If you pull up the Statcast batting leaderboards and sort by hard hit rate, the number one player won’t surprise you; it’s Giancarlo Stanton with a full two-thirds of his batted balls hit harder than 95 mph this year. But if you set the minimum batted ball filter to 40 events, the third name on the list is quite surprising: Evan Longoria. The 35-year-old third baseman is putting up some of the most encouraging offensive numbers since his heyday in Tampa Bay. And if you look a little further down, another veteran third-baseman shows up: Kyle Seager, who is carrying much of Seattle’s offense on his shoulders. These two veterans are simply crushing the ball right now and are enjoying late-career resurgences to help their respective teams get off to hot starts in April.

Longoria more than Seager has struggled offensively in the recent past. Since being traded to San Francisco prior to the 2018 season, he’s put up a 93 wRC+ in three seasons, accumulating just 3.1 WAR. That’s a significant step back from the peak of his career when he was widely considered to be one of the best, most consistent third basemen in baseball. After three disappointing years in the Bay area, his Statcast batting profile looks completely different this year. He’s posting career highs in average exit velocity, barrel rate, and hard hit rate leading to the highest power output of his career.

Of course, if you’ve been paying attention to the conversations around the changes in the ball introduced this year, you’d know that nearly every batter is seeing higher exit velocities on their hardest hit balls in play. Here’s what Justin Choi wrote in early April:

“The pressing issue, though, is that inflated exit velocities on batted balls force us to view the improvements of hitters with a rather healthy dose of skepticism. So far into the season, many players have surpassed their previous max EV highs; to my knowledge, 19 of them did so by a margin of 2 or more mph. But how can we tell which of those power surges are genuine? Did they make mechanical adjustments, or are they beneficiaries of the new baseball?”

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With another full week of baseball on the horizon, let’s set our sights on three intriguing faceoffs. One is riddled with questions about each starter’s ability to become a true ace, another connects two former teammates who have each proven themselves as aces, and the final is between two fellas who haven’t proven much of anything yet this year.

Tuesday, April 20, 6:40 PM ET: Zac Gallen vs. Luis Castillo

For years, Gallen has embodied promise. He was, and in many ways still is, the physical form of “could be.” The Cardinals took him in the third round of the 2016 draft, and his 1.62 ERA and 2.17 FIP at High-A in 2017 showed quick returns on the their investment. Gallen made it all the way up to Triple-A by the end of the year, then was traded to Miami in December 2017 along with Sandy Alcantara and two other players in exchange for Marcell Ozuna. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now about 10 days into the season, which means it’s time for a round of “Who’s looking good out of the gate?” Today, I want to focus on three post-hype starters who piqued my interest in the last week: Carlos Rodón, Jeff Hoffman, and Justin Dunn. Obviously, these three have teased before, and given their track records, there’s good reason to be skeptical of them going forward. All three have good arms though, and I’m a sucker for a spring breakout. With that in mind, I’ve donned my yellow zigzagged shirt, taken a running start, and am ready to blast this metaphorical football.

I trust that a small sample warning isn’t really necessary here. We all know that we’re working with extremely limited data at this point in the year, and that the following content comes with an extra-large SSS warning label. I trust you to recognize the intent of this article, which is simply to highlight interesting starts from a few talented but oft-frustrating arms. I’m not declaring that they’re suddenly budding All-Stars; I’m not even arguing they belong on your fantasy team. If someone reads this and comments “Uh, it was one start,” I will, well, I won’t do anything, but someone else will down-vote you in the comments, and that will be embarrassing. Don’t do that.

With that out of the way:

Carlos Rodón

Rodón’s run of bad luck in recent years is well-documented. He missed a couple of months in 2018 with a shoulder injury, then had to go under the knife for Tommy John early the following year. He returned to the mound last season, but only for a handful of innings, and he was unceremoniously non-tendered this past winter. Chicago invited him to camp anyway, and while he had a strong spring and won a job in the rotation, he didn’t have a ton of buzz heading into the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball, a prospect trade, and minor league co-op action in Arizona. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Waldy Arias, 3B, Campbell: 3-for-9, 3 BB, K, 2 SB, 2 HBP

If you are here for hardcore draft info, skip to the next paragraph. If you want to have fun for a minute, stick around. Arias is a little junior third baseman at a mid-major program who is slugging .290. Nobody is going to print a magnet with his name on it come July. My question is why does he have so many enemies? With two more hit by pitches over the weekend, Arias has now been hit 16 times in 21 games. That’s nearly once every six plate appearances, which was his exact rate last year, when he got hit 12 times in 15 games. Arias is a pesky slap hitter who crowds the dish. His high front elbow hangs out over the plate and the overall setup reminds me a bit of a mini-Carlos Quentin, who took a fair number of pitches to the body in his career. With access to some of the video and data tools pro teams have, I was able to click a few buttons and watch all 16 HBP. Here are the results:

1. Curveball: Foot
2. Slider: Leg
3. Fastball: Thigh
4. Fastball: Thigh
5. Slider: Foot
6. Fastball: Thigh
7. Fastball: Elbow
8. Fastball: Elbow
9. Slider: Head
10. Fastball: Elbow
11. Changeup: Shoulder
12. Fastball: Back
13. Slider: Elbow
14. Fastball: Elbow
15. Changeup: Hand
16. Slider: Shoulder

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley attempt to make sense of unsightly spring training uniforms, then preview the 2021 Braves (08:42) with Grant McAuley of From The Diamond and the 2021 Mariners (45:27) with Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times.

Audio intro: Ken Stringfellow, "Uniforms"
Audio interstitial: Anti-Flag, "20 Years of Hell"
Audio outro: Jethro Tull, "Uniform"

Link to Meg’s tweet about the Padres’ uniforms
Link to Uni Watch on the St. Patrick’s Day unis
Link to Mike Petriello on the Braves’ projections
Link to Petriello on Tatis/Acuña/Soto
Link to Craig Goldstein on Fried
Link to study on Cobb County
Link to Neil deMause on the Cobb County study
Link to From The Diamond
Link to BP Mariners preview
Link to Rodríguez homer video
Link to Ryan on the Rodríguez homer
Link to Ryan on Kelenic and Mather
Link to Ryan on Kelenic’s injury
Link to Ryan on Dunn and spring training clichés
Link to Dan Szymborski’s hitter bust candidates
Link to Ryan on Kikuchi
Link to Ryan on the pandemic and the M’s rebuild

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The Mariners’ starting pitchers can be broken into two different groups. There are the veterans at the top in Marco Gonzales and James Paxton, who between them have spent about 10 seasons in Seattle. They’ve both been successful, and so long as they stay healthy — not a given for Paxton — we know what to expect from them. The other half of the Mariners’ rotation is the young guys: Justus Sheffield, Justin Dunn, Logan Gilbert, and others. Each of them had or has considerable prospect stock, but while they’re expected to be successful at some point in the future, we can’t be sure that success will arrive in 2021.

Holding those two groups together in the middle is left-hander Yusei Kikuchi, fittingly, as he represents something from both. At 29 years old and with nine seasons spent in NPB, he’s already a veteran. But as with the young guys, there is still a lot to learn about how he will fare in the majors, given that his MLB experience amounts to two years. The first was 2019, his rookie season and first time pitching in the U.S., when he posted a 5.46 ERA and 5.71 FIP in 161.2 innings as Seattle finished last in the AL West.

The pandemic-shortened 2020 season, though, suggested there could be a lot more to him. Kikuchi’s ERA stayed above 5.00, but his FIP plummeted to 3.30, and he made significant progress with his strikeout and home run rates. If his surface numbers take the step forward this year that his peripherals did last year, it would be a major boost to the Mariners as they try to crawl toward contention.

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Jarred Kelenic is right, or at the very least, he’s not wrong. There’s no reason not to take the recent claims of the Mariners outfielder and his representative, Brody Scoffield, at face value. Their story — that Kelenic was offered a pre-debut extension and that when he declined to sign it, the club refused to call him up in 2020 for service time reasons — is totally believable, and is backed up by Kevin Mather’s now infamous remarks over Zoom to the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club; Mather, the club’s President and CEO at the time of his remarks, resigned last week. The proposed extension, which Mather described as a “long-term deal, six-year deal for substantial money with options to go farther,” speaks both to Kelenic’s immense talent as well as the Mariners’ desire to lock him up on team-friendly terms.

Jerry Dipoto, who addressed the situation last Tuesday, is right, or at the very least, he might not be wrong. Dipoto said what one normally would about a highly-ranked prospect who is generating hype but isn’t on the roster yet. (Here it worth remembering that GMs operate within the budget strictures ownership set for them. That’s not to say Dipoto has no agency, and owners look for GMs who are willing to let this type of fiscal responsibility take precedence over winning baseball games. But in reality, ownership should be on the hook to a far greater degree than the front office in the eyes of fans.) Kelenic has only played 21 games above A-ball. He hit a very solid .253/.315/.542 in those 21 games, as a teenager mind you, and was actually remarkably unlucky, as evidenced by his exceptionally light .246 BABIP. Still, a little more seasoning in Triple-A, as Dipoto suggests, might be beneficial. Kelenic’s approach could use some tightening and his strength gains have come with some of his twitch going backwards, which is starting to hinder him defensively.

But those are nitpicks, not deficiencies that should have kept him out of Seattle. Evan White proves the case. White isn’t nearly as talented as Kelenic, but he signed a pre-debut deal and was instantly the Opening Day first baseman in 2020. His bat wasn’t ready, as evidenced by a miserable 66 wRC+ to go with an ugly 41.6% strikeout rate, yet he was there. Was White the Mariners’ best option? Maybe. But did the fact that he signed the sort of big league deal that Kelenic turned down drive the decision to have him with the major league team while Kelenic futzed around at the team’s alternate site in Tacoma? No question. Read the rest of this entry »

There were so many concerning and reprehensible elements to Kevin Mather’s address to the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club — given earlier this month, but unearthed, in YouTube form, by commenters on Lookout Landing yesterday — that it would be beyond the scope of a single post to adequately address them all. Mather, still the President and CEO of the Mariners at this writing and even after the Seattle Times reported his history of alleged workplace harassment in 2018, managed in the course of 45 minutes to offend on a multitude of different levels, none of which were mentioned specifically in his apology statement. Here, though, I will specifically address the element of his speech that I have the most knowledge and experience with — the one that, as a result, was the most infuriating to me. In the course of his question period, Mather, twice and entirely unprompted, denigrated his players’ ability to speak English.

The video has since been deleted from the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club’s channel, where it was originally updated, but it has been uploaded elsewhere; Lookout Landing also posted a full transcript here. The quotes below are pulled from the Lookout Landing transcript. First, Mather was asked by one of the members of the Club to “tell [them] about Julio Rodríguez.” Mather’s answer began like this:

Julio Rodríguez has got a personality bigger than all of you combined. He is loud, his English is not tremendous.

Later, another member asked about what support the Mariners offered to players who don’t speak English as their first language. Mather described the improvement in such supports over the last 20 years, before deciding to illustrate his point with this example:

As far as Korea, Japan, Taiwan, those players are typically older. They don’t come over as 16- or 18-year-olds, they come over as 28, 30, 32 year olds. We typically…it frustrates me…For instance, we just re-hired Iwakuma, he was a pitcher with us for a number of years. Wonderful human being, his English was terrible. He wanted to get back into the game, he came to us, we quite frankly want him as our Asian scout, interpreter, what’s going on with the Japanese league. He’s coming to spring training. And I’m going to say, I’m tired of paying his interpreter. When he was a player, we’d pay Iwakuma X, but we’d also have to pay $75,000 a year to have an interpreter with him. His English suddenly got better, his English got better when we told him that! For the older players from the Far East, we have an interpreter that travels with them. For the younger Dominicans, Venezuelans, Caribbean players, we really invest in them at a young age before they get here. Good question! It’s important.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days after signing Ken Giles to bolster their bullpen of tomorrow, the Mariners signed a free agent who should help the team this year, and it’s a big one for Seattle fans. On Saturday, the M’s agreed to a one-year, $8.5 million deal with James Paxton, with incentives that could bring the total outlay to $10 million. With spring training just a few days away, it’s a reunion that makes a lot of sense for both parties.

Paxton was originally drafted by the Mariners in 2010 and worked his way through the organization to make his major league debut in 2013. A litany of injuries prevented him from making an impact during the first three years of his major league career, but he broke out in 2016 when he suddenly started throwing 97 mph. He was traded to the Yankees prior to the 2019 season and was a solid presence in their rotation that year, but the injury bug struck again in 2020, limiting him to just five starts. Now, he returns to the Mariners and will share the rotation with the headlining prospect — Justus Sheffield — that came to Seattle from New York in that trade two years ago.

Paxton’s ability to stay on the mound has always been a lingering concern. The last time he made it through an entire season without at least one trip to the injured list was 2013, when he made a full slate of starts for the Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers and then made his major league debut in September. Last year, it was a strained flexor in his left forearm that sidelined him (that after offseason back surgery). The year before that it was a knee injury. He’s also dealt with arm contusions, back inflammation, and muscle strains in his fingers, arm, and torso. If you were to map out the parts of his body that have been hurt, the entire left side of his body would glow red.

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Addressing a historically bad bullpen was the primary goal of the Mariners this offseason. Going back to 1969 — the year MLB lowered the mound — the 2020 Mariners bullpen posted the second worst league-adjusted FIP and the fourth worst league-adjusted ERA in a single season. They’ve already made a number of moves to strengthen their relief corps, including trading for Rafael Montero and bringing in a ton of relievers on minor-league deals. Yesterday, they capped off their offseason plan by signing a big-name closer to a multi-year deal. They locked up Ken Giles to a two-year deal, though the specific financials have yet to be reported at time of publication. The only problem is that Giles recently underwent Tommy John surgery and likely won’t pitch until 2022. Elbow troubles have plagued Giles over the last two years. He pitched through inflammation in 2019 but all that wear and tear on his arm caught up to him a season later. He threw just 3.2 innings in 2020 and went under the knife on October 1.

He’s the latest player to sign a deal like this. Garrett Richards and Michael Pineda are the two biggest names who have signed multi-year deals soon after undergoing major arm surgery. It’s an interesting move for the Mariners who have had a rather quiet offseason. They’re not quite ready to break out of their rebuild and have avoided opening the purse strings to make a splash this year. By locking up Giles now, they have him committed to their 2022 roster when they’re hoping to be more ready to compete. Read the rest of this entry »