September call-ups, both high-profile and totally innocuous, have been trickling in over the transaction wire for the last several days. As always, there are some that will have real impact on the playoff race, some that are interesting for the purposes of player evaluation, such your usual spare lefty reliever and catcher (by far the most common types of September additions), and some teams with no new names at all. Below I’ve compiled notes on every player brought up by National League teams since the start of the month, no matter how inconsequential, and I slip some rehabbers and August 31st acquisitions in here, too. It’s a primer for you to get (re)acquainted with players who might impact the playoff race or seasons to come.

Contenders’ Reinforcements

Atlanta Braves — INF Johan Camargo, RHP Chad Sobotka, RHP Jeremy Walker, LHP A.J. Minter, RHP Bryse Wilson

Camargo didn’t hit with the big club at all this year, not even in late July or all of August when he was handed pretty regular at-bats filling in for an injured Dansby Swanson. But he hit .483 over the few weeks he was down in Gwinnett after Swanson returned and Camargo was optioned. He’ll be a versatile, switch-hitting bench piece for the stretch run, and he projects as that sort of premium bench player long-term.

Sobotka and Walker were optioned to make room for the multiple relievers Atlanta acquired at the deadline. Sobotka, who sits 94-98 with life and has a plus, 2900-rpm slider, posted a 16-to-2 strikeout to walk ratio at Triple-A since being sent down. You may see him pitching big innings this month. Walker has been throwing 25-pitch, 2-inning outings with three days of rest in between. He may be on mop-up or long relief duty. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
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For a losing team, the Cincinnati Reds have been busy. It’s not just trading players either, as Cincinnati made one of the biggest deadline moves while many contenders slumbered in near-stasis, picking up Trevor Bauer with an eye towards retooling for the 2020 season. Only three of the eight players in Wednesday’s lineup were also in the lineup on Opening Day: Tucker Barnhart, Eugenio Suárez, and José Iglesias. Chief among the new additions is the recently called-up Aristides Aquino, a big slugger lurking far back from the head of the team prospect lists coming into the season. After a fairly unimpressive minor league career, Aquino has feasted on the major league bouncy ball in 2019, slugging 28 homers in 294 AB in the formerly pitcher-friendly International League and then a shocking 11 homers in just 20 major league games.

Aquino was not some elite prospect finally being called up. The Reds have only received the benefit of getting a look at Aquino because they decided to use their ABs in a now-lost season in a productive way. If the team hadn’t dropped Matt Kemp or traded Yasiel Puig, choosing to go with the known quantity in a mistaken attempt to goose attendance (there’s no evidence this actually works), there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities to assess Aquino or Josh VanMeter or Phil Ervin in the majors. They now have more information on these players — how they’ve played at the big league level — and that information can have a positive effect on the decisions they make on how to win the NL Central or a wild card spot in 2020. Even picking up veteran Freddy Galvis, a 2.0 WAR player, for free has a value to a team like the Reds given his one-year, $5-million option for 2020. Scooter Gennett was always likely to be gone, but Galvis may not be, and now the Reds have another player who they can choose to start in 2020 or trade over the winter.

The Reds have been fortunate in these decisions, but I would have been in favor of this calculus even if Aquino/VanMeter/Ervin had been terrible. My fundamental belief is that among hitters and pitchers, teams have roughly a combined 12,000 plate appearances/batters faced to work with every year, and as many of them should be devoted to trying to win games as possible. Maybe they’re not 2019 wins — maybe they’re wins in 2020 or 2023 or 2026. But even players not working out gives you information; if Aquino came to the majors and hit like Lewis Brinson, it would still give the Reds data they didn’t have before. You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge when you’re a 90-loss team still penciling Billy Hamilton or Chris Davis into the lineup on a daily basis. 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.
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When we talk about teams not taking advantage of the best seasons of their stars, there’s no better example than Mike Trout and the Angels. You could make a 90-win team by simply building a .500 team around Trout, and yet the Angels have been able to do this only once with their center fielder. But they’re hardly the only team to fritter away the prime of top talent. Enter the Colorado Rockies.

The Rockies can hardly be called a grand failure on the field, having won 87 and 91 games in 2017 and ’18, making the playoffs in consecutive years for the first time in franchise history. But you could also argue that it’s a team that you can say underperformed those win totals, especially last year. The 2018 Rockies won 91 games, but that was with two legitimate Cy Young and MVP contenders; after successfully doing the hard part and finding legitimate stars, they’ve repeatedly failed to put a halfway competent team around those stars.

To illustrate this, here is team WAR from 2017, 2018, and 2019 (through July 29) outside of a team’s top two position players and top two hitters. As noted above, the Rockies have done as good job finding high-end talent as any team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Like Nomar Garciaparra before him, Troy Tulowitzki had the primary attributes of a Hall of Fame shortstop. He dazzled us with his combination of a powerful bat, good range, sure hands, the occasional spectacular leap, and a strong and accurate arm while making a case for himself as the position’s best. And like Garciaparra, Tulowtzki has been forced away from the game in his mid-30s after a seemingly endless string of injuries, leaving us to wonder what might have been. The 34-year-old shortstop announced his retirement in a statement released by the Yankees last Thursday.

Tulowitzki’s Yankees career lasted just five games, a blink of an eye compared to the 1,048 he played for the Rockies, or even the 238 he played for the Blue Jays. He wound up a Yankee after being released by Toronto in November 2018, that following a full season spent on the sidelines recuperating from surgery to remove bone spurs in both heels. The Blue Jays cut him while he still had $38 million in guaranteed salary remaining on the 10-year, $157.75 million deal he signed back in November 2010. Given that he would cost his next employer no more than the minimum salary, interest in him was heavy following a December showcase, with as many as many as 16 teams reportedly interested. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, Boston sports-TV anchor Bob Lobel used to say of former Red Sox players excelling for other teams, “Why can’t we get players like that?” Similar words are currently being uttered in Detroit, in regard to James McCann. In his first season with the Chicago White Sox, the 29-year-old catcher is slashing a robust .320/.378/.519, and he’s already gone deep nine times.

McCann wasn’t nearly that good with the stick in his four-plus years with the Tigers. When he signed with the ChiSox in December — a bargain-basement one-year deal for $2.5M, no less — he was a .240/.288/.366 career hitter. How did he suddenly morph into an offensive force?

“Honestly, the biggest thing for me this year is that I’m trying to be the best James McCann,” is how the Tigers castoff explained it prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “I’m staying within myself and not trying to do too much. I’m taking my base hits the other way — I’m taking my singles — and not trying to hit the impossible six-run homer.”

The breaking-out backstop trained with Rangers infielder Logan Forsythe over the offseason — both live just south of Nashville — and as McCann pointed out, each has played with some great hitters over the course of their careers. Not that attempting to emulate one’s more-talented peers is always the best idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, I wrote about Ian Desmond’s improved swing. For two seasons, Desmond hit ground balls at the highest rate in baseball, which is generally not the mark of a successful hitter. That is especially true in the current era of “elevate and celebrate.” Desmond was not elevating and thus rarely celebrating, even while playing most of his games in Coors Field.

Things changed this season, and for the better. Desmond had an average launch angle of 0 degrees in both 2017 and 2018, but has raised that mark to 7.8 degrees in 2019. His barrel rate has increased as a result, and he’s hitting for much more power: His .236 ISO is a career high.

When I first wrote about Desmond, the results weren’t yet there. On May 15, the day before publication, he sported a .218/.285/.411 slash line. His 64 wRC+ ranked 159th among qualified hitters, and his -0.4 WAR ranked 166th. While the underlying numbers were still encouraging at the time, Desmond was not yet seeing results. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, Kyle Freeland had a very good season. For some, it was almost too good. Here at FanGraphs, Freeland put up a 3.67 FIP, and playing half his games in Colorado meant a 4.2 WAR in over 200 innings and one of the 10 best pitching seasons in the National League. Freeland’s ERA was even better than his FIP, and with a 2.85 mark, his RA/9WAR was 7.5, the fifth-best mark in all of baseball. The distance between his ERA and FIP likely created a gap between those who believed Freeland was one of the best pitchers in baseball and merely a good one. The latter group thought that Freeland was in for some regression this year. After a rough two months, including time on the injured list, Freeland has been dispatched to the minors. That’s not regression. Allow me to explain.

Before being sent down, Freeland had a 6.37 FIP, a 7.13 ERA, and had given up 16 homers in 12 starts after giving up 17 in all of 2018. After last season, it’s possible some were expecting another sub-three ERA, but doing so would have been unrealistic. Expecting some regression might have meant that Freeland’s BABIP would go up from the .285 where it was a year ago and his LOB% would go down from 83%. Those numbers wouldn’t affect his 3.67 FIP, but it might take his ERA closer to his FIP. Maybe Freeland’s 8.5% HR/FB would creep up closer to average, leading to a higher FIP and ERA. In fact, projections considered many of those factors and forecast Freeland for a roughly average season with an ERA and FIP around 4.50. If regression had come for Kyle Freeland, that might have been what it looked like. If Freeland were pitching just like last season, we might expect a similar FIP and worse ERA. The problem is that Freeland isn’t pitching like he did last season. This isn’t regression (or reversion). This is Kyle Freeland being not as good of a pitcher as he was a year ago.

Freeland is a command lefty who excelled last season by pitching to his spots. In late 2018, Jeff Sullivan wrote about how good Freeland’s command had been all season, using multiple heat maps. We’ll engage in a similar exercise below, showing Freeland last year and this year. First, here are all of his pitches in 2019 compared to all of his pitches last season:

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