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 »

We have a sizable collection of players to talk about this week because the two of us have been busy wrapping up our summer looks at the 2020 Draft class over the last couple weeks. This equates to every prospect added to or moved on THE BOARD since the Trade Deadline.

Top 100 Changes
We had two players enter the 50 FV tier in Diamondbacks SS Geraldo Perdomo and Padres C Luis Campusano. Perdomo is in the “Advanced Baseball Skills” player bucket with players like Vidal Brujan, Brayan Rocchio and Xavier Edwards. He’s added visible power since first arriving in the States and had as many walks as strikeouts at Low-A before he was promoted to the Cal League, which has been Campusano’s stomping ground all summer. He’s still not a great catcher but he does have an impact arm, big power, and he’s a good enough athlete that we’re optimistic he’ll both catch and make the necessary adjustments to get to his power in games down the line.

We also moved a D-back and a Padre down in RHP Taylor Widener and 1B Tirso Ornelas. Widener has been very homer prone at Triple-A a year after leading the minors in K’s. His fastball has natural cut rather than ride and while we still like him as a rotation piece, there’s a chance he continues to be very susceptible to the long ball. Ornelas has dealt with injury and swing issues.

On Aristides Aquino
Aristides Aquino was a 50 FV on the 2017 Reds list; at the time, he was a traditional right field profile with big power undermined by the strikeout issues that would eventually cause his performance to tank so badly that he became a minor league free agent. A swing change visually similar to the one Justin Turner made before his breakout (Reds hitting coach Turner Ward comes from the Dodgers) is evident here, so we’re cautiously optimistic Aquino will be a productive role player, but we don’t think he’ll keep up a star’s pace. 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.
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As soon as I finish this piece, I’m going to get ice cream. There’s a soft serve frozen yogurt place owned by a surprisingly fastidious stoner about a mile from my house, and I go there once or twice a week. If I told you there are 10 rotating flavors, with chocolate and vanilla as constants, how long do you think it would take you to learn what I like by watching me fill my bowl (there are all sorts of bowl-packing jokes on the store’s signage)? How many times would I need to go in there and pull that soft serve lever before you’d know that vanilla is actually pretty high on my pref list, and that only a few things, like coconut or coffee, will pull me away from it? Or that I avoid all of the fruit flavors?

How long before we can start to identify team regime patterns in player acquisition, and start talking about team preferences with confidence, the way we do when we say that progressive clubs look for common arm slots and hand positions, or fastballs that spin? The current Marlins regime has basically now been in place since the fall of 2017, when Gary Denbo was brought in as Vice President of Scouting and Development. Miami has made a lot of seller’s trades during that year and a half, and they clearly have a type, especially when you look at their amateur acquisitions. Yesterday, that type came further into focus after a deadline deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Here’s the trade:

Marlins get:
SS Jazz Chisholm

Diamondbacks get:
RHP Zac Gallen

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The Tampa Bay Rays are in the thick of a playoff hunt. The Miami Marlins are not. Both teams behaved accordingly today, with the Rays sending Ryne Stanek and Jesús Sánchez to the Marlins in exchange for Nick Anderson and Trevor Richards. This trade, as many trades do, seems to favor the Rays, though all four players changing sides are interesting in one way or another. I wouldn’t fault you for thinking the Marlins might come out ahead in the end.

To my eyes, the gem of the trade is Nick Anderson. An out-of-nowhere success this season, Anderson is the kind of high-octane pitcher modern bullpens covet. He also won’t reach free agency until 2025, which means that he’s doubly attractive to the cost-conscious Rays. A rate monster, he boasts an eye-popping 37.1% strikeout rate, ninth-best among relievers this season, courtesy of a spinny four-seam fastball and devastating breaking ball.

While his results have been inconsistent this year, it’s not for lack of underlying numbers. He surrenders hard contact, with a 6th-percentile exit velocity allowed and 4th-percentile hard contact rate, but makes up for it with the aforementioned heaps and bales of strikeouts. It’s too early in his career to know how much of a problem the contact will be, but if his underlying talent there is close to league average, he’s immediately one of the best relievers in baseball.

Want a best-case comparison for Anderson? Think of Ken Giles. His fastball doesn’t boast quite the same top end as Giles, but they’re both four-seam/breaking ball pitchers who mix the two pitches almost equally and post ludicrous swinging strike rates. Anderson is at 17.4% for the year, while Giles is at 17.1% over his career. Giles has also had intermittent struggles with hard contact, though he seems to have worked through them en route to a 1.6 FIP this year. Anderson’s upside might not be quite that high, but his stuff is tremendous. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Marlins and Twins pulled off a pre-deadline swap.

First, the trade:

Miami gets:

1B Lewin Diaz

Minnesota gets:

RHP Sergio Romo
RHP Chris Vallimont
Player to be Named Later

This deal’s immediate big league relevance centers around 36-year-old Romo, who has had an incredible career for a reliever, especially one who throws as hard as he does. Romo’s fastball has never averaged more than even 90 mph, topping out at 89.9 mph during his rookie year, while average relief fastballs now hum in at 93.6 mph. His 9.8 WAR ranks 15th among relievers since he debuted in 2008, and splitter wizard Koji Uehara is the only other soft-tosser ahead of him.

Most of our readers have probably seen enough of Romo over the last decade to know that he’s been exceptional because of his ability to locate, and change the speed and shape of, his trademark slider. Hitters know that slider is coming — he’s thrown it roughly 53% of the time during his career, second most to Carlos Marmol among all pitchers with 400 or more innings since Romo debuted — and yet Romo’s surgical placement of the pitch just off the plate, equal parts enticing and unhittable, has had big league hitters flailing away at it across more than a decade now. Read the rest of this entry »

Six weeks ago, the Miami Marlins looked dead in the water. They were 10-31 at the time, and given their tough schedule ahead, they had a small yet tangible shot at eclipsing the 1962 Mets’ record for the most losses since integration. Jay Jaffe covered Miami’s putrid start, and the details were very grim indeed:

They’ve lost seven games in a row… They scored a grand total of eight runs in that span, never more than two in a game… Did I mention that it’s been a full week since the last Marlins position player drove in a run, or 11 days since one of their players homered? Or that it’s the team’s only homer this month, hit by a 29-year-old rookie named Jon Berti?

Miami’s ineptitude at the plate explained most of the trouble; the Fish were scoring barely 2.5 runs per game. They were also on pace to hit fewer than 100 home runs, an astonishingly feeble output in today’s dinger-happy game.

But in baseball, yesterday’s trends are tomorrow’s distant memory. Miami commenced a six-game winning streak the day Jaffe’s post went live, and they’ve gone 20-17 since publication — an 88-win pace. Obviously, they’re not that good: even terrible squads can string together a .500 stretch over 40 games. Still, the club’s recent surge has given them a better record than four other teams in the majors. Even stranger, the Marlins are… gulp… surprisingly entertaining! Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball teams continue to search for whatever edge they can find when it comes to bringing cheap, talented players into their organizations. The draft is one of the easiest ways for teams to accumulate talent, as clubs take turns picking the best amateur players in the country, and the Commissioner’s office, as authorized by the CBA between the players and owners, tells teams how much they are allowed to spend. Most amateur players have very little leverage, and generally sign for the recommended slot amount. Because individual draft picks receive a slotted amount, but teams are allowed to spend their entire draft pool in whatever manner they choose, money often gets moved around pick-to-pick, with those players with less leverage receiving much less than the slot amount for their pick while those players with some leverage getting quite a bit more. This year, the Reds, Mets, White Sox, and Marlins all appear to be moving significant money around in an effort to manipulate the draft system to their benefit. Is it worth it though?

While every team moves money around in the draft, these four clubs stood out for drafting hard-to-sign prep players in the early rounds, then taking college seniors with multiple picks later in the first 10 rounds. Presumably, the college senior picks will sign for amounts significantly under their slot value (you can find all the slot values here), meaning the savings can be used to sign the prep players who threatened to go to college if their bonus demands are not met. Here are the teams, players, slot amounts, and the number of senior signs for each team.

All four players are likely to require more than their draft slot provides in order to sign a contract with their drafting teams. Tyler Callihan has reportedly agreed to a deal for $1.5 million. Allan is rumored to have an asking price of about $3 million, which might be why the Mets selected seniors with seven picks in the first 10 rounds. The slot for Evan Fitterer is pretty low, requiring the Marlins to make sacrifices with many of their subsequent picks. We don’t yet know exactly what it will take to sign all of the players listed, but we do have an idea of how much value teams gave up in later rounds, as well as the expected value of the players who were picked. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you remember what you were doing last Saturday night, at about 7:45 pm Eastern? Perhaps it was a memorable occasion, a fancy dinner with your significant other. Maybe it was a round of drinks with your buddies to launch a raucous evening on the town, or just a lazy, relaxing weekend day that leaked into dusk. The Marlins surely remember where they were at that moment, because that was the last time they scored a run.

Indeed, it’s been a bleak week-plus for the Miami nine. They’ve lost seven games in a row, and so their theoretical highlight reel for the May 7-16 period would consist of a rainout and two off days. They scored a grand total of eight runs in that span, never more than two in a game in a stretch that includes back-to-back walk-off losses to the Cubs and back-to-back shutouts by the Rays. Did I mention that it’s been a full week since the last Marlins position player drove in a run, or 11 days since one of their players homered? Or that it’s the team’s only homer this month, hit by a 29-year-old rookie named Jon Berti? I kid you not.

Ladies and gentlemen, the 2019 Marlins are awful. On the heels of a 63-98 season, their first in a teardown carried out under the Bruce Sherman/Derek Jeter regime, we knew that they would be bad; our preseason forecast called for a 63-99 record. We did not envision them slipping below the Throneberry Line, the .250 winning percentage of the 1962 Mets, but at 10-31 (.244), that’s where the Marvelous Marlins are.

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

I turned last Thursday’s edition in too late for publication (I lost track of time at an Extended game) but certainly won’t deprive you of the notes I have from that day. Here they are:

Xavier Edwards, SS, San Diego Padres
Level: Low-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 45+
Line: 5-for-5, 2B

Notes
After 21 Low-A games, X is hitting .390/.450/.455 and has walked more than he has struck out. He has just one extra-base hit and has been caught stealing a bunch, but even for one of the more advanced high school bats from last year’s class, this is a strong start. Gabriel Arias was just put on the IL at Hi-A Lake Elsinore and Edwards has out-performed Justin Lopez and Tucupita Marcano, so he might be in line for a quick move up depending on the severity of Arias’ injury.

Yordan Alvarez, LF/1B, Houston Astros
Level: Triple-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 7   FV: 50
Line: 6-for-8, 2 2B, HR, BB (double header)

Notes
The use of the major league baseball at Triple-A combined with the PCL hitting environment has had, um, some impact on offensive performance. It’s important to keep this in mind when considering what Alvarez has done so far, though his line through 23 games — .386/.474/.916(!) with 12 homers — is remarkable. Notably, several of those homers have come against breaking balls, which Alvarez is particularly adept at identifying and adjusting to mid-flight. He does not have a sellout, max-effort swing — this power comes easy and it plays to all fields, as seven of Alvarez’s homers this season have been opposite field shots. He was toward the back of our 50 FV group pre-season because of concerns about his body and defensive limitations, but he’s hitting like someone who belongs toward the front of that tier, up near Pete Alonso. Read the rest of this entry »