Non-roster invitation season is prime time to Remember Some Guys, players who had their moments in the sun in some hazy but not-so-distant past before slipping beneath the radar for one reason or another. A subset of those Some Guys are left-handed pitchers, and as discussed here previously, lefties who can throw strikes have a chance to stick around forever, at least in this NRI limbo if not on a major league roster or, at the very least, its fringes. Within this subset one finds Scott Kazmir, a onetime fireballer who last appeared in the majors with the Dodgers in 2016. The now 37-year-old lefty agreed to terms on a minor league deal — and of course the requisite NRI — with the Giants earlier this week.

Kazmir, a 12-year veteran and three-time All-Star who owns a career 108-96 mark with a 4.01 ERA, 4.01 FIP, and 25.2 WAR, is no stranger to comeback attempts. After his career deteriorated during his run with the Angels, the former Mets-prospect-turned-Devil-Rays-phenom was released following his lone appearance in April 2011; he was still owed nearly $14.5 million through the following season. Just 27 years old when he was released, Kazmir overhauled his mechanics, restored some lost velocity, spent a season with the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League, and resurfaced with Cleveland in 2013. Thus began a four-year, four-team run during which he was nearly as effective as ever, posting a 3.75 ERA and 3.79 FIP in 667.2 innings with additional stops with the A’s, Astros, and Dodgers. In that time, he made his third All-Star team and landed a pair of lucrative multiyear deals: a two-year, $22 million one with Oakland after the 2013 season, and then a three-year, $48 million one with the Dodgers two years later.

Alas, back and neck issues limited Kazmir to 136.1 innings with a 4.56 ERA and 4.48 FIP in 2016 with the Dodgers, including just one inning on September 23 after a month-long absence. Tightness in his left hip forced him to shut down in the spring of 2017, and he managed just 12 innings, all during abortive rehab stints at High-A Rancho Cucamonga, for the entire season. In December of that year, he was traded to the Braves as part of a five-player deal that brought Matt Kemp back to Los Angeles but mostly amounted to two teams shuffling bad paper for Competitive Balance Tax purposes. Though at one point Kazmir appeared on track to make the Braves out of spring training in 2018, diminished velocity and a bout of arm fatigue led to his late-March release. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that strikeouts are at an all-time high. Nor is it a secret that not every strikeout is “just another out.” Balls in play can advance baserunners, and that’s especially important when the 90 feet being traversed is from third to home. What fan, or manager, doesn’t bemoan one of the team’s hitters going down by way of the K with a man on third and less than two out? It’s an opportunity wasted, one that often leads to a squander.

Save for the rare occasions when a batter reaches on a wild pitch or a passed ball, a strikeout is also a guaranteed out. Making contact — even weak contact — at least gives you a chance. While last year’s .292 BABIP was baseball’s lowest in nearly three decades, that’s still markedly better than than the infinitesimal odds of taking first base on a punch-out. Moreover, fielders make errors. In short, contact matters.

Given MLB’s ever-increasing strikeout rate, I asked six managers a simple, straightforward question: Is the ability to hit with two strikes an undervalued asset in today’s game?

———

Bud Black, Colorado Rockies

“It’s been undervalued in the history of the game. It’s probably lessened a little bit more [as] something that has been talked about. I think, more so than ever, because of the stuff today, it’s harder to hit with two strikes, especially the velocities that we’re talking about. The breaking pitches. The secondary pitches. The quality of those pitches. The swing-and-miss that’s happening now is a combination of maybe not shortening your swing, and maybe the stuff is that good to where it’s tough to make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve presumably had some time to think about the enormity of the extension that Fernando Tatis Jr. signed last week. Fourteen years! Three hundred and forty million dollars! An excuse for me to use exclamation points! It’s such a huge deal, it would almost be unthinkable not to have spent a silly amount of time thinking about it.

As for me, I’ve thought a lot about it in a theoretical sense. You can math out the contract and say that our best estimates show the Padres getting meaningful value from it, which I did using Dan Szymborski’s projections. You can think about Tatis’ place in the pantheon of great young hitters, as Jay Jaffe did. You can think about the team-building implications of locking up a young star for so long. I decided to answer a different question, though: Why haven’t more players and teams agreed to these massive extensions so early in the arbitration process or even before it starts?

If you think that the Padres overpaid, this isn’t the article for you. I’m ignoring that outcome, because if that’s the case, we have an answer. Teams don’t try these deals because they’re negative value in expectation. That’s an unsatisfying answer, though. If you think that, imagine Tatis were good enough to merit the deal — give him Mike Trout’s numbers, let’s say — and indulge me in this one. Read the rest of this entry »

You probably haven’t thought about the Padres’ bullpen in a while, and you’d be forgiven for that. Most of the high-profile additions they’ve made in the last several months have come in the starting rotation. The other big moves, such as trading for Austin Nola and signing Ha-seong Kim, have been upgrades to the lineup. Oh, and there’s that whole record-setting contract they just gave to their 22-year-old superstar.

All of that has overshadowed the fact that the turnover in San Diego’s relief staff lately has been extreme. Seven of the team’s top eight projected relievers on our Depth Charts page were not on the roster at the end of the 2019 season. Like the rest of the Padres, though, that turnover has resulted in a unit that now looks like one of the best in baseball. It’s worth getting caught up, then, on who the newest arrivals are, who has recently departed, and where that leaves the group as a whole.

San Diego did a lot of its heavy lifting last offseason and at the trade deadline, but the team signed two notable big leaguers in the last few weeks. One was Mark Melancon, the 35-year-old veteran who will join the eighth team of his soon-to-be 13-year big league career. Melancon became famous at the back of Pittsburgh’s bullpen in the mid-2010s when his cutter made him one of the game’s most dominant closers for a few years, bringing about the obligatory comparisons to Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera. From 2013 to ’16, he threw 290 innings with a 1.80 ERA and 2.25 FIP, all while throwing his cutter about 67% of the time. After that, he landed a big contract with the Giants, who traded him to the Braves at the deadline in 2019. Melancon wasn’t as good over the past four seasons as the four previous, but he still managed to pitch effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

Shin-Soo Choo’s seven-year contract with the Rangers didn’t end the way anyone wanted it to, either in the grand scheme or the specifics. In a season already shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic, he missed additional time due to oblique and calf strains, then sprained his right hand on September 7. He recovered in time to return to the lineup for the season’s final game, beat out a bunt to lead off the home half of the first inning… and then sprained his left ankle tripping over first base. D’oh!

Alas, that might have been the final play of Choo’s major league career. Though the 38-year-old outfielder/DH sought a contract for the 2021 season and had interest from as many as eight teams (some of them contenders), earlier this week he agreed to return to his native South Korea via a one-year deal with the SK Wyverns of the Korea Baseball Organization. “I want to play in Korea because I want to play in front of my parents and I want to give back to Korean fans,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Jeff Wilson.

Read the rest of this entry »

DL Hall isn’t No. 83 on our 2021 Top 100 Prospects list because of his command. Then again, he sort of is. With a better grasp of the strike zone than he’s shown, the 22-year-old left-hander would be ranked much higher. Since being drafted 21st overall by the Baltimore Orioles in 2017, Hall has walked just over five batters per nine innings.

But then there’s the power arsenal. These words, written by Eric Longenhagen, help explain why the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Hall has a chance to one day dominate hitters at the highest level:

“Ultra-competitive, athletic southpaws with this kind of stuff are very rare. Here’s the list of lefty big league starters who throw harder than Hall, who averaged 94.9 mph on his fastball in 2019: Jesús Luzardo, Blake Snell. That’s it.”

———

David Laurila: Lets start with something Eric Longenhagen wrote in your prospect profile. Is “ultra-competitive” a good way to describe you?

DL Hall: “I do think that I’m a super-competitive guy. Everybody that steps in the box, I try to own. I like winning, and I hate losing.”

Laurila: Do you hate losing to the extent that it actually bothers you?

Hall: “That’s a tough question. It definitely bothers me, but I’ve also learned how to learn from it, if that makes sense. I learn from losses now, versus dwelling on them.” Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in mid-November, when the free agent market was still moving at a glacial pace, the Braves signed Drew Smyly to a one-year deal worth $11 million. After years of injury issues, Smyly finally appeared to be (relatively) healthy in 2020. He increased the velocity on each of his pitches by 2.6 mph, helping him post the highest strikeout rate and lowest FIP of his career, though it came in just 26.1 innings.

Eleven million dollars might seem like a bit much for an injury-prone starter who showed the briefest glimpse of a breakout last year, at least on a relative basis. Corey Kluber signed for $11 million; Garrett Richards got $10 million; and James Paxton signed for $8.5 million. If healthy, each of those other starters likely has more upside than Smyly. Still, Atlanta was willing to take the chance in the hopes that Smyly’s velocity holds and portends a bigger breakout in 2021.

Fast forward a few months and Atlanta is again betting on another injury-prone player who had a mini-resurgence in 2020. This time around the money risked is even lower. On Sunday, the Braves brought in Jake Lamb on a one-year, non-guaranteed, major league deal worth $1 million.

Since 2017, Lamb has played in just 165 games, with a major shoulder injury and a quad injury sidelining him for much of the ’18 and ’19 seasons, respectively. During those two years, his wRC+ hovered right around 78 and the power he displayed during his breakout seasons in 2016 and ’17 was glaringly absent. For the first 18 games of the 2020 season, the same struggles persisted. After limping to just a 14 wRC+ in 50 plate appearances, the Diamondbacks cut him loose on September 10. Five days later, he signed with the Athletics after Matt Chapman went down with a season-ending hip injury. With the A’s, Lamb looked completely rejuvenated, slugging three home runs in 13 games and posting a 141 wRC+.

Anyone can look good over a 13-game stretch, but for Lamb, it was a glimpse at what could be if his body was healthy again. His average exit velocity was right in line with what he had posted in years past, over half the balls he put in play came off the bat at 95 mph or higher, and his barrel rate was 10.8% in Oakland. But even though his power returned in this tiny sample, the excellent plate discipline skills he’s shown in the past disappeared.

It’s nearly impossible to glean anything from Lamb’s performance in Oakland, let alone take anything away from the combined 99 plate appearances between the A’s and the Diamondbacks. But the Braves felt like they had a need on their roster and were confident enough in Lamb’s health to bring him in for spring training. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley preview the 2021 Athletics with Alex Coffey of The Athletic and the 2021 Phillies (30:13) with Matt Gelb of The Athletic.

Audio intro: The Divine Comedy, "Come Home Billy Bird"
Audio interstitial: George Harrison, "Stuck Inside a Cloud"
Audio outro: The Apples in Stereo, "Play Tough"

Link to Alex on Beane
Link to Alex on players’ reactions to Semien leaving
Link to Ken Rosenthal on Semien’s exit
Link to Alex on Oakland’s offseason and finances
Link to Alex on the 1955 Mays/Aaron exhibition team
Link to Sam on the Phillies’ rebuild
Link to Matt on the Phillies’ revamped player dev
Link to Matt on the Phillies’ rebuilt bullpen
Link to Matt on Kingery
Link to Matt on Fuld’s promotion
Link to Matt on Dombrowski’s front office
Link to Matt on Harper and the Phillies’ offseason
Link to R.J. Anderson on Mathis
Link to Matt on the Phillies’ outfield failures
Link to Matt on the Phillies’ new roster

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“Already a physical presence as a teenager, Veen has big power potential and a pretty left-handed swing to go with a plus arm that should serve him well in right field.”

Those words, written by Eric Longenhagen, lead Zac Veen’s profile in our recently-released 2021 Top 100 Prospects list. The 19-year-old outfielder came in at No. 70, which is especially impressive when you consider that he’s yet to play a game — Fall Instructional League notwithstanding — at the professional level. A Port Orange, Florida native, Veen was drafted ninth overall last year by the Colorado Rockies.

Another quote from Longenhagen’s writeup bears noting: “His in-the-box actions are quiet and smooth up until the moment he decides to unleash hell on the baseball.” In short, the 6-foot-5, 210-pound Veen profiles as a middle-of-the-order slugger if he approaches his full potential.

———

David Laurila: I’ll start with a question I’ve asked several hitters over the years: Do you see hitting as more of an art, or more of a science?

Zac Veen: “For me, it’s more of an art. I’m more of a feel hitter and don’t really get into a lot of the analytics. Guys who look at a lot of video… I’d say it’s more of a science to them, but I like to stay away from a lot of that stuff. It can be helpful, but for the most part I’m more of a feel, see how the ball comes off the bat kind of guy.”

Laurila: It’s pretty common for young hitters to go into a cage and use technology when working to fine-tune their swings. Have you done that at all?

Veen: “I’ve tried it, my junior year of high school, but that caused me to overthink things a little bit. I’d take a really good swing, then I’d look at the video and be like, ‘Oh, wow, I can do this differently,’ instead of just being happy with a line drive to centerfield. That’s not something I want to do. When I take a good swing, I want to just be happy with it, and not be too picky about anything.”

Laurila: Is the swing you have right now, at age 19, essentially the same swing you had a few years ago, or has it evolved? Read the rest of this entry »