Last week may have been highlighted by the start of the 2022 regular season, but it also featured a spate of contract extensions. Today I’m going to take a closer look at two such extensions, both involving glove-first outfielders entering their age-27 seasons.

We’ll begin with Myles Straw, the center fielder for the Cleveland Guardians, who signed a five-year, $25 million extension, according to Zack Meisel of The Athletic. The extension includes club options for the 2027 and ’28 seasons that would bring the total to $41.5 million over the next seven years. Remarkably, this is the Guardians’ third extension this month with the potential to keep a player in Cleveland through the 2028 season — the team also inked deals with star third baseman José Ramírez and closer Emmanuel Clase.

2021 was Straw’s first full season as an everyday player. He came over to Cleveland from the Astros at the trade deadline in exchange for Phil Maton and Yainer Diaz. After the trade, he continued to build on his breakout campaign. He ended the having posted stellar defense (11 OAA), great baserunning (30 steals in 36 attempts), and about league-average offense (98 wRC+). That well-rounded production quietly placed him among the best center fielders in baseball last season, finishing sixth in WAR at the position with 3.7:

That chart does a good job of showing how unusual Straw’s profile is compared to his peers’, as he’s the only center fielder on the list without a clearly above-average bat. These offensive limitations mostly come from a lack of power, and it is a serious lack of power at that, with Straw posting an ISO, Barrel% and HardHit% all below the fifth percentile. His max exit velocity is actually above average, which could be a sign that more consistently hard contact is hidden away somewhere, but there’s just not a lot to suggest that he’ll be putting up double-digit home run totals anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Hassell III is a confident hitter, and for good reason. No. 50 on our 2022 Top 100 Prospects list, the 20-year-old outfielder — in the words of Eric Longenhagen — “arguably wielded the most advanced bat of the 2020 draft’s high school hitters.” Drafted eighth overall that summer by the San Diego Padres, he’s lived up to that billing. Playing last year at Low-A Lake Elsinore and High-A Fort Wayne, Hassell slashed .303/.393/.470, with his left-handed stroke responsible for 33 doubles, four triples, and 11 home runs. Moreover, he swiped 34 bases in 40 attempts.

Hassell — back at Fort Wayne to begin the current campaign — talked hitting prior to taking the field for the TinCaps opener last Friday.

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David Laurila: In your own words, who are you as a hitter?

Robert Hassell III: “Last season was the first time I played more than 50 games in a season — I played 110 — and after that, I definitely had a good idea — if I hadn’t already — of what I do consistently. It didn’t take me long. Even through last spring training, just getting in the daily reps, I knew that I was going to be a barrel guy [and] an on-base guy. That’s kind of what I’ve been my whole life, so it’s what I would self-identify as, for sure.”

Laurila: Define “barrel guy.”

Hassell: “I would say that a barrel guy isn’t a dude that can only hit fastballs, or only hit curveballs, or that he excels at one thing way more than the other. I wouldn’t consider that guy a ‘barrel guy.’ I see myself being able to hit every pitch, in any count. That’s what I mean by that.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees and Aaron Judge found a way to bring extra drama to Opening Day. Even with an additional 24 hours of negotiations due to the postponement of their season opener against the Red Sox, the team did not reach an agreement on a contract extension with the slugger in time to meet his self-imposed deadline. Judge, who turns 30 on April 26, had said that once the 2022 season opened, all negotiations would cease, and he maintained that stance on Friday morning amid a flurry of reports detailing the Yankees’ offer, telling the assembled media, “First pitch is at 1:08 pm.”

His status did not change, and so on Friday night Judge told The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler, “At the end of the year, I’ll be a free agent. I’ll get to talk to 30 teams. The Yankees will be one of those 30.”

“I’m just disappointed because I think I’ve been vocal about — I want to be a Yankee for life, and bring a championship back to New York,” Judge told reporters after Friday’s 6-5 win. “I want to do it for the fans here. This is home for me, and not getting it done right now stings, but I’ve got a job to do on the field and I’ve got to shift my focus to that now and go play some ball.”

In a break from the way that the Yankees normally do business, general manager Brian Cashman laid out the offer to Judge “for transparency purposes” rather than rely on leaks to the media that he would have to confirm. According to Cashman, the team offered Judge seven years at $30.5 million per year, plus $17 million for this year, his final one before free agency, for a total package of $230.5 million. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that for every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason.

Let’s start things off with a brief look at last year’s breakout hitter list and see how they fared.

• Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: .311/.401/.601, 166 wRC+, 6.7 WAR
• Alex Kirilloff: .251/.299/.423, 93 wRC+, 0.3 WAR
• Kyle Schwarber: .266/.374/.554, 145 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Gary Sánchez: .204/.307/.423, 99 wRC+, 1.5 WAR
• J.P. Crawford: .273/.338/.376, 103 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Nathaniel Lowe: .264/.357/.415, 115 wRC+, 1.6 WAR
• Ryan McMahon: .254/.331/.449, 95 wRC+, 2.5 WAR
• Luis Urías: .249/.345/.445, 111 wRC+, 2.7 WAR

On the plus side, nobody really embarrassed me. Alex Kirilloff came closest, but in his defense, he was playing with a wrist injury that eventually required surgery. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2021-22 offseason in the books, it’s clear we’ll remember it, at least in part, for how the Twins of all teams took the reins and strengthened their roster. They flipped Mitch Garver for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who then went to the Yankees along with Josh Donaldson in exchange for Gio Urshela and Gary Sánchez. It wasn’t much of a downgrade, and the move gave Minnesota the opportunity to sign Carlos Correa, the biggest free agent of the offseason.

And now, here’s the cherry on top. In an attempt to address the fragility of their rotation, the Twins had already traded for Sonny Gray. But one good pitcher can’t lift an entire staff, so they went ahead and acquired another starter. And as we’ll discuss later, there were several other intriguing players involved in the deal. A fairly complex trade on the morning of Opening Day? Don’t mind if I do. Here’s the basic breakdown:

Padres Get

• Taylor Rogers
• Brent Rooker
• Salary Relief ($6.6 million)

Twins Get

• Chris Paddack
• Emilio Pagán
• PTBNL

This started off as a discussion about the Twins, but let’s actually begin with the Padres’ return. Now, the bullpen down in San Diego was never projected to be an issue. If anything, it’s one of the league’s better ones, as evidenced by an 11th-place spot on this year’s positional power rankings. But it did lack a clear ninth inning stalwart after the departure of Mark Melancon, a problem made more obvious by last week’s Opening Day fiasco. With Rogers not yet with the team, Craig Stammen allowed a walk-off three-run bomb to Seth Beer (on National Beer Day, no less). Read the rest of this entry »

Carson Spiers has quietly thrived since being bypassed in the five-round 2020 draft. Signed that summer by a Cincinnati Reds team that at the time employed Kyle Boddy as their pitching coordinator, the 24-year-old right-hander has done so with a studious approach that he pairs with a bulldog attitude. Featuring a well-rounded pitch mix, Spiers is coming off a season where he logged a 3.55 ERA with 130 strikeouts in 111-and-two-thirds innings spent between Low-A Daytona and (primarily) High-A Dayton.

A senior-sign with a management degree from Clemson University, Spiers — currently on the roster of the Double-A Chattanooga Lookouts — is No. 15 on our newly-released Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list. He discussed his development, and the debt he owes to Boddy, over the phone in mid-March.

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David Laurila: Who are you as a pitcher? How would you describe yourself?

Carson Spiers: “I’d say that I’m a competitive guy who likes to attack. I’ll fill the zone with four different pitches and let my arsenal work for me. I wouldn’t say I’m the most overpowering guy on the mound, but I have a good enough fastball to play at any level. I also have some pretty good off-speed that I can throw in any count; I can create swings and misses with those pitches, as well. But I’d say that my best trait is my competitive edge. I have a strong will to want to win.”

Laurila: What is your best pitch?

Spiers: “My best pitch is strike one, for sure. My slider and my changeup are definitely my out pitches, but ‘best pitch’ is tough to say, because I can throw all four in any count. I wouldn’t say I have a best.”

Laurila: Baseball America has called your changeup your best pitch… Read the rest of this entry »

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 our own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

Kevin Gausman had a career year with the San Francisco Giants last season. Pitching a personal-best 192 innings, the 31-year-old right-hander won 14 of 20 decisions while logging 227 strikeouts with a 2.81 ERA and a 3.00 FIP. Buoyed by that performance, he was bestowed a five-year, $110M contract by the Toronto Blue Jays, who inked him to a free-agent deal in December.

Gausman’s Giants experience was as educational as it was successful. Signed to a less-lucrative free-agent deal with San Francisco prior to the 2020 season, the LSU product embraced not only his new surroundings, but also the organization’s pitching development process.

“Their big thing over there is pitching to your strengths, and we’d do things to kind of teach ourselves what we’re good at,” explained Gausman, who’d previously pitched for the Baltimore Orioles, Atlanta Braves, and Cincinnati Reds. “For me, it was pitching up in the zone. My bullpens would be focused on strings up in the zone, trying to throw above them, and then on splits down in the zone.”

Brian Bannister, who Gausman called one of the best pitching minds he’s ever been around, played an important role. The righty pointed to Bannister’s knowledge of how grips work for each individual pitcher, how an arm path works, and “what you can do to manipulate a ball.” Gausman wasn’t the only beneficiary. San Francisco’s Director of Pitching also helped Anthony DeSclafani have a career year. Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by their 69-win projection and negligible odds of winning the World Series, the Pirates don’t have a great deal to look forward to from a competitive standpoint in 2022. But Opening Day is a time for celebration and optimism nonetheless, and early on Thursday afternoon, FanSided’s Robert Murray reported that the team had agreed to an eight-year, $70-million extension with third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, the largest contract in Pirates history.

The contract for the 25-year-old Hayes is also a record for a player with between one and two years of service time. It covers his final two pre-arbitration years, his three years of arbitration-eligibility, and the first three years of his free agent eligibility, through his age-32 season. The exact details have not been reported at this writing, including the value of his club option for the ninth year (2030).

The celebration was almost immediately dampened when Hayes left the Pirates’ opener against the Cardinals in the bottom of the first inning due to an apparent injury to his left wrist. He dove trying to catch a bloop into left field by Dylan Carlson, but the ball fell and turned into a double. After Tyler O’Neill singled Carlson home two batters later, Pirates head athletic trainer Rafael Freitas and manager Derek Shelton came out of the dugout to check on Hayes, unwrapping his left wrist and taking him out of the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks and Rangers made a minor deal on Opening Day, with Texas sending upper-level infielder Yonny Hernandez to Arizona for low-level center field speedster Jeferson Espinal. Arizona desperately needs big league infield help with Nick Ahmed (shoulder) and Josh Rojas (oblique) starting the year on the injured list. They traded cash to Chicago for upper-level infielder Sergio Alcántara a few days ago and now add the plucky Hernandez, who was squeezed out of Texas by the additions of Corey Seager and Marcus Semien from above, and by the bevy of prospects (among them Ezequiel Duran, Josh Smith, and Davis Wendzel) who are either on, or are soon-to-be-on, the 40-man from below. Read the rest of this entry »