Adam Frazier has an admirable goal, one that few of his contemporaries would even contemplate trying to attain. At a time when hitters are going down by way of the K more frequently than at any time in history, the Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman aspires to walk more than he strikes out.

He might actually do it. With Memorial Day right around the corner, Frazier has a 9.6 K% — fourth-best among qualified hitters — and 16 free passes to go with 19 strikeouts. Moreover, he’s been putting barrels on baseballs. To scant acclaim — par for the course when you play in Pittsburgh — Frazier is slashing an eye-opening .337/.399/.466.

Asked about his stated goal, the 29-year-old Mississippi State University product admitted that it won’t be easy.

“Guys today throw harder and harder, with nastier stuff,” said Frazier. “[Hitting] continues to get more difficult. I’ve always felt I have a pretty good eye, it’s just a matter of being able to put the bat on the ball.”

Frazier has fanned twice in a game three times this season, on each occasion punching out against a starter and a reliever. There are no walks in the park in today’s game. From first inning to last, power arms are everywhere you turn.

Whom has he faced that stands out as being especially nasty? Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another week of college baseball and minor league play. Remember: prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Eric’s Notes

Wes Kath, SS, Desert Mountain High School

High schoolers with profiles driven by their hit tool are becoming more sought-after in the draft room, and every year there are guys who don’t light up the showcase circuit workouts with big tools and instead need some combination of time and impressive swing-and-miss data to be appreciated. Kath is one of those players. On Tuesday, his high school won the Arizona 5A State Championship as Kath homered and reached base several times. He has a sweet lefty swing and advanced bat control, as well as a good baseball frame. He’s currently a shortstop and is capable of making routine plays there, with a sufficient arm for short and good body control, but his size and slow-twitch movements might push him to third base, and some scouts think he’ll eventually end up at first. Kath does not have big bat speed, and his swing tends to look long when he offers at lower pitches, but that’s what has to happen for him to get the barrel there with lift. West Coast hit tool guys like this tend to sign for close to $1 million.

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Heading into the ninth inning of a blowout loss Monday, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli waved the white flag and summoned Willians Astudillo from… wherever he was sitting at the time. La Tortuga already had a scoreless inning under his belt this year, titillating Twins fans and the Baseball Twitterverse with an eephus that limped over the plate at 49 mph. Astudillo’s slow-pitch softball routine was received warmly that first appearance, and in a year where very little has gone right for Minnesota, the locals seemed pleased to see him out there again.

Naturally, we couldn’t get through the outing without an unwritten rules controversy.

With two outs, Astudillo fell behind Yermín Mercedes 3-0. The catcher-turned-hurler boldly stuck with the pitch that he’d ridden to get the first two outs and lobbed another one, this time over the outer half of the plate.

Mercedes hit the tar out of it:

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These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Wander Franco, SS, Tampa Bay Rays
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Durham   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1 (1st overall)   FV: 80
Line: 4-for-5, 2B
Notes
Franco is now hitting .348/.404/.652 on the year and he’s doing it as a 20-year-old at Triple-A while playing flashy defense all over the infield (his bicep soreness, which caused him to leave winter ball, seems fine). This is a guy who hasn’t had so much as a dry spell as a player, no multi-week slump that needed to be busted in a superstitious, charitable, or ethically dubious way. He’s indomitable and so far is meeting the unprecedented expectations put upon him.

The “when will Wander Franco debut?” questions have already begun, as have the chat/social media queries about Vidal Bruján. Willy Adames is struggling (though he’s shown signs of life lately), but as I wrote on the Rays list, I think Taylor Walls is a better role replacement for Adames if Willy were to pull a hammy or something. Part of Adames’ roster fit is because of his excellent defense, which is one of Walls’ carrying tools. Franco is a cleaner fit in the role Joey Wendle plays. Bruján isn’t a polished defender anywhere and needs more reps in the outfield. Who of those three top 100 prospect debuts first and when likely depends more on the kind of situation the Rays find themselves in rather than the prospects themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2021 season nears its Memorial Day checkpoint, feast your eyes upon some stars who are off to the best starts of their career, a couple of wily veterans still learning (and if they know what’s good for them, eventually unlearning) some new tricks, and two-up-and down hurlers on a quest for consistency.

Tuesday, May 18, 6:40 PM ET: Trevor Rogers vs. Zack Wheeler

Two of the National League’s best pitchers through the season’s first month are on a collision course at Citizens Bank Park. One is an NL East mainstay who generated considerable prospect hype; the other is making a name for himself after a relatively anonymous minor league career. While Rogers was a first-round pick and a top-six prospect in the Marlins’ system heading into the season, he certainly was not on many fans’ radars outside of South Florida; our own Eric Longenhagen viewed him as a “stable 2-WAR starter prospect.”

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I love wonky early-season slash lines, the kinds of combinations that make you scratch your head and consider what exactly had to happen to get to this point. It’s pretty easy to put Yasmani Grandal’s start in that category: Through 22 games and 91 plate appearances, Grandal is hitting .113/.378/.242, slugging two homers and posting a… 102 wRC+?!?

Yes, you read that correctly. Through games on Sunday, Grandal has just seven hits and has the worst batting average among players with at least 80 trips to the plate. And yet he’s also managed to be an above-average hitter by wRC+. There’s truly some wild stuff going on here.

Of course, none of this is sustainable. Grandal has faced some pretty horrible BABIP luck, and as Dan Szymborski noted in his article yesterday, he is the fourth-largest underachiever in actual BABIP (.119) versus ZiPS-developed zBABIP (.261). Plug that figure into his balls-in-play total and you’d find that Grandal should have more than 13 hits this season, giving him a more-respectable-though-still-not-great .210 batting average.

But what is most interesting about Grandal’s start isn’t that he’s faced such poor BABIP luck; it’s that he has still managed to be a productive hitter in spite of it. Grandal has walked a whopping 27 times to start the season, a near-30% walk rate and a figure that leads baseball by a rather healthy margin. As of this writing, Max Muncy is the only other player who has amassed more than 50 plate appearances with a walk rate above 20%, and he’s still more than six points behind Grandal. Since 1901, Grandal’s 27 walks in his 22 games are tied for the 16th-most walks in any player’s first 22 to begin a season, but he’s one of just five players to do that while also batting under .150. Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Corbin Carroll, CF, Arizona Diamondbacks
Level & Affiliate: Hi-A Hillsboro   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1 (20 overall)   FV: 60
Line: 3-for-5, HR, 3B, BB, 2 SB

Notes
I’m going to bet Carroll goes to the Futures Game and ends up promoted to Double-A shortly after the showcase. He’s shown no signs of slowing down after looking like the best player in all of Arizona during 2020 instructs. This is the kind of player who’s going to out-produce his raw power in games because the quality of his contact is just so good. His homer yesterday (which tied the game in the ninth) was hit to the opposite field. It wasn’t like a lot of oppo bombs that rely on brute strength (think of Giancarlo Stanton’s right-center homers) or just happen to suit the swing path of someone with big power (Ryan Howard). Instead, Carroll just dove to try to cover the outer third of the plate and poked the barrel there, and he hit the bottom of the ball with the sweet spot of the bat. Read the rest of this entry »

All the pitchers in the league seem to have gotten together and decided that someone has to throw a no-hitter each week. One of our best matchups this week involves a guy who already threw one, two guys meeting in LA who are certainly pitching well enough to nab one of their own, and an AL Central altercation between pitchers – and teams – trending in opposite directions.

Tuesday, May 11, 7:10 PM ET: John Means vs. Marcus Stroman

John Means got his 15 minutes of fame last week after methodically tearing the Mariners apart. Means’ destruction of the M’s lineup earned him a no-hitter and the baseball world’s spotlight, but the Baltimore bro has been reliably great all season. He’s allowed just five hits and three earned runs over his last 22.1 innings, striking out 27 hitters along the way. If we zoom out and look at his entire body of work across seven starts, we find that Means has become one of the best pitchers in the game thanks to one little trick.

Like a local magician bringing their act on the road, Means risked letting the secret out of the bag when he performed the trick over and over again in Seattle. The Orioles’ breakout star threw first pitch strikes to 26 of the 27 hitters he faced, elevating his first-pitch strike percentage to a maniacal 73.5%. Not only is this 12 percentage points above Means’ career-high, it’s also the highest of any American League starter. As a predominantly fastball-changeup artist, one would think that Means adheres to the traditional method of fastballs in the zone, changeups just underneath it. While he still utilizes his changeup in that fashion – to the tune of a 33.3% chase rate – it’s actually the pitch he throws most frequently in the zone, per Baseball Savant. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox took a giant blow Sunday when young centerfielder Luis Robert injured his right hip flexor running to first while trying to beat out a grounder to third against Cleveland. As it turns out, the injury wasn’t minor, as he was diagnosed with a Grade III strain — a complete rupture of the muscle involved — and will not be able to resume baseball activities for 12–16 weeks.

Chicago hasn’t officially ruled out Robert for the season, but there’s enough uncertainty that senior VP/general manager Rick Hahn did not give a particularly optimistic assessment of when his return could be.

“But it’s safe to say in terms of projecting his possible return, it’s too soon to know. Quite frankly, we are not going to be able to provide you with an educated projection of that for another 12 weeks or so as we see how he progresses.”

The most serious consequence of Robert’s injury is naturally a painful recovery process for last year’s AL Rookie of the Year runner-up. But the White Sox have more than 130 games to play, meaning there will also be consequences for the team and some pivotal decisions to make.

Losing Robert is particularly unwelcome for the Sox, as he represents the second serious loss at a position at which they’re not terribly deep. In an unfortunately timely look I did last month at baseball’s most irreplaceable players, the ZiPS projections pegged him as the seventh-most crucial player in the majors in terms of effect on the playoff race.

From a straight-up projection standpoint, Robert falls short of most of the names on this list. Just on the Sox, ZiPS thinks Lucas Giolito is a significantly more valuable player overall, at least when he’s not pitching in the morning. But if something should happen to Giolito, Chicago has spare arms to patch up the hole. If the team loses Robert, let’s just say ZiPS does not have a case of Leurymania or Engelalia. The race with the Twins is likely going to be a tight one, and the Royals have shown surprising spunk. The White Sox could ill afford an injury to their center fielder.

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The moment was certainly worth a chuckle. In the seventh inning of a 10-0 drubbing by the Braves on Wednesday night, Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo took the mound. After retiring Johan Camargo on a grounder to first and then walking Ronald Acuña Jr., the NL leader in wRC+, the lefty-tossing Rizzo faced off against lefty-swinging Freddie Freeman, the reigning MVP — and struck him out.

Neither combatant could keep a straight face as Rizzo fell behind 2-0 via a slow curveball that was about two feet outside, and then a 70-mph fastball that missed the outside corner. Freeman laid off another 70-mph fastball that was in the zone, fouled one off that was a few clicks faster, and then went down swinging at a sweeping 61-mph curve that was low in the zone.

“I couldn’t stop laughing as I was going up to the plate,” Freeman told reporters afterwards. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”

“He’ll have that over me forever. But that’s one strikeout I’m OK with. That was fun. It was fun to be a part of.”

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