Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment, I’ll discuss three pitchers I’ve come across in A-ball who boast more polish than most at their level.

Summary
Plutko gained plenty of prospect helium with a dominant run at Low-A early in the season, but he’s found the going tougher after a promotion to the Carolina League.

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Author’s note: literally simultaneous to the publishing of this post, news emerged that Tanaka is getting an MRI on his arm. Welp! Nothing below is entirely invalidated, but it’s been a while since I’ve had such lousy timing. Let us all learn a valuable lesson.

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When we analyze new players, there’s always a multi-step process. Analysis is nothing but a series of questions, and the first question is always the simplest: is the new player good? Overall, is the new player mediocre, average, good, or great? From there, over time, we start to get a little more detailed. You begin with finding out whether a player is good. Then you can start to understand how a player is good. Within the majors, there are plenty of good players, but they all achieve that level in their own particular ways, and it’s that variety that helps to keep this analysis fresh.

It didn’t take long to answer the first question about Masahiro Tanaka. Yeah, he’s good. He’s real good, as a matter of fact, and he’s one of the players most responsible for keeping the Yankees somewhere within the race. How does Tanaka succeed? Well, we all saw the splitter coming, and, yep, he throws a dynamite splitter, and with his command and unhittability, it’s hard to imagine Tanaka not being successful. By this point we know a lot about the Yankees’ new ace, but we are still filling in details. And here’s another one: Tanaka bears down with runners in scoring position. When situations are at their most dangerous, Tanaka has responded, in an interesting fashion.

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The Yankees just pulled a rare feat by trading Vidal Nuno to the Diamondbacks for Brandon McCarthy. Only once in the last five years has a team traded for a pitcher whose results were so out of whack with their process and peripherals. Of course, that was when the Dodgers traded a player to be named later to the Phillies for Joe Blanton in 2012, but the Yankees have a few reasons to believe that this will turn out better for them than that trade did for the Dodgers.

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Major League Baseball’s signing period for international prospects kicked off on Wednesday and will continue until June 15, 2015. Teams may sign players residing outside the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico who have or will turn 16 by September 1 of this year. Just a few years ago, teams were allowed to spend as much as they wanted to develop and sign international prospects. That all changed with the current collective bargaining agreement, which went into effect in 2012.

The CBA imposes bonus pool limits on international signings. The team with the worst winning percentage in the prior year receives the largest bonus pool for the next year. The team with the best winning percentage receives the smallest. The remaining 28 teams fall in between, again according to their winning percentage from the prior season. International players who are 23 years of age or older, and have played professional baseball for five or more years, are exempt from the bonus pool limits. Click here for the list of bonus pools by team, with the Houston Astros on top with $5,015,400 and the St. Louis Cardinals at the bottom with $1,866,300.

In additional to the bonus pools, MLB also assigns slot values for international prospects, even though there is no international draft. But the slot values are tradeable, and are therefore valuable for teams looking to spend more on international prospects than their assigned bonus pool would allow. A team can trade for up to 50% of its bonus pool, but it must trade for a specific slot value. For example, a team with a $4 million bonus pool can trade for up to $2 million in pool space, but it must receive in return specific slot values that add up to $2 million, or less. Click here for the list of 120 slot values assigned to each team. The Astros have the top slot value of $3,300,900 and the Cardinals have the lowest at $137,600.

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It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Mike Napoli called Masahiro Tanaka an idiot on the baseball field. It would, of course, be misleading — Napoli didn’t say that to Tanaka’s face, and Napoli wasn’t asserting that Tanaka is some kind of moron. Napoli was simply gleeful, returning to the dugout Saturday night after breaking a tie with a ninth-inning dinger. Down two strikes, Napoli was pleased to see Tanaka throw him an elevated fastball, and Napoli knocked it out of the yard to right-center. Though the ESPN Home Run Tracker says the ball would’ve left just one of 30 stadiums under standard conditions, that one, presumably, is New York, and within a few minutes the Yankees lost. Dingers have been Tanaka’s one human side.

If you listen to Napoli, Tanaka was a fool for throwing a fastball. Obviously, according to results-based analysis, Tanaka was a fool for throwing a fastball, since that pitch ultimately was the difference in the game. There’s no question that Tanaka made a mistake in that he missed his spot and left the pitch up. But let’s think a bit about the sequencing. Did Tanaka make a mistake in going with the heat in a 1-and-2 count? Was Tanaka being an idiot, or did he get burned by a fine idea?

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment, I examine three interesting groundball prospects who most have probably never heard of.

Summary
Newell’s exceptional plane and solid slider have allowed him to carve up Low-A hitters.

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What’s an “average” fastball velocity? This year, it’s 91.9 mph. Last year, it was 92.0 mph. In 2012, it was 91.8 mph. We could go back further, but since that’s all pretty consistent and this isn’t really going to be about how hard pitchers throw anyway, three years is fine. We can say that 92 mph is pretty much the average fastball speed in Major League Baseball.

So with that knowledge in mind, here’s what I wanted to know: what hitters have to deal with the most heat that’s at average and above velocities? And how do they handle it? Fortunately, we have Baseball Savant, so we can look at this pretty easily. With a minimum of 500 fastballs seen — for reference, Matt Carpenter and Brian Dozier have each seen over 1,200 total pitches, so 500 pitches would be fewer than half of what an everyday player would have received — there’s only three hitters who have seen at least 35 percent of pitches coming in at 92 or higher:

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

In this installment of the Prospect Watch, I check in on the progress of three players whom I discussed last year.

Summary
Glasnow continues to put up big numbers, though his rawness remains significant.

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Dellin Betances made his major-league debut as a top prospect in 2011. Here’s how that went for him:

(via Baseball Savant)

You don’t need to know much about that chart to know that Betances was terrible. Beyond struggling with precise location, he struggled with general location, and he looked nothing like a pitcher a team would want to use. He had size and he had heat, but he didn’t have anything else, and there were signs he’d end up nothing but a bust.

In one sense, Betances is back. In another sense, he’s arrived for the first time. Betances now is excelling as a Yankees reliever, and the past no longer has much relevance. He’s changed some parts about his delivery. He’s changed his breaking ball. He’s changed his role, which is the most significant change of all. The things Betances has kept are his size and his heat, but the questions from the past aren’t the questions of today. I’m not sure today there are any questions.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Summary
O’Brien’s hanging in with the legendary Joey Gallo in the minor league home run chase, and he plays the most important position on the defensive spectrum, yet he falls behind the first tier of slugging prospects due to a variety of weaknesses.

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