FanGraphs Baseball

Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the National League East. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Atlanta Braves (Preseason List)

1. Ronald Acuna, CF
2. Ozzie Albies. 2B
3. Kyle Wright, RHP
4. Luiz Gohara, LHP
5. Kolby Allard, LHP
6. Kevin Maitan, SS
7. Ian Anderson, RHP
8. Mike Soroka, RHP
9. Joey Wentz, LHP
10. Cristian Pache, CF

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Aaron Judge’s monster first half made him an obvious MVP candidate, even as he’s slowed down in the second half of the year. Jose Altuve leads qualified hitters in wRC+, as a second baseman who also happens to steal a bunch of bases, so he’s an obvious MVP candidate. Mike Trout is within +1 WAR of both of them despite spending two months on the disabled list, and on a per-game impact, is again obviously making the biggest impact of anyone on the planet, so he’s a less-obvious MVP candidate, but he should be in the mix by season’s end.

But if the voting were held today, there would be a pretty clear choice for the American League’s Most Valuable Player, and it would be Chris Sale.

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12:03

Travis Sawchik: #Statcast @statcast .@Rafael_Devers homered off a 102.8 mph fastball – the fastest pitch hit for a homer since at least 2008…. twitter.com/i/web/status/8… 14 Aug 2017

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Giancarlo Stanton had become overshadowed, both literally and figuratively.

Until just recently, Stanton had been a Statcast God, often lapping the field in categories involving 100 mph-plus batted balls and average exit velocities.

But then Aaron Judge broke out, and Stanton, who was once the strongest and most physically imposing player in the game, was dropped down to the second chair. There is no larger perception drop than from first to second.

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Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the American League East. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Baltimore Orioles (Preseason List)

1. Chance Sisco, C
2. D.L. Hall, LHP
3. Ryan Mountcastle, OF
4. Austin Hays
5. Cedric Mullins, OF
6. Cody Sedlock, RHP
7. Keegan Akin, LHP
8. Hunter Harvey, RHP
9. Jomar Reyes, 3B
10. Anthony Santander, OF/1B

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about “Babe Ruth’s Legs,” then talk to researcher and statistician David Neft about how he rebuilt baseball’s historical record to create the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, or “Big Mac,” which provided the most comprehensive and accurate account of the sport’s statistical past when it was published in 1969, and which made baseball’s sabermetric revolution possible.

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Half a dozen years after Pittsburgh drafted him out of a Dallas, Texas high school, Josh Bell’s power game has finally emerged. After going deep just 47 times in his first five professional seasons, the switch-hitting first baseman has 20 home runs for the Pirates in 448 plate appearances. Augmenting those numbers are 21 doubles, four triples, and a .257/.333/.486 slash line.

When I talked to the then-21-year-old old Bell in August 2013, he told me that his “power is going to come, just from maturity; I can’t really change my swing.” Two years later, at the Double-A All-Star game, he told me he had made an adjustment to where he felt he could “power through the ball while still making consistent contact.”

On Wednesday, I asked him what’s changed since our 2015 conversation.

“In Double-A, I was (batting) average first with a low number of strikeouts,” answered Bell. “Last year. I started focusing on driving the ball more — more doubles and homers. That’s carried over into this year. I’ve kind of morphed from what I was then to what I am now.”

The launch-angle approach espoused by an increasing number of hitters wasn’t the impetus. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan talk to 17-year-old Jack Dumoulin, the first American winner of the Microsoft Excel World Championship, about how baseball stats helped him get good at spreadsheets, his high-school baseball career, how he won the championship, and his dream of working for an MLB team. Then Ben and Jeff answer listener emails about overlooked players near the top of the WAR leaderboard (with a focus on Tommy Pham), Joe Sewell on bat boning, player injury-prone-ness, whether sac bunts should be counted as outs, Leo Mazzone and a velocity mismatch, whether defense is underrated, and what would happen if two fielders had to touch a ball before one of them threw it to first.
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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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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We’re at a point in the season when you can reasonably split the data into two halves. In terms of reliability for batted-ball metrics, 50 balls in play is a good sample, and the majority of regular position players have produced that many since the first of July, more or less. If you look at exit velocity in two halves, Miguel Sano’s name jumps off the list. In a bad way. But why?

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