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

Dedgar Jimenez, LHP, Boston (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 8 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K

Notes
Jimenez has 60 strikeouts and just 17 walks over 57.1 innings this year. He’s big — 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds — but is a good athlete who repeats his delivery and not only throws a lot of strikes but often throws them exactly where he intends to. His stuff is fringey, his best pitch an average slider which he uses heavily, and he’s surviving purely off of command right now. Without any physical projection, it’s hard to envision him competing at upper levels with this stuff, even if he has plus command.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew McCutchen’s time as a Pirate was always likely to end in one of two ways: either by way of trade or departure as a free agent. Several years ago, a significant portion of the fan base — and perhaps a significant portion of the clubhouse — would have liked to have seen another contract extension for the 2013 NL MVP, but that was always unlikely. The club had little interest in guaranteeing a player entering his 30s a nine-figure contact, and McCutchen seemed uninterested in taking another below-market deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Michael Paez, INF, New York NL (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 4-for-5, HR

Notes
Paez was the best prospect on Coastal Carolina’s 2016 College World Series championship team. He’s 5-foot-8 but has sneaky pull power to which he’s always been able to get in games despite high strikeout totals. He’s 22 and a college hitter at Low-A so his season .306/.404/.543 line needs to be taken with a large grain of salt, but he could be a big-league bench piece as a power-before-hit infielder who can play second and third base.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex Stumpf’s fifth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

On the whole, the Phillies’ offense appears to be taking a big step forward in 2017. Entering play Sunday, their combined wRC+ was 14 points higher than it was the previous year and the highest it’s been since 2011. The team’s batting average, slugging, and on-base percentages are all up, putting them on pace to score 113 more runs than last season.

But they’ve been doing it without much help from Maikel Franco.

After a strong rookie campaign and then slump in his sophomore season, Franco has taken another step back in 2017. His wRC+ has dropped from 129 two years ago to 74 today — the second lowest out of Philadelphia’s regulars and 25th out of 27 qualified third basemen.

The results he’s had don’t reflect the positive steps he’s taken this season, however. He vowed at the end of last year to be more patient at the plate. So far he says he’s done that, which is why his walk rate has crept up and his strikeout rate is going down. He is able to get those better numbers because is he is chasing out of the zone a lot less, dropping his chase percentage 7.2 points from a year ago. According to PITCHf/x, he was swinging at 26.5% out of the zone entering play Sunday. And while his output is down, his average exit velocity is holding steady with last year, which is still up from 2015.

Getting a couple breaks to raise his .222 BABIP average would help, too, but he isn’t worried about that at the moment. “I have to not think about that stuff,” Franco said. “…I have to do everything that I can control.”

But the good has been outweighed by one major problem. If you’ve seen the title of this post, you probably know what that problem is: he’s struggling against the slider.

Read the rest of this entry »

I first became acquainted with Charlie Morton while covering the Pittsburgh Pirates as a newspaperman and while conducting research for my non-fiction work Big Data Baseball.

Morton was the first major-league player I encountered who exhibited a real interest in analytics. He developed an appreciation of numbers from his father, Chip, an accountant and former Penn State basketball player. As Morton struggled with inconsistency early in his major-league career — he posted a 6.15 ERA with the Braves as a rookie in 2008 — he turned to PITCHf/x information to better understand his stuff and performance beyond a traditional box score. He found PITCHf/x data and fielding-independent numbers kept him sane. He found advanced statistics and PITCHf/x provided a better baselines of performance to study. His father dove into the data, too, and they often had phone calls discussing the quality of his stuff, the velocity, and horizontal and vertical movement, etc.

Earlier in his career with the Pirates — and with the help of Jim Benedict and Ray Searage — Morton had dropped his arm slot and and adopted the two-seamer as his primary pitch. His new, and present, delivery reminded many of Roy Halladay. The Pirates had Morton watch video of Halladay. And at times, Morton’s stuff — his darting sinker and bending curveball — also resembled former Philadelphia and Toronto ace’s. In Pittsburgh, during the good times, he earned nicknames like “Electric Stuff” and “Ground Chuck.” He posted a 62.9% ground-ball rate in 2013 to go along with a 3.26 ERA and 3.60 FIP. He earned a three-year contract extension after the 2013 season.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex Stumpf’s fourth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

Andrew McCutchen is struggling early in the season. If you’ve followed him for the last three years, you’re aware that this is nothing new.

In 2015, he hit .194 in April. In 2016, he slumped his way to a .719 OPS through the first four months of the season. After getting benched for a series in Atlanta, he posted an .852 OPS over the rest of the campaign, just north of the .844 career mark he’d possessed entering the year.

Last year’s strong finish created optimism for this season. So far, however, McCutchen is slashing just .212/.218/.401, with a career worst 84 wRC+.

The absence of both Jung-Ho Kang and Starling Marte — due to visa issues and a PED suspension, respectively — means that the Pirates require an excellent performance from McCutchen just to keep the offense afloat. So far, that hasn’t happened. In fact, the results have been even worse recently: entering play Sunday, McCutchen had recorded a .132/.207/.302 line in 58 plate appearances since April 29th.

As usual, though, the results only tell part of the story. The quality of contact is sloping downward, too. In 2015, McCutchens’ exit velocity averaged out to 90.7 mph. In 2016, it was 89.6 mph. Through May 13th of this year, it was 87.6. The rate of balls hit at 95 mph or above is down, from 44.8% in 2015 to 42.6% in 2016 to 39.3% in 2017. The same goes for barrels, too, dropping from 9.5% to 8.5% to 5.6%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Pirates called up 23-year-old utility man Max Moroff from Triple-A. Moroff was off to a hot start — he was slashing .258/.345/.546 — but to most this as a rather mundane transaction. It piqued my interest, however, because Moroff cracked the the All-KATOH team in the preseason thanks to his stellar minor league performance in spite of his lack of prospect pedigree.

Moroff spent last season at the Triple-A level, where he slashed .230/.367/.349 with a concerning 25% strikeout rate and an impressive 17% walk rate. He has something of a three true outcomes profile, which is somewhat uncommon for a middle infielder. His offensive numbers didn’t really drive KATOH’s optimism, however. Rather, it liked that he played premium defensive positions and has played them relatively well as a 22- and 23-year-old in the upper levels.

Fast forward a month into 2017, and Moroff has started to hit too. His strikeout and walk rates have both ticked in the wrong direction, but he’s added power to the mix. He belted eight homers in his first 24 games, which already ties his career high. The power has seemingly come out of nowhere, although erstwhile lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel did say he had “feel for the game and a little pop, but he has trouble getting to it in games” a couple of years ago.

Max Moroff suddenly looks like a 23-year-old, Triple-A shortstop with power and decent speed. As a result, my KATOH system projects Moroff for 6.6 WAR over his first six seasons by the traditional method and 4.4 WAR by KATOH+, which integrates his pessimistic prospect rank from Eric Longenhagen. Both are up a couple of ticks from the preseason. My model saw him as a no-doubt top-100 prospect over the winter, and he’s only improved his stock since. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Alex Stumpf’s first piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well.

With one month of the season in the books, the Ivan Nova signing has been the steal of the offseason.

After performing a career 180 following his trade to the Pirates from the Yankees at the deadline last year, Nova has become even more Nova-y in 2017, recording a 1.50 ERA over 36 innings, refusing to walk batters, and working at a record-setting pace.

His 95-pitch Maddux* on Saturday night was his fifth complete game in 16 outings as a Pirate. In that stretch of 100.2 innings, he has faced 396 batters and walked only four, including just one out of the 133 who stepped into the box this season. The last starter to go at least 100 innings in a season with a lower walk rate per nine was George Bradley in 1880. That was the year the number of balls required for a walk was reduced to eight, and four years before pitchers were permitted to throw overhand.

*”Maddux” is a term coined by Jason Lukehart in 2012 to denote a game in which a pitcher records a shutout while throwing fewer than 100 pitches.

Nova has been pitching like he is double-parked all year, challenging hitters right out of the gate and getting a lot of outs early in the count. Pittsburgh manager Clint Hurdle uses the number of batters retired on three pitches or less as a barometer for a starter’s performance. Nova has done it 57 times over five starts this season. His first pitch has been a strike 66.9% of the time, and he’s in the zone on 51.3% of his offerings. He has said he isn’t afraid to throw strikes, but there’s a fine line between challenging hitters and going out there with a “hold my beer” mentality and daring them to go hacking at the first pitch. They haven’t had a lot of success coming out swinging, combining for a .111 average with a mean exit velocity of 80.6 mph off the bat on the first offering.

That has all resulted in an average of just 12.1 pitches per inning — the lowest since Stats LLC started keeping track in 1988. If Rob Manfred ever institutes a Pace of Play Hall of Fame, Nova would be a first-ballot inductee.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 735
Managing editor Dave Cameron is the guest on this edition of the program, during which he discusses the absence of Starling Marte from the Pirates and the absence of Madison Bumgarner from the Giants and, implicitly, the absence of “human behavior” from his behavior.

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 39 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS