Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cincinnati Reds. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 we 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 »

I like to analyze what’s happening with individual batters as a way to have a broader discussion about hitting. The story I wrote about Oneil Cruz back in January also covered how unusual it is for long-limbed hitters to crush high pitches. Digging into Brent Rooker’s excellent 2024 campaign in December offered me an opportunity to look at how batters can make subtle adjustments to command the top of the zone. And today’s piece on Brewers second baseman Brice Turang doubles as a primer on the best way to make bat speed gains.

It’s almost always a good thing for hitters to increase their bat speed. That sounds obvious, right? If you swing faster, you can hit the ball harder, get to more pitches, and have more time to react. No arguments there.

But when training to increase your bat speed, you don’t just swing some weighted bats around and magically become a better hitter. Your goal should be to swing faster while preserving the strengths of your swing. Sometimes higher-effort hacks can have unintended consequences, so hitters and their coaches need to pay attention to how individual swing components interact with all the others. For Turang specifically, this meant he had to figure out how to swing harder while maintaining his elite contact skills, which come from his bat angle variability and short stroke. With bat speed, intercept, and swing length data now in the public sphere, we can better understand how Turang is doing this. But first, let’s take a look at how much better Turang has been this season than he was in 2024:

Yes, somehow, this is the same hitter. Turang’s Barrel% has jumped from the third percentile to the 56th, while his Hard-Hit% surged from the ninth percentile to the 80th. That’s ridiculous. Turang was essentially a bottom-decile guy across the board when it came to contact quality. Now, he’s well above average, and he’s improved without compromising the other parts of his game, which I’ll get into later. He’s also increased his power ceiling, with his max exit velocity climbing from the 33rd to the 64th percentile.

All these improvements are due to the fact that Turang is swinging significantly faster. No qualified hitter has increased his average bat speed more than the 2.8 mph that Turang has added, from 66.2 mph last year to 69.0 mph in 2025. That’s important when you consider that last year batters posted a .164 xwOBA on swings below 66 mph. Looking at how the distribution of Turang’s swing speeds has changed further demonstrates why it was especially crucial for him to take harder hacks:

This visualization specifically focuses on swings when Turang made contact. In 2024, about a tenth of his swings were at or below 60 mph, and those swings yielded a .165 xwOBA. Now, nearly all of his swings have a speed above that threshold. He has raised his floor a ton by minimizing how often he swings that slowly. The midpoint of his swing speed distribution has shifted beyond 70 mph – more often than not he’s giving himself a chance to do real damage, and that just wasn’t the case in the past.

Going back to what I mentioned earlier, Turang has kept other components of his swing almost exactly the same even as he’s made these gains. His point of contact relative to his body is the same. Last year, his intercept point (which also includes swings without contact) was 31 inches versus his center of mass. This year, that’s shifted, but barely, 30.6. This is fantastic. To understand why, I need to get a little nerdy and bring in some more context. There are ways to cheat bat speed gains that can actually be detrimental to a hitter. Yes, I know that’s a bit contrary to my previous point, however, it can be true! If a hitter does everything the same and shifts his point of contact further out in front of his body (even if that creates suboptimal contact) his bat speed will increase!

It comes down to physics. One component of measuring bat speed is the distance from the bat’s knob (assuming that is the reference point) to the point of impact. If that radius increases, so will your bat speed, though obviously there is a limit here. That means that you can keep your angular speed (how quickly the bat rotates) the same while lengthening your radius to increase your bat speed. There is a sweet spot for that radius increase to be beneficial. If you exceed it, you’ll start to yank all your solid contact foul, and if you want to keep the ball fair, you’ll have to alter your bat angles, which leads to suboptimal contact. Like with every part of baseball, balance is needed.

Based on this calculation of bat speed, we can deduce that Turang is creating more angular speed in order to increase his overall bat speed without changing his average intercept point much. Very good! Along with that, Turang’s swing length is still elite (90th percentile this year compared to 100th last year), and he is now standing more toward the back of the box. The former means his swing is still short and sweet, and the latter adjustment might mean that when he does shift his point of contact farther out in front, he has more wiggle room to keep the ball fair. All this combined leads to the type of improvements we’ve seen so far.

Lastly, I’ll leave with you some video highlighting how Turang has drastically changed his setup compared to last year, which likely is one of the main factors driving his bat speed gains:

2024

2025

He stands more narrow with his hands higher and begins his load with a big leg kick. This has helped him swing the bat faster on average by cutting down on his slower, non-A swings while also maintaining his previous point of contact. For many hitters, the leg kick is a timing mechanism and not just a way to set up their rotation. I think this is the case for Turang. And to make sure this change wouldn’t leave him off balance, he has paired it with higher hands to keep his upper and lower halves connected. Really good process decisions here.

Turang has always been a great baserunner and an excellent fielder, but because of the gains he made during the offseason, he has elevated both his ceiling and his floor. And as a result, he is now emerging as a valuable everyday player for Milwaukee.

It can be difficult to contextualize just how unusual James Wood’s offensive profile really is. He hits the ball so very hard. He hits the ball in the air so very never. In his major league debut last season, the Nationals outfielder put 198 balls into play. Only five of them were fly balls to the pull side. Of the 403 batters who put at least 100 balls in play last season, that 2.5% rate put Wood in 385th place. As for those five pulled fly balls, they turned into two home runs, two doubles, and one very loud flyout.

That seems like a promising avenue for further investigation, doesn’t it? The kind of batted ball that turns into an extra-base hit at roughly the same rate that dentists recommend, you know, brushing? If Wood could figure out how to pull the ball in the air with any sort of regularity, he’d be one of the game’s great sluggers. And yet here we are a month into the season: Wood has not at all figured that out, and somehow he’s one of the game’s great sluggers anyway. He’s running a 153 wRC+ and a top-10 isolated slugging percentage because his prodigious power allows him to get the absolute most out of one of the least optimized profiles in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Sandy Alcantara was supposed to be the last bastion of the traditional starting pitcher, the guy who pumps gas seven innings a start come hell or high water. The stoic, hirsute antidote to the effete, three-ply soft five-and-dive starter of today. In his 2022 Cy Young campaign, Alcantara threw more innings than any other National League pitcher since 2015, and he did it while throwing harder than any other starter in the league that year. Oh yeah, man, that’s the stuff.

A mildly disappointing 2023 ended in a torn UCL, which prevented Alcantara from participating in a rare Marlins postseason appearance. But he’s back now, ready to remind the world what 220 innings a year looks like.

Through six starts, the Miami ace has an ERA of 8.31. His strikeout rate is down to 15.8%, which is about two-thirds of what it was at his peak, and his walk rate is 14.2%, which is so bad you don’t need context to appreciate it.

Hachi machi. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not often that I take a pause from the prospect lists to write about individual call-ups, but we have three big league debuts on the docket for today, and I wanted to update readers on those pitchers, as well one other prospect-related bycatch that’s come up during the course of me working on the Reds, Guardians, and Brewers org lists.

First, let’s talk about the starting pitchers making their big league debuts today: Chase Petty of the Reds, AJ Blubaugh of the Astros, and Noah Cameron of the Royals. All of them have updated player profiles over on The Board.

Chase Petty, RHP, Cincinnati Reds (50 FV)

Petty, who touched 102 in high school, came to the Reds from Minnesota during the spring of 2022 in a trade for Sonny Gray. After missing time with an elbow issue in 2023, he had a healthy and complete 2024 season in which he worked 137 innings spent mostly at Double-A Chattanooga, many more frames than he had thrown in any year prior. Proving he could sustain big stuff across that load of innings was instrumental to his inclusion among the 2025 Top 100 Prospects. His fastball was still sitting 94-97 mph after Petty had been promoted to Louisville at the very end of last season, and he has carried that into 2025. As of his call-up, he has 27 strikeouts, nine walks, and a 1.30 WHIP in 23 innings (five starts). Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Correa has grounded into six double plays this season. He doesn’t lead the league; that would be Junior Caminero, who has already racked up nine, putting him on pace for an even 50 by the end of the year. If Caminero keeps that up (he won’t), he would shatter the single-season record of 36, set by Jim Rice in 1984. Still, it’s Correa whose GIDP numbers I find most intriguing.

Correa has always been prone to double plays. Since the day of his debut, 10 years ago in June, only five major leaguers have grounded into more of them. However, in 2023, Correa took things to a new level. He set a single-season Twins record by grounding into 30 double plays. He did so in just 130 games and 580 trips to the plate. His 30 GIDPs were the most by any player in a season since Casey McGehee in 2014 (31) and the most on a per-PA basis (min. 500 PA) since A.J. Pierzynski in 2004 (27 GIDPs in 510 PA). Adjusted for era, Correa’s GIDPs-per-PA rate registered as the third highest of all time:

Correa’s historically pitiful GIDP performance in 2023 made what he did next all the more fascinating. In 2024, he produced an equally historical turnaround season. He hit just five groundball double plays, 25 fewer than the year before. Admittedly, he played significantly fewer games, but even on a rate basis, the difference was astounding. Never in his career had he grounded into two-outers at a lower clip. (Quick aside: Writers need synonyms, and if they don’t exist, it’s our job to make them up. Get ready.) Read the rest of this entry »

Particularly in light of their failure to upgrade their roster this winter, starting pitching is the foundation of the Seattle Mariners. Last year, four of their starters took at least 30 turns, and the unit posted the majors’ lowest ERA (3.38) while ranking either first or second in the American League in FIP and WAR as well. But while this year’s Mariners are currently running first in the AL West at 17-12, their rotation has scuffled, in part because it’s far from whole. George Kirby, who led the staff in WAR last year, began the season on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation, and now Logan Gilbert, who made the All-Star team and received Cy Young votes, has joined him there due to a flexor strain.

The 27-year-old Gilbert made his sixth start of the season on Friday night at T-Mobile Park against the Marlins. While the results were impressive — he needed just 29 pitches to throw three perfect innings, striking out three — his average four-seam fastball velocity was down 1.1 mph from his season average of 95.6, and his slider and curve were a bit slower than usual as well. He did not return for the fourth inning, replaced by reliever Casey Lawrence, and the Mariners soon announced that he had departed due to forearm tightness.

“I felt it a little bit warming up,” said Gilbert. “Just never really went away. Sometimes you just get going and it feels a little better. Tonight, it just didn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Newcomb has thus far fallen short of the high expectations he’d set coming out of college and during his first years of pro ball. Drafted 15th overall by the Los Angeles Angels in 2014 out of the University of Hartford, the 31-year-old left-hander has a record of 28-28 to go with a 4.50 ERA and a 4.38 FIP over 454 1/3 career big league innings. He’s currently trying to revive his career. Now with his fifth organization after signing with the Boston Red Sox as a minor league free agent over the winter, Newcomb made the team out of spring training — injuries to multiple Red Sox hurlers played a role in his doing so — and he’s since taken the hill six times. Over five starts and one relief appearance, the Massachusetts native has a 4.24 ERA, a 2.61 FIP, and a 27.5% strikeout rate in 23 1/3 frames. All three of his decisions have been losses.

His second major league season suggested stardom was in his future. Traded from the Angels to the Atlanta Braves as part of the Andrelton Simmons deal in November 2015, Newcomb went on to make 30 starts in 2018 and log a 3.90 ERA over 164 innings. In June of that year he was featured here at FanGraphs, with yours truly writing that the hard-throwing southpaw was “rapidly establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League.” A month later, he came within one strike of notching a no-hitter. Then things started going in the wrong direction. Newcomb not only landed in the Braves bullpen in 2019, he had a stint in Triple-A. From 2020-2024, he tossed just 98 2/3 big league innings while toiling for three different teams. His ERA over that span was 6.66 ERA.

Turn the clock back to March 2015, and Newcomb was ranked no. 2 on our Angels Top Prospects list, behind only Andrew Heaney. What did Newcomb’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what our then prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Newcomb to respond to it.

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“Newcomb was the Hunter Dozier of the 2014 draft, a player that clubs liked higher than the media consensus had them, partly because teams weren’t sure if they were the only team that had him so high, so they kept it pretty quiet.”

“I think a big part of it was my coming out of the Northeast,” Newcomb replied. “That made me a little more of an unknown, but I did kind of have an idea that I was going to be a first-rounder. I talked to all 30 clubs. I actually thought there was a chance that I was going with the fifth pick to Minnesota.”

“Sources have indicated that the Mariners probably would’ve taken Newcomb with the sixth pick if Alex Jackson wasn’t there.” Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know how many leaderboards we have here at FanGraphs? I don’t. I genuinely don’t. Just in our main offense, defense, and pitching leaderboards, I counted 78. That’s before you get into team stats, league stats, splits, spring training, the postseason, combined WAR leaderboards, NPB, KBO, the minors, college, the BOARD, and on and on. We have hundreds of leaderboards because you, the citizens of planet baseball, deserve them. If you want to know who’s leading the Florida State League in groundball-to-fly ball rate, it is your right to learn that Kyle Henley of my beloved Daytona Tortugas is somehow hitting a mind-boggling seven grounders for every ball he hits in the air. I didn’t think it was possible for a baseball player’s offensive profile to suffer from acrophobia, but here we are learning new things from the leaderboards every day.

We have three plate discipline leaderboards because we pull data from Sports Info Solutions, Pitch Info, and Statcast. The strike zone is (for now) three dimensional, and so is our coverage of it. I came to really appreciate this fact on Monday, when I got curious about which hitter was doing the best job of avoiding whiffs. According to SIS, Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner is leading all of baseball with a perfect, shining 100% contact rate inside the strike zone. Let’s stop for a moment and reflect upon this achievement. We have been playing baseball for over a month now. Over more than 100 plate appearances and nearly 400 pitches, Hoerner has yet to swing at a strike and miss. He is the only player in baseball who can make such a claim, and yet that claim is disputed nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »