Luke Voit is a huge football fan. In recent years, he’s been a huge football fan without an NFL team to support. A Missouri native, Voit grew up rooting for the Rams, but the franchise relocated from St. Louis to Los Angeles while he was climbing the minor-league ladder in the Cardinals system. A void was thus created.

That jilted-lover experience is now safely in the rearview, and he has a new allegiance in mind. Voit recently bought a Sam Darnold jersey and is flirting with the idea of becoming a New York Jets fan.

“Because I’m playing for the Yankees now,” was the sturdily-built slugger’s response when I asked why that is (the Jets have gone 14-34 over the past three seasons). “I think it would be a fun connection to have. I want a team, and being in New York — I have a place there — I’ll be able to go to a game or two.“

His younger brother excelled on the gridiron. John Voit was a defensive lineman at
Army for four years, serving as a co-captain and earning the team’s prestigious Black Lion Award. Luke likely would have played collegiately himself had he not blown out his shoulder in high school. It was at that point that he devoted his full attention to baseball.

Upon learning that he’s been a linebacker, I asked Voit if he liked to hit people. His smiling response was, “Oh, yeah.” Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 Arizona Fall League rosters were (mostly) announced today, and we’ve created a tab on THE BOARD where you can see all the prospects headed for extra reps in the desert. These are not comprehensive Fall League rosters — you can find those on the AFL team pages — but a compilation of names of players who are already on team pages on THE BOARD. The default view of the page has players hard-ranked through the 40+ FV tier. The 40s and below are then ordered by position, with pitchers in each tier listed from most likely to least likely to start. In the 40 FV tier, everyone south of Alex Lange is already a reliever.

Many participating players, especially pitchers, have yet to be announced. As applicable prospects are added to rosters in the coming weeks, I’ll add them to the Fall League tab and tweet an update from the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account. Additionally, this tab will be live throughout the Fall League and subject to changes (new tool grades, updated scouting reports, new video, etc.) that will be relevant for this offseason’s team prospect lists. We plan on shutting down player/list updates around the time minor league playoffs are complete (which is very soon) until we begin to publish 2020 team-by-team prospect lists, but the Fall League tab will be an exception. If a player currently on the list looks appreciably different to me in the AFL, I’ll update their scouting record on that tab, and I may add players I think we’re light on as I see them. Again, updates will be posted on the FanGraphs Prospects Twitter account, and I’ll also compile those changes in a weekly rundown similar to those we ran on Fridays during the summer.

Anything you’d want to know about individual players in this year’s crop of Fall Leaguers can probably be found over on THE BOARD right now. Below are some roster highlights as well as my thoughts on who might fill out the roster ranks.

Glendale Desert Dogs
The White Sox have an unannounced outfield spot on the roster that I think may eventually be used on OF Micker Adolfo, who played rehab games in Arizona late in the summer. He’s on his way back from multiple elbow surgeries. Rehabbing double Achilles rupturee Jake Burger is age-appropriate for the Fall League, but GM Rick Hahn mentioned in July that Burger might go to instructs instead. Sox instructs runs from September 21 to October 5, so perhaps he’ll be a mid-AFL add if that goes well and they want to get him more at-bats, even just as a DH. Non-BOARD prospects to watch on this roster include Reds righties Diomar Lopez (potential reliever, up to 95) and Jordan Johnson, who briefly looked like a No. 4 or 5 starter type during his tenure with San Francisco, but has been hurt a lot since, as have Brewers lefties Nathan Kirby (Thoracic Outlet Syndrome) and Quintin Torres-Costa (Tommy John). Dodgers righty Marshall Kasowski has long posted strong strikeout rates, but the eyeball scouts think he’s on the 40-man fringe. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
Read the rest of this entry »

For a losing team, the Cincinnati Reds have been busy. It’s not just trading players either, as Cincinnati made one of the biggest deadline moves while many contenders slumbered in near-stasis, picking up Trevor Bauer with an eye towards retooling for the 2020 season. Only three of the eight players in Wednesday’s lineup were also in the lineup on Opening Day: Tucker Barnhart, Eugenio Suárez, and José Iglesias. Chief among the new additions is the recently called-up Aristides Aquino, a big slugger lurking far back from the head of the team prospect lists coming into the season. After a fairly unimpressive minor league career, Aquino has feasted on the major league bouncy ball in 2019, slugging 28 homers in 294 AB in the formerly pitcher-friendly International League and then a shocking 11 homers in just 20 major league games.

Aquino was not some elite prospect finally being called up. The Reds have only received the benefit of getting a look at Aquino because they decided to use their ABs in a now-lost season in a productive way. If the team hadn’t dropped Matt Kemp or traded Yasiel Puig, choosing to go with the known quantity in a mistaken attempt to goose attendance (there’s no evidence this actually works), there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities to assess Aquino or Josh VanMeter or Phil Ervin in the majors. They now have more information on these players — how they’ve played at the big league level — and that information can have a positive effect on the decisions they make on how to win the NL Central or a wild card spot in 2020. Even picking up veteran Freddy Galvis, a 2.0 WAR player, for free has a value to a team like the Reds given his one-year, $5-million option for 2020. Scooter Gennett was always likely to be gone, but Galvis may not be, and now the Reds have another player who they can choose to start in 2020 or trade over the winter.

The Reds have been fortunate in these decisions, but I would have been in favor of this calculus even if Aquino/VanMeter/Ervin had been terrible. My fundamental belief is that among hitters and pitchers, teams have roughly a combined 12,000 plate appearances/batters faced to work with every year, and as many of them should be devoted to trying to win games as possible. Maybe they’re not 2019 wins — maybe they’re wins in 2020 or 2023 or 2026. But even players not working out gives you information; if Aquino came to the majors and hit like Lewis Brinson, it would still give the Reds data they didn’t have before. You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge when you’re a 90-loss team still penciling Billy Hamilton or Chris Davis into the lineup on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »

We have a sizable collection of players to talk about this week because the two of us have been busy wrapping up our summer looks at the 2020 Draft class over the last couple weeks. This equates to every prospect added to or moved on THE BOARD since the Trade Deadline.

Top 100 Changes
We had two players enter the 50 FV tier in Diamondbacks SS Geraldo Perdomo and Padres C Luis Campusano. Perdomo is in the “Advanced Baseball Skills” player bucket with players like Vidal Brujan, Brayan Rocchio and Xavier Edwards. He’s added visible power since first arriving in the States and had as many walks as strikeouts at Low-A before he was promoted to the Cal League, which has been Campusano’s stomping ground all summer. He’s still not a great catcher but he does have an impact arm, big power, and he’s a good enough athlete that we’re optimistic he’ll both catch and make the necessary adjustments to get to his power in games down the line.

We also moved a D-back and a Padre down in RHP Taylor Widener and 1B Tirso Ornelas. Widener has been very homer prone at Triple-A a year after leading the minors in K’s. His fastball has natural cut rather than ride and while we still like him as a rotation piece, there’s a chance he continues to be very susceptible to the long ball. Ornelas has dealt with injury and swing issues.

On Aristides Aquino
Aristides Aquino was a 50 FV on the 2017 Reds list; at the time, he was a traditional right field profile with big power undermined by the strikeout issues that would eventually cause his performance to tank so badly that he became a minor league free agent. A swing change visually similar to the one Justin Turner made before his breakout (Reds hitting coach Turner Ward comes from the Dodgers) is evident here, so we’re cautiously optimistic Aquino will be a productive role player, but we don’t think he’ll keep up a star’s pace. Read the rest of this entry »

As we’re reminded every time they face the Yankees and give up homers by the half-dozen, the Orioles are a very bad baseball team. At 39-82, they’re 41 1/2 games out of first place, and on pace for 52 wins, which means they could lose more than two-thirds of their games for the second season in a row. They’re just nine homers away from breaking the single-season record for dingers allowed (258). And yet they’re not even the majors’ worst team. Neither are the Marlins, who through the first 41 games of the season slipped below the Throneberry Line by losing 31 games.

That so much attention has been paid to those bad ballclubs might be chalked up to yet another instance of East Coast Bias, because tucked away in the more wholesome Midwest are the Detroit Tigers, who are doing things (and not doing things) to rekindle memories of their 2003 squad, which gave Throneberry’s 1962 Mets a run for their money by losing 119 games. At 36-81, these Tigers are on pace to go 50-112, but a slight slippage could send them past last year’s 115-loss Orioles. In the words of James Brown, “People, it’s bad.”

This — what’s the opposite of web gem? — might be the 2019 squad’s signature play (h/t @suss2hyphens):

The Tigers were a competitive concern as recently as 2016, when they went 86-75 but slid out of a Wild Card spot in late September. That was the last gasp of the core that won four straight AL Central titles from 2011-14, and one that probably should have begun scattering to the four winds earlier. As it was, general manager Al Avila — who replaced Dave Dombrowski in late 2015 — traded Alex Avila (his own son!), J.D. Martinez, Justin Upton, Justin Verlander, and Justin Wilson in a six-week span in mid-2017, as the team was en route to 98 losses.

The Tigers are rebuilding, but their rebuild has been hampered by a farm system weakened by years of bad drafts and repeated mining to keep their competitive window open. One has to dial back to 2011 to find a year in which the Tigers’ top draft pick (James McCann, who was a second-rounder) ever suited up for the team in the regular season, and 2012 (Jake Thompson) for one who even played in the majors. Baseball America’s annual organizational rankings placed their system between 26th and 30th annually from 2014-17. That’s a lousy platform from which to launch a rebuild, and it’s shown. Last year’s Tigers lost 98 games under new manager Ron Gardenhire, and this year’s crop is worse. Much, much worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 trade deadline has passed and, with it, dozens of prospects have begun a new journey toward the major leagues with a different organization. We have all of the prospects who have been traded since the Nick Solak/Peter Fairbanks deal ranked below, with brief scouting snippets for each of them. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of were analyzed at length on this site. Those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “From” column below. We’ve moved all of the players below to their new orgs over on THE BOARD, so you can 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. Thanks to the scouts, analysts, and executives who helped us compile notes on players we didn’t know about.
Read the rest of this entry »

Having already bolstered their bench with super-utilityman Tony Kemp, the Cubs have added a more substantial bat in the form of right fielder Nicholas Castellanos, a pending free agent who has spent his entire career with the Tigers. The 27-year-old righty swinger heads from the Motor City to the Windy City in exchange for a pair of right-handed pitching prospects.

Cubs get:

OF Nicholas Castellanos

Tigers get:

RHP Alex Lange
RHP Paul Richan

A supplemental first-round pick in the 2010 draft out of a Florida high school, Castellanos spent the bulk of his first four full major league seasons (2014-17) playing third base — and badly at that (-25.8 UZR, -64 DRS). During that time, he hit for a modest 104 wRC+ in 2,304 plate appearances, good for just 4.8 WAR. The bulk of that value arrived in the last two of those years, as he began to hit for more power and trimmed his strikeout rate. He bopped a career-high 26 homers in 2017, the same year that he took up playing right field in September, two months after J.D. Martinez was traded to the Diamondbacks. Though he hit only 23 homers last year, he set across-the-board career highs in all three slash stats (.298/.354/.500) as well as wRC+ (130) and WAR (3.0).

Castellanos has been unable to match that performance this year, hitting .273/.328/.462 for a 106 wRC+ with just 11 homers in 439 PA. His average exit velocity has dropped from 89.6 mph to 88.3, and his xwOBA, too, from .377 to .335. He has chased pitches out of the zone like never before (a career-high 41.2% O-Swing%), and while he continues to crush fastballs (as Devan Fink noted last week), he has been vulnerable to changeups outside the zone and has experienced a spike in popups on such pitches; where he hit for a career-best 167 wRC+ against changeups last year, he’s back down to 117 this year, though he has cut his swinging strike rate on them by more than half (from 21.8% to 10.2%). He has struggled against sliders, whiffing on them 22.6% of the time, and hitting for just a 74 wRC+ against them. Pitchers have noticed; changeups and sliders have accounted for 36.3% of the pitches he’s seen, up from about 28-32% from 2016-18. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tigers are rebuilding as the Braves have tried to build a bullpen on the fly all season long. The match between the two teams is an easy one to make, and Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Tigers are close to trading away closer Shane Greene to the Braves. Robert Murray has added the return for the Tigers. Here’s the deal:
Braves Receive:

• RHP Shane Greene

Tigers Receive:

• LHP Joey Wentz
• OF Travis Demeritte

A season ago, Greene racked up 32 saves for the Tigers, but he generally wasn’t a very good reliever. His ground-ball rate at 40% was lower than in previous seasons, and too many fly balls meant too many homers and a 4.61 FIP and an ERA over 5. This season, Greene was able to get back to his ground-balling ways with a sinker/cutter/slider arsenal, and he’s been a pretty good pitcher as a result. Looking at Greene’s ERA might lead one to believe he is a great pitcher, but the underlying numbers don’t completely support that greatness.

Greene has a 1.18 ERA, which is certainly really good. Only Kirby Yates‘ 1.02 mark bests Greene among relievers this season. Expecting Greene to continue to post a 1.18 ERA is folly. He has struck out 29% of batters, which is good, while walking 8% of batters, which is roughly average. His ground-ball rate on the season is 54%, and that’s going to keep the ball in the park and limit damage, but those things alone aren’t enough to take a 3.80 FIP, which is about 20% better than average in these heightened run environments, and move it to a 1.18 ERA.

Greene’s BABIP is .181 and his left-on-base rate is 85%, and neither number is sustainable going forward. He’s also given up six runs on the season which weren’t earned, more than double his total of five earned runs. This isn’t to say Greene isn’t good, but it is enough to say Greene isn’t great. Over at Statcast, his xwOBA is a solid .282, but his actual wOBA is about 60 points lower. Greene is a solid addition to the Braves pen, and 15 years ago, the ERA and saves might have netted the Tigers a top-50 prospect. Today, Greene is another solid reliever among many available at the trade deadline. The Braves are likely to pay a premium for that need, but their top prospects were always going to be off limits. Read the rest of this entry »

Evidently, Nicholas Castellanos doesn’t love playing in Comerica Park.

“This park is a joke,” he told Chris McCosky of The Detroit News on July 21. “It’s to the point where how are we going to be compared to the rest of the people in the league in terms of power numbers, OPS, slugging and all that stuff when we got a yard out here that’s 420 feet straight across center field?”

As we approach the July 31 trade deadline, it appears likely that Castellanos won’t have to call Comerica home for much longer. The Tigers are 30-67, and as MLB.com’s Jon Morosi reported on Wednesday, they are “virtually certain” to trade him by the deadline. But a change of scenery might not be the solution to Castellanos’ problems. Playing the majority of his games in Detroit isn’t why the outfielder has taken a slight step back this season (130 wRC+ in 2018; 114 wRC+ in 2019).

First, let’s dispense with Castellanos’ claim. Here are Castellanos’ 2019 home and road splits:

Those are some pretty drastic splits, but it’s clear that Castellanos is not being hindered by the effects of Comerica Park. The wRC+ split ⁠— which, as we know, adjusts for park factors ⁠— tells the full story. While Castellanos has been a better hitter on the road than at home, it’s not the fault of the ballpark. Read the rest of this entry »