With two months of the minor-league season now complete and the draft also finished, it’s an appropriate time to publish a revised version of our preseason top-100 list. The list is below. Notes about methodology and specific players appear below that.
Sean Newcomb has turned a corner. On the heels of an erratic rookie campaign that saw him go 4-9, 4.32 in 100 innings for the Atlanta Braves last year, the 24-year-old former Angels prospect is rapidly establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League. A dozen starts into his second big-league season, Newcomb is 7-1 with a 2.49 ERA and he’s held hitters to a paltry .198 average and just three home runs.
Improved command and confidence have buoyed the young southpaw’s ability to flummox the opposition. His 4.3 walk rate (down from 5.1 last year) remains less than ideal, but he’s no longer the raw, strike-zone-challenged kid that Atlanta acquired from Anaheim in the November 2015 Andrelton Simmons deal. He’s making the transition from thrower to pitcher, and the results speak for themselves.
“I feel more comfortable now,” Newcomb told me prior to a late-May start at Fenway Park. “I had last year’s experience to take into the season, so I’ve felt more settled in. My fastball has also been working well, and I’ve been able to go from there.”
The fastball in question is by no means run-of-the-mill. It’s very good, and not for reasons that jump out at you — at least not in terms of numbers. Newcomb’s velocity (93.3) is right around league-average. His four-seam spin rate is actually lower than average (2,173 versus 2,263), as is his extension (5.6) versus 6.1). 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.
Read the rest of this entry »
After Ben Lindbergh briefly mourns the Shohei Ohtani injury news, he and Jeff Sullivan banter about the…impassioned response to Ben’s article about the DH and pitcher hitting, a few DH-related fallacies, Steven Brault’s bullpen conversation, the newly patient Pablo Sandoval, the effective wildness of Tyler Chatwood, and the effective non-wildness of Miles Mikolas, follow up on the Vroom Vroom Guy and an ugly half-inning, and answer listener emails about the Alex Reyes injury, the historic struggles of Chris Davis, Jacob DeGrom’s hard luck, the breakout of Brandon Nimmo, immaculate innings vs. three-pitch innings, a “Mike Trout meets J.R. Smith” hypothetical, a Cubs kids’ book, how to describe complete games, eight-man lineups, and constructing a roster where pitchers never hit, plus a Stat Blast about hitters who’ve reached on catcher’s interference twice in one game and a dramatic reading of anti-DH tweets.
Audio intro: Loose Fur, "You Were Wrong"
Audio outro: Built to Spill, "You Were Right"
Link to Ben’s pitcher hitting article
Link to Joe Posnanski’s DH article
Link to Jeff’s Pablo Sandoval article
Link to Troy Carter’s Vroom Vroom Guy chronicles
Link to Troy’s Vroom Vroom video
Link to list of immaculate innings
Link to list of three-pitch innings
Link to list of games like the one described in Good Night, Cubs
Link to Travis Sawchick’s “spread of the opener” article
Link to Deadspin’s article about the EW Facebook group
Link to Arthur Rudolph’s data on EW episode length
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Pop quiz, hot shots: what does this video…
https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/SociableMistyDragon
… have to do with this one?
https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/HappyBossyBullmastiff
Obviously, they’re both Paul Goldschmidt, and they’re both base hits. They’re actually the first two hits he’s collected all season long against four-seam fastballs thrown at 95 mph or above. By comparison, the Diamondbacks’ five-time All-Star slugger had 21 such hits last year, and an average of 19 from 2015 to -17.
Two hits against high velocity. Two measly, stinkin’ hits. That grim tally — a May 28 single off the Reds’ Tanner Rainey and Wednesday’s double off the Giants’ Reyes Moronta — appears to be be the primary reason why the 30-year-old first baseman has struggled so mightily this year.
I’ve checked in on Goldschmidt twice already this year, first in a dedicated look a couple weeks into the season and then more in passing shortly after A.J. Pollock went down. Almost immediately after the first piece, he went on a brief tear that raised his wRC+ to 145 (.273/.395/.505 line) by the end of April, seemingly providing an object lesson in the dangers of dwelling too long on a single bad month. But then he was utterly dreadful in May (.144/.252/.278, 48 wRC+), his worst calendar month since… well, since last September (.171/.250/.305, 35 wRC+).
New information has come to light in the wake of each piece — or new to me at least. A few days after the Pollock injury, ESPN’s Buster Olney wrote about Goldschmidt in the context of over-30 players struggling with high-velocity fastballs, though he drew the line at 96 mph and considered only batting average. More recently, both Goldschmidt and Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo have fielded questions about any connection between the slugger’s current slump and a bout of inflammation in his right elbow that sidelined him for five games at the beginning of September 2017, the presumed cause of the aforementioned late-season struggle.
Like half my social-media feed, I woke up to the awful news of the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, whose work I have loved going all the way back to the 1999 New Yorker piece that became Kitchen Confidential, his first book. The chef-turned-writer-turned-television-journalist had a remarkable gift for illuminating any corner of the world he wandered via A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown, bringing a rare and genuine empathy, compassion and gusto along with him. His career-changing discovery of his writing voice was among the many that inspired me as I embarked upon my own change from graphic design to writing about baseball.
Since it’s always draft-evaluation season, I thought it might make sense to start this post-draft notes column with some names for future draft classes. It’s too early to really rank these guys with any depth since we (and scouts) will be seeing all these players over the next couple months, so they will shuffle themselves a good bit this summer, but we definitely have a sense of who the top tier of talent is in the amateur ranks. These names are all in order of preference within the group in which they are identified.
For the 2019 class, there is a top tier of five prep standouts, while the college side is very deep in hitters. College pitching is very shallow at this early juncture, however. On the prep side, we have SS C.J. Abrams (Georgia), SS Bobby Witt, Jr. (Texas), LHP Hunter Barco (Florida), 3B Rece Hinds (Florida), and RHP Brennan Malone (North Carolina).
Atop the very deep college hitter class, we have SS Bryson Stott (UNLV), C Adley Rutschman (Oregon State), SS Logan Davidson (Clemson), C Shea Langliers (Baylor), SS Greg Jones (UNC Wilmington), RF Michael Toglia (UCLA), 3B Josh Jung (Texas Tech), RF Michael Busch (North Carolina), RF Matt Wallner (Southern Miss), and SS Braden Shewmake (Texas A&M).
As for that second tier of college bats, we have 3B Drew Mendoza (Florida State), 1B Andrew Vaughn (Cal), SS Will Holland (Auburn), CF Kam Misner (Missouri), 2B Chase Strumpf (UCLA), CF Wil Dalton (Florida), SS Will Wilson (North Carolina State), 1B Spencer Brickhouse (East Carolina), and 2B Nick Quintana (Arizona). All of those college hitters have top-two-round type profiles and the depth of the class means Team USA and the Cape will be deep with bats to watch this summer. There isn’t a clear top college pitcher, and none project for the top 15 picks at this point.
| 9:08 |
: Hello friends |
| 9:08 |
: Sorry sorry! Podcasting! |
| 9:08 |
: Welcome to Friday baseball chat |
| 9:08 |
: I know they’re completely independent, but the Caps make me feel better about the Nats chances this year. Is that sports? |
| 9:09 |
: That’s sports |
| 9:09 |
: It also shows the power of the narratives we make up about them to make them more interesting |
PITTSBURGH — Dodgers reliever Scott Alexander had just finished his lunch and was walking down the 16th Street Mall in Denver last Friday when he received a text from Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.
“‘Hey, you’re getting your start today,”’ the text read, as Alexander remembers it. “‘One or two innings.’”
Alexander had not regularly started professional baseball games since he was in Rookie ball with the Royals in 2010.
The left-hander had watched with curiosity last month as Rays reliever Sergio Romo started back-to-back games for the Rays, ushering in a new label, “the opener,” and a new game strategy. And on that Friday at Coors Field, the movement spread to the Dodgers and the NL West, as Alexander pitched the first inning of an 11-8 win over the Rockies. The Dodgers employed the strategy again yesterday in Pittsburgh when Daniel Hudson started against the Pirates.
After learning of what the Rays were doing with Romo, Alexander approached Dodgers bullpen coach Mark Prior in the bullpen during a May 28 game at Dodger Stadium. There Alexander “half-jokingly” broached the idea with Prior, saying he would be open to “opening” for the Dodgers.
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.
Josh James, RHP, Houston (Profile)
This marks James’ seventh appearance among the Five proper, and he continues to occupy the top spot on the arbitrarily calculated Scoreboard found at the bottom of this post. Of note regarding James’ season isn’t simply how well he’s performed on the whole but also how little decay his rates have experienced following the right-hander’s promotion to the Pacific Coast League.
As the table below reveals, the differential between his strikeout and walk rates is almost precisely the same at Triple-A as it was in a similar sample at Double-A.
| Level | G | BF | IP | K% | BB% | K-BB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AA | 6 | 93 | 21.2 | 40.9% | 10.8% | 30.1% |
| AAA | 5 | 110 | 28.1 | 38.2% | 8.2% | 30.0% |
James’ lone appearance from the past week is included in that second line. Facing Milwaukee’s affiliate in Colorado Springs, he produced a 13:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 25 batters over 7.0 innings (box). The most recent reports on his velocity continue to place his fastball in the mid-90s.
