There’s no disputing that Spencer Torkelson had a disappointing rookie season. Drafted first overall by the Detroit Tigers in 2020 out of Arizona State University, the 23-year-old first baseman went into last year with sky-high expectations only to finish with a 76 wRC+ and just eight home runs in 404 plate appearances. Moreover, he was demoted to Triple-A in mid-July and proceeded to put up a middling .738 OPS with the Toledo Mud Hens before returning to Motown for the final month of the campaign.

Last February, our lead prospect analyst, Eric Longenhagen, had written that “Torkelson’s bat is his ticket to the big leagues, and it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t think he’ll be a terrifying presence in the box for years to come.” Despite his abysmal debut, the potential for Torkelson to become that terrifying presence remains strong. Rejuvenated after an offseason of reflection, the confident slugger logged an impressive hard-hit rate during spring training — my colleague Davy Andrews wrote about it in late March — and he’s continued to scorch a fair number of balls in April, albeit without much to show for it; of the 12 balls he’s hit with an exit velocity of at least 98.2 mph, seven have gone for outs. Belying his slash line — a hard-luck .235/.250/.353 that seems bound to improve once squared-up balls start falling — his average exit velocity ranks in the 74th percentile, his max exit velocity in the 90th. Last Tuesday, Torkelson torched a 424-foot home run off of a 98.9-mph Ryne Stanek heater when the Tigers played in Houston.

Torkelson talked about his history as a hitter, and the keep-it-simple approach that comes with it, during spring training.

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David Laurila: When did you learn to hit?

Spencer Torkelson: “Gosh. I learned at a pretty young age. I kind of just fell in love with hitting the ball over my backyard fence when I was two. I’d walk around asking everybody to throw to me. I’d say that my uncle and my dad had the biggest influence on my hitting. My dad always preached to use the whole field, and my uncle always preached quick hands, quick hips. I had a lot of repetitions with both of them and those things kind of clicked.” Read the rest of this entry »

No hitter in the majors has gotten off to a hotter start this season than Adam Duvall, who joined the Red Sox this past winter via free agency and is currently carrying a slugging percentage above 1.000. Unfortunately, the 34-year-old center fielder won’t be available to star in Small Sample Theater for awhile because on Sunday while diving for a ball, he fractured his left wrist.

Duvall injured himself attempting to catch a bloop off the bat of the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson in the ninth inning of Sunday’s game. Charging in from center field, he slid and appeared to make the grab, but his glove hand hit the grass awkwardly as he rolled over, and the ball squirted loose. Torkelson was credited with a single, while Duvall came up clutching his wrist, the same one that he sprained last July 23 while playing for the Braves. That time, he jammed his wrist against the wall in pursuit of a Shohei Ohtani fly ball and needed season-ending surgery to repair a torn tendon sheath.

This time, Duvall was diagnosed with a distal radius fracture in his left wrist. Such injuries generally mean a loss of six to eight weeks, but the Red Sox haven’t announced a timeline. Duvall underwent additional testing to determine if he would need surgery to set the fracture or repair tissue damage, but manager Alex Cora told reporters after Monday’s loss to the Rays that he’ll avoid that. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates are off to a surprisingly hot start, winning six of their first 10 games and sitting in second place in the NL Central. But that fair weather cloud has a dark lining, as the team’s young shortstop, Oneil Cruz, landed on the injured list on Monday with a fractured ankle. While Cruz’s injury was (thankfully) well below Jason Kendall’s broken ankle running to first in 1999 on the gruesomeness scale, it was enough to require Sunday night surgery. The early timetable for Cruz indicates that his 2023 season isn’t necessarily finished, but it’ll likely be four months, or sometime in mid-August, until he’s likely to be back in playing form.

Cruz’s injury came on a literal bang-bang play, one which led to some fisticuffs, or at least some minor shoveicuffs. With runners on the corners and no outs in a 1–0 game in the sixth, Ke’Bryan Hayes hit a bouncer off of White Sox starter Michael Kopech. Yoán Moncada at third was shallow enough that trading a run for a double play wasn’t really possible; the play at home was the easier one. What exactly happened is a minor controversy, but the basic facts are that after running on the outside of the foul line, Cruz took an inside line as he approached the plate, appeared to stumble on the dirt, and careened into catcher Seby Zavala knees first.

I don’t get the impression from the play that Cruz intended to take out Zavala; if you were going for the 1970s-style demolition derby smash that looked great on highlight packages and poor in CT scans, you don’t intentionally put on the brakes and then kind of fall into the catcher clumsily. You don’t see a lot of NFL coaches advising their linebackers to tackle with their knees. Zavala was mic’d up and instantly offered a few not-so-minced oaths, but from his point of view, it’s hard to blame him. From his perspective in the heat of the moment, a runner altered his path slightly to make contact, even though he left space for a good slide, and practically groined him with a couple of knees. It wasn’t quite as bad a slide attempt as Adley Rutschman‘s Tekken-style spin kick into Christian Arroyo’s head, but it was up there. Carlos Santana then came out to have words with Zavala, which resulted in the benches emptying. Control of the situation was restored quickly, however, and we had no Royal Rumble-style brawling. I’m not here to judge behavior, though, at least unless you vote Szymborski to be the Grand Inquisitor of Baseball in the 2024 election. Read the rest of this entry »

If the Marlins are going to jump into playoff contention anytime soon, it will be on the back of their young pitchers. Of these, they have assembled many, with varied results. Sandy Alcantara just won the Cy Young. Trevor Rogers looked like a future Cy Young winner for a little bit, though not so much anymore. Max Meyer got hurt but should be back soon enough. Sixto Sánchez got hurt and might not be the back ever. The Marlins even declared a surplus in this area, trading Pablo López (and Zac Gallen, if you want to broaden your time horizons a little) for position players. Braxton Garrett, Edward Cabrera, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But Miami’s most promising young starter at the moment, other than Alcantara, is Jesús Luzardo. He faces the Phillies on Tuesday night having allowed just one earned run in 12 2/3 innings over his first two starts of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

After a decade of hand-wringing and tedious arguments on both sides, MLB restricted defensive shifts this past offseason. Much has already been written about the pros and cons of this decision, and I’m not going to take the time to recapitulate all of those arguments here. One debate in particular really caught my eye, though: Would teams still play an overshift-esque alignment by moving an outfielder to the shallow right field position occupied by shifted second basemen in pre-restriction shifts?

I expected it to be a rare tactic, but still one that came up from time to time. Five-man infields already existed; in fact, I ran the math on when they might make sense in 2019 when the Dodgers tried one. The exact conclusion of that piece isn’t important; the point is that teams sometimes thought a five-man infield was the best defensive alignment when any defense was allowed, so they would surely prefer it with restrictions on other alignments in place. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the Oakland Athletics farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. I tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.

This is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the A’s farm system. We like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in our reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players there allows us to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. However, this approach has led to some situations where outdated analysis (or no analysis at all) was all that existed for players who had already debuted in the majors. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system will allow this time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be an A’s prospect list that includes Gunnar Hoglund, Max Muncy, Daniel Susac and all of the other prospects in the system who appear to be at least another season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

It came as a big blow to the Phillies when Rhys Hoskins, a career 125 wRC+ hitter and the de facto team captain, went down with a season-ending injury. But if there were a silver lining to the circumstances, it was that Darick Hall would get the opportunity to prove himself with a more regular role in the starting lineup. Even Hoskins agreed; the day after he tore his ACL, he told Hall he was genuinely happy for him. The 27-year-old non-prospect forced his way to the majors last summer after hitting 20 home runs in 72 games at Triple-A, then crushed another nine at the big league level, finishing with a .522 slugging percentage and 120 wRC+. This year, he had a shot to show he could keep slugging over a full season. If he could, the Phillies would be much better equipped to handle the loss of Hoskins.

Unfortunately, Hall’s big chance was short-lived. On Wednesday afternoon, the winds began to change and the clouds turned dark. The silver lining became harder to see amid the storm. While trying to stretch a single into a double, Hall landed awkwardly at second base, jamming his right thumb into the side of the bag. He stayed in the game for another inning but eventually came out when he realized something was amiss. A righty-throwing first baseman doesn’t use his right thumb in the field all that often, but five out of five doctors recommend hitting the showers when you tear a ligament.

Indeed, a torn ligament was the official diagnosis, and it will require surgery to fix. The Phillies have yet to offer an official timeline for Hall’s return, but it could be several months before he steps back on the field. Mike Trout needed surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb in 2017 and missed about six weeks. Kevin Kiermaier had a similar procedure the following year and missed nine. Travis d’Arnaud lost more than three months after such a surgery in 2021. Clearly, recovery time depends on the individual player and the extent of the injury; we should hear more about Hall in the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday night’s game at Tropicana Field featured a rare sight: the Rays trailing a team by a 1–0 margin. It was a blink-and-you-missed it moment, with a run in the top of the second inning putting Tampa Bay behind for the first time since Tuesday night, and just the second time all season. But it didn’t last long: on the first pitch of the second inning, Harold Ramirez hit a Ken Waldichuk offering for a solo homer into the right field corner, kicking off a six-run inning that also featured a grand slam by Isaac Paredes. The Rays never looked back, beating the A’s, 9–5, on Friday and then 11–0 on both Saturday and Sunday to run their record to 9–0.

It’s an understatement to say that the Rays are off to the best start in franchise history (their previous record for season-opening wins was three) or the best of any team this year. By consecutive victories to open a season, they’re off to the best start in 20 years, and by run differential, they’re doing some things not seen in the majors since the late 19th century — and some never seen before. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a tough start to the season for the Mets’ rotation. Their two-headed ace monster isn’t looking so fearsome, as Justin Verlander went on the IL before throwing a regular-season pitch — joining fellow free-agent signee Jose Quintana — and Max Scherzer has been ineffective through two starts. To make matters worse, Carlos Carrasco dealt with erratic velocity in the first of the team’s back-to-back blowout losses at the hands of the Brewers and yielded a six-spot against the light-hitting Marlins. But one major bright spot has shone.

Kodai Senga, the former three-time NPB All-Star, shut down the Marlins in his Mets debut. With a trademark offering he calls the “ghost fork” and an emblazoned glove to match, he seems poised to become a fan favorite.

Kodai Senga's ghost fork glove ? pic.twitter.com/0Xr9zaL8l7

— David Adler (@_dadler) April 2, 2023

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