The White Sox lost a good chunk of the best parts of their starting lineup to the injured list in 2022. Indeed, it was one of the main reasons the team fell to a .500 record after winning 93 games the year prior. So when Eloy Jiménez was placed on the 10-day IL with a strained hamstring just five games into the 2023 season, it was an unwelcome reminder of both the team’s problems last year and their limited depth in the present.

Jiménez, who was one of the two main prospects acquired from the Cubs in the 2017 José Quintana trade (Dylan Cease was the other), has spent a great deal of time on the shelf since 2020. After an encouraging 138 wRC+ in the COVID-shortened season, he tore a pectoral tendon during spring training in 2021. It required surgery and kept him out until the end of July; last season’s early injury, a torn hamstring tendon, also required surgery. Still, Jiménez was able to come back more quickly than the year before, and his .305/.372/.523 line after returning was one of the team’s highlights over the second half of the season.

Fortunately, this injury does not appear to be on the same level as either of the other two. The strained hamstring, resulting from running the bases in a game against the Giants, is not the same one that required surgery last spring. There has been no talk of surgery, and the team seems relatively optimistic, floating two to three weeks as the timeframe for his return. Jake Burger was called up from Triple-A Charlotte to take Jiménez’s place on the roster. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re only a week into the regular season, which means it’s too early to do any serious analysis. Or, to spin things another way, it’s a perfect time to hurry up and write about something wild that’s happening before everyone regresses to the mean.

So let’s talk about Brian Anderson.

Anderson was the best hitter in baseball in the first week of the 2023 MLB regular season. Through Wednesday’s games, he led the league in wOBA and xwOBA, and was a close second to Adam Duvall in wRC+. Anderson probably won’t finish the season with a wRC+ over 300 — though if he does, I guarantee we’ll cover it — but he’s no Tuffy Rhodes. He was a very good player not too long ago, and this hot start might represent a return to form. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants have an improved farm system, one that is highlighted by the presence of Kyle Harrison (no. 26) and Marco Luciano (no. 97) on our preseason Top 100. There are other promising prospects in the system as well. I recently asked Giants Senior Director of Player Development Kyle Haines about four of them:

• Vaun Brown, a 24-year-old outfielder who was taken in the 10th round of the 2021 draft out of Florida Southern College. Brown slashed .346/.437/.623 with 23 home runs and 44 stolen bases last year between Low-A San Jose and High-A Eugene (plus one game with Double-A Richmond).
• Casey Schmitt, a 24-year-old third baseman/shortstop who was selected in the second round of the 2021 draft out of San Diego State University. Schmitt slashed .293/.365/.489 with 21 home runs between High-A and Double-A (plus five games in Triple-A).
• Carson Whisenhunt, a 22-year-old left-hander who was taken in the second round of last year’s draft out of East Carolina University. Whisenhunt was suspended for his final collegiate season, then made two appearances each in the Arizona Complex League and Low-A.
• Rayner Arias, a 16-year-old outfielder who was signed as an international free agent this January. The son of former Detroit Tigers pitching prospect Pablo Arias is a native of Bani, Dominican Republic.

In the opinion of Eric Longenhagen, all four have “impact FV grades.” Overall, our lead prospect analyst considers pitching development to be the organization’s strength. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season is only a week old, but the Dodgers have to be quite satisfied with the early returns from their outfield. Mookie Betts aside, the unit entered the season full of question marks, and those only got larger once manager Dave Roberts had to start moving players around to cover for Gavin Lux’s season-ending ACL tear. Yet through the team’s first six games, rookie James Outman, holdover Trayce Thompson, and newcomer Jason Heyward have each produced some impressive performances that offer hope they can help to offset the team’s notable offseason departures.

Lux was supposed to be the Dodgers’ regular shortstop, and while the team soon traded for Miguel Rojas to be the regular, his loss pulled Chris Taylor into the mix to a greater degree than expected. In turn, the Dodgers have brought Betts into the second base mix; recall that the future Hall of Fame right fielder — you heard me — began his professional career in the middle infield, and spent the last two weeks of his 52-game rookie season filling in at the keystone for the injured Dustin Pedroia.

Given the anticipation that both Taylor and Betts would spend more time on the dirt, the Dodgers found room for both Heyward, a 33-year-old non-roster invitee who was released by the Cubs last year, the penultimate one of his eight-year, $184 million contract, and Outman, a 25-year-old prospect who entered the season with four games of major league experience. Both lefty swingers are on the roster in addition to the righty-swinging Thompson, who enjoyed a nice little breakout in the second half of his age-31 season, and lefty David Peralta, a free agent whom the Dodgers signed to a one-year, $6.5 million deal mid-February. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. 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 »

The Blue Jays were our staff pick to win the AL East, moreso due to the strength of their lineup than their pitching, though I think it’s safe to say that nobody thought their run prevention would be this bad, this early. Indeed, the team gave up nine runs to the Cardinals in an Opening Day victory, then lost three straight, surrendering nine runs in two of those games. Whether in Canada or the United States, that’s not a good exchange rate.

It’s not often that a team gives up nine or more runs in three of its first four games, and as you might guess, it’s rarely an indicator of quality. It’s happened just 12 times in the Wild Card era (1995 onward), including twice this year:

The 10 previous teams to get beat up with such frequency to start the season combined for a winning percentage that equates to a 71–91 record. Five of those teams went on to lose 95 or more games, and only two finished at .500 or better, with the 2001 Cardinals the only ones to make the playoffs, and that as a Wild Card team.

That’s not great company to be in, and yet the Blue Jays aren’t alone even among teams in their division; the Orioles gave up exactly nine runs in each of their first three games, making them the fourth Wild Card-era team to allow at least nine in all three and the first since the 2005 Rockies. Yet neither of them came close to allowing as many runs as the Phillies did over their first four games: 37, as compared to Toronto’s 31 and Baltimore’s 27. The reigning NL champions entered Tuesday night with a staff ERA of 9.28 as the team went 0–4; at least the Blue Jays won one game and the Orioles two. Funny enough, the three teams combined to allow four runs in their victories as I was writing this, as if you needed a reminder that such ugliness was unsustainable.

Admittedly, it wasn’t pretty for the Blue Jays’ starters in those four games, as they were rocked for a 10.80 ERA and 6.49 FIP in 18.1 innings. While one turn through the front four of the rotation is just that — a mere 2.5% of the season — the lack of surrounding data feeds into anxieties about what could go wrong. As a matter of due diligence for those who might consider riding the Blue Jays’ bandwagon as well as those who are already hyperventilating, let’s take a closer look.

Alek Manoah had the honor of the Opening Day start after a season in which he made his first All-Star team and finished third in ERA (2.24) as well as the Cy Young voting. Facing the Cardinals, he was staked to a 3–0 first-inning lead but quickly gave back a run via an infield single, an error, a walk, and a single by Nolan Arenado in a laborious 29-pitch frame. After a scoreless second, he served up a two-run homer to Tyler O’Neill in the third, then gave up a two-run homer to Brendan Donovan in the fourth before getting the hook with two outs. Final line: 3.2 innings, nine hits, five runs, two walks, three strikeouts.

Obviously that’s not what you want, but his performance didn’t offer any major red flags. Manoah’s fastball velocity was slightly up from last year (94.1 mph versus 93.8), and while the results on his slider weren’t good (the Cardinals went 4-for-5 with a homer), its velocity and movement were in line with last year (it scored a 117 in Stuff+). Manoah said afterwards he wasn’t aggressive enough. “One thing I’ve got to remember is I’m really good myself,” he told reporters. “Sometimes you might go in there and face a good lineup and the act of giving them a lot of credit makes them even better.”

The Blue Jays did come back to win that one despite Manoah’s struggles. On Saturday, however, they squandered a good effort by Kevin Gausman (six innings, three unearned runs, one walk, seven strikeouts), as starter Jack Flaherty and relievers Drew VerHagen and Andre Pallante kept them hitless through 6.1 frames (albeit with seven walks from Flaherty) before Kevin Kiermaier singled. The unearned runs came with two outs and two on in the third inning, when Matt Chapman’s bobble and throwing error on an Arenado grounder brought in one run and Nolan Gorman followed with a two-run single.

Gausman’s average four-seam velocity was down 1.1 mph relative to last year (93.9 versus 95.0) but off by only 0.5 mph relative to his monthly averages for April and May of that season; he averaged 93.6 mph in his first outing of 2022. Again, probably nothing to worry about.

Far more troubling were the performances of Chris Bassitt on Sunday and José Berríos on Monday. Signed to a three-year, $63 million deal in December, Bassitt had a brutal debut, serving up four homers and allowing nine runs in 3.1 innings. His first official pitch as a Blue Jay, a high changeup to Donovan, ended up going over the right centerfield wall for a 397-foot solo homer. Two pitches later, Alec Burleson hit a high fastball 363 feet over the left field wall. With two outs and one on later in the frame, Gorman destroyed a hanging curveball, sending it to right-center for a projected distance of 446 feet. He hit another two-run homer, 395 feet to right-center off a cutter in the middle of the zone, in the third inning.

By the time manager John Schneider came out to get Bassitt in the fourth, he had secured the worst outing of his career in terms of hits (10), runs, homers, and Game Score v2 (-8). He didn’t walk or strike out a single hitter and induced just four swings and misses and six called strikes from among his 57 pitches, for a CSW% of 17.5%.

As Dan Szymborski noted in his 2023 Bust Candidates rundown, the 34-year-old righty’s velocity was down all spring. “Bassitt’s fastest pitch this spring was 93.5 mph, below his average in more than half of his starts last year,” he wrote. “If he were averaging 90–92 but still hitting 95–96, I’d be less worried, but I’m skeptical that he simply chose to go through a whole month without ever throwing his fastest fastball.”

That trend continued on Sunday, with the velocity on Bassitt’s sinker (his primary fastball) off 1.7 mph relative to last year (91.1 mph versus 92.8), and most of his other pitches were similarly off as well; he reached 93 mph just twice. Afterward, Bassitt found himself “at a loss for words a little bit” because he’d “never had a game” where so many types of pitches from his broad arsenal (he threw eight different pitch types according to Statcast) were hit so hard. Twelve of his 19 batted ball events reached or exceeded 95 mph; among pitchers with at least 10 batted ball events this season, only Chris Sale had a higher hard-hit rate than Bassitt’s 63.2% (Germán Márquez tied him).

“I think it was just mis-executed pitches,” Schneider said. “He just didn’t really hit his spots. A team like that, you can’t make mistakes. I know he focused on the middle of their order, and it was the guys before and after those guys who did damage. I think it just came down to poor execution.”

Absent any reports of injury or discomfort, this should be something Bassitt and the Jays can fix. But if his underperformance ends up being an aberration, Berríos’ struggles against the Royals on Monday had a more familiar ring. He gave up four hits and three runs in the first inning, settled down for a couple of frames, then was tagged for five more hits — four of them with exit velocities of 98.3 mph or higher — in a four-run fourth. He also walked one batter, who scored when MJ Melendez greeted reliever Zach Pop with a sixth-inning homer. The eight runs allowed matched last year’s high and marked the seventh time in his last 28 starts in which he allowed six or more runs.

Berríos’ 93.9-mph average four-seamer velocity was just 0.1 mph off last year, and he did strike out seven with 11 swings and misses (seven on his slurve) and a 30.3% CSW%; his 33.3% chase rate matched his career average. But when he was hit, he was hit hard, with an average exit velo of 94.1 mph and a hard-hit rate of 61.1%. His performance wasn’t as extreme last year — we are talking about one start compared to 32 — but those contact stats were dreadful. His 9.5% barrel rate placed in the 15th percentile, which was at least higher than his 90.0 mph average exit velo (13th), 43.8% hard-hit rate (11th), or 5.11 xERA (ninth); meanwhile, his 5.23 ERA was the highest of the majors’ 45 qualifiers, and his 4.55 FIP was the AL’s second highest. In the context of his being in the first year of a seven-year, $131 million extension, the performance was an unsettling one, to say the least.

Last August, Ben Clemens noted that where Berríos had previously gotten away with leaving a lot of four-seamers in the middle of the strike zone, last year those were getting demolished. More recently, old friend Travis Sawchik added that Berríos threw a career-low 7.1% of fastballs (four-seamers and sinkers) on the edges of the plate against lefties. More:

Berríos allowed a career-worst batting average of .447 to lefties on fastballs in the “heart” of the strike zone, according to MLB’s Statcast data – which was more than .100 worse than his next worst season.

He allowed 29 home runs last year, sixth most in the majors, and left-handed hitters crushed 20 of them; 12 came via Berrios’ fastball. Only Josiah Gray of the Nationals allowed more home runs to lefties.

On the whole, the Statcast value of 17 runs above average on Berríos’ four-seamer made it the majors’ sixth-least valuable heater and the eighth-least valuable pitch of any stripe. Repeating a table from my Madison Bumgarner piece:

While Berrios did throw 9% of his fastballs on the edges of the zone against lefties on Monday, 14.6% of such pitches wound up in the heart of the zone, nearly double last year’s rate of 7.7%. Three of the hits he allowed, including a Nicky Lopez triple, came on such pitches, and the six batted balls those pitches produced averaged 102.2 mph with a .957 xSLG. His 13 pitches in that location to lefties had a .559 wOBA, even higher than last year’s .511. All of which is to say that Berríos still has work to do, particularly against lefties.

Thankfully for the Blue Jays, on Tuesday night, Yusei Kikuchi stopped the bleeding with a five-inning, three-hit, one-run performance in a 4–1 victory over the Royals, with a 455-foot Franmil Reyes homer the only blemish. It was only one victory, and that against a team that lost 97 games in 2022, but the winning has to start somewhere.

If you compare our staff predictions for the season to our preseason Playoff Odds, for five of the six divisions our staff picks line up with the crunched numbers, with the Braves, Cardinals, Padres, and Astros all favored to win, and the Twins and Guardians a tossup. Only in the AL East did our staff go against the odds, picking the Blue Jays over the Yankees by a margin of 19–6 despite the latter’s 42.7%–29.4% edge.

I was one of those 19, my own pick influenced — perhaps overly so — by the mounting casualties within the Yankees’ rotation. First it was Nestor Cortes‘ hamstring and Frankie Montas‘ shoulder, then Carlos Rodón‘s forearm and Luis Severino’s latisimuss dorsi. Of those, Cortes’ injury was minor enough that he still took his first regular-season turn on schedule, and only that of Montas — a shoulder issue that required arthroscopic surgery that could keep him out until late in the season — is serious. Even so, it’s not hard to look at the track records of Rodón and Severino and imagine much longer outages than initially projected.

The Jays’ rotation, though it ranked “only” 11th in our preseason Positional Power Rankings (where the Yankees were first even with their injuries) entered the year seemingly healthy, with the projections for Manoah (2.9 WAR) and Gausman (3.7) feeling a bit light compared to what they’d shown last year (4.1 WAR and 5.7, respectively), suggesting some possible upside. Combine that with a stronger lineup that carried fewer question marks — only at second base did the Blue Jays rank below 11th among the non-pitchers, where the Yankees had three such spots — and you can understand why Toronto was a trendy pick.

The Blue Jays may indeed come out on top, but at the very least, their starters will have to pitch up to their capabilities if that’s to happen. As the first week of their season has shown, it’s not all going to happen simply based on hype.

Mike Yastrzemski became a good hitter through a lot of hard work, but it didn’t hurt that he had a good tutor growing up in Danvers, Massachusetts. The San Francisco Giants outfielder is the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski, who logged 3,419 big league hits, including 452 home runs, on his way to the Hall of Fame. A late bloomer who didn’t make his big league debut until he was 28 years old, the younger Yastrzemski may never come close to those numbers, but he is nonetheless a quality hitter. Now in his fifth season, all with the Giants, the 32-year-old Vanderbilt product has a 115 wRC+ and 74 round-trippers in 1,742 career plate appearances.

Yastrzemski — 5-for-14 with four extra-base hits so far this season — talked hitting late in spring training.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite icebreaker questions: Do you view hitting as more of an art or as more of a science?

Mike Yastrzemski: “It’s definitely an art. You can have all the science in the world and it doesn’t make you a good hitter. You can have every angle, you can have every exit velo… again, that’s not going to make you a good hitter. Can it help you? Definitely. But I don’t see it as as much science-based as I see it as an art.” Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot to love about how the Padres built their roster, and I’m not talking about the obvious stuff like trading for Juan Soto or building a lineup entirely of shortstops or sneaking Xander Bogaerts out of Boston under the fuel tank of an Isetta bubble car. I’m talking about how they built their pitching depth. It’s a smorgasbord of guy-remembering, a combination of starters from the 2010s who are just hanging on and top prospects from the 2010s who are still trying to break through.

Look at the pitching staff of the 2023 El Paso Chihuahuas: Cole Hamels, Jay Groome, Julio Teheran, Anderson Espinoza, Aaron Brooks, and (pounds table) Wilmer (pounds table) Jetpacking (pounds table) Font! In a ranking of expensive San Diego-based nostalgia trips, I did not think anyone would beat Top Gun: Maverick so soon, but here we are.

One of those 2010s late bloomer prospects broke camp with the big league club. Brent Honeywell Jr., who not so long ago was one of the most interesting pitchers in the high minors, has now made two appearances in the majors for the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to my first game of the season this past weekend: the Yankees hosting the Giants on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in the Bronx. In the bottom of the second inning, Anthony Volpe came up to the plate against Alex Cobb and hit an 0–2 slider into left field for his first career hit, drawing a standing ovation from the folks in attendance.

After his hit, Volpe got to moving on the basepaths. In 2022, he swiped 50 bags over 132 games between Double and Triple-A. The limited pickoffs rule and bigger bases aided him, but like any good base stealer, he took advantage of pitchers with slow deliveries and/or catchers with poor pop times whenever he could. As we’ve learned from the first week of games, the combination of those factors can create an ideal environment for aggressive runners. But there is one thing that Volpe does that makes him different from your normal base stealer: the vault lead. Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Vargas couldn’t swing. I don’t mean that in the insulting way that little leaguers sometimes do — “hey batter, you’ve got nothing, you can’t even swing.” I mean that he was medically prohibited from swinging. That didn’t stop the Dodgers from playing him this spring, as Davy Andrews detailed for this very site last month. It did mean, however, that he had to watch every pitch thrown to him, ball or strike, and simply take it. Not exactly the way he expected to enter his first spring training with a big league job nailed down, I’m sure.

The pinky finger fracture that kept Vargas from swinging has healed, but you might not know it from his batting line so far this year, because it seems he took that lesson to heart. Five games into his 2022 season, he’s come to the plate 18 times. In nine of those plate appearances, he’s walked. That 50% walk rate is amazing on its own, and I’ll come back to that, but the way he’s gotten to it is downright stunning.

The key to walking a lot is not swinging at bad pitches, and Vargas is doing that to a fault. Per Statcast, he’s swung at four of the 50 pitches he’s seen outside the strike zone in 2023. That’s the best rate in the majors, which is impressive on its own; 205 batters have seen at least 25 pitches outside the strike zone already this season, and every single one of them has swung at them more frequently than Vargas. We’re talking all the various plate discipline geniuses already enshrined in the pantheon of good eye; they’re all looking up at Vargas’ extreme selectivity. Read the rest of this entry »