The Red Sox caught us all by surprise by jumping out to an incredible start en route to an early-season lead atop the AL East. As Tony Wolfe wrote, the strong performance was largely thanks to consistent run-scoring and a dominant bullpen. Fast-forward to mid-May, and Boston is still there, first in the division and continuing to climb up various weekly Power Rankings (including our own). As impressive as the Red Sox have been at the plate, though, the rotation seems to have been overshadowed. I get it; there’s not a lot of name brand recognition. Their two best starters from 2019, Chris Sale and Eduardo Rodriguez, pitched a grand total of 0 innings in 2020. But after taking three of four from the Angels over the weekend, the Red Sox lead the American League in FIP (3.29) among starting pitchers.

Leading the charge is Nathan Eovaldi. His most recent start extended his streak without giving up a homer to 50 innings; he is the only qualified starting pitcher who has yet to do so. That helps make up for a modest 4.50 ERA and strikeout-per-nine rate of 8.46; his FIP is 2.15. Since he’s been in Boston, Eovaldi has struggled with home runs, allowing an average of 1.86 per nine over the past two seasons. That makes sense, as he’s always allowed a lot of balls to be put in play with a penchant for giving up the occasional dinger. But so far this season, the expected value in terms of xwOBA on those balls suggests that Eovaldi is eliciting softer contact, which is supported by his peripherals.

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Cleveland develops pitchers as well as any team in baseball, and that’s good news for Tanner Burns. The second of the club’s two first round picks last summer, Burns has an Auburn University pedigree and a high ceiling. He also has some question marks, as evidenced by Eric Longenhagen — who acknowledged that he’s “a little lighter on Burns than the industry consensus” — having ranked the 22-year-old right-hander conservatively at No. 20 on the team’s 2021 Top Prospects list. Baseball America is somewhat more bullish on Burns, slotting him at No. 15 on their own list.

The Decatur, Alabama native has pitched solidly in his first two appearances of the season. In a pair of starts for the High-A Lake County Captains, Burns has allowed four hits and two runs, with one walk and 13 strikeouts, his fastball sitting 94-95 and topping out at 96. He discussed his approach to pitching, and the influences of Tim Hudson and Casey Mize, following his initial outing.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with an icebreaker I’ve used several times in the past: Do you consider pitching to be more of an art, or more of a science?

Tanner Burns: “I feel it’s more of an art. I try to keep it plain and simple, like straight vanilla. With my release points, I think ‘off my right ear’ to go inside on a righty, ‘off my nose’ for down the middle,’ and ‘off my left ear’ for away to a righty.’ So I kind of take it as an art, delivering my pitches, letting it come off my hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

At some point in your baseball fandom, you’ll end up thinking about Schrödinger’s Baseball Player. The question posed by it is simple: When does a struggling hitter or pitcher stop existing as a superposition of states – either plain unlucky or genuinely worrisome – and become one or the other?

Consider the case of Luis Castillo. Like most, I initially ignored his first few bad starts. But now, about a quarter of the way into the season, the righty’s 7.71 ERA is the worst amongst all qualified starters. Though his peripherals are much better, including a relatively respectable 4.79 FIP, you have to imagine that something is off. Maybe we should open the box and find out what.

There are a couple of things to consider regarding Castillo, but let’s focus on his changeup. Improved command of it led to a breakout season in 2019, which he followed up with an excellent 2020. A pitch with incredible movement and a penchant for missing bats, it’s the foundation of his entire repertoire. In fact, even this season, hitters have only mustered a .254 xwOBA against it, which is obviously great. So what’s the hold up? Well:

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The Angels made a minor move to bolster their relief corps over the weekend, acquiring veteran reliever Hunter Strickland from the Rays. Strickland has been effective over the first six weeks of the season, with a 1.62 ERA and a 2.83 FIP in 16 innings for Tampa Bay. In return for his services, Los Angeles will give up either cash considerations or a player to be named later.

The Rays love reclamation projects, and Strickland was one of their latest, signing a minor-league deal with the team just before the start of spring training. It wasn’t Strickland’s first time. Once a rotation prospect with the Pirates — he was a Red Sox draftee picked up in the Adam LaRoche trade — he missed the 2011 season due to rotator cuff surgery and was waived by Pittsburgh after a disappointing 2012 season. The Giants moved him to the bullpen, and the big righty with big fastball looked like a future closer candidate. He also came equipped with a big temper, resulting in such incidents and playing the cavalry general for a bullpen charge into the Yasiel Puig–Madison Bumgarner incident, yelling at Salvador Perez after an Omar Infante homer in the 2014 World Series, and intentionally hitting Bryce Harper in 2017.

When someone says there's free food in the breakroom pic.twitter.com/IiPyD1ZbXJ

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) September 20, 2016

That hot-headedness led to a broken hand that caused him to miss two months in 2018, the unsurprising result of punching a door after blowing a save, and the Giants non-tendered Strickland after that season.

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These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Wander Franco, SS, Tampa Bay Rays
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Durham   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1 (1st overall)   FV: 80
Line: 4-for-5, 2B
Notes
Franco is now hitting .348/.404/.652 on the year and he’s doing it as a 20-year-old at Triple-A while playing flashy defense all over the infield (his bicep soreness, which caused him to leave winter ball, seems fine). This is a guy who hasn’t had so much as a dry spell as a player, no multi-week slump that needed to be busted in a superstitious, charitable, or ethically dubious way. He’s indomitable and so far is meeting the unprecedented expectations put upon him.

The “when will Wander Franco debut?” questions have already begun, as have the chat/social media queries about Vidal Bruján. Willy Adames is struggling (though he’s shown signs of life lately), but as I wrote on the Rays list, I think Taylor Walls is a better role replacement for Adames if Willy were to pull a hammy or something. Part of Adames’ roster fit is because of his excellent defense, which is one of Walls’ carrying tools. Franco is a cleaner fit in the role Joey Wendle plays. Bruján isn’t a polished defender anywhere and needs more reps in the outfield. Who of those three top 100 prospect debuts first and when likely depends more on the kind of situation the Rays find themselves in rather than the prospects themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always a strange thing to see an all-time great donning an unfamiliar uniform at the tail end of his career. Even if the sights of Willie Mays in Mets pinstripes or Hank Aaron wearing a Brewers pullover — to say nothing of Babe Ruth as a Brave — predate your time as a viewer, they probably produce a double-take. Examples such as Ken Griffey Jr. in White Sox garb, Mike Piazza in A’s green and gold (or Padres blue and sand), or Randy Johnson in Giants black and orange might be more recent, but those sights are no less alien. Which brings us to Albert Pujols of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The 41-year-old Pujols, a future Hall of Famer who is one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs, was designated for assignment by the Angels last week. Not surprisingly, given that he was hitting just .198/.250/.372 while still due the bulk of this year’s $30 million salary, he cleared waivers, thus sticking the Angels for the lion’s share of that amount. After clearing waivers, he reportedly drew interest from three or four teams, but while it was easy to spitball a few possible destinations — the Cardinals given his status as franchise icon, the Reds because they’d just lost Joey Votto to a broken thumb, the White Sox because they’re managed by Tony La Russa, the Marlins because they could use an attendance bump — nobody saw the Dodgers as contenders for his services. Yet on Saturday afternoon, the Los Angeles Times‘ Jorge Castillo reported that the defending champions had signed Pujols to a major league deal for the remainder of the season. They’ll pay him the minimum salary while the Angels pick up the rest of the tab.

In a vacuum, the move was something of a head scratcher, but the Dodgers are amid an incessant wave of injuries that on the offensive side had already claimed center fielder Cody Bellinger, superutilityman Zach McKinstry, and infielder Edwin Ríos, and kept growing over the weekend. On Friday, left fielder AJ Pollock reaggravated a left hamstring injury that had limited him to three plate appearances in a week, and on Saturday, just hours after the Pujols news broke, so too did the fifth metacarpal in Corey Seager’s right hand, via a pitch from the Marlins’ Ross Detwiler. Given all the moving parts among the Dodgers’ multiposition players, the injury opens up a lane for Pujols to get some playing time, but whether he can improve upon his meager production to date is another story. Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2021 season nears its Memorial Day checkpoint, feast your eyes upon some stars who are off to the best starts of their career, a couple of wily veterans still learning (and if they know what’s good for them, eventually unlearning) some new tricks, and two-up-and down hurlers on a quest for consistency.

Tuesday, May 18, 6:40 PM ET: Trevor Rogers vs. Zack Wheeler

Two of the National League’s best pitchers through the season’s first month are on a collision course at Citizens Bank Park. One is an NL East mainstay who generated considerable prospect hype; the other is making a name for himself after a relatively anonymous minor league career. While Rogers was a first-round pick and a top-six prospect in the Marlins’ system heading into the season, he certainly was not on many fans’ radars outside of South Florida; our own Eric Longenhagen viewed him as a “stable 2-WAR starter prospect.”

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. 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.

David Bednar has been a find for the Pirates. Picked up from the Padres over the offseason as part of the seven-player Joe Musgrove deal, Bednar has emerged as one of the most-reliable arms in the Pittsburgh pen. In 17 outings comprising 15-and-a-third innings, the 26-year-old right-hander has 19 strikeouts to go with a 2.35 ERA and a 2.91 FIP.

Expectations weren’t nearly that high. San Diego’s 35th-round pick in the 2016 draft, the former Lafayette College Leopard came into the current campaign with a gnarly 6.75 ERA in 17-and-a-third big-league innings. Moreover, while his velocity has always been intriguing — ditto his splitter — Bednar’s name had never been spotted near the top of a prospect list. By and large, the 6-foot-1, 245-pound hurler came to his new club unheralded, unpolished, and in need of a fresh start.

I asked Ben Cherington if the decision to acquire the Pittsburgh-born-and-bred Bednar was driven more by the team’s analytics department, or by its scouting department.

“It was both,” said the Pirates GM. “From the scouting end, I believe Andrew Lorraine was one of the pro scouts who had seen him. Joe Douglas from our professional acquisitions group is someone who dug into him from a data perspective. Plus, he’s from here, so we had some personal background as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments here.

Eric’s Notes (Games from May 12)

Cody Poteet, RHP, Miami Marlins
Level & Affiliate: MLB   Age: 26   Org Rank: 24   FV: 40 Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 0 BB, 6 K

Notes
Poteet was a prospect several years ago, last on the Marlins list in 2017 (it was just 13 names long) as a potential backend starter. He had a two-tick velo bump during quarantine, and after sitting 89-93 and topping out at 95 in 2019, he’s sitting 92-95 and touching 96 now. He had a 10-strikeout start in his first 2021 minor league outing then was immediately promoted to the big league team for Wednesday’s start. It’s surprising that Poteet had such a late bump in velocity. His era of UCLA pitcher had already adopted Driveline principals, and I would have guessed he was already maxed out. Of his three secondaries, Poteet most-often deploys his changeup, a heavy, sinking offering in the 85-88 mph range. His slider has more linear movement than two-planed sweeping shape, but it can still miss bats if it’s located away from righty batters. His curveball has plus-plus spin rates but is easy to identify out of his hand since he has a sink/tail-oriented fastball, and Poteet hung a couple of them Wednesday, one of which got put into the seats. The limited utility of his breaking balls and his fastball being more of a grounder-getter than a bat-misser holds Poteet in the low-variance backend starter bucket for me. Read the rest of this entry »