J.T. Chargois and Adam Walker are both players I saw as amateurs in 2012, they both went in the top 100 picks to the Twins and both have interesting tools that had evolved by the time I saw them in instructs. Chargois is a right-handed reliever out of Rice that was a 2nd round pick (72nd overall) and signed for slot, just over $700,000. Walker is an outfielder from Jacksonville University that went in the 3rd round (97th overall) and signed for slot just under $500,000.

I saw Chargois late in the amateur season, shutting down UCF in series that decided the conference championship. He worked at 91-94, touching 95 mph with an above-average changeup that flashed plus and an inconsistent 79-82 mph curveball with three-quarter tilt that was above average at times. Scouts that saw him earlier in the season told me they saw a plus breaking ball and that the changeup was a third pitch, so when you put those two accounts together, you can see what got the Twins excited.

Despite having three above average pitches, Chargois isn’t really a starting option. He was primarily a hitter his first two year at Rice and has an athletic cut from both sides with average raw power. Beyond his lack of experience, Chargois has effort in his delivery and while he’s got a chance to have average command, he is more of a thrower than pitcher.

Read the rest of this entry »

Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted  last year about the value of a consistent offense.

In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.

I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I said that Byron Buxton was the headliner at Twins instructs due to being the consensus top talent in the recent draft. Unfortunately, Buxton was overmatched at times against advanced competition so the most entertaining Twins prospect to watch was Miguel Sano. Sano has had plenty of fanfare himself after he signed for $3.15 million as a 16-year-old in 2009 after highly contentious negotiations with the Pirates. This drama and the Dominican amateur baseball system as a whole were covered in the documentary Pelotero

Sano had an up and down full season this year in Low-A Beloit, hitting .258/.373/.521 with a 14.5% walk rate and 26.0% strikeout rate. Strikeouts and contact were issues all season, but Sano was also 18 years old at the start of the season. What I saw in instructs jives pretty well with the stat line and what I’ve seen of Sano in the past. I was also reminded of his upside from one swing: a two-strike fastball up and in that he hit halfway up the batter’s eye.

His power is an easy 80, stemming from obscene raw strength, very good bat speed and the torque, loft and high finish you expect from big boppers. The thing he does that sets him apart from other sluggers is he keeps his hands pretty low throughout his setup and Sano also doesn’t have a pronounced load. Most hitters have to do both things to create power and give away some contact ability, but Sano doesn’t need to and that’s why he has a chance to be the rare high-average cleanup hitter.

Read the rest of this entry »

The headliner at Twins instructs was their recent first rounder, the second overall pick from a rural south Georgia high school, center fielder Byron Buxton. He was considered the top prospect in the draft by most scouts on the strength of his prodigious toolset, compared most often to Matt Kemp and the Upton brothers. Buxton signed for $6 million, just below slot recommendation for the pick and will be 19 all of the next year in his full-season debut, very likely with Beloit in the Low-A Midwest League.

The thing that sets Buxton apart from other top prospects is his athleticism and the easiness of his actions. The first time I saw him take batting practice, it was hard to believe how much more fluid his actions were and how quickly he made them, even compared to the other top draft prospects I had seen the weeks before, including top 10 picks like Albert Almora and Mike Zunino. That said, Buxton doesn’t have huge current raw power (45 on the 20-80 scale) and while his athleticism allows you to round up with somewhat limited physical projection left, I can’t go higher than 55 on the projected raw power. His approach at the plate and his mechanics are not geared for power, so I’ve got Buxton pegged as an average game power guy at maturity, but he’s young and raw enough to beat that projection.

One tool that Buxton’s quick-twitchiness shows up in now is his speed. Scouts tend to use the term “off the charts” too liberally considering the chart was designed to cover everyone, but Buxton, like Reds prospect Billy Hamilton, can regularly put up times that aren’t on the scale most teams use. 4.3 seconds from the right-handed batter’s box to first is considered average (50 on the 20-80 scale), 4.2 seconds is 60, 4.1 is 70 and 4.0 is 80, the top of the scale. I’ve clocked Buxton in the 3.9s from the righty box on multiple occasions on digs and got two 4.03s in on instructs game on routine ground balls where Buxton didn’t look like he was even exerting himself. Buxton also has an excellent first step and acceleration, normally the downfall of speedsters with some size, a sign that they will slowly lose it as they age. It’s rare to find an 80 runner with any kind of other skills, so you can see why scouts get so excited about Buxton, a 90 runner with a chance for above average power.

Read the rest of this entry »

Why isn’t there more interest in Michael Bourn? A six-win center fielder is on the market, and our most recent article on the subject is whether or not his agent has waited too long to get him a deal. We don’t know what his asking price is, but the idea that a player coming off a career year and four straight seasons with more than four wins now needs a pillow contract seems to suggest that either there’s a reason to doubt Bourn’s work, or there’s a lack of demand for his services in the market place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bad news for Michael Bourn – the Phillies just emphatically closed the door on bringing back the free agent center fielder, giving up Vance Worley and top prospect Trevor May to acquire Revere from the Twins. Given the price that we just saw Denard Span go for last week, this is a bit of a shocking price for Revere, and looks like a significant overpay for the Phillies.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers aren’t sure that they want to go to three years for Ryan Dempster, but they do need a pitcher now that Shaun Marcum is seeing other teams. There are good reasons to like him — a few changes he’s made in his approach have seem to stuck — and there is one main reason to worry about giving him too many years.

Read the rest of this entry »

This article was originally published on May 17th. With Meyer’s trade to Minnesota today, we’re re-running it in order to give Twins fans a look at what they’re getting.

With rain being a scouting nemesis for much of early April, having Nationals first rounder Alex Meyer fall into my lap in Rome, Georgia after consecutive postponements was a welcome surprise. Meyer’s start marked the beginning of a three-day stretch of scouting which included four top-100 pitching prospects (Trevor Bauer, Tyler Skaggs, Nathan Eovaldi, Allen Webster), along with two former first rounders in Chris Withrow and Meyer. And while the former University of Kentucky Wildcat held his own against this group in terms of raw stuff, Meyer’s poor command pushed him to the back of the line compared to other prospects scouted that week.

Video after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another day, another NL East team solves their center field problem. Yesterday, the Braves spent $75 million to sign B.J. Upton to a contract that is perfectly fair and should provide them with a quality player going forward. Today, the Nationals spent $21 million — and, to be fair, a solid pitching prospect — and got a similarly valuable player in Denard Span. Advantage, Nationals.

Similarly valuable doesn’t mean similar, of course. The similarities between Span and Upton pretty much end after you note that they’re both athletic center fielders. Upton derives a lot of value from hitting for power, while Span has hit nine home runs in the last three years combined. Span derives most of his value from making contact and running, using his speed to help him get on base, score runs, and save them in the outfield. And yet, at the end of the day, they end up with results that are about equally effective at winning games.

For his career, Upton has a 107 wRC+ while Span checks in at 105. Interestingly, both players produced a wRC+ in 2012 that was an exact match for their own career average. Span struggled a bit the previous couple of years — and his issues were compounded with a mid-summer concussion that ended up costing him about half of the 2011 — but he rebounded nicely last year and showed some of the production that made him such a dynamic player earlier in his career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Early Sunday morning, Twitter was abuzz with news that the Dodgers and Fox Sports West had agreed to a 25-year broadcast deal valued between $6 billion and $7 billion. By Sunday afternoon, Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times had confirmed the outline of the deal, but cautioned that the Dodgers and Fox were still negotiating, with a November 30 deadline looming.

As I explained last week in this post, the parties’ existing agreement gave Fox an exclusive, 45-day window in which to negotiate a new deal to govern the 2014 season and beyond. Hence, the November 30 deadline. If an agreement isn’t inked by Friday, the Dodgers must submit a final offer to Fox by December 7. Fox then has 30 days to accept or reject the offer. If Fox rejects the offer, the Dodgers are free to negotiate with whomever they want.

However the negotiations play out, it’s clear now that the Dodgers’ local TV revenue is about to enter the stratosphere. A 25-year deal worth between $6 billion and $7 billion would net the Dodgers between $240 million and $280 million per year. Per year. That’s more than any team has ever spent on player salaries in a single season — even the Yankees. And it’s nearly double the amount of local TV revenue pulled in annually by the team with the second-most lucrative deal — the other Los Angeles team (the Angels) — which entered into a 17-year deal with Fox Sports West worth $2.5 billion.

Read the rest of this entry »