The trade deadline has come and gone, and teams are approaching the two-thirds mark of the season. With the elimination of August waiver season, clubs have little room to adjust from here. Other than the smallest of moves involving minor leaguers or unaffiliated players, rosters are what they are, and evaluators have already moved on to preparing for the offseason free agent class. In some ways, it’s a frustrating time for playoff contenders, as one can feel a bit helpless; all you can do from here on out is watch what happens. For teams clearly out of the playoff race, August and September have a different dynamic, with clubs using their last 60 games to learn about their young players. There is no greater jump in baseball than from Triple-A to the big leagues. The players are exponentially better, and there are prospects who thrive (or shrink) in ballparks with third decks, bright lights, and an army of TV cameras. In terms of the 2021 season, the teams listed below are playing out the string. But they’re also using this time to figure out which of the players on their roster can be part of their next team to play late-season games that matter.

Arizona Diamondbacks

The Diamondbacks had a relatively quiet deadline, but this also wasn’t a team expected to be this bad or loaded with good players on expiring deals. It will be interesting to see if Cooper Hummel, acquired from Milwaukee in the Eduardo Escobar deal, gets some major league at-bats this year. He’s had an outstanding Triple-A campaign, with more walks than strikeouts and a decent amount of power, but he also turns 27 in November, so it’s time to get going. It’s interesting to note that Arizona tried him at third base (it was just his second game at the position as a pro) during his first week in Reno, as most scouts put him firmly in the 1B/LF category. It looks like the D-backs will initially give at-bats to another older minor league slugger in the form of Drew Ellis, with the hope that one of the pair can represent an improvement over Christian Walker, which wouldn’t be asking much. The club also needs more assurances from Pavin Smith and Daulton Varsho, who so far have both looked more like nice bench pieces than everyday players on a contending team. A remarkable 36 players have taken the mound for the Diamondbacks, but the majority of their better pitching prospects are at the lower levels, so all they can really do from here is keep rolling out a variety of Quad-A-type bullpen arms to see if any of them have potential beyond that. Read the rest of this entry »

What a ride this year’s deadline was. All told, we had 75 prospects move in the last month. They are ranked below, with brief scouting reports written by me and Kevin Goldstein. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below. I’ve moved all of the players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to 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.

A couple of quick notes before I get to the rankings. We’ve included a few post-prospect players here (those marked in blue) so you can get an idea of where we value them now as opposed to where we had them at their prospect peak. Those players, as well as the Compensatory pick the Rockies will receive after they extend Trevor Story a qualifying offer and he signs elsewhere, are highlighted below. We had closer to 40 prospects (and 23 Players to be Named Later) traded last year, with the PTBNL number inflated by 2020’s COVID-related transaction rules. The backfields are not well-represented here, with just four prospects who have yet to play in full-season ball. Two of those are currently in the DSL and have no official domestic pro experience, though Alberto Ciprian has played stateside for instructs/extended spring training. Now on to the rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »