These are notes on prospects from Brendan Gawlowski, who will be chipping in on Daily Prospect Notes once a week. Read previous installments of the DPN here.

Today, we have a few notes from a series between Tri-Cities and Everett, the High-A affiliates of the Los Angeles Angels and Seattle Mariners, respectively.

Jordyn Adams, CF, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: High-A Tri-Cities Age: 22 Org Rank: 2 FV: 50
Line: 2-5, two infield singles, 3 SO

Adams is having a bad season. After a lower-leg injury sidelined for more than a month, the 22-year-old has been ice cold since returning to the lineup. Now more than 100 PAs into his season, he’s hitting .174/.260/.261 with a 35% strikeout rate, good for a 49 wRC+.

At the plate, he looks lost. He’s struggling to identify breaking pitches out of the hand, taking strikes on balls that bend into the zone and flailing early on pitches spinning down and away from him. He also swung and missed at several low-90s fastballs in the zone. When he does make contact, everything’s on the ground, much of it hit weakly the other way. Mechanically, he’s inconsistent as well, alternately lunging at low breaking balls or pulling off the plate on swings against the heat.

He’s also raw in the field: Two nights ago, he fielded a short fly with runners on first and second and despite no intent from the lead runner to advance, Adams came up firing and launched the ball well over the third baseman’s head. His 80-grade speed is also playing down at the moment. At the plate, he’s not quick out of the box, and on one occasion he posted a 4.3 DTL on a grounder to short. There’s more speed in the tank than that, and it’s possible that the leg injury is still bugging him, but at present he’s not consistently impacting the game with his wheels. Read the rest of this entry »

With just a week until the All-Star break, the Mariners have played their way into the thick of the AL Wild Card race, though our Playoff Odds remain skeptical. Based on their pre-season projections, you might expect their surprising success to be linked to two of their top prospects having made their debuts in mid-May. You’d be partially right. While Jarred Kelenic’s big league career hit a major hiccup, Logan Gilbert has been a solid addition to the Mariners’ beleaguered starting rotation.

Gilbert has made nine starts in the majors so far and has compiled a 4.10 ERA backed by an impressive 3.50 FIP. In an ideal world, the Mariners probably would have liked to see Gilbert develop a bit longer in Triple-A earlier this season, but a bunch of injuries to their rotation forced their hand a bit. James Paxton, Nick Margevicius, and Ljay Newsome are all out for the season. Marco Gonzales missed time with a strained forearm. Justin Dunn has been sidelined recently with some recurring shoulder issues. Yusei Kikuchi has pitched extremely well, and deservedly earned the team’s only spot on the American League All-Star roster, but behind him, the rotation has been rather thin. Gilbert’s success at the highest level stabilized that group at a critical point as they began making their way up the standings. With just over 40 innings pitched under his belt, we now have an adequate amount of data to start comparing his minor-league scouting report to his major league results. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Brendan Gawlowski, who will be chipping on Daily Prospect Notes once a week. Read previous installments of the DPN here.

Today, we’ll review some live looks, watch at a little video, and head off the beaten path for a bit. It should be fun, and apologies in advance for highlighting a few performances from earlier in the week. Onward!

CJ Van Eyk, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
Level & Affiliate: High-A Vancouver Age: 22 Org Rank: 10 FV: 40+
Line: ⅔ IP, 4 H, 7R, 1 SO, 3 BB

It was a night he’d like to forget. The line probably oversells how rough he looked — a couple of gork singles extended the inning — but Van Eyk’s primary developmental goal this season is to pound the zone, and only 17 of his 33 pitches were strikes on Tuesday night. He often missed badly to his arm side with his fastball and curve, and a lack of competitive pitches limited him to just one true swing and miss.

Mechanically, Van Eyk has a loose arm, clean arm swing, and still head, all of which should help him throw strikes. His landing spot is very inconsistent though, and that seems to affect his ability to throw strikes. Sometimes he lands in a clean fielding position; on other occasions his left foot lands so awkwardly that he practically falls off the mound toward the first base dugout (you can see footage of that in action in Tess Taruskin’s notes from a few weeks back). Up to 94 with a curve that flashes plus, there’s good stuff here if he can find a delivery that facilitates more strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

There were lots of notable performances in the minors last night, so I covered more players than usual and shortened up some of the notes. Additionally, the 2021 Futures Game rosters were announced today and they are freaking loaded. You can see the entire rosters and access players’ scouting reports on The Board’s seasonal tab. Thanks to Sean Dolinar for his speedy help in getting that up.

A.J. Puk, LHP, Oakland Athletics
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Las Vegas Age: 26 Org Rank: 2 FV: 50
Line: 2 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 4 K

Notes
Puk has now had two consecutive scoreless outings after he surrendered multiple runs in each of his previous six (!). When I saw him during the spring, his velo was only in the low-90s, well below the 96-99 range a fully healthy Puk would typically be operating in. Per Synergy, that velocity has returned to peak levels during the regular season. Today I noticed a change in Puk’s arm slot. This change occurred earlier this month. I don’t know if that velo rebound occurred in concert with this change, or if this is something Puk was instructed to do, or if it just began happening naturally. Regardless, this is still a lefty with big velo and a deep coffer of impact secondaries. If he can get right at some point this season, he can be an impact relief weapon for a team fighting for its division, and I still like Puk as a multi-inning reliever long-term. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

Emerson Hancock brought a power arsenal with him to the Seattle Mariners organization. Drafted sixth-overall last year out of the University of Georgia, the 22-year-old right-hander features a mid-90s fastball, a biting slider, a plus changeup, and a capable curveball. But he’s not your prototypical flamethrower. While not backing away from the power-pitcher label, Hancock fashions himself more as a craftsman, a starter who can go deep into games by mixing and matching, and by commanding the strike zone. His track record backs that up. Over his final two collegiate seasons — this in the talent-laded SEC — he logged 131 strikeouts, and walked just 21, in 114-and-a-third innings.

No. 4 on our Mariners Top Prospects list, Hancock currently has a 2.19 ERA in four starts comprising 12.1 innings with the High-A Everett AquaSox. He talked pitching with FanGraphs over the weekend.

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David Laurila: To start, give me a self scouting report. How do you identify as a pitcher?

Emerson Hancock: “One thing I’ve always tried to do, especially since college, is be able to ‘pitch’ — mix speeds, throw pitches in different locations, throw anything in any count to get hitters off balance. That’s something I take pride in. Another thing is trying to do the little things right, like holding runners.”

Laurila: You have plus stuff. How do you go about balancing power and command?

Hancock: “Something that’s helped me is that I haven’t always had the power. In high school, I struggled to have that big-time velocity, so I kind of had to learn at a younger age how to ‘pitch.’ At Georgia, [velocity] started happening — it came along — so now I had this other way. I had to learn how to use it. Even now, in the minor leagues, I’m trying to find different ways to use it. It’s something that’s always evolving for me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of you, I spent a good portion of Memorial Day watching baseball. I started with the Rays and Yankees, and was watching the YES Network feed when rookie shortstop Taylor Walls stepped to the plate. Immediately, the broadcast went to a graphic of who the Rays elected not to call up after they traded Willy Adames to the Brewers: Wander Franco, universally seen as the best prospect in the game, and the red-hot Vidal Bruján. It was a nice little troll, but while so much attention is deservedly paid to the Franco and Jarred Kelenic types before and after they debut, not every rookie has the same kind of prospect pedigree. With that in mind, here are nine prospects who aren’t getting the same kind of hype but are performing at a level that might earn them a big-league look this year. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cubs’ 2021 schedule came out, I circled May 17-20. That otherwise unremarkable four-game series with the Nationals would mark the return of 2016 World Series heroes Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber to Wrigley Field. I knew they would receive an epic welcome from fans and I felt like I needed to be part of it.

The Cubs are pretty far removed from the juggernaut that won 103 games on the way to the team’s first championship in 108 years. While a relatively weak division means it’s certainly possible they could go on a run that would keep Jed Hoyer’s front office from being sellers at the deadline, it is far from guaranteed. Our playoff odds give the Cubs a 35.1% chance of making the postseason. It has left me looking for those moments of joy that fall short of the ultimate goal of hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy at the end of the season but are still meaningful.

It occurred to me that I am far from the only fan looking for moments to celebrate beyond the expectation of playing in October. So I started looking for all of the silver linings to 2021’s cloudiest seasons. I identified all of the teams with less than a 20% chance to make the playoffs per our odds, then dug into the prospect lists, record books and clubhouse storylines to see what I might circle on the calendar for the sport’s less fortunate faithful. So here they are, a few moments of joy for the fanbases that may still be holding out hope that their team will channel its inner 2019 Nationals, but suspect they won’t. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s what struck me as notable. Today, I’ll take a look at the American League, with a National League post to follow next week. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Games from 5/18

Terrin Vavra, MIF/CF, Baltimore Orioles
Level & Affiliate: Double-A Bowie Age: 24 Org Rank: 9  FV: 45
Line: 3-for-3, 2 BB, HR
Notes
This makes five consecutive multi-hit games for Vavra. Cursory video analysis shows no change in his swing or physicality; he’s just on an epic early-season heater and should probably be at Triple-A. The real development here is his defensive movement: After playing both middle infield spots with Colorado, he’s now also getting reps in center field with Baltimore. Those who miss and appreciate all-fields contact will love Vavra, who is very adept at hitting outside pitches to the opposite field. He projects as a good multi-positional role player. Read the rest of this entry »