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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

We’re entering a time on the scouting calendar when a great shift in resources occurs. Short-season leagues get underway this week (if they haven’t already), which means some amateur scouts will pick up regional pro coverage now that the draft is done, while others stay on the amateur showcase circuit to prep for 2019. It also means teams that know if they’re buying or selling at the trade deadline can target scouting resources more efficiently by identifying likely trade partners and focusing on those systems. For example, the Padres have probably considered what teams are in need of lefty relief help at the deadline and have made it an organizational priority to know about those teams’ systems more than the systems of other rebuilding clubs. Daily Prospect Notes returns as a space to explain and discuss concepts like this, individual performers, my in-person notes, and whatever else I see fit to talk about.

Yordan Alvarez, 1B/OF, Houston Astros (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 3  FV: 55
Line: 2-for-5, HR

Notes
Sunday was Alvarez’s first game back from a hand injury that cost him about a month and a half. Injuries have limited him to 134 games combined in parts of three pro seasons. Between those extended periods of inactivity, however, Alvarez has dominated. This is a giant 20-year-old who is remarkably athletic and twitchy for his size and crushing Double-A in a modest sample. This was the relatively unknown guy that the Dodgers signed for $2 million just before the clock struck midnight on the 2015 July 2 period. He hadn’t suited up for the Dodgers before they sent him to Houston for Josh Fields, and now he’s the best prospect from that 2015 Dodgers July 2 class by a sizable margin. He’s a potential middle-of-the-order force and quickly closing in on an increasingly expendable A.J. Reed.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the thirteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Dennis Eckersley, Michael Fulmer, Miguel Gonzalez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

———

Dennis Eckersley (Hall of Famer) on His Slider

“I couldn’t throw a curveball because of my angle. I couldn’t get on top of it. That’s all they’d ever tell me. Every time somebody would whistle at me, it would be, ‘Get your arm up! Get your elbow up!’ But a slider came pretty easy. It was just, ‘Turn your wrist a little bit.’

“I went straight from high school to pro ball [in 1972], and all of a sudden my fastball didn’t play. I was in the California League when I was 17, and they could hit. The next thing you know, I’m throwing a lot more breaking balls than I ever did in my life. I didn’t have any choice.

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June is Pride Month in the United States. By way of explanation:

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month (LGBT Pride Month) is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan. The Stonewall riots were a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBT Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

You can read more about the Stonewall riots here for greater context. Essentially, though, Pride Month is a time not just to celebrate gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the United States, but also to highlight the current state of LGBTQ+ rights in the United States. For our purposes, it also represents an opportune moment to examine the current state of LGBTQ+ issues in baseball.

A couple of years ago, Gallup found that 4.1% of Americans overall, and 7.3% of millennials, identify as LGBT, although the demographer who published that data suspects that, after accounting for those respondents who are unwilling to disclose details regarding their sexuality, the overall figure is probably closer to 10%.

Britni de la Cretaz, who’s written a number of fascinating stories on the intersection of sport, gender, and sexuality, wrote an article last month exploring queer women in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a facet ignored by A League of Their Own. And two major leaguers have come out as gay: Glenn Burke and Billy Bean.

But in another sense, baseball generally, and MLB specifically, has a lot of work to do when it comes to LGBT inclusion. Both Burke and Bean came out after their playing days were over. David Denson, the first openly gay player in affiliated ball to come out while still playing, has since retired. And while Denson said his retirement wasn’t related to his coming-out – and that his teammates were largely supportive – he nevertheless related to Bleacher Report some cringeworthy tales from his time in baseball clubhouses.

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Jeimer Candelario is establishing himself as one of the best young players on a young Detroit Tigers team. Playing in his first full big-league season, the 24-year-old third baseman is slashing a solid .251/.346/.476 with 10 home runs. His 2.0 WAR leads all Tigers.

Acquired along with Isaac Paredes in the deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs at last summer’s trade deadline, “Candy” is a switch-hitter with pop. His M.O. is gap-to-gap, and the orientation of his top hand is a focal point of his swing.

“I want to hit the ball with palm up,” explained Candelario. “If you’re palm up and you hit the ball, you finish up. I try to be connected. My back side, my hands, my hips, and my legs come in the same moment. That way, when I hit the ball I hit the ball with power, with palm up.”

Candelario credits Cubs assistant hitting coach Andy Haines — at the time the club’s hitting coordinator — for helping him develop his stroke. Now that he’s in Motown, he’s heeding the advice of Lloyd McClendon, who is emphasizing “How to load and then follow through, which helps me have some doubles and homers. If I just concentrate on hitting line drives, the ball will carry.”

McClendon is bullish on the young infielder’s future. Ditto his here and now. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan follow up on Terry Collins, trick running plays, Steven Brault‘s disappointing strikeout, the Mariners, and Justin Miller, banter about Takuya Nakashima’s 200th career sacrifice bunt, the Astros’ enviable depth, the most exciting rookies of 2018 (including Juan Soto, Gleyber Torres, Walker Buehler, and Adam Cimber), and MLB’s attendance decline, and talk to Hans Van Slooten about his years building and maintaining Baseball-Reference.com as Sports Reference’s manager of baseball operations, his decision to accept a new job as a baseball systems developer with the Minnesota Twins, the pros and cons of working for an MLB team, writing words vs. writing code, the differences between public and private and big and small(er) data, how Baseball-Reference adds (or doesn’t add) information, the expanding Sports Reference empire, his favorite finds on B-Ref, Barry Bonds’s WAR, comparing current players and long-retired players, how the “opener” strategy and Shohei Ohtani affected the site, and how to have his job.

Audio intro: The Police, "Too Much Information"
Audio interstitial: Elf Power, "Back to the Web"
Audio outro: Keith West, "On a Saturday"

Link to Steven Brault strikeout GIF
Link to Takuya Nakashima t-shirt photo
Link to Travis Sawchik’s attendance post
Link to Sports Reference site index
Link to Sports Reference web developer job listing

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update have also been excluded from consideration.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Josh James, RHP, Houston (Profile)
Every time James produces a strong start — an event that has occurred with considerable frequency this season — FanGraphs contributor and traveler within the world of ideas Travis Sawchik sends a note to the present author that reads, “His name is JOSH JAMES.” While I can’t argue with the literal sense of Sawchik’s message — namely, that this right-hander’s given name literally is Josh James — I suspect that my colleague is attempting to communicate something more profound than a single datum from James’s biography. Have I pursued the topic? No. Not because I’m afraid to, either — but rather because I am infested by indifference.

James made one start this week, recording an 11:2 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 23 batters while facing Houston’s affiliate in Fresno (box).

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