UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 17

This is the 17th episode of a sorta weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men.

This episode is focused on Monday’s MLB Draft and our coverage of it, which is featured in the widget above and on THE BOARD. We spent a few minutes on each team, the timestamps for which below so you can get to the part you’d like to hear:

2:20 – Arizona Diamondbacks
5:23 – Atlanta Braves
8:01 – Baltimore Orioles
10:38 – Boston Red Sox
13:00 – Chicago Cubs
15:17 – Chicago White Sox
17:39 – Cincinnati Reds
20:41 – Cleveland Indians
23:18 – Colorado Rockies
25:59 – Detroit Tigers
28:33 – Houston Astros
30:25 – Kansas City Royals
32:28 – Los Angeles Angels
35:09 – Los Angeles Dodgers
37:38 – Miami Marlins
40:36 – Milwaukee Brewers
43:04 – Minnesota Twins
45:45 – New York Mets
48:10 – New York Yankees
51:02 – Oakland A’s
53:20 – Philadelphia Phillies
56:15 – Pittsburgh Pirates
59:05 – San Diego Padres
1:01:40 – San Francisco Giants
1:04:20 – Seattle Mariners
1:06:40 – St. Louis Cardinals
1:08:40 – Tampa Bay Rays
1:12:30 – Texas Rangers
1:15:15 – Toronto Blue Jays
1:17:40 – Washington Nationals

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 85 min play time.)

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Speed bump aside, Jordan Groshans has been hitting on all cylinders in Low-A Lansing. Currently on the shelf with a stress injury to the navicular bone of his left foot — his return is still TBD — the 12th-overall pick in last year’s draft was slashing .337/427/.482 when he went down in mid-May. Few question his ceiling. The 19-year-old shortstop is ranked fifth in a strong Blue Jays farm system.

Groshans brings more than tools to the table. According to Gil Kim, Toronto’s Director of Player Development, character and drive were major selling points for the Magnolia, Texas product when last summer’s draft rolled around.

“Area scout Brian Johnston, cross-checker C.J. Ebarb, and our amateur department as a whole did a nice job of identifying his talent,” said Kim. “They were also convicted that the strong makeup would allow him to continuously improve and to impact his teammates. That’s the part that we’re most excited about. He’s always asking questions, he’s open to feedback, and he’s always engaging in conversations with our staff about how to get better. Jordan has been fun to work with because he burns to be great.”

The youngster feels that his biggest strides have come in the plate-discipline department; the numbers back that up. His 13.5% walk rate with the Lugnuts is nearly double last year’s 7.3% in rookie-ball. Easing his foot off the gas pedal has been a key. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play a little game. Here is a Statcast leaderboard of the Barrels per plate appearances leaders (minimum 50 batted ball events). Without looking it up, try to figure out who’s behind Gary Sanchez:

I’ll give you a hint: he’s a catcher. Another hint: he’s on the Minnesota Twins. And no, it’s not Willians Astudillo, as much as we wish it were him. The answer is Jason Castro. Granted, Castro only has 92 plate appearances to his name this season. He also has accumulated 2,839 plate appearances over his career and, as far as Statcast has detected since 2015, he’s never hit the ball this hard. His career-high in average exit velocity was 88.6 mph back in 2015. He’s coming off a 2018 season during which he hit for an average exit velocity of 86.8 mph, his lowest in the Statcast era. In 2019? 92.6 mph. Here’s the difference between 2019 Jason Castro and his 2015-2018 self:

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On Tuesday, the Phillies snapped a five-game losing streak and maintained their razor-thin margin atop the NL East, but not before suffering a different kind of loss when they learned that Andrew McCutchen will miss the remainder of the season. The 32-year-old outfielder tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee while trying to avoid being tagged during a rundown in the first inning of Monday’s game against the Padres. It’s a costly loss for the Phillies. Not only has McCutchen — the leadoff hitter in 59 of the team’s first 60 games — been one of the team’s most productive players, but Philadelphia’s outfield depth has been depleted by a variety of other means.

The play on which McCutchen got hurt was a strange one. After he led off the game by drawing a walk, Jean Segura popped up but lost his balance and fell to one knee in so doing. Rather than catching the ball, Padres second baseman Ian Kinsler alertly let it drop, then barehanded the ball on the first hop and threw to first baseman Eric Hosmer for the first out. That left McCutchen in no man’s land; he broke for second, then reversed towards first, threw on the brakes, then tried an ill-advised spin move to elude Hosmer. By the time he was tagged, Cutch was clutching his knee:

Rotten luck. “I didn’t feel it pop or anything,” McCutchen told reporters after the game. “Something felt uncomfortable, something that made me grab my knee and go down. I’ve had an ACL injury before and I know what that feels like. This didn’t feel like that.” Alas, the outfielder’s optimism proved to be ill-founded, as an MRI taken on Tuesday showed the tear.

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Think back to the first weeks of the season. Those few weeks of time are disproportionately important, because they shape our understanding of the baseball season in a way that two random weeks normally wouldn’t. It’s taken quite a while, for example, for everyone to realize that Christian Yelich is excellent but probably not the second coming of Babe Ruth, or that Paul DeJong is a good shortstop who isn’t one of the best five players in baseball. Marco Gonzales was a no-strikeout pitching phenom, compiling a 3.1 FIP (2.8 ERA) and 1.3 WAR. He’s been below replacement level since, but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t take the time to look. Yes, the first few weeks of the season exert a powerful hold on our minds.

What if they didn’t, though? What if, for some crazy reason, the first month-plus of baseball didn’t happen, and the season started on May 1? The narratives and the takes would be extremely different. We don’t see them now, because a month of March and April stats camouflage the full-season lines, but here’s a glimpse of what could have been. Read the rest of this entry »

J.D. Martinez is one of the best hitters on the planet. Last year he posted a 170 wRC+ and 43 home runs, which is probably good. This year, he “only” has a 128 wRC+ and an obscenely-low-for-a-power-hitter 17.1% strikeout rate. When a .291/.373/.513 triple-slash means you’re having a “down” year, you’re either ridiculously good or your name is Mike Trout.

Martinez is not without problems, however. As Scott Holland explains for the Cook County Record:

A baseball agent has sued Merrill Lynch for allegedly conspiring to steer a superstar client to a rival agent Scott Boras just before the player landed a huge contract. . . . In a complaint filed May 10 in Cook County Circuit Court, agent Bob Garber, president of RMG Sports Group, sued Merrill Lynch; Pierce Fenner & Smith; and Bruce Lee, a financial adviser in Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office, alleging tortious interference with contractual relations.

Let’s break this down. Bob Garber is Martinez’s former agent. Days before he hit free agency, Martinez fired Garber and hired Scott Boras. Martinez and Boras then went on an offseason-long courtship with baseball before the slugger finally signed a five-year, $110-million contract with three opt-outs.

Now, whether Martinez would’ve been better off with Garber instead of Boras is anyone’s guess. It’s worth noting that Garber isn’t an inexperienced agent; his most notable negotiations include those for erstwhile Astros ace Roy Oswalt a 5-year, $73 million extension in 2006 and a five-year, $77 million deal between free agent southpaw C.J. Wilson and the Angels in 2011. More recently, Garber obtained a three-year, $38 million commitment for Tyler Chatwood from the Cubs. So Garber isn’t a neophyte, is the point, and that gives his lawsuit significantly more credence.

What is his lawsuit about? According to the complaint, which you can read here, Martinez was using a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch named Bruce Lee to manage his money. Garber alleges that he and Lee were friends, and that he referred his clients to Lee because he had personally invested with Lee himself. But, according to Garber, Lee told Martinez to drop Garber and hire Scott Boras, because Lee wanted to obtain a financial benefit from having Boras’ book of superstar clients invest with him. Garber is seeking the 5% commission that he would have received had he negotiated Martinez’s Red Sox contract himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing says more about the state of Major League Baseball in 2019 than the fact that one of the biggest stories during the MLB Draft is the possible signings of two of last winter’s biggest name-brand free agents. Unencumbered by the signing team’s loss of draft picks with the conclusion of the MLB Draft, Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel have suddenly become a lot more exciting to clubs.

While it’s become commonplace to point to these non-signings as proof of MLB’s broken system of player compensation, I’m not actually buying it. Not that I’m disputing that there’s a serious issue, but I’d argue that the signings that are most problematic are when players like Ozzie Albies feel the need to take pennies on the dollar in their early twenties just so they can guarantee getting some of the win-related revenue they generate.

For free agents that aren’t elite contributors, I don’t think there’s any financial system that puts the genie in the bottle. Teams may not generally use straight WAR measures as unerring scripture, but they are more widely aware — even the teams run relatively poorly — of the limited impact of any one player. Mike Trout, as amazing as he is, isn’t the LeBron James of baseball, because the very design of the game itself prevents any one player from having as much of an impact on a team as LeBron or Steph Curry or James Harden or Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes.

The demands of the players matter as well. It was widely reported over the winter that Craig Kimbrel was looking for a contract worth over $100 million for six years. While you’ll never get these rumors backed up with ironclad verification, nobody I’ve talked to inside baseball about Kimbrel’s demands has done anything but accept that as his camp’s demands.

At his best, Kimbrel was possibly the most dominating reliever of this generation, arguably even better than Mariano Rivera at his best (remember, what made Mo special wasn’t just how good he was, but how good he was for two decades). Baseball’s system no doubt underpaid Kimbrel — and the system for cost-controlled player needs serious addressing — but the Yankees or Red Sox or Cardinals or whichever team signs him has no interest in “making up” missing dollars to him that the Braves didn’t have to pay. Read the rest of this entry »

Six in a row, 10 out of 11, 16 out of 19, 27 out of 35 — however you slice it, the Dodgers have been steamrolling everything in their path lately. They haven’t lost a series since dropping two of three to the Giants April 29 to May 1, and now own the NL’s best record (42-19) by a margin of 7.5 games. Their +96 run differential is nearly equal to the sum of those of the league’s second-ranked Cubs (+53) and third-ranked Diamondbacks (+46). Their offense owns the league’s highest wRC+ by a wide margin (117 to the Cubs’ 109), and their rotation owns the NL’s best ERA (2.88) and FIP (3.46) while also the most innings per start (5.89).

Which brings us to their bullpen. Sure, it hasn’t been a dumpster fire on the order of the Nationals’ (6.81 ERA, 5.08 FIP) or Orioles’ (5.84 ERA, 5.66 FIP), but there are only so many teams who can be that lucky. Through Monday, the Dodgers’ bullpen ranked 10th in the NL in ERA (4.71) and ninth in FIP (4.48). The former number doesn’t even account for the fact that the unit has allowed 43% of the runners inherited from the starters to score, the league’s second-worst mark; include all inherited runners and the rate falls to 39%, third-worst. While their relievers’ 7.6% walk rate is a league low, their 22.2% strikeout rate is the second-lowest, and their 1.37 homers per nine is mid-pack. Their clutch score — a measure of whether a player or team has done better or worse than expected in higher-leverage situations — of -2.54 is second-to-last in the NL, ahead of only the Nationals.

As you can see from those numbers above, the offense and rotation have largely papered over the bullpen’s problems. The week-long span from Sunday, May 26 through Saturday, June 1 — during which Dodger relievers combined for a 7.08 ERA and 6.64 FIP in 20.1 innings — illustrates the point in dramatic fashion:

• Sunday, May 26 vs. Pirates: Caleb Ferguson entered with a seven-run lead and turned it into a four-run lead, though the Dodgers still won, 11-7.
• Monday, May 27 vs. Mets: Joe Kelly entered with a five-run lead and failed to retire any of the three hitters he faced, the highlight of whom was a two-run homer by Adeny Hechavarria, the owner of a career .346 slugging percentage and a total of 29 homers compiled in eight seasons. When Kelly’s successor, Dylan Floro, got into trouble, manager Dave Roberts called upon Kenley Jansen for a five-out save, which he converted in the 9-5 win.

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Over the weekend, I saw the Yankees’ Double-A affiliate, the Trenton Thunder, host the Nationals’ Double-A affiliate, the Harrisburg Senators. These are my thoughts on a few of the prospects I saw, starting with those on the visiting Senators.

Harrisburg (WAS)

Luis Garcia, MIF, Top 100 Rank: 53, Org Rank: 3

An average-sized, sturdy teenager, Garcia is a bit thick in his lower half and might need to watch his weight moving forward. He continues to show solid feel to play but did not show tools during Saturday’s game that would lead me to believe he’d be anything more than a utility player in the major leagues. He has good hands and an arm strong enough to stay on the left side of the dirt but showed just fringy speed and below-average twitch. I’m skeptical about his ability to play shortstop as anything more than a fill-in, and think he likely migrates to second base as he reaches full maturity.

Any teenager who only strikes out 14.9% of the time in the Carolina league and 18% of the time (as of writing) in the Eastern League deserves credit for his bat-to-ball ability, and Garcia is not an exception, but his inability to drive the ball consistently leaves some cause for concern. Garcia’s hands and bat path are fine, but he does very little in the way of utilizing his lower half, which leads to him simply slapping at the ball and guiding it to all fields. This approach might work for an 80-grade runner, but it likely won’t work for someone like Garcia long-term. Ruling out the possibility of Garcia improving would be foolish given that he just turned 19 last month, so I will reserve final judgment as he continues to refine and improve his hitting mechanics. The current iteration of his swing, however, produces little impact. Read the rest of this entry »