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

With the college baseball postseason underway, today’s notes will be a mix of observations from conference tournament play and the minor leagues. We’ll begin…

In the SEC…

Top-10 nationally ranked teams Tennessee and Mississippi State both lost their opening round games; the two will square off in an elimination game today. Alabama’s win over Tennessee moves them closer to an at-large bid, though their chances of doing damage in June are hurt by the absence of lefty Connor Prielipp who will have Tommy John surgery today, as Kendall Rogers reported yesterday. Prielipp is a top 10 talent. The recovery time from TJ puts his 2022 college season in jeopardy, and the date of next year’s draft becomes significant for him as he has a better chance to throw in front of teams if it’s again in July. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot went wrong for Pittsburgh last season. Josh Bell tanked his trade value with a career-worst season. Gregory Polanco showed rather conclusively that he can’t hit. The team finished last in the NL Central for a second year in a row and has spent the last few winters demonstrating a disinterest in climbing out of the cellar anytime soon. There are enough problems with the Pirates that a sudden decline by young outfielder Bryan Reynolds was more or less reduced to a footnote.

Reynolds, a former second-round pick who was acquired from San Francisco in the Andrew McCutchen trade and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2019, hit an abysmal .189/.257/.357 (72 wRC+) in 55 games last year. That line allowed him to blend in with pretty much everyone else in the lineup not named Ke’Bryan Hayes, but it was still an unwelcome development. While Hayes is clearly the player Pittsburgh wants to build its next good team around, having a second foundational player in the lineup is always going to make things a little easier down the line. Reynolds seemed like that player after his rookie season. Fortunately for the Pirates, he now looks like that player again.

Through 44 games, Reynolds is hitting .298/.389/.472 with four home runs, good for a 139 wRC+ and a team-high 1.4 WAR. He’s been on a particular tear in the month of May, hitting .324/.400/.549 with 10 doubles in just 19 games. Last Thursday, he took Drew Smyly deep with a game-tying homer to center in a game the Pirates would go on to win in extras.

Reynolds’ start to 2021 looks awfully similar to the performance he gave in 2019, when he hit .314/.377/.503 with 16 homers, a 130 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR, and he’s having success for a lot of the same reasons. He hits lots of line drives, picks up extra bases by putting balls in the gaps, and provides modest over-the-fence power. The consistency of his numbers in 2019 and ’21, though, brings up one question: What the heck happened last year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Frazier has an admirable goal, one that few of his contemporaries would even contemplate trying to attain. At a time when hitters are going down by way of the K more frequently than at any time in history, the Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman aspires to walk more than he strikes out.

He might actually do it. With Memorial Day right around the corner, Frazier has a 9.6 K% — fourth-best among qualified hitters — and 16 free passes to go with 19 strikeouts. Moreover, he’s been putting barrels on baseballs. To scant acclaim — par for the course when you play in Pittsburgh — Frazier is slashing an eye-opening .337/.399/.466.

Asked about his stated goal, the 29-year-old Mississippi State University product admitted that it won’t be easy.

“Guys today throw harder and harder, with nastier stuff,” said Frazier. “[Hitting] continues to get more difficult. I’ve always felt I have a pretty good eye, it’s just a matter of being able to put the bat on the ball.”

Frazier has fanned twice in a game three times this season, on each occasion punching out against a starter and a reliever. There are no walks in the park in today’s game. From first inning to last, power arms are everywhere you turn.

Whom has he faced that stands out as being especially nasty? Read the rest of this entry »

David Bednar has been a find for the Pirates. Picked up from the Padres over the offseason as part of the seven-player Joe Musgrove deal, Bednar has emerged as one of the most-reliable arms in the Pittsburgh pen. In 17 outings comprising 15-and-a-third innings, the 26-year-old right-hander has 19 strikeouts to go with a 2.35 ERA and a 2.91 FIP.

Expectations weren’t nearly that high. San Diego’s 35th-round pick in the 2016 draft, the former Lafayette College Leopard came into the current campaign with a gnarly 6.75 ERA in 17-and-a-third big-league innings. Moreover, while his velocity has always been intriguing — ditto his splitter — Bednar’s name had never been spotted near the top of a prospect list. By and large, the 6-foot-1, 245-pound hurler came to his new club unheralded, unpolished, and in need of a fresh start.

I asked Ben Cherington if the decision to acquire the Pittsburgh-born-and-bred Bednar was driven more by the team’s analytics department, or by its scouting department.

“It was both,” said the Pirates GM. “From the scouting end, I believe Andrew Lorraine was one of the pro scouts who had seen him. Joe Douglas from our professional acquisitions group is someone who dug into him from a data perspective. Plus, he’s from here, so we had some personal background as well.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Building off of yesterday’s American League conference call agendas, let’s move on to the National League and see what’s on the docket for the teams of the senior circuit.

Arizona Diamondbacks

• We’re over .500 and we’re banged up. This team is better than people on the outside thought. That said, I don’t think we’ll be exceptionally busy in terms of buying this summer. We’re not catching the Padres or Dodgers, and let’s not forget about the Giants. Let’s stick to the plan and just keep getting better long-term.
• The rotation has been up-and-down, and Corbin Martin is probably the only minor league piece with a chance to contribute in that area. Let’s get some ideas going as to how we get through 162 games with depth issues in that department.
• Let’s have some initial talks about draft strategy, as we’re picking sixth. It feels like there is a four-player tier at the top of the draft, so let’s see if there’s a tier-two player we like at six, or if we should be more creative and spread the wealth a bit.
• The offense overall has been good, but our infield is not hitting. There aren’t any immediate moves to make, but it sure would be nice to see Seth Beer get off to a nice start to gauge whether he can get some at-bats up here as a Christian Walker replacement.
• We love having the presence of Eduardo Escobar and Asdrúbal Cabrera, but there should be a market for both this July, and we should be listening. Let’s focus on arms in those discussions.
• The same goes for David Peralta, even though he’s been our second best hitter and is signed for next year as well. That extra year, which is a cheap one at that ($7.5 million), should help generate some interest.

Read the rest of this entry »

Myles Straw grew up a big Tampa Bay Rays fan and has been to hundreds of games at Tropicana Field. Much for that reason, he’s more than a little familiar with Brandon Guyer. Which isn’t to say that Straw emulates the recently-retired outfielder. Guyer reached base via HBP a bruise-worthy 85 times from 2014-2018, and he did so despite never getting as many as 400 plate appearances in a single season. The bulk of his plunkings came in a Rays uniform.

When I talked to Straw this past Wednesday, he had played in 120 big-league games, all with the Houston Astros. He had never been hit by a pitch.

“I didn’t know that,” Straw claimed when I brought up the subject. “I mean, I don’t really jump out of the way of pitches. I’ll turn, because I don’t want to get hit in the ribs. If it hits me in the back, it hits me in the back, and that’s OK; I’m willing to take my base. But I’m not going to go up there and try to get hit. You always have a chance to get hurt with how hard guys are throwing these days.”

That same night, Straw was 2 for 2 with a pair of singles — one of the RBI variety — when he stepped into the box against Seattle Mariners right-hander Keynan Middleton. The second pitch he saw was a heater, well inside. Straw turned, and… you can probably guess the rest. The pitch hit him square in the back. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s docket has several marquee matchups, but we respect your intelligence enough not to explain why Shane Bieber vs. Lucas Giolito or Yu Darvish vs. Dustin May is worth watching. Instead, turn your attention to three games where the visiting pitcher will return to their old stomping grounds, and don’t gloss over Tuesday night’s game in Atlanta either.

Wednesday, April 14, 6:35 PM ET: Joe Musgrove vs. Tyler Anderson

Joe Musgrove is baseball’s hottest pitcher at the moment, and after becoming the first Padres pitcher to throw no-hitter, he’ll try to become the latest ex-Pirates pitcher to make Pittsburgh look silly for having traded him. Musgrove, who Pittsburgh traded to San Diego in January, is looking to join Gerrit Cole and Tyler Glasnow as the latest pitcher to take another leap forward ditching his black and gold threads, and his early-season showing has been superlative. Still only 28, Musgrove was deemed unlikely to help the next good Pirates team (he’s a free agent after the 2022 season), and was traded for prospects. Over his three-year stay in Pittsburgh, during which the team had the majors’ seventh-lowest winning percentage, Musgrove was the Pirates’ best pitcher by nearly two wins. Now, he’s part of a San Diego team built to win a championship, which would already be the second of Musgrove’s underrated career. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Musgrove came into the season viewed by many as a breakout candidate, and it’s easy to see why. The 28-year-old Pirate-turned-Padre possesses plus stuff, and the change of scenery — from Pittsburgh to his hometown of San Diego, no less — portends more success…. particularly in the won-loss column. Musgrove went a paltry 1-5 with the N.L. Central cellar-dwellers in 2020, while his new club is poised to win, per our projections, 94 games in the current campaign.

By and large, the breakout has already happened, and not solely because the 6-foot-5, 235-pound right-hander hurled the year’s first no-hitter on Friday night. His 2020 peripherals were those of a pitcher who’d turned the corner. With the caveat that it was a pandemic-shortened season, Mugrove set career-bests in ERA, FIP, and strikeout rate, and more importantly, he did so with improved pitch profiles. Per StatCast, the spin and movement of his offerings were better than they’d ever been.

I asked the righty about that in a spring-training Zoom session.

“I’m not really a big analytical guy; I’m not big on the Rapsodo numbers,” responded Musgrove. “I look at that information more as a benchmark. When I have real strong outings, or I have real poor outings, I look at the numbers to see where they’re at when I’m good, or when I’m poor. But by no means am I going home and saying, ‘I need to get 200 more RPM on my curveball,’ or ‘I need to change the spin axis on this pitch.’ I kind of just let our analytical guys coach me up a little bit on that, and offer suggestions where they can.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg getting vaccinated, the social dynamics of looser restrictions for vaccinated MLB players, an update on the infamous Tom & Jerry baseball scene, another baseball term named after a player, Willians Astudillo making the Twins, a few other players not making their respective teams, politicians’ performative fandom, Randy Dobnak and the future of contract extensions, and FanGraphs’ spring membership drive, then preview the 2021 Yankees (41:14) with Lindsey Adler of the The Athletic and the 2021 Pirates (1:19:54) with Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Audio intro: Danko/Fjeld/Andersen, "One More Shot"
Audio interstitial 1: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "Yankee Go Home"
Audio interstitial 2: The Lemonheads, "Pittsburgh"
Audio outro: Golden Earring, "One Shot Away From Paradise"

Link to Lindsey on vaccinations and protocols
Link to Tom & Jerry baseball scene
Link to Hader tweets and 2018 ASG
Link to Laurila’s latest Sunday Notes
Link to video of Willians out at second
Link to Willians styling his homer
Link to Yang tweets
Link to reversible Mets/Yankees mask
Link to Tony Wolfe on the Dobnak extension
Link to Sam on contract extensions
Link to FanGraphs’ new contributors
Link to FanGraphs spring membership drive
Link to Travis on the “elbow spiral”
Link to Lindsey on the pitching workshop
Link to story on Kratz and García
Link to Brault’s showtunes album
Link to Ben on Keller’s 2020
Link to Jason’s interview with Nutting

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