Cleveland’s willingness to trade Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco was the result of two related factors: ownership would not pay anything close to market value for one of the best players in baseball; and the club believed it could maintain competitiveness on the cheap with its core of cost-controlled pitching still receiving pre-arbitration checks. Shane Bieber is the headliner, but breakout seasons from previously unheralded prospects Aaron Civale and Zach Plesac gave the soon-to-be Guardians confidence that they could suppress runs at an above-average clip and hand the game off to a good bullpen.

That plan has not come to pass; Cleveland’s pitching staff ranks just 19th in WAR as of the writing of this piece. But while the bullpen has held up its end of the bargain, sitting ninth in WAR among relief units, the rotation has accumulated just 4 WAR total through the beginning of August.

Much of that can be attributed to the three starters who were supposed to lead the way. Bieber and Civale have been on ice for most season due to a shoulder strain for the former and a finger injury for the latter; both were recently moved to the 60-day IL with the hope of returning in September. Plesac has also missed time, but he hasn’t helped much when he has been on the field. Through his most recent start, he has posted a 4.84 ERA and 5.08 FIP and a strikeout rate of only 15.6%, fifth lowest among starters with at least 80 innings pitched.

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 »

Eric Haase is having a breakout season with the Tigers. Acquired from Cleveland in January of last year, the 28-year-old catcher has a 128 wRC+ and a team-leading 18 home runs. Opportunity has helped fuel the production. Coming into the current campaign, Haase had appeared in just 26 games at the big-league level.

As impressive as Haase has been with the bat, it’s his background that drove a conversation that took place at Comerica Park on Thursday. I began by asking the Detroit-area native about his old organization’s well-earned reputation as a pitching-development machine.

“I think it starts with the guys you’re taking the draft,” opined Haase, who was in the Cleveland system from 2011-2019. “Obviously, there some are high-upside guys, and some organizations pick those top guys and kind of say, ‘Go out there and pitch.’ They think they’ve got themselves more of a finished product. With Cleveland, it was more about picking guys that already had a good feel for pitching, and then implementing things that would give them little spikes in velocity. They were big on weighted balls, big on strength and conditioning. Basically, they’d take guys who already had good command and give them some more legitimate weapons to get hitters out.”

Haase cited Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale, Mike Clevinger, and Zach Plesac as prime examples, and technology played a big role in their respective development paths. Drafted out of Dearborn Divine High School in 2011, Haase was there when the organization began transforming itself. 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 »

Some teams have an instantly identifiable “type.” You know what I’m talking about: the Cardinals and scrappy-but-under-tooled infielders, the Cubs with pitchers who don’t crack 90 mph, and the Rays with platoon-ish hitters who would be stretched as everyday players. Today, the Rays got their man again — Jordan Luplow, who is exactly the kind of hitter that always seems to be lurking on Tampa Bay’s bench, waiting to ruin some poor lefty reliever’s day.

The Rays are heavier on lefties than they’d probably like this year; Kevin Kiermaier, Austin Meadows, and Brett Phillips have all gotten plenty of run in the outfield, and only Meadows is someone I’d like to run out there against same-handed pitching. In all, Kiermaier and Phillips have 152 plate appearances against lefties, where they’ve put up a combined 27 wRC+. Not great, Bob.

In 334 career plate appearances against lefties, Luplow is hitting .251/.371/.556, good for a 143 wRC+. You can’t take platoon splits at face value with such a small sample, but he truly looks like a lefty masher; he walks nearly twice as often against lefties as compared to righties, strikes out less, and hits for a ton of power, with an enviable 11.5% barrel rate against southpaws (7.9% against righties). He also smashes four-seam fastballs, and there are lefty fastballs worth smashing in the AL playoff chase. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves could have been buyers or sellers at the start of this trade deadline season; I wouldn’t have been surprised either way. They have struggled to gain traction in a winnable National League East, and despite preseason projections that had them finishing 91–71 and in a tie with the Mets atop the division, they have not spent a single day in 2021 over .500 and entered Friday with playoff odds of just 9.7%.

A big reason for Atlanta’s woes is the outfield, where the team has lost two starters. On June 1, Marcell Ozuna dislocated two fingers on his left hand on a slide; less than a week later, he was arrested in connection to a domestic violence call and was charged with aggravated assault strangulation and misdemeanor battery. It’s unlikely he sees the field again this season (and probably as a Brave as well). A little over a month later, things reached DEFCON 1 when Ronald Acuña Jr. landed awkwardly trying to make a catch and tore his ACL, which required season-ending surgery.

The Braves have tried patching those holes as best they can. Not long after Acuña went down, they sent Bryce Ball to the Cubs for Joc Pederson. On Friday, they tossed some more bodies into the mix, adding Eddie Rosario from Cleveland and Adam Duvall from Miami. In exchange, Cleveland will get Pablo Sandoval, and the Marlins will receive Alex Jackson, who ranked eighth in our preseason Atlanta top prospects list. (The Braves also picked up Jorge Soler from the Royals in a deal announced after the deadline; we’ll have that transaction written up separately later.) Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have been in need of a stopgap at second base ever since Nick Madrigal tore tendons in his right hamstring and required season-ending surgery in mid-June. Since then, they’ve frequently been connected to trade candidates such as Adam Frazier and Eduardo Escobar, but with both of those players dealt within the past week and the team getting nowhere in its pursuit of Trevor Story, they had to turn elsewhere to fill the spot, though they didn’t have to go far. On Thursday they acquired Cesar Hernandez from division rival Cleveland.

In exchange for Hernandez, Cleveland will receive Konnor Pilkington, a 23-year-old lefty who was the team’s third-round pick out of Mississippi State in 2018, and who had been pitching for Chicago’s Double-A Birmingham affiliate. This is just the fourth trade between the two teams have since the formation of the AL Central in 1994. In the most recent one in December 2018, Cleveland traded Yonder Alonso to Chicago for minor league outfielder Alex Call.

The 31-year-old Hernandez was in his second season with Cleveland after a seven-year run in Philadelphia, which non-tendered him following a mediocre 2019 season. After an excellent 2020 campaign (.283/.355/.408, 110 wRC+, 1.9 WAR) during which he made the prorated share of $6.25 million plus incentives, he took a pay cut, signing a $5 million, one-year deal with a $6 million club option and no buyout for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearly here and once again, team behavior will be driven, at least in part, by 40-man roster dynamics. Teams with an especially high number of both rostered players under contract for 2022 and prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that the team has incentive to clear their overflow of players by trading for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or, more typically, younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. In an effort to see whose depth might augment trade behavior, I enjoy assessing clubs’ 40-man futures every year. This exercise is done by using the RosterResource Depth Chart pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the Team Payroll tab), and then weighing the December 2021 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day Injured List. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins, they have to cut someone from the 40-man to make room.

In November, clubs have to add prospects to the 40-man to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. RosterResource is the most accessible resource for tracking the prospect timelines. Most teams add a handful of players every offseason, while some add just one, and others may add as many as 10. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Anderson Espinoza, RHP, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: High-A Fort Wayne Age: 23 Org Rank: 8 FV: 40+
Line: 2.2 IP, 6 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 6 K

Notes
San Diego acquired Espinoza in the Drew Pomeranz trade in 2016, but he was shutdown before the start of the 2017 due to elbow discomfort. That began five years of developmental delays in the form of multiple Tommy John surgeries and the canceled 2020 minor league season. Now the 23-year-old is back on the mound and looking to recapture the stuff that once earned him top prospect status.

His longest outings this season have gone three innings (a mark he’s matched five times), so his 2.2 innings of work is on par with his understandably stringent workload restrictions. The six hits he allowed were all singles and the ones that came in the first and second innings were all weakly hit, though well placed. Espinoza’s outing ended when those softer hits turned into more solid contact in the third, but not before recording a season-high six strikeouts. His pitch count was already pushing 70 by the end of his short outing. On paper that may seem like cause for concern regarding Espinoza’s command and feel to pitch, which he struggled with earlier this year in his sole spring training appearance with the big league club. But that wasn’t the case on Thursday; the only walk he issued was to the first batter of the game, after which only one other hitter saw a three-ball count, and many of the pitches that were called for balls were extremely close and could just as easily have been called for strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

For the full introduction to the Replacement-Level Killers series, follow the link above. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the July 30 deadline, and in this two-position batch in particular, I don’t get the sense that any of these teams have these positions atop their shopping lists. With catchers in particular, framing and the less-quantifiable aspects of knowing a pitching staff make it easier for teams to talk themselves out of changing things up unless an injury situation has compromised their depth.

Note that all individual stats in this article are through July 18, but the won-loss records and Playoff Odds include games of July 19. Read the rest of this entry »