Watching the Mets and the Nationals Sunday night on ESPN, there was a lot of talk about momentum. Momentum that the Mets seem to have, which has allowed them to catch and overtake their heavily-favored rival. It’s an easy thing to say, and an easy thing to believe, but then, right before the Mets caught fire, you could argue they bottomed out. They lost to the Padres, they had the whole Carlos Gomez fiasco, and then they lost to the Padres much much worse. The Mets right now are at a local maximum. Immediately preceding this, they had crashed to a low point.

There are some parallels between the Mets as a whole and their own Lucas Duda. Overall this season, Duda’s been pretty good. Over the last week and a half or so, Duda’s been the very hottest hitter in baseball. But from the start of June through July 24, Duda slugged .275. He then ripped off a stretch of nine homers in eight games. The timelines aren’t the same, but, Duda, like the Mets, bottomed out, and then reversed course in an instant. Duda flipped his own momentum, and in so doing, he wound up bashing an anomalous dinger.

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With Rick Porcello headed to the disabled list following a triceps injury, the Red Sox were in need of a starting pitcher for tonight’s start against the Yankees. Rather than turning to a Triple-A scrub to take Porcello’s spot in the rotation, the Sox opted to call up top prospect Henry Owens. Owens will take the mound in Yankee stadium tonight for his big league debut.

Owens, 22, has pitched exclusively at Triple-A Pawtucket this year, where he’s put up a 3.16 ERA and 3.68 FIP over 122 innings of work. The 6-foot-6 lefty has struck out 21% of the batters he’s faced, and has walked 11%. Other than Owens’ height, none of the figures cited above sound particularly impressive. Owens’ strikeout rate is hardly better than the International League average of 18.6%, and his walk rate is significantly worse than average. If you didn’t know any better, you might look at Owens’ 2015 stat line and conclude that he’s a fringe prospect.

Owens’ 2015 numbers may not be much to look at, but he performed markedly better in his first three seasons as a pro. In 2012, the year after the Red Sox took him 36th overall, Owens struck out 29% of opponent batters faced in Low-A. The next year, he whiffed 30% between High-A and Double-A in 2013. However, while the strikeouts were certainly encouraging, his 11% walk rate inflated his FIP to 3.61 over that span. Read the rest of this entry »

Twenty one games into the 2015 season, the Houston Astros were 14-7. It was a delightful story because at the time even the Astros seemed to think they were a year or two away from real contention, and there they were seven games above .500 before the end of the first month of the season. At the time, I noted that their early season success put them in a situation where they were legitimately within a few moves of the postseason. After those strong opening weeks, their full season projection was around 83 wins, and getting to 90 was now doable with a few aggressive alterations to their roster.

As part of the exercise, I forbade myself from forecasting any breakouts. It would have been boring if I had just predicted MVP seasons from George Springer and Colby Rasmus in order to pad the win total. Instead, I opted for various call ups and trades that they could reasonably make in order to become real contenders. This included calling up Carlos Correa, trading for Andre Ethier, Gerardo Parra, Cole Hamels, Matt Garza, and Aroldis Chapman (or similar players).

A lot of people said it was an unrealistic move for the team, and fans who read the article said they preferred to ride out the good luck with an eye on the future which made total sense given the state of things in April. As I’m sure you know, however, the Astros kept playing well. So well, that over the last two weeks they traded for Scott Kazmir, Mike Fiers, and Carlos Gomez, and there were some rumors that they were after one of the un-traded relief aces until the deadline, as well.

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Three years ago, a struggling Red Sox team dumped a big part of their roster — and their payroll — on the Los Angeles Dodgers, shipping Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to Los Angeles in exchange for a few prospects and a lot of financial relief. The deal freed up the team to reallocate a bunch of that money to free agents a few months later, and after hitting on signings like Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew, and Koji Uehara, the team celebrated a World Series title in 2013.

Things have fallen apart again since, however, and last winter’s free agent spending spree looks like a total disaster at this point. Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval have combined for -1.8 WAR while pulling in $40 million between them, and there’s no way the team can go into 2016 with this same defensive alignment. Ramirez is clearly not an outfielder, and Sandoval has been a bit of disaster at third base this year as well, leading to speculation that one of the two may move to first base next year. And that probably is the path of least resistance, but as rumors percolated of Red Sox-Padres trade discussion before last week’s deadline, I started wondering if there wasn’t an August deal to be made that might actually make sense for both sides.

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The hands seem so important when it comes to hitters, it’s fair to maybe be fascinated with them. Where are they before the swing? How do they get to the ball? How important is the top hand with respect to the bottom hand? It’s easy to spot them, it’s easy to track them, it’s easy to talk about them.

But so much of what you do with your body determines what is happening with your hands. And so, if you talk to Josh Donaldson about hitting, he won’t have a ton to say about his hands. But his shoulders? His torso? He’ll have plenty to say about those things.

And so, even if I asked Donaldson about his hands, it’s what followed that was maybe more interesting.

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There’s no questioning that the Colorado Rockies’ rotation has been awful this season. In fact, by way of FIP-, the 2015 Rockies have the third worst rotation since 1915. As of this writing, not a single Rockies pitcher with more than 10 starts has a FIP that’s even above-average this year — which leaves fans with little to look forward to. That’s about to change, though, as the Rockies have summoned 23-year-old top prospect Jon Gray from Triple-A Albuquerque to start tonight’s game against the Mariners.

The Rockies drafted Gray third overall in the 2013 amateur draft out of the University of Oklahoma, and he immediately began to perform in the minor leagues. He closed out his draft year by pitching to a 1.93 ERA and 1.88 FIP in nine starts between Rookie Ball and High-A. Gray appeared to be on the fast track to the majors after such an exciting debut, but his performance tailed off substantially in Double-A last year. After striking out 26% and 42% of batters faced in Rookie Ball and High-A, respectively, he whiffed just 22% at the Double-A level. Along with a 8% walk rate, this resulted in a middling 3.91 ERA. KATOH forecasted Gray for just 2.3 WAR through his age-28 season. Read the rest of this entry »

This past Saturday, I was collecting some first-hand accounts on a few players at the NBC World Series in Wichita, Kansas. The NBC World Series brings in some of the top teams from various college summer leagues for a double elimination tournament. On Friday, I was up until 2 a.m. watching the final Friday game and then at the stadium for the 8 a.m. game.

During the day’s third game (Liberal Bee Jays vs San Diego Force), a play was just finishing, when I heard the sound that resonated throughout the stadium. The on-deck batter was taking a warm-up swing and hit the team’s bat boy in the head. While I didn’t see the actual contact the Bee Jays’ player made with their bat boy’s head, I saw the last few steps the boy made in his short life. He stumbled twice and then fell to the ground. Then chaos ensued for a few minutes. The player who just hit the boy was holding the lifeless body in his arms. The boy’s mother was screaming as she jumped on the field. The home plate umpire immediately began to administer first aid. During this whole time, I never saw the little guy move.

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The trading deadline has come and gone, and while it wasn’t quite as insane as last year’s, significant major leaguers and prospects of varying status changed uniforms in reasonably large numbers. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve taken a look at each club’s respective minor league talent arsenals, from which they might be able to obtain established talent. Now, let’s take a look backward, and see which clubs traded some future for the present, and vice versa. A handful of other clubs, on the other hand, offer brightness or bleakness all around.

As we have the last couple of weeks, we’ll rank the 30 minor-league systems based upon my midseason position-player and starting-pitcher rankings. If you aren’t familiar with my minor-league lists, here is a brief refresher. They aren’t pure top-prospect lists; they basically serve as follow lists, after which traditional scouting methods are used to tweak the order. Qualification for my lists are based upon a combination of performance and age relative to league/level. The younger a prospect is at each level, the less production is required to get him onto the list. At level-specific “optimal ages” (22 at AAA, 21 at AA, 20 at High-A, 19 at Low-A), a player qualifies regardless of performance. At level-specific, much older ages (26 at AAA, 25 at AA, 24 at High-A, 23 at Low-A), you can’t qualify for the list no matter how loud your performance. Only full-season league prospects are considered.

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