Baseball is cracking down on pitch-movement-enhancing substances such as, though not limited to, Spider Tack. I asked Pittsburgh Pirates GM Ben Cherington if that was a concern for his scouting staff going into this week’s amateur draft.

“We did what I think probably every team did, which was to try to learn as much as we could about whether guys were using anything, what it was, and what adjustments they were making,” replied Cherington. “We’re not naive to think that the sticky stuff was only inside professional baseball. We did some analysis on data we have from amateur pitchers in terms of spin-rate changes over time, to see if we could glean anything from that.

“Whether or not a pitcher has used anything to get a better grip on the ball is a piece of information,” continued Cherington. “But in no way does that mean… if they had to stop using something, that they can’t adjust and still be really good. These are the most talented pitchers in the world and they have a way of adjusting and finding new ways to compete and be better. So I think that it was a small piece of information that we tried to get at, but not a major driver in any decisions.”

Following up, I asked the GM about the level of pitch-analysis data they were able to get for high school draftees, including fourth-round pick Owen Kellington out of small-town Plainfield, Vermont. 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 »

On June 28, baseball media swarmed to the story of Gwen Goldman, a 70-year-old New York Yankees fan who after 60 years was finally granted a wish she’d made as a 10-year-old. In 1961, Goldman wrote to then Yankees general manager Roy Hamey asking for an opportunity to be a Yankees batgirl.

The response she received from Hamey was rife with the kind of sexism one might expect from a missive penned in 1961. “While we agree with you that girls are certainly as capable as boys, and no doubt would make an attractive addition to the playing field, I am sure you can understand that in a game dominated by men a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout.”

While it’s hard to overlook that Hamey thought it appropriate to tell a 10-year-old that adding women to baseball would be “an attractive addition,” it’s clear that he was also dismissing any arguments Gwen might have made in favor of her merit in her original appeal, which unfortunately has not been recovered. Baseball, and especially the Yankees, were clearly important enough to Gwen to risk applying for the job, and thankfully her rejection was not enough to dampen her enthusiasm for the game. 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 »

Few major leaguers can claim as exciting a debut week as Akil Baddoo had. On the first pitch he saw in the majors, he launched a 372 foot home run to the opposite field. The next day, he blasted a grand slam in the ninth inning of a blowout loss. The good vibes continued in his third major league game. After entering the game as a pinch runner in the eighth inning, Baddoo knocked in the game-winning run in the bottom of the 10th.

I often wonder what happens to rookies like Baddoo who make such a big splash in their debuts. How do they handle the inevitable failures they encounter in the big leagues? Baddoo’s first couple of steps in the majors were fantastic, but it’s the third, fourth, and fifth steps that so often trip up players trying to establish themselves at the highest level.

The tough reality of playing in the majors quickly brought Baddoo back down to earth. He launched another pair of home runs in back-to-back games a week after his extra-inning heroics, but soon began to struggle to handle big league pitching. Those struggles shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, Baddoo had played just 29 games above Single-A during his short minor league career. Tommy John surgery wiped out most of his 2019 season in High-A and the pandemic prevented him from getting on the field in any professional capacity last year. Nonetheless, the Tigers selected him from the Minnesota Twins in the Rule 5 draft based on his toolset and potential alone.

But as you might expect for any 22-year-old with just over 1,000 professional plate appearances under his belt, Baddoo soon found himself flailing against the best the sport has to offer. On May 18, he reached 100 plate appearances on the season. On that date, his season slash line sat at .222/.287/.478 with an ugly strikeout rate touching nearly 40%. After the first two weeks of the season, when he slugged seven extra base hits in nine games, he collected just 10 total hits across the next 23 games, only five of which went for extra bases.

Baddoo has always shown an excellent understanding of the strike zone. His minor league walk rate was 13.7%, and in his only other full season as a professional (2018), he walked 14.3% of the time in Single-A. While that keen batting eye resulted in plenty of walks, it didn’t necessarily prevent him from developing significant holes in his swing. His minor league strikeout rate was 22.7% but much of that overall rate is pulled down by his excellent showing in rookie ball in 2017. During the last two seasons of his minor league career, his strikeout rate rose — to 24.0% in 2018 and 29.8% in ’19.

Making the adjustment to major league pitching is a tough task for any prospect, and most are making the transition from Triple-A with far more experience under their belts. Baddoo made the jump from High-A, with more than a year and a half between professional appearances complicating matters even further. These struggles were expected, but the true measure of his resilience is how Baddoo has adjusted. Over the 20 games and 58 plate appearances since May 18, Baddoo has compiled a .333/.448/.521 slash line and his strikeout rate has fallen to just 20.7%.

Here’s how he described how he approached his adjustments to Chris McCosky of The Detroit News:

“Really, it’s just having a game plan and sticking to what got you here. It’s just about staying mentally strong throughout the whole process. There’s been a lot of ups and downs, but I just took what the coaches and the veteran players were giving me and I made my own routine, my own plan on how to attack the game of baseball.”

Here’s a look at his 10-game rolling strikeout and walk rates this season:

After about a month of exposure to major league pitching, Baddoo made some significant changes to his approach that resulted in a dramatic decrease in his strikeout rate and an increase in his walk rate.

If we use May 18 as a breakpoint in his season, giving us 100 plate appearances in the first period and just under 60 in the second, we see some significant improvements in all of Baddoo’s plate discipline metrics.

He’s cut his chase rate and improved his contact rate, thereby reducing his rate of swinging strikes. His contact rate is still something to worry about; even in its improved state, it sits below league average. That was a big concern while he was a prospect in the Twins organization. A bit of swing-and-miss will always be a part of his game, but if he’s making enough solid contact and getting on base often enough, he might be able to mitigate that part of his offensive profile.

The walks have certainly come as the season has progressed but the results on contact have been a bit more mixed.

Even though Baddoo’s overall offensive contributions have been far more valuable over his last 60 plate appearances, the quality of contact he’s made has been decidedly worse. His hard hit rate has fallen precipitously though his expected wOBA on contact has stayed steady. Instead of making solid contact and driving the ball, he’s been thriving on weakly hit flares and groundballs finding holes. During his surge over the last month, his BABIP has been .429 despite all of the weaker contact.

We’re working with a total sample of just 159 plate appearances and trying to glean some evidence of improvement over the last 60 PAs. It’s not much to work with and it may amount to nothing at all. Opponents will inevitably adjust their approach and Baddoo will face a new challenge when they do. But it is encouraging to see some of the tools he featured as a prospect materialize in the majors after they were largely absent during the first month of the season.

The Tigers have also diligently protected him on the strong side of an outfield platoon. He’s compiled all of 27 plate appearances against left-handed pitching so far and has been completely neutralized. That was the profile scouts had envisioned for him as a prospect, and Detroit’s outfield is in a state where they have little to loose to see if Baddoo can reach or exceed that ceiling.

The changes Baddoo has made to his approach bring his excellent pitch discernment to bear and have paid dividends, but he’s far from a finished product. He needs to find a way to reincorporate that penchant for solid contact he displayed during the first two weeks of his major league career. His confidence and drive were big reasons why the Tigers felt comfortable taking such a raw player in the Rule 5 draft. He’s learning on the fly how to overcome failure without the option to return to the minor leagues to work on things in a low pressure environment. That kind of resiliency isn’t easy to maintain, but Baddoo hasn’t let the big stage get to him yet.

“Once I stop smiling, we’ve got a problem,” he said to McCosky. “When I’m smiling, we’re good to go.”

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 »

When the Cubs’ 2021 schedule came out, I circled May 17-20. That otherwise unremarkable four-game series with the Nationals would mark the return of 2016 World Series heroes Jon Lester and Kyle Schwarber to Wrigley Field. I knew they would receive an epic welcome from fans and I felt like I needed to be part of it.

The Cubs are pretty far removed from the juggernaut that won 103 games on the way to the team’s first championship in 108 years. While a relatively weak division means it’s certainly possible they could go on a run that would keep Jed Hoyer’s front office from being sellers at the deadline, it is far from guaranteed. Our playoff odds give the Cubs a 35.1% chance of making the postseason. It has left me looking for those moments of joy that fall short of the ultimate goal of hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy at the end of the season but are still meaningful.

It occurred to me that I am far from the only fan looking for moments to celebrate beyond the expectation of playing in October. So I started looking for all of the silver linings to 2021’s cloudiest seasons. I identified all of the teams with less than a 20% chance to make the playoffs per our odds, then dug into the prospect lists, record books and clubhouse storylines to see what I might circle on the calendar for the sport’s less fortunate faithful. So here they are, a few moments of joy for the fanbases that may still be holding out hope that their team will channel its inner 2019 Nationals, but suspect they won’t. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s what struck me as notable. Today, I’ll take a look at the American League, with a National League post to follow next week. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Frazier has an admirable goal, one that few of his contemporaries would even contemplate trying to attain. At a time when hitters are going down by way of the K more frequently than at any time in history, the Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman aspires to walk more than he strikes out.

He might actually do it. With Memorial Day right around the corner, Frazier has a 9.6 K% — fourth-best among qualified hitters — and 16 free passes to go with 19 strikeouts. Moreover, he’s been putting barrels on baseballs. To scant acclaim — par for the course when you play in Pittsburgh — Frazier is slashing an eye-opening .337/.399/.466.

Asked about his stated goal, the 29-year-old Mississippi State University product admitted that it won’t be easy.

“Guys today throw harder and harder, with nastier stuff,” said Frazier. “[Hitting] continues to get more difficult. I’ve always felt I have a pretty good eye, it’s just a matter of being able to put the bat on the ball.”

Frazier has fanned twice in a game three times this season, on each occasion punching out against a starter and a reliever. There are no walks in the park in today’s game. From first inning to last, power arms are everywhere you turn.

Whom has he faced that stands out as being especially nasty? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time to proclaim 2021 the Year of the No-Hitter.

At the beginning of April, Joe Musgrove graced us with an electric performance versus the Rangers. Just five days later, Carlos Rodón announced his resurgence by shutting down Cleveland. John Means then tossed a near-perfect game against the Mariners, and Wade Miley followed in Rodón’s footsteps, handing Cleveland another no-hit night. That brings us to yesterday, when Spencer Turnbull became the latest pitcher to go the distance, striking out nine Mariners while allowing just two baserunners via a pair of walks.

That’s an almost unfathomable five no-hitters – and we’re still in the month of May. Since 1901, the only other season with at least five such games before June was 1917, a year that falls in major league baseball’s Dead Ball era. There were six total no-nos that year, all thrown prior to June, but it doesn’t feel like the string of no-hitters will come to a stop this time around. Though the league’s offensive environment is certainly livelier now compared to a century ago, pitchers of all sizes, deliveries, and repertoires are throwing harder and smarter than before. In addition, a greater emphasis on power has seen hitters whiffing at higher and higher rates, sacrificing contact for big hits. The modern record for the most no-hitters in a single season is seven, which occurred in 1990, 1991, and 2012. We are on track to obliterate it.

On a more granular note, the Seattle Mariners give opposing pitchers one of the better chances at authoring baseball history. Coming into the game against Detroit, they collectively carried a 89 wRC+, the eighth-lowest mark in baseball. At the conclusion of Turnbull’s masterful performance, the team’s batting average dropped below .200, the worst in the majors. Mariners hitters have struck out in 26.3% of their plate appearances, but the main issue is they just aren’t performing well – that goes for regulars (Dylan Moore) and recently demoted prospects (Taylor Trammell) alike. Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2021 season nears its Memorial Day checkpoint, feast your eyes upon some stars who are off to the best starts of their career, a couple of wily veterans still learning (and if they know what’s good for them, eventually unlearning) some new tricks, and two-up-and down hurlers on a quest for consistency.

Tuesday, May 18, 6:40 PM ET: Trevor Rogers vs. Zack Wheeler

Two of the National League’s best pitchers through the season’s first month are on a collision course at Citizens Bank Park. One is an NL East mainstay who generated considerable prospect hype; the other is making a name for himself after a relatively anonymous minor league career. While Rogers was a first-round pick and a top-six prospect in the Marlins’ system heading into the season, he certainly was not on many fans’ radars outside of South Florida; our own Eric Longenhagen viewed him as a “stable 2-WAR starter prospect.”

Read the rest of this entry »