Howard Norsetter, the Minnesota Twins’ international scouting coordinator, was fired at the end of the 2017 season. The termination came as a shock, both because of Norsetter’s long tenure with the team – he was first hired by Minnesota in 1991 – and also because of his record whilst working for the Twins. Norsetter is most notable for being the scout who discovered and signed stars like Justin Morneau, but the sheer number of legitimate major league players he uncovered during his career is remarkable. Norsetter signed Grant Balfour, Liam Hendriks, Max Kepler, and Byung Ho Park, among more than 25 major leaguers. John Sickels posted an interview with Norsetter from 2010 in which he demonstrated a sharp baseball mind.

And even after Norsetter was let go, the Twins continued signing players he’d found and recommended, including Kai-Wei Teng. In other words, Norsetter, who lives in Australia, is undeniably good at his job. The Twins evidently agreed, saying his termination wasn’t performance related. Norsetter was later hired for a lesser position with the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Ron Darling, Jack Morris, and Tyler Thornburg — on how they learned and developed their change-of-pace pitches.

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Ron Darling, Former All-Star

“When I first started throwing a split, I was one of those pitchers who could never develop a changeup. I was in the minor leagues with Al Jackson, who was a crafty left-hander in his day, and he taught me a screwball. He used to throw one. I got very adept at it, but it made my arm hurt. I had to develop a change-of-pace pitch that didn’t hurt my elbow, and that’s how the split-finger came to be.

“It was an era where the pitch was popular. Roger Craig taught it to a lot of pitchers, but it was a split-finger fastball for those guys. For me it was more of a forkball. It was something soft that I could combine with my fastball and hard curveball.

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On a recent podcast episode, Eric Longenhangen and I discussed the premise for this article, which is another way of asking which organizations are healthiest in the short-to-medium term. The factor that goes furthest towards answering that question is present on-field talent, although salary, controlled years, the presence of impact minor leaguers on the horizon, and front-office quality are all relevant — as is payroll ceiling, which serves as a proxy for margin for error. With the World Series starting tonight, it seemed like the right time to look ahead at the favorites for the five World Series beyond this one.

I’ve experimented with some objective ways of measuring organizational health. I think it’s ultimately possible to produce an algorithm that would do a solid job, ranking teams objectively in a number of key categories. It would also require considerable time. Eager to arrive at some kind of answer, I’ve settled for subjective assessment for this version of the post, but I intend to work on something more systematic in the winter.

Here are the criteria I’ve considered to produce these rankings: short-term MLB talent, long-term MLB talent/upper-minors prospects, lower-minors prospects/trade capital, payroll ceiling, MLB coaching/front office, and amateur signings (draft and international). You could quibble and combine or separate a few of those groupings, or argue some of these can’t be quantified properly. You may be right, but we’ll keep tweaking things until they are.

I had originally intended to limit this list to five teams for purposes of symmetry, but the top tier looked like seven teams to me, and the sources by whom I ran this list agreed. In the same way that the I approached the Trade Value Rankings from the point of view of a medium-payroll, medium-term-focused team, I’ve undertook this exercise by asking which team would be most attractive to a prospect GM if his or her only interest is to win the most World Series possible (and not have low state income tax, run a childhood team, or live in a cool city) over the next five seasons.

Without further explanation, here are the organizations most likely to win the 2019-23 World Series.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers

The top-three teams on this list all have some reasonable claim to the top spot, but I ultimately went with the Dodgers, as they have a little more certainty in terms of on-field personnel than the Yankees possess, while both clubs feature similar built-in financial advantages. (Houston lags behind on the second count.)

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With nothing expected of the majority of the AL Central teams in 2018, the Twins were the main hope for making Cleveland’s season inconvenient. Like a Star Wars prequel, this new hope failed to materialize in a satisfying way.

The Setup

The Twins were one of the more successful regular-season teams in baseball during the aughts, making the playoffs in six of nine seasons, but also going 6-21 in the actual postseason. With the core of the team fading quickly after 2010, Minnesota spent several years wandering around as one of baseball’s few remaining (relatively) “pure” old-school franchises.

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The last pitcher to strike out Willians Astudillo was Tyler Olson. With two on and one out in the top of the eighth of a one-run game, Olson put Astudillo away with the sixth pitch of the at-bat, a well-thrown low-away changeup. Astudillo had also struck out ten plate appearances earlier, facing Blake Snell. Snell was the first guy in the majors to get Astudillo to go down on strikes. Olson was the second. There have been only the two strikeouts. Olson’s happened on August 29.

Astudillo appeared again on September 1. He started on September 2. So far in September, Astudillo has come to the plate 55 times, and he hasn’t struck out. He is the only major-leaguer without a strikeout this month, among everyone with at least 50 opportunities. And though Astudillo has also drawn just one September walk, he’s batted .389. Overall, in a small sample in the bigs, he’s batted .350. Ordinarily we don’t cite batting average very often around these parts, but with Astudillo, it can tell most of the story. The weirdest player from the minors is making it work.

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When the Mariners’ James Paxton completed his no-hitter against the Blue Jays on May 8, it was the majors’ second in a five-day span. The Dodgers’ Walker Buehler and three relievers had performed the same feat versus the Padres on May 4. It was also the third in 18 days, if we include the A’s Sean Manaea performance against the Red Sox on April 21. We haven’t seen one since, though we’ve certainly seen no shortage of credible bids, including three that made it into the ninth inning, the most recent of which was this past Saturday (care of the Royals’ Jorge Lopez against the Twins). On Wednesday night, the Twins’ own Jake Odorizzi was the latest to give it a go, holding the Yankees hitless for 7.1 innings before yielding an RBI double to Greg Bird.

The hit came on Odorizzi’s 120th pitch, matching a career high set on June 3, 2016, which suggests that he likely wouldn’t have finished the job even if he’d retired Bird. That said, it sounds as though manager Paul Molitor had given him the green light. Via The Athletic’s Dan Hayes:

“I told him, ‘This is one of those rare nights when you get in this type of area,’ in terms of doing something that was magical,” Molitor said. “You just try to do the best you can and trust that he was going to make a good decision for himself and not get too caught up. Sometimes you have to do that for him, but I thought he was in a good place.”

Odorizzi had begun running up his pitch count in the first inning, when he threw 23 pitches via three-ball counts against both Andrew McCutchen and Miguel Andujar sandwiched around an Aaron Hicks plate appearances that featured five straight foul balls. He walked three batters in all. Only in the seventh inning, when he needed just seven pitches to retire Andujar, Giancarlo Stanton and Didi Gregorius, did he throw fewer than 14 pitches.

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There is a moment during Ryan Pressly’s delivery at which it appears — from certain camera angles and for the briefest of flickering moments — as if he might fall down. He begins his motion by raising himself quickly and powerfully onto his back leg, back slightly hunched and ball only just beginning to separate from glove. As his front leg begins to drop, Pressly moves his center of gravity — and full weight — onto that strong back leg, pitching arm pointing very nearly towards first base and glove out in front on his left hand like a talisman, as if to ward off the batter.

This is the point, in freeze frame, at which it appears ever-so-slightly possible that he might lose his balance and tumble, ass-backwards, off the mound. But then, a split second before the point of no return, the hips fire from their hyper-rotated position, the arm whips toward the batter at 45 degrees, and in the matter of an instant it is Pressly’s chosen victim, rather than the pitcher himself, who begins to look rather foolish.

That strikeout of Jonathan Lucroy, which came in the seventh inning of the Astros’ August 17th encounter with the surging A’s, was Pressly’s 10th for Houston since arriving via trade on July 27th. He has since added eleven more Ks against just one walk, which brings his totals in 16.2 innings pitched in the orange and navy to 23 strikeouts and just one walk. No other reliever has anything approaching that K/BB ratio over that period since Pressly arrived in Houston. Heck, Pressly himself has never really had such a dominant stretch of success. In the 47.2 innings he threw for the Twins before being traded, he struck out 69 and walked 19 — perfectly nice numbers, but nothing close to what he’s done in Texas.

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Blue Jays infielder Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who became the consensus No. 1 prospect in baseball once Ronald Acuña graduated, has recorded one of the top batting lines at Triple-A since his promotion to that level at the end of July. White Sox outfielder Eloy Jiménez, generally considered one of the game’s top five prospects, has actually been slightly more productive than Vlad Jr. during his own 200-plus plate appearances in the International League. Mets prospect Peter Alonso, meanwhile — who lacks the transcendent talent of the aforementioned players but also rates as a top-100 prospect — leads the minor leagues in homers and plays a position from which the Mets have gotten sub-replacement level production. All three have demonstrated some level of mastery over minor-league competition. None of them are likely to appear in the majors this year.

If the circumstances were different, one could understand. If the Jays or White Sox or Mets were in the midst of a playoff race and were adding veteran talent to complement their rosters, that would be one thing. That’s not the case, though. All three clubs possess sub-.500 records. All three have endured depressed attendance figures (down 24.7% in Toronto, 5.7% in Chicago, 7.4% in New York). All three are looking towards next year.

Despite this emphasis on the future and development, executives have found excuses not to recall any of aforementioned players, ranging from a lack of available playing time to defense (always defense) to checklists to which the public isn’t privy. If the formula holds, not only will Guerrero, Jiménez, and Alonso fail to appear in the majors this year, they also won’t break camp with their respective clubs at the beginning of next season. Instead, their teams will head north from spring training without them and then, a few weeks later in April, summon them to the big club — as soon as they’ve acquired what amounts to another year of control.

What’s happening with this particular group of young players isn’t uncommon, of course. We’ve been here before — with Evan Longoria in 2008, with David Price and Matt Wieters in 2009, with Mike Trout and Bryce Harper (2012), with George Springer (2014), with Kris Bryant and Maikel Franco (2015), and with Gleyber Torres (who at least was returning from a season-ending injury) and Acuña this year.

From a cutthroat, competitive standpoint, it makes sense. Acting in their own self-interest under the rules of the collective bargaining agreement, teams want to retain their best young players for longer while paying them as little as possible. The executives’ euphemisms are all the more tiresome, however, because fans have become conditioned to accept (or even defend) them, taking the sides of billionaires (the owners) against millionaires (if, in this case, they got a handsome signing bonus). The teams’ actions may not be illegal (though colleague Sheryl Ring offered a legal argument on their behalf concerning their postponed entry into the union). We’ve become hyperconscious of it in the wake of Bryant’s delayed arrival and subsequent grievance, which three years later remains unresolved.

The problem is, the subject of teams manipulating the service time of young players is diverting attention away from the games themselves and becoming it’s own story. It’s a bad look for the sport, particularly in a year where nearly one-third of the teams are noncompetitive by design, where leaguewide attendance is down 4.6% relative to 2017 and slated to finish below 30,000 per game for the first time since 2003.

Instead of any collective effort to address the problem, however, the sport has recently produced a novel kind of service-time manipulation — in this case, involving former consensus No. 1 prospect Byron Buxton.

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Bobby Wilson has caught for 16 seasons — nine of them at the big league level — so he knows pitching like the back of his hand. Particularly on the defensive side of the ball. With a .577 OPS in exactly 1,000 MLB plate appearances, the 35-year-old hasn’t exactly been an offensive juggernaut. But his stick isn’t why the Chicago Cubs acquired him from the Minnesota Twins this past Thursday. They picked him up for his receiving skills and his ability to work with a staff.

The quality and style of pitching he’s seeing today aren’t the same as what they were when he inked his first professional contract in 2002.

“The game is ever evolving, ever changing,” Wilson told me a few weeks ago. “I’ve seen it go from more sinker-slider to elevated fastballs with a curveball off of that. But what really stands out is the spike in velocity. There’s almost no one in this league right now who is a comfortable at bat.”

In his opinion, increased octane has made a marked impact on how hitters are being attacked.

“If you have velocity, you can miss spots a little more frequently, whereas before you had to pitch,” opined Wilson. “You can’t miss spots throwing 88-90. If you’re 95-100 , you can miss your location and still have a chance of missing a barrel. Even without a lot of movement. Because of that, a lot of guys are going to four-seam, straight fastballs that are elevated, instead of a ball that’s sinking.”

But as the veteran catcher said, the game is ever evolving. He’s now starting to see more high heat in the nether regions of the zone, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Note from Eric: Hey you, this is the last one of these for the year, as the minor-league regular season comes to a close. Thanks for reading. I’ll be taking some time off next week, charging the batteries for the offseason duties that lie ahead for Kiley and me.

D.J. Peters, CF, Los Angeles Dodgers
Level: Double-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 4-for-7, 2 HR, 2B (double header)

Notes
A comparison of DJ Peters‘ 2017 season in the Cal League and his 2018 season at Double-A gives us a good idea of what happens to on-paper production when a hitter is facing better pitching and defenses in a more stable offensive environment.

Reports of Peters’ physical abilities haven’t changed, nor is his batted-ball profile different in such a way that one would expect a downtick in production. The 2018 line is, I think, a more accurate distillation of Peters’ abilities. He belongs in a talent bucket with swing-and-miss outfielders like Franchy Cordero, Randal Grichuk, Michael A. Taylor, Bradley Zimmer, etc. These are slugging center fielders whose contact skills aren’t particularly great. Players like this are historically volatile from one season to the next but dominant if/when things click. They’re often ~1.5 WAR players who have some years in the three-win range. Sometimes they also turn into George Springer.

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