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

Jarren Duran, CF, Boston Red Sox
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Worcester   Age: 24   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR, 2 K

Notes
This is the kind of thing you like to see from a guy who clearly underwent a swing change last year but wasn’t able to play in actual games to show us if it was going to have a meaningful impact. In fact, when Duran went to Puerto Rico for winter ball after spending the summer at the alt site, he failed to hit for power there as well. Now he already has three homers in 2021, which is just two shy of his single-season career high. As he’s doing this, Duran is also striking out 33% of the time, a far cry from the ultra-low rates that helped make him a prospect in the first place. It’s rare for a prospect this old to be such a high-variance player. We’re all learning about how Duran’s swing change is going to alter his output in real time. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities. Read the rest of this entry »

On February 18, the Reds signed outfielder Tyler Naquin to a minor league contract with a non-roster invitation to major league spring training. It’s not the kind of transaction that generally generates analysis here at FanGraphs. It was just a standard depth move at the time, the kind of signing every team makes multiples of every off-season. Flash forward nearly three months later, and after an impressive spring training, Naquin is among the top 15 in wRC+ in the National League and part of the best offense in the senior circuit. The Reds utilize a daily strategy of trying to outslug their opponent to make up for what has been a miserable pitching staff, and the results so far have them hovering around .500.

Hot stars happen all the time, and while one week should be readily dismissed as a small sample not worthy of any kind of real scrutiny, a month merits looking into. Where did the player come from? Has anything changed? Is this sustainable? In Naquin’s case, the answers are a bit murky.

Naquin’s background is unique. The 2012 draft was weak in terms of college position players, but Naquin was nonetheless the second one selected at 15th overall. And while there was much debate over his ability to stay in center field, as well as his ultimate power ceiling, scouts were universal in their praise for the Texas A&M product’s hit tool after he led the Big 12 conference in batting average during each of his final two years as an Aggie.

His minor league career was filled with good-but-not-great seasons as he moved up the ladder (probably more slowly than Cleveland anticipated), but he got the call in 2016 and showed unexpected power on his way to 2.1 WAR in 116 games. It’s a figure he’s yet to match, as the following years were defined by injuries and inconsistent performance that saw him waver between fourth outfielder and Quad-A status. Out of time, and out of patience, Naquin was suddenly a six-year free agent looking for work this winter. The Reds offered him the best deal in terms of the combination of money and opportunity, and he’s certainly taken advantage of it. Read the rest of this entry »

First, a bit of history:

The major league annals include just two players born in Slovakia. One of them is Elmer Valo, an outfielder for six teams from 1940-1961 who hailed from the village of Rybnik. The other is Jack Quinn (born Johannes Pajkos), a pitcher for eight teams from 1909-1933 who drew his first breaths 333 kilometers away in Štefurov. Both came to the United States at a young age, their families settling in the Pennsylvania.

Adam Macko hopes to follow in their footsteps, albeit via pathways. A native of Bratislava, Slovakia, Macko moved to Stoney Plain, Alberta, Canada when he was 12 years old — a year in Ireland bridging the Atlantic journey — and then to the southern part of the province where he spent three years at the Vauxhall Baseball Academy before being selected by Seattle in the seventh round of the 2019 draft.

Profile-wise, Macko is more finesse than power, albeit not by a wide margin. The 20-year-old called himself “a command lefty” when offering a self scouting report, but that belies a velocity jump that saw him clocked as high as 97 mph in spring training. In his first start of the season, Macko sat 92-96 with his four-seamer while hurling four scoreless innings for the Low-A Modesto Nuts. Mixing and matching effectively, the southpaw set down seven Stockton Ports batters on strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on our partially crowd-run Out Of The Park Baseball team, the season wasn’t yet underway. We spent the offseason building pitching depth after a nightmarish injury season left us with a bullpen made of duct tape and late-season callups. In an effort to avoid a recurrence of that problem, we came into this season with pitching depth that could best be described as excessive.

Even after trading Eric Lauer (more on that in a second), the team went seven deep on starters: Brandon Woodruff, Kevin Gausman, Collin McHugh, Freddy Peralta, Adrian Houser, Corbin Burnes, and Brent Suter are all at least candidates for a rotation spot. Surely, I (and you) reasoned, that depth will sustain us even if injuries become a problem again.

Good news: through 42 games, injuries haven’t been a problem. Our top five starters have made all 42 starts, though virtual Adrian Houser is headed for the bullpen unless he turns things around quickly; his 10.64 ERA isn’t reflective of his true talent, but his 9.25 FIP isn’t exactly a great sign. He’s become a two-pitch pitcher in this simulation, so a swap with Suter might suit both.
Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. 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.

I love wonky early-season slash lines, the kinds of combinations that make you scratch your head and consider what exactly had to happen to get to this point. It’s pretty easy to put Yasmani Grandal’s start in that category: Through 22 games and 91 plate appearances, Grandal is hitting .113/.378/.242, slugging two homers and posting a… 102 wRC+?!?

Yes, you read that correctly. Through games on Sunday, Grandal has just seven hits and has the worst batting average among players with at least 80 trips to the plate. And yet he’s also managed to be an above-average hitter by wRC+. There’s truly some wild stuff going on here.

Of course, none of this is sustainable. Grandal has faced some pretty horrible BABIP luck, and as Dan Szymborski noted in his article yesterday, he is the fourth-largest underachiever in actual BABIP (.119) versus ZiPS-developed zBABIP (.261). Plug that figure into his balls-in-play total and you’d find that Grandal should have more than 13 hits this season, giving him a more-respectable-though-still-not-great .210 batting average.

But what is most interesting about Grandal’s start isn’t that he’s faced such poor BABIP luck; it’s that he has still managed to be a productive hitter in spite of it. Grandal has walked a whopping 27 times to start the season, a near-30% walk rate and a figure that leads baseball by a rather healthy margin. As of this writing, Max Muncy is the only other player who has amassed more than 50 plate appearances with a walk rate above 20%, and he’s still more than six points behind Grandal. Since 1901, Grandal’s 27 walks in his 22 games are tied for the 16th-most walks in any player’s first 22 to begin a season, but he’s one of just five players to do that while also batting under .150. Read the rest of this entry »

First base is an offense-first position. Sure, it’s great to have a first baseman who is handy with the glove and can scoop errant throws, but by and large, it’s a position for sluggers. Even though the position supplied both of last season’s MVPs — Freddie Freeman and José Abreu — it’s production doesn’t hold up as strongly as it has compared to previous years. From 2018 through the 2021 season thus far, first basemen have averaged a 108 wRC+ compared to an average wRC+ of 115 over the 2000-17 seasons.

There are plenty of teams suffering from lackluster production at first base but I want to highlight two of them: the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays. The Brewers have managed a measly 68 wRC+ and -0.5 WAR, with contributions mostly from the duo of Keston Hiura (who is now in Triple-A) and Daniel Vogelbach. The Rays have been a bit better with a wRC+ of 82 and -0.1 WAR. These aren’t the worst teams in the majors at first base but they do share something in common; they once had Jesús Aguilar under team control and let him go.

In his tenure with the Marlins after being selected off waivers on December 2, 2019, Aguilar has solidified himself as the team’s primary first baseman, slashing .254/.356/.469 with 14 homers across his two seasons (the stats in this piece are through May 9); that’s good for 126 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR. This season has been particularly good to Aguilar so far. He’s slashing .269/.363/.490 and is in the top 10 in the majors among first basemen in wRC+ (9th) and WAR (9th). Not bad for a waiver pickup! I make mention of his previous clubs’ oversight not to shame them; it’s not the first time a valuable player has been overlooked. But his path to the player he is today is a unique one. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Bryce Johnson, CF, San Francisco Giants
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Sacramento  Age: 25   Org Rank: NR   FV: 35
Line: 5-for-5, 2 2B

Notes
Johnson was a 2017 sixth round pick out of Sam Houston State, his draft stock driven by his above-average speed, terrific baseball frame, and feel for the strike zone. His career .271/.358/.361 line in the minors perfectly illustrates his offensive skillset and flaws. He’s the sort of hitter who can be a bench outfielder if he can play a dynamic center field, where Johnson is closer to average. While the hitting environment in Las Vegas (where Sacramento spent their first six games) likely aided Johnson’s incredible start to the year (.684/.727/1.263 with five multi-hit games in six days), his swing is clearly different now than it was in 2019, so maybe he will actually hit for some more power now. His stride is quite a bit longer now than it was when we last saw him and the bigger move forward has made his swing a little more athletic. Johnson’s back foot is coming off the ground close to the time of contact, not something you’d see with his last swing’s more conservative footwork. It’s too early to re-evaluate an older hitter like this, and even if this change proves to be meaningful, Johnson is still probably just a bench player, but it might be the difference between him getting a cup of coffee at some point or not. Read the rest of this entry »

We are reaching peak levels of Shohei Ohtani early in the 2021 season. The true two-way play we were teased with in 2018 is now on full display, with both hitting and pitching in the same game. But as incredible as the hitting has been, there are still questions about Ohtani’s performance as a pitcher: In 18.2 innings, he has somehow pitched to a 2.41 ERA and 3.96 FIP despite a 22% walk rate that is third worst in the league among pitchers with 10 innings or more. Yet in the midst of massive control issues and everything he’s doing at the plate, Ohtani is continuing to develop as a pitcher, adding a multi-faceted cutter to the pitch mix.

There’s a Jekyll and Hyde nature that comes about even within Ohtani’s starts. Take a look at his April 26 outing in Texas to see what I’m talking about.

Updating Ohtani's night on the mound…

1st inning: 4 runs, 2 hits, 2 walks, HBP, 1 K, 11/29 strikes
Since: 0 runs, 1 hit, 0 walks, 8 Ks, 30/46 strikes https://t.co/H9xcc9hH6i

— Jack Harris (@ByJackHarris) April 27, 2021

Something obviously clicked after the first, and all was well again. But looking at his pitch usage that night tells a story itself about where Ohtani is in his development as a pitcher.

It’s an overly simple bit of visualization, and it should be pretty clear what’s going on: Ohtani is largely only comfortable with the fastball and splitter. You can see that the slider, curveball and cutter barely feature, with the latter two popping up in the first inning but not after and the slider appearing only in the fifth and sixth. That’s in line with his career (70 innings) to date: fastball (52% usage), splitter (21%), slider (12%), curve (6%), and cutter (7%). Not that there isn’t precedent for a pitcher who can live primarily off of a four-seam/splitter mix (cf. Kevin Gausman), but it’s a dangerous line for a starter to walk, especially with Ohtani’s command as is.

Read the rest of this entry »