Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Andres Gimenez, SS, New York Mets (Profile) Level: Hi-A Age: 19 Org Rank: 3 FV: 50 Line: 3-for-5, 2B, 3B
Notes
Gimenez is a 19-year-old shortstop slashing .280/.350/.430 in the Florida State League. That’s good for a 107 wRC+ in the FSL. Big-league shortstops with similar wRC+ marks are Trea Turner (a more explosive player and rangier defender than Gimenez) and Jurickson Profar, who have both been two-win players or better this year ahead of the break. Also of note in the Mets system last night was Ronny Mauricio, who extended his career-opening hitting streak to 19 games.
Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Victor Robles, CF, Washington Nationals (Profile) Level: Rehab Age: 21 Org Rank: 1 FV: 65 Line: 0-for-1, BB
Notes
Robles has begun to make rehab appearances on his way back from a hyperextended left elbow that he suffered in early April. He’s gotten two plate appearances in the GCL each of the last two days. The Nationals’ big-league outfield situation should enable Robles to have a slow, careful rehab process that takes a few weeks. He is one of baseball’s best prospects.
Adam Haseley, CF, Philadelphia Phillies (Profile) Level: Hi-A Age: 22 Org Rank: 7 FV: 45 Line: 2-for-5, HR
Notes
The homer was Haseley’s fifth of the year and his slash line now stands at .301/.344/.417. He’s undergone several swing tweaks this year, starting with a vanilla, up-and-down leg kick last year; a closed, Giancarlo Stanton-like stance early this season; and now an open stance with more pronounced leg kick that loads more toward his rear hip. All that would seem to be part of an effort to get Haseley hitting for more power, his skillset’s most glaring weakness. But Haseley’s swing plane is so flat that such a change may not, alone, be meaningful as far as home-run production is concerned, though perhaps there will be more extra-base hits.
The way Haseley’s peripherals have trended since college gives us a glimpse of how a relative lack of power alters those variables in pro ball. His strikeout and walk rates at UVA were 11% and 12% respectively, an incredible 7% and 16% as a junior. In pro ball, they’ve inverted, and have been 15% and 5% in about 600 pro PAs.
Notes
Baddoo is scorching, on an 11-game hit streak during which he has amassed 20 hits, nine for extra-bases. He crushes fastballs and can identify balls and strikes, but Baddoo’s strikeout rate has doubled this year as he’s seen more decent breaking balls, with which he has struggled. Considering how raw Baddoo was coming out of high school, however, his performance, especially as far as the plate discipline is concerned, has been encouraging. He’s a potential everyday player with power and speed.
Jesus Tinoco, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile) Level: Double-A Age: 23 Org Rank: NR FV: 40 Line: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K
Notes
Tinoco didn’t make the Rockies’ offseason list, as I thought he had an outside shot to be a reliever but little more. His strikeout rate is way up. He still projects in the bullpen, sitting 93-95 with extreme fastball plane that also adds artificial depth to an otherwise fringe curveball. He’ll probably throw harder than that in the Futures Game.
Notes
MacGregor is a projection arm who is performing thanks to his ability to throw his fastball for strikes, though not always where he wants. His delivery has a bit of a crossfire action but is otherwise on the default setting and well composed, with only the release point varying. It’s pretty good, considering many pitchers with MacGregor’s size are still reigning in control of their extremities. MacGregor’s secondaries don’t always have great movement but should be at least average at peak. He projects toward the back of a rotation.
Austin Cox, LHP, Kansas City Royals (Profile) Level: Short Season Age: 21 Org Rank: HM FV: 35 Line: 5 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 10 K
Notes
Cox, Kansas City’s fourth-rounder out of Mercer, has a 23:3 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 11.2 pro innings. He put up goofy strikeout numbers at Mercer, too, but struggles with fastball command. He’s a high-slot lefty who creates tough angle on a low-90s fastball, and his curveball has powerful, vertical shape. It’s likely Cox will be limited to relief work due to fastball command, but he could be very good there, especially if the fastball ticks up in shorter outings.
Notes from the Field
Just some pitcher notes from the weekend here. I saw Rangers RHP Kyle Cody rehabbing in Scottsdale. He was 94-96 for two innings and flashed a plus curveball. Joe Palumbo rehabbed again in the AZL and looked the same as he did last week.
Cleveland has another arm of note in the AZL, 6-foot-1, 18-year-old Dominican righty Ignacio Feliz. He’s one of the best on-mound athletes I’ve seen in the AZL and his arm works well. He sits only 88-92 but that should tick up as he matures physically. His fastball has natural cut, and at times, he throws what looks like a true cutter in the 84-87 range. He also has a 12-to-6 curveball that flashes plus.
Feliz could develop in a number of different ways. Cleveland could make a concerted effort to alter his release so Feliz is more behind the ball, which would probably play better with his curveballs. Alternatively, they might nurture his natural proclivity for cut and see what happens. Either way, this is an exciting athlete with workable stuff who doesn’t turn 19 until the end of October.
Between 15 and 18 scouts were on hand for Saturday night’s Dodgers and Diamondbacks AZL game. That’s much more than is typical for an AZL game, even at this time of year, and is hard to explain away by saying these scouts were on usual coverage. D-backs OF Kristian Robinson (whom we have ranked No. 2 in the system) was a late, precautionary scratch after being hit with a ball the day before, so he probably wasn’t their collective target. Instead, I suspect it was Dodgers 19-year-old Mexican righty Gerardo Carrillo, who was 91-96 with a plus curveball. I saw Carrillo pitch in relief of Yadier Alvarez on the AZL’s opening night, during which he was 94-97. He’s small, and my knee-jerk reaction was to bucket him as a reliever, but there’s enough athleticism to try things out in a rotation and see if it sticks.
Willians Astudillo has captured baseball’s collective imagination — and for good reason.
In an age when the march toward three true outcomes seems inevitable and indomitable, Astudillo arrives as an outlier of outliers, an offensive peformer who never walks or strikeouts, whose batting line would make much more sense if it were produced by a 19th century hitter.
When the Twins called up Astudillo late last month, Jeff Sullivan examined his curious numbers at every professional stop. It is believed Astudillo first appeared in these Web pages as Carson’s “guy” way back in 2016.
Fittingly, Astudillo has not struck out or walked through his first 14 major-league plate appearances.
Said Astudillo of his approach to the Star-Tribune:
“Coaches try to change my approach,” he said. “It’s just who I am. I’m a free swinger.”
Said Twins baseball operations chief Derek Falvey to the Star Tribune:
“I don’t think he gets to [strike] three very often. He’s an aggressive guy. It’s not a secret. I’m not revealing anything the advance work won’t show. He attacks the ball and makes good contact. Sometimes that profile plays well off the bench when you think about different types of guys to bring in the sixth, seventh, eighth inning.”
It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing has gone right for the Twins since the 2018 season began. After all, they’ve won 35 games, which is more than the Orioles, Royals, or White Sox have done. They finished June with their best record of any calendar month (13-14, .481). Their big-league pitchers have avoided Tommy John surgery this year, Target Field has not burned down, and the last time we checked, none of their players has been sucked into an interdimensional vortex.
Still, yuck. This was supposed to be a much better and more interesting team, with 24-year-old center fielder Byron Buxton its centerpiece in the wake of last year’s second-half breakout (.300/.347/.546, 130 wRC+, 2.7 WAR). Buxton was a promising part of a Twins group that become the first team to rebound from a 100-loss season with a playoff berth.
The Twins were also one of the most active and intriguing clubs the winter, exploring the possibility of trading for the Rays’ Chris Archer, making free agent Yu Darvish a credible nine-figure offer, and taking advantage of the weird slowness of the market by buying bargains in bulk. They signed Lance Lynn, Logan Morrison, Michael Pineda, Addison Reed, Fernando Rodney, and Zach Duke, all without committing more than two years or $16.75 million to any of them.
While they may have avoided falling knives when it comes to Archer and Darvish, the Twins were swept by the Cubs at Wrigley Field this past weekend and fell to 10 games below .500 for the first time since the end of 2016. Their playoff odds, which stood at 28.7% at the start of the season, were down to 1.2% entering Tuesday. They’re a big reason the AL Central is on track to be the worst division since 1994 realignment; at 18-33 in games outside that division, their .353 winning percentage is right on target with the entire division’s collective .354 mark in such games.
When you do this as a full-time job, you spend a lot of time looking at the numbers. And when you spend a lot of time looking at the numbers, you start to notice certain outliers. Then you start to root for certain outliers. It’s hard to be a fan of a team, when you’re supposed to write about everyone objectively. So you settle on other interests. The Twins just called up an interest.
The Twins selected the contract of catcher/infielder Willians Astudillo from Triple-A Rochester. Astudillo appeared in 49 games for the Red Wings this season, hitting .290 (51-for-176) with 12 doubles, seven home runs and 25 RBI.
Astudillo is now on the roster at the expense of Felix Jorge. Or, if you want to look at it differently, he’s on the roster at the expense of Taylor Motter. Jorge was designated for assignment, and Motter was placed on the disabled list. And I don’t think the Twins want to be here; they’d rather be higher in the standings. They’d rather have a healthy Jason Castro. They’d rather have a productive Miguel Sano. The Twins would like to have a lot more things going right. But there’s the story of the team, and there are the stories of the team’s individual players. Circumstances have permitted Astudillo to reach the majors for the first-ever time. I’m sure he doesn’t care about the explanation. Astudillo has been a career-long outlier, and now he’ll receive his first major-league paycheck.
Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Jabari Blash, OF, Los Angeles Angels (Profile) Level: Triple-A Age: 28 Org Rank: NR FV: 35 Line: 3-for-3, 3 HR, BB
Notes
Blash is no longer rookie-eligible, so while he’s a fun player to watch hit bombs and had a hell of a game last night, he’s on here today as a conduit to discuss what’s going on with some of the Angels hitters in the lowest levels of the minors. This is Trent Deveaux last fall, when he first arrived in the states. His swing was largely the same early this spring, albeit with a stronger, more involved top hand, which helped him drive the ball with more authority. This is what he looks like right now, which bears quite a bit of resemblance to Blash. No offense to Blash, who has had a long pro career and will probably play for another half-decade or so, but I’m not sure I’d proactively alter an ultra-talented 18-year-old’s swing to mimic that of a notoriously frustrating replacement-level player. Deveaux isn’t the only low-level Angels hitting prospect whose swing now looks like this.
A little more than four years ago, on the cusp of the 2014 big-league baseball season, you could have been forgiven for not paying all that much attention to Eddie Rosario. His performance as a 21-year-old between High-A and Double-A in 2013 had been good but not exceptional (a .275/.324/.415 line over 746 plate appearances), and he’d just been popped for use of a banned substance, which would keep him off the field for the first 50 games of 2014. He was a back-end top-100 prospect — No. 60 on BP’s list, 76 on ours, and 119 on Minor League Ball’s — but sufficiently outclassed by the four Twins ranked above him on all three lists (Byron Buxton at No. 1 on our list, Miguel Sano at No. 10, Alex Meyer at No. 23, and Kohl Stewart at No. 32) that he missed out on much of the national attention then showered on his colleagues.
Four years later, it’s a different story in Minnesota. Stewart is in Double-A, Meyer is in Anaheim, and Rosario’s 9.0 career WAR outclasses every single one of the Twins’ prospects from that loaded class, including Sano and Buxton — even if you throw the rest of our 2014 Twins top-10 list into the hopper for comparison’s sake:
Now, let’s be clear about what I’m not saying here: I’m not saying that Rosario will end his career with more WAR than Buxton, Sano, or even Berrios, who’s had a pretty nice start in the majors, as well. At 25, Rosario is older than all three of those men, and more than a third of his career WAR has come in the last three months. We’re nowhere near being able to render a final verdict on the Twins prospects of recent vintage. So I’m not saying Rosario has “won” anything or that his peers have flopped.
What I am saying, though, is that it’s perhaps at least a little surprising that Rosario — and not any of the other men on this list — has been the most productive member of that loaded Twins farm system to date and, further, that perhaps his performance to date merits a little bit of examination as a result. So let’s examine, shall we?
Ron Gardenhire’s experience in the game extends far beyond his 14 seasons as a big-league manager. The 60-year-old “Gardy” has also spent time as a coach and a minor-league manager — and, before that, he played nine seasons as an infielder in the New York Mets system. Primarily a shortstop, Gardenhire appeared in 285 games with the NL East club between 1981 and -85.
He’s also a lifelong fan of the game. The bulk of Gardenhire’s formative years were spent in small-town Okmulgee, Oklahoma, where he collected bubble-gum cards, religiously tuned in to The Game of the Week, and cheered for his heroes. Then he got to live his dream. Gardenhire played with and against the likes of Dave Kingman, Rusty Staub, and Pete Rose. As he told me recently at Fenway Park, “I’ve been fortunate.”
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Ron Gardenhire: “I was an Okie, so I followed the guys who were from Oklahoma more than anything else. Mickey Mantle, Johnny Bench, Bobby Murcer. I also watched the Dodgers, Don Drysdale and those guys, because my dad was in the military and we were out in Arvin, California when he was overseas in Korea. That’s when I really got into baseball. I collected bubble-gum cards, and all that stuff, with my cousins out there.
“Every Saturday we would hunker down in front of the TV and watch the Game of the Week. In our area — this is when we were back in Oklahoma — a lot of the time it was the Cardinals. They were prominent there. We’d also get to see the Yankees quite a bit, and the Dodgers.
This past weekend, the San Diego Padres completed a trade, sending Janigson Villalobos to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Phil Hughes.
The precise players involved aren’t of particular significance. The Padres’ prospect list contained 75 names and Villalobos was not among them. As for Hughes, he had recently been designated for assignment after pitching poorly over the last three seasons. Much of that subpar performance was due to injury and included thoracic outlet surgery. As Jay Jaffe recently chronicled, few pitchers return to prominence after TOS.
By designating Hughes for assignment, the Twins appeared willing to eat the roughly $22 million remaining on his contract through next season. The Padres are taking on some of that obligation in exchange for a competitive balance draft pick, so the functional part of the trade looks like this.
Padres get:
74th pick in 2018 draft and $812,200 in bonus pool money that goes with it.
Twins get:
$7.6 million, with $7.25 million paid next season, per Jon Heyman.
The Twins designated Phil Hughes for assignment on Monday, bringing to an apparent end the 31-year-old righty’s five-year run with the team and perhaps marking the end of his 12-year big league career. On a superficial level, his is a tale of a big-money contract gone wrong, as the Minnesota media — which knows red meat when it sees it, as fan perception of Joe Mauer’s long decline phase attests — was quick to take note of the team’s $22.6 million remaining salary commitment. On a deeper level, Hughes’ tenure with the team is a reminder of the fragility of pitchers’ bodies in general, and the ravages of thoracic outlet syndrome, for which Hughes underwent surgery not once but twice. The annals of such surgeries feature few happy endings.
Hughes had thrown just 12 innings this year, allowing four home runs while being pummeled for a 6.75 ERA and a 7.62 FIP. After starting the year on the disabled list due to an oblique strain, he returned on April 22 and failed to escape the fourth inning in either of his two starts. Sent to the bullpen, he made five appearances, the last three each separated by one day of rest. While his average fastball velocity (90.4 mph according to Pitch Info) was back up to where it was in 2015, his last reasonably healthy season, it sounds as though manager Paul Molitor felt hamstrung when it came to finding situations in which to use him.
“I guess it was somewhat comparable to almost a Rule 5 situation where you’re trying to find the right spots, and they were few and far between,” Molitor told reporters on Monday night.
