has struggled recently and now finds himself on the Injured List. Enter Logan Webb, a pitcher much their junior, who couldn’t have picked a better time to get his first taste of big league success.

A fourth round pick back in 2014, Webb moved methodically through a Giants farm system that was struggling to develop starting pitching. Even with the blockades of a 2016 Tommy John Surgery and a 2019 PED suspension, Webb still made his debut in 2019 at 22 years old, making him the youngest Giants starter to debut since Madison Bumgarner did so at age 20 in 2009.

Now 24, Webb is sustaining a high-level of performance in the midst of a pennant race that has the Giants gripping tightly to first place in a stout NL West. He currently boasts an ERA (3.33) more than two runs better than his career mark prior to the season (5.36). He also has the best ERA and FIP in the rotation since July 1 and has given up two runs or fewer in his last eight starts — half of which came against the vaunted Dodgers (three times) and Astros:

Read the rest of this entry »

What a ride this year’s deadline was. All told, we had 75 prospects move in the last month. They are ranked below, with brief scouting reports written by me and Kevin Goldstein. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below. I’ve moved all of the players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates. Our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline.

A couple of quick notes before I get to the rankings. We’ve included a few post-prospect players here (those marked in blue) so you can get an idea of where we value them now as opposed to where we had them at their prospect peak. Those players, as well as the Compensatory pick the Rockies will receive after they extend Trevor Story a qualifying offer and he signs elsewhere, are highlighted below. We had closer to 40 prospects (and 23 Players to be Named Later) traded last year, with the PTBNL number inflated by 2020’s COVID-related transaction rules. The backfields are not well-represented here, with just four prospects who have yet to play in full-season ball. Two of those are currently in the DSL and have no official domestic pro experience, though Alberto Ciprian has played stateside for instructs/extended spring training. Now on to the rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

This deadline had its share of earthquakes, but it also featured smaller aftershocks, as teams improved their depth or addressed smaller, specific needs. So let’s run down some of the deals that might get buried by the higher-Richter scale shakes of the likes of Max Scherzer and Kris Bryant.

The Houston Astros acquired pitcher Phil Maton and catcher Yainer Diaz from the Cleveland Guardians for center fielder Myles Straw

This trade is actually a slightly unusual one, as the team in the playoff shot — it’s not Cleveland — is the one giving up the best player. Straw’s offensive profile will likely prevent him from being an actual star at any point, but he’s fast, plays enough defense, and gets on-base at a respectable enough level to be an average or even better starter in center; he’s already hit the 2-WAR threshold, after all. UZR, our defensive input for WAR, has him at +6.6 runs, while OAA has him at +5 runs and DRS has him at +2. I don’t think I’d ever play him except in a pinch, but Straw’s theoretical ability to at least stand at second or short in an emergency has some additional value, too. Read the rest of this entry »

The NL West has been a slugging match all year. The Giants have the best record in baseball. The Dodgers are hot on their heels and just added two All-Stars to go for the division title, with the Padres in hot pursuit. San Francisco wasn’t going to take that lying down, though. As Jeff Passan first reported, the team has acquired Kris Bryant from the Cubs in exchange for two prospects, Alexander Canario and Caleb Kilian.

Bryant has been a hotly rumored deadline chip for seemingly forever; as soon as the Cubs hit a rough patch in the standings, they announced their intentions to sell off pieces that weren’t controllable past 2021, with him, Anthony Rizzo, and Javier Báez the obvious candidates for a move. All three have now been dealt to contenders, and for my money, Bryant is the best player of the three. He’ll slot into San Francisco’s roster all over the place, one of the perks of trading for him; he plays all four corner spots capably and has even started 10 games in center as the Cubs dealt with injury and ineptitude in the outfield. He’s not going to win a Gold Glove out there anytime soon — and the less said about his two innings at shortstop, the better — but if you’re looking to squeeze Bryant’s bat into the lineup, there are any number of possibilities.

That bat is the reason San Francisco made this trade. Rumors of Bryant’s demise were greatly exaggerated; he had an absolutely abysmal 2020, playing in only 34 games and compiling easily the worst line of his career, but he’s been back to his old tricks in 2021. That game is power and walks, and it’s worked to the tune of a .267/.358/.503 slash line, an on-base-light approximation of his career line.
Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Gallo is a Yankee, Eduardo Escobar is a Brewer, and Starling Marte will finish his season in Oakland. It’s already been a fast-paced trade season, and there are still a lot of deals that could be done before Friday’s deadline. But as I noted in a piece on Wednesday that looked at the most impactful players on the IL for American League contenders, there are top-flight pitchers and hitters who are not going to be traded but are waiting in the wings. Today I want to look at the NL side of things.

As a reminder, I calculated team injury impact to date this season by looking at the injury ledger data from Baseball Prospectus to determine each team’s injury impact to date in FanGraphs WAR compared to preseason projections. Additionally, while most of the teams I identified as contending had at least one impactful player on the IL, one did not; I’ll still spend some time on the Padres, but they will need to look to the trade market for reinforcements.

Finally, the cutoff for contending is defined as having playoff odds greater than 30%. I’m sure that will frustrate some Philadelphia and Atlanta fans who believe their teams still have a chance to chase down the Mets. For what it’s worth, the Braves are hoping that Ian Anderson and Drew Smyly can return to throw meaningful innings and that Travis d’Arnaud will return to catch them. The Phillies have zero projected position player WAR on the IL at the moment, although starting pitcher Zach Eflin’s return from the 10-day IL should bolster the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »