If you’ve followed baseball closely this year, you can’t miss the tidal wave of impact rookies. Fernando Tatis Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the two top prospects in baseball, have succeeded in the majors, and they haven’t been alone. Pete Alonso is hitting the stuffing out of baseballs. Mike Soroka and Chris Paddack are pitching like top-tier starters. Tatis is hitting .323 with power and playing a passable shortstop, and he’s not even the clear Rookie of the Year. The competition is just that good.
That’s just the top tier. Go half a level down, and the league is filled with rookies making their presences felt. Keston Hiura has absolutely mashed in his limited plate appearances with the Brewers. Yordan Alvarez has a .353 ISO and a 191 wRC+ over nearly a third of a season. Brandon Lowe is a key cog on the Rays. Oscar Mercado brought the Indians back to life. It’s a good year to be young and in baseball.
Even in this age of constant baseball coverage, though, one rookie has gone overlooked. The best three rookies this season by WAR have been Tatis, Alonso, and Soroka. No one would argue their hegemony. The fourth, though, hasn’t even been named yet in this article. Bryan Reynolds has been the fourth-most-productive rookie, in this year of impact youngsters, and he’s done it in near-complete anonymity.
Reynolds wasn’t supposed to make an impression in the majors this year. He was a good-but-not-great hitter in Double-A in 2018 after being traded from the Giants in the Andrew McCutchen deal, riding BABIP and walks to a 128 wRC+ despite middling power. Prospect evaluators saw him as an average-bat, average-glove regular who could play center in a pinch — in a few years. He ranked ninth in our Pirates’ preseason top prospects list, but didn’t crack Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel’s top 100. As a 23-year-old in Double-A, it seemed reasonable for him to take 2019 adjusting to Triple-A before reaching the majors in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »
When it was completed, the Tyler White deal didn’t rock many (if any) boats. It was a minor move: The Dodgers acquired White from the Astros in exchange for Andre Scrubb, a 2019 Rule 5 eligible right-handed pitcher who had most recently been throwing in Double-A.
White has been scuffling of late, but a quick look at his offensive performance from the previous two seasons makes clear why the Dodgers find the first baseman intriguing. White’s bat has been significantly above league-average at times, even if his defensive profile limits his overall value:
You knew it was coming. When Houston acquired Aaron Sanchez from the Blue Jays, changes to his repertoire were bound to follow. By now, the pitching preferences of the Astros organization are well known: throw your best pitch more often and ditch your worst. It’s not as simple as telling pitchers to throw more breaking balls or throw fewer fastballs, though. It’s an individualized pitching strategy based on the strengths and weaknesses of the particular pitcher. Erstwhile FanGraphs author Travis Sawchik describes how these individualized development plans are presented to new Astros in his new book, The MVP Machine, co-authored with Ben Lindbergh:
When you're traded to the Astros, this is what your first meeting with the club is like (via a nonfiction book titled The MVP Machine): pic.twitter.com/EwqD5ZgMBW
We may have expected some tweaks, but I’m not sure anyone could have expected the adjustments to have such an immediate impact for Sanchez. With the Blue Jays, he had posted a league worst 6.07 ERA with a 5.03 FIP across 23 starts. In his first start with his new team, he held the Mariners hitless over six innings, allowing just three base runners and striking out six. Will Harris, Joe Biagini (who came over from the Blue Jays in the same trade), and Chris Devenski completed the combined no-hitter after Sanchez was lifted after the sixth.
Corbin Martin has had an eventful summer. The 23-year-old right-hander made his MLB debut in mid May, underwent Tommy John surgery in early July, and four days ago he was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks as part of the blockbuster Zack Greinke deal. Martin came into the season ranked No. 3 on our Houston Astros Top Prospects list.
He didn’t follow a traditional path to the big leagues. Primarily a centerfielder as a Cypress, Texas prep, he didn’t begin pitching in earnest until his second collegiate season. Moreover, he cemented his conversion under the midnight sun, 4,000-plus miles from home.
“When I got to [Texas] A&M, they were like, ‘Hey, we know you pitched a little in high school; do you want to try it out?,’” Martin told me prior to the second of his five big-league starts. “I was like, ‘Sure.’ At first I was kind of frustrated, because I like hitting, but I ended up running away with it.”
Baseball is said to be a marathon, not a sprint, and immediate success wasn’t in the cards. Martin pitched just 18 innings as a freshman, then struggled to the tune of a 5.47 ERA as a sophomore. It wasn’t until his junior year, which was preceded by a breakout summer in the Cape Cod League, that “all the pieces finally came together.”
Tonight, 21-year-old Dustin May is set to bring his flaming red hair to Dodger Stadium when he makes his major league debut against the Padres. Every prospect’s journey to the bigs is unique, but they start in similar places, on amateur fields, often under the watchful eye of scouts. May’s path is especially familiar to me; though I was far from the only person in the Dodgers organization involved, I was the scout who signed him.
The funny thing is, I wasn’t especially enamored with May the first time I saw him pitch. It was a little more than four years ago to the day, at the annual Texas Scouts Association showcase game on a characteristically hot July day in San Antonio. May pitched one of the later innings of the day; he worked in the upper-80s with his fastball and threw a sharp upper-70s slurve with good spin. While he pitched well against the high school competition he faced, his stuff didn’t stand out among a crowd of intriguing 2016 high school draft prospects that included players such as Forrest Whitley, Hudson Potts, and Kyle Muller.
Still, May’s prospect status continued to rise at a relatively quick pace following that initial outing. After a solid performance in two separate appearances during the fall of his senior year, he was planted firmly among the list of “must see early” players – a list commonly populated by projectable high schoolers who might make a jump during the springtime. May, who was an ultra-skinny 6-foot-6 with a quick arm, fit the bill well.
By time his senior spring rolled around, May’s velocity had crept up from where it was during my first look. Touching 94 and routinely working in the low-90s with life, he began to morph into a prospect who didn’t seem as far away as he had a few months before. To go along with the increased fastball velocity, the breaking ball, which had always spun well but often got sweepy and had slurvy shape to it, began to develop into more of a true slider.
As an area scout, my responsibility was to gather as much information as I could so the scouting department could make the best decisions possible when choosing among hundreds of options during the draft. It was no different with May. I spent the spring speaking with his coaches, teammates, and teachers, to the college coaches who had recruited him, and advisers who were assisting his family in the process. May was selected in the third round of the 2016 draft as a projectable high school righty with the makings of two pitches that projected to potentially be plus in the future. He was given a $997,500 signing bonus and went straight to work in the AZL.
Between then and now, May has thrown just over 400 innings in the minor leagues, showcasing advanced command and inducing groundballs at an above-average clip. He now works with a four-pitch mix, highlighted by a plus low-90s cutter he added last year. His sinker, which has averaged 95 mph and touched 99, would be among the hardest sinkers major league starters throw. His curveball would be among the highest average spin breaking balls of any major league starter as well. His changeup, still a work in progress, is thrown just over 8% of the time and flashes average.
Beyond being a part of May’s signing process, I also served as one of his coaches – first during Fall Instructional League in 2016, and then again at the end of the 2017 season in his brief but impressive stint in the Cal League. I vividly remember having a conversation with him during instructs after a two-inning outing. He was told to only throw fastballs and changeups during his second inning of work in order to gain reps throwing the changeup, which was developmentally behind his breaking ball. May threw a total of 24 pitches in his two innings – 12 fastballs, 12 changeups. After the outing, he was asked if he intentionally threw the exact same number of each pitch, and if he was aware he could have utilized his breaking ball in his first inning of work. His response was succinct. He explained that he didn’t know it was an exact 50-50 usage split, but that he’d known he could use the breaking ball and decided not to. When asked for his rationale, he said he knew he needed a changeup to get big league hitters out. The coaches who observed this discussion nodded in approval. It’s rare for a teenager to possess the sort of foresight and maturity present in May’s response, one that suggests not only an awareness of what the exercise is intended to achieve in the moment, but also of the purpose it is meant to serve years down the road. It was then that I fully realized that May’s mental makeup would be a strength as his professional career continued.
Coming into the 2019 season, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked May second in the Dodgers system and 21st overall, earning a 55 FV and a report that heralded him as a near-complete prospect, only missing a changeup to round out his arsenal. Their report on May detailed the strength of his curveball and his curls:
May’s flamboyant ginger curls and Bronson Arroyo-esque leg kick are maybe the third and fourth most visually captivating aspects of his on-mound presence once you’ve gotten a look at his stuff. His mid-90s fastball plays up due to great extension, and further incorporation of a running two-seamer has given May’s heater enough tail to miss bats in the strike zone. His vertically-breaking slider (May calls it a slider, but it has curveball shape) has one of the better spin rates in the minors and enough vertical depth to miss bats against both left and right-handed hitters. It’s May’s out pitch, but he also has a developing cutter and its movement is a great foil for his two-seamer. After trying several different changeup grips in 2017, it seems like May is still searching for a good cambio, but his fastball and breaking ball command should suffice against lefties for now.
In 79.1 innings in Double-A this year, May produced a 3.18 FIP, a 19.8% K-BB%, and a 50.5% ground-ball rate. He earned a promotion to Triple-A, an invite to the Futures Game in Cleveland, and a 60 FV, moving closer to fulfilling the promise that had Eric and Kiley describe him as, “what was once a prospect with mid-rotation upside has become one with mid-rotation likelihood.” May is now ranked as the No. 1 prospect in the Dodgers system and eighth overall in baseball on THE BOARD.
Now, after a trade deadline that saw Los Angeles decline to make a significant pitching acquisition, May is getting the call. He’s a young pitcher with a unique combination of a high floor and a high ceiling. There’s a strong likelihood that he is a mid-rotation starter – a plus athlete who throws four pitches for strikes and has never had a major arm injury – and the chance that he continues to refine his arsenal and becomes someone featured at or near the top of a major league rotation. He’ll likely contend for a playoff roster spot on the 2019 Dodgers team, and figures to be featured in the rotation beginning in 2020 and moving forward. His path to the bigs might be complete, but his journey is just beginning.
The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can see where they rank among their new teammates; our farm rankings, which now update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up post-deadline. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about. Read the rest of this entry »
As soon as I finish this piece, I’m going to get ice cream. There’s a soft serve frozen yogurt place owned by a surprisingly fastidious stoner about a mile from my house, and I go there once or twice a week. If I told you there are 10 rotating flavors, with chocolate and vanilla as constants, how long do you think it would take you to learn what I like by watching me fill my bowl (there are all sorts of bowl-packing jokes on the store’s signage)? How many times would I need to go in there and pull that soft serve lever before you’d know that vanilla is actually pretty high on my pref list, and that only a few things, like coconut or coffee, will pull me away from it? Or that I avoid all of the fruit flavors?
How long before we can start to identify team regime patterns in player acquisition, and start talking about team preferences with confidence, the way we do when we say that progressive clubs look for common arm slots and hand positions, or fastballs that spin? The current Marlins regime has basically now been in place since the fall of 2017, when Gary Denbo was brought in as Vice President of Scouting and Development. Miami has made a lot of seller’s trades during that year and a half, and they clearly have a type, especially when you look at their amateur acquisitions. Yesterday, that type came further into focus after a deadline deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Here’s the trade:
In one of the lower profile deals of the day, the Dodgers added a new top lefty to their pen at a low cost, while the Rays continued their concerted effort to clear out 40-man space, with a gamble on a power bat who doesn’t need to be protected for two years.
Adam Kolarek is a lefty reliever who throws sinkers 82% of the time at 88-91 mph from a near-sidearm slot. Over the last two seasons, he’s eighth in groundball rate among relievers with at least 70 IP. Lefty relievers at that level come in velo models of hard (Zack Britton and Aaron Bummer average 95 mph), medium (Scott Alexander averages 93 mph), and soft (Kolarek and T.J. McFarland averages 89 mph). Aside from Bummer, they all have xFIPs between 3.60 and 4.00, so while Kolarek doesn’t seem overwhelming, his regular season peripherals aren’t that different from Britton’s, even though Britton’s higher-octane stuff figures to play better in October. As you might guess, Kolarek has a 101-point platoon split in his wOBA allowed. He may be fine in the short-term, and he’s still pre-arb with options remaining, but he’s also a 30-year-old late-bloomer with no margin for error, so this likely won’t last forever.
Niko Hulsizer was a 35 FV in the Others of Note Section of the offseason Dodgers’ list, and he’s still there for now, having not been added to THE BOARD just yet. He hit 27 homers as a sophomore at Morehead State, but that came with 74 strikeouts. A broken hamate bone in his draft year pushed him to the 18th round. He’s struck a better balance between power and strikeouts in pro ball, and is 22-years-old in High-A, continuing to hit for enough thump to make it all worth it. There’s some stiffness to the strength-based power, so he’s likely a platoon piece or bench power bat if it all clicks, with our expectations being that he’s more of a Triple-A slugger who gets a cup of coffee, at least until we see a little more performance. Read the rest of this entry »
The Atlanta Braves continued their deadline bullpen upgrades by acquiring relief pitcher Mark Melancon from the San Francisco Giants for pitchers Tristan Beck and Dan Winkler.
Coming into today, the ZiPS rest-of-season projections for the Braves, when combined with the FanGraphs depth charts, had the Braves with the No. 19 bullpen in baseball, ahead of only the Phillies, Nationals, and Angels among the plausible contenders. ZiPS is also the more optimistic of the two systems; when you combine ZiPS and Steamer on the FanGraphs Depth Charts, the Braves drop to 22nd.
There’s a misconception that Atlanta’s relief woes are because of Luke Jackson, the team’s closer for most of the season. It’s true that Jackson has only saved 17-of-24 games for the Braves, but save percentage is actually a rather poor predictor of future save percentage, especially when other metrics exist (ERA, FIP, batter OPS, pretty much anything else). Melancon and Jackson are in roughly the same tier performance-wise, along with Shane Greene; the reason the trade improves the team is because it improves the depth of the bullpen, which was a significantly larger problem than the closer himself.
San Francisco trading Melancon (and Ray Black, Sam Dyson, and Drew Pomeranz) does not represent the Giants throwing in the towel on the 2019 season. Prior to these trades, the ZiPS/Steamer combined projections had San Francisco with eight relief pitchers projected to have a FIP below four over the rest of the season. The Giants still retain five of them (Pomeranz was not on the list), more than enough pitching to cover high-leverage relief innings. The team has an improving farm system, but that’s largely due to the first-tier talent at the top of their prospect list: Joey Bart, Marco Luciano, Heliot Ramos, and Hunter Bishop. Much like the Braves’ bullpen prior to today, what the Giants’ system still lacks is depth. Read the rest of this entry »
After adding David Phelps and Derek Holland to bolster their relief corps earlier this week, the Cubs traded right-handed reliever Carl Edwards Jr. to the Padres as the trade deadline closed. For Edwards, a change of scenery seemed like the best course of action after struggling this season. The trade was first reported by Jesse Rogers and the Padres return was reported by Mark Gonzales.
Just a few years ago, Edwards was one of the key relief arms who helped the Cubs end their 108-year World Series drought. From 2016 through last year, he was an excellent setup man, posting a 3.03 ERA and a 3.12 FIP across more than 150 innings. Among all 189 qualified relievers during those three years, his strikeout rate ranked 11th and his park- and league-adjusted FIP ranked 29th.
Edwards’ success came in spite of extremely poor command. His walk rate was the third-highest in the majors during that period. He managed to keep his FIP so low by maintaining a ridiculously high strikeout rate and keeping the ball in the park with a very low home run rate. This year, his strikeout rate has fallen to just 26.6% and his home run rate has spiked. That’s led to a 5.87 ERA and a 5.51 FIP. His struggles have forced the Cubs to option him to Triple-A twice this season. He’s also spent some time on the injured list for a strained back.
But his problems might have started way back during spring training. In an effort to solve the command issues that have plagued him throughout his career, he worked on a new delivery all spring, which included a pause and a toe tap to help him gain consistency. But during his first appearance in the regular season, umpire Bill Miller informed him that his new delivery was illegal.
After swapping back to his old mechanics on the fly, Edwards was quickly demoted to Triple-A to continue working on his delivery. After returning to the majors in May, he looked much better, allowing just four walks and a single home run in 13.2 innings. In many ways, he looked like he had made the necessary adjustments to his mechanics to try and solve his command woes, even if his strikeout numbers weren’t nearly as gaudy.
In his one major league appearance after returning from his back injury, Edwards’ fastball velocity was down to 92.7 mph. It’s possible the Cubs activated him a little too early. They optioned him back to Triple-A after that single inning on July 21. Now he is off to San Diego to strengthen the Padres’ bullpen. The 27-year-old is arbitration eligible for the first time next year and controlled through 2022, and if he is healthy, the Padres should get a nice piece for the back of their bullpen — especially if he’s figured out his mechanical problems. For Edwards, too, the change of scenery might be beneficial. His time with the Cubs was certainly memorable, but his relationship with the fans might have soured after receiving racist messages via social media during his rough patch at the start of the season.
In return, the Cubs get a left-handed reliever who is physically the opposite of the slender Edwards. Brad Wieck is listed at 6’9”/255 lbs — a very large human. After making the transition to relief work in 2016, he’s posted a 37.3% minor league strikeout rate across three levels. He made his major league debut last year but has struggled with the long ball this season. He’s allowed 12 home runs in 42.3 combined innings in Triple-A and the majors. Here’s Eric Longenhagen’s scouting report:
Wieck sits 93-94 and touches 95, vertical arm slot creates weird angle on the pitch, he’s a plus-plus extension guy who adds about two ticks of perceived velo because of it, and he gets a lot of swinging strikes with the fastball. Fills the zone up with the heater and just throws a lot of fastballs, generally. He’s a good lefty relief piece.
The 27-year-old did have surgery for testicular cancer over the offseason, but his minor league track record could make him an interesting piece for the Cubs.
