Clubs have begun their pre-draft meetings, with some teams already about a week into theirs, while the last team to start them (Milwaukee, as far as I know) begins today. The number of people in draft meetings varies significantly from team to team. Some have more than 20 people in the room, others five or so. When any one person in the draft room learns something new, whether it’s from a scout buddy with another team or during a conversation with an agent or media person, the other folks in the room tend to also learn that thing. It is during this window that the dope starts to flow in a way that makes a more specific, full-round mock draft more feasible.

Below are notes I’ve compiled across the last couple of days from conversations with scouts, front office people, and agents. There isn’t intel on every single team or first round player out there in the ether right now. In spots where I’m making an educated guess based on a player’s fit with past team or decision-maker behavior, I try to make it obvious that’s what I’m doing. I let you know when rumors are coming from industry sources, while being vague enough to not burn a source. I also have some thoughts peppered in that aren’t specific to teams’ picks, but instead what the arc of the first round of this draft might look like based on the nature of this year’s class. For more info on the players below, head over to The Board for scouting reports, tool grades, and rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Last season, the college baseball game of the year was the national semifinal matchup between LSU and Wake Forest. It pitted the first two pitchers chosen in that year’s draft — Paul Skenes and Rhett Lowder — against one another, with a berth in the College World Series final on the line. The two star right-handers obliged, combining to strike out 15 while allowing just eight baserunners over 15 scoreless innings. The game remained tied, 0-0, until the very final at-bat, when Tommy White hit a two-run walk-off home run to win it for LSU.

The closest thing we had to that kind of pitching matchup in 2024 came in the losers’ bracket of the Greenville Regional. The top four college starters in this year’s draft — Wake Forest’s Chase Burns, Arkansas’ Hagen Smith, East Carolina’s Trey Yesavage, and Iowa’s Brody Brecht — all played in different conferences. The only time any of those four faced each other was in a win-or-go-home matchup between ECU and Wake on the second day of the NCAA Tournament, and the contours of this game were somewhat different as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardians rate as one of baseball’s bigger surprises. After finishing 76-86 last year — their worst record since 2012 — they’ve rebounded to go 57-33 thus far, and entered Wednesday with the AL’s best record. Their offense is much more potent than it was last year, and despite losing ace Shane Bieber for the season due to Tommy John surgery, they rank second in the league in run prevention at 3.87 runs per game.

While Cleveland’s staff owns the AL’s second-highest strikeout rate (24.2%), a good amount of credit for the team’s run prevention belongs to its defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — the Guardians rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Yankees, who spent much of the first half atop the AL East before a 5-16 slide knocked them into second place, are the only team ahead of them.

On an individual level, even a full season of data isn’t enough to get the clearest picture of a player’s defense, and it’s not at all surprising that a 600-inning sample produces divergent values across the major metrics. After all, they’re based on differing methodologies that produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom, spreads that owe something to what they don’t measure, as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or FRVs, catchers don’t have UZRs, and DRS tends to produce the most extreme ratings. Still, within this aggregation I do think we get enough signal at this point in the season to make it worth checking in; I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. Read the rest of this entry »

The amateur draft is this weekend and I’ve done a top-to-bottom refresh and expansion of my draft prospect rankings, which you can see on The Board. Please go read those blurbs and explore the tool grade section of The Board to get a better idea of my thoughts on the players. The goal of the draft rankings is to evaluate and rank as many of the players who are talented enough to hop onto the main section of the pro prospect lists as possible, so they can be ported over to the pro side of The Board as soon as they’re drafted. Players for whom that is true tend to start to peter out in rounds four and five of the draft as bonus slot amounts dip below $500,000. Over-slot guys are obvious exceptions. By the seventh round, we’re mostly talking about org guys who are drafted to make a team’s bonus pool puzzle fit together, or players who need significant development to truly be considered prospects. That usually means ranking about 125 players, but this year’s class is a little bit down and right now I have 100 guys on there.

Scouts and executives tend to think this is a weaker draft class. The high school hitters in this year’s crop are especially thin, while the depth in the class is in high school pitching, usually a demographic teams don’t love drafting with high picks and bonuses. There are still going to be plenty of good players in this draft, but it’s not the best year to be either a team picking at the very top (because there isn’t a generational talent or two) or a team with a lot of picks (there are fewer exciting places to put all that extra bonus money).

For example, last year’s deeper draft class had just over 60 players who I had as 40 FV or better prospects. This year, that number is just over 40. That’s almost a whole round’s worth of impact players present in one draft but not the other. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember back in 2021 when Gen Z tried to tell everyone to move their side parts to the middle and swap their skinny jeans for a looser variety? While most Millennials responded with outward indigence, offline they begrudgingly tried on high-waisted mom jeans and posted up in the bathroom blowing out their hair in a new direction. But before long they let their hair go back to lying in the manner to which it had become accustomed and eschewed jeans completely in favor of athleisure-wear. Even as many of us considered complying with the directive of our teenaged overlords, it felt absurd that people who haven’t even finished developing their prefrontal cortexes are left in charge of dictating what’s cool. As it turns out, though, that’s exactly why teenagers decide what’s cool. Teenagers are the only members of society with the time, energy, and lack of rationality to care so deeply about something that matters so very little.

Those who stuck to their dated stylings and weathered the petty hail storm of Zoomer mocking were vindicated a couple of months ago, when the celebrity and influencer cohort brought back the side part, declaring it on-trend once more. Around that same time another trend was taking hold among the baseball commentariat: Using strength of schedule to determine which teams had actually earned their W-L records. Mostly, this meant arguing that the Phillies weren’t a top team in the league because they’d played a soft schedule. The discourse eventually spawned multiple articles arguing that while yes, Philadelphia hadn’t exactly been slaying dragons while walking a tightrope, its act wasn’t entirely smoke (generated by the clubhouse fog machine) and mirrors either.

Strength of schedule is not typically a prominent talking point when comparing MLB teams. It might occasionally come up when comparing September schedules in a tight postseason race, but as a phrase uttered in May, it’s typically part of a college baseball discussion, or because you’ve wandered into a BCS-era college football forum. College sports need strength-of-schedule metrics because teams don’t all play one another and the variation in team quality spans the Big Ten’s new geographical footprint. But in the major professional leagues, the schedule is fairly balanced, and even though the White Sox and Rockies exist, dominating the worst teams in MLB presents a tougher task than rolling over the University of Maryland Baltimore County Golden Retrievers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s daughter coining a baseball term, how the on-screen strike-zone plot (slightly) delays the rest of the broadcast, Jose Miranda and the surprising 12-consecutive-hits club, David Robertson’s elite relief career, whether Shohei Ohtani should stop pitching, an attempt to quantify players’ smiles, how this season stacks up in terms of total team days at .500, and the latest player to break a bone punching a wall, followed (1:31:24) by Ben and Jessie Barbour performing the song, “Will the Bird Bones Be Unbroken?”

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to DeMarsico episode
Link to DeMarsico episode wiki
Link to pickoff attempt 1
Link to pickoff attempt 2
Link to Miranda hit
Link to MLB.com on Miranda
Link to Episode 1964 wiki
Link to Dropo SABR bio
Link to Higgins SABR bio
Link to SABR on Higgins streak
Link to streaks wiki
Link to Twins Miranda tweet
Link to FG Plus stats
Link to Robertson ERA+
Link to reliever FIP-
Link to Lindsey on Ohtani
Link to Betteridge’s Law
Link to smiles study
Link to SMILE+ leaderboard
Link to facial-recognition bias
Link to .500 percentage graph
Link to story about Brewer
Link to Brewer photo
Link to list of fractures
Link to Ben and Jessie’s song
Link to song lyrics
Link to original song wiki
Link to Carter Family variant
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

When I was in Phoenix for the Draft Combine, I kept running into Seaver King’s friends.

“That’s my homie,” said JJ Wetherholt, the West Virginia infielder and presumptive top-five pick. He and King played together on Team USA last summer, and Wetherholt said King was the person he’d been looking forward to seeing most at the Combine. “He’s a great kid. He’ll be funny. Good dude.”

Michael Massey, the Wake Forest right-hander and sometime pitch design experimentalist, lived with King last season and gave him a positive reference as a roommate.

“He’s fun. He’s a high-energy guy,” Massey said. “Always wants to keep the vibes up, keep everyone having fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

There are just too many players in baseball these days. I don’t mean that in a “contract the league” way – I think that there should be expansion, in fact. I’ll get back to that, for the record. The problem, instead, is with me. As teams have increasingly realized that the best way to get the most out of players is by giving them frequent rest, more people are playing relevant roles every year. Take the Giants, for example: The 2010 World Series team featured 19 pitchers, from Matt Cain’s 223 1/3 innings all the way down to Waldis Joaquin’s 4 2/3. This year’s Giants have already used 24 pitchers, and we haven’t even hit the All-Star break.

Back in those days, it was easy to know most of your team’s bullpen, as well as the regular starters. It was just fewer names to keep track of, fewer different styles and deliveries and permutations of facial hair. The present-day Giants have an honest-to-goodness pair of identical twins and a closer with his own light show. They have the tallest player in baseball. It’s a wildly eclectic bullpen. And I haven’t even mentioned their best pitcher yet, which is kind of my point. Ryan Walker is having a season for the ages, and he’s doing it in anonymity.

One “problem” with Walker – note: not actually a problem – is that he’s an archetype of pitchers we’ve seen before. He throws a sinker, and he throws a slider. He hides the ball well and throws hard. He misses bats, and always has: Starting in 2019, his first full season, he compiled a 28% strikeout rate in the minors. There’s nothing particularly novel or unprecedented about Walker’s game – it’s just effective.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »