With disastrous free agent signing after disastrous free agent signing, and then the trade of Nolan Arenado, the Rockies have already fallen into irrelevance, even if their 20-34 record isn’t actually the NL West’s worst. As if they needed more problems, star shortstop Trevor Story has been sidelined by inflammation in his right elbow. At a time when his production has already fallen short of expectations, the 28-year-old shortstop’s injury — which recalls a late-2018 scare — could have a significant impact upon his trade value.

According to manager Bud Black, Story began experiencing tightness and pain in his elbow and forearm following a play against the Mets in the second game of a doubleheader last Thursday. Fielding a grounder off the bat of Cameron Maybin in the third inning, he ranged to his left, spun, and threw a one-hopper to first base in time for the out.

Story left the game in the middle of the fourth inning, without fielding another ball or coming to bat. He did not play on Friday, and was placed on the 10-day Injured List on Saturday. With the Rockies in the midst of a week-long road trip to New York and Pittsburgh, the team planned for him to undergo an MRI on Monday, once he returned to Denver, to determine if the injury is more severe. At this writing, the Rockies have yet to share the results with the public, but the early indications are that this isn’t a worst-case scenario; Black characterized Story’s injury as “not as bad” as one he suffered in late 2018 (more on which momentarily). Via MLB.com’s Manny Randhawa:

“Trev and I and [head trainer] Keith [Dugger] spoke this morning, and we decided the best thing for Trev was to go on the injured list,” Black said. “There’s still some residual soreness and general tightness around the joint of the elbow. He wasn’t gonna play today, probably wasn’t gonna play tomorrow, and then the off-day. And then the three of us also thought there’s gonna be a couple days to test this, to go out in Denver and throw and hit at some level of intensity as opposed to just picking up and playing.”

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You won’t find many joint Yankees/Mets fans, but if such a bizarre chimera exists, it’s been a rough few days for pitching health. On Tuesday, Noah Syndergaard made a scheduled rehab start for the St. Lucie Mets. He departed after only an inning, and he’s now been shut down for six weeks. Meanwhile, Corey Kluber made his first start since no-hitting the Rangers, only to leave after three innings. The Yankees placed Kluber on the Injured List and announced that he won’t throw for at least four weeks, with a return date still unknown.

Weird hypothetical New York fans aside, there’s an obvious link between these two situations. Both teams are suffering greatly in the wave of injuries currently sweeping baseball, and how both teams deal with the loss of their pitcher will do a lot to determine the outcome of their respective East divisions. Injury management is nothing new, but these two come at particularly pivotal times for both teams.

Syndergaard’s setback isn’t immediately devastating to the Mets. He was still likely more than a month away from returning to the major leagues, and the Mets planned around his absence. They acquired pitching in bulk this offseason; Taijuan Walker, Joey Lucchesi, Carlos Carrasco, and Jordan Yamamoto are all newcomers who the team expected to provide some coverage this season.

With Jacob deGrom looking no worse for the wear after a brief IL stint, the Mets are fine at the top of their rotation. Marcus Stroman, too, has been solid. Things dip from there — Walker, Carrasco, and Yamamoto are all on the IL, and Carrasco hasn’t pitched yet this year — but deGrom and a reasonable followup is all you need for an acceptable rotation. Walker will likely be back soon, to boot — he’s already throwing live batting practice. Read the rest of this entry »

For the better part of five years, Corey Kluber was borderline unhittable. At his double-Cy-Young peak, he was a one-man dead ball era, putting up a 2.85 ERA even as offensive numbers exploded across the league. Though he never closed the deal, he felt like a threat to pitch a no-hitter every time he started.

Kluber isn’t the same pitcher he once was. His walk rate is nearly double where it sat in those halcyon years; his strikeout rate has declined. His fastball doesn’t always crest 90 mph anymore. But he still has that same vicious cutter/slurve combination that powered his ascent, and let’s be honest with each other: This year, nearly every pitcher feels like a threat to throw a no-hitter every time out.

Kluber no-hit the Rangers last night, a capstone achievement that will forever feel slightly out of place with the arc of his career. That’s not to discount the moment: He was excellent last night. He worked off of his slurve rather than vice versa; he threw 31 of them and only 23 sinkers. From the start of the game, he was placing the pitch exactly where he wanted it, befuddling the Rangers’ lineup:

Kluber’s ceaseless desire to fill up the zone worked in his favor last night. He drew a whopping 25 called strikes, a number he hadn’t surpassed since his glory days. Batters step in against him wondering which breaking ball he’ll embarrass them with, which is a truly awful mindset to take into at-bats against a strike-throwing machine, but that’s always been his unique gift: He throws so many pitches that break at so many strange angles, putting batters at a disadvantage right from the jump.
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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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The Padres already had to endure life without Fernando Tatis Jr. for one stretch this season due to his left shoulder subluxation, and now they’re without him again. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old shortstop tested positive for COVID-19 and landed on the Injured List. He quickly gained company when right fielder Wil Myers also tested positive, while three other Padres — first baseman Eric Hosmer, outfielder Jorge Mateo, and superutilityman Jurickson Profar — were sidelined via MLB’s contact tracing protocols. The absences have left San Diego significantly shorthanded and highlighted the potential competitive disadvantage that a team can face while dealing with an outbreak.

The Padres aren’t the only team in the midst of a COVID-19 cluster, either. On Tuesday, about an hour before Tatis’ positive test became public, news of an outbreak among the Yankees’ coaching staff broke as well. While Padres manager Jayce Tingler declined to say whether any of his sidelined players have been vaccinated, their status will become apparent depending upon how quickly they’re allowed to return (more on which below). Meanwhile, the Yankees’ group — now up to eight, including third base coach Phil Nevin, first base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matt Blake, and shortstop Gleyber Torres, plus four unnamed members of the team’s traveling staff — are known to have been fully vaccinated. In fact, the Yankees were among the majors’ first teams to reach the 85% vaccination threshold that allowed them to relax certain health and safety protocols. But less than a week after MLB announced that more than 83% of all Tier 1 individuals (players, managers, coaches, athletic trainers and support personnel) had been partially or fully vaccinated, and that it had gone a week without a single positive test from its major league camps (and just one positive from a staffer at an alternate site), the Padres and Yankees offered rude reminders of COVID-19’s lingering presence.

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

Jarren Duran, CF, Boston Red Sox
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Worcester   Age: 24   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR, 2 K

Notes
This is the kind of thing you like to see from a guy who clearly underwent a swing change last year but wasn’t able to play in actual games to show us if it was going to have a meaningful impact. In fact, when Duran went to Puerto Rico for winter ball after spending the summer at the alt site, he failed to hit for power there as well. Now he already has three homers in 2021, which is just two shy of his single-season career high. As he’s doing this, Duran is also striking out 33% of the time, a far cry from the ultra-low rates that helped make him a prospect in the first place. It’s rare for a prospect this old to be such a high-variance player. We’re all learning about how Duran’s swing change is going to alter his output in real time. 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 »

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

Brandon Valenzuela, C, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Lake Elsinore   Age: 20   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 40
Line: 2-for-3, 2 BB

Notes
Valenzuela was in the honorable mentions section of last year’s Padres list as a notable teenage follow due to his athleticism and physique, both of which are uncommon for a catcher. He’s off to a strong start at Low-A Lake Elsinore with three hits (one a homer), four walks and no strikeouts in his first two games. Valenzuela switch-hits, he tracks pitches well, and the bat-to-ball and strike zone feel pieces were both in place already throughout 2019, but he’s swinging with a little more explosion now. Well-built players with a foundation of skills rather than tools are often a threat to breakout as those more overt physical tools come with maturity, and we may be seeing the early stages of that here.

Jose Salvador, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Inland Empire  Age: 21   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 35+
Line: 4.1 IP (relief), 1 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 12 K Read the rest of this entry »

Despite playing for the Yankees and having the largest contract ever handed out to a pitcher, I think Gerrit Cole’s start to the 2021 season is going under the radar. Now, I have no empirical evidence that this is the case, but go with me here. I think two things are at play. First, Jacob deGrom is striking out every batter he faces (do not fact check me on that) and plays in the same city. Second, the Yankees’ struggles have been the talk of baseball in the early going, with much of the focus centered on the lineup and rightfully so. The team’s performance thus far has been extremely underwhelming, though they are 9-4 since their 5-10 start.

None of the blame for the Yankees tepid beginning can be put on Cole, however. He is off to a fantastic start. Through his first six starts, he has struck out 44.3% of the batters he has faced and walked only 2.1%. That strikeout rate is third in the majors behind deGrom and Corbin Burnes; the walk rate sits fourth in the league behind Burnes, Zach Eflin, and Walker Buehler. Put those two figures together and Cole has a K-BB% of 42.1%, only a few percentage points behind Burnes and deGrom and a shade under 10 percentage points above Joe Musgrove. The difference between Cole and Musgrove is about the same as the difference between Musgrove and Clayton Kershaw who is 19th on the leaderboard. Cole’s 2.4 WAR is tops in the league, though he has made one more start than both deGrom and Burnes, though I will note that he has only thrown two and two thirds more innings than deGrom so on a rate basis he has actually been more effective in accumulating WAR. Most of the difference has to do with a .315 BABIP allowed compared to deGrom’s .241 and a strand rate that is 8.3 percentage points lower.

So, Cole has been great. But this is not a breakout. Cole has been one of the best handful of pitchers in the sport since he first donned an Astros uniform in 2018. In the three preceding seasons, he posted a 36.6% strikeout rate and 6.8% walk rate over 485.2 innings, good for 6.05 WAR per 200 innings pitched. What is notable is that early on, he is pitching as well as ever. Better even. Since 2018, Cole only has one six start stretch where he struck out at least 44.3% of opposing hitters (44.6% from the end of July to end of August in 2018) and he has never posted a six start stretch walking so few batters (on a rate basis). At this point baseball fans are accustomed to Cole’s dominance over the opposition, but the degree to which he is doing so is unprecedented. Read the rest of this entry »

This week kicks off with two exciting players who should leave a huge impact on the sport over the next decade, and concludes with two who left their fingerprints all over the last one.

Monday, May 3, 9:38 PM ET: Tyler Glasnow vs. Shohei Ohtani

Outside of a deGrom-Ohtani matchup (which, All-Star Game, if you’re listening…) you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more exciting combination of starting pitchers. Tyler Glasnow, a pitcher who’s been abandoned by consistency at times in the past, is turning his question marks into periods. The looming issue with Glasnow was always when, not if, his strikeout numbers would reach kick-ass status. Like many of his fellow right-handed power pitchers, getting out of Pittsburgh was a great start. In his first full season with Tampa – albeit in just 12 starts – Glasnow made it over the 30% K-rate hump for the first time. His second full season with the Rays ended with a 38.2 K% and a trip to the World Series. This season, he’s still climbing, and hitters are getting completely neutralized.

Notching 10 or more strikeouts in three of his last four starts, including a career-high 14 on April 12 against the Rangers, Glasnow’s strikeout percentage is a robust 39.2%. With Blake Snell and Charlie Morton out of the picture, Glasnow is still bulldozing everything in his path, and he’s on an immaculate pace.

The most elementary reasons for that? Rather than going all in on fastballs and curveballs – pitches he threw a combined 95.4% of the time last season – Glasnow has scaled back the curve and introduced a slider-cutter hybrid. He’s spoken about the increased confidence that came from working with Tampa Bay’s coaching staff and their support, stating that they instructed him to “out stuff” guys rather than trying to dot the corner. When he only had two pitches though, his stuff was too predictable. Enter the “slutter,” a pitch that Glasnow admits has made things easier on him, which I’m sure he and his Boy Meets World good looks really needed. Read the rest of this entry »