I’ve teased in the last few chats that some big updates on the various prospects lists will be out in a few weeks, but I wanted to address some of the most-asked-about prospects I’ve recently scouted in one piece as an appetizer for the big update.

Jeff Hoffman, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays

In Hoffman’s offseason scouting report I noted that he was in contention to go #1 overall until his elbow surgery, just before the 2014 draft where he went ninth overall. He made his first pro appearance this year and started making buzz right away, showing big velocity in a late big-league spring-training appearance, then in extended spring training and in his regular season debut at High-A Dunedin (he was just promoted to Double-A in the last few days). In the video, the first game shown is when I saw Hoffman about a month ago and the second game is when our own Chris King saw his first start for Dunedin about a month before that.

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The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

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A few years ago, early in the World Series, Pablo Sandoval teed off against the Tigers, going deep three times. What people tend to remember most is Sandoval tomahawking an 0-and-2 Justin Verlander fastball, up and out of the zone. Sandoval, of course, has always been perhaps the best bad-ball hitter in the game, but it was still something to get on top of that kind of pitch, in that kind of place, in that kind of situation. A relevant still:

That’s a high pitch, that Sandoval drilled with little problem. The form looks good. I mean, it was a dinger — the form had to look good. Some people took to saying that Sandoval homered off a pitch at his eyes. Something of an exaggeration, sure, but it’s the language of baseball, and it’s not like pitches get a whole lot higher.

On Monday, against Toronto, Pablo Sandoval hit a pitch that was actually at his eyes. It wasn’t the World Series, and it wasn’t a home run. It wasn’t even a base hit. It was just a groundball, like any other groundball. Except for that one thing, where the pitch was more than five feet off of the earth. People still remember Sandoval going upstairs to punish Verlander. The pitch Sandoval put in play against R.A. Dickey was higher than the Verlander pitch by 21 inches. 21 inches is the height of the world’s smallest man. Between Monday’s pitch and the Verlander pitch, you could fit a whole man.

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This is a weird home run, that Yoenis Cespedes hit off Trevor Bauer Monday night:

It’s weird for a few reasons. The pitch was down. Cespedes hit it to the other side of center field. It was a low rocket, and the majority of these low-rocket dingers tend to hug the lines. Pretty good demonstration of Cespedes’ strength, or bat speed, if you think of those as different things. Things that are weird make me curious. Alas, I found a recent home run that was even weirder. It happened just this past weekend.

I hear you guys. You’re sick of reading about the Red Sox. You’re sick of reading about Hanley Ramirez. It’s totally understandable, but let me assure you — this isn’t being written because it’s about Hanley Ramirez on the Red Sox. That’s a coincidence. This would’ve been written about, I don’t know, Shin-Soo Choo on the Rangers, if that had been what’d happened. But there was a weird home run, and Hanley Ramirez hit it, and, dammit, it’s going to get words.

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It seems like a simple question to ask. Which recent home run was the least likely?

You could flippantly answer — the one Erick Aybar hit this year, or the one Melky Cabrera hit this year — and because they’ve got the lowest isolated slugging percentages with at least one homer hit, you would be right. But that doesn’t control for the quality of the pitcher. Aybar hit his off of Rick Porcello, who is having some issues with the home run right now.

A slightly more sophisticated approach might have you scan down the list of the worst isolated powers in the game right now, and then cross-reference those names with the pitchers that allowed those home runs. If you do that, you’ll eventually settle on Alexei Ramirez, who hit his first homer of the year off of Johnny Cueto earlier this year.

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It has been almost exactly two years since the Red Sox made high-school left-hander Trey Ball the seventh-overall pick in the 2013 draft, the first southpaw off the board. Needless to say, such a high selection comes with considerable fanfare and attendant expectations. Soon after being drafted, most Red Sox prospect lists included Ball somewhere in the top 10 (in a stacked organization), and he even snuck into the back end of a few overall top 100s. He did sign for under slot, and as a lanky, projectable high-school arm, he wasn’t exactly expected to move quickly, but still, Ball has spent his career at least largely under the microscope.

Now under a month from his 21st birthday, though, Ball has done little to inspire significant praise since his selection. In 175.2 career innings, he has struck out 115, walked 75, allowed 18 home runs, and posted a 4.41 ERA. He ranked just 15th on Kiley’s offseason Red Sox prospect list, and that wasn’t far off his typical placement. Nobody’s written Ball off as a bust, but nobody has thrown future ace plaudits at him as a pro, either. Oddly, he seems to be almost flying under the radar, as others in Boston’s system have attracted more attention at various points in the past two seasons.

Ball nevertheless remains an important figure in the Boston system, and he’s at the point in his career where it’s time to start examining the present and future of his development. I caught his start on May 29, and it definitely gave a better sense of why Ball hasn’t taken the minors by storm yet, as well as how he projects going forward.

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On Friday, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports wrote an article titled “Red Sox need to dump Sandoval, Ramirez, like, now.” He states, in essence, that the Red Sox need to dump Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez, like, now. He states that they’re bad fits for Boston and that the Red Sox should have known that and the only way forward for Boston is to send both elsewhere and pay whatever it costs to do so. Suppose the Red Sox did trade Sandoval and Ramirez. Suppose they followed Rosenthal’s plan and got rid of both. What would happen then? Would Boston be better off? Let’s find out!

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Last night I was out getting a drink with our own Matthew Kory. His favorite team is the Red Sox. My favorite team is the Mariners. The bar we went to was showing the Mariners game, and while the Mariners were actually winning, that did nothing to stem the tide of jokes at our own expense. They’re two very different teams in two very similar situations — they came in with a lot of hype and promise, some people labeling them World Series contenders, and to this point they’ve more or less sucked. I don’t know which team has been the bigger disappointment. There’s still time yet, but while that means things could get better, that means, also, things could get worse.

The conversation turned to looking ahead. It was just last week I wrote about the meaning of the standings through a couple months, relative to the meaning of the projections. The numbers suggested that the Sox and Mariners would be pretty good. They continue to suggest that, and, my brain knows it should believe that. But it can be difficult to fully accept, when you’re watching a team playing different from the expectations. It feels like a bad team is just a bad team. It feels like a good team has something special going on. There are feelings you’re supposed to feel, and feelings you actually feel. Actual feelings, you could say, are greatly prone to recency bias.

The conversation has led to this post. It’s another post with an assortment of polls, asking for your participation. The idea: do you see something, in the teams you follow, the projections don’t? Do you see reason to doubt the projected records? The polls will ask about five teams: the Red Sox, Mariners, Royals, Cardinals, and Nationals.

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Almost three weeks ago, Pablo Sandoval did something extraordinary at the plate. To be fair, Sandoval often does interesting and unique things — mostly involving swinging at and hitting impossible pitches — so this might not come as a surprise. However, this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill sort of Sandoval madness. I’ll allow a short looping film to begin to tell the story:

A few things happened here: he swung at the first pitch, it was high and inside, and he got jammed but still managed to hit a line drive. These are all things Sandoval routinely does, so you can’t be blamed if you think one of them is what we’re highlighting. The true answer? Sandoval faced a left-handed pitcher as a left-handed batter.

If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider this: Kung Fu Panda hadn’t batted from the left side against a left-handed pitcher before this at bat since 2011. For what it’s worth, both Sandoval and his manager John Farrell claimed he only batted as a lefty in this pinch-hit appearance because of a knee injury sustained by a hit by pitch a few days before. Still, the fact remains: Sandoval’s struggles as a switch hitter from the right side are well documented, and they’ve gotten remarkably worse this season. It says at least say something that he batted from the left side here, given his struggles.

So just how bad has it gotten when he’s in the right batter’s box? Sandoval has a .160 OPS mark as a right-handed hitter facing a left-handed pitcher this year. He owns a 2.1% walk rate and a 27.1% strikeout rate from that side. In other terms, he’s hit three singles in 46 at-bats with one walk. That’s about the equivalent offensive output of Kyle Kendrick in 2014, except that Kendrick is a pitcher, and he doesn’t bat near the middle of the order for the Red Sox.

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The Boston Red Sox 2015 season is starting to look like an abject failure. A week ago, they were not too far from pulling back up to .500 and were only five and a half games back of first place in a weak division, and they had an upcoming six game stretch against the Orioles and Blue Jays that presented a real opportunity to gain some ground on two of their competitors. Instead, the Red Sox lost all six games, are now 10 games under .500, and are eight games behind both the Yankees and Rays, and seven games behind the Blue Jays. In one week’s time, they’ve moved from being within spitting distance of first place to being equally far back of fourth place.

Nearly every move the organization made last winter is currently looking like a disaster. The big acquisitions of Hanley Ramirez (-0.4 WAR), Pablo Sandoval (+0.1 WAR), and Rick Porcello (+0.5 WAR) have resulted in a trio of highly paid replacement level performers, and the more minor acquisitions like Wade Miley (+0.5 WAR) and Justin Masterson (-0.2 WAR) have been just as ineffective. While the history of these deals won’t be written based on their first few months in Boston, it’s fair to say that things aren’t exactly working out according to the team’s plans.

And now the Red Sox are heading towards a crossroads. This experiment hasn’t worked, and with just six weeks to go before the trade deadline, the Red Sox have to start considering the fact that they may be sellers at the deadline. The upside of being terrible is that it’s a good year to be selling talent, but the Red Sox are struggling in large part because their big expensive acquisitions have been lousy, and it’s not so easy to dump $100 million contracts a few months after they were signed. The path forward for the Red Sox isn’t so obvious, but let’s try to figure out some priorities for this team’s short-term and longer-term future.

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