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It’s been a topsy-turvy year in baseball, at least from a team perspective. Shohei Ohtani is still great, and so are Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto, but the teams leading the charge look nothing like last year’s playoff hopefuls. The Rangers, Diamondbacks, and Reds are in first place in their respective divisions. The Orioles are in second place but sport the third-best record in the game.

In a lot of ways, those teams are doing well because they have great players. That’s just kind of how it works, you know? You don’t get good by having a pile of bad players. That makes it harder to suggest clean upgrades. Sure, occasionally you get a situation like Texas’ outfield mishmash or the back end of Cincinnati’s rotation, but for the most part, “how do we get good players to upstart teams?” is a self-solving problem. The teams are good because they have good players, and there’s just no need to complicate it more than that.

A lot of the good hitters and starters now are the same guys who were good half a decade ago, so teams build their farm systems accordingly. Each of these four surprising teams has core position players and starters who will be there a while. Gunnar Henderson and Adley Rutschman, Corbin Carroll and Zac Gallen, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager, the entire Reds infield: they’re pillars of their respective franchises. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is a team-by-team analysis of last night’s draft activity. Remember that you can find more detailed scouting reports and tool grades for the players drafted over on The Board.

Arizona drafted a mix of floor and upside on Day One, adding a relatively stable, Top 100 prospect to their mix in Troy before taking two college dev projects in Grice and Groover. Groover is one of the most exciting players in the draft because his bat speed is ridiculous, though he needs refinement in many areas, especially defense. Lefties with a breaking ball as good as Grice’s tend to pan out, if only as relievers, but Grice could break out if he focuses solely on pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

As the baseball world celebrates the All-Star festivities in Seattle this week, let’s take a look at how every team stacks up with the first half of the season at an end.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Braves had their nine-game win streak snapped on Tuesday but managed to win both of their series last week anyway, including a huge three-game set against the Rays over the weekend. After his slight hiccup at the start of June, Spencer Strider has gotten his outstanding season back on track; he held Tampa Bay scoreless over 6.1 innings on Saturday, striking out 11. Atlanta heads into the All-Star break with the best record in baseball and plenty of momentum for the second half of the season.

Both the Rays and the Rangers have slipped recently. Tampa Bay snapped a seven-game losing streak with a 10-run outburst on Sunday after scoring just eight runs in five games previous. Those struggles have allowed the Orioles to close the gap in the AL East to just two games. Meanwhile, Texas hasn’t won a series since taking two of three from the White Sox back on June 19–21. The team has done some early work to try to improve the roster, trading for Aroldis Chapman on June 30, but that hasn’t significantly impacted the results yet. The Rangers are also heading into the All-Star break just two games up in their division. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes there’s a difference between returning and being back. After tearing his right ACL in July of 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. returned on April 28, 2022. He put up a solid 2.1 WAR over 119 games, a 2.9-win pace. Think of him as Paul McCartney in 1970, releasing the solid but uninspiring McCartney on the heels of a regrettable rupture. This year, Acuña is back. He’s Paul McCartney in 1971, authoring an all-time classic in Ram. Please don’t examine this metaphor any further because it can’t stand up to scrutiny (but please give Ram a listen because it can).

Acuña has put up 4.9 WAR and a 166 wRC+ and racked up outfield assists on throws beautiful enough to make an angel cry (or a Cardinal, or a Padre).

Acuña is slashing .335/.412./.589, and for what it’s worth, his 166 wRC+ might be the result of a bit of bad luck. His .459 xwOBA is 34 points higher than his actual wOBA. It’s also the highest in the league, even higher than You Know Who. Read the rest of this entry »

In a stunning revolt against Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, the answer is almost certainly yes. But now that you’ve clicked, you might as well stick around to find out why I asked the question. All season, the conventional wisdom has been that an LSU Tiger would be the best prospect selected in last night’s amateur draft. Since last season, outfielder Dylan Crews has topped most draft big boards, and a winter of tutelage from outgoing Tigers pitching coach Wes Johnson moved Skenes from a top-10 prospect to the no. 1 overall pick. The pair are the first teammates to be taken first and second overall in MLB draft history.

But over the last week or so of the NCAA tournament, a third LSU player emerged as a potential first-rounder. The last time scouts laid eyes on Ty Floyd, the right-hander struck out 17 Florida Gators in Game 1 of the College World Series final. That’s no mean feat; that same Florida lineup — featuring no. 4 pick Wyatt Langford and potential 2024 top pick Jac Caglianone — hung 24 on LSU the following afternoon. Floyd’s 17 strikeouts equaled a 51-year-old record set by Arizona State’s Eddie Bane, best known now as the scouting director who drafted Mike Trout (along with Randal Grichuk, Garrett Richards, Tyler Skaggs, and Patrick Corbin, in what must be the best two-round run by any team in draft history).

Floyd made himself a lot of money in Omaha, and he and Skenes are now in select company: Pitchers from the same team who went in the first round of the same draft. And if you think the first two paragraphs of this post were a fire hose of useless trivia, well, strap in, because we’re just getting started. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you’d like to learn more about the players mentioned here, you’ll find rankings and scouting reports over on The Board. There is more context for these names on my first mock, which is here. I’ll be chatting live from Lumen Field tonight at 4 PT/7 ET, Woj’ing picks and providing reaction and analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third 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 I 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 »

Grant Anderson had an especially-memorable MLB debut earlier this season. Pitching in Detroit on May 30, the 26-year-old Texas Rangers right-hander entered the game in the fifth inning and promptly fanned Zach McKinstry to strand an inherited runner at second base. He then returned to the mound in the sixth and struck out the side. In the seventh, he induced a line-out followed by a pair of punch-outs. In the eighth, yet another strikeout was followed by a Miguel Cabrera single that ended his evening. All told, the sidearming rookie had faced nine batters and fanned seven of them. He was credited with the win in Texas’s 10-6 victory.

He could have been working in a rubber plant instead. On two occasions — one of them as recently as this spring — Anderson seriously considered giving up baseball. More on that in a moment.

Five years ago, Anderson was at home in Beaumont, Texas following the draft with his father and twin brother Aidan [who now pitches in the Rangers system] when the Seattle Mariners took him in the 21st round with the 628th-overall pick. A half dozen or so calls and texts had come earlier. The Brewers, Mets, and a few other teams had reached out to say, “Hey, what do you think about this number and this round?” That none of them actually pulled the trigger wasn’t a matter of high demands. As Anderson put it, “I was coming from a small place and just wanted to play pro ball, so it didn’t really matter to me what the money was. I guess they all just found a better guy for those spots.”

Seattle and Colorado had shown the most interest prior to draft day, and had the former not drafted him, the latter presumably would have. The Rockies called to say they were planning to take him in the 21st round, only to have the Mariners do so a handful of picks in front of their own. Read the rest of this entry »