The Braves have added an entire outfield in one deadline day. They swung two deals earlier on Friday, one with Cleveland and one with Miami, helping them set up a left-field platoon of Eddie Rosario and Adam Duvall. But they made an even bigger splash just prior to the buzzer with a one-for-one deal with the Royals, acquiring Jorge Soler from Kansas City in exchange for righty Kasey Kalich.

Soler is a huge name on paper, but he’s in the midst of a major down year. He’s pretty much your typical big-power, swing-and-miss outfielder, but a deflated BABIP at just .229 and a below-career-norm ISO at .179 have contributed to an uncharacteristically low .192/.288/.370 triple slash, good for a 81 wRC+. He’s still slugged 13 homers, but the lack of production at the plate — in combination with poor defense in right field and half of his starts coming at designated hitter — has yielded an ugly overall output. Soler has been worth -1.0 WAR, the fourth-lowest mark among all position players.

Still, there’s plenty of reason to think that Soler’s 2021 is something of an anomaly. He’s hitting the ball hard — his average exit velocity and hard-hit rates are both in the 91st percentile — and he’s still hitting the ball in the air, with a 17.3 degree average launch angle and just a 39.7% ground ball rate, a touch below his career averages. Perhaps he is hitting too many popups though, as the percentage of batted balls he’s “under” has risen to his highest level since 2017, before his breakout. Perhaps that is still a bit nit-picky for someone who has seemingly just been dealt a lot of poor luck; Soler’s expected wOBA is still roughly in line with his 2020 figure, and the disparity between his expected and actual wOBAs is the fifth-largest in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

At the start of the season, the Dodgers had so much pitching depth it was a legitimate question as to how they would effectively use all of their talent. But what was a source of strength for Los Angeles in March has become a reason for cautious concern in July, as the team lost Dustin May to Tommy John surgery in early May and Clayton Kershaw to elbow inflammation in July. In the bullpen, meanwhile, Corey Knebel was lost on April 24 to a lat injury, Scott Alexander went on the IL for a second time on July 20 with left shoulder inflammation, and Joe Kelly is day-to-day with a hamstring injury. The Dodgers shifted Tony Gonsolin and David Price to the rotation to patch some of those holes, but while that pair’s been mostly effective as starters, that’s come at the expense of bullpen depth.

The bottom line is that the Dodgers probably needed to bolster their pitching staff, and that’s been the case since even before Trevor Bauer was placed on administrative leave while MLB and the Pasadena Police Department investigate disturbing charges of sexual assault. His latest hearing was postponed until at least August 16, and MLB has extended his administrative leave until at least August 6; it’s an open question at this point if he’ll pitch again this season (or for Los Angeles).

So with 36 hours until the deadline, the Dodgers made a deal with the Royals to replenish some of that depth with injured veteran Danny Duffy, who is in the final year of his contract and could work as a middle reliever or spot starter. Given his nature as a rental, the two teams will settle on player(s) to be named later from a pre-approved list, with Los Angeles also getting some cash back from Kansas City. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearly here and once again, team behavior will be driven, at least in part, by 40-man roster dynamics. Teams with an especially high number of both rostered players under contract for 2022 and 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 the team has incentive to clear their overflow of players by trading for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or, more typically, younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. In an effort to see whose depth might augment trade behavior, I enjoy assessing clubs’ 40-man futures every year. This exercise is done by using the RosterResource Depth Chart pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the Team Payroll tab), and then weighing the December 2021 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day Injured List. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins, they have to cut someone from the 40-man to make room.

In November, clubs have to add prospects to the 40-man to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. RosterResource is the most accessible resource for tracking the prospect timelines. Most teams add a handful of players every offseason, while some add just one, and others may add as many as 10. Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features a southpaw, Damon Jones, and a pair of right-handers, Zach McCambley and Josh Staumont, on their curveballs and sliders.

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Damon Jones, Philadelphia Phillies prospect

“My slider is kind of seam-shifted. I get a lot of horizontal — something like 23 inches, which is pretty crazy — and I kind of picked it up off a Pitching Ninja video. It was Trevor Bauer’s grip, but I changed it up a little bit. It was more my thumb. I left the fingers how he had them, but he touches his thumb and I kind of hook it on the bottom part of the horseshoe. I think that helps the ball come out of my hand a little bit later. Watching the video, he wanted to get it out early and let it spin. I want it to be more of a late, back-foot pitch. The more I can make it look like a fastball the better, and it’s been pretty similar for me in terms of release point, release height, and all that.

“This was in 2019 — I made the jump from High-A to Triple-A that year — and it was shortly after spring training. After my first or second start in High-A, I was toying with stuff, saw the grip, and started throwing it. The guy on the Rapsodo was like, ‘Can you repeat that pitch? Can you do it again?’

“Then, when I got to Double-A, Tommy Hunter was rehabbing with us. He told me, ‘It’s like an Andrew Miller type of slider, it’s just wipeout.’ I was like, ‘Well, he’s got a lot of showtime and has seen a lot of guys with good sliders, and he’s comparing me to the guy Andrew Miller was when he was in his prime.’ I was like, ‘I’ll take that.’ Read the rest of this entry »

The Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last month after being on hiatus due to the pandemic. Each week, we’ll hear from three pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features three right-handers — Scott Barlow, Aaron Nola, and Nick Sandlin — talking about their curveballs and sliders.

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Scott Barlow, Kansas City Royals

“I have both a slider and a curveball. I’ve started to integrate the curve a lot more, whereas in the past it was a lot of sliders. It still kind of is. But they kind of work hand-in-hand, and because I’ve thrown the slider so much in the past, my curveball is probably the better story. It’s been a big learning curve as far as when to throw it.

“I messed around with a curveball a lot when I was a starter, but then as a reliever… it was kind of weird, because a lot of relievers typically have two pitches, maybe three. Coming out of the bullpen it was kind of ‘When should I throw that third pitch?’ I think the more opportunities you get, and the more hitters you face, the more you understand when to throw that pitch.

“I threw a lot of sliders and curveballs in high school, but the breaks were a lot different because the arm speed was different. But with the curveball, I had an idea of the grip I liked and I stuck with it. It just really came down to committing to it, rather than having it being ‘poppy,’ having the same arm speed as the fastball, and then kind of adjusting. When you first learn to throw it hard, you tend to spike it a lot, throw in the dirt. You kind of understand how to adjust your sight lines — where to start that fastball arm action point — so you can get it in the right location. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryson Stott had a pretty good idea of what to expect coming into the 2019 draft. Ultimately taken 14th overall by the Philadelphia Phillies, the now-23-year-old shortstop out of the University of Nevada Las Vegas had reason to believe that he would be selected in that neighborhood of the first round. Our own mock draft had him going one pick earlier, while Baseball America ended up being spot-on with their prediction.

Stott likewise knew that several of his friends would be taken in the first round, albeit not necessarily by which organizations. He and a handful of former USA Baseball teammates would periodically update each other on what they’d been hearing, as well as any pre-draft workouts they’d been invited to. Specific expectations were couched in caution.

“As I’m sure you know, you don’t really get much before the draft,” Stott told me earlier this month. “It’s kind of, ‘You hear one thing and then something else happens.’ So it’s a weird time, and an exciting one, but still pretty stressful.”

As Stott pointed out, the entire 2018 USA team infield went in the first round the following year. Andrew Vaughn was at first base, Braden Shewmake was at second, Stott played short, and Josh Jung covered the hot corner. Will Wilson was an extra infielder, while Shea Langeliers and Adley Rutschmann were the catchers. Last year’s first-overall pick, Spencer Torkelson, was also on the team.

“It was a pretty good infield,” said Stott, in what could rightly be called an understatement. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

Read the rest of this entry »

On hiatus since the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last week with three pitchers telling the stories behind their sliders. Today, in the second of this year’s installments, we hear from Jake Brentz, Brooks Kriske, and Hirokazu Sawamura on their changeups and splitters.

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Jake Brentz, Kansas City Royals

“I never had a changeup in the minor leagues. I was fastball slider/breaking ball, but I always mixed around my breaking ball. I didn’t really find a breaking ball that worked for me until probably a year and a half, two years ago — not until I got to Triple-A.

“Paul Gibson is our pitching coordinator here with the Royals, and last year at the alternate site he told me, ‘Hey, I would like you to develop a changeup; I think it would be a very valuable pitch for you.’ So I really focused on developing one, throwing it as many times as I could during an outing. We were just playing each other — nothing really mattered — so it was just developing and whatnot. I’d throw it back to back to back, and messed around with grips. I found one that really worked for me, and then worked on it more over the offseason. In spring training I wasn’t throwing it a lot at first, but Mike [Matheny] came to me said, ‘I think your changeup can be a devastating pitch, so we’re going to throw that a lot.’ Over time, I’ve continuing to throw it. Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here. Today’s notes feature thoughts on three college hitters who played in the NCAA Regionals, as well as three pitching prospects currently in the big leagues.

Reed Trimble, CF, Southern Miss
Draft Class: 2021  Age: 21
Regional Line: 14-for-25, 4 HR

Notes
When I named Trimble one of Conference USA’s top prospects in a tournament preview post from a couple weeks ago, I made a mistake with respect to his draft eligibility. He’s indeed a (COVID) freshman, but his 21st birthday was Sunday, so he’s a draft-eligible freshman. Trimble hit .345/.414/.638 this year, and the Southern Miss schedule was no cakewalk even though they’re a mid-major. It included 12 games against eventual regional host and top-16 team Louisiana Tech, as well as games against Mississippi State, Alabama, Florida State and Ole Miss, and four against South Alabama, who made a deep regional run. Read the rest of this entry »