Francisco Urbaez wasn’t sure what to expect when he reported to spring training. Signed by the Cincinnati Reds as a non-drafted free agent in June of last year, the 23-year-old infielder knew only that he was being given an opportunity. To say he’s made the most of it would be an understatement. In 275 plate appearances with the High-A Dayton Dragons, Urbaez is slashing an eyebrow-raising .332/420/.454.

A native of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Urbaez didn’t come to the United States solely to play baseball. The son of a mechanical engineer and a psychologist, he came to earn a degree.

“That was my family’s plan,” explained Urbaez, who spent two years at Chipola Junior College, and two more at Florida Atlantic University. “They were like, “Go to the States and play ball, and whatever happens happens, but you need an education first.”

Already fluent in English when he arrived in the U.S. at age 18, Urbaez was initially an Accounting major, but then changed to International Business, and ultimately to Business. And while baseball wasn’t the priority, it did serve as a catalyst. Former Toronto Blue Jays slugger Jose Bautista is involved with a foundation that helps Latin American student-athletes come to the U.S. via scholarships, and Urbaez was one of the beneficiaries.

Unlike many Dominicans currently playing professional baseball, Urbaez hadn’t attracted a lot of attention while on the island. He received only one offer from an MLB organization, and that was after he’d committed to come Stateside to begin his studies. Teams didn’t exactly knock down his door during his JC tenure, either. It wasn’t until his junior year at FAU that scouts began to take notice. Prominent among them was Andrew Fabian, whose familiarity with Urbaez dated back to his time as a coach at Hillsborough Community College. Now an area scout with the Reds, Fabian saw potential in the under-the-radar second baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Eric Haase is having a breakout season with the Tigers. Acquired from Cleveland in January of last year, the 28-year-old catcher has a 128 wRC+ and a team-leading 18 home runs. Opportunity has helped fuel the production. Coming into the current campaign, Haase had appeared in just 26 games at the big-league level.

As impressive as Haase has been with the bat, it’s his background that drove a conversation that took place at Comerica Park on Thursday. I began by asking the Detroit-area native about his old organization’s well-earned reputation as a pitching-development machine.

“I think it starts with the guys you’re taking the draft,” opined Haase, who was in the Cleveland system from 2011-2019. “Obviously, there some are high-upside guys, and some organizations pick those top guys and kind of say, ‘Go out there and pitch.’ They think they’ve got themselves more of a finished product. With Cleveland, it was more about picking guys that already had a good feel for pitching, and then implementing things that would give them little spikes in velocity. They were big on weighted balls, big on strength and conditioning. Basically, they’d take guys who already had good command and give them some more legitimate weapons to get hitters out.”

Haase cited Shane Bieber, Aaron Civale, Mike Clevinger, and Zach Plesac as prime examples, and technology played a big role in their respective development paths. Drafted out of Dearborn Divine High School in 2011, Haase was there when the organization began transforming itself. Read the rest of this entry »

After addressing their offensive needs with their acquisition of Eduardo Escobar earlier this week, the Brewers turned their focus to their pitching staff. Their starting rotation has been the best in the majors but their bullpen has been merely good. They added some depth to their relief corps on Friday by trading for Daniel Norris, sending RHP Reese Olson to the Detroit Tigers in return.

Norris had worked out of the rotation for much of his career but recently made the transition to full-time relief work in 2020. Across 51 relief appearances over the last two seasons, he’s posted a solid 3.39 FIP that’s been somewhat hidden by an ugly 5.89 ERA this year. Like you would expect with any starter transitioning to shorter outings in relief, Norris’s fastball velocity has really benefited. He’s averaged 92.7 mph on his four-seam fastball during these last two campaigns, the highest velocity he’s seen on his heater since 2017. He’s also simplified his pitch mix, entirely cutting out his curveball and focusing on his slider and changeup as his two secondary options. Read the rest of this entry »

On May 14, I wrote about how despite some early excitement, the Tigers were struggling to meet the expectations of their rebuild and were on course for a historically bad 2021 season, or at least the first overall pick in the draft. Since then, however, some things have changed, and while they likely won’t be making any kind of a postseason push (our Playoff Odds still have their chances at 0.0%), what they have been doing is playing exciting, fun, winning baseball.

Case in point: their Wednesday afternoon game against the Twins. That 17–14 slugfest exemplified pretty much everything that is going right and wrong for the club over the past few months: an aggressive offense with two legitimate Rookie of the Year contenders, and a pitching staff that can turn even a 10–0 lead into something uncertain.

The improvements in the offense have been the biggest part of Detroit’s success. In April, the team was dead last in wRC+ at a dismal 63; now, the offense ranks 18th overall at 93. That looks even better if we narrow it down to just July, in which Detroit ranked 12th at 107. Oddly, the Tigers have been excellent in high-leverage situations; for the season, they rank eighth in that split with a 108 wRC+, and if we look solely at the month of July, that goes up to an incredible 164. Similarly, with runners in scoring position, the team has a wRC+ of 103 on the season and 135 in July, up from 92 in April.

Where are the Tigers finding this surge? One of the biggest stories here has to be the incredible rookie season of Akil Baddoo, who made waves by hitting a home run in his first major league plate appearance, struggled slightly at the beginning of May, and has since found his rhythm once more, slashing .309/.394/.497 in his last 56 games. If not for an already loaded class, Baddoo would likely be garnering some attention for Rookie of the Year discussions; he’s currently hitting .273/.345/.494 with a 126 wRC+ and a team-leading 1.9 WAR.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chosen in the ninth round of the 2018 draft, Tarik Skubal had a meteoric rise in prospect pedigree, tearing through the minor leagues in just 145 innings. He allowed just one earned run in 22.1 innings in 2018, then compiled a 2.58 ERA in high A and a 2.13 ERA in Double-A, but what caught the eye of analysts and prospect hounds alike were the strikeout and walk rates. He punched out about 40% of the batters in 2018 versus a walk rate of about 5% and posted strikeout rates of 30.3% and 48.2% in high A and Double-A, respectively, against walk rates of 5.9% and 10.6% in ’19.

Those numbers earned Skubal a place on our 2019 Tigers list before the start of that season, with Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel noting that he “dominated in pro ball after signing by throwing about 80% fastballs. He’s a ground-up rebuild who had third-round stuff at his best in college.” After he continued to dominate in 2019, Skubal climbed the 2020 version of the list, placing fourth behind three excellent prospects in their own right.

Skubal missed the entirety of the July summer camp last year but showed enough at the alternate site to earn a call-up, making his major league debut on August 18. It didn’t go to plan, though: He struck out a healthy 27.9% of batters with an 8.2% walk rate but also allowed a 72.3% fly ball rate with a 20% HR/FB ratio. That led to an ugly 2.53 HR/9 and a 5.63 ERA over 32 innings.

Unsatisfied with his 2020, Skubal made the pilgrimage to Driveline Baseball over the offseason. There, he first tried to make improvements to his existing changeup, but nixed that in favor of working on a splitter after immediately feeling comfortable with the offering used by his highly-touted teammate, Casey Mize.

Despite the new offspeed pitch, Skubal surrendered a 6.14 ERA in April despite allowing a miniscule .242 BABIP. His walk rate increased from 2020, and he was allowing even more contact in the air. And the splitter was not doing him any favors, with a pedestrian 10.2% SwStr% (the average for a left-handed pitcher’s splitter is 24.5%). He also had no control over the pitch, posting a 33.9% zone rate. Those two factors led to a .539 wOBA allowed on it.

About midway through the month, manager A.J. Hinch mentioned in a postgame press conference that Skubal would throw more breaking pitches going forward at the expense of his new splitter. That wasn’t all; he made a substantial change in terms of fastball usage after his start on the last day of April.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »