Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball, a prospect trade, and minor league co-op action in Arizona. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Waldy Arias, 3B, Campbell: 3-for-9, 3 BB, K, 2 SB, 2 HBP

If you are here for hardcore draft info, skip to the next paragraph. If you want to have fun for a minute, stick around. Arias is a little junior third baseman at a mid-major program who is slugging .290. Nobody is going to print a magnet with his name on it come July. My question is why does he have so many enemies? With two more hit by pitches over the weekend, Arias has now been hit 16 times in 21 games. That’s nearly once every six plate appearances, which was his exact rate last year, when he got hit 12 times in 15 games. Arias is a pesky slap hitter who crowds the dish. His high front elbow hangs out over the plate and the overall setup reminds me a bit of a mini-Carlos Quentin, who took a fair number of pitches to the body in his career. With access to some of the video and data tools pro teams have, I was able to click a few buttons and watch all 16 HBP. Here are the results:

1. Curveball: Foot
2. Slider: Leg
3. Fastball: Thigh
4. Fastball: Thigh
5. Slider: Foot
6. Fastball: Thigh
7. Fastball: Elbow
8. Fastball: Elbow
9. Slider: Head
10. Fastball: Elbow
11. Changeup: Shoulder
12. Fastball: Back
13. Slider: Elbow
14. Fastball: Elbow
15. Changeup: Hand
16. Slider: Shoulder

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a few weeks ago, Julian Merryweather was fighting for a spot on the Blue Jays Opening Day roster. A back injury suffered early in spring training pushed his Grapefruit League debut back to mid-March and he struggled to get up to speed in such a compressed timeframe. But then Kirby Yates went down with an elbow injury that would require Tommy John, a couple of other pitchers were sidelined to start the season, and Merryweather just barely snuck onto Toronto’s 26-man roster on March 31.

The very next day, he was pitching in the 10th inning in Yankee Stadium, trying to hold a one-run lead on Opening Day. He came one pitch away from throwing an immaculate inning and ended up striking out the side to secure the win. Three days later, he was thrown into the fire again, this time being asked to protect a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. He recorded two more strikeouts in that outing and earned the second save of his career.

When I wrote about what the Blue Jays bullpen might look like without Yates a few weeks ago, Merryweather wasn’t even on my radar. Jordan Romano and Rafael Dolis have definitely been in the mix for high-leverage work — they threw in the eighth and ninth of that Opening Day victory paving the way for Merryweather’s appearance in the 10th. The quality of Merryweather’s stuff has been a revelation and has helped him emphatically declare his spot in the bullpen pecking order.

Merryweather was acquired by the Blue Jays in August of 2018 when Toronto traded Josh Donaldson to Cleveland right before the waiver trade deadline. It was viewed as a light return at the time since Merryweather had blown out his arm during the previous season and was in the middle of rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. He got back on the mound in 2019 but another arm injury limited him to just six minor league innings. Last season, he made his major league debut in September, showing impressive velocity and a starter’s repertoire out of the bullpen, but another elbow issue cut his season short after just 13 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Carmen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Carmen is an engineer living in the Bay Area. Born and raised in Connecticut, his inherited Yankees fandom (yes, he can hear all of your grumbles) and curiosity about math and science combined to foster a fascination with how players contribute to run scoring and prevention, as did growing up reading the venerable pages of sabermetric havens such as FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Beyond the Boxscore. The accessibility of pitch-by-pitch Statcast data has allowed him to dig deeper into player and team tendencies and examine how each approaches the opposition, which he has written about at his own website, Sabermetric Musings. He hopes to use his skills and interests to contribute to the baseball discourse at large, as well as the website that played such a big part in making him the baseball observer he is today.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a supremely talented hitter. In this season’s early going, he has already hit a ball 114.1 mph, swatted a home run, and has a couple of RBI to his name. Prior to his call-up in 2019, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel rated him as the best prospect in baseball with a 70 Future Value. If you go to The Board, only five other players since 2017 have received such a grade: Wander Franco (now an 80), MacKenzie Gore, Gavin Lux, Yoán Moncada, and Shohei Ohtani. His specific combination of future tool grades, consisting of a 70 hit tool, 70 game power, and 80 raw power, is unrivaled in the dataset, a unique blend of elite bat-to-ball skills and game-changing power. At 19, he posted a 203 wRC+ in Double-A and a 175 wRC+ in Triple-A. The latter is especially impressive given that the average age of a Triple-A player is 28.

With those things in mind, you might say that what we have seen from the young phenom thus far is a bit disappointing. In 757 plate appearances through his age-21 season, Guerrero has posted a 107 wRC+. That places him 112th amongst all hitters since 2019 (for players with at least 500 plate appearances), sandwiched between the aging Robinson Canó and Omar Narváez. But I would note that context is key. Guerrero is one of only 10 players to receive 500 plate appearances through age 21. On that list, he ranks seventh in wRC+ behind Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Cody Bellinger, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Carlos Correa. One could argue that four of those guys are on a Hall of Fame trajectory while the fifth (Correa) has been one of the top talents in the sport when he is not struggling with injury.

Guerrero is in rare company given the amount of big-league time he has logged at such a young age; that is an accomplishment in and of itself. But we are still left wanting more. How can he unlock his generational tools and become the hitter we hope he can be? I would argue the most glaring potential adjustment is to his swing plane. In 2019 and ’20, Guerrero posted groundball rates of 50.4% and 54.6%, respectively. The following represents his rolling average groundball rate in 25 groundball samples:

A whopping 68.5% of these samples yielded groundball rates above the major league average. Over the past two seasons, major league hitters have produced a .218 wOBA and .244 BABIP on groundballs compared to a .500 wOBA and .344 BABIP on batted balls in the air. Among the group of players with 500 plate appearances the past two seasons, Guerrero ranks 15th out of 226 players in the cohort. The frustrating part of this phenomenon is that he hits the ball exceptionally hard, to the point where if he put the ball in the air at closer to league average rates he would be a candidate to place amongst the league leaders in home runs and overall production.

To get a better idea of how Guerrero compares to sluggers with his prodigious power, I pulled the batted ball data from Baseball Savant (via Bill Petti’s baseballR package) for a select few right-handed hitters who posted comparable maximum exit velocities to Guerrero in ’19 and 2020. This list includes the following:

Max exit velocity is our best indication of a player’s raw power. We do not have to worry about a sufficient sample of plate appearances to see how that power plays in the game; all we care about is how hard the player can put the ball in play if he makes optimal contact. You, the reader, might gripe that it is difficult to use max exit velocity to gauge a player’s power. How do we know this is truly the hardest he can hit the ball? To that I say, yes, smart reader we definitely do not know if a player’s maximum exit velocity is actually the hardest he will hit the ball. But, I will say, we can reasonably confident that we are in range fairly quickly, based on research from Alex Chamberlain.

The main comparison I am interested in is the differences in approximate attack angle between these players. The concept was outlined in great detail by Jason Ochart at Driveline in this 2018 post, but the TLDR is it is the vertical angle (which is associated with the launch angle of a batted ball) of the bat as it goes to impact the baseball. Hitters can measure it with bat sensors or by parsing video.

Unfortunately, we do not have this information for major league hitters in games because they do not walk up to the plate with sensors on their bats. Instead of throwing our collective hands up, however, we can approximate attack angle with the data we do have access to. And fortunately, that has already been done. Back in 2017, David Marshall wrote an amazing piece on the Community Research blog here at FanGraphs reverse engineering attack angle from Statcast data. He concluded his post with an elegant linear equation approximating attack angle based on the launch angle of the top 20% of a player’s hardest hit batted balls. Anthony Shattell has also posted about data of this nature in the past, and I would highly-recommend scrolling through his feed for some batted ball related visuals; he uses the top 10% of hardest hit balls for his attack angle approximations. For this analysis, I arbitrarily took the top 5%. One might quibble with such a choice, but I think it gets the same point across.

Here are the estimated attack angles for the hitters in the table above based on my filtering criteria:

Stanton has the flattest swing in this group with an estimated attack angle of 8.74 degrees. Guerrero is even lower at 8.71 degrees. Stanton and Judge stick out in that they hit a ton of home runs but have noticeably flatter swings then the rest of the group. They make up for those flat swings by hitting the ball harder than anybody else in baseball. In the Statcast era (since 2015), Stanton has hit 28 balls over 118 mph, the most in the majors. Judge sits second with 10 (he was not a full-time regular until 2017). Third, despite his lack of experience in the big leagues, is Guerrero. If you just look at 2019 and ’20, Vlad is tied for the most with Stanton. Guerrero and his power are in rare company. What’s more, Stanton and Judge have career strikeout rates of 28.1% and 31.4%. Guerrero’s sits at just 17.0%. Even though he doesn’t have quite the same amount of juice on contact as the Yankees outfielders, he makes up for it by putting the ball in play much more often, albeit on the ground. Stanton and Judge have career groundball rates of 42.2% and 38.5%, respectively, with the former about league average and the latter about a standard deviation below it.

Guerrero is still a step behind Stanton and Judge with regards to power, so any large increase in extra base hits (where he has been slightly above league average in terms of the percentage of his total plate appearances) will have to come from either hitting the ball harder or putting more balls in the air. In my own research, I found that maximum exit velocity peaks around age 26 and average exit velocity on balls in the air peaks around 30. So maybe there is some power Guerrero can still squeeze out of his bat. Given that he is already inside the top 1% in raw power, however, I am dubious of how much room for growth there is in that department. What about swing plane? There is precedence for young hitters changing their distribution of batted balls.

More often than not, these young talented hitters saw performance boosts when putting the ball in the air more. That is not to say Guerrero will definitely see a bump in production if he focuses on hitting the ball in the air. It could mess with his swing for all I know. But I do believe that there is room for him to add some loft in his swing, even at the expense of more whiffs. His strikeout rate is close to six percentage points below the league average. There is a trade-off to be had there that can make him the fearsome hitter we all believe he can be.

Guerrero is still very young and has a lot of room to grow as a hitter. The projection systems seem to agree. The FanGraphs Depth Charts projections see him putting up a .360 wOBA in 2021, 23rd in baseball. THE BAT X, which to my knowledge most explicitly leverages existing Statcast data, is even more optimistic. It sees a .376 wOBA in Vlad’s future, placing him 11th in the league and sandwiching him in between Yordan Alvarez and Judge.

When you consider his pedigree coming into the majors, his high-end bat control (as evidenced by his strikeout rate), and his nearly unmatched power, I still think these projection systems are a little light on what to expect from Vlad Jr. going forward. His combination of skills should put him in the conversation to be among the best hitters in baseball, the type who is in the MVP conversation throughout his 20s. Let’s hope he can make the necessary adjustments and grow into that kind of player starting this season.

The long Rougned Odor era in Texas has ended. On Tuesday, the Texas Rangers traded their second baseman, the incumbent since 2014, to the New York Yankees for minor league outfielders Antonio Cabello and Josh Stowers. The trade represents the final dismantling of the team’s longtime Odor-Elvis Andrus double play combo, a process that began last September when the cellar-bound team benched both players.

The interests are clear for both sides of this minor trade. The Rangers had already all but moved on from Odor despite the two seasons remaining on the six-year, $49.5 million contract he agreed to before the 2017 season. The second baseman didn’t even make the team’s final roster cuts this spring; he was designated for assignment last week. So getting two players in return for a guy they were willing to let go for free had to be attractive to the Rangers. In 2017, Odor was still just 23 and coming off two very solid seasons as the starter, albeit with some notable flaws. Odor’s power was always compelling, but his glovework was inconsistent, and though his contact rates weren’t that lousy, he still had abysmal strikeout-to-walk ratios. Odor never really developed an ability to leverage plate discipline into actual performance. For example, where the league tends to slug about .650 after 1-0 and 2-0 counts, Odor was only about 50 points above his career slugging percentage in these situations.

ZiPS didn’t anticipate much growth from Odor from age-23 on due to these issues, but thought he would at least plateau as a low-OBP hitter with excellent power for a second baseman and a below-average glove that wasn’t so abysmal as to force a move off the position. Read the rest of this entry »

If you had Jonathan Lucroy driving in the first runs of the Nationals’ 2021 season, take your ticket to the window and claim your winnings. Due to a COVID-19 outbreak that forced the team to sideline nine players, the 34-year-old backstop, who was unemployed as of last week, suddenly became Max Scherzer’s batterymate for the Nationals’ season opener against the Braves. Things didn’t go well at the outset, but in his first major league plate appearance in about a year and a half, Lucroy helped the Nationals’ ace dig out of an early 3-0 hole with a two-run double.

In their first game in front of fans since winning the 2019 World Series — albeit just 4,801 fans, with Nationals Park only allowed to be filled to about 12% capacity — the Nationals completed a dramatic comeback via Juan Soto’s walk-off single in the ninth for a belated Opening Day win under very strange circumstances.

The situation was the culmination of a sequence of events that served to remind Major League Baseball that yes, there’s still a pandemic going on. Despite just 25 players out of a total of more than 2,000 testing positive for COVID-19 either on intake or during spring training, MLB made it exactly zero days into the regular season before having to deal with its first outbreak. The marquee Opening Day matchup between Scherzer and the Met’s Jacob deGrom was postponed after the test of a Washington player from Monday, the final day of spring training, came back positive. The remainder of the three-game series was scrubbed once the total number of positives climbed to four, with nine other players quarantined following contact tracing. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Gallo is a walking archetype. You know the rough outlines: strikeouts like you wouldn’t believe, gobsmacking power, and the walks that accompany those two. When he’s good, he’s blasting his way to success; the park almost doesn’t matter when he gets into one, so titanic is his power.

If you knew only that about Gallo — and to be clear, it’s the most important thing — what would you think about his BABIP? It could be sky-high; he whiffs quite a lot, but that doesn’t matter for BABIP, and when he makes contact, it’s the loudest contact there is. He’s barreled up a fifth of his batted balls, and hit 50% of them 95 mph or harder. That makes it easier to find a hole — or make one.

It could be low, though! Many of those hard hit balls leave the park. What might be doubles in the gap or smoked line drive singles for another player might be home runs for Gallo, and singles and doubles are the bedrock of BABIP. Grounders and pop ups are no good; the real juice is in line drives and low fly balls, and he might simply hit his too hard to keep them in the field of play.

The answer is depressingly pedestrian. Gallo’s career BABIP stood at .270 entering this year, below average but not atrocious. That’s 40th-worst in baseball over that time period, in the same general area as many homer-happy sluggers. Mike Moustakas, Kyle Schwarber, Rhys Hoskins, Chris Davis — basically, hitters who get a disproportionate amount of their value by putting the ball in the air and over the fence. Read the rest of this entry »

You can see, if you want, the teenager who signed with the Minnesota Twins in 2016: a second-round pick from Salem High School in Georgia, leaving an offer from the University of Kentucky to make a go of it in the minors. You can see, in fact, his pre-draft workout for the Twins. It’s right here on YouTube, with a modest thousand views: not the best quality, not the best angle, but he’s there, swinging away, his face turned away from the camera. The video was uploaded by John Baddoo, his dad, whose channel features just one other video — again, starring his son Akil, this time going up to bat in Puerto Rico. From behind the dugout in the sparsely-populated stands — so far that, at first, it’s unclear who is being filmed — the phone camera slowly focuses on Akil as he takes his warm-up swings. Its shaky zoom follows him to the plate. When he puts the ball in play, the video ends abruptly. We don’t know what happened to that ball, whether it was a hit or an out, but it doesn’t matter: We saw his patience, his swing. When this video was uploaded in 2015, he was only 17 years old.

Now, Akil Baddoo is 22. He is, as of last week, a major leaguer. And his debut week has been unlike any other. He made his first appearance on Sunday. His parents were there at Comerica Park, watching, just as they had been when their son was in high school. And on the very first pitch Baddoo saw in the majors, he homered.

That, in itself, is some incredible magic — of all the players who’ve debuted in the major leagues, a number that is currently approaching 20,000, only 31 have done what Baddoo did — seen one pitch and sent it out of the ballpark. But it didn’t stop there. The next day, Baddoo hit another home run: a grand slam, in fact. Read the rest of this entry »

Spiritually, the Orlando Arcia era in Milwaukee came to an end when the team acquired Luis Urías from San Diego in a four-player swap back in November 2019. Urías, then 22, had been one of the top prospects in the Padres’ farm system before his rookie eligibility expired the season prior and was expected to take over as the Brewers’ starting shortstop. Such a move would likely mean benching Arcia, a former top prospect himself who had put up rather anemic numbers in his first four big league seasons. Alas, Milwaukee’s starting infield hit a number of road blocks in the year that followed that trade, and when all was said and done, Arcia appeared in all but one of the team’s games last year, as well as each of the first four in 2021.

Now, it would appear that era has formally come to a close once and for all. On Tuesday, the Brewers traded Arcia to the Braves, who immediately optioned him to the team’s alternate training site as the infielder undergoes necessary COVID protocols. Two pitchers, Chad Sobotka and Patrick Weigel, were sent to Milwaukee to complete the deal.

Braves acquiring Orlando Arcia from Brewers, source tells @TheAthletic. First on talks: @JonHeyman and @ByRobertMurray.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) April 6, 2021

When word first got out that the Brewers were discussing a deal involving Arcia, there was naturally speculation that the team on the other end might be San Diego. After all, just night before, the Padres had watched in horror as franchise shortstop Fernando Tatis Jr. crumpled to the ground after injuring his left shoulder following through on a swing, and as of Tuesday morning remained unaware of how much time he was likely to miss. San Diego has ready replacements for Tatis in-house, but for a team as committed to accumulating depth as the Padres are, the timing of the news seemed all too convenient. Read the rest of this entry »

After Gary Sánchez’s rough 2020, there’s pretty much nowhere to go but up.

That was the rationale for including him among the 2021 ZiPS breakout candidates, with Dan Szymborski noting that no big league hitter — especially one with Sánchez’s power pedigree — carries a true-talent .159 BABIP. Unfortunately for the Yankees’ backstop, that’s how his batted ball luck shook out, with the shortened 60-game season preventing his BABIP from ever regressing to the mean.

Granted, Sánchez was not the only hitter to face extremely poor batted ball luck. A perusal of all players with at least 100 trips to the plate last season shows us that Sánchez only posted the fourth-lowest BABIP in the majors, with Hunter Renfroe (.141), Edwin Encarnación (.156), and Rougned Odor (.157) all worthy of taking even more issue with the BABIP Gods.

But even compared to these other tough luck seasons, Sánchez sticks out. What caused him as much trouble, if not more, was a lot of swinging and missing, something he did considerably more often than most of his peers in the bad BABIP department, with strikeouts in 36% of plate appearances. That combination of poor BABIP and a low propensity to put the ball in play resulted in a career-worst .147/.253/.365 triple slash.

Read the rest of this entry »