Over the past few weeks, I’ve done a few big-picture stories looking at things like bunting and aggressive baserunning. Small ball, you might say if you were feeling charitable. “That Max Carey-Lookin’ Nonsense,” you might say otherwise.

During that process, I kept running into Rockies center fielder Brenton Doyle. Not literally, of course. Doyle is extremely fast (98th-percentile sprint speed); I could not run into him unless I were chasing him on a bicycle over level ground, and even then it’d be dicey.

Doyle gets the most out of his legs. He’s 19-for-23 in stolen bases on just 101 opportunities, and the defensive components of his Baseball Savant page are all in red and pegged to the right: 99th percentile not just in arm value, but range as well. Despite playing just 112 games, he’s been 19.4 defensive runs above average, making him the fourth-most valuable defender in the league this season and the second-most valuable non-catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Rockies and starting pitcher Germán Márquez agreed on terms to a two-year contract extension worth a guaranteed $20 million. This was a lost season for Márquez, as an elbow injury and eventual Tommy John surgery resulted in him only making four starts. Unsurprisingly for a pitcher suffering a major injury, the second year of his new deal is heavily incentivized, with two roster bonuses and three inning bonuses. Márquez is expected to miss the first half of the 2024 season, but if he throws 160 innings in 2025, he’ll net a cool $22 million for the season. The contract also includes a $1 million assignment bonus, paid by his new team if the Rockies should trade him.

An elbow injury that requires a scalpel is never a welcome sign for anyone, but for Márquez, originally a free agent this fall, it was a particularly hard blow. The hope had been that he would bounce back from a pedestrian 2022 season that saw his FIP balloon to nearly five and his strikeout rate fall about 10% from 2021. While my thoughts on how the Rockies have been run since, well, 1993 are well-known, he was one of their biggest coups in franchise history. It’s hard to prove the Rays wrong on a young pitcher, but that the Rockies did, picking up Márquez and Jake McGee from Tampa Bay for Corey Dickerson and Kevin Padlo in 2016. Despite being only 28, he already looms large in Rockies history.

Jiménez’s three-year peak as an elite pitcher makes him the king of the mountain, but Márquez is only a couple good months behind him. When you consider offense as well (Márquez was once a Silver Slugger), the latter is already the leader. And while I can’t expect anyone in Denver to appreciate this, it certainly matters to me that my most recent memory of Márquez isn’t Buck Showalter throwing him into a playoff game for no particular reason.

Lest you think Márquez’s lofty standing is me damning the Rockies with faint praise, he’s long been one of the best-projected young pitchers in ZiPS WAR:

Naturally, his position in the rankings dropped as he failed to maintain his 2018 strikeout rate, but some of the decline is natural due to having fewer tomorrows remaining. With the kind of bounceback that ZiPS expected, he would have been looking at a pretty good payday in free agency. Here’s what his long-term projections for 2024 and beyond looked like before the start of 2023. I’m using a neutral park for this one since Coors Field is… complicated.

Based on that projection, ZiPS recommended a seven-year, $126 million extension or $116 million over six years. That’s not Gerrit Cole money and reflects the increased risk stemming from his 2022, but nine figures can buy an impressive haul of goods and/or services. It certainly would have been a better use of money than, say, signing an aging third baseman from the Cubs to play left field for $182 million.

I went ahead and told ZiPS that Márquez has missed time due to Tommy John surgery (I normally do this after the season) and re-ran the numbers.

ZiPS would have suggested two years at $18.2 million, but the difference between that and $20 million, in the context of MLB, is basically nothing. In any case, the fact that he is a pitcher who has survived Coors Field is almost certainly worth a bit more cash, even if ZiPS isn’t specifically valuing that here. In other words, the Rockies made a move that I cannot complain about.

Where does Márquez fit into the future of the Rockies? That’s a much trickier question. While the best result for him is that he makes a grand return next July and returns to his 2017–21 peak form, resulting in him getting that $100 million contract in a couple of years, I’m not sure the Rockies will take fullest advantage of this sunny scenario. If the organization is going to become competitive again, it has a lot of work to do, and Márquez rocking the NL inside out in 2025 likely makes him more valuable to the Rockies in terms of who they can acquire for him rather than his actual performance.

Trading veterans, especially veterans who had an important past in the story of the franchise, always appears to be psychologically difficult for Colorado’s ownership. But that’s a problem for the future Rockies. The team made a good move in extending Márquez to a low-risk, high-upside contract, and that’s good enough for me to pause my grumbling.

With Instructional League underway in Arizona (casts look of disappointment toward Florida) and Fall League rosters likely about two weeks out, the time has come to line the coffers with data and re-worked scouting reports in preparation for another round of farm system audits. Especially at the up-the-middle positions, defense is both very important and also a bit of a black box for readers, as there aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats and so much of evaluating defense is visual. I’ve recently been working on a video deep dive on the position players currently graded as 50 FV prospects or better, specifically to evaluate their defense in detail. Here I’ve taken a pass at the shortstops, providing video supplements for the prospects who I’ve evaluated in the 55 FV tier and above. I’ve made changes to their defense and arm tool grades over on The Board as a result of this exercise, and highlight the instances where this has caused a change to the player’s overall FV grade in the analysis below.

I’ve cut the videos in such a way that you can see each shortstop making similar plays one right after another. The videos feature plays to their left where I want to see them flip their hips and throw, plays that show the extreme end of their range, backhand plays in the hole to their right, plays coming in on the grass, and double play attempts. The fewest balls in play I watched for an individual player was 36 (Colson Montgomery and Dyan Jorge) and the most was closer to 70 (Jackson Holliday, Carson Williams and Marcelo Mayer). Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves made another fine-tuning move on Tuesday, bringing in veteran left-hander Brad Hand from Colorado in exchange for minor league right-hander Alec Barger. Hand joins his ninth big league club – his seventh since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season – where he’ll factor into a righty-heavy bullpen stocked with veterans. (With his latest relocation, Hand is a lock for the Immaculate Grid Hall of Fame, though Rich Hill was not to be outdone and found himself yet another team Tuesday afternoon.)

The Braves, who are just 7-8 since the All-Star break, already had significant pitching help coming by way of the injured list. They activated lefty A.J. Minter on Monday and stand to get Max Fried back soon, with Dylan Lee and Kyle Wright hopefully returning in the coming weeks as well. But Hand gives them another veteran option with just about every type of experience a relief pitcher can offer. After acquiring backup infielder Nicky Lopez – the third Lopez to get dealt at this year’s deadline – for the recently-acquired Taylor Hearn on Sunday, the Hand deal is another low-cost upgrade to a team that is fully intent on making a run at a championship this October. At season’s end, Hand and the Braves have what is now a $7 million mutual option for 2024, with a $500,000 buyout.

Hand’s 2023 isn’t particularly shiny, but some of that is the result of one particularly bad outing. He’s given up 18 earned runs in 35.2 innings over 40 outings, but four of those came on July 2, when he walked three and gave up a grand slam to Jake Marisnick in Denver. Take that line off his game log and he’d have a 3.63 ERA instead of his actual 4.54 mark (next to a 4.03 FIP and 4.07 xFIP), while his walk rate would drop from 10.2% to 8.7%. He’s pretty clearly not the same pitcher he was during an elite 2017-19 run that sent him to three straight All-Star Games, but he hasn’t lost much velocity since those days. His sweeper has been less effective than in previous years and is breaking less, though some of that difference may be a result of an uptick in velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

We all knew the Angels were desperate to add at the deadline. How desperate? Well, how desperate would you have to be to call your ex — two of your exes, actually — on a Sunday night?

The Halos continued their deadline restocking process by reacquiring a pair of their former first-round picks, Randal Grichuk and C.J. Cron, from Colorado in exchange for minor league pitchers Jake Madden and Mason Albright. (No, not the former secretary of state, but I’m gonna keep doing a double-take every time I see Albright’s name until well into his big league career.)

Every big league organization has its own special circumstances and cultural idiosyncrasies, but this trade brings together the two teams that have the best claim to being in unique situations. With Shohei Ohtani three months from free agency, the Angels sit four games out of a Wild Card spot with two teams to climb over. They face time pressure unlike anything most franchises have ever experienced. And the Rockies, well, are the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

Figuratively speaking, Bryce Elder is pitching well under par. In 21 starts for the Atlanta Braves, the 24-year-old right-hander is 8-2 with a 3.18 ERA. Killing worms is his M.O. Relying heavily on a modified two-seamer, Elder has a 53.6% ground-ball rate that ranks fifth-best among qualified hurlers. Earlier this month, he was named an N.L. All-Star in his first full big-league season.

When he’s not sinking fastballs, he’s sinking putts. Atlanta’s fifth-round pick in the 2020 draft, the University of Texas product is an accomplished golfer who shoots in the mid-to-low 70s. More on that in a moment.

Elder learned his sinker late in his freshman year of college. He’d thrown a four-seamer in high school, but lacking plus velocity — his heater was, and remains, in the 90-mph range — an adjustment was in order. His pitching coach showed him a one-seam grip, he threw a few off the mound, and the dividends soon became apparent.

The improvement was evident in the numbers. The Decatur, Texas native had a 5.55 ERA as a four-seam freshman. As a one-seam sophomore, he had a 2.93 ERA. As a junior — this in the truncated COVID season — that number was 2.08. Success in pro ball followed, but stagnation was never part of the plan. In a continued effort to get better, the righty subsequently tweaked his sinker grip. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves made two minor moves on Monday to fill out their bullpen headcount, acquiring right-handed reliever Pierce Johnson from the Rockies and lefty reliever Taylor Hearn from the Rangers. Heading to Colorado are righty relief pitcher Victor Vodnik, our no. 13 Braves prospect a few months ago, and minor league starter Tanner Gordon. The return for Hearn is unknown as of press time, but it’s unlikely the Rangers will be getting a prospect of much significance.

The Rockies have traded RHP Pierce Johnson to the Braves for a pair of minor leaguers, per source.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) July 24, 2023

If these turn out to be the biggest trades made over the last week of July, it would be a mighty disappointing deadline, but the Braves get what they wanted here. Their bullpen hasn’t exactly struggled this season — it’s second in FIP, WAR, and ERA — but adding a bit of depth while they still can has a lot of appeal to it. Through graduations and trades in recent years, the top of their farm system is kind of shallow at the moment, so internal reinforcements would be a bit trickier. Not helping matters is that they currently have five relievers on injured lists, four of them on the 60-day IL, and basically have no additional relievers on the 40-man roster left to call up in a pinch without shoving a starting pitcher in there.

Johnson is probably the safer bet of the two pickups, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn him with faint praise considering the season he’s had so far. Even in a Coors Field environment, an ERA of six is not what you like to see, and even the FIP in the mid-fours hardly screams “pitcher you’re going to use in high-leverage situations.” Johnson took over the closer role when Daniel Bard had to step away from baseball temporarily earlier this season. He only blew a couple of saves before losing the gig last month, but his walk rate this season — never his strength — led to a lot of adventures like you’d see from Fernando Rodney in a down year. Johnson’s saving grace, and almost certainly the reason the Braves valued him, is that he misses bats and throws hard; if carefully managed, he can be an asset to the ‘pen. Read the rest of this entry »

Jazz Chisholm and Jean Segura caught my attention while they were playing catch prior to a recent Miami Marlins road game at Fenway Park. Unlike their teammates, the duo was trading tosses underhand, windmilling their throws like fastpitch softball pitchers. Moreover, they looked good doing it. Their motions were smooth and easy, their deliveries firm and accurate. Having never seen professional baseball players do this, I was very much intrigued.

Standing nearby was Jennifer Brann. Now an analyst with the Marlins, Brann had excelled on the mound at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland prior to being hired by Miami two years ago. I asked her if she had seen them do so previously.

“I’ve seen Segura mess around a little bit, but I’d never seen Jazz pitch underhand like that,” Brann told me. “It was cool to watch. They knew what they were doing, especially Segura; he threw a rise ball and a changeup. But Jazz looked pretty good, too.”

The following day, I made it a point to approach both players in the clubhouse to find out if they had any softball experience. It turns out that they did.

“My grandma was a professional [fastpitch] softball player,” said Chisholm, who grew up in Nassau. “She played for the Bahamas National Team. That’s what really got me into baseball — I learned a lot of my baseball skills from softball — and she played until she was 60, too. She was just superhuman.”

Chisholm played fastpitch growing up, in part because the sport is played in Bahamian high schools, while baseball is not. (He did play Little League baseball.). Having attended a K-12, he began competing against upperclassmen as a sixth grader, both as a shortstop and a pitcher. Chisholm subsequently moved to the United States at age 12, thus ending his competitive softball days, Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Buck Farmer is flying under the radar while making an impact in Cincinnati. Baseball’s hottest team went into yesterday having won 12 straight games, and the 32-year-old reliever had pitched in seven of them. Moreover, the Reds had been victorious in 14 of the last 15 contests he’d appeared in. Over those outings, Farmer was credited with two wins and a save while allowing just a pair of runs in 15 innings.

He’s been solid from the start. On the season — his second in Cincinnati after eight in Detroit — the Conyers, Georgia native has held opposing hitters to a .188 average while logging a 2.41 ERA over a team-high 35 appearances. Consistently pounding the zone with a three-pitch mix, he’s issued just 10 free passes while fanning 33 batters in 37-and-a-third innings. By most statistical markers, he’s never been better.

Farmer credits Cincinnati’s pitching program for much of his success.

“I think it’s the development here,” Farmer replied when asked what differentiates his current and former clubs. “[The Tigers] were starting to change over to a more analytical approach before I left, but I don’t think they’d quite made that adjustment yet. When I came here, they were already tuned in. DJ {Derek Johnson] and the other coaches are fully invested in us. They want us to grab a little bit more here and there, and that includes taking what we’re good at and trying to make it great.”

For Farmer, that meant reworking a pitch that has become a lethal weapon. Augmented by a four-seam fastball and a changeup, his slider has flummoxed hitters to the tune of an .091 average and a .212 slug. His whiff-rate with the offering is a heady 45.3%. Read the rest of this entry »