Casey Meisner, RHP, Oakland A’s

Meisner is listed at 6-foot-7 and 190 pounds, and that’s usually the first thing mentioned in any report about him. His long limbs make him projectable so you can dream on the average stuff improving and it gives him good plane to the plate but it also makes it more difficult for him to repeat his delivery and hit his spots.

I saw Meisner pitch yesterday and these same positives were still there, similar to two summers ago when the Mets took him in the third round out of a Texas high school. He had trouble keeping the ball down, particularly his changeup, which flashed average but was below average and down the middle many times in the outing. He sat 90-93 mph and hit 94 with occasional two-seam life and also flashed a hard overhand curve that was average to slightly above at its best, with good 11-to-5 shape, but often soft spin.

You can easily imagine the fastball and curveball becoming above average if there’s a velo bump (Pirates’ top prospect RHP Tyler Glasnow looked kinda like this when he was 18-19, so that’s a best case scenario) and then you’re looking at a league average (#4) starter or better. With just incremental adjustments the next few years, Meisner is an inventory arm that could be a back-end starter, but he’s only 20, so the chance for Oakland winning a projection gamble and getting a mid-rotation guy is still alive.

I had Meisner in the middle of the 40 FV group for the Mets list last year, ranking 22nd, and he’ll be there, if not near the top of the 40 FV group, at least somewhere on the A’s list this offseason.

Though the Mets need a bat most of all, their acquisition of Tyler Clippard makes good sense. By fielding-independent numbers, their bullpen has been middle-of-the-road so far this year, and the returns of Jenrry Mejia and Bobby Parnell might not be enough to push this bullpen into a strength as the end of the season approaches. Mejia’s post-season ban also creates a need, should they win the wild card and play extra baseball.

The prospect going back to the Athletics may not move the national needle much. 20-year-old Casey Meisner has spent the last 100+ innings striking out fewer than a batter per inning, and our own Kiley McDaniel wasn’t effusive in praise when he ranked Meisner the 22nd-best prospect in the Mets organization:
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In an attempt to strengthen their under-achieving lineup, the Mets swung a deal for infielders Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson from the Atlanta Braves on Friday evening. In exchange for the infielders’ services, the Mets sent right-handers Rob Whalen and John Gant to the Braves.

Neither of these arms are highly touted prospects. Kiley McDaniel gave Whalen a FV of 40 — essentially a middle reliever — on his offseason Mets writeup, while Gant didn’t even merit a mention. However, both of these pitchers have pitched fairly well in the minors this year.

Whalen, who’s 21, has spent all of 2015 as a starter for High-A Port St. Lucie. He’s put up a 3.36 ERA and 3.85 FIP in 83 innings. That’s not a bad showing for a 21-year-old, but his 17% strikeout rate leaves a little to be desired. Based on his 2015 numbers, KATOH forecasts Whalen for a meager 0.9 WAR through age-28 — down from 1.4 WAR in the preseason.

Gant has been slightly more impressive this year between High-A and Double-A. The 22-year-old opened the year at the former location, where he dominated over six starts. He struck out 30% of the batters he faced, and walked just 6%, on his way to a 1.79 ERA and 2.91 FIP.

Gant’s been much less dominant following a May promotion to Double-A. His strikeout rate’s cratered to 16%, while his walk rate has ballooned to 10%. Taking these two partial seasons together, KATOH forecasts him for 2.7 WAR through age-28, which would have put him 195th on KATOH’s preseason list. KATOH projected him for 1.7 WAR after the 2014 season.

Although Gant has the better numbers, both he and Whalen are in the same boat as prospects. Both were late-round draft picks — taken in the 12th and 21st round, respectively — and are fringy prospects at best. Their minor-league performances suggest they might be of some use to the Braves in a year or two, perhaps as middle relievers, but even that’s not guaranteed.

They apparently got close last night before a physical issue with a prospect derailed the deal, but after a morning of working through things, it appears the Royals are going to acquire Johnny Cueto from the Reds.

Source: #Royals getting Cueto.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 26, 2015

I made the case for the Royals to acquire Cueto last week, and it’s a fit that seemed to make the most sense of any out there. The Royals were throwing out replacement level starters on a regular basis and lacked anyone who you’d want to start in Game 1 of a playoff series, so Cueto not only upgrades their chances of winning the division — which were already quite high — but gives them a guy who can keep their bullpen from getting overworked early in the postseason.

The price hasn’t been announced yet, but the Royals have a lot of high upside/high risk prospects, so the Reds probably are getting some guys with real potential, but they may have to wait a while to see the rewards at the big league level. Raul Mondesi Jr would make a lot of sense as the center piece, but that’s just my speculation. We’ll have more analysis later when the whole deal is announced.

Earlier today, Dave wrote about how we might be in a buyer’s market now. He was referring mostly to starting pitchers, but might that apply to relievers as well? The only reliever we seem to be getting news about is Jonathan Papelbon, and the news is that his market seems to be drying up. And with the Red Sox and Rays now looking to trade relievers, there may be more guys in play than previously thought. Either way, the Cardinals, true to their form, weren’t waiting around for the market to heat up. They have acquired the first relief pitcher of the trade deadline season, and didn’t pay much for it. Via Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald:

#marlins to receive double A RHP Kyle Barraclough from cardinals for Steve Cishek

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) July 24, 2015

Steve Cishek is an interesting get. Entering the year, he was one of the better relievers in the league. From his full season debut in 2011 through the end of 2014, he had the 19th-best FIP- among qualified relievers, and three of the guys on the list ahead of him are out of baseball now. Last season, he whiffed a career best 30.6% of the batters he faced. He rode his slider — which he didn’t learn until 2009 — into prominence, and last year leaned on it more than ever.

This year, he hasn’t been as effective. Or, he wasn’t as effective in the season’s first two months. At the end of May, he had a 6.98 ERA, 4.20 FIP and 4.37 xFIP, and he had struck out 17 batters against 10 walks in 19.1 innings. He finished the month by taking the collar in a loss to the Mets, and that was the final indignity that got him sent packing.

After six scoreless, walk-free innings in Double-A, he was called back up, and has been much better since — a 0.71 ERA, 2.27 FIP and 3.49 xFIP in 12.2 innings. He has struck out 11 and walked just 4 since being recalled. And those strikeout numbers may come up in the near future, as Cishek’s contact percentage hasn’t changed since 2012. While his strikeout percentage last year may have been on the high end of the spectrum, this year’s 19.4% K% would seem to be on the far low end.

With the positive recent results and the harbinger of better results in the future, there is a decent chance that Cishek’s early season troubles are behind him, and that he’ll be a vital member of the Cardinals bullpen moving forward. They don’t need him to be the closer, Trevor Rosenthal has that job covered. The Cardinals in fact already had a pretty strong bullpen. Kevin Siegrist and Seth Maness both have good SD-MD numbers as well, and overall the unit’s FIP- ranks 10th for the season, though it has been just 15th over the past 30 days. Add in Cishek and the rehabbing Jordan Walden, and there is quality depth there. And it didn’t cost St. Louis hardly anything.

A seventh round pick in 2012, Kyle Barraclough didn’t reach Double-A until his age-25 season this year, and in his first 24.2 innings there, he has walked 17.7 percent of the batters he has faced. He also walked a higher percentage of batters in his second turn at High-A than his first. He gets a decent amount of strikeouts, but he is not going to generate much excitement, and he represents another data point that the trade market thus far is favoring the buyers.

When examining the Rest of Season projections from either ZiPS or Steamer, one will notice in both systems that Giancarlo Stanton is expected to finish just short of the league lead in home runs. While this is a tremendous accomplishment on its own, Stanton’s projected presence near the top of the home-run charts looks like an even more tremendous feat considering that Stanton has already missed 22 games this season, and will be missing even more as he recovers from a fractured left wrist.

At first glance the two projection systems regard Stanton very differently: ZiPS projects Stanton to finish second in the league in home runs at 43 — a single dinger behind Mike Trout — and Steamer projects that Stanton will finish tied for sixth, at 36. Upon further inspection, both projection systems regard Stanton’s on-field skills very similarly: ZiPS is projecting a home run once every 13 PAs, and Steamer once every 12.67 PAs. (Stanton has deposited a souvenir in the bleachers once every 11.7 PAs so far this season.) The true difference is that ZiPS is more confident in Stanton’s continued health, projecting only nine missed games from Stanton for the rest of the season, while Steamer projects that Stanton will finish the season with about 100 fewer PAs, or I guess about 25 missed games on top of the ZiPS projection.

So I wondered: how often does a player reach the league lead of a cumulative counting stat while missing such a huge chunk of the season? It turns out that players who finish on the edge of qualification actually hit the top 10 in some category just about every year — except when it comes to total hits, and home runs.

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Back in spring training, I had a chance to talk hitting with Kyle Schwarber. As fate would have it, our conversation was brief. The Cubs’ clubhouse closed a few minutes after we began chatting, and I was airport-bound by the time it reopened.

In May, I arranged a follow-up phone interview while Schwarber was playing at Triple-A Iowa. We spoke for a little over five minutes, but fate once again intervened. Upon disconnecting, I discovered that the frayed cable – the one I should have replaced months earlier – leading from ear to Digital Voice Recorder had failed. Not a word spoken by Schwarber was audible on tape.

I opted not to call back and ask if he was amenable to a re-do. Rather than aplogetically impose, I decided to wait for my planned visit to Wrigley Field in late June, knowing there was a good chance he’d be called up by then. He was, but as luck would have it, three days before I arrived in Chicago, he was returned to Iowa.

The slugger is back with the big club, and given his offensive explosion, he’s likely to be sticking around this time. But even though I’ll be returning to Wrigley in a few weeks, I’m not going to tempt fate yet again. Here is what Schwarber had to say in Mesa: Read the rest of this entry »

Just to be clear, there are two separate positions here.

Position: Milwaukee Brewers Developer – Baseball Systems

Location: Milwaukee

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When we first picked Dan Warthen’s brain about his specific slider, Noah Syndergaard did say that he’d played around with the pitch, but only to improve a different pitch. “I played with it a little bit to pick up the RPMs on my curveball,” he said then. Yesterday, Syndergaard did more than play with it — he threw eight of them, making it the second time this year that he’s thrown the pitch that often.

It looked like this:

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Position: Atlanta Braves Baseball Operations Analyst

Location: Atlanta

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