Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball dreams and a holiday weekend in MLB marred by testing delays, canceled practices, concerned players, and other impediments to a safe and smooth season, then pick up where they left off four months ago in their season preview series by previewing the 2020 Tampa Bay Rays (16:05) with The Athletic’s Josh Tolentino and the 2020 Miami Marlins (57:10) with the Miami Herald’s Jordan McPherson.

Audio intro: Warren Zevon, "Disorder in the House"
Audio interstitial 1: Superchunk, "Florida’s on Fire"
Audio interstitial 2: Modest Mouse, "Florida"
Audio outro: Mac DeMarco, "Dreams From Yesterday"

Link to Jay Jaffe’s summary of MLB’s testing mess
Link to story on Chaim Bloom’s cardigan
Link to Yandy Díaz workout
Link to story on Jonathan Erlichman
Link to Josh’s Rays return-to-play guide
Link to Josh on the Rays’ farm system
Link to FanGraphs’ Rays prospect rankings
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ furloughs
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ COVID-19 concerns
Link to Jordan on Marlins roster decisions
Link to FanGraphs’ Marlins prospect rankings
Link to Roster Resource Team Info Tracker

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Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed.

Updating the East

Because our world is a roil of chaos in which people often drop the ball when the stakes are high, there have been a few roster changes in the Eastern divisions, mostly related to COVID-19’s spread or the reasonable fear of it. My initial thoughts on the AL East are linked above, while the NL East is here.

Atlanta’s positive tests during intake included Freddie Freeman, Touki Toussaint, Pete Kozma, and Will Smith, while Felix Hernandez and Nick Markakis opted out. The combination of Markakis’ opt out and Freeman’s delay (Markakis cited a discussion with Freeman as part of his reason for opting out) makes it much more likely that Yonder Alonso breaks camp with the big league club because he plays first base and hits left-handed, the latter of which the Braves’ major league roster sorely lacks. The Markakis opt out also means one of the dominoes leading to a slightly premature Cristian Pache and/or Drew Waters debut has fallen.

The bullpen is thinner without Touki and Smith but still strong because of all the talented youngsters, while Felix’s opt out makes it more likely that one of young arms, most likely Kyle Wright or Bryse Wilson, ends up in the Opening Day rotation.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s COVID situation is already so dire that it seems likely they’ll qualify for the “extenuating circumstances” clause in Section 6 of Major League Baseball’s 2020 Operations manual:

In the event that a Club experiences a significant number of COVID-19 Related IL placements at the Alternate Training Site at any one time (i.e., three or more players), and the Club chooses to substitute those players from within the Club’s organization, MLB reserves the right to allow that Club to remove those substitute players from the Club Player Pool without requiring a release.

Read the rest of this entry »

No sooner had the Yankees opened their summer camp — or spring training 2.0, or whatever we’re calling this tense and perhaps tenuous ramp-up to the long-delayed 2020 season — on Saturday than they got their first scare: the sight of pitcher Masahiro Tanaka being drilled in the head by a line drive hot off the bat of Giancarlo Stanton. The 31-year-old righty never lost consciousness but was taken to the hospital for testing and further evaluation, and while he was released, on Sunday he was diagnosed with a concussion. The terrifying sequence was a reminder that the coronavirus isn’t the only thing for players to fear during this abbreviated build-up to the regular season, but all things considered, both he and the Yankees look quite lucky right now.

At Yankee Stadium, in a simulated game that marked their first formal workout of the restart, Tanaka had faced Aaron Judge and Gleyber Torres before Stanton stepped in. The slugger smoked a line-drive comebacker that struck the pitcher on the right side of the head and ricocheted high in the air (I’ll leave it to you to find the video). Keep in mind that since the advent of Statcast in 2015, only Judge and Nelson Cruz have higher average exit velocities than Stanton’s 93.4 mph — he is emphatically not the guy you want pounding a ball off your noggin. According to James Paxton, the ball came off the bat at a sizzling 112 mph. Tanaka fell to the ground, writhing in pain, and stayed down for about five minutes before sitting up and eventually being helped off the field with the assistance of two trainers. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have been eagerly awaiting Hunter Greene’s return from Tommy John surgery. And for good reason. Prior to going under the knife 15 months ago he was hitting triple digits with his heater. Drafted second overall by the Reds in 2017 out of a Sherman Oaks, California high school, Greene is No. 77 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

According to Kyle Boddy, his return is nigh. Cincinnati’s pitching coordinator recently spent time with Greene in California, and he deemed the 20-year-old’s rehab “basically done.” Throwing in front of a Rapsoto, Greene was “an easy 97-plus [mph], reaching 100-101 when he was rearing back.”

More than a return to health is buoying the return to form. With the help of technology — “he’s really getting into the metrics and analytics” — and a former Chicago White Sox pitcher, Greene has made a meaningful change to his delivery. What had been “long arm action with a big wrap in the back” is now a shorter-and-cleaner stroke.

“That’s a credit to people like James Baldwin, who was the rehab coach and is now our Triple-A coach,” Boddy told me. “JB has worked with Hunter extensively, leaning on materials from Driveline Plus. Hunter has had a tendency to cut his fastball, so we’ve relied on a lot of video to show him how to fix that and get more carry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan O’Rourke experienced life in the big leagues. The recently-retired left-hander appeared in 54 games with the Minnesota Twins between the 2015 -2016 seasons, and in two with the New York Mets last year. But the bulk of his career was spent in the minors. A 13th-round pick by the Twins in 2010 out of Merrimack College, O’Rourke toiled down on the farm in each of his 10 professional campaigns.

He experienced a lot. The minor leagues are an adventure, and while often fun, they are by no means a bed of roses. The pay is bad, the travel and accommodations are arduous, and for the vast majority of players, crushed dreams are inevitable. Moreover, success and failure aren’t always dictated by talent alone.

———

David Laurila: How would you describe professional baseball at the minor-league level?

Ryan O’Rourke: “Now that I can look at it from a helicopter point of view, I’d say that it’s a crapshoot in the truest sense of that word. If you don’t end up with the right organization, and your development isn’t a priority, your path to the big leagues is so much more difficult than it already is.

“I was fortunate to be with the Twins, who were very good about taking care of people, but I’ve heard horror stories from other teams. If you’re a nobody — anyone outside the 10th round is probably a nobody — and don’t show promise right away… let’s just say that guys who get big money in rounds one through 10 are given countless opportunities over someone who may have deserved it more.

“That’s the sad nature of the minor leagues, which, from a business standpoint, I do understand. If you gave one guy $400,000 and another guy $4,000, it’s obvious who you’re keeping. And sometimes it’s a matter of a coach liking you or not. Sometimes you’re cut because you didn’t impress one guy.”

Laurila: How much jealousy and resentment is there of high-round guys? For instance, Byron Buxton is a talented player but he also got a $6 million signing bonus. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is another installment of my series discussing each team’s 60-man player pool with a focus on prospects. If you missed the first piece, you’re going to want to take a peek at its four-paragraph intro for some background, then hop back here once you’ve been briefed. Let’s talk about the National League East.

Atlanta Braves

Prospect List / Depth Chart

The Braves have pooled the most catchers in baseball with seven (eight if you count Peter O’Brien and the faint memory of his knee-savers), several of whom are prospects. I think Travis d’Arnaud’s injury history and the implementation of the universal DH makes it more likely that Alex Jackson opens the season on the active roster. I don’t think this would save Atlanta an option year on Jackson since they optioned him in mid-March, and Atlanta’s bench projects to be very right-handed, so he might be competing with Yonder Alonso for a spot.

We’re probably an Ender Inciarte injury away from seeing Cristian Pache play in the big leagues every day. Aside from him, I doubt we see any of the recently-drafted position players (Drew Waters, Braden Shewmake, Shea Langeliers) playing in the bigs this year, and if William Contreras debuts it’s likely because a couple guys ahead of him have gotten hurt. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, a few days after the transaction freeze was lifted, we had our first mid-pandemic trade when the Padres acquired Jorge Mateo from Oakland for a Player to be Named Later. Let’s dig into this deal, which is more important mechanically than it is from a baseball standpoint.

The Padres sending a PTBNL to Oakland circumvents the stated 2020 restriction that only players who are part of the 60-man player pool may be traded. Even if the A’s and Padres already know who the player will be, announcing the deal with a PTBNL distinction enables Oakland to avoid using a player pool spot on the new prospect. It’s an indication that, whoever the player is or will be, they’re not currently in San Diego’s 60-man pool, otherwise they’d just have been announced as the trade piece. Since there will be no minor league season, we won’t have an awkward, Trea Turner or Drew Pomeranz situation where a team is rostering and developing a minor leaguer who they and the industry knows they’ll soon trade. Even if the PTBNL needs to be put on the 60 later this summer in order to complete the transaction, doing it at the last possible moment enables the teams to have that roster spot free for as long as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a mundane transaction, one that ordinarily wouldn’t have required 500 words to explain to a baseball-starved readership, let alone 1,800. Matt Kemp, a 35-year-old former All-Star who played just 20 major league games last year, signed a minor-league deal with the Rockies. Given the move’s timing and the circumstances that surround it, however, Kemp-to-Colorado leaves a whole lot to unpack, and so here we are.

Kemp is on a minor-league deal, but he won’t play in the minors this year because there won’t be any minor league season, news of which was officially announced on Tuesday, though the outcome had long been apparent. Kemp may not play in the majors, either, not only because it’s unclear whether he’s good enough to do so anymore, but because the coronavirus pandemic that delayed Opening Day by nearly four months is still running rampant, and because the precautions designed to keep players and associated staff healthy may not be enough.

Even before the official green-lighting of the season, the Rockies were among the first teams to feel the impact of the coronavirus. Last Tuesday, the Denver Post’s Kyle Newman reported that four-time All-Star outfielder Charlie Blackmon was among three Rockies who had tested positive for COVID-19, along with pitchers Ryan Castellani and Phillip Diehl, all of whom had been informally working out at Coors Field in recent weeks. News of their illness followed reports of at least half a dozen teams being hit by the virus, though the players and staffers who tested positive on those teams weren’t identified. Blackmon and company were, but that’s not supposed to happen. While MLB has created a COVID-19-related injured list among its many new roster rules, on Tuesday ESPN’s Marly Rivera reported that both Yankees general manager Brian Cashman and Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer said that teams are not allowed to divulge the names of players who tests positive, in accordance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Read the rest of this entry »

In the Before Times, when the 2020 season was planned at 162 games — on February 12, to be exact — Major League Baseball officially announced a handful of rule changes that had been in the works for awhile, many of which concern teams’ active rosters. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, however, the season has been drastically shortened, and between a hasty reboot of spring training, a suspended minor league season, and voluminous health- and safety-related protocols, the league has been forced to put some of those changes on hold and adopt a very different set of roster rules than was initially planned.

What follows here is my attempt to sort through those rules and explain some of the new entries in the transaction lexicon. Additionally, I’ll use a couple of teams as examples in order to illustrate some of the roster considerations that may be in play. We’ll start with the easy stuff…

Active rosters

Instead of simply expanding from the tried-and-true 25-man active rosters — a limit that was introduced with the first Collective Bargaining Agreement in 1968 — to 26-man ones as planned, teams will begin the season on July 23 or 24 with rosters of up to 30 players, though they’re allowed to carry as few as 25 (a minimum that will remain in place all season). According to the 2020 Operations Manual, on the 15th day of the season (August 6 or 7) the upper limit drops to 28 players, and two weeks after that date, it drops again to 26. For any doubleheaders after that point, teams will be permitted to add a 27th player.

Additionally, the nit picky rules governing the makeup of those rosters, which were laid out in February (and panned here by yours truly), are on the shelf. Teams won’t be limited to carrying 13 pitchers, after all, and position players won’t be limited to pitching only in extra innings, or in games in which teams are ahead or behind by at least seven runs. In other words, all of this is as it was last year, and somebody damn well better sign catcher/blowout closer Russell Martin tout suite. Read the rest of this entry »

Many species of shark, most commonly lemon sharks, give birth in shallow, nutrient-rich mangroves teeming with small sea life that can easily sustain their offspring while also insulating them from the predators typically found in deeper, open waters. Most young sharks spend years feasting in these hazy, sandy green mangroves until they’ve grown, then head out to sea. Some leave the safety of the roots and reeds early and enter the blue black depths at greater risk of a grisly fate. Many of them won’t make it. The ones that do will likely become the strongest of all the adult sharks.

Now that teams have announced their 60-player pools for the upcoming season, we can see how they’ve balanced rostering players who can help them compete this season with prospects for whom they’d like to ensure playing time, while avoiding prospects whose service time clocks they don’t want to risk winding. Below, I have analysis of the prospects in the player pools for the AL East clubs. I’ll be covering every division in the coming days, with some divisions requiring their own piece and others combined where appropriate.

Two of our site tools go hand-in-hand with this piece. The first is The Board, which is where you’ll want to go for scouting reports on all of these players (click the little clipboard), as this piece focuses on pathways to playing time and potential roles and strategic deployment rather than on scouting. Perhaps the more relevant visual aid are Jason Martinez’s RosterResource pages, which outline the player pools that have been dictated by all 30 teams in a depth chart format, and also include columns that indicate where the prospects in the pools rank within each club’s farm system.

A couple roster mechanics to keep in mind as you read: Teams are allowed a 60-player pool. They don’t have to roster 60 guys from the start; not doing so allows them to scoop up released or DFA’d players without cutting someone. Within those 60 players still exists the usual 40-man roster rules from which teams will field an active roster of 30 players, a number that will shrink to the usual 26 as the season moves along. Big league clubs are allowed a three-man taxi squad that can travel with the team but isn’t part of the active roster; that squad must include a catcher (this is clearly to mitigate the risk of some injury/COVID/travel-related catastrophe). Players not invited to big league camp, or who aren’t on the active roster (40-man players and beyond) when the season begins, will train at an alternate location, typically a nearby minor league affiliate. Lastly, only players in the 60-man pool (including prospects) may be traded during the season. Read the rest of this entry »