Chris Murphy is gaining helium. A sixth-round pick in the 2019 draft out of San Diego State University, the 24-year-old southpaw was No. 38 on our Red Sox Top Prospects list going into last season, with a modest 35+ FV. But on the heels of a 2022 campaign that saw him excel in 15 starts with Double-A Portland and then hold his own in 15 more with Triple-A Worcester, this year he will be moving up to the 14–16 range with a 40 FV, per our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. He also just participated in Boston’s Rookie Development Program, which focuses on easing the transition into MLB — an indication that Murphy could be in Boston as soon as this summer.

A self-proclaimed nerd who is well-versed in his vertical approach angle and pitch metrics, Murphy discussed his craft earlier this week at Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with who are you as a pitcher. How do you get outs?

Chris Murphy: “That’s a good question. There have been times in my career where it’s very fastball heavy — come at you fastball/changeup primarily and then curveball/slider secondarily. I’ve generally been aggressive with the fastball up in the zone. I have good vertical break, good two-plane, and a pretty decent vertical approach angle. That’s why I get swings and misses up in the zone and why my changeup plays down in the zone. Using that to my advantage, being a shorter pitcher, is something that’s given me a career to this point. That and throwing from the left side.”

Laurila: How tall are you?

Murphy: “The book will say 6-[foot]-1, but I’m probably just under six feet. I weigh about 185, so I’m not the biggest guy.”

Laurila: You said that you get good vertical but also two-plane. Can you elaborate?

Murphy: “Yes, I get both ride and run. There are days where my fastball is more true and it’s just ride, but ride and run is ideally where I like it to be. And then with the changeup, it’s about killing the spin, killing the vert, and adding more horizontal. The goal this year is to be under six vertical and negative-18–19 horizontal.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot. Rounding out the 2023 projections? The Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

The Rays lineup presents a tale of two offenses. On the good side is a team with one of the best 2B/3B/SS combinations in the majors. Yandy Díaz had a monster 2022 season, basically as offensively amazing as it’s possible for a corner infielder with below-average power to be. ZiPS is low on Díaz relative to Steamer and The Bat, and his projection here is still excellent. It’s a real shame that he’s somehow still underrated in the eyes of fans, even in an age when most people realize on-base percentage is a thing. Díaz isn’t quite Eddie Yost or Eddie Joost in terms of pure walk rate, but he’s a mold-breaker along similar lines. With Isaac Paredes needing at-bats of his own and Curtis Mead aggressively pushing his way up from the minors, the Rays will almost certainly continue to use Díaz at multiple positions. I’d be happy with any of those three as my starting third baseman.

Brandon Lowe had a disappointing, injury-filled season, but it would take some severe recency bias to forgot that he was an elite second baseman in 2021, which wasn’t exactly an eon ago. Wanderkind Franco had his own injury problems in 2022, but he’s still very young, certainly young enough that you shouldn’t fret about it too much (yet). With some luck in terms of health, the Rays will have one of baseball’s best infields even if they get very little out of first base. Unfortunately, the computer doesn’t expect the Rays to get much out of first base. ZiPS has never been in on Jonathan Aranda, even after his most promising minor league season yet. Given the offensive explosion in the minors, ZiPS doesn’t translate his .318/.394/.521, 18-homer season for Durham as well as you might think, only having him at a .276/.341/.420, 12-homer season. Combine that with a poor debut and you can see why ZiPS really hopes that Aranda’s future is at second, not first. The player ZiPS does like is Kyle Manzardo, who gets a translation of .267/.346/.456 for his age-21 season, his first full pro campaign. Manzardo has a very good chance to be the top first baseman on the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects list next month. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Tampa Bay Rays. 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 Rays front office has more than earned the benefit of the doubt in terms of talent evaluation, particularly when it comes to pitching. At this point, they have a long history of player development and evaluation success, from homegrown prospects to reclamation projects to the trade market. With that reputation preceding them, Wednesday’s agreement with reliever-turned-starter Jeffrey Springs to a four-year, $31 million contract extension feels more like an assertion of his future than a bet on it.

Still, to negotiate an extension with a 30-year-old player who had yet to reach 50 innings in a major league season entering 2022, the Rays have to feel pretty good that his season was a sign of more good things to come. The agreement has some uncertainty built in; while the Rays guaranteed him $31 million over four years, it includes a $15 million club option for a fifth year and a series of incentives tied to innings and Cy Young Award voting placement that could more than double the deal’s total value by the end of its course. For the Rays, it’s a relatively modest investment on the low end; on the other end, having to dole out the full $65.75 million would in all likelihood be a good problem to have. For Springs, it’s nothing short of hard to believe. Read the rest of this entry »

The one constant this offseason is that Bryan Reynolds is probably going to get traded. We all knew this, because he’s a good player on a bad team that doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon. Players like that get traded, or at least they get talked about as trade candidates. In December, Reynolds turned circumstantial evidence into an actual news story by requesting a trade.

A month and a half later, there’s still no movement, which isn’t really a surprise. Reynolds is under team control through 2025, and the Pirates — if they decide to move on from Reynolds at all — shouldn’t be in any rush to get rid of their best player. A couple weeks ago, Jon Heyman cited a rival executive who compared Pittsburgh’s ask for Reynolds to what the Padres gave up for Juan Soto last August.

If you’ve been around baseball, followed it, watched it, or even become generally aware that there’s a sport behind cultural idioms like “ballpark figure” and “getting to second base,” you know how this dance goes. Player requests a trade, team negotiates with rivals both privately and through leaks to reporters, a price is eventually agreed upon, and the trade is executed.

But I find this process particularly intriguing for Reynolds, because it involves determining a public consensus over how good he actually is. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox have spent most of the offseason with a big hole up the middle of their infield. With Xander Bogaerts departing in free agency, Boston had no true shortstop on the roster. While Enrique Hernández and Christian Arroyo each made a handful of starts at the six on Bogaerts’ off days, neither is a true shortstop and both are needed to man the other up-the-middle positions, where the team still lacks depth. Yesterday, the Red Sox at least partially filled that hole, trading left-handed reliever Josh Taylor to the Royals for switch-hitting infielder Adalberto Mondesi and a player to be named later.

A healthy Mondesi is one of baseball’s most exciting position players to watch. Most fans likely know him for his top-of-the-charts speed, which he shows off in all facets of his game. Let’s start with the most visible one: baserunning. Mondesi has multiple seasons under his belt with an average sprint speed above 30 feet per second, making him one of the most electric runners in the game. Since his debut in 2016, 44% of his competitive runs have been defined as bolts, a mark bested by just four others during that time. Of course, Mondesi has also used his speed to steal bases, and his combination of aggressiveness and efficiency has allowed him to put up ludicrous stolen base numbers despite never getting a full season’s worth of plate appearances:

Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Gelof doesn’t profile as a boom-or-bust prospect. Coming off of a season that saw him reach Triple-A at age 22, the University of Virginia product is a near lock to perform on the big stage — not as a headliner, but rather as a solid contributor to a lineup that is currently patched together with Band-Aids. The low-budget Oakland Athletics need all the help they can get, so getting Gelof — ditto the higher-ceilinged Tyler Soderstrom — to the big leagues is an organizational priority.

Drafted 60th overall in 2021, Gelof slashed .270/.352/.463 with 18 home runs this past season, with the bulk of his action coming with Double-A Midland. The right-handed-hitting infielder added three more homers in the Arizona Fall League, and it is his power potential that most stands out for our lead prospect analyst. When I asked Eric Longenhagen for a snapshot scouting report on Gelof, he told me that “it is definitely a power-over-hit profile at this point,” adding that while his 70% contact rate wasn’t great, his “peak power and barrel rates were very encouraging.”

When I asked Gelof for a self-scouting report, he chose not to cite specific strengths, but rather his all-around skillset and desire to get better.

“I’d say I’m a really athletic infielder who likes to compete,” the Delaware native told me during his stint in the AFL. “But I try not to think about who I am and what people scout me to be. I just worry about working on basically every area that I can. I want to perform on the field and be the best player that I can be.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, what felt like months of Pablo López trade rumors finally came to fruition, as he was sent to Minnesota (along with two prospects) for reigning batting champion Luis Arraez. (For an in-depth breakdown of the trade, check out Ben Clemens’ summary here.) In theory, the trade should help both rosters: the Twins needed pitching depth, and the Marlins needed offensive help. For this piece, I’m going to focus on how López can recover the best version of himself that we saw in 2021 before he missed much of that season’s second half.

López established himself as an above-average starting pitcher in the shortened 2020 season, when he threw 57.1 innings with a 3.61 ERA and 3.09 FIP. The main reason for his success: he bought into the idea of throwing your best pitches more often, throwing his four-seamer and changeup over 60% of the time for the first time in his career. That success carried over into 2021, when he threw 102.2 innings with a 3.07 ERA and 3.29 FIP, followed by a hot start to 2022. But from the middle of June through the rest of the season, he kept tossing up clunkers.

The short story is that hitters stopped whiffing at López’s changeup. He had a slight recovery in the final month, but as you can see in that pitch’s whiff rate and his strikeout rate, that wasn’t him at his best. His repertoire hinges on both righties and lefties swinging at and whiffing on changeups. It’s the key to his success, and it will need to be the focus if he hopes to return to his 2021 form.

So why did hitters swing and miss less at López’s changeup as the season went on, and is it directly related to the pitch itself?

To answer that, it’s worth considering first what a changeup is: a deception. And in order to deceive, you have to make the hitter believe something else is coming. To do that, you must throw your complimentary pitch regularly and in an ideal location. In the case of the changeup, you usually pair it with a four-seamer or sinker; for López, it’s the four-seamer. The success of those pitches goes hand in hand; if one is off, then the performance of the other could be in jeopardy. To go into more detail: if the shape of one changes and no longer tunnels as well with the other, then the combination isn’t as deceptive.

That seems to have been the case with López. Below is a table of his four-seamer/changeup metrics from the last few seasons:

The difference is jarring. López didn’t have pure backspin on his four-seamer to begin with, but a change in shape from the low-80s in Active% (also known as spin efficiency) to 66.2% completely alters a pitch’s shape and, as a result, its effectiveness. Even though his changeup metrics were relatively the same from 2021, the change in the fastball negatively impacted the entire arsenal. If a hitter can distinguish between those two pitches because of shape and/or location, they are less likely to be fooled by either one.

This negative development for López can be traced directly to an injury suffered when he took a liner right off the right wrist on June 10. After that, his performance was sporadic, and more importantly, his release point and pitch location changed:

During his rough patch in July and August, his release point moved down and closer to third base. This slight change perfectly tracks with a loss in active spin. By getting further around the ball, your finger and seam orientation at release are less on top of the ball and more on the side. To get more backspin, you ideally release the ball closer to the top of your fingertips. A change in grip strength that could be the result of a wrist contusion would have a direct impact on these components and cause compensations that take time to realize and adjust to. And while López felt healthy enough to throw 180 innings last year, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t compensating.

When combing through the video, it’s easier to see the change in release. Below are four total clips; the first two are from April, and the two after are from July and August.

There are a few things I want to address. First, López’s altered release point can be traced back in his delivery to a slight change in the use of his glove side. Comparing his throws in the spring to those in the summer, you can see that he’s altered the way he turns his glove over at peak lead arm extension. Early in the year, he only had a slight quarter turn in his glove; in the second half, he progressed into a full turnover.

That subtle difference creates two different reciprocal movements. A reciprocal movement is one that is a direct result of another; if you throw a ball up, it must come down. The same principle works for the body. A change in direction of the glove turn affects the direction of torso rotation, which then affects the angle or position of the throwing arm at release. (The kinetic chain!) That’s an area where he and his coaches can look at when discussing how he can make the proper mechanical adjustments to recover his fastball shape.

It’s important, too, to note how important that recovery will be for López’s tertiary pitches as well. When you lose one of your primaries, hitters can more easily sit on the pitches that aren’t as effective in the arsenal. For López, that pitch was his cutter. After two seasons with a wOBA under .325, the pitch was wrecked in 2022: a .447 wOBA and .321 batting average against. Its downfall can also be traced to his four-seamer, as the pitch went from the mid-50s in spin efficiency to the mid-30s. He may only throw it 10% of the time, but it was still a huge liability. Hopefully whatever mechanical adjustments López makes to recover his four-seamer can filter down to that pitch as well.

Injuries in general can be tough to overcome in the middle of a season. For a pitcher, that difficulty increases with anything related to their arm. A contusion may not be a long-term health concern, but López’s second half shows how something that looks insignificant can lead to detrimental short-term compensations. Luckily for him, this is the type of thing that shouldn’t take any drastic adjustments to fix, and he already has a blueprint for success from his 2020 and ’21 campaigns. With the help of a new coaching staff in 2023, his two-pitch combo should give him and the Twins an above-average starter for the next couple of seasons.

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Francisco Giants.

Batters

The Giants are a good team. They certainly didn’t feel like one for much of the middle portion of last season, but after a disappointing home sweep by the rival Dodgers in mid-September, they mopped up the Rockies and Diamondbacks and banked enough wins to get back to the .500 mark. Bringing in Michael Conforto as a decent starter/reclamation project meaningfully upgrades the outfield, and the Mitch Haniger signing was practically a bargain for a player who could be a top-tier designated hitter again if healthy. There’s a real solidity to the roster; no one on the infield has an impressive projection, but they have a lot of those guys on hand. Without even being aggressive, there are six or seven players on the team who could take one of the non-first base infield jobs and be at least passably adequate in the role. The problem here and in the outfield, however, is that the Giants can’t combine their 1.5-to-2.5 WAR guys together into three-to-four WAR players like piles of Legos. You could go full horror movie and try to sew David Villar to Wilmer Flores, but you won’t get an All-Star in the mix, just a couple of very angry players, an arbitration case, and a visit from the local constabulary. Platoons don’t really count here, either, as you can’t get a thousand plate appearances from a single platoon!

It’s not that Giants didn’t try. They were, after all, very close to inking Aaron Judge to a monster deal, talked seriously with pretty much every big free agent hitter out there, and were even the prospective employer of Carlos Correa before all of the drama that ended with the star shortstop returning to the Twins. So unlike a team with a need that it simply didn’t address, the Giants were cognizant of the weak part of their team — the lack of a big star to build around offensively — and tried very hard to correct that situation. The problem is that when the season starts, there’s no credit given for attempted WAR. Whether you fail to land a star after giving it the ol’ college try or because you’re the Cincinnati Reds, the result is the same: that player wearing someone else’s uniform. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of Twins Trade Talk. I’m your host, Ben Clemens, ostensibly a writer at FanGraphs but now an exclusive chronicler of Twin City swaps. Last week, Minnesota traded AL batting champion Luis Arraez in a deal I absolutely loved. If that’s the main course, Monday’s move was dessert:

The Twins are acquiring OF Michael A. Taylor from the Royals for LHP Evan Sisk and RHP Steven Cruz, per source.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) January 23, 2023

Let’s start here: I love this trade for both sides. Michael A. Taylor has been a quality contributor when healthy for much of his career, and his last two seasons in Kansas City encapsulate his career well. In a sentence: very good outfield defense is valuable. Taylor hit a paltry .249/.304/.357 in blue and gold, but he was still worth 3.5 WAR (by our calculation, 5.7 per Baseball Reference) over roughly 1,000 plate appearances because he’s one of the best outfield defenders around. Depending on which defensive metric you’re most fond of, he’s either first (DRS), first (UZR), or second by one run (OAA) among all outfielders over the past two years. Read the rest of this entry »