Chris Sale is apparently done for the year. Nathan Eovaldi is back in the rotation after his stint in the bullpen went badly. Mookie Betts is answering questions about his desire to test free agency. The Red Sox’s playoff odds look like the base of a Bryce Canyon formation, but right now, Rafael Devers isn’t just in the midst of a breakout season at age 22, he’s one of the hottest hitters in baseball.

Over an eight-game span against the Angels, Indians, and Orioles from August 9-18, Devers went 20-for-37 with 12 extra-base hits and 14 RBI, batting .541/.575/1.081 for a 324 wRC+. On August 13 against the Indians, he went 6-for-6, the first Red Sock to collect six hits in a game since Nomar Garciaparra on June, 21, 2003; four of those hits were doubles. He began the next night with a pair of hits off Shane Bieber, including a homer, to run his streak to eight straight. On Sunday, he had four hits, running his season total of four-hit games to four, one fewer than major league leader Charlie Blackmon. Unsurprisingly, Devers was named the AL Player of the Week on Monday.

Such is the nature of hot streaks that as soon as I started writing this, Devers went 0-for-4, and to be fair, one can find recent stretches — all of them relatively small sample sizes — where Gio Urshela or Aristides Aquino or Alex Bregman had better numbers, but the larger point is that the kid is in the midst of a great season during which he’s shown significant improvements on both sides of the ball. Devers entered Monday ranked second in the AL in slugging percentage (.596), third in batting average (.332), tied for fifth in wRC+ (147), 10th in on-base percentage (.380), and tied for 11th in homers (27th). His 5.5 WAR was tied with Bregman, trailing only teammate Xander Bogaerts (5.6) and you-know-who, Mike Trout (8.3). Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I saw two New York-Penn League games. The first was Friday night’s matchup between the Lowell Spinners and the Staten Island Yankees; the second was Sunday afternoon’s matchup between the Tri-City Valley Cats and the Brooklyn Cyclones. Below are some notes about players from each game.

Lowell Spinners (BOS)

Noah Song, RHP, Top 100 Rank: N/A, Org Rank: 12

Song graduated from the Naval Academy this past spring with uncertainty surrounding his required military service time, which is the main reason why he wasn’t taken until the fourth round of the 2019 draft as a senior. As of this writing, Song must serve two years of active duty before being eligible to petition to serve the remainder of his time as a reservist. In late June, President Trump signed a memorandum ordering the Pentagon to develop a policy similar to the one in effect prior to 2017 that allowed Griffin Jax to pitch as part of the World Class Athlete Program and could permit athletes like Song to defer their service obligation due to what was described as a “short window of time” to compete. Though no one is certain if or how this proposal will be actioned, if it is, it looks like the Red Sox got a steal.

Song had a record-setting senior season at Navy, leading the nation in strikeouts with 161 in 94 innings pitched. He’s a lean 6-foot-4, with a simple, rhythmic, on-line delivery. He has a short arm action that sees him pinch his arm up near his ear a bit, but it is loose and he repeats it well. His fastball worked 94-97 mph on Friday with good life, showing ride through the zone and some tail. It comes out of the hand well and looks like it might play slightly above its velocity through the zone. He threw two different breaking balls. The slider was too slow, working in the low-to-mid 80s, and had horizontal tilt with proper slider action, but was a short breaker that looked a bit like a cutter at times. It touched average and, if thrown harder consistently, can sit there. He threw just one curveball and it was a 74 mph roundhouse type that was below average, though sources have indicated that they’ve seen better ones. He threw a handful of fading changeups against left-handed hitters that were average as well. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a sizable collection of players to talk about this week because the two of us have been busy wrapping up our summer looks at the 2020 Draft class over the last couple weeks. This equates to every prospect added to or moved on THE BOARD since the Trade Deadline.

Top 100 Changes
We had two players enter the 50 FV tier in Diamondbacks SS Geraldo Perdomo and Padres C Luis Campusano. Perdomo is in the “Advanced Baseball Skills” player bucket with players like Vidal Brujan, Brayan Rocchio and Xavier Edwards. He’s added visible power since first arriving in the States and had as many walks as strikeouts at Low-A before he was promoted to the Cal League, which has been Campusano’s stomping ground all summer. He’s still not a great catcher but he does have an impact arm, big power, and he’s a good enough athlete that we’re optimistic he’ll both catch and make the necessary adjustments to get to his power in games down the line.

We also moved a D-back and a Padre down in RHP Taylor Widener and 1B Tirso Ornelas. Widener has been very homer prone at Triple-A a year after leading the minors in K’s. His fastball has natural cut rather than ride and while we still like him as a rotation piece, there’s a chance he continues to be very susceptible to the long ball. Ornelas has dealt with injury and swing issues.

On Aristides Aquino
Aristides Aquino was a 50 FV on the 2017 Reds list; at the time, he was a traditional right field profile with big power undermined by the strikeout issues that would eventually cause his performance to tank so badly that he became a minor league free agent. A swing change visually similar to the one Justin Turner made before his breakout (Reds hitting coach Turner Ward comes from the Dodgers) is evident here, so we’re cautiously optimistic Aquino will be a productive role player, but we don’t think he’ll keep up a star’s pace. Read the rest of this entry »

C.J. Chatham doesn’t fit the stereotype of the modern-day hitter. At a time when driving balls in the air is all the rage, the 24-year-old Red Sox prospect channels Wee Willie Keeler. Contact-oriented, Chatham believes in hitting ‘em where they ain’t.

“When they shift me, I don’t care where the pitch is; I’m going to go the other way and get a hit,” Chatham told me early in the season. “I might even break my bat, but I’ll squeak it through the space where the second baseman isn’t standing. A lot of my hits are through the infield that way. That’s kind of what I do.”

The approach has its merits. Chatham was leading the Double-A Eastern League in batting average (insert large grain of salt here) when he was promoted to Triple-A Pawtucket yesterday. His slash line was .297/.332/.401; last year, those numbers were .314/.355/.384 in High-A. Pair those lines with a solid glove at the shortstop position, and the lack of power — 12 home runs in 1,015 professional plate appearances — can largely be overlooked. Or can it?

He’s doing his best to ignore the skeptics. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday night, in their 114th contest of the season, the Red Sox lost their 55th game. Normally, this might escape notice — 16 teams beat them to that particular punch — but last year, the Sox didn’t lose their 55th game until October 6 (Game 2 of the AL Division Series against the Yankees), that after storming to 108-54 record during the regular season. They would lose just three postseason games, one in each round, en route to their fourth championship of the millennium. This year’s Red Sox do not appear destined to increase that total.

Sunday’s loss was the Red Sox’s eighth in a row, all within the AL East; after taking the first three games of a four-game set from the Yankees at Fenway Park from July 25-27, they lost the series finale, then three straight at home to the Rays before being swept in a four-game series in the Bronx, which knocked them to 14.5 games behind their New York rivals. The skid — which ended with Monday’s 7-5 win over the Royals — was the team’s longest since July 2015; no Sox team of the past three seasons lost more than four straight, and last year’s powerhouse never lost more than three straight.

As a result of the slide, Boston’s playoff odds have dropped precipitously:

Through July 27, the Red Sox were 59-47, eight games back in the AL East (the closest they’d been since June 25) and tied with the A’s for the second AL Wild Card spot. Their playoff odds stood at 64.6%, with a 6.5% chance to win the division and a 58.0% chance of retaining a Wild Card spot; their odds of winning the World Series stood at 6.2%, higher than every team except the Astros (23.6%), Dodgers (18.8%), Yankees (15.7%), and Twins (7.3%). After Sunday, their odds were down to 15.9%, with just a 0.2% shot at the division, and just a 1.4% chance at winning the World Series, lower than 10 other teams. With Monday’s win, which isn’t reflected in the above graph, they’re back to 20.7%, but no closer to the division lead; it’s Wild Card or bust.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

An earlier summer-ball stint was arguably a more important stepping stone. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Britton bought himself an Edgertronic earlier this month. He’s pondering purchasing a Rapsodo, as well. The Yankees southpaw boasts a 2.57 ERA — and MLB’s highest ground-ball rate, to boot — but that doesn’t mean he’s satisfied. Once the offseason rolls around, Britton plans to fine-tune his arsenal even more.

If you’re a hitter chagrined by this news, blame his nerdiest teammate.

“I bought all the [Edgertronic] equipment, and wired it up in my house,” Britton told me yesterday. “Talking with Adam Ottavino about what he’s been doing the last two off-seasons is what really piqued my interest. It’s a way to keep up with how we’re being evaluated now, and it allows us to make adjustments faster.”

While a primary driver, Ottavino’s influence wasn’t the sole selling point. Britton hasn’t had a chance to put his new purchase to use, but the 31-year-old former Oriole has thrown in front of an Edgertronic before.

“The Yankees have high-speed cameras at the Stadium,” explained Britton. “I’ve noticed differences with both my breaking ball and my sinker. I can see where my hand position is when I throw a good pitch. Rather than just feeling my way through an adjustment, I can get instant feedback on the adjustments I need to make.”

Britton had the winter months in mind when he went shopping. While details still need to be worked out, the plan is to link his Edgertronic — and perhaps a Rapsodo — with ones used by the Yankees.

“We can communicate back and forth during the offseason,” said Britton. “[Pitching coach] Larry Rothschild can see the numbers and know the things I’m doing. And if there’s anything they want to see, I can try it and then send them the data. We have the technology to where we can do that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Getting traded has long been a part of the game. Players move from team to team on the whims and wishes of general managers looking to make their clubs better — be it in the near term, for a pennant push, or down the road. Sometimes these deals happen during the winter months. Other times they happen in-season, most commonly at the July trade deadline. Either way — and regardless of whether the player is happy with the change of address — more than the name on the front of uniform is going to be different. To varying degrees, getting dealt impacts the day-to-day lives of players, particularly those who have families.

With this year’s deadline fast approaching, I went in search of interesting trade stories. With a broader perspective in mind, I talked not only to current players, but also to former players, a coach who managed in the minors for nine seasons, and a couple of broadcasters. All of these conversations took place last week when the Red Sox hosted the Blue Jays at Fenway Park.

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Trent Thornton, Blue Jays pitcher

On November 17, 2018, the Houston Astros traded Thornton to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for Aledmys Diaz.

“I got a call from one of the front office guys with the Astros, Armando Velasco. I’d just gotten back from the [Arizona] Fall League, so I thought they were putting me on the 40-man roster. Instead, it was, ‘Hey, you were just traded to the Toronto Blue Jays.’ I almost blacked out. I kind of just said, ‘OK, thanks,’ then went in to tell my parents.

“I ended up calling [Valasco] back about five minutes later, because I hadn’t really heard anything he’d said. He was like, ‘Yeah, someone from the Blue Jays will be calling you in about 15 minutes. He’ll give you a little rundown of what’s going on.’

“About 15 minutes later, someone does call. I’m having this conversation with the guy and he’s saying, ‘We’re super excited to have you,’ blah blah blah. At the end of the conversation, I said, ‘Who are you again?’ I’d never caught his name. He goes, ‘Ross Atkins.’ I go, ‘Oh, OK.’ Then I hung up the phone. Read the rest of this entry »