I was hired to be FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 Draft and took my first run at evaluating the entire minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers transpire (or not). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and gauge the gap between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. I spent time this offseason compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment. Below are the results of that exercise and my thoughts on them.

There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I took the approach I did here, discuss its flaws, and posit other potential methods (while also including some thoughts about their limitations). Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets were born in farcical circumstances, and have spent 62 years trying to wipe clean the memory of their ludicrous infancy. Now that they have the richest owner in the league and one of the top executives in baseball manning the tiller, we’re probably close to the end of the Mets’ reign as baseball’s pre-eminent (and I apologize for stealing an idiom from soccer) banter club.

But Billy Eppler gave them a hell of an encore before the curtain drops for good. Last week, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred suspended Eppler until after this year’s World Series. That sanction comes after a four-month investigation into the former Mets GM’s misuse of the injured list as a de facto taxi squad during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that Eppler directed the team to fabricate injuries for “up to a dozen players.” Read the rest of this entry »

I thought that today’s article was going to be an easy one to write. Reading Alex Chamberlain’s post on the pulled fly ball revolution made me imagine the worst pitch a pitcher could throw: a sinker that ended up high and inside, an easy-to-contact fastball in the area of the plate that leads to the most damaging types of opposing batted balls. Then I extrapolated my idea out a little bit. Maybe I could look up the pitchers who throw their sinkers high in the zone most often. We could all laugh about how they’re called “sinkers” — so that’s clearly a bad place to throw them. Maybe we would gawk at a table of a few pitchers who do this bad thing, and then we could move on with life.

Well, I can do at least one thing. Here’s a table of the pitchers who threw elevated sinkers in or around the strike zone most frequently in 2023:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs boast one of the top farms systems in the game, and Dan Kantrovitz is a key reason why. The club’s VP of Scouting for each of the last four drafts, Kantrovitz has overseen the selections of first rounders such as Matt Shaw, Cade Horton, and Jordan Wicks. Thanks in part to shrewd drafting, the Cubs’ prospect pipeline is robust on both the pitcher and position player sides.

A St. Louis native, Kantrovitz attended and played baseball at Brown University, where he recorded 208 hits in his four years as the starting shortstop. After he graduated with a degree in Organizational Behavior and Management in 2001, his hometown Cardinals selected him in the 25th round of the MLB draft. Assigned to the Johnson City Cardinals of the Appalachian League, he went 1-for-3 in his first and only professional game; a shoulder injury from his senior year of college flared up again and ended his playing career.

Kantrovitz joined the Cardinals front office in 2004, and a few years later, he went to Harvard for a two-year master’s program in statistics, hoping to develop the skills to keep pace with the growing analytics movement in baseball. He got a job in the Oakland A’s front office upon graduating from Harvard. St. Louis hired him back to be its amateur scouting director in 2012, before he returned to Oakland three years later and worked for five seasons as the the team’s assistant GM. Wanting to get back into a draft-specific role, he took his current position with the Cubs in late 2019. Baseball has changed over his two decades working in front offices, and his understanding of the game and his approach to scouting has evolved with it.

———

David Laurila: A number of mock drafts are published prior to the draft itself. Do scouting directors pay attention to them?

Dan Kantrovitz: “I think it would be disingenuous for any scouting director, or front office, to say that they don’t pay attention to mock drafts by respected third-party publications — especially as you get closer to the draft. Now, do we rely on our internal data to make draft decisions? Yes, of course. Do we also want to have an idea of what might happen before and after us? Also a yes. Sometimes mock drafts can be a solid indicator of what the rest of the industry might be thinking. If nothing else, they are certainly fun.”

Laurila: Our own mock draft from last year had you taking Nolan Schanuel, a college first baseman whom the Angels took a few picks before you selected middle infielder Matt Shaw 13th overall. Generally speaking, what are your thoughts on drafting first basemen in early rounds? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a difference between baseball and football (as illustrated by the Super Bowl), the lowering of the limit on players per organization, and umpire Jen Pawol’s ascent toward the majors (and history). Then they preview the 2024 Texas Rangers (22:28) with MLB.com’s Kennedi Landry and the 2024 Chicago Cubs (56:31) with The Athletic’s Sahadev Sharma.

Audio intro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ben’s podcast on trailers
Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki
Link to Cooper on roster rules
Link to Pawol article 1
Link to Pawol article 2
Link to Rangers offseason tracker
Link to Rangers depth chart
Link to Kennedi’s MLB.com archive
Link to Cubs offseason tracker
Link to Cubs depth chart
Link to Sahadev on Kanzler
Link to Sahadev’s The Athletic archive
Link to Pham tweet

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I’ll lead with this: I’m not certain the Launch Angle Revolution^TM was ever really a thing — or at least, it wasn’t a thing in the way we thought it was. In 2019, we were faced with an onslaught of home runs that needed an explanation, a genesis. It made sense to turn to launch angles: all else equal, if you hit balls higher, they tend to travel farther. As we’d later learn, juiced balls were much more a culprit than anything else. I wish I could find the sound byte for it – my squishy memory may have manufactured it – but I swear I recall Christian Yelich, perhaps the juiced ball’s most prominent (though, to be clear, not necessarily its biggest) beneficiary, scoffing at the concept of a “launch angle swing.” (Edit: It’s here! Thanks, Mike Petriello!) Although Yelich’s fly ball rate jumped 13.4 percentage points in 2019, he (arguably rightly) denounced the very idea of what everyone assumed had fueled his success.

There is, however, unquestionably another revolution afoot: the Pulled Fly Ball Revolution^TM. Inherently, it’s its own kind of launch angle revolution. But it’s also a spray angle revolution, and a pitch selection revolution, and a swing decision revolution. It is multifaceted and sprawling, and it is much more clearly defined than its predecessor. Here’s the percentage of batted ball events (BBE) that were pulled fly balls (PFBs, for short) by year:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A month after Rowdy Tellez was non-tendered by the Brewers, the first baseman signed with the Pirates to little fanfare. It’s not hard to see why that particular transaction flew under the radar. Back in the good old days of December, the offseason was at its peak. There were more pressing concerns than a player with exactly 0.0 career WAR joining a rebuilding club. Yet two months later, amidst the dullest stretch of the winter (and perhaps a bout of offseason-induced delirium), I have realized we made a dreadful mistake. FanGraphs has cursed Rowdy Tellez, and now it falls on my shoulders to reverse the spell. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t think I’m alone in my fascination with pulled fly balls. In fact, I know I’m not, because Alex Chamberlain wrote about them today too. These days, we’re practically drowning in data: exit velocities, launch angles, chase rates, aggression rates — the list goes on and on. There are so many different ways of thinking about exit velocity that you can read an entire great article about what they all mean. If you want to translate how hard someone hits the ball into how they’re likely to perform, there’s no shortage of instructive articles. But in that deluge of data, horizontal angle has been left out, for reasons both purposeful and accidental, and the unavailable is always interesting.

Earlier this month, I did some idle digging into what pull rate means for production on contact. The takeaway was, to be generous, middling. It seems like pulling your aerial contact results in better overall production on that contact, but the effect isn’t huge. Perhaps the more interesting takeaway was that xwOBA on these batted balls had a bias: the more pull-happy the hitter, the lower their xwOBA was on the balls they hit in the air. That was the case despite greater overall production on those balls.

That’s a weird little artifact, though I didn’t think too much of it because I kind of knew what it would say in advance. Every time I look at a dead pull fly ball hitter, they’re getting home runs out of batted balls that xwOBA hates. But that doesn’t mean the statistic is working incorrectly; it’s doing exactly what it says on the label by bucketing batted balls based on exit velocity and launch angle. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Wicks is one of the most promising young pitchers in the Chicago Cubs organization. Drafted 21st overall in 2021 by the North Side club out of Kansas State University, the 24-year-old southpaw is coming off of a season that saw him win four of five decisions and log a 4.41 ERA over his first seven big league starts. Moreover, his minor-league ledger included a 7-0 record and a 3.55 ERA between Double-A Tennessee and Triple-A Iowa. Assigned a 50 FV by our own Eric Longenhagen, Wicks is projected to slot comfortably into new Chicago manager Craig Counsell’s rotation in the coming campaign.

The big lefty — he’s listed at 6-foot-3, 220-pounds — has a diverse arsenal, but one offering stands out above the rest. His changeup, which he began throwing as a Little Leaguer in Conway, Arkansas, is not only the best in the system, it could prove to be one of the best in the National League. As he explained at the tail end of last season, the pitch is his “bread-and-butter, and it has been for awhile.”

Asked for more history on his go-to, Wicks told me that it was his “premium off-speed” growing up, and that he “didn’t really throw a curveball or a slider when [he] was younger.” His repertoire now includes both, as well as a cutter and both two- and four-seam fastballs. Pitchability is another of his assets, and he gets high marks for his competitiveness, but again, it’s the diving circle that earned him his first-round pedigree and has him poised to contribute to a big-league rotation. Read the rest of this entry »