Archive for Teams

News broke on Monday that Zack Wheeler had a tear in his UCL, and would need to undergo Tommy John Surgery. This sucks. It sucks every time we lose an exciting, young arm to injury, and this case is no different. But one man’s misfortune is another man’s opportunity. While unfortunate for both Wheeler and the Mets, Wheeler’s injury helps clear up the log jam in the Mets rotation. It opens the door for a slew of youngsters, who may have otherwise spent a good chunk of the year in Triple-A or the bullpen.

Even after losing Wheeler, the Mets are still able to field a full rotation without turning to any unproven rookies. Dillon Gee will presumably join Matt Harvey, Bartolo Colon, Jon Niese and Jacob deGrom in New York’s rotation. Still, even if the Mets rotation is set for now, we all know that teams almost always need more than five starting pitchers to get through a season. Furthermore, the Mets number one and number two starters are coming off of Tommy John Surgery and old as dirt, respectively. It’s only a matter of time before they will need to dip into their farm system, and luckily for them, they have no shortage of replacements to choose from.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox, Orioles, Yankees, Braves, Athletics, Angels, Dodgers, Blue Jays, Tigers, Cardinals, Brewers, Indians, Mariners, Pirates, Royals & Giants

Top 200 Prospects Content Index

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Draft Rankings: 2015, 2016 & 2017

International Coverage: 2015 July 2nd Parts One, Two & Three, 2016 July 2nd

The Cardinals have their own way of doing things, from the types of pitchers they draft, how they develop them and their recent history of turning unheralded prospects into productive big leaguers.  For a team that hasn’t spent big in the international market and always picks in the back half of the first round, this is a nice, balanced system with upside/certainty, pitching/hitting, domestic/foreign and depth at each tier of talent and level of the minors.

There’s a lot of solid infielders, specifically shortstops, at the lower levels, but Cardinals personnel told me that was more outcome than plan. There’s also a lot of young big league talent, evident from the list a couple paragraphs down. This may seem like an intro full of vague generalities, but this is another workmanlike effort of a farm system from an organization with a a farm in the middle third of the game.

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In the grand scheme of things, evaluating a baseball player’s current ability isn’t that difficult. If you have a sampling of their statistics and have a chance to watch a handful of their games, a reasonably informed observer will come up with a pretty good estimate of the player’s current talent level. Figuring out how good a player is right now requires some skill, but it’s nothing compared to having that same information about a player and attempting to forecast six years into the future.

That’s the job of a scout. You get a handful of looks at a 19 year old, you talk to a few people, you glance at some numbers, and then you’re asked to predict what that player is going to look like at 25. It’s a big ask and as a result, there’s a pretty big margin of error. A good scout should be more accurate than a decently competent observer, but no one would expect a scout to be right on every player. There’s just too much uncertainty involved.

One would hope that a scout doesn’t miss any Mike Trouts or bet high on many Jeff Larishs, but they’re going to miss good players and speak highly of bad one’s during the course of their careers. That’s especially true with respect to very young players.

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Tony Cingrani is going to the Reds bullpen, having already been ruled out of the Cincinnati starting competition. If that’s a surprise, it’s only because after they shed Alfredo Simon and Mat Latos over the winter, the team might now actually start the season with one (or both!) of Paul Maholm and Jason Marquis in the rotation. As Dave Cameron laid out yesterday, that’s absolutely no way for a team on the fringes of contention to be operating.

Cingrani isn’t pleased about it, but let’s be honest and admit that he seemed like a future reliever from the day he set foot in the big leagues. In a short cameo at the end of 2012, he threw 90% fastballs. In 104.1 innings in 2013, he threw 81% fastballs, trying desperately to find a useable second pitch. Last year, he got that down to 73%, but he also missed a considerable portion of the season with a shoulder injury, not pitching at all after June 19.

Or, put another way: Read the rest of this entry »

It has one grip, and one sign, but Jake Arrieta’s slider has many shapes. Ask him if it’s a slider or a cutter, and he says it’s both, and more. As much as anything was the secret to his breakout last year, the slider — in its many forms — might be the best answer.

“I can manipulate the velocity, I can manipulate the break, depending on the situation, depending on the hitter, depending on the count,” the pitcher said last week in Spring Training. Look at the movement and velocity of all the balls labeled slider or cutter by PITCHf/x over the past two years, and it just leaps out at you: it looks like he has three sliders.

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Over the winter, the Reds remade their starting rotation, trading away both Mat Latos and Alfredo Simon, getting younger and cheaper players back in return for a pair of arms headed into their walk years. However, they declined to go into a full rebuild, keeping both Johnny Cueto and Mike Leake despite the fact that they’re also pending free agents; the Reds wanted to take one more shot at winning with their current core, especially given that they’re hosting the All-Star Game this year.

Now, the Reds actually pulling off this contend-while-kinda-rebuilding plan seems like a bit of a longshot. We currently have them projected for 75 wins, last in the NL Central, with just a 2.7% chance of winning the division and a 5.9% chance of capturing one of the two Wild Card spots. And it’s not like we’re out on a limb here; Bovada has the Reds over/under at 77.5. Baseball Prospectus is slightly more optimistic, pegging them at 79 wins, matching Clay Davenport’s projected win total.

So, in general, the pre-season forecasts peg the Reds as something like a 75 to 80 win team, meaning they need to find an extra dozen or so wins in either surprisingly strong performances or sequencing luck in order to sneak into a playoff spot. It definitely is possible, especially if the team gets strong bounce back performances from Jay Bruce and Joey Votto, but the Reds are going to need to get a few breakthrough performances from unexpected sources. When you’re starting from this position and trying to win, you need to take some gambles and have them pay off.

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Cubs third-base prospect Kris Bryant produced one of the top minor-league seasons in recent history last year, recording a weighted batting line approximately 90% better than league average over 594 plate appearances between Double- and Triple-A while also playing a seemingly competent third base. Were minor-league WAR a thing, Bryant would have recorded the best one of those in all of affiliated baseball — roughly the equivalent of nine wins.

Largely as a result of that wildly successful 2014 season, Bryant enters 2015 featuring the top WAR projection among all rookie-eligible players — and one of the top WAR projections realistically possible for a player who’s made zero major-league appearances. His performance over the first couple weeks of spring training indicates — to the degree that spring-training performance can indicate such things — that he’s, at the very least, unlikely to be overwhelmed by major-league pitching.

Before Kris Bryant led all the minors in home runs, he led all the NCAA in home runs, too. In 2013, as a junior at the University of San Diego, Bryant hit 31 homers. That June, he was selected second overall in the draft by the Cubs. The next month, he was presented with the Golden Spikes Award.

Technically, the Golden Spikes Award is presented each year to the best amateur player in the country. In practice, however, the award has been given to a college player (either the four-year or junior-college variety) every year since its inception in 1978. Bob Horner was the Golden Spikes recipient that year following his junior campaign at Arizona State — a performance which convinced Atlanta not only to select him first overall in the draft that year, but also to send him directly to the majors, where he produced a 2.3 WAR in 359 plate appearances.

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Today, Joe Kelly took the mound in Ft. Myers, and it didn’t go well; he gave up seven hits in 2 2/3 innings before leaving with an injury currently being called biceps tightness

Kelly said he had biceps tightness that limited him to fastballs; 'not concerned.' Says he's had it before. 'Usually doesn't last too long'

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) March 16, 2015

Today’s performance continued a trend from his two previous spring training starts, as he’s now allowed 17 hits in 7 2/3 innings this spring; his spring training ERA currently stands at 11.05. On their own, the results aren’t a big deal, but when you combine it with a potential injury, it might be fair to say that Kelly’s spot could be up for grabs at this point.

Of course, any time the Red Sox rotation is mentioned, people will invariably bring up Cole Hamels, but Boston continues to seem uninterested in meeting the Phillies price, and they do have some interesting alternatives in-house. While youngsters Henry Owens and Eduardo Rodriguez are the two best long-term prospects and might be ready for an audition, John Farrell has made sure the beat writers keep Steven Wright’s name in the picture as well. Per Alex Speier, from this morning:

The Sox would not be opposed to adding a veteran starter to their Triple A rotation. But Farrell again expressed confidence in Steven Wright as a depth starter. “He gives us a lot of comfort. As that knuckleball has come along, he’s throwing a lot more strikes,” Farrell said. “He’s got the ability to give a contrast of style.”

Projecting the performance of knuckleballers is not quite impossible, but is something kind of close to it. Wright could be very good — as he was in a September trial last year — or he could be terrible, with pretty much any result in between seemingly equally likely. Knuckleballers are lottery tickets, especially ones with spotty track records and iffy command. Dickey’s success came after he cut his walk rate in half, which Wright appears to have done in Triple-A last year, but we essentially have half a minor league season and a month of big league action where Wright showed a consistent ability to throw strikes. If he’s not throwing strikes, he’s not any good, and it’s not a big surprise that the Red Sox wouldn’t want to count on his 2014 command improvement carrying over when trying to win in 2015.

But there are a couple of reasons why I think it might make sense for the Red Sox to give Wright a shot, especially if Kelly needs replacing on the Opening Day roster: his Z-Contact% and the knuckleball carryover effect.

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Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Detroit Tigers. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Detroit’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Tigers’ system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Detroit system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

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Ask top prospect Kris Bryant about his swing, and he’ll tell you something you may have never heard before. You’ll probably also have to ask a few knowledgable people to help explain what he means.

After talking to Bryant in Spring Training last week, I asked FanGraphs prospect maven Kiley McDaniel, professional hitting consultant Dan Farnsworth, and prospect video guru Steve Fiorindo of the Prospect Pipeline to comment on the things Bryant said about his own swing. It’s an analysis of a self-analysis, if you will, with some of the moving images below provided by Carson Cistulli.

Kris Bryant: I stood straight up in high school. I haven’t changed anything since my college years, that’s when I widened out. Sophomore year I widened out so I could get to the low pitch easier. I got more power from it too because I started using my hips and legs and I was firing through the zone a lot quicker. Now that I’m wider, I have a whole lot more power.

Kiley McDaniel: I note when a batter has a low stance, since it’s easy to notice and is descriptive, but as with pitcher arm actions and the general idea of a guy’s swing, things like wide setup/power hitter, these aren’t things you can usually change with any success. So having an opinion about it in general usually doesn’t matter, since you’re so unlikely to be able to change it long-term even if you think you have a better answer.

Steve Fiorindo: I think the widening of the stance minimizes other movements, it helps for a quiet swing, but you have to be pretty strong to do it (obviously he is). Wide base, little or no stride = less opportunity for swing to break down. I know some guys like the big leg kick, (I say do whatever works for you), but the big leg kick often leads to foot getting down and body shifting weight over the front foot too so the swing breaks down and there is nothing behind it.

Dan Farnsworth: While there’s no magic distance between the feet that can create the most power in general, on the individual level it can definitely make a big difference. For Bryant, I would imagine his base being wider allows him to more easily activate his glutes than when he was more narrow.

Think of it like doing a squat with a narrow base versus a wide base. There’s certainly a sweet spot dictated by individual anatomy that allows for the quickest firing of the strongest muscles in the lower half. The swing isn’t strictly an upward move like a squat, but the same muscles utilized to push into the ground go through much of the same movement to turn that linear force (straight into the ground) into rotational force. His best position for creating power is just a reflection of how the muscles and bones in his lower half are built, and his previous swing base probably wasn’t in as optimal of a position.

Kris Bryant: It’s almost like a rubber band between your hips and your hands. Your hips go and you have your hands kept back as long as possible, until the last second, then they have to come through and so it’s like a rubber band effect, essentially.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.