September call-ups, both high-profile and totally innocuous, have been trickling in over the transaction wire for the last several days. As always, there are some who will have real impact on the playoff race and some who are interesting for the purposes of player evaluation, like your usual spare lefty reliever and catcher (by far the most common types of September additions). Some teams with no new names at all. Below I’ve compiled notes on every player brought up by an American League team since the start of the month, no matter how inconsequential; I’ve slipped some rehabbers and August 31 acquisitions in here, too. It’s a primer for you to get (re)acquainted with players who might impact the playoff race or the seasons to come. (The National League’s complement can be found here.)

Contenders’ Reinforcements

Houston Astros– OF Kyle Tucker, C Garrett Stubbs, RHP Josh James, RHP Jose Urquidy

Kiley and I have Tucker projected as an above-average regular, ranked 15th overall among prospects in baseball. I have no idea what kind of playing time he might get this month. Stubbs (24th in the org) has begun playing a little bit of second base and outfield. A part time, multi-positional role might help keep his tiny frame from breaking down, and enable Houston to get his long-performing bat in the lineup, as well as create flexibility on other parts of the roster.

James was 94-97 in rehab outings before he returned, then reached 99 on Monday. Urquidy projects as a strike-throwing fifth starter.

New York Yankees– OF Clint Frazier, RHP Jonathan Loaisiga, RHP Ryan Dull, RHP Chance Adams, LHP Tyler Lyons, INF Brenny Escanio (prospect)

I think it’s likely Frazier, who many scouts/teams continue to think has everyday ability, gets traded this offseason, both because he’s part of a crowded outfield/DH mix and because he and the org don’t seem to be a great fit. Read the rest of this entry »

A little over a decade ago, the soft-tossing lefty was all over the place. There was Barry Zito, Mark Buehrle, and Ted Lilly. Late-career Tom Glavine, Kenny Rogers, and Jamie Moyer were getting by on guile, too. Even Mark Redman and Chris Capuano were getting outs without much velocity. Looking around today’s game, we have Jason Vargas trying to hang on and CC Sabathia declining with age, along with diminished velocity and stuff from Dallas Keuchel and Gio Gonzalez. The last four years have seen just three low-velocity left-handers put up three-win seasons, and the only pitcher with two such campaigns is Marco Gonzales, king of the soft-tossing lefties.

On June 2, Gonzales gave up 10 runs to the Angels on the heels of giving up eight runs to the Rangers. It ended a five-start stretch that saw him allow 30 runs in 24.2 innings. He struck just 15 batters and walked nine in that span. Still, due to a solid start to the year, his FIP stood at a decent 4.33 and his ERA was a little worse than average at 4.89. Since that game, roughly half a season of starts has passed and Gonzales has been one of the better pitchers in the game with an ERA and FIP both around 3.50 and his 2.3 WAR ranking 11th, just behind Justin Verlander and just ahead of Lucas Giolito. Gonzales isn’t a great pitcher, but he’s uniquely good, and this is the second straight season he’s accomplished that feat.

There are only 10 qualified starting pitchers in the game who put up a three-win season last year (3.4 for Gonzales) and have already eclipsed that mark this season (3.5 for Gonzales). Verlander, Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin, Jacob deGrom, Trevor Bauer, and Gerrit Cole are the easier guesses. Zack Wheeler, Jose Berrios, and German Marquez are also in there along with Gonzales. His 6.9 WAR ranks ahead of only Berrios in that group, but it is worth mentioning even lowering the bar to two 2.5-WAR seasons in a row only adds Jake Odorizzi, Charlie Morton, Zack Greinke, Aaron Nola, Jon Gray, Kyle Hendricks, and Kyle Gibson. We are still talking about a relatively small group. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a losing team, the Cincinnati Reds have been busy. It’s not just trading players either, as Cincinnati made one of the biggest deadline moves while many contenders slumbered in near-stasis, picking up Trevor Bauer with an eye towards retooling for the 2020 season. Only three of the eight players in Wednesday’s lineup were also in the lineup on Opening Day: Tucker Barnhart, Eugenio Suárez, and José Iglesias. Chief among the new additions is the recently called-up Aristides Aquino, a big slugger lurking far back from the head of the team prospect lists coming into the season. After a fairly unimpressive minor league career, Aquino has feasted on the major league bouncy ball in 2019, slugging 28 homers in 294 AB in the formerly pitcher-friendly International League and then a shocking 11 homers in just 20 major league games.

Aquino was not some elite prospect finally being called up. The Reds have only received the benefit of getting a look at Aquino because they decided to use their ABs in a now-lost season in a productive way. If the team hadn’t dropped Matt Kemp or traded Yasiel Puig, choosing to go with the known quantity in a mistaken attempt to goose attendance (there’s no evidence this actually works), there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities to assess Aquino or Josh VanMeter or Phil Ervin in the majors. They now have more information on these players — how they’ve played at the big league level — and that information can have a positive effect on the decisions they make on how to win the NL Central or a wild card spot in 2020. Even picking up veteran Freddy Galvis, a 2.0 WAR player, for free has a value to a team like the Reds given his one-year, $5-million option for 2020. Scooter Gennett was always likely to be gone, but Galvis may not be, and now the Reds have another player who they can choose to start in 2020 or trade over the winter.

The Reds have been fortunate in these decisions, but I would have been in favor of this calculus even if Aquino/VanMeter/Ervin had been terrible. My fundamental belief is that among hitters and pitchers, teams have roughly a combined 12,000 plate appearances/batters faced to work with every year, and as many of them should be devoted to trying to win games as possible. Maybe they’re not 2019 wins — maybe they’re wins in 2020 or 2023 or 2026. But even players not working out gives you information; if Aquino came to the majors and hit like Lewis Brinson, it would still give the Reds data they didn’t have before. You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge when you’re a 90-loss team still penciling Billy Hamilton or Chris Davis into the lineup on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Trevor Cahill, Marco Gonzales, and David Phelps— on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

———

Trevor Cahill, Los Angeles Angels

“I didn’t throw my [current] curveball until my second year in the big leagues. I used to throw the double-knuckle — I didn’t spin it; I would literally flick it — and that worked in the minor leagues. It was actually my strikeout pitch. But once I got up here, I couldn’t really throw it with the big-league ball. Not consistently.

“The seams in the minor leagues were bigger, and that made a difference. Plus, big league hitters are more patient. I used to throw that pitch in the dirt a lot, and get swings, but I had trouble throwing it for strikes. Big league hitters, if you can’t throw it for a strike, they see that spin and just spit on it.

“One day I was playing catch with Brett Anderson, working on his slider grip, which he spikes. I did that, and it was really good on flat ground, so that offseason I started working on it. Then my finger started coming up higher, so I was throwing a normal spiked curveball. In 2010, in spring training, I started using it against hitters. I’ve thrown it ever since. Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Little may well become a big-league pitcher. Ditto a member of a big-league front office. Drafted in the fifth round this year out of Stanford University, the 21-year-old right-hander possesses the potential to do both. For now, he’s taking the mound for the Great Lakes Loons, the low-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

On Friday, I asked Little about the genesis of his low-three-quarter arm slot.

“That’s a good question, honestly,” replied the righty, who has a 2.05 ERA in 22 professional innings. “In high school I was more high three-quarters — a normal three-quarters slot — but then I kind of just naturally moved lower. It wasn’t intentional, I just did it.”

Success followed. Little began getting more swings-and-misses with his fastball, and unlike many pitchers who move to a lower slot, the movement wasn’t downward. “I started missing above barrels a lot more,” Little explained. “I became more deceptive, and while I’m not 98 [mph] — I’m only low 90s — it kind of gets on the hitter, and plays more up in the zone.”

His slider is his best secondary pitch, which didn’t used to be the case. Prior to moving into the closer role at Stanford in his sophomore season, Little’s changeup was his go-to off-speed. He subsequently became fastball-heavy, with his changeup in his back pocket, and his slider a reasonably reliable No. 2 option… this despite its being, as he now knows, markedly unrefined. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can 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. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
Read the rest of this entry »

Just moments before trading away Zack Greinke in the blockbuster move of deadline day, the Arizona Diamondbacks made an addition to their rotation, acquiring Mike Leake from the Seattle Mariners. It is the second time Leake has been traded since he signed a five-year, $80-million contract with the St. Louis Cardinals before the 2016 season, and the third time overall that he has been traded in-season. According to arizonasports.com’s John Gambadoro, the D-Backs will be responsible for just $6 million of the roughly $20 million still owed to Leake on his contract. The Mariners received 22-year-old infielder Jose Caballero in the deal.

Leake, 31, has been good for about league-average production and a lot of innings eaten throughout his career, and the same remains true for his 2019 season. With a 4.40 ERA in 22 starts, his ERA- sits at 101, which just so happens to line up perfectly with his career mark. His FIP, however, has jumped to 4.74, thanks to a career-worst HR/9 mark of 1.71.

The Leake deal was one of several the Diamondbacks made on Wednesday, though it was the only one that involved the organization actually taking on an established big leaguer. Greinke — along with $24 million of the $77 million owed to him on his contract — was sent to Houston in exchange for a mighty haul of prospects just before 4 p.m. On a much smaller scale, Arizona also traded backup catcher John Ryan Murphy to the Atlanta Braves, and in a rare flip of notable prospects, sent shortstop Jazz Chisholm — ranked the D-backs’ No. 1 prospect by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel — to the Miami Marlins for right-handed pitching prospect Zac Gallen. Arizona was heavily rumored to be shopping left-handed starter Robbie Ray throughout the week, but no deal ever came to fruition. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached that time of year once again: the day when Mike Rizzo trades several intriguing prospects for bullpen relief. After earlier acquiring Daniel Hudson from the Blue Jays, the Nationals acquired Roenis Elías and Hunter Strickland from the Mariners in exchange for Aaron Fletcher, Elvis Alvarado, and Taylor Guilbeau. The Nats hope Elías and Strickland, who won’t be free agents until 2022, will be a stabilizing force in the middle of their bullpen for years to come, or at the very least a cromulent bridge to the stars of the pen.

As seems to happen every year, the Nationals came into 2019 with a plan to fix the bullpen. They signed Trevor Rosenthal and traded for Kyle Barraclough in the offseason, both interesting arms with velocity to spare and control issues. They also signed Tony Sipp just before the start of the season, promoted Tanner Rainey, who they acquired from the Reds in a Tanner swap with Tanner Roark, and signed Jonny Venters when the Braves released him in May. It’s clear, in other words, that they knew they had a bullpen problem and attempted to fix it.

As Nationals fans already know, they didn’t fix it. The Nationals bullpen has been among the worst in the majors this year. They’ve compiled a collective 5.99 ERA, last in baseball, and an equally horrific 5.07 xFIP (though their FIP is slightly better, at 4.80). As bad as that 5.99 ERA sounds, though, their results have been even worse than that due to poor timing. The bullpen has been worth -7.98 WPA, meaning they’ve cost the team a staggering eight wins on the year. Eight wins is the difference between fighting for a Wild Card spot, where the Nats find themselves now, and having the second-best record in the NL.

It’s safe to say that the team has a clear objective, but the way they’re addressing it differs from past years. They’ve previously traded middle relievers with years of team control left for dominant closers, sending Felipe Vázquez to the Pirates for Mark Melancon and Blake Treinen plus prospects to the A’s for Sean Doolittle and Ryan Madson. Those trades came back to bite the team — Vázquez and Treinen have since been among the most effective relievers in baseball, while Melancon and Madson left in free agency. Read the rest of this entry »