Mark Zaleski / The Tennessean-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Now that the lower minor leagues’ regular seasons are over, teams have commenced with instructional league activity in a traditional sense, with a select group of players from several of their affiliates working out and scrimmaging at their spring training complexes. While “Bridge League” (the unofficial period of scrimmage activity that occurs after the late-July conclusion of the Complex Level schedule) frequently includes some newly drafted players, most of the rosters are made up of the guys who have been on the complex all year. But once “instructs” begin, the talent and quality of play of these games ascends to a different level as teams test their most interesting young players or get an intimate look at prospects who might be up for a 40-man roster spot during the winter. The snowbirds haven’t returned in full because the weather here in Arizona is still pretty gross, so driving across the metro is easier now than it will be in a few weeks (and during next year’s spring training). For that reason, I decided to focus my early looks on teams based in the western half of the Phoenix metro, farther from the house. Read the rest of this entry »
He did it! Cal Raleigh launched his 60th home run of the season last night, joining a rare club of elite sluggers. In hitting 60 so quickly, he’s left himself with a chance to match Aaron Judge’s American League record of 62, or perhaps even surpass it. With four games left in the season, how likely is it? I fired up my computer to ask. As a refresher, last week I modeled Raleigh’s home run hitting talent, the parks he’ll play in, and his scheduled opposition to work out which side of the plate he’ll hit from and how likely he is to hit a home run in any given plate appearance the rest of the way. Then I simulated the season a million times to work out the probability of each milestone. Read the rest of this entry »
Area Scout, Amateur Scouting (South Texas and South Louisiana)
Baseball Operations / Full-time / Remote
DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW:
The Amateur Domestic Scouting department is primarily responsible for improving organizational talent through the Rule IV Draft and UDFA signing process. The Amateur Domestic Scouting department strives to be best in class at identifying, evaluating, and valuing amateur baseball talent through a relentless commitment to our process and our people. This includes, but is not limited to creating well-rounded scouting practices, building relationships, leveraging R&D for process support, developing strong staff education frameworks, and establishing sound decision-making processes.
POSITION OVERVIEW:
The Area Scout is responsible for overseeing the draft process for players within their designated geographical area. This role places a strong emphasis on collaboration with other members of the amateur operation to gather and verify a wide range of critical information, including, but not limited to, background details, medical records, performance data, and player evaluation, all of which are vital to the Amateur Scouting efforts. A key responsibility of the Area Scout is to establish strong relationships with players, parents, coaches, and other relevant sources to ensure the accuracy and depth of the collected data, which is essential for informing decision-making. The ideal candidate should be inquisitive, openminded, and possess excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Collect and verify comprehensive information, including background details, medical records, performance data, and other relevant information to inform scouting decisions.
Collaborate with the National Coordinator, Amateur Scouting, to align efforts and ensure consistency in scouting practices.
Travel within the designated geographical area to scout games, attend events, and meet with key contacts as needed.
Establish and maintain strong relationships with players, parents, coaches, and other relevant sources to ensure the accuracy and depth of collected data.
Continuously stay updated on players’ progress, changes in performance, and other relevant factors within the designated area.
Evaluate talent and submit evaluations on all prospects in the area in preparation for the annual MLB Draft.
Participate in scouting meetings throughout the year, both in person and via video conference, to discuss prospects in the assigned area.
COMPETENCIES:
Ability to build, cultivate, and leverage genuine relationships.
Ability to connect with and respect people from different backgrounds and cultures, including players, families, coaches, agents, trainers, and others.
Proficient with the necessary hardware, tools, and equipment to acquire necessary information and conduct important tasks.
Ability to use the appropriate software platform(s) and digital tools necessary for the submission and quality control of evaluations.
An expertise of the Amateur scouting landscape and context.
Ability to understand and utilize the data that drives the desired signals in the Amateur Scouting domain.
An understanding of each evaluation domain (development, performance, medical, behavioral health, background, etc.) to be able to succinctly capture the information necessary to meaningfully engage with experts (doctors, S&C coaches, analysts, etc.)
In addition to the above requirements, all roles within Baseball Operations are expected to effectively demonstrate our universal competencies related to problem solving, teamwork, clarity of communication, and time management, along with embodying our culture of honesty, humility, relentlessness, and commitment to DEIB.
Frank Bowen IV/The Enquirer/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
I was going to start this piece by acknowledging that a month ago, it would’ve been logical to write the Cincinnati Reds off. Then I remembered something: I actually did write the Reds off. From FanGraphs Dot Com, on August 29: “Unless the Reds Do Something Wild, the NL Playoff Race Is Over.”
Well, the Reds did something wild. As a rule, I try to caveat my predictions; rather than saying something absolutely will or won’t happen, I’ll use a frame like “This is extremely unlikely to happen; we’ll write about it if and when it does.” Well, from August 29 to September 22, Cincinnati went from playoff odds in the low single digits to a virtual coin flip:
The Nationals will remember 2025 as a gap year, if they’re lucky. The 2023 and 2024 teams, invigorated by many of the prospects acquired in the Juan Soto trade, each won 71 games, dragging Washington out of the bottom-of-table ignominy that it had occupied since winning the World Series in 2019 and then blowing up the roster. This year’s squad is going to finish with a win total in the 60s and some developmental hiccups, a step backward from the recent past. But lost in the broadly disappointing year is one bright shining beacon: Daylen Lile might just be a keeper.
Lile, a high school draftee in 2021, missed all of 2022 rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, then spent the next two years methodically climbing through the minor league ranks. He started 2025 hot, with a .337/.383/.509 line in his first 40 games in the minors, and got his first taste of the majors when Jacob Young briefly hit the IL. Lile struggled during that first stint but landed in the majors for good a few weeks later when the Nats overhauled their bench. By the All-Star break, he’d carved out a role as a rotational right fielder.
That’s the boring part of this article. The exciting part? As Lile settled into big league life, opportunity beckoned. Young scuffled. Alex Call got traded. Dylan Crews was still out with injury. Lile? He just kept hitting. By August, he was locked in as a starter, and why not? Since the break, he’s hitting a sensational .323/.371/.552 for a 153 wRC+, and turning heads with his aggressive approach and hair-on-fire baserunning. Move over, other baby Nats – there’s a new top youngster in town.
Lile’s game is built around a sensational feel to hit. He regularly ran gaudy contact rates in the minor leagues, and his zone contact rate in the majors is above 90%, squarely in the upper echelon of the league. Like many hitters who make a ton of contact, Lile likes to swing. Unlike those peers, though, he’s done a good job of avoiding the over-chase downward spiral that traps so many singles hitters into lunging at sliders off the plate. Read the rest of this entry »
I started with every defensive season in which someone played 800 innings at a position in consecutive seasons. I treated corner outfield positions as different positions here, just to keep this as clean and simple as possible. Statcast defense is still a relatively new thing, so we have only 583 two-year runs for individual players. Not enough to break it down further by age or position or component in a meaningful manner, but enough to look at the bottomline numbers. When we look at three-year runs, we drop down to 277 individual players. Thanks 2020!
Of the players who had 800 innings at the same position in three consecutive seasons, here are the 30 largest gainers from the first year to the second. I used FRV/1200 instead of raw FRV.
Nearly two-thirds of the biggest improvers had negative FRV numbers the first season, and averaged a 10.8-run improvement in the second season. While FRV is obviously a volatile number, these players successfully retained a large portion of their one-year gains in the third season, averaging a 6.4-run improvement, with only five players going back into negative territory.
Turner’s 2024-2025 improvement in FRV/1200 is 11.7 runs, which would rank him ninth on this list, and the second-largest improvement among shortstops, behind Tim Anderson from 2017-2018. Turner doesn’t feature here because this is specifically for three-year runs, and the 2026 season hasn’t happened yet. His current Year 1-to-Year 2 gain for 2023-2024 is 4.5 runs — from -8.0 to -3.5 — and therefore not enough to make the top 30. It’s worth noting, though, that ZiPS projects him to be worth about 4.0 FRV/1200 in 2026, meaning he’d maintain about half his improvement from last year to this season.
The story here is similar. The 30 biggest decliners averaged an 11.7-run slide from Year 1 to Year 2. All but two of the 30 were initially in positive territory, and only two players (Trevor Story and Evan Longoria) rebounded to positive territory in Year 3. Compared to the change of -11.7 runs in the first two seasons, Year 3 was still at -7.9 runs below the first year. So again, the biggest declines generally still displayed significant deterioration of their defensive performances.
Despite my sample size misgivings, I also look at the stickiness by age or position. Unfortunately, the results weren’t terribly interesting; the sample sizes were simply too small to draw meaningful conclusions from this part of the exercise.
So, what does this mean? While you shouldn’t take the most recent FRV of a player as some magical this-is-their-true-ability number, large changes in performance are very meaningful going forward. That’s good news for Turner and Phillies fans.
Matt Blewett, Junfu Han-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images, Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images
The Detroit Tigers are in a dogfight with just six games remaining on the schedule. Not only is their lead in the American League Central down to one game over the Cleveland Guardians — their opponent the next three nights — a Wild Card berth is no sure thing if they don’t hang on to win the division. As my colleague Kiri Oler pointed out just yesterday, while their chances are promising on paper, “the error bars on those odds are huge.” In order to stave off what could reasonably be deemed a collapse, a Tigers team that has lost nine out of their last 10 is badly in need of wins down the stretch.
A trio of pitchers who will help determine Detroit’s fate were the subject of a recent conversation I had with Dan Hubbs. Now the bullpen coach for the Athletics, Hubbs was the Tigers’ director of pitching development in 2019 and 2020, a time in which Tarik Skubal, Casey Mize, and Will Vest were all on the doorstep of the majors. Skubal (who made his major league debut in 2020) is slated to start tonight, while Mize (also 2020) will be on the mound over the weekend, and Vest (2021) has a team-leading 21 saves.
Heading into the 2020 season, Skubal was no. 4 on our Tigers prospect rankings with a 50 FV, Mize was ranked no. 2 with a 60 FV, and Vest was no. 36 with a 35+ FV. How did Hubbs view them then, and what does he see from them — albeit from a distance — five years later? That was what I wanted to know.
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Hubbs on Tarik Skubal:
“With Tarik, it was getting him to command the arm side a little bit more. He was always kind of cross body and ran balls in on guys, and he would pitch up. He’s always had the mindset. I mean, he’s an animal on the mound, and always attacking the strike zone. So, one of the biggest things now is that he commands the arm side. But what has really changed is that he never had the changeup that he has now. That’s taken him to a whole different stratosphere. He throws 100 [mph], then he has this changeup that he can throw against [righties or lefties], interchangeably with his fastball. Read the rest of this entry »
The Boston Red Sox enter the final week of the regular season with a one-game cushion in the AL Wild Card race, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. With Boston and Detroit at 85-71 and Cleveland and Houston at 84-72, with the AL Central and two Wild Card spots on the line, this is a four-goes-into-three situation. Factor in that the Astros have been pretty anemic of late, and the Tigers — who actually end the season with a three-game set at Fenway — look like they couldn’t find their own shoes with a flashlight and a map right now, and you have to like Boston’s chances.
Our playoff odds give the Sox an 89.9% chance of making the postseason. That’s not what I’d consider a lock, but it’s pretty close. Close enough to wonder about what their playoff rotation is going to look like. Read the rest of this entry »
Junfu Han-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images; David Richard-Imagn Images
On July 8, the Tigers had 59 wins, while the Guardians had just 42. With one week remaining in the regular season, the Tigers have 85 wins and the Guardians have 84. A single game separates the two teams in the race for the AL Central title, a division that seemed all but sewn up for the Tigers as recently as September 13, when Detroit’s odds to win the Central sat at 98.2%, putting Cleveland’s odds at 1.8%. As of this writing, the Tigers are still favorites to win it, at 62.7%, but given that three of Detroit’s last six games are against Cleveland, the error bars on those odds are huge.
That wild swing in divisional odds happened over the course of the last week, but such a dramatic swing could only occur because in the two months leading up to it, two teams that had been heading in opposite directions both gradually rerouted and wound up on a collision course. Through April 25, both teams were winning games at roughly a .600 clip, but their fates diverged from there. By July 8, the gap in winning percentage had widened to 167 points, which translated to an additional 17 wins for the Tigers compared to the Guardians. Ever since July 8, that divide has slowly evaporated, and now the two teams own nearly identical records. Read the rest of this entry »
