Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Mark Vientos, 3B, New York Mets
Level: Appy   Age: 18   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 3-for-3, 2B, BB

Notes
The Mets have made effectual changes to Mark Vientos’s swing since he signed. His stance has opened up and his hands set up in a way that has enabled him to lift the ball better than he did in high school, especially pitches on the inner half. His hands are more alive and powerful than they were a year ago, and Vientos has launched balls out the other way even when he doesn’t fully square them up. His size/build might eventually cause a tumble down the defensive spectrum (he’s been projected off of shortstop to, at least, third base since he was a high-school underclassman), which would mean power alone won’t be enough to enable him to profile. His early-career contact rates are positive, especially considering Vientos doesn’t turn 19 until December.

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The Mets’ trade deadline strategy seemed a bit dysfunctional. They traded pending free agent Asdrubal Cabrera for an upper-level pitching prospect, which seems like a good idea. However, that was basically the one positive thing the Mets did. They also traded Jeurys Familia, but the return was incredibly light and could have been stronger if the Mets were willing to pay down any of Familia’s salary to get better players back. They added Austin Jackson and kept Jose Bautista for some reason. Keeping Devin Mesoraco wasn’t that terrible because he will probably pass through waivers. Zack Wheeler was shopped extensively but did not move. All of this comes on the heels of a public relations debacle regarding Yoenis Cespedes’ injuries, and a disappointing Tuesday ended with an exclamation point thanks to a 25-4 loss to the Nationals that night.

It certainly appears as though the Mets don’t know what they’re going. Even more concerning, the Mets might actually agree. The following words come from the Mets’ Assistant General Manager, John Ricco, in Ken Davidoff’s New York Post piece from deadline day.

“I think all that happened today is we did not make a trade by the trade deadline,” the assistant general manager said Tuesday in a conference call. “It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed into one direction or the other [on the starting rotation]. We’ll make a more informed decision this offseason.”

Davidoff further elaborates on the difficult task the next Mets General Manager faces with an organization in disarray and an ownership group that has repeatedly underfunded the team in an embarrassment to the franchise and the game. The Mets — who over the past half-decade have not been tanking nor rebuilding in a way that would justify a low payroll — haven’t had a payroll higher than 15th in MLB since the 2012 season. From 2000 through 2011, the Mets’ average payroll ranked fourth in baseball, congruent with their status in a massive media market as a club with good attendance and a great local television contract. The Mets are still in a massive media market, generate solid attendance, and have a great television deal, but over the past five years they’ve spent money like the Royals.

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Anyone who has ever studied statistics generally, and sabermetrics or other analytics specifically, will have at least a passing familiarity with the idea of sample sizes. I’m not a sabermetrician – nor do I play one on TV – but you can’t be a good trial lawyer without at least a decent understanding of statistics. And regardless of the statistic, it’s generally true that one game isn’t really all that useful. I mean, it’s useful in the sense that being entertained is useful, but it’s usually not useful in the sense that you can determine talent levels from it.

Enter the Nationals and Mets. They are both, in theory, Major League Baseball teams. They both play on the East Coast. And on July 31, as major league teams are wont to do, they played a baseball game. And when they were done, this had happened.

And as you might expect for a team that scored 25 runs, a lot went right for the Nationals. Daniel Murphy had three hits, hit two homers, and drove in six, yet had just a 0.10 WPA, because that’s what happens when your team scores 25 times. Tanner Roark, the Nationals’ starting pitcher, tossed seven innings of one-run ball and had two hits, including a bases-clearing double. Matt Adams and Mark Reynolds both homered for Washington, and neither of them even started the game. The Nationals walked eight times, had a hit batsman, racked up 26 hits and, as a team, hit .520/.593/1.000, which, in case you were wondering, comes out to a 311 wRC+ and a .646 wOBA. In other words, the Mets’ pitching staff allowed eleven more batters to reach base (35) than they got outs (24).

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Less than three weeks ago, in the context of a July 11 game that featured the longest pitching appearance by a position player since 1988, the earliest mound entry by one since 1979, and the first instance of multiple position players tossing multiple innings in the same game since 1956, I noted that the count of such instances for this season had already reached 29 (not including those of Shohei Ohtani), essentially guaranteeing a smashing of the single-season record of 36 (or 32, depending upon how you feel about Christian Bethancourt, whose conversion to the mound didn’t take), set just last year. In the 21 days since then — four of which were part of the All-Star break — an additional 17 non-pitchers have taken the hill, an average of one per day. On Tuesday night, we saw the worst of them, and perhaps the nadir of the entire genre, when the Mets’ Jose Reyes was battered for six runs by the Nationals while throwing 48 pitches in a single inning of work.

Reyes, who already has little business being on a major-league roster given his ineptitude as a position player (.182/.254/.240, -1.1 WAR entering Wednesday, when of course he homered twice!), entered a game in which the Mets trailed 19-1 in the eighth inning. Working with a fastball that averaged 81.5 mph and topped out at 86.9, and a curve that averaged 63.5, he retired Ryan Zimmerman on a fly ball, and then proceeded to allow the next six batters to reach safely: Juan Soto won a 10-pitch encounter with a double to rightfield, Matt Adams followed with a two-run homer to right-center (21-1), Michael Taylor and Matt Wieters both walked, pinch-hitter Mark Reynolds followed with a three-run homer (24-1), and then Trea Turner singled. Reyes got Anthony Rendon to fly out, but then Wilmer Difo tripled (25-1). Good grief, Charlie Brown.

Reyes then hit Zimmerman with a 54-mph curveball, after which Zimmerman pretended as though he might charge the mount. Finally, Soto flied out to end the debacle.

While a position-player pitching appearance is supposed to be either a break-glass-in-emergency desperation move (generally in extra innings) or a lighthearted farce that draws attention away from an otherwise unpleasant blowout, this was unpleasantness itself. In all, Reyes’s 48 pitches were three more than Jacob deGrom threw in a single inning on June 17 before being pulled out of concern for his health. Regardless of Reyes’s current playing ability or his status as a pariah in the wake of his 2016 domestic violence suspension, manager Mickey Callaway allowing him to toil that long was irresponsible, though it was at worst the second-most irresponsible act of the night following a dead-armed Steven Matz being torched for seven first-inning runs and then later examined for complaints of forearm tightness. Chalk it up as the umpteenth data point illustrating the team’s incompetence and lack of accountability when it comes to protecting its players.

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With 47.1% odds of winning the NL East and 63.4% odds of reaching the postseason entering play Friday, few teams ought to be more aggressive buyers than the Phillies as they try to consolidate and improve their NL East-leading position in a year they perhaps arrived ahead of schedule.

The Phillies attempted to improve Friday by acquiring veteran infielder Asdrubal Cabrera from the Mets. One of the Phillies’ weaknesses has been a general lack of run production from their infield positions. The Phillies rank 12th in the majors in wRC+ by second basemen (98), 27th at shortstop (75), and 23rd at third base (90).

Cabrera has posted a 122 wRC+ for the season and a .277/.329/.488 slash line. He posted a 111 wRC+ last season and has a 107 mark for his career. The switch-hitter has generally been an above-average offensive player, particularly relative to middle infielders. The 32-year-old impending free agent has produced 2.1 WAR to date this season.

Cabrera, who has been limited to second base in 2018, gives the Phillies roster flexibility in addition to representing an offensive upgrade in the infield. He was primarily a shortstop through 2016, though he also has experience at third base. It’s not exactly clear how and where Phillies manager Gabe Kapler will employ Cabrera.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luc Rennie, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: NR   FV: 30
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 14 K

Notes
Rennie is four appearances deep into his first year back in affiliated ball since 2015, when he was with Baltimore. He’s spent the last several seasons with Evansville in the independent Frontier League and was injured for a portion of that time. He was dominant for the Otters this spring and signed with the Mets earlier this month. Last night he pitched the game of his life and struck out 14 hitters, a Columbia franchise record, with most of them coming on a plus upper-70s 12-6 curveball. Rennie has five pitches. His fastball has natural cut, he has a two-seamer, an average mid-80s slider, that curveball, and a below-average changeup. He’ll run the fastball up to 95 but sits 90-92 and mixes his breaking balls well. Rennie is carrying a 0.83 ERA through 21.1 innings at Low-A.

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Whereas the first notable reliever acquisition of the trade deadline saw Cleveland receive, in Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, two pitchers who will remain with the club for future seasons, the Athletics this afternoon have performed a swap with a more traditional rent-a-player flavor, getting Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets in exchange for right-handed reliever Bobby Wahl, third baseman William Toffey, and an unspecified pile of international slot money, the 2018 version of a player-to-be-named-later.

There’s an argument to be made that, at this point, Familia may be slightly underrated among relievers. The extra couple of walks per nine that Familia picked up in a 2017 season mostly ruined by surgery to remove a blood clots from his shoulder have disappeared in 2018. Familia’s not relying on his hard, heavy sinker as much as he has in the past — especially against lefties — but given that the A’s have an infield whose four primary players, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, and Jed Lowrie have all been above average by UZR (Lowrie a couple of runs in the negative in DRS), I’d be happy to see him go to that well a bit more often again. Even without relying on the sinker, Familia’s pitching as well as he was in 2016, which was enough to earn him an All-Star appearance and a rather odd MVP vote. Familia is in the top 20 of relievers in WAR and among the top 30 in FIP, so it’s a real upgrade to the A’s bullpen. Blake Treinen will remain the closer, which I believe is absolutely the right tack to take.

Despite Sandy Alderson’s insistence earlier this season that the Mets have no plans to go full-scale rebuild, the team’s at least been listening to offers on pretty much the entire roster. Familia doesn’t necessarily indicate a stronger organizational willingness to go that route, of course, as he was likely to be traded anyway given his contract and the team’s position in the standings.

Bobby Wahl is an interesting flier for the Mets to take. It’s hard to characterize a 26-year-old reliever as some kind of top prospect — and I won’t — but Wahl throws in the upper 90s, has an effective slider (that really feels more like a slurve to me), and can change speeds at least tolerably well. His control’s been an issue at times, though not on the Bobby Witt scale, and one of the reasons he’s not been a bit higher in the pecking order is that he has a long history of injury, losing parts of most years with varying ailments, most recently surgery for a thoracic outlet issue last season. He was fine by spring training and, as far as I know, hasn’t had any significant issues along those lines since.

Prospect-watchers tend to like Will Toffey more than Wahl, and ZiPS agrees that he’s a bit above-average defensively, placing him at about two runs per 150 games better than average based on the rough estimates ZiPS makes from play-by-play data. I’m really not sold on his bat: 23 is just too old for a player not in the middle infield or catching to not be killing the ball in the California League. While there’s obviously more time for Toffey to develop into something more than Wahl, I think the latter is more likely to actually contribute to a major-league team. The Mets’ squadron isn’t that deep in relief pitching and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see him in the back end of the team’s bullpen in April (or even this year!) depending on what other moves the Mets make.

It’s interesting to see Oakland positioning themselves as buyers, at least in the bargain section. To find the last time Oakland was the team trading prospects for a veteran rather than vice-versa, you actually have to go back to the 2014 Jeff Samardzija trade, which saw the team give up Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and Billy McKinney to the Cubs for Samardzija and Jason Hammel. (They picked up Jon Lester later in that month, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe Yoenis Cespedes as a prospect.) While one doesn’t really think of the A’s as front-line, top-tier contenders, the fact is they’re essentially in a two-team race for the second Wild Card with the Mariners, a team that only has a Pythagorean record of right around .500 and likely isn’t as good as their seasonal record when you talk the rest-of-season projections. Even four games back, that it’s a two-team race is quite important: I’d rather be four games behind one team than two games back and fighting with seven other teams. But the 2018 National League is highly competitive one and the American league, the bifurcated stars-and-scrubs league, a flip of the situation a few years ago.

I’m not a believer in going all-in for a Wild Card unless it comes with a significant chance of also capturing the division title, but with what Oakland is giving up, they’re not going all-in, but simply making an incremental addition to enhance their Wild Card odds. Being less risk-averse with Familia is better in this situation than rolling the dice with Wahl would be. In all, the A’s add a significant part of their present without giving up a significant part of their future.

Wins on both sides here, with both teams getting what they need from this trade. I daresay that I’d be happier with Familia at this price than Zach Britton at the price he eventually fetches.

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Andres Gimenez, SS, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: 3   FV: 50
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, 3B

Notes
Gimenez is a 19-year-old shortstop slashing .280/.350/.430 in the Florida State League. That’s good for a 107 wRC+ in the FSL. Big-league shortstops with similar wRC+ marks are Trea Turner (a more explosive player and rangier defender than Gimenez) and Jurickson Profar, who have both been two-win players or better this year ahead of the break. Also of note in the Mets system last night was Ronny Mauricio, who extended his career-opening hitting streak to 19 games.

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It’s been awhile since something went right for the Mets, but on Sunday, Noah Syndergaard traveled the 20-odd miles from Citi Field to Coney Island and didn’t gorge himself on 74 Nathan’s hot dogs in 10 minutes. Nor did he suffer a sword-swallowing mishap, or have his hair charred by a fire-eater with questionable control. In his first competitive outing since May 25, a rehab start for the Low-A Brooklyn Cyclones, the 25-year-old righty singed Staten Island Yankees hitters with fastballs that sat at 98 mph and touched 99 during a five-inning, 71-pitch outing that could pave the way for his return to the majors later this week, and perhaps an audition for a blockbuster trade later this month.

Syndergard hasn’t pitched in the majors since being scratched from his May 30 outing due to a strained ligament in his right index finger. Unsurprisingly, he had a bit of extra adrenaline early in his return, beginning with six straight balls. He issued a four-pitch walk of leadoff hitter Alex Junior, who followed with a steal of second. Junior took third on a single by Josh Breaux and scored on a wild pitch, the first of two that Syndergaard uncorked on the afternoon. That run was the Yankees’ only one of the day, however, and after Breaux’s single, Syndergaard retired nine of the next 10 hitters and allowed just one additional hit, a fourth-inning single by Frederick Cuevas. That single was followed by another steal and a wild pitch on a strikeout that put Syndergaard under pressure, but he escaped by getting Eduardo Torrealba to line into an unassisted, inning-ending double play. Syndergaard then completely overwhelmed the Baby Bombers in a 10-pitch, two-strikeout fifth. Read the rest of this entry »

Great teams may dream of winning 116 games in a season, but for losers, whether of the lovable or non-lovable stripe, 120 is the number at which they gaze, gimlet-eyed. The 1962 Mets, with their inaugural band of cast-offs, left behind a legacy of being great at being not-so-great, losing 120 games and planting their flag in the Mt. Everest of Terrible.

Yes, 120 losses isn’t actually the MLB record, that feat being accomplished by the 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who lost 134 of their 154 depressing games. But it took a bit of chicanery to reach that sum. Frank and Stanley Robison owned both the Cleveland Spiders and St. Louis Perfectos and transferred most of the good 1898 Spiders over to St. Louis in an attempt to build one superteam and one comedy legend. Cleveland was doomed by design, though the Perfectos failed to be a superteam.

Incidentally, the Brooklyn Superbas pulled this off more successfully, looting the Baltimore Orioles to put together a 101-win roster (though I’d have penalized them a few wins for the confusing team name, which was swiped from an acrobatic act of the time and awkwardly made into a plural noun).

The 1962 Mets earned their infamy on the square and now serve as the gold standard for seasonal ineptitude. But as we head towards the trade deadline, we have two teams trying to make it interesting, the 25-66 Baltimore Orioles and the 25-65 Kansas City Royals.

Both teams stand slightly behind the Mets’ fierce pace, with winning percentages that round to 45-117, tantalizingly close to bleak greatness, but not quite there. Like when a batter tries to hit .400 over the course of the season, you want to have a cushion over the mark, since the natural course of regression will stamp down on the extremes.

But there’s at least a chance, which is really all that matters. What fun is a record if it’s likely to be surmounted? And it gives an additional layer of excitement to losing seasons when you need a break from wondering in what wacky way the Baltimore Orioles will mess up a Manny Machado trade or being astounded that the Royals actually advertise that it took them years to spare the roster from even a single game of Alcides Escobar’s services.

Powering up the ZiPS SuperComputer (it’s really just a regular computer), I cranked up the old simulations to get the latest probabilities that either the Royals or Orioles pull off the 120-loss feat.

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