Andy McKay oversees one of the best farm systems in the game. Seattle’s Director of Player Development does so with a sports-psychology background — McKay has an MBA in Organizational Behavior Studies — as well as a deep appreciation for data and technology. The former college coach is anything but old school when it comes to developing young talent. Case in point: Mariners prospects have their regularly-revisited player plans put together not by coaches, but by analysts.

In Part One of a wide-ranging interview, McKay addresses several of his philosophies, as well as how the Mariners are approaching development without a minor league season.

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David Laurila: We’re talking on July 26, 2020. What is the state of the Mariners farm system right now?

Andy McKay: “We’re really excited about where we’re at, both in terms of our department — the people we’re employing, and the process we’ve created — and the players we have in our system. Those things are moving along at a really good clip. We’re continuing to move the needle forward, even through COVID-19.”

Laurila: How exactly are you moving forward with no minor league season?

McKay: “We made the decision to turn our taxi squad into a very heavy prospect-based camp. If you look at who is down in Tacoma right now… not to mention we had, I think, four players make their major league debuts yesterday. We’re the youngest team in the big leagues. So we have the 10-week program going on, like all the other clubs, and then we’ve got things going on individually, all over the country with our players. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m biased, but I think summer in Vancouver can be one of the most beautiful seasons anywhere in the world. The rainforest, having spent the autumn, winter, and spring growing lush under the cover of clouds and rain, shines rich green under the sun, illuminated by the light coming off the ocean. It’s hot, but not overwhelmingly so. On some days, you can look out over the water and see the spout of a humpback whale or the dark, swift-moving fins of a transient orca pod. And at sunset, the bright place where the sky and the ocean meet seem to go on forever.

In the summer of 2017, fires engulfed the Pacific Northwest. There was record heat; record time passed between rainfalls. I spent that summer working in a basement shop, bitter and sad, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase at the end of every day, I would often see a sky choked thick with ash and smoke, the sun swollen and red. Everything that was normally so vibrant was cast over with a dull haze. It was sometimes difficult to breathe. I thought, at the time, that it seemed apocalyptic: the reality of climate change clearly visible above me, around me, hanging in the air itself.

That was the summer Nate Pearson came to town.

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The Vancouver Canadians are the Blue Jays’ short-season affiliate, playing in the Northwest League. Baseball has a long, diverse history in Vancouver, though the city isn’t exactly baseball-crazy. Back when the Canadians were a Triple-A franchise, affiliated most recently with the A’s, there were some pretty lean years in terms of attendance and interest. But a renovation of their ballpark, the 68-year-old Nat Bailey Stadium, and affiliation with the recently-successful Blue Jays has made the franchise one of the healthiest and most well-attended in the minor leagues. The banners around the stadium show some of the Canadians alumni who are currently successful major leaguers — Kevin Pillar, Marcus Stroman, and Noah Syndergaard, to name a few.

They show, too, the legends who visited and played in Vancouver in days long gone: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who came north on barnstorming trips. Though thoroughly renovated for the demands of a 21st-century baseball team, the Nat is deliberate in making you feel its history. A little museum is tucked into the concourse under the grandstand; the tall wooden scoreboard is a replica of the original, salvaged from the remains of Sick’s Stadium in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Cardinals got some bad news. Miles Mikolas, the team’s second-best pitcher and a valuable source of bulk innings, suffered a setback in dealing with the arm injury that had bothered him all year. He’ll need surgery to repair his flexor tendon, which will keep him out for all of 2020.

After a scintillating 2018 (2.83 ERA, 3.28 FIP, and a sixth-place finish in Cy Young voting), Mikolas came back to earth slightly in 2019. Even then, his pinpoint control and ability to coax grounders out of opposing batters gave him an excellent floor. While a 4.16 ERA might not sound impressive, it was better than league average in this homer-crazed era, and 184 innings of average pitching is hugely valuable.

The Cardinals came into this season with a competition for starting spots, but Mikolas wasn’t one of the competitors. He and Jack Flaherty would provide the guaranteed quality atop the rotation, while Adam Wainwright, Dakota Hudson, Carlos Martínez, Daniel Ponce de Leon, and Kwang Hyun Kim battled it out for the remaining three slots.

If there’s good news in Mikolas’s injury, it’s that deep bench of starting options. They’re all worse than Mikolas — all worse by a decent margin — but all five look to be quality major league options, which softens the blow. Ponce de Leon, who will take the hill today, made spot starts in 2018 and 2019 with solid results. We project him to be roughly 0.25 runs of ERA worse than Mikolas, which is hardly an unbridgeable gulf.

The real trouble begins if another Cardinals starter goes down. Kim is still an option, but he currently serves as the team’s closer, which is still a pretty wild sentence to write. The bullpen is already a little short-handed, though that should change as Giovanny Gallegos settles in and Alex Reyes and Génesis Cabrera return to the team. At the moment, however, Kim probably can’t stop closing, which leaves St. Louis in a bind. Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of an outbreak of the coronavirus that has infected 15 Marlins players and two coaches thus far — including four new positive tests reported on Tuesday morning — Major League Baseball showed signs of grasping the gravity of the crisis by backtracking on its previous plan for the team to resume play on Wednesday in Baltimore. Instead, the team’s next two series have been postponed; they won’t play again until at least Tuesday, August 4. The Phillies, whom they faced this past weekend, will be kept out of action until Saturday, August 1 (initially, the plan was for Friday). The postponements affect the Orioles, Yankees, and Nationals, and MLB is in the process of reconfiguring its schedule to absorb the impact of the weekend’s events.

Said MLB in a statement, “Given the current circumstances, MLB believes that it is most prudent to allow the Marlins time to focus on providing care for their players and planning their baseball operations for a resumption early next week.”

The Marlins were initially scheduled to play the Orioles in Miami on Monday and Tuesday, and then in Baltimore on Wednesday and Thursday. In an interview with MLB Network’s Tom Verducci on Monday — by which point the team had at least 13 known infections among players and staff — commissioner Rob Manfred suggested that the Marlins could resume play on Wednesday and Thursday in Baltimore “if the testing results are acceptable.” Even absent Tuesday’s positives, how a double-digit total of infected personnel could be deemed “acceptable” in this context is unclear, but in any case Manfred and the league have seen the light, so now that two-game series has been postponed, as has the Marlins’ three-game set against the Nationals in Miami from July 31-August 2, after which they have a scheduled off day. Per The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, the “vast majority” of Nationals players voted against going to Miami for the series, and while it wasn’t their call to make, it’s noteworthy that the players publicly offered some pushback regarding the league’s plans.

Read the rest of this entry »

Five years ago, gimmick defenses were bush league. I don’t just mean that in the pejorative baseball sense, though of course I mean that too. Rather, I mean that when Sam Miller and Ben Lindbergh were running the Sonoma Stompers, they toyed with adding gimmick defenses to their indy ball team, and the team rebelled. The players tolerated it — not without reservation — but the reason the wild defensive alignments merited mention in the book is because they were wild.

That was 2015, however, and sensibilities have changed since then. Strange defensive alignments are hardly unusual now. Joey Votto faced a four-man outfield in 2017, and it’s gotten weirder from there. Joey Gallo faces four-man outfields with some frequency. Five-ish man infields have sometimes been a thing in do-or-die late game situations, but the Dodgers rolled one out against Eric Hosmer in the middle innings last year.

I know what you’re thinking. Ben’s going to talk about the “seven-man outfield” the Royals used against Miguel Cabrera. I’m not exactly sure that’s a novel defensive alignment, though. Backing up when somebody slow is batting isn’t the same as forfeiting a right fielder or inventing a new position. It was funny, no doubt, the ultimate mark of disrespect for someone’s speed, but teams have been doing something similar to Albert Pujols for years.

Even though the shock of novel positioning has mostly worn off, I did do a double take on Monday night. With the Pirates attempting to lock down a 5-1 win against the Brewers (about that…), Justin Smoak came to bat. The Pirates checked their laminated positioning cards, shuffled around, and presto! Four in the outfield:

Read the rest of this entry »

Corey Kluber’s debut with Texas lasted just one inning. A strikeout, walk, caught stealing, and popup made for a snappy opening frame against Colorado on Sunday, and after 18 pitches, the 34-year-old right-hander’s velocity was right where it has been for years. It seemed like the start of a solid return to the mound for Kluber and an exciting first glimpse for Rangers fans at the team’s biggest offseason addition, but the good vibes faded quickly. Kluber never took the mound for the second inning, with the team quickly citing “tightness in his right shoulder” and saying there would be an update Monday.

The update came, and it wasn’t reassuring — Kluber has a Grade 2 tear of his teres major muscle, an injury that will require him to be shut down for at least four weeks. There is a chance he could miss the entire season, and if he does return at some point, he will need to pitch out of the bullpen, as there won’t be enough time to stretch him back out to handle a starter’s workload.

This is the second consecutive season the two-time Cy Young winner has missed substantial time following several years of him being one of the most durable starters in the game. Kluber threw at least 200 innings every year from 2014-18, racking up the second-highest innings total over that five-year span. That run got busted on a fluke play last spring when Marlins third baseman Brian Anderson hit a line drive that got Kluber in his right arm, causing a non-displaced fracture that ended his season after just seven starts. Read the rest of this entry »

The last time I saw Matt Shoemaker was on the grass, grimacing in pain. It was last year in Oakland; Shoemaker ran over to cover first on a groundball, then crumpled to the ground. He had torn his ACL.

As I wrote then, it was a cruel, unfair freak accident for someone who had seen far too many of those in his career. Shoemaker, though, seemed determined to push through. I was rooting for him to return and succeed. On Saturday, finally, he made his first start in over a year — having, again, overcome adversity to come back to the field.

And though he was making his return in front of an empty stadium, in the middle of a global crisis, it was hard not to give in to the creeping feeling of joy, sneaking in from behind the anxiety. It is wonderful to see someone succeed in spite of everything.

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“Overcoming adversity” is about as tired a baseball cliche as there is. Look deep enough into the background of pretty much any player and you’ll find adversity that was overcome — that’s just the nature of life, and especially the nature of pursuing a career as stressful, all-consuming, and specialized as professional baseball. That’s not to say that these stories aren’t worth hearing: It’s important to understand the lifetimes of effort and struggle that go into the games we watch for entertainment. But flattening every story into a pat tale of “overcoming adversity” doesn’t do justice to the gravity of players’ experiences. Read the rest of this entry »

Less than a week into the 2020 regular season, Major League Baseball has a full-blown crisis on its hands, as the Miami Marlins are in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak that threatens their ability to field a competitive team and calls into question the league’s entire return-to-play effort. On Sunday, the Marlins played the Phillies without three of their regulars or their scheduled starting pitcher, all of whom had tested positive for the coronavirus. On Monday morning, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that eight more players and two coaches had tested positive as well, and on Tuesday The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported four additional players testing positive, bringing the total number of cases over the last five days to 17. Monday and Tuesday’s games involving both the Marlins (who were to play their home opener against the Orioles) and Phillies (who were to host the Yankees) have been postponed, and more may follow.

Needless to say, this is not good.

Even before the Marlins’ outbreak came to light, MLB was unable to make it to the first official pitch of the regular season without a star player testing positive and being scratched from the Opening Day lineup amid questions about testing turnaround time and the protocol for handling exposed players. About five hours before the Yankees’ Aaron Hicks stepped in against Max Scherzer at Nationals Park last Thursday, Washington left fielder Juan Soto was pulled from the lineup due to a lab-confirmed positive test off a saliva sample taken on Sunday — four days earlier — igniting fears that other Nationals had been exposed in the time since he had provided the sample on Tuesday. That Soto had tested negative on three subsequent instant-result tests (both saliva and nasal) further muddied the waters.

The Nationals did not quarantine any additional players after contact tracing Soto’s infection, having determined that “no players or staff were deemed to have met the CDC definition of close contact” — staying within six feet for at least 15 minutes — with Soto. Thankfully, the 20-year-old slugger is reportedly asymptomatic and has received the first of two lab-confirmed negative tests necessary for his return; he will also have to go 72 hours without exhibiting symptoms. The rest of the Nationals reportedly tested negative as of Saturday, and at this writing, the team has reported no further infections.

As for the Marlins, though they hail from a state that has become the epicenter of the pandemic, the team had not experienced a disproportionate number of positive tests between the start of their summer camp and the approach of Opening Day, with only outfielders Lewis Brinson and Matt Joyce landing on the injured list due to undisclosed reasons as of July 16. On Friday, however, just before the their first game against the Phillies in Philadelphia, the Marlins placed catcher Jorge Alfaro on the injured list for undisclosed reasons. Then, about an hour before Sunday’s game, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that scheduled starting pitcher José Ureña had been scratched due to a positive test. The game proceeded nonetheless, and Heyman soon followed up with a report that first baseman/designated hitter Garrett Cooper and right fielder Harold Ramirez — both of whom had started the team’s first two games — had tested positive as well, as had Alfaro. Read the rest of this entry »

Once Major League Baseball made the necessary decision to dramatically shorten its 2020 season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the chances that there would be a few more statistical oddities than usual significantly increased. The potential exists for the numbers themselves to be goofy, like a player hitting .400, but the players who top leaderboards this season might also surprise. For a 60-game stretch in 2018, the batting title belonged to Scooter Gennett; for another, the home run leader was Matt Carpenter. And with this morning’s disturbing news of an outbreak in the Marlins’ clubhouse, this season could wind up being even shorter than we believed just a few days ago, cut off at a point so early that its statistics would be rendered utterly meaningless. But even if we don’t end up 60 games worth of baseball, one data point will likely hold up to historical scrutiny: Giancarlo Stanton had the hardest hit ball of 2020.

483 feet! 121 mph! @Giancarlo818 with a ?. pic.twitter.com/REfWTeejGV

— MLB (@MLB) July 26, 2020

You don’t need to know any of the numbers to appreciate that home run. It’s a cool home run. It has all the aesthetics of a good Stanton dinger — a mistake pitch up in the zone, a direct, powerful swing from a truly massive human being, and then that same human being slowly strutting up the first base line while he watches an obviously crushed ball land in a place most guys can’t reach in batting practice. It’s hard to improve upon that experience, but the numbers actually do add something here. The distance of the homer was 483 feet, and the exit velocity was 121.3 mph. In 2019, just seven home runs surpassed that distance, and no batted balls of any kind matched that exit velocity. If I had to guess, none will in 2020, either.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Ivey fashioned a 1.46 ERA over 46 Double-A innings last year, and in the words of our own Eric Longenhagen, he features “a gorgeous, old-school, 12-to-6 yakker that freezes hitters.” A third-round pick in 2017 out of Grayson County College, Ivey is No. 14 on our Houston Astros Top Prospects list.

Ivey is also somewhat unique. Along with having transferred from a D-1 power to a JUCO — this despite holding his own as a freshman — the Dallas-area native has a delivery that the Baseball America Prospect Handbook described as “something out of the 1940s.”

The 24-year-old right-hander, who as noted in a recent Sunday Notes column has recovered from COVID-19, talked about his “yakker,” his path to pro ball, and his “violent head whack” over the telephone earlier this month.

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David Laurila: You transferred from Texas Tech to Grayson for your sophomore season, reportedly to become draft-eligible a year early. You were subsequently selected by the Astros in the third round. Did things pretty much go as planned?

Tyler Ivey: “First, going to junior college was different, but it was a very good different. I was excited to go there because of the coach at Grayson, Dusty Hart. I’d known him a little in the past, and a lot of buddies had played for him. I’d heard nothing but amazing things about him and Grayson.

“Obviously it’s a different environment there. You go from living in a three-story condo/house to a pretty crammed-up dorm where you’re sharing a bathroom with four other guys. But that’s something you fall in love with over time. Grayson was a really good place to do your own thing and just be yourself. They have a minor-league sort of mentality where you need to put the work in and then just go out and perform. That really allowed me to grow within myself and create my own routine. It ended up working out as well as I possibly could have hoped.”

Laurila: Living in a crammed-up dorm sounds like perfect preparation for life in the minors. Read the rest of this entry »