Last week in this space, we took a look at some shortstops predominantly known for their gloves who’ve taken some real (and not so real) steps forward with the bat. (Zack Cozart was not included; he deserves his own article soon.) This time, let’s flip the script and assess the light offensive production of some shortstops known for their bats not all that long ago.

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Kaz Matsui’s big-league career was fairly unremarkable. From 2004-2010, he logged a .701 OPS, and compiled 5.4 WAR, playing second base and shortstop for the New York Mets, Colorado Rockies, and Houston Astros. His best season came in 2007, when he was the starting second baseman on the “Rocktober” Rockies.

That season, he was worth 2.7 WAR, and formed an incredible double-play combination with a rookie across the second-base bag by the name of Troy Tulowitzki. While Matsui was never much of a hitter in MLB — NPB was another story — no self-respecting Rockies fan will ever forget his Game 2 performance in the 2007 NLDS, when he came a single shy of the cycle; his fourth-inning home run was the biggest play of that game, and kept the Rockies’ famous run chugging along.

Matsui’s seven American seasons were bookended by stints in his homeland, where he’s starred for the Seibu Lions (1995-2003) and Rakuten Golden Eagles (2011-2017). Yes, Matsui — now 41 years old — is still active.

Darrin Jackson knew him when he was just breaking into NPB. The Chicago White Sox broadcaster — at the time a veteran of nine MLB seasons — spent 1995 and 1996 in Japan, as Matsui’s teammate. To say he was impressed with the switch-hitting infielder’s raw talent would be an understatement.

I recently asked Jackson if he could share his memories of Matsui. Here is what he had to say.

…

Darrin Jackson: “I can tell you a couple of things about a young Kaz Matsui. First of all, he was 19 years old when I got there. He had an unbelievable arm. He was also just learning how to switch-hit. He’d only batted right-handed, and they were teaching him how to bat left-handed.

“Every day, for his training, the coaches would be out there by the mound with a basket of balls. They put padding on his right side — his legs, his hips, his shoulder. They would wrap him up, and he’d stand there in the left-hander’s batter’s box. They’d throw balls at him, literally at him, and have him turn into them, turn into them, turn into them. They were getting him used to having balls come at him — seeing the balls that way, and not flying open. They put padding on him to teach him how to stay on the ball, hitting left-handed. I thought that was amazing. And there was more. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Gonzalez has been a very good hitter for quite a while now. Since 2009 (his first season in Colorado) through 2016, he was one of just 74 position players to accrue 4,000 plate appearances. Among those players, his 122 wRC+ ranked 26th.

As recently as last season, he was hitting the ball with authority, relative to his peers. In a February piece, Tony Blengino stated that his batted ball profile was one that “projects as a safely above average offensive ballplayer in any ballpark,” despite no longer being elite. That hasn’t been how Gonzalez’s season has played out, as he has looked like a shell of himself all season. Even in June, I was still hopeful. I said that I didn’t think Gonzalez had gone from “a .366 wOBA player to a .287 wOBA player overnight.”
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Catchers are unique, and catchers are tricky. There are always questions about how any new player will fit in, but if you want a new left fielder, you can just go get a new left fielder. Catchers are more complicated, because they occupy leadership roles, and they need to be familiar with entire pitching staffs. For reasons like those, you don’t often see everyday catchers dealt in the middle of the season. Jonathan Lucroy was an exception last summer, when he was traded from the Brewers to the Rangers. And now he’s exceptional again, having been traded from the Rangers to the Rockies. Lucroy, teams are willing to believe in. Lucroy must be considered fast to adapt.

The two trades have Jonathan Lucroy in common. What they also have in common is that, like the 2016 Rangers, the 2017 Rockies are looking to go to the playoffs. But there’s one dramatic difference. Lucroy, a year ago, fetched high-level prospect talent. That was talent he was worth. Lucroy, this year, has fetched a player to be named later, or cash. I could make the same statement. Lucroy’s stock has plummeted — and yet, that even being the case, he can still make the Rockies a better baseball team.

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

Michael Kopech, RHP, Chicago AL (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 3   Top 100: 21
Line: 6 IP, 2 H, 2 BB, 1 R, 12 K

Notes
Engineered in a lab by the Abercrombie Corperation and then accidentally exposed to Serum 102 by The Syndicate, Kopech’s superhuman stuff is almost unhittable when he’s throwing strikes and, for his last few starts, he has. Kopech has a chance to have an 80 fastball and two plus secondary pitches, giving him one of the few true top-of-the-rotation ceilings in all of prospectdom.

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Philadelphia sent All Star reliever Pat Neshek to Colorado on Wednesday night in exchange for three prospects. Let’s refresh:

Colorado gets
RHP Pat Neshek

Philadelphia gets
SS Jose Gomez
RHP J.D. Hammer
RHP Alejandro Requena

Gomez, a 20-year old infielder at Low-A Asheville, is the owner of a .316 career batting average and indeed scouts like his feel to hit. Gomez doesn’t get much out of his lower half and is a bit undersized, and thus very unlikely to hit for much power barring a mechanical change, but he has good hand-eye coordination, above average bat speed and a chance to be a plus hitter at peak.

An average runner with an average arm, Gomez lacks the high-end athleticism typically found at shortstop and is not a lock to stay there. He’s already seeing time at second and third base, two positions where Gomez will likely lack the power to profile every day should one of them become his long term defensive home. He projects as a bat-first utility player.

Hammer is a 23-year old relief prospect with a plus, running fastball that will touch 97. He was a 24th rounder out of Marshall last year and had struck out 47 hitters at Low-A before a late-June promotion to Hi-A Lancaster. Hammer’s arm is lightning quick and while he shows some feel for locating his fastball to his arm side with consistency (in part because it naturally runs that way), his command is currently below average. He also has a power slider (I’ve had scouts call it a slider and curveball, and the way its’ described makes it sound like a hard slurve, so I’ll call it a slider) that flashes average. He projects as a middle relief piece but could be more if a better secondary pitch can be coaxed out of that arm speed and, as a Colorado high schooler who then went to a college not typically associated with baseball, perhaps that’s coming late.

Finally, 20-year old Venezuelan Alejandro Requena is a pitchability who had posted a 2.85 ERA this season at Asheville. He sits in the 88-92 range with his fastball which he locates readily to both sides of the plate and he has a loopy, fringey curveball that he can lob in for strikes to get ahead of hitters or bury in the dirt when ahead in the count. He could max out as a backend starter but is more likely to fall in the starters 6-10 range teams typically need to dip into during the course of a season.

As far as FVs go, Gomez is a 40 for me, projecting as a utility man with a better bat than usually found there. That’s a 45 at peak with Gomez’s proximity from the Majors diluting the mark. The other two are, in FanGraphs prospect parlance, honorable mention prospects worth continued attention.

The Colorado Rockies bullpen has seen better days. Dominant at the start of the season, we’ve long passed the point where it could call itself that. In order to help rectify this problem, the team acquired reliever Pat Neshek from the Philadelphia Phillies tonight:

The #Rockies have acquired RHP Pat Neshek from the Philadelphia Phillies. pic.twitter.com/xf3bWwdz8Y

— Colorado Rockies (@Rockies) July 27, 2017

In a subsequent tweet, the full scope of the deal came together. It is as follows:

Let’s go back to the Rockies bullpen for a second, so we can see the impetus for this trade (July numbers are as of Wednesday morning):

Fright. Night. Comparisons to the Titanic’s maiden voyage and the Rockies bullpen are welcome. Except with the acquisition of Neshek, the Rockies are aiming to steer around those icebergs. Neshek has been a top-10 reliever this season, and automatically becomes one of the Rockies two-best relievers, if not their best reliever.

Always a pretty efficient pitcher in terms of walks and strikeouts, Neshek has really maxed out this season, particularly with his strikeout rate, which is at a career-best 30.4%. He is simultaneously getting batters to swing at more pitches than ever and making them miss more than ever, which is a particularly nasty combination.

Neshek is a fly-ball pitcher, which generally you would think of as a bad thing at Coors Field, but Jeff Zimmerman introduced research last week that shows that fly-ball pitchers have been able to handle the home run surge better than ground-ball pitchers. And indeed Neshek has been. His HR/FB is at the second-lowest mark for his career.

Neshek works in a sinker-slider fashion almost exclusively — Pitch Info has his pitch mix as 49.3% sinkers, 47.8% sliders and 2.7% change-ups. If those first two percentages seem high, it’s because they are. His sinker percentage ranks 20th among qualified relievers, and his slider percentage ranks 10th. The only other two qualified relievers who are throwing both their sinker and slider both 40 percent of the time are Peter Moylan and Luke Gregerson.

Looking at that slider usage leaderboard, we find that the two relievers just ahead of Neshek are also Rockies’ pitchers — Adam Ottavino and Greg Holland. Heading into today, Rockies relievers were tied for fourth in the majors and first in the National League in slider usage with … the Phillies. With Neshek heading west to Colorado, the Rockies’ slider usage is only going to increase. If there’s a fly in this ointment, it’s that the Dodgers and Nationals have been crushing sliders this season, but should the Rockies make it that far, it will be fascinating to watch that strength vs. strength matchup.

With this trade, the Rockies should be able to achieve the simultaneous goals of dumping Jordan Lyles at the nearest dumpster fire (they’d want him to feel right at home, after all) and relying a lot less on Ottavino. Ottavino has been striking out hitters at a level better than his career average, but his control and home runs allowed have taken a significant turn for the worse, and it will help Colorado a bunch that they will be able to throttle back his high-leverage usage. At least until he figures out how to get his control back under, uh, control.

Moreover, this is a clear signal from the Rockies front office that the team is interested in competing for the NL pennant right now. As former Purple Row writer Andrew Fisher pointed out on Twitter after the trade was announced, this may very well be the first time the Rockies have acquired an All-Star at the trade deadline in the same season in which said player was an All-Star. While relievers are not usually the most exciting All-Stars, this is still a pretty big deal for Colorado.

Since Neshek is a free agent at the end of the season, it didn’t cost them a ton either. All three players acquired by Philly have interesting things about them, but none of them make you sit up in your chair and say wow. The one who got any prospect heat this spring was Jose Gomez. Here’s what Eric Longenhagen had to say about him last November:

Jose Gomez, SS, 2.8 KATOH+ – A stocky 5-foot-11, Gomez is an average runner with an average arm and could be a 45 or 50 at shortstop at maturity. He has mature bat-to-ball skills and hit well for his age in the Pioneer League this year but lacks power projection because the body is already pretty maxed out. He’s got a long-term utility profile.

Gomez posted a 132 wRC+ in rookie ball last year, and has replicated that this year in Low-A Asheville with a 136 wRC+. This is notable in the sense that Asheville’s ballpark is generally better for left-handed hitters, and Gomez is a right-handed hitter. He has notched 18 steals, but he’s also been caught 11 times, so we’ll charitably classify his baserunning as “raw.” Still, a .324/.374/.437 is a line you’d love to see from a middle infielder. While Gomez has played mainly shortstop this year, he has also started 10+ games at second- and third base, so his prep for that future utility role is already well underway.

The internet, as it is wont to do, briefly became obsessed with J.D. Hammer’s looks this evening. His 38.9% strikeout rate also may be worthy of future obsession, but since he’s compiled it at Low-A and High-A, we’ll hold off on salivating for another few months. Also tamping down expectations is his high walk rate since being promoted to High-A. It is a little disappointing to see him traded away though, as he is a Colorado native, and it would have been a great story had he ascended to the majors in a Rockies uniform.

After three seasons in rookie ball, Alejandro Requena is pitching well for Asheville this season. His 2.85 ERA is tops among Tourists starters, and it ranks 10th among South Atlantic League pitchers with at least 70 innings pitched this season.

The Rockies bullpen started the season flying high, but has since come crashing back to earth. By acquiring Pat Neshek, they have put themselves on much firmer ground as the pennant race starts to heat up. He won’t win them the World Series all by himself. But his acquisition — which cost them three interesting but likely low-ceiling players — signals that Colorado has designs on getting there, and that they will try to get there on the wings of so many sliders.

Denver, we have a problem.

Actually, it’s Denver’s baseball team that has a problem — and maybe problems, plural. The club has weaknesses at right field, catcher — MLB.com’s Thomas Harding reports that the Rockies have expressed interest in Jonathan Lucroy despite his framing decline — and maybe even first base. If the team wishes to maintain and perhaps enhance their postseason chances, they ought to consider addressing their problem areas.

While we always think about the Rockies as having run-prevention issues, it’s important to understand their performance in the context of their mile-high home environment. The club’s starters actually rank seventh in the NL in WAR and ninth in ERA- (93). Colorado also ranks fourth in relief WAR. So even though the Rockies’ pitching has slumped over the last month, they’ve still enjoyed an influx of talent to the rotation and have had success (well, at least before recent weeks) with a new philosophy that includes throwing breaking balls lower in the zone than every other team in baseball.

Are the Rockies looking for pitching? Perhaps, but only because every team is looking for pitching. Their roster has greater need elsewhere, though.

For example, the club ranks 25th in first-base production (0.6 WAR), where Ian Desmond was signed as a curious fit — and has been replacement level at first and left field this season. Mark Reynolds and his game of extremes have earned the recent lion’s share of playing time. He’s projected for a precisely league-average line (100 wRC+) over the course of the season. That doesn’t require immediate attention, perhaps, but isn’t ideal for first base.

Catcher is another position where the Rockies rank poorly, and where Tony Wolters‘ framing value has declined this season, but that is likely a tougher position to fill. Wolters was expected to be an asset behind the plate and end the Rockies’ long history of poor receiving, though Lucroy wouldn’t seem to help in that area.

But the most glaring production void among all contenders, to date, comes care of the Rockies’ right-field situation, where Carlos Gonzalez and company have produced a disastrous collective line.

If you weren’t concerned about CarGo already, you should be.

Whether the issue is an injury or a mysterious Andrew McCutchen-like extended slump or perhaps a premature and dramatic decline, CarGo’s power has vanished and his increased out-of-zone swing rate suggests a player who is searching and isn’t close to an answer.

Consider what we can find from new heat-map capabilities at FanGraphs.

Gonzalez’s slugging per swing this season:

Gonzalez’s slugging per swing last season:

One chart looks like one storm cell on a weather radar reading (this season), compared to a storm front in 2016.

We’re getting close to August, which means we are approaching Monday’s trade deadline. Gonzalez has a 50 wRC+. He’s had injury-plagued seasons before this — like in 2014 when he recorded a sub-100 wRC+ — but he’s never experiened a slump like this one.

It’s been the kind of season where CarGo’s best swing has resulted in a foul ball.

It’s probably not surprising, given their trouble in right field, that the Rockies were reportedly interested in J.D. Martinez.

That interest is perhaps indicative of the club’s level of concern with Gonzalez’s performance. And as Morosi notes, Martinez would have helped against the high volume of left-handed pitchers in the division. (And in hindsight, keeping Martinez away from the division- and Wild Card-rival Diamondbacks would have been helpful, particularly given the low cost.)

The Rockies could call upon Raimel Tapia again, who didn’t show much power but slashed .314/.369/.480 in limited plate appearances — and who, unlike Gonzalez, has produced above replacement-level value. Another internal option is David Dahl, who was activated off the 60-day DL last week and has just 60 minor league plate appearances this season.

There are still a number of possible trade short-term targets. Jose Bautista, Jay Bruce, Matt Joyce, Daniel Nava, and Steve Pearce are among the outfield options detailed at MLB Trade Rumors.

At 58-44, the Rockies have a firm grasp of the No. 2 Wild Card spot at the moment, and their +52 run differential suggests they are a quality group that isn’t outperforming their true talent level. But FanGraphs projections have the Rockies going 29-32 with a -17 run differential the rest of the way. FanGraphs playoff odds give the Rockies a 69.8% of reaching the postseason, and, interestingly, a 31.8% chance of reaching the division round of the playoffs. This is a Rockies team to bet upon.

To protect their position, hedge against continued dearth of production in right field, to strengthen a possible postseason roster, it could help to upgrade right and perhaps first base, with, say, fly-ball machine Yonder Alonso.

The Rockies are in a rare position. The market for position players seems to favor buyers by a lot. Their greatest needs are arguably position players. They can upgrade and hedge against continued disappointment. And given the fickle nature of pitching, particularly young pitchers on the steppe just east of the Rocky Mountains, the Rockies could do worse than try and upgrade the soft spots in the lineup. Martinez would have been an excellent fit at a low cost, but the good news for the club is there are other affordable options available.

Time is ticking toward non-waiver deadline, but there is still time for the Rockies to build upon their best team of the last decade.

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

Wes Rogers, OF, Colorado (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: HM   Top 100: NR
Line: 2-for-4, HR, BB

Notes
Rogers’ draft stock spiked during the 2014 JUCO World Series, during which he hit .538. He went straight from Grand Junction — where the JUCO World Series is held and where the Rockies’ Pioneer League affiliate plays their home games — to Scottsdale to workout with Colorado. He ran a plus-plus 60-yard dash there and the Rockies drafted him in the fourth round. He’s having a bit of a breakout year, albeit as an old-for-level prospect repeating the Cal League. But Rogers runs very well, has above-average bat speed, and exhibits terrific command of the strike zone. He’s also been an efficient and prolific base-stealer, lifting 159 career bases in 324 games at an 88% success rate. He’s also a long-limbed, small-school prospect, both late-blooming traits. Some of his power is probably fueled by Lancaster’s hitting environment, but there are big-leagues tools here, too.

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Adam Ottavino had three wild pitches this year before Sunday’s game.

That’s one of those opening sentences that doesn’t bode well for what happened next. You can’t reduce your wild-pitch total, and it’s generally not newsworthy when someone throws just one wild pitch, regardless of how devastating the ramifications of that errant throw are. For this sort of thing to be newsworthy, Ottavino would have had to commit a particularly nasty act of self-immolation.

Well, he did. Ottavino threw four wild pitches, and runs scored on all four of them. The Rockies scored six runs. Because of the wild pitches, though, they lost. It’s not what you want if you’re a Rockies fan.

A Tommy John survivor, Ottavino’s had a much rougher time putting the ball where he wants it to go this season. He carried a 14% walk rate into Sunday, the ninth-worst mark among qualified relievers. Then he walked three of the nine batters he faced. A walk rate that high is never all that great, but it helps that Ottavino can also strike guys out. He boasts a mid-90s fastball and a slider so notorious that it has its own Twitter account. When it’s on, it’s disgusting, and that’s the state it’s usually in. When it’s not, things can get hairy. The slider wasn’t the issue yesterday. His fastball is what got him in trouble.

Tony Wolters wants the fastball away from Yasmani Grandal’s bat with the bases loaded. The fastball didn’t go away. It went in, and bored a hole to the backstop. Ottavino’s release point is all out of whack, so he’s throwing across his body far more than usual. By the time he releases the ball, it’s got nowhere left to go. Justin Turner jogs home, and it’s a one-run game.

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