Before this season, Nick Madrigal had spent just one inning at third base. It was in a showcase game; he was a high schooler. Madrigal played a fair bit of shortstop at Oregon State, but he has always primarily been a second baseman. Then in December, the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson, bumping Nico Hoerner over to second and Madrigal into a utility role.

Madrigal took the change in stride. He started a long toss regimen to improve his arm strength, and said all the right things to the press:

Bench coach Andy Green even flew out to Arizona to spend a week helping him get up to speed at the hot corner. All of that work seems to have paid off. So far this season, Madrigal has spent 53 innings at second and 303.2 at third. As a third baseman, DRS and OAA both have him at +4, DRP has him at +1.1, and UZR has him at -0.1. Again, that’s after exactly playing exactly one inning at the position when he was a teenager.

It looks like Madrigal’s regular playing time at third is coming to an end, though. Patrick Wisdom is returning from the IL, and Madrigal just started his own IL stint due to a right hamstring strain. It’s a disheartening development for many reasons: Because he needed season-ending surgery on that same hamstring in 2021; because it makes his spot on the Cubs’ roster even more precarious; because he was on pace to have the most productive season of his young career; and because he does something really fun when he plays third base. I’ve been struggling with how to put it into words, so before I make my attempt, let’s see if you can spot it for yourself.

I don’t have a good sense of whether or not you’ll notice what I want you to notice. Maybe you saw it right away. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan and you already noticed it earlier this year. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice until someone points it out, and then you can never not notice it. To make it a little easier, I combined two frames from that clip: I took the moment when Madrigal fielded the ball, then I added the moment when he threw it over to first.

Those two Nick Madrigals are in very, very different places. The first one is fielding the ball in a normal position roughly 15 feet behind the bag. Somehow the second one is way over on the right, about to make his throw with a foot on the infield grass. That’s a whole lot of infield to traverse right in the middle of a routine groundout. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to be rude, but here’s a fact of life: I pay less attention to the Nationals than the average team in Major League Baseball. It’s not because I have a grudge against them or anything; I went to college in Virginia and have a ton of family in the D.C. area, so I know an absolute ton of Nats fans. They’re just not that interesting at the moment, and there’s a lot of baseball to watch, so someone has to slide down the priority queue.

When I have paid attention to the Nationals, though, I’ve liked what I’ve seen. I thought they made some smart signings this offseason. They’ve done a good job of giving plenty of playing time to interesting players. Lane Thomas might never have found a regular home if the Nats hadn’t come calling, Joey Meneses is being given every chance to play out of a season-starting slump, and Hunter Harvey looks like a nice bullpen arm for the trade deadline.

In my chat this week, someone mentioned that the Tigers would be in the thick of the AL Central race if they’d merely held onto Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes. And that drove a realization for me: Candelario looks good again. Is he the real deal? Can some contending team plug him in at third base and have an All-Star–level contributor? Let’s find out. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien isn’t on pace to match his career-best 2019 and 2021 numbers, but he remains a productive hitter. Two months shy of his 33rd birthday and in his second season with the Texas Rangers, the venerable middle infielder is slashing .271/.338/.438 with 11 home runs and a 115 wRC+. A key cog in the lineup for a first place club, Semien batted leadoff for the American League in last night’s All-Star Game.

Semien sat down to talk hitting during the Rangers’ recent visit to Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your formative years in the game. How did you learn to hit?

Marcus Semien: “As a kid, I watched major league baseball. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area as a Giants fan — my dad is a Giants fan — and we always had baseball on. From there, I was imitating Barry Bonds’ swing, Jeff Kent’s swing — all those guys I used to watch as a kid. Read the rest of this entry »

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. wasn’t exactly the forgotten man at the 2023 Home Run Derby at T-Mobile Park; this scribe was hardly alone in predicting he’d win. But the 24-year-old slugger didn’t put up an astronomical total of dingers the way hometown favorite Julio Rodríguez did in the first round (breaking Guerrero’s own 2019 record of 40 homers, at that). Nor did he cruise into the finals by a lopsided score the way Randy Arozarena did in knocking off the top-seeded Luis Robert Jr. in the semifinals. Guerrero did start his night by steamrolling Mookie Betts, then narrowly eked out wins over both Rodríguez and Arozarena to take home the championship that eluded him in 2019, when he was runner-up to Pete Alonso. In victory, he joined his father, who won in 2007, as the first father-son duo to win the Derby. Congrats to Vlad and Dad.

With Blue Jays manager John Schneider serving as his pitcher, Guerrero — one of just three contestants who had participated in a previous Derby, along with Alonso and Rodríguez — needed until his fifth swing to get on the board, but once he did, with a 453-footer, he found his groove. He beat Betts handily, 26–11, then walked off against Rodríguez, needing just one homer in bonus time to win, 21–20. He hit 25 in the finals, a record for the shorter round (two minutes instead of three), then had to wait out Arozarena, who finished regulation with 20. Crucially, Arozarena only had the standard 30 seconds of extra time because he hadn’t gotten the distance bonus, unlocked when a player hit two homers with projected distances of at least 440 feet — something Guerrero managed in all three rounds. Arozarena ran out of both gas and time as his final fly balls fell short; he finished with 23 homers to make Guerrero the champion, the second-youngest in history by a day (1993 winner Juan Gonzalez was younger).

Guerrero will serve as a reserve for Tuesday night’s All-Star Game after starting at first base in each of the past two seasons. Yandy Díaz was voted to start for the AL, and it’s tough to complain when he’s hitting .323/.408/.515 for a 165 wRC+, the highest of any first baseman in either league by 10 points (NL starter Freddie Freeman is second at 155) and the second-highest of any qualified hitter behind only Shohei Ohtani.

Diaz’s 165 wRC+ is reminiscent of the league-leading 166 Guerrero put up during his 2021 season. We’re now two years removed from that breakout campaign, when at age 22, Vladito made a run at the Triple Crown, falling short but still hitting an impressive .311/.401/.601 with 48 homers and 6.3 WAR. His home run total led the league, as did his on-base percentage, a small consolation for finishing “only” third in batting average; likewise, he led in total bases and slugging percentage and was second in WAR, a pretty good offset for finishing “only” fifth in RBIs.

When you’re 22 years old and the son of a Hall of Famer, a season like that sends expectations into the stratosphere, so it’s come as something of a disappointment that Guerrero’s follow-up seasons have not been up to that standard. He hit .274/.339/.480 with 32 homers, a 132 wRC+, and 2.8 WAR last year, and arrived at the All-Star break batting .274/.344/.443 with 13 homers, a 120 wRC+, and (gulp) 0.4 WAR this year. A good — or not-so-good, actually — part of that decline in value is Guerrero’s defense, which has gone downhill quickly. I’ll get to that below, but what everyone is wondering is what’s happened to his offense. In looking at his numbers, a few things stand out. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a topsy-turvy year in baseball, at least from a team perspective. Shohei Ohtani is still great, and so are Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, but the teams leading the charge look nothing like last year’s playoff hopefuls. The Rangers, Diamondbacks, and Reds are in first place in their respective divisions. The Orioles are in second place but sport the third-best record in the game.

In a lot of ways, those teams are doing well because they have great players. That’s just kind of how it works, you know? You don’t get good by having a pile of bad players. That makes it harder to suggest clean upgrades. Sure, occasionally you get a situation like Texas’ outfield mishmash or the back end of Cincinnati’s rotation, but for the most part, “how do we get good players to upstart teams?” is a self-solving problem. The teams are good because they have good players, and there’s just no need to complicate it more than that.

A lot of the good hitters and starters now are the same guys who were good half a decade ago, so teams build their farm systems accordingly. Each of these four surprising teams has core position players and starters who will be there a while. Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, Corbin Carroll and Zac Gallen, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, the entire Reds infield: they’re pillars of their respective franchises. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes there’s a difference between returning and being back. After tearing his right ACL in July of 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. returned on April 28, 2022. He put up a solid 2.1 WAR over 119 games, a 2.9-win pace. Think of him as Paul McCartney in 1970, releasing the solid but uninspiring McCartney on the heels of a regrettable rupture. This year, Acuña is back. He’s Paul McCartney in 1971, authoring an all-time classic in Ram. Please don’t examine this metaphor any further because it can’t stand up to scrutiny (but please give Ram a listen because it can).

Acuña has put up 4.9 WAR and a 166 wRC+ and racked up outfield assists on throws beautiful enough to make an angel cry (or a Cardinal, or a Padre).

Acuña is slashing .335/.412./.589, and for what it’s worth, his 166 wRC+ might be the result of a bit of bad luck. His .459 xwOBA is 34 points higher than his actual wOBA. It’s also the highest in the league, even higher than You Know Who. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Grant Anderson had an especially-memorable MLB debut earlier this season. Pitching in Detroit on May 30, the 26-year-old Texas Rangers right-hander entered the game in the fifth inning and promptly fanned Zach McKinstry to strand an inherited runner at second base. He then returned to the mound in the sixth and struck out the side. In the seventh, he induced a line-out followed by a pair of punch-outs. In the eighth, yet another strikeout was followed by a Miguel Cabrera single that ended his evening. All told, the sidearming rookie had faced nine batters and fanned seven of them. He was credited with the win in Texas’s 10-6 victory.

He could have been working in a rubber plant instead. On two occasions — one of them as recently as this spring — Anderson seriously considered giving up baseball. More on that in a moment.

Five years ago, Anderson was at home in Beaumont, Texas following the draft with his father and twin brother Aidan [who now pitches in the Rangers system] when the Seattle Mariners took him in the 21st round with the 628th-overall pick. A half dozen or so calls and texts had come earlier. The Brewers, Mets, and a few other teams had reached out to say, “Hey, what do you think about this number and this round?” That none of them actually pulled the trigger wasn’t a matter of high demands. As Anderson put it, “I was coming from a small place and just wanted to play pro ball, so it didn’t really matter to me what the money was. I guess they all just found a better guy for those spots.”

Seattle and Colorado had shown the most interest prior to draft day, and had the former not drafted him, the latter presumably would have. The Rockies called to say they were planning to take him in the 21st round, only to have the Mariners do so a handful of picks in front of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll is having a marvelous season. After a 2022 cup of coffee in which he put up a 130 wRC+, he has improved in nearly every statistical category and leads all rookies in WAR by a wide margin. But while he has a 145 wRC+ (highest among NL rookies) and 41 extra-base hits, he isn’t just a one-dimensional slugger; the completeness of his profile is astonishing for a 22-year-old rookie. He’s amassed 7 RAA since his debut and is the only outfielder with three five-star catches this season, though his arm strength still has room for improvement. Most impressively, Carroll is possibly the most electric baserunner in the league and is producing value with his legs at a historic rate.

Carroll puts a lot of balls in play; his 19.8% strikeout rate and 8.4% swinging-strike rate are both better than league average. But perhaps the only remaining weakness in his game is in his batted ball distribution. He hits the ball on the ground nearly half the time, and while he’s good at turning his fly balls into homers, a considerable fraction of his air balls are popped up. In other words, many of Carroll’s batted balls are either hit straight up or straight down, with a big gap in the middle. His sweet spot rate ranks in the 16th percentile, and his line drive percentile is barely in the double digits. While Luis Arraez can practically walk to first thanks to his barrage of liners into the outfield, Carroll has to sprint for every base he can get.

Luckily for Carroll, his ability to fly out of the box is nearly unmatched. His average home-to-first time of 4.07 seconds is tied for second in baseball. And he can turn on the jets when he needs to; his 62 bolts rank second to only Bobby Witt Jr., who carries the disadvantage of having to start from the right-handed batter’s box. But Carroll doesn’t just use his speed to get on base (he has just six infield hits this year); he uses it to stretch his base hits as far as they can go. With his ability to rocket around the basepaths, any ball he puts in play can easily become a double or triple.

Imagine you’re an MLB outfielder. A batter hits the ball hard on the ground, past a diving shortstop. You run to cut the ball off before it gets past you and fire a strike to second base. How much time do you think you need to make that play? If your answer is anything longer than 7.5 seconds, then congratulations: Carroll has just stretched his single into a double off you. He had the three fastest home-to-second times in the majors in 2022 despite hitting just nine doubles, leveraging his 99th-percentile sprint speed to teleport around the bases. Read the rest of this entry »

There comes a time in many a Red Sox pitching prospect’s life when he is likened to Pedro Martinez, which must be every bit as intimidating as it is flattering. His name was invoked when the Red Sox acquired six-foot-flat Dominican fireballer Rubby de la Rosa — whose grandmother nannied the Martinez boys back in Santo Domingo — in the blockbuster 2012 deal that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, and Nick Punto to the Dodgers. Martinez was again floated as a lofty comp for small-framed Venezuelan right-hander Anderson Espinoza when he emerged as the team’s most promising pitching prospect in 2015 and ’16. Across the league, countless others have drawn the hopeful comparison, sometimes of the Hall of Famer’s own accord.

For 24-year-old Red Sox starter Brayan Bello, the comparisons started at least a couple of years ago. The diminutive Dominican right-hander was also overlooked for his smaller frame in his youth, and while he favors a two-seam fastball over his four-seamer — both register in the mid-90s velocity-wise — it’s the changeup that is perhaps most reminiscent of the pitcher he calls an idol. In May 2021, Peter Gammons quoted a team official noting that Bello was “up to 97 with the best changeup I ever seen, at least since Pedro.” For Bello, the comparison hasn’t exactly been unwelcome; in May of last year, upon his promotion to Triple-A, he said through a translator that he ”would eventually like to be better than him,” reflecting a kind of unabashed confidence that itself is not unlike the former Sox ace. Read the rest of this entry »