PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. – When Jake Odorizzi arrived to the Rays’ spring headquarters in February of 2013 following Tampa Bay’s trade of James Shields to Kansas City, he was summoned into a conference room at the Rays spring training facility, which rests in a rural and remote part of southwestern Florida. Present in a conference room were then-general manager Andrew Friedman and pitching coach Jim Hickey among others. Odorizzi remembered the meeting was informal and relaxed, but there was an important message presented, one Odorizzi had never heard in his professional career.

“They said ‘We like what you do. We like your stuff,” Odorizzi recalled to FanGraphs in the Rays’ clubhouse last week.

For years, Odorizzi had heard from coaches and others in the Kansas City and Milwaukee organizations that he needed to make significant changes to his pitching philosophy. Odorizzi felt his fastball played better in the upper reaches of the strike zone, but the Brewers, who selected Odorizzi with the 32nd overall pick in the 2008 draft, and later the Royals — where Odorizzi was traded as part of the package for Zack Greinke — informed Odorizzi he must pitch in the lower part of the zone.

“When I was with Milwaukee early on, and with Kansas City in the lower minor levels, I was never really a lower-in-the-zone type of guy,” Odorizzi said. “When I was in Milwaukee, they kind of told me in a roundabout way ‘Well, if you don’t learn to pitch down in the zone, you’ll never make it to the big leagues.’ This was in 2008, 2009 which was, shoot, nearly 10 years ago. Pitching up in the zone consistently, purposefully, was unheard of. You pitch down in the zone, you get ground balls. I could pitch down in the zone, but I had more conviction when I did not consciously think about it and let [the fastball] do its own thing, let it take off a little bit.

“It was comforting for me to finally have an organization [the Rays] say ‘We like what you’re doing.’”

Odorizzi is an interesting pitcher at an interesting point in time. In recent years, the ground ball, and pitching down in the zone, has become more and more valued as shifts have increased dramatically and proliferated, as teams try and better avoid extra-base hits. The top five ground-ball seasons on record at FanGraphs have all been posted in the past five seasons. But the philosophy has become so common that hitters like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez have begun to adjust and preach a get-the-ball-in-the-air philosophy, which can be an effective counter-punch to the popular two-seam pitching approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about an Ian Desmond quote and a curious Dick Williams managerial motivational tactic, then preview the Mariners’ 2017 season with Meg Rowley of Baseball Prospectus and the Rockies’ 2017 season with Jen Mac Ramos of the Sonoma Stompers.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Earlier this morning, Eric Longenhagen rolled out his list of the top-100 prospects in baseball, with Red Sox-turned-White Sox prospect Yoan Moncada at the top of his rankings. Helpfully, Eric’s rankings include the FV grade for each player, so that we can see that he really does see a difference between Moncada and the rest of the pack, as Moncada was the only prospect in the sport to garner a 70 grade.

As Eric notes in his piece, the grade is really the more important number here, as the ordinal ranking can create some false sense of separation, where players might be 20 or 30 spots apart on the list but offer fairly similar expected future value. The FV tiers do a good job of conveying where the real differences lay, highlighting those instances when Eric actually does see a significant difference between players, versus simply having to put a similar group of prospects in some order regardless of the strength of his feelings about those rankings.

But while the FV scale is helpful in binning players, it doesn’t do much to convey the differences between the tiers themselves. How much more valuable is a 60 than a 55? Or is a team better off with one elite 65 or 70 FV prospect or a multitude of 50-55 types? These are interesting questions, and ones that teams themselves have to answer on a regular basis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is my list of the top-100 prospects in baseball. Each prospect has a brief scouting summary here with links to the full team reports embedded in their names where applicable. Those without links will have them added as I cover the remaining farm systems. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources, as well as from my own observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

Note that prospects below are ranked overall and that they also lie within tiers demarcated by their FV grades. I think there’s plenty of room for argument within the tiers, and part of the reason I like FV is because it can illustrate how an on-paper gap that seems large may not actually be. The gap between prospect No. 3 on this list, Amed Rosario, and prospect No. 33, Delvin Perez, is 30 spots but the difference between their talent/risk/proximity profiles is quite large. The gap between Perez and prospect No. 63, Kyle Tucker, is also 30 numerical places but the gap in talent is relatively small. Below the list is a brief rundown of names of 50 FV prospects who didn’t make the 100. This same comparative principle applies to them.   -Eric Longenhagen

70 FV Prospects

Scouting Summary
The tools are deafening. Moncada is a plus-plus runner with plus-plus arm strength, plus raw power and an advanced idea of the strike zone. He’s going to strike out, and there are some within the industry concerned about how much. That said, I think it’s important to consider that while Moncada was K-ing a lot late last year he was also a 21-year old who had played for just a month and a half above A-ball and, during a large chunk of that time, was learning a new position. The stat-based projection systems, KATOH and otherwise, seem comfortable with it, and so am I. I think he’ll provide rare power and patience while playing a premium position — he’s looked fine at second base in my looks this spring — and, while it might take adjustment at the big-league level, I think he’ll eventually be the best of this crop of minor leaguers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first words out of Casey Kelly’s mouth surprised me. When I asked the former top prospect how he’d describe his career, I expected something along the lines of, “It’s been frustrating.”

He said “It’s been fun.”

That’s a glass-is-half-full attitude if there ever was one. Since being taken in the first round of the 2008 draft by the Red Sox, the 27-year-old right-hander has thrown just 640 professional innings, 62 of which have come at the highest level. They haven’t been pretty innings. Kelly’s big-league ERA is an unattractive 6.39.

His future look especially bright after he was acquired by San Diego in the Anthony Rizzo–Adrian Gonzalez trade. Heading into the 2011 season, Kelly was ranked by Baseball America as the Padres top prospect (Rizzo was right behind him). Displaying a power arsenal, he went on to hurl 142 quality frames as a 21-year-old in Double-A.

Clouds were looming on the horizon. Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan preview the Blue Jays’ 2017 season with Joshua Howsam of BP Toronto and the Athletics’ 2017 season with Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 722
Kate Preusser is the managing editor of Seattle Mariners SB Nation blog Lookout Landing. She’s also (a) FanGraphs’ inaugural writer-in-residence and (b) the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Would you like to nominate someone for a residency? You can do that here.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 7 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

BRADENTON, Fla. – Gerrit Cole was really never himself last season, certainly never his 2015-self — his best self — when he finished fifth in NL Cy Young voting.

The trouble started early when Cole sustained an injury while working out in the offseason, rib inflammation which disrupted and delayed the beginning of spring training for him. From that point, as he tried to play catch up, his season was interrupted three times by trips to the disabled list.

After a healthy 2015 during which he reached 200 innings for the first time in his professional career — a season in which he recorded a 2.60 ERA, 2.66 FIP and 5.4 WAR — Cole landed on the disabled list on June 11 for a strained right triceps. He returned to the DL on August 25 for right elbow inflammation and was placed on the DL again on September 13 with right elbow posterior inflammation after lasting 13 batters in his return from the DL. His season ended with 116 innings of work, 2.5 WAR and a 3.88 ERA. It wasn’t until the newly married Cole was honeymooning in the Caribbean in November — Cole is married to the sister of former UCLA teammate Brandon Crawford — that he said he felt healthy again.

“I did everything I could,” Cole said. “That was the frustrating part. Scratching and clawing to find answers and not getting them. I was just determined [this offseason] to put myself in the best position I could this year. I just started attacking things from Day 1. I was pretty beat up all year, and out of shape toward the end of the year. I figured I’d take every single day we had [this offseason] and try to get better. I started with small stuff initially and built from there.”

I’ve chronicled Cole’s career closely. He was handled carefully as an amateur, not permitted to throw year round like other Southern Californian kids, in part because his father read about the Verducci Effect. While the merits of the Verducci Effect have since been refuted and challenged, the general premise that overworked young arms are at greater risk of injury is generally accepted. As a professional, Cole has explored just about everything that might keep him healthy, from wearable technology that monitors stress levels and energy usage to the ancient Eastern practice of “cupping.”

Read the rest of this entry »