Keeping Up With NL West Prospects
Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I spent the summer watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. This is the final divisional installment of those thoughts, as well as a general recap. The other divisions can be found here: National League East, NL Central, American League East, Central, and West.
Below is my assessment of the National League West, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of these final 2020 changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on the updated Board, though I provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team.
I’ve made no substantive alterations to my evaluation of Daulton Varsho despite him struggling to the tune of a .188/.287/.366 line across 115 sporadic plate appearances late in the summer. I do, however, think he’s going to end up playing much more outfield than catcher, and so he’s slid within the 50 FV tier behind the prospects I think are everyday, nine-inning fits behind the plate, like Miguel Amaya. But the positional flexibility he’ll provide, and the way he’ll enable the Diamondbacks to hit for Carson Kelly when needed, still makes him a valuable and unique player. For fantasy players, bet on Varsho being catcher-eligible.
Andy Young, the third piece in the Paul Goldschmidt trade, played in just twelve big league games before he broke his right hamate and required surgery to remove the bone. He holds serve as a 40+ FV shift-enabled infielder who hits enough to play a substantial role, similar to Mike Brosseau and late-career Howie Kendrick. Young spent time at second and third base but made throwing errors in all three of his opportunities at the hot corner and is more a 1B/2B/DH type for me. A shade behind him is Pavin Smith, who I think hits enough to be a role-playing lefty stick who sees scattered time at first base and the corner outfield spots. I just don’t think he hits for enough power to play in all situations.
Most Diamondbacks rookies contributed to the bullpen. I never ranked side-arming righty Stefan Crichton any higher than in the Honorable Mention section of a list, but he’s probably a long-term fit as a “Look” reliever similar to the Aaron Loup/Ryan Thompson types Tampa Bay ran out there much of this year. He should have been a 40 FV before graduating. Taylor Widener has a fastball with (usually) undesirable natural cut that runs into opposing barrels, making him vulnerable to hard contact, and that cut crept back into his fastball movement throughout the year. I have the 26-year-old as a reliever at this point, down from a 45 FV starting prospect (around when he was traded to Arizona, a few of my sources thought he should be a top 100 guy) at peak.
Humberto Mejía (part of the deadline return from Miami for Starling Marte) moves up a tier and into the 40 FVs. The 23-year-old has four viable pitches: a curveball, a slider, a changeup, and a low-90s fastball that plays up due to vertical movement. I think he could be a backend starter or valuable multi-inning reliever if he can more consistently locate his fastball in the top third of the zone rather than right down the middle, which is where his heater lived in 2020.
No changes here, though Brendan Rodgers is already in public evaluation purgatory because of his inconsistent playing time and injury issues. That kept us from seeing him consistently enough to get a true feel for how he fares against big league pitching. His industry-perceived value is very difficult to nail down right now.
I’m curious as to why Ashton Goudeau didn’t get a longer look this year, but I still have him as a valuable multi-inning relief piece. He, Tommy Doyle, and Ben Bowden are part of a relief contingent the org is dragging along very slowly.
Caleb Ferguson is likely to miss 2021 due to Tommy John rehab, which places more middle-inning weight on the shoulders of fellow lefty Victor Gonzalez. Gonzalez has rare velocity for a southpaw and a viable three-pitch mix, but I’m bearish about his strike-throwing consistency, and so he’ll stay in the 40 FV tier despite arguably having 40+ FV stuff.
I’ve had readers ask me why Brusdar Graterol and Dustin May aren’t missing more bats, and I point them to this piece. Fastball movement shape is important, which is why Tony Gonsolin (whose fastball backspins) has a better swinging strike rate on his fastball even though he doesn’t throw as hard as either of them. All three of those pitchers were ranked with this in mind, so there are no changes to their evaluations.
Most of the Padres’ rookies either graduated or barely played (there’s no baseball reason to alter Luis Campusano’s evaluation, for instance), except for young righty Luis Patiño, who had trouble throwing strikes during 2020. I’ve had scouts tell me their opinions of Patiño have shifted toward the bullpen: As he’s gotten bulkier and stronger, it appears that he’s lost some tactile feel for pitching, and his arm action is long for someone his size. But I’m still betting on the athleticism and makeup here; I think those issues will be ironed out, and that Patiño will still eventually be a star-level rotation piece.
The Giants are still largely cycling through post-prospect fliers on their big league roster, so there’s not much to discuss here aside from Joey Bart. I still have a 60 FV grade on Bart despite his struggles — he hit .233/.288/.320 and struck out 37% of the time across 111 plate appearances — because a) he’s not only a long-term lock at a premium position but also an impact defender there; b) he has big power in a vacuum, let alone for a catcher; and c) he has all of those staff-leading intangibles that pitchers and coaches appreciate and consider meaningful, as do I. Bart is at increased risk of Zunino’ing because of how quickly the Giants pushed him, but it’s too early to consider that a likely outcome.
Eric Longenhagen is from Catasauqua, PA and currently lives in Tempe, AZ. He spent four years working for the Phillies Triple-A affiliate, two with Baseball Info Solutions and two contributing to prospect coverage at ESPN.com. Previous work can also be found at Sports On Earth, CrashburnAlley and Prospect Insider.
It is true that a center fielder who can both hit and field isn’t as valuable as a catcher who does both of those things but it’s still nothing to sneeze at. Especially since he would have been below average catching but likely average (or maybe even better) in CF. League average bat with average defense in CF makes him a 2-3 win player…
Any thoughts on Morejon? I know he’s technically not a prospect anymore but the stuff has taken a big step up, especially with the velo+ knuckle change.
I suppose he graduated but I would have loved to see if a 2nd disappointing run of PAs in MLB from Lux changes the evaluation there at all.
I get the sense that Lux’s value is still propped up by his video game-esque numbers in AAA a few years back. A 188 wRC+ that was aided by a .451 (!!!) BABIP. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he kept that pace, even in the minors.
There’s still a tremendous amount of talent there, and a lot to like with Gavin Lux, but so far, he’s been really lackluster in the majors. I don’t think he’s shown himself to be the 70 FV prospect this website still calls him, but he needs to figure out big league hitting very soon.
His saving grace may be the benefit of playing for LA. They have a knack for helping guys figure it out.
This year for Lux got fairly jacked up – he reported to summer camp late for an undisclosed reason and took a long time to get going there. He similarly had a slow start in spring, and said then that it takes him like 100 PA to get right to start a season. I dont know if he had a covid exposure or a case or just had to quarantine, but given the reason for his late report was never disclosed it seems like it was probably something along those lines.
He’s really had limited MLB opportunities and has barely graduated. Two pretty short stints with very interrupted and inconsistent playing time don’t really make for a good evaluation. As long as the Dodgers continue to refuse to move him, I’ll trust he’ll probably be alright- the guys they mark offlimits have very high success rates (urias, bellinger, buehler, seager, smith, etc).
His PA sample is a lot less than, say, Vladito or another similar prospect who has struggled. It’s just spread out over a long time which makes it feel like it’s gone on for as long as those guys. Vladito has 757 career PAs; Lux has 151. His situation is much more like Jo Adell’s, where it’s definitely too early to read a ton into it, and he has not struggled away from the plate like Adell (in fact, even in his relatively limited sample his 2b defense graded out exceptionally).
The small sample size is why I obviously think Lux needs to be given a chance. But it’s not untrue that he’s struggled mightily since his promotion from AAA and it’s not untrue that his 2019 AAA numbers are completely unsustainable, and yet, in a very large way, holding up a lot of his future value.
No one is closing the book on Lux, but there certainly has to be some level of concern. While he’ll probably figure it out, I just don’t believe he’s a 70-FV guy anymore.
And as a fan of a different NL West team, I’d love to see him prove me wrong. Seeing good players in the NL West and good teams makes it more fun. So Lux figuring it out is for the good of baseball.
What’s worrisome about Lux is that Dodger top prospects usually jump right in and are successful. He looked nothing like a major league player this season. Looked completely overmatched at the plate and had defeated body language. The other guys you mentioned looked comfortable in the big leagues from the jump.
Agreed—I came here hoping for news on Lux and surprised to see nothing :/
Has Lux been able to fix his throwing?
He throws fine from 2b, though I think the consensus is that SS is no longer a home.
Just reading his body language, a lot of his struggles look to be due to be mental issues to me. Looks to be struggling to find his confidence.
I have a quick question: how much of Bart’s defensive value is from framing? If we get robo umps soon, given his slightly above average throwing tool, does that make him substantially less valuable?
I’d imagine robo umps will make a lot of catchers worse, and pitchers as well. Bart, like most catchers, will be obviously affected.
A lot of folks focus on how framing ‘steals’ strikes that should be called balls, but another thing that framing does is ensure that strikes dont get erroneously called balls.
Robo-Ump is going to pose some challenges around the parts of the strike zone that are almost never called strikes in reality (the strikezone as called has rounded, not square, corners), but in terms of net edge of zone strikes where the strike zone already exists it’s more likely to be a wash than you expect.
The cases where a pitch should be a ball and is miscalled are obvious and you notice the impact of framing there, but the situations where the ball IS a strike, but framing ensures it gets called correctly are probably more common and provide a higher portion of the current value of framing. Turning a 60% strike into an 80% strike is a big deal, and there’s a lot more of those.
You could kind of see this in how the Dodgers intentionally moved to using their superior framing catcher with both Kershaw and Buehler. Both hunt for strikes in certain locations, and Barnes got them a much better ratio of calls on those pitches – but most of those calls were accurate, Barnes just ensured they got more -correct- calls on them than Will Smith (especially in the bottom of the zone, where Buehler rather uniquely uses his 4 seamer to hunt low strikes that guys just assume will be balls low, but end up strikes due to his insane FB spin).
I guess we’ll see, but I’d expect rob- umps to make the handful of good framers worse, since they don’t steal any strikes, and the bad framers better, since they’re no longer stabbing at strikes and influencing umps to not call them as such. In other words, I would anticipate there to be less difference between good and bad catchers: everybody’s in the middle of the bell curve and the black swans out at either end are gone.
In such an environment, I’d expect teams to put a priority on agile/athletic catchers who can smother balls in the dirt and corral balls with crazy movement: it would no longer matter how frantic they look getting to those balls, since the pitch is called a ball/strike the same, but what matters is that they do get to them. Pitchers have to have the confidence to throw those crazy-movement pitches, and — at least where’s men on base — that requires confidence in the catcher actually catching them. Assuming the emphasis on spin rate continues, crazy movement follows, and the catchers have to react. Of course there’s also the trend towards fewer men on base (especially if robo-umps lead to yet another rise in K rates, though maybe walk rates go up too) but when the bases are empty anybody can be behind the plate. Well, not anybody; but we don’t have any good data on or even a quantitative framework for game calling and pitch sequencing skills. So that will probably be the next place we find puzzling catchers hanging onto jobs over potential replacements who otherwise seem superior on the things we can measure.
Is there any org that has consistently messed up evaluation over the past decade than the Rockies?
The Rangers. Jon Daniels inherited some good players, and has had an excellent record with undervalued free agents (which is probably part skill, part luck). You can count the number of good, regular contributors they’ve developed in the last 10 years and who have been good, consistent contributors on one hand…Elvis Andrus, Nelson Cruz, CJ Wilson, Derek Holland, and…uh…Matt Harrison? Rougned Odor and Neftali Feliz had good years but overall have not been good. And the farm system is awful.
In contrast, the Rockies actually have some big success stories. German Marquez, Arenado, and Story are all way better than anyone the Rangers have developed, and Blackmon is on par with any of them.
Andrus and Cruz are arguably not really even within the last 10 years at this point.
Yeah, I think that’s fair. I was thinking of people who were contributors in the last 10 years. But pretty much no matter what window you use the Rockies come out way better than the Rangers on “developing your own talent.” It’s just that the Rockies have wasted it.
Sometimes people fixate on the won-loss record but there are a lot of different roads to success. The Rockies have had adequate-to-good development and the Rangers have been a lot better despite having some of the worst development outcomes in the game.
Fair. I’m clearly underselling recent Rockies’ pitching.
The Orioles seem to fall into this category, though maybe more on the pitching side.
I can’t say I’ve followed them closely, but the Rockies seem to have had a weird tendency to block their own guys by going out and getting middling free agents at the same position, which is a really unusual way to for team to sabotage itself.
It probably depends a bit on when you set the window, but Machado and Britton were clear wins and Schoop and Chen weren’t bad. Trey Mancini is promising. Plus their prospects and guys who recently made their debut are way better than Texas’s.
Orioles?
Is the Junior Perez that was the PTBNL in the Mateo trade with Oakland last week the same one as is SDs #17 and 40+ FV here. Sure seems to be – just a possible small tweak here. He seemed to be the only prospect of note that got moved (a couple of Other Prospects with their prior orgs moved too) in the small spate of completed trades last week.
And hoping all is well with you Eric. But wondering if you have any details on what your approach will be to updating the team prospect lists this offseason with little to go on. I can’t imagine you’ll be able to visit all the instructional camps for some kind of look at some of the key prospects.
Under normal circumstances – and we are quite far from those – your team profiles tended to start rolling out sometime in November. This is the last of the division “updates” based on what you could see in the majors this season.
Looking forward to any word on what might follow and when. Completely understand if there’s no news on that front as yet, and wishing you the best in dealing with tumultuous times.