Archive for Teams

When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades. There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades. -Kiley

Chris Anderson, RHP, Rancho Cucamonga Quakes (LAD, High-A – most recently viewed 8/17 at Rancho)

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Buck Farmer, despite the name, is a real person who exists. A month ago, he was making his final start for the Single-A West Michigan Whitecaps in Clinton, Iowa, a town that has a smaller population (26,885 in 2010) than 21 of the 30 MLB teams pack into their ballparks on any given night. When he did, on July 25, the Tigers, the top of Farmer’s Detroit organization, had a 6.5-game lead in the AL Central and a 94.0% chance of winning the division, had just picked up Joakim Soria, and were about to add David Price to a rotation that was already very good.

This isn’t about Farmer, really, though he’s part of it. He’s just a pretty good entry point into how the Tigers, a team that was flying free and clear to their fourth straight division title against relatively indifferent AL Central competition, could manage to turn that lead into a 1.5-game deficit into fewer than six weeks. Those playoff odds, which seemed to make them a near-certainty to win the division, dropped all the way to 43.3% before the Royals lost last night, which, as Jeff showed yesterday, is by far the biggest downturn of any team in baseball. They wouldn’t even be in the wild card playoff at the moment, thanks to the fact that the AL West has two of the best teams in baseball and a Mariners club that has just stopped losing.

A month ago, Farmer was pitching in A-ball. A week ago, he was getting exactly one out while allowing eight runs for Toledo against a Columbus team that had someone named Giovanny Urshela hitting cleanup. Surrounding that, he’s made two major league starts for a Tigers team desperately trying to hold off one of the biggest collapses we’ve seen in years. If you want to know how the Tigers have fallen apart, that’s a great place to start.

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Two facts, with which you as a FanGraphs reader are likely familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays are among the most sabermetrically-inclined organizations in major league baseball.

• Sabermetrically-inclined folk generally are against the decision to sacrifice bunt.

One more fact, with which you are less likely to be familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays have attempted 58 non-pitcher sacrifice bunts this season, by far the highest mark in the major leagues. No other team has even 50.

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There’s a regular shortstop in the National League you probably don’t think about very often. The Marlins, though, think about Adeiny Hechavarria very often, and they happen to think very much of him. Which, of course, is implied by his still being a regular shortstop, but Hechavarria’s coming off a weekend in which he made some more dynamite defensive plays, and Jarred Cosart went and took himself to Twitter late Saturday:

Hechavarria shows me everyday why WAR and all these #s are garbage. Best defensive shortstop I’ve seen period. Fish fight on 2morrow

— Jarred Cosart (@JarredCosart) August 24, 2014

Cosart isn’t just in it to build himself and his teammates up. And this is a sentiment we’ve heard before from the organization. From November 2013:

[Michael] Hill was befuddled as to how Hechavarria wasn’t among the three finalists for the Gold Glove award, a prize that went to Braves’ counterpart Andrelton Simmons over Ian Desmond and Troy Tulowitzki.

From just the other day:

“They’ve got all these fancy numbers you measure stuff by and I guess I’m just a dinosaur,” [Perry] Hill said. “I go by what I see. I know what my eyes see and my eyes tell me he’s an elite shortstop.”

The Marlins are big believers in Hechavarria, from the front office on down to the players on the field. Those are opinions that can’t just be ignored, because the Marlins have repeated the point time and time again. To them, defensively speaking, Hechavarria’s nothing short of elite. So why don’t we talk about Hechavarria like he’s defensively elite?

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

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It almost seems funny now, but for the entirety of spring training and into the first few weeks of the season, the Mets were unable to resolve the issue that had been hanging over their head for more than a year: Ike Davis or Lucas Duda? Davis had hit 32 homers in 2012 and had certainly had his moments otherwise, but was never able to produce consistently around an injured ankle and a bout with Valley Fever, and had generally been awful in 2013. Duda had shown he could consistently be something more than a league-average hitter, but he’d never had 500 plate appearances and was such a bad defensive outfielder when forced out there that he was no longer an option anywhere but first base. Both are lefties, and neither can hit lefty pitching, ruling out a platoon. One had to go.

Duda started seven of the first 15 games at first, plus another at designated hitter. Davis started five. Josh Satin, a righty swinger who has long since been dispatched to Triple-A, started three more. On April 18, the Mets finally made a call and dealt Davis to Pittsburgh for minor leaguers Zach Thornton and Blake Taylor. Since then, Davis has been a replacement player — literally, 0.0 WAR — in part-time play for Pittsburgh, and he’s about to lose playing time to the Pedro Alvarez experiment.

The job, then as now, belonged to Duda. You might say that the Mets chose wisely.

* * *

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We’re talking about pace-of-game again, in light of the recent vote to identify the next commissioner. Baseball games are taking longer and longer, with replay and constant shifting only adding to the length, and while certain fans believe it’s no issue because that’s just the beauty of baseball, this is one of those areas where you need to look at the big picture, and most people would prefer that games take less time. Baseball games now have a greater duration with the same amount of action, and that’s not the stuff of anyone’s dreams.

Cutting down on game length isn’t as easy as identifying that baseball should want to cut down on game length. The commercial breaks are always going to be there, because they need to be. Teams aren’t going to be real receptive to ideas that limit bullpen usage and flexibility. Every so often someone brings up the idea of a pitch clock, and maybe that’s the sort of step that needs to be taken. The best target for time reduction are all the seconds that pass between pitches. At least, that’s how people frequently feel. They don’t feel like that so much when Mark Buehrle’s on the mound.

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When our other prospect writers submit scouting reports, I will provide a short background and industry consensus tool grades.  There are two reasons for this: 1) giving context to account for the writer seeing a bad outing (never threw his changeup, coming back from injury, etc.) and 2) not making him go on about the player’s background or speculate about what may have happened in other outings.

The writer still grades the tools based on what they saw, I’m just letting the reader know what he would’ve seen in many other games from this season, particularly with young players that may be fatigued late in the season. The grades are presented as present/future on the 20-80 scouting scale and very shortly I’ll publish a series going into more depth explaining these grades.   -Kiley

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After getting outbid for Jose Abreu, the Red Sox apparently weren’t going to let that happen when they had another shot at a young Cuban defector, and today, they’ve agreed to sign outfielder Rusney Castillo for a reported $72 million over six years. This beats Abreu’s total by $4 million, and is almost double the contract that Yasiel Puig got a couple of years ago. There’s little question that the massive success of those two players has forced teams to reevaluate their assessments, and as I pointed out on Wednesday, the international free agent market has been significantly underpriced of late.

Of course, the success of Abreu and Puig doesn’t mean that Castillo’s going to be a monster. Here’s what Ben Badler reports that scouts have told him about Castillo’s potential:

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In less than a month, the Angels have been dealt some two deadly blows to their starting rotation. Neither Tyler Skaggs not Garrett Richards will be pitching any time in the foreseeable future. Jeff detailed the devastating blow that their losses may have on their World Series chances yesterday. Today, I thought we could take a look at the potential pitchers that the team could acquire for the stretch run.
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