FanGraphs Baseball

Infielder Eduardo Escobar entered the 2017 campaign having recorded 27 homers, a .128 isolated-power figure, and 84 wRC+ over the course of 1,620 plate appearances. In the roughly 900 plate appearances since the beginning of 2017, however, he’s been a different sort of hitter, accumulating 36 homers while posting a .215 ISO and 109 wRC+ during that interval.

The difference is stark. Indeed, one could say without much need for hyperbole that, after having conducted himself like a slap-hitting middle infielder for much of his career, Escobar somewhat suddenly become a legitimate power threat. By way of reference, consider some of the players whom Escobar has outslugged: Nicholas Castellanos (.214 ISO), Joey Votto (.213), George Springer (.213), Anthony Rizzo (.209), Corey Dickerson (.204). Those are all players whose presence in the major leagues is founded, at some level, on their ability to create runs on contact. All of them have recorded wins at an above-average rate since the start of 2017. None of them has hit for more power than Escobar, though.

Of course, having hit more home runs than expected is different than continuing to hit more home runs than expected. The former is a matter of record, the latter a question of true talent. The Arizona Diamondbacks, it seems, are at least somewhat optimistic about the latter: earlier today, they acquired Escobar from Minnesota in exchange for three prospects: right-hander Jhoan Duran, outfielder Ernie De La Trinidad, and other outfielder Gabriel Maciel.

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With 47.1% odds of winning the NL East and 63.4% odds of reaching the postseason entering play Friday, few teams ought to be more aggressive buyers than the Phillies as they try to consolidate and improve their NL East-leading position in a year they perhaps arrived ahead of schedule.

The Phillies attempted to improve Friday by acquiring veteran infielder Asdrubal Cabrera from the Mets. One of the Phillies’ weaknesses has been a general lack of run production from their infield positions. The Phillies rank 12th in the majors in wRC+ by second basemen (98), 27th at shortstop (75), and 23rd at third base (90).

Cabrera has posted a 122 wRC+ for the season and a .277/.329/.488 slash line. He posted a 111 wRC+ last season and has a 107 mark for his career. The switch-hitter has generally been an above-average offensive player, particularly relative to middle infielders. The 32-year-old impending free agent has produced 2.1 WAR to date this season.

Cabrera, who has been limited to second base in 2018, gives the Phillies roster flexibility in addition to representing an offensive upgrade in the infield. He was primarily a shortstop through 2016, though he also has experience at third base. It’s not exactly clear how and where Phillies manager Gabe Kapler will employ Cabrera.

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Remember Ryan Doumit? I’m dating myself by saying it, but back in 2005 and 2006, I was obsessed with him. He was an oft-injured catcher who could really hit. He approached a .200 ISO in back-to-back years of part-time duty in 2006-07 and absolutely destroyed the minor leagues.

But the Bucs were steadfastly against making Doumit their starting catcher, sticking him at first base and in the corner outfield. At the time, I thought the Bucs were making a serious mistake by not playing Doumit behind the plate every chance they got. I mean, the guy posted three wins on the back of a 123 wRC+ in 2008, his first full year of play. How could a team not stick that bat behind the plate?

What I didn’t appreciate at the time were the Pirates’ concerns. Ryan Doumit was an extraordinarily bad pitch-framer, a fact the Pirates knew and I didn’t. And as pitch-framing has become an increasingly important part of the game, an interesting question has emerged: is pitch-framing even legal?

This is actually a really interesting issue, for a lot of reasons — and the first of those reasons is that it forces us, first of all, to define what, exactly, pitch-framing means. What is pitch-framing, anyway? I mean, if you read this site, it’s a pretty good bet you have an intuitive understanding of what it is, but we can’t exactly take our intuition, go to baseball’s rulebook, and look that up. In order to figure this out, we need to have one, firm definition of pitch-framing.

There’s just one problem: there is no one definition of pitch-framing. Here’s proof – we can’t get lawyers, who make definitions of things for a living, to agree on a definition.

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Growing up, the closest minor-league club to me was the Richmond Braves. This was the late 90s and many top prospects who would go on to major-league careers came through town for a season. My scorebook from those years is filled with games that included former major leaguers Andruw Jones and Bruce Chen, along with lesser luminaries such as Wes Helms and Odalis Perez. The Braves moved to Gwinnett after the 2008 season, and the Flying Squirrels — the Giants’ Double-A affiliate — would move to Richmond in 2010.

The parade of prospects slowed a bit after the Flying Squirrels arrived. Buster Posey skipped Double-A, Brandon Belt’s 2010 breakout helped propel him to a top-100 prospect. However, without question, the biggest prospect who stayed in Richmond for any length of time was Kyle Crick. He arrived in 2014 as the 32nd-best prospect in baseball according to MLB.com. He proceeded, however, to stay in town for three seasons without being promoted or demoted. Needless to say, his prospect light dimmed during that period.

When Crick was promoted to Fresno in 2017, it was more out of a need to see if he had any chance of reaching the majors that season, as he was eligible to become a minor-league free agent at the end of the year. He would eventually make it to the Giants’ bullpen and then, later, to Pittsburgh as part of the Andrew McCutchen deal.

In Pittsburgh, Crick has become a serviceable bullpen option, combining with Richard Rodriguez and Felipe Vazquez to helm a bullpen unit that ranks among the league’s top 10 in K/9, FIP, and xFIP. The success of all three has been unexpected — Crick included, despite his prospect pedigree. By leaning on his long-held strengths and gaining a modicum of control over his weaknesses, Crick has been able to end his long minor-league odyssey and has found success in the majors, albeit in a role which he had hoped to avoid.

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The Angels traded 31-year-old glove-first catcher Martin Maldonado to Houston yesterday in exchange for Astros 21-year-old LHP Patrick Sandoval. The Astros signed Sandoval away from a USC commitment with a $900,000 signing bonus in 2015. He was their 11th-round pick. He has tracked through the minors at an even pace, amassing 97 strikeouts in 88 innings split between Low- and High-A this season while also reducing his walk rate to half (4.3%) of what it was last year (8.5%).

Sandoval’s fastball sits 88-92 and will top out around 94. He can really spin a 12-6 curveball, one that’s above average when Sandoval is getting on top of it. Effectively, Sandoval has an almost perfectly vertical arm slot, but the way he gets there is somewhat odd and there’s some skepticism among scouts as to the sustainability of this year’s uptick in strike-throwing. There’s enough of a changeup here for continued development in a rotation and, if everything clicks, Sandoval will be a No. 4 or 5 starter. If not, he’s a lefty with a good breaking ball and a fine bullpen candidate. It’s a fair return for a backup catching rental.

Had Sandoval gone to USC, he’d have been draft eligible this year. Comparable college lefties in this year’s draft would have been Nationals second-rounder Tim Cate from UConn, and White Sox third-rounder, Mississippi State lefty Konnor Pilkington. Cate is a better athlete than Sandoval and the breaking ball is a little better. He signed for slot a 65th overall, $986,200. Pilkington’s stuff is closer to average across the board. I’d have him behind Sandoval just on stuff. He signed for $650,000, slightly below slot at pick No. 81. I think Sandoval would have fit somewhere in that range on draft day, which means the Astros properly valued him three years ago and used an 11th-round pick to acquire a future second- or third-round talent for second- or third-round money. It also means Sandoval probably got an equal or better bonus than he would have this year, and he’s further along the developmental path than most his age-appropriate peers from the 2018 collegiate draft class.

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 within Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update — and the updates published by Jeffrey Paternostro of Baseball Prospectus and John Sickels at Minor League Ball — 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.

Tony Gonsolin, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
This represents Gonsolin’s third consecutive appearance in this weekly exercise, and it’s possibly his most deserving. Since last Friday’s edition of the Five, the right-hander has made two starts. In 13.0 innings between them, Gonsolin recorded a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 18:3 against 50 batters.

Gonsolin’s profile isn’t the most common sort for a future major-league starter. He was a two-way player in college, not drafted till the ninth round, and features some traits on the mound (pronounced over-the-top delivery, effort) that are atypical for starters. He’s made it work thus far, however. He’s also continued to exhibit a strategies for contending with left-handed hitters, six of whom he faced in his second-to-last start (box).

Here’s a 92 mph slider to a lefty from that game for a called third strike:

And a curveball at the back foot for a swinging strike:

And a change with splitter-type action, also for a swinging strike:

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Cole Hamels has accumulated the third-most WAR among big-league lefties dating back to 2006. Last night, was traded for a fringe prospect. A 5.20 FIP, a $6 million buyout at the end of the year, and a relatively lengthy no-trade list all limited Hamels’ value on the trade market, and the Rangers received 2017 11th-rounder ($125,000 bonus) Rollie Lacy in their swap with the Cubs.

In Lacy, the Rangers acquired a 23-year-old righty who is performing in A-ball. He has K’d 94 hitters in 80.2 innings this year, but the scouting reports indicate lesser stuff than Lacy’s strikeout rate would otherwise indicate. He’s a sinker/slider righty (60% ground-ball rate this year, which is excellent relative to the big-league average of 43%) with some cross-body mechanical deception and a fringey changeup.

On stuff, Lacy looks like an up-and-down arm. His ability to generate ground balls and the way his delivery enables his stuff to play up are possible paths toward more than that.

An impromptu conversation will sometimes glean quality interview material, and that was the case earlier this season when I chewed the fat with Scott Emerson in the visiting dugout at Fenway Park. The Oakland pitching coach loves discussing his craft, and that fact came to the fore when an answer to a question about an individual member of the A’s staff segued into what you’re about read here. From the importance of staying closed in a delivery to the value of disrupting timing and attacking weaknesses — with boxing, bullets, and airplane analogies thrown in for good measure — Emerson had a lot to offer.

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Scott Emerson on pitching: “Some guys can create the analytic everybody is looking for with a bad delivery. What I mean by that is they bail out in their delivery and the hitters see the ball better. We can’t quantify the hitters seeing the ball, but the longer they see it — no matter what the spin rates are — the more it takes away from the effectiveness of the pitch. It gives the hitter the advantage.

“Sometimes it’s, ‘Oh, this guy can spin it,’ and people are wondering ‘Why does he have a 6.00 ERA?’ Well, he has a 6.00 ERA because he doesn’t hang onto his mechanics well enough. He exposes the ball to the hitter sooner. It’s like a boxer bailing out on a punch. If we’re boxing and I open up too much, I’m exposed and you can hit me with a left hook. But if I’m driving through you, I’m not exposing myself. I’m not giving you the opportunity to beat me up.

“For instance, when Daniel Mengden is really good, he stays closed longer. He’s down the lane, down the slope, closed, and then he explodes out of it. When he gets himself in trouble is when he wants to overthrow. His front shoulder bails out and he exposes the baseball to the hitter. That gets him in trouble.

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In late July, basically every contender is in pursuit of starting pitching in some form or another, whether it’s an ace who can make an impact in the playoffs or a rotation piece who can help the club survive the duration of the season.

That’s certainly the case for the Chicago Cubs. While the club actually does currently have five experienced and healthy starters — plus Yu Darvish — what they need most is quality starting pitching. The team’s starters have put up a 4.76 FIP and accumulated just 3.0 WAR, ranking 25th in baseball and outpacing only the Reds by that measure in the National League. It has quite possibly been one of the franchise’s worst rotations ever so far. And even after accounting for Cubs’ above-average defense, the team still only places in the middle of the pack in terms of run-prevention. In order to give themselves the best possible chance of qualifying for the postseason, Chicago needed better starting pitching.

Last night, they attempted to meet that need, reaching an agreement with the Texas Rangers to acquire left-hander Cole Hamels.

In Hamels, the Cubs receive a pitcher who’s recorded a good road ERA while having performed less well in a very tough pitcher’s park. It stands to reason, as Buster Olney himself reasoned yesterday afternoon, that a change in scenery alone — to a better park, to a league without the designated hitter — might lead to much better performances for Hamels. While there might be something to that, it’s important to remember that similar sentiments accompanied Tyler Chatwood’s arrival in Chicago. Now Hamels is probably taking Chatwood’s job.

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