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. 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 altered begin by telling you so. For the others, the blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside the org than within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there. Lastly, in effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both in 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.

It would be inaccurate to say the Giants have been big spenders on the market this winter, but it also wouldn’t be right to say they’ve done nothing. Coming into this week, they had added six players on major league contracts, improving their rotation, bullpen, catching and infield depth with nothing other than cold hard cash. What all of those players had in common, though, is that they all were willing to agree to cheap one-year deals. San Francisco has been willing to fill holes and add talent, but only in low-risk situations.

Consider Tuesday’s news, then, somewhat of a reprieve from that strategy. The Giants signed infielder Tommy La Stella to a three-year contract, a few days before his 32nd birthday. Though we don’t know the exact dollar figure yet, it’s the first three-year deal the team has given since Tony Watson’s before the 2018 season, and it will likely be the most money the team has committed to a free agent since Mark Melancon heading into 2017. The risk involved with this deal, however, isn’t anything to sweat over, even if La Stella was basically a career pinch-hitter until just two years ago.

To call La Stella a unique player in 2021 would be an understatement. He’s coming off a season in which he struck out in just 5.3% of plate appearances, with a walk rate more than double that. It was his second-straight season with a strikeout rate under 10%. Even more impressively, La Stella’s transition into a truly elite resistance to whiffs has also included him hitting for more power than he ever has. Doing both of those things at once is something few hitters can accomplish.

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Everybody Signs an Infielder Tuesday concluded with the Twins reaching agreement with Andrelton Simmons on a one-year contract worth $10.5 million. Originally a Brave until a 2015 trade for Erick Aybar and prospects sent him to the West Coast, Simmons hit .297/.346/.356 over 30 games for the Angels in 2020. Unless something incredibly bizarre happens, he will become Minnesota’s starting shortstop, prevent a bunch of runs, and assist the Twins in their quest to win their first playoff game in forever.

Let’s start with the least fun part of this article: the grumpy caveat. Back in May of 2019, Simmons injured his left ankle trying to beat out a grounder and, after a misstep, was unable to put weight on it. It landed him on the injured list for a month, and he missed another month later in the season with an injury to the other side of the same ankle. In the first week of 2020, he did it again, spraining his ankle in a July game against the Athletics, costing him nearly half of the abbreviated 2020 season. Leg and foot injuries are no laughing matter for a middle infielder: There have been plenty of aging second basemen and shortstops who had their careers dramatically waylaid by such injuries. Jose Offerman is the first example that comes to mind; when his legs started being an issue, he went from a .391 OBP second baseman to out of baseball in a blink of an eye.

Simmons hasn’t been fully healthy in two years, and a player with his skill set is more reliant on having healthy feet and legs than a plodding slugger at first base or DH. But $10.5 million is practically peanuts, and the Angels are getting even more of a discount than the associated risk entails. Over 2017 and ’18, he hit .285/.333/.419 to go with his typical sterling defense, enough to combine for over 10 WAR. The Twins may not get that player, but they’re also not paying for that player; if you pay 2018 Andrelton Simmons on merit, $10.5 million would be long gone before you even get to the All-Star break.

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It was a busy day for free agent infielders yesterday. A flurry of moves saw Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, and Tommy La Stella find new homes in Toronto, Minnesota, and San Francisco, respectively. Those big names overshadowed a couple of smaller signings that occurred earlier in the day. Cleveland re-signed Cesar Hernandez to a one-year, $5 million deal with a club option for 2022, while Baltimore signed Hernandez’s former double-play partner, Freddy Galvis, to a one-year, $1.5 million contract.

Both switch-hitting infielders came up through the Phillies farm system and established themselves at the major league level around the same time. Galvis left the Phillies in 2018 and bounced from San Diego to Toronto to Cincinnati over the last two years. Hernandez lasted in Philadelphia a little longer; 2020 was his first season on a new team. Both are defensively-minded infielders who have holes in their offense that have held them back from bringing in a bigger payday.

Hernandez is clearly the better of the two. He’s the reigning AL Gold Glove winner at second base and has quietly been one of the better second basemen in the league since claiming a full-time role in 2015. During that window, he’s sixth in the majors in WAR among qualified second basemen, accumulating 14.3 wins. Last year, Cleveland signed him to a one-year, $6.25 million deal to be their primary second baseman. That deal worked out nicely and they’ve returned to the same well, albeit with a new shortstop installed to his right — either Amed Rosario or Andrés Giménez.

His keen eye at the plate has always been the strongest part of his offensive profile, but he saw his walk rate dip to 6.7% in 2019 after posting a 11.1% rate over the previous four years. The most confusing aspect of his 2019 was his swing rate. He was much more aggressive at the plate, upping his swing rate to 45.5%. That would explain why his walk rate fell but he made enough contact with all those additional swings that his strikeout rate actually fell, though it didn’t offset the lack of free passes. Last Fall, Tony Wolfe wrote about Hernandez’s slipping plate discipline in his final year in Philadelphia:

“There is some real head-scratching to be done over Hernández’s 2019 season, but the numbers we’ve seen seem to indicate this year saw him employ a completely different approach from the one he’d used throughout his career. That provides an easy excuse for his struggles, but it also makes him more difficult to project. His changes resulted in a few positives, but overall, they didn’t make him a better hitter.”

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When Eric Longnhagen wrote up Daulton Jefferies for last year’s Oakland A’s Top Prospects list, he cited a “plus, upper-80s changeup and plus command” as the now–25-year-old right-hander’s primary attributes. That combination helped earn Jefferies a cup of big-league coffee last September, and it has him projected as a member of Oakland’s starting rotation for the upcoming season.

Drafted 37th overall out of Cal-Berkley in 2016 — he underwent Tommy John surgery that same year — Jefferies is atypical among young, modern-day pitchers in that he stands just six-foot (and weighs 195 pounds) and is neither data-savvy nor a flamethrower. His fastball sits a relatively pedestrian 93–95 mph, and the spin rates on his array of pitches remain a mystery to him. Then there is the strangest thing of all: Jefferies features a no-seam repertoire.

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David Laurila: What is your full repertoire, and what is your best pitch?

Daulton Jefferies: “I have four- and two-seam fastballs, a changeup, a slider, and a cutter. My best pitch is my changeup.”

Laurila: What makes it effective?

Jefferies: “I think it’s more of a tunneling thing. You want everything to look like a fastball for as long as possible — Gerrit Cole does that really well, [Jacob] deGrom, [Max] Scherzer, all those guys — and mine has good depth. It’s also really hard; it’s like 87 to 90 [mph] and I can run it up to 90 at times. The only time I get in trouble is when it flattens out and basically becomes a straight fastball. Most of the time, it’s my go-to pitch, right-on-right. It’s my baby.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays had already made a splash in free agency, signing George Springer to a six-year deal last week. They added to their haul yesterday, signing Marcus Semien to a one-year, $18 million contract, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Most of the deals that have gone through so far this offseason have exceed both Craig Edwards’ projections and our crowdsourced estimates. It’s been a slow offseason, sure, but not an abnormal one when it comes to the players who have actually signed. Semien breaks that trend, and it’s worth looking back at his career to see how we ended up here.

Stop your tape after 2018, and Semien looked like a competent but unspectacular regular. His batting line was almost metronomic — 97 wRC+ in 2015, 98 in ‘16, 97 in ‘17, and 97 again in ‘18. There were glimmers of something interesting going on — his strikeout rate kept dipping, he increased his contact rate without sacrificing power, and he put the ball in the air to the pull side frequently. Still, at some point you are what you are, and Semien looked like an average hitter.

One very interesting thing happened to Semien in 2018, however. He’d long been regarded as a defensive liability, both by the eye test and by advanced defensive metrics. From 2013 to 2017, DRS pegged him as 8 runs below average at shortstop, while UZR was far more pessimistic at 20 runs below average. Worse than average (for a shortstop) with his glove, roughly average with his bat — Semien looked like a league average player, a nice but forgettable piece for the A’s.

In 2018, Semien’s defense suddenly improved. It’s possible that it was already headed that way, that opinion (and noisy statistics) lagged reality. In 2015, the A’s went full Brad-Pitt-in-Moneyball and brought in Ron Washington to teach Semien defense, and it worked. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday afternoon, the Phillies answered one of the biggest questions of their offseason in decidedly positive fashion, reportedly coming to terms with J.T. Realmuto on a five-year, $115.5 million contract. A physical is still pending, but the contract will keep Realmuto in Philly until the end of the 2025 season assuming all goes well. The number-one free agent in our offseason top 50, Realmuto’s signing removes the best option for anyone looking to make a race-changing upgrade at catcher.

The Philadelphia Phillies and JT Realmuto are in agreement on a 5 year $115.5 million dollar contract. Pending physical. Per source.

— Craig Mish (@CraigMish) January 26, 2021

It’s hard to overstate Realmuto’s importance to the Phillies. Indeed, his presence is so crucial that if Philadelphia were for some reason only able to retain one of him or Bryce Harper, I’d have to choose Realmuto, a two-time All-Star who has led the team in WAR over the last two seasons. Harper’s a very fine player and will likely still be in baseball years after Realmuto retires, but the short-term alternatives behind the plate looked bleak if the organization had had to scramble for a Plan B. There’s no combination of Andrew Knapp, Rafael Marchan, and non-roster invitee Christian Bethancourt that would have given the Phillies a fighting chance to avoid being near the bottom of the league at the position. Nor would the free agent options have provided a panacea; James McCann, Jason Castro, and Kurt Suzuki are already gone, and Yadier Molina is ancient.

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In a rare swap between rivals, the Yankees sent reliever Adam Ottavino to Boston on Monday, along with pitcher Frank German, in return for future considerations. Also heading to Boston was $850,000 to defray part of Ottavino’s $8 million salary for the 2020 season, the final year of the three-year contract he signed to leave the Rockies after 2018.

Ottavino, one of the Yankees’ top relievers in 2019, had decidedly mixed results last year, putting up a 3.52 FIP but an ERA of nearly six. While Ottavino’s .375 BABIP is almost certainly a bit of bad luck — historically, non-pitchers dragooned into throwing innings have a BABIP in the .330 range — there are a few negative indicators to send us the opposite direction in evaluating him. His contact numbers were down, with nearly career-worsts in contact rate and swinging strikes, and when he was hit in 2020, he was walloped, with a five-mph bump in the average exit velocity. Yes, we’re only talking 50 batted ball events, but a 50% hard-hit rate, even in such a small sample, is a significant deviation from the 29% rate from the previous two seasons.

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Enrique Hernández’s phone should have been busy over the last three months, because he’s the kind of player every team has a roster spot for. If you have a hole in your lineup at second base, third base, or any outfield spot, consider Hernández. If your starting infield is set but you need a good replacement off the bench, consider Hernández. If your starting outfield is set but you want a backup who can capably man center, consider Hernández. If you simply want to add a veteran with loads of postseason experience to your clubhouse, consider Hernández. It is impossible not to find a use for one of the few players who can play every position in the field (minus catcher) and whose asking price is modest enough that even Pittsburgh could afford it. The only question is whether Hernández will hit.

The Red Sox believe he will, signing Hernández to a two-year contract worth $14 million on Friday — the only multi-year deal the team has handed out this winter. Boston reportedly agreed to terms with the former Dodger after missing out on Jurickson Profar, a similarly versatile player who signed with San Diego for the same AAV but for one additional year. As noted over on The Athletic, Hernández could address either of Boston’s two most glaring needs at second base or in center field and provide assistance at any other spot at which he might be needed.

Red Sox fans are no stranger to having a Swiss Army Knife on the roster. That same role was occupied for most of the last decade by Brock Holt, before he signed with Milwaukee a year ago. Like Hernández, Holt was able to log lots of playing time by providing serviceable defense everywhere on the field. But while Holt’s lack of pop limited his potential to be an impact hitter, the same can’t be said about Hernández, who has a .195 ISO going back to 2017. That power has had a knack for showing up in big moments during his playoff career, including two different game-tying homers in last year’s NLCS, one of which was a pinch-hit dinger in Game 7.

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There are baseball stars, there are heroes and legends, and then there is Henry Aaron. The slugging right fielder is remembered mainly for surpassing Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record on April 8, 1974, but even that crowning achievement obscures the all-around excellence and remarkable consistency he demonstrated during his 23-year major league career.

What’s more, Aaron’s accomplishments can most fully be appreciated only with an understanding of the racism he encountered throughout his life and his career, as a Black man who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues, who became a star before half of the teams in the National League had integrated and a champion before the last teams in the American League did so, who emerged as a force for civil rights while becoming the first Black star on the first major league team in the Deep South, who surpassed the most hallowed record produced by the game’s most famous player while facing a nearly unimaginable barrage of hate mail and death threats, and who broke down further barriers after his retirement, as one of the game’s first Black executives and as a critic of the lack of diversity among managers and executives.

More than a Hall of Famer, Aaron was a true titan, an American icon in his own right. Sadly, he is the latest Hall of Famer in an unrelenting stretch to pass away. News of his death was announced on Friday morning, four days after that of Don Sutton, 15 days after that of Tommy Lasorda, and 27 days after that of former teammate Phil Niekro. He was 86 years old, and had been in the news earlier this month as he received a COVID-19 vaccination.

“Hank Aaron was one of the best baseball players we’ve ever seen and one of the strongest people I’ve ever met,” said former president Barack Obama in a statement released on Friday. Former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush paid tributes in statements as well, as did President Joe Biden:

President @JoeBiden on #HankAaron’s legacy: “As a nation, we will still chase the better version of ourselves that he set for us.” pic.twitter.com/xL7AESxaek

— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) January 23, 2021

While Aaron’s story is often cast as that of a man overcoming or ignoring racism and hatred to achieve greatness with quiet dignity, it does the man a disservice to soften his edges and diminish the pain that he felt, and the scars that he bore — particularly given that he did not do so in silence. Surpassing Ruth “was supposed to be the greatest triumph of my life, but I was never allowed to enjoy it. I couldn’t wait for it to be over,” he once said. “The only reason that some people didn’t want me to succeed was because I was a Black man.” Read the rest of this entry »