The Cleveland Indians were looking into the future when they selected Will Benson 14th overall in the 2016 draft. The powerfully-built Atlanta, Georgia product was a week shy of his 18th birthday, and his left-handed stroke — lethal against prep competition — was going to require polish if he hoped to reach his sky-high ceiling. Two years later, that process is well underway.

“You really wouldn’t,” Benson responded when I asked if now-versus-then film footage would show the same setup and swing. “In high school, you’d see a very athletic kid just competing and somehow getting it done. What you’d see now is more efficient movement — that’s a big thing I’ve worked on — and I’m maintaining better posture throughout my swing. Mechanically, making sure I’m getting behind the baseball is huge for me.”

Hitting the ball long distances isn’t a problem for the young outfielder. His power potential is a primary reason he went in the first round, and 545 plate appearances into his professional career — keep in mind he’s still a teenager — Benson has gone yard 23 times. The youngest position player on the roster of the Lake County Captains, he currently co-leads the low-A Midwest League with seven round trippers.

While Benson’s swing is conducive to clearing fences, his mindset is that of a well-rounded hitter. While he’s embraced launch-angle concepts, his focus is on simply squaring up the baseball. 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 banter about a new newsletter about baseball debuts, Shohei Ohtani’s latest exploits, the pitiful state of the AL Central, the even more pitiful performance of Orioles starter Chris Tillman, pitchers’ perplexing lack of respect for the Braves’ Ronald Acuña, Ichiro’s debut as a bench coach and future in baseball, and the ongoing battle between the Yankees and Red Sox. Then (29:58) they bring on the three tallest catchers in MLB history—current Tigers catcher Grayson Greiner, former Brewers and Phillies catcher Pete Koegel, and former Red Sox catcher Don Gile—to discuss the perils of playing a smaller person’s position despite standing 6’6″, the skeptics they proved wrong, how their size affected their framing, blocking, throwing, and health, the evolution in the treatment and prevention of brain injuries, Koegel’s memories of Steve Carlton’s incredible 1972 season, and Gile’s memories of his teammate Ted Williams.

Audio intro: Passion Pit, "Let Your Love Grow Tall"
Audio interstitial: Harry Nilsson, "Jesus Christ You’re Tall"
Audio outro: Neil Young + Promise of the Real, "Stand Tall"

Link to This Week in Baseball Debuts newsletter
Link to Jeff’s post about the weak AL Central
Link to article about the Angels’ team name

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The commissioner’s office has been concerned with the game’s pace of play for some time now — and for good reason, as the game has never been as slow as it was last season. Nor is time of game simply the issue. Perhaps more relevant in the smart phone, attention-deficit era, the game was never slower in terms of time elapsed between pitches.

This author believes patrons do not have an issue with the total time of game so much as that time elapsing between pitches and the increasing lack of action.

While the threat of unilateral pitch-clock implementation was not realized this offseason, other pace-of-play initiatives were, including the limitation of mound visits.

As I wrote back in February, some of the measures in place don’t really address pace. Cutting commercial time between innings, for instance, addresses total time of game — which is down five minutes to a flat three hours per contest — but pace of the action is probably more important.

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Cal Quantrill’s potential is considerable. Drafted eighth overall by the Padres in 2016 despite having undergone Tommy John surgery while at Stanford — he missed all of his junior year and much of his sophomore season — the 23-year-old right-hander possesses a combination of plus stuff and pitchability. Baseball America and MLB.com rank him as the fourth-best prospect in the San Diego system, while our own list — expect that soon — will have him a bit lower.

Quantrill, who is lauded as having one of the best changeups in the minors, has made seven starts for Double-A San Antonio this season and has a 3.52 ERA, a 3.29 FIP, and is striking out 8.2 batters per nine innings. He discussed his multi-pitch mix, and his take-no-prisoners approach, during spring training.

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Cal Quantrill: “I’m a fastball pitcher. Am I a power pitcher? I guess that would depend on how you want to define it. To me, a power pitcher is someone who attacks hitters, regardless of how fast their fastball is. They don’t fool around — they don’t play around with the edges of the strike zone — they go right after them. Getting ahead in the count is something I take great pride in. I try to make hitters get themselves out, and I want that to happen quickly so that I can go deep into games.

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NEW YORK – On Thursday night in the Bronx, the Regression Monster clawed back at CC Sabathia, whose stellar work over his previous three starts had been one of several factors in the 17-1 surge that allowed the Yankees to overtake the hot-starting Red Sox and claim sole possession of first place in the AL East. Though no longer able to muster the 95 mph fastball of his heyday, Sabathia’s remade repertoire — along with the smoke and mirrors produced by a .211 batting average on balls in play — had helped him to a 1.39 ERA entering the night, the league’s second-best mark among starters. Alas, the Red Sox teed off on a handful of pitches that Sabathia called “probably too good to hit with two strikes” and allowed a season-high four runs in a rain-shortened four-inning start. The Yankees’ 5-4 loss brought their eight-game winning streak to a halt and at least temporarily ended their sole occupancy of first place in the AL East.

Though Sabathia netted a season-high 15 swings and misses against the Red Sox, he was peppered for nine hits, three of which never left the infield — death by BABIP. Just after he served up a solo homer to Hanley Ramirez to start the fifth, putting the Yankees in a 4-0 hole, the skies opened up and drenched the playing field, causing a 55-minute rain delay and ending the 37-year-old southpaw’s night after just 80 pitches. The Yankees lineup, though held to just one hit by Sox starter Eduardo Rodriguez and reliever Matt Barnes over the first six innings, rallied to tie the game in the seventh, only to fall behind for good via J.D. Martinez’s eighth-inning solo homer off Dellin Betances.

“I felt pretty good, maybe a little too aggressive a couple times with two strikes,” said Sabathia afterwards. Indeed, while he had held opposing batters to a .159/.183/.261 line with two strikes (the AL average is .175/.247/.280), five of the nine hits he surrendered were two-strike hits. Each one led to runs: Mookie Betts‘ game-opening ground rule double, the three straight third-inning hits by Betts, Andrew Benintendi (a double), and Ramirez that keyed a two-run rally, and Ramirez’s solo homer.

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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 on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*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.

Jalen Beeks, LHP, Boston (Profile)
Beeks is here because his body of work over the first month of the season is impossible to ignore. In six starts for Triple-A Pawtucket, the left-hander has recorded strikeout and walk rates of 40.9% and 6.3%, respectively, the former of those representing the highest mark among all qualified minor-league pitchers. He’s basically the Josh Hader or Andrew Miller of the International League, except in a starting capacity.

One reason Beeks is unlikely to replicate that sort of performance in the majors is because no one has every replicated that sort of performance in the majors. Another, though, is because Beeks — for all his strikeouts — doesn’t actually possess much in the way of swing-and-miss stuff. Consider, for example, all six of the strikeouts from his most recent appearance (box):

https://gfycat.com/KaleidoscopicEssentialGrayling

All but one of Beeks’ strikeouts was recorded by means of a rather ordinary fastball; the sixth, a short breaking ball on a called third strike. Nor does this pattern appear to be anomalous. An examination of Beeks’ last three starts seems to reveal an inordinately high ratio of strikeouts by way of the fastball and/or the called third strike. And while, as noted, he has the top strikeout rate among all minor-league qualifiers, his swinging-strike rate ranks 61st among that same population. Of course, this doesn’t render his present achievement any less remarkable. It merely suggests that it’s unlikely to translate directly to the majors.

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The other day, Jay Jaffe wrote an article titled, “Does Any Team Want to Win the AL Central?” At that writing, the Indians were in first place, with a record of 17-18. The Indians subsequently won, which helped appearances somewhat, but still, the AL Central is a division with five teams, and right now not one of them is playing over .500. Four of them are playing under it. Every other division in baseball has more total wins than losses. The AL Central is there to pick up the slack. Or do whatever the opposite of picking up the slack is.

I can say this doesn’t come as the biggest surprise. The AL Central was projected to be lousy, with quite possibly the three worst teams in the American League. Now, the Indians, in the early going, have been a disappointment, but they’ll probably get it together. They’re supposed to be the juggernaut. The Twins are in there as a fringe contender, a team boosted by the realities of the unbalanced schedule. Anyway, one point: We assumed it would be bad. Another point: It’s looking really bad. There could be some kind of divisional history in the making.

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