Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the BBWAA’s new sports gambling regulations, then (11:22) discuss the stories they’re most interested in following for the rest of the MLB season (plus, the implications of a bearded Aaron Judge).
All-Star Week is the traditional midpoint of the baseball season — though not the mathematical one – and with the MLB Draft adding a bunch of new prospects to the minors, it’s a good time to look back at the ZiPS prospect list from this past winter. Some prospects have excelled in the majors and some, well, not so much, but that’s why we call them prospects and not certainties. Interpreting minor league statistics properly has always been a challenge, but it’s more so these days with an unusual divergence in offensive levels between the majors and high minors, especially the Triple-A leagues. An .850 OPS that may have been impressive in the International League a few years ago isn’t that mouth-watering these days, while an ERA around four is unusually promising. ZiPS, naturally, has to translate minor league performance as part of predicting how players will fare in the majors, and now that we have public Statcast data for the minors, there’s even more to dig into in 2024.
For each player in last winter’s ZiPS Top 100, I’m listing quick lines for their translated minor league performance (lower-case m), any major league performance, and lastly, a combination of the two to get one 2024 line (noted with a c).
As I’ve said before, Jackson Holliday might actually be underrated at this point. I got a lot of complaints about the “bearish” .255/.341/.381 projection for him coming into the season, but ZiPS (and I) shared the belief that people were coming too quickly on him. He’s still extremely likely to be a fantastic player, but considering he’s a 20-year-old who blasted through four levels of the minors, it’s not the weirdest thing ever that he’d see a consolidation season. That .336/.332 OBP/SLG isn’t really that far behind his projection, especially considering ZiPS expected the major league offensive environment to be better than it has been this season.
Coby Mayo has had the better season but still wouldn’t come close to passing Holliday if I rerolled the full top prospects right now. James Wood actually has surpassed Holliday, though that will only last until he exceeds the rookie maximum and sheds his prospect status; he was legitimately excellent in the minors this year. The sheen has come off both Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter a little bit, while Jackson Chourio and Masyn Winn have performed about as advertised. As movers go, Adael Amador and Pete Crow-Armstrong look like the two who will take the biggest hit of this group before next year’s rankings (if PCA hasn’t graduated). There hasn’t been as much ink about Emmanuel Rodriguez as I would have expected this year, even before he injured his thumb last month. The Texas League, unlike the Triple-A leagues, is a pretty low offensive environment, with a league OPS of just .705, so his actual 1.100 OPS is pretty impressive.
Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shota Imanaga have both performed as well as ZiPS expected. While that’s hardly going out on a limb for Yamamoto, whom everyone liked, ZiPS was in on Imanaga very early. Paul Skenes, of course, has been fabulous, even more so than his top-notch translations from April and May. I’d only describe two of the pitchers on this list as unmitigated disappointments so far in 2024, at least from a projections standpoint: Both Ricky Tiedemann and Dylan Lesko will take pretty big hits in the next rankings. Andrew Painter will slide quite a bit as well, but it would be pretty churlish to call a pitcher a disappointment for being injured.
Among this tranche of prospects, Brooks Lee is having arguably the most impressive 2024, and he’s continued to hit since his call-up a couple of weeks ago. Between Lee and the Twins’ taking Kaelen Culpepper with their first-round pick on Sunday, Edouard Julien might get lost in the shuffle quickly in Minnesota; if I were a GM of a team in need of a second baseman, I’d give the Twins call to see if he can rule again on my club. Anyway, I actually expected ZiPS to come around quicker on Dylan Crews, but he’s not really torching minor league pitching as I thought he would. Davis Schneider has long been a ZiPS favorite, but he’s cooled off since a hot run right after he earned more playing time through the process of elimination in Toronto’s struggling lineup.
Jett Williams inevitably will drop considerably after a wrist injury ruined his 2024 season, and Kevin Alcantára was one of the big ZiPS droppers in terms of future WAR. While Samuel Basallo is not matching his breakout 2023 season, he’s still a 19-year-old catcher, so he won’t sag in the rankings too far.
Looking at this group’s long-term projections, it’s almost shocking how little movement there’s been in the long-term projections. Of these 21 pitchers, only three have had their five-year projected WAR move by more than two WAR. The first is Drew Thorpe, who was solid for Birmingham, and his poor K/BB ratios in the majors so far probably aren’t representative of his abilities. The other is a much less heralded prospect, Thomas Harrington of the Pirates, a rather Doug Fister-y prospect (is that a legal adjective), who relies on control and changeups. The high minors can be cruel for this type of pitcher, but he’s survived at least one of the jumps, to Double-A, which improves his long-term outlook. On the flip side, Mick Abel’s command has continued to deteriorate, with both a seven-walk and a six-walk outing in the last month. It would be a shock if he didn’t fall completely off the ZiPS Top 100 for 2025.
It hasn’t shown yet in the majors, but Kyle Manzardo’s minor league performance this year before his call-up wiped out the real “meh” feeling that ZiPS had about his 2023. Post-suspension Noelvi Marte has been pretty lousy, though we have enough data from players after drug suspensions to dismiss any histrionics that he’s struggled because of the lack of performance enhancement. Last year was largely the season that ZiPS came around on Colson Montgomery after being later than practically everyone/everything else, and the result has been a little how I feel after eating a hot dog from a gas station. Joey Ortiz is the big winner in this group, contending for the NL Rookie of the Year award, and Kyle Teel ought to see a bump in next year’s prospect rankings as well. Like Basallo, Ethan Salas’ bat has backslid a bit, but it’s not worth obsessing over how a teenage catching prospect is hitting. Andy Pages hasn’t matched his minor league start this year, but he’s been at least respectable.
Heston Kjerstad just missed the overall ZiPS gainers list, yet given Baltimore’s crowded offense, he’s still had trouble getting a full serving of plate appearances in the majors. If the O’s land Tarik Skubal or Garrett Crochet, Kjerstad has to be one of the names likely to be included, especially for the Tigers considering they are much more motivated to add major league-ready talent than the hopeless Sox. ZiPS was as big fan of Michael Busch, one of those low-ceiling, high-floor hitters without any real positional value, and he’s performed about as well for the Cubs as could have reasonably been expected.
ZiPS was hoping for more power from Matt Shaw, and he’ll probably drop from the top 100 unless his trajectory changes again. But he won’t drop as far as Luisangel Acuña, who has only a 73 wRC+ in Triple-A, though the Mets don’t actually seem disappointed with his performance. Even as offense is up across Triple-A, Angel Martínez was having a dynamite season before he was called up; you shouldn’t dismiss a 147 wRC+ at Triple-A without a pretty compelling reason. He’s also continued to hit in the majors, and I now feel kinda guilty that I didn’t give ZiPS some new RAM to reward it for being so high on him coming into the season.
Have you ever had a friend enthusiastically recommend that you watch a TV show and then say, “It takes a few episodes to get going, and the timeline gets weird at the end, and one or two of the main characters can be kind of annoying, but other than that it’s SO GOOD.” And initially you might be put off, thinking that a truly good show wouldn’t require that many qualifiers. Sometimes you’re right about that, but sometimes it turns out the show is Parks and Recreation and even though the first season is about as appealing as living in a pit, the rest of the show is an absolute treat.
Sometimes small components of a larger body of work do a poor job of representing the work as a whole. The oddities that occur in small samples are likely not a new concept to FanGraphs readers, nor will it shock anyone when I note that what constitutes a small sample depends on what exactly we want to measure. Recently, the fine folks at MLB Advanced Media gifted us with a handful of new metrics that make use of Statcast’s bat tracking technology. Every time we dig into a new metric, we must consider the appropriate serving size to satiate our hunger for knowledge, lest we find ourselves hangrily generating takes that we later regret.
For this article, we’ll attempt to determine appropriate sample thresholds for measuring a hitter’s average bat speed; so that players without bats don’t feel left out, we’ll do the same for sword rate from the pitcher’s perspective. For many metrics, the sample size is measured in pitches or plate appearences, but since both bat speed and sword rate are tied specifically to bat movement, their samples will be composed of swings. To determine reasonable sample sizes, I used the split-half correlation method. The idea is to randomly select two samples of size X from a player’s collection of swings, calculate the player’s average bat speed or sword rate for both samples, lather/rinse/repeat for a bunch of players, then take the full set of two-sample pairs for all players and see how well they correlate. We complete the experiment by repeating the process for progressively larger sample sizes. And just to be super thorough, we’ll re-run the experiment several times and average the correlation values. Read the rest of this entry »
At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).
This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) this week. This is a strange week for the column. The All-Star break cut into the number of games available to watch; mathematically speaking, fewer games means fewer chances for weird things to happen. I took a weekend trip and didn’t watch any MLB games on Friday or Saturday. I’m also hard at work on the upcoming trade value series, which comes out between the All-Star game and the deadline every year – check back Monday for that annual exercise’s kickoff. In any case, that means this is a hodgepodge list: some stuff from this week, sure, but also plays and series that got left out last week, and some low-level baseball to boot. Thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format idea. And two quick programming notes: I won’t be doing my regular Monday chat or Five Things next week; instead, I’ll be doing a jumbo-sized chat Friday morning.
1. The New Derby Format
The modern swing-happy Home Run Derby has been a great success, at least as far as I’m concerned. It’s more fun to see sluggers launch as many home runs as they possibly can than it is to see them agonize over every single swing. The format wasn’t perfect, though. I’m not trying to be a grump about it – is it even possible to be a grump about the Home Run Derby? – but there was one downside to the timed-round format: not enough drama. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
It’s amusing that we consider this morning the start of the second half of the Major League Baseball season, considering 1,449 games have been played, with only 981 left on the schedule. Yet, of course, we know why that’s the case: The All-Star break offers players and coaches a little breather and provides an easy dividing point in the action. Besides, “first uninterrupted segment of the season” is quite the mouthful.
So, anyway, now that the lopsided first half is over, I figured this would be a good time to take a high-level view of where things stand as we begin the second section of the season. Let’s run things down division by division, first covering the National League from East to West before doing the same for the American League. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the highlights of the All-Star Game, a hypothetical Evan Longoria unretirement scenario, the newly announced 2025 regular-season schedule (featuring Tokyo contests and a “Rivalry Weekend”), a baseball movie-mention conspiracy theory, players possessed by Gameday 3D, the timing of Martín Maldonado’s DFA, and the potential effect of moving the foul lines. Then (36:54) they bring on FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen to break down the standout trends, teams, and players of the amateur draft, the demographics of amateur baseball, trading draft picks, and more.
The 2024 MLB Draft has concluded, and it’s time to make definitive judgments about which teams did the best and worst before many of the players have even signed their deals. Just kidding — while I do have a few team-specific thoughts below, this piece is more about what unfolded across the draft as a whole. I texted folks in the industry (scouts, executives, and agents) to see what they thought of the overall results, and if they noticed a continuation of broad industry trends or observed behavior specific to this year’s proceedings. I’ve incorporated some of their thoughts below. Read the rest of this entry »
The Toronto Blue Jays’ Matt Hague is earning a reputation as one of the best young hitting coaches in the game. Promoted to the big league staff this year after a pair of seasons spent working at Double-A, followed by a year in Triple-A, the 38-year-old former first baseman is one of the team’s two assistant hitting coaches. (Hunter Mense, who was featured in our Talks Hitting series in July 2022, is the other, while Guillermo Martinez is the lead hitting coach and Don Mattingly serves as the team’s offensive coordinator.)
Hague’s playing career included several strong seasons in the minors, but only a smattering of opportunities in the majors. The Bellevue, Washington native logged just 91 big league plate appearances, 74 with the Pittsburgh Pirates and 17 with the Blue Jays. And while what he experienced over 11 professional campaigns influences the approach he brings to his current role, what he’s learned since is every bit as important. Like most coaches who excel at their jobs, Hague is not only an effective communicator, he embraces modern training methods.
Hague sat down to talk hitting when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park in late June.
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David Laurila: You last played professionally in 2018. What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
Matt Hague: “Oh, man. That’s a really good question. I think the how. As a coach you’re kind of forced to unfold things that you thought as a player, but didn’t necessarily go really deep into, or didn’t have the chance to go as deep into. The importance of certain things shift on what you want to emphasize. That’s because you’re looking out for a whole group, even though it’s an individual plan, or an individual mover — a certain trait that an individual person needs to develop and continue to get better at.
“There are a lot of different pathways on how to bring out certain stuff, and the more you evolve as a coach, your perspective shifts. You try to find understandings on the mentality side, the game-planning side, the technical part of it. So yeah, I think it’s that you’re just forced to find out more. You’re forced to have a broader perspective than you had as a player.” Read the rest of this entry »
Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.
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