The Rangers have made it rain in free agency for two years running. Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Jacob deGrom highlight their haul, but Andrew Heaney, Jon Gray, and Nathan Eovaldi are no slouches either. Texas shopped in bulk in the luxury aisles of free agency, and that shopping vaulted the expectations higher. The team hasn’t won 70 games since 2019 but is broadly projected, whether by playoff odds or betting lines, to end up in the 80s this year and to compete for a playoff berth.

Until late last week, the Rangers were expected to do so while attempting the team-building equivalent of playing with one hand tied behind their back. Baseball teams are required to use nine different batters, but the Rangers were short a few. Their left field plans involved Bubba Thompson, Brad Miller, Ezequiel Duran, Josh H. Smith, non-roster invitees, duct tape, and a ouija board. There’s no polite way to say this: that’s bad. But the Rangers knew it, and they acted to address their shortfall by signing Robbie Grossman to a one-year deal worth at least $2 million, and up to $5 million depending on incentives. Read the rest of this entry »

Prospect Week continues with an update to the International Players section of The Board. Some of it is housekeeping, while some of it is scouting-driven and news-oriented.

Let’s begin with the housekeeping. For those of you who don’t care about this sort of thing and want to skip ahead, I’ve indicated below where the housekeeping ends. As you can see in the dropdown menu on the International Players tab, there has been a nomenclature change when the lists transition from 2019 to 2021. There was essentially no 2020 signing class because the pandemic pushed what was supposed to be the July 2nd 2020 class to January of 2021. It doesn’t appear that the international signing period calendar will ever return to the pre-pandemic July-through-May structure; the current format is either here to stay, or at some point we’ll get an international draft. We had previously referred to a given year’s signing period as its “July 2 Signing Period” because it ran across two calendar years, until the following May. If a prospect signed in April of 2015, for instance, he signed during the “2014 July 2 Signing Period.” Now that the signing period is basically flush with the calendar year, going forward we’ll refer to it as “20XX International Signing Period” on the prospect lists and “20XX International” on The Board. Capsules for players who signed in 2019 or earlier will still say “July 2nd Signing period, 20XX” until the prospects from that era are no longer part of the prospect population. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I dream about a life as a scout, traveling around the world watching baseball players in person for the first time. That’s not reality for me, though. Instead, I’m limited to a dozen or so games a year in person and many more on my television. But every now and then, I get a remnant of that in-person feeling when watching on TV and can recall the performance pitch by pitch. Those are special in their own way. This year, one of those came in a mid-September game when Brayan Bello took on the Yankees in Fenway Park.

For the first time since his call-up in July and after a rough patch to kick off his big league career, Bello was on a nice run of success, with back-to-back starts of five or more innings. And over five innings, he was solid again against his team’s biggest rival, racking up 14 whiffs, striking out six and not yielding a single run. Through a combination of four-seamers, sinkers, changeups, and sliders, he stifled the Yankees’ lineup two times through the order. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s a clear no. 1 biggest college baseball program in the country, I’m not going to offer my opinion on what it is. Not because I don’t have an opinion on the subject, but because sharing it — no matter what answer you give — tends to invite dozens of message board posters to find out where you live and hide spiders in your car.

Regardless of who’s no. 1, LSU — in terms of tradition, program success, resources, developmental track record, and fan support — has to be up there.

In 2022, former Arizona and Nevada head coach Jay Johnson took over for the recently retired Paul Manieri, who’d made five College World Series in his 15 seasons in Baton Rouge, and won the 2009 national championship. Results in Johnson’s first year were in the neighborhood of what Manieri accomplished in his final few seasons: The Tigers went 40-22 (17-13 in SEC play) before falling to Southern Mississippi in a regional final. Whether that’s viewed as a failure, a minor disappointment, or a step in the right direction, one thing is for absolute certain: It’s not where LSU wants to be. Read the rest of this entry »

The St. Louis Cardinals consistently boast a productive prospect pipeline, and Randy Flores is one of the reasons why. The 47-year-old former big leaguer has been the club’s Director of Scouting since August 2015 — Assistant General Manager was added to his title in 2018 — and the drafts he’s overseen have yielded both admirable results and enviable promise. Especially impressive is the fact that the Cardinals haven’t drafted higher than 18th overall under Flores’ watch; the team has uncovered several gems beyond the first round.

Flores discussed St. Louis’ draft and development processes, as well as some of the organization’s current top prospects, in a recent phone conversation.

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David Laurila: You were drafted out of USC by the Cardinals in 1996, and subsequently drafted and signed by the Yankees the following year. How do those experiences inform what you do as a scouting director?

Randy Flores: “When I think back to that — going through the internal pressures of the draft, which I felt — what stands out is that I was able to do it relatively anonymously. With today’s player, it’s completely different. With the growth of amateur coverage, third party, and all the social media platforms… these players already have followings in high school. They are ranked. They are graded against their peers at a level that I don’t know how I would have handled. So to answer your question, going through that experience gives me tremendous empathy for the modern young player who is embarking on this pressure-packed journey in a fish bowl that I couldn’t have imagined.” Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Barfield had a relatively short big league career. Now the farm director for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the 40-year-old son of 1980s outfielder Jesse Barfield played for the San Diego Padres in 2006, and for the Cleveland Indians from 2007-2009. I asked the erstwhile infielder whom he considers the most talented of his former teammates.

“I think I’d have to say Grady Sizemore,” replied Barfield. “He was ridiculously talented. He could do just about everything on the field. Probably the best player overall — the best career — was Mike Piazza, but for pure talent it would be Grady.”

Sizemore debuted with Cleveland and accumulated 27.3 WAR — — only Albert Pujols, Chase Utley, and Alex Rodriguez had more — from 2005-2008 in his age 22-25 seasons. He made three All-Star teams, won two Gold Gloves, and logged a 129 wRC+ with 107 home runs and 115 stolen bases over that four-year-stretch. A string of injuries followed, torpedoing what might have been a brilliant career. When all was said and done, Sizemore had just 29.7 WAR.

Other former teammates who stand out for Barfield were Adrian Gonzalez, Mike Cameron, and Victor Martinez, the last of whom he called the most gifted hitter of the group. Read the rest of this entry »

No sooner had pitchers and catchers begun reporting to Tampa, Florida than the Yankees rotation sustained a double blow. On Monday, Nestor Cortes revealed that he had suffered a hamstring strain that will keep him from participating in the World Baseball Classic and sideline him for at least part of spring training. On Wednesday, the team announced that Frankie Montas will undergo arthroscopic shoulder surgery next week and at best will be limited to a late-season return. While the team has the depth to cover for both losses — indeed, their rotation currently tops our preseason Depth Charts by a full win — the Yankees can’t afford for much more to go wrong with the unit.

The 28-year-old Cortes is coming off a breakout campaign during which he made the AL All-Star team and blew past his previous career high of 93 innings. His 158.1 innings fell just short of qualifying for the ERA title but among AL pitchers with at least 150 innings, his 2.44 ERA ranked ninth, his 3.13 FIP eighth, and his 3.6 WAR tied for 10th. He missed a couple of turns due to a late-season groin strain that recurred in the Yankees’ final game of the season, their ALCS Game 4 loss to the Astros.

Cortes had agreed to pitch for Team USA in next month’s World Baseball Classic, and so like other participants in the tournament, he reported to camp on Monday, three days ahead of the Yankees’ official report date for pitchers and catchers. Upon reporting, he revealed that he had suffered “a low Grade 2” strain of his right hamstring while running sprints on February 6 near his home in Miami. He has been able to continue his throwing program, and manager Aaron Boone and pitching coach Matt Blake both told reporters on Wednesday that they believe Cortes will be ready by Opening Day; he even threw a bullpen on Friday morning. Looking ahead, the Yankees open at home against the Giants on March 30, and thanks to an off day on the 31st, they won’t need a fifth starter until April 5 against the Phillies. Read the rest of this entry »

On October 27, 2008, I lay sprawled on the carpet in front of the television, watching as Cole Hamels twirled yet another postseason masterpiece. My new puppy sat calmly by my side, having finally learned the rally towel was my toy, not his. Hamels pitched six innings that night; he could have gone deeper were it not for a 48-hour rain delay, but his efforts proved to be enough. Two days later, I was jumping with joy into my father’s arms as Hamels clutched the World Series trophy in his.

Fifteen years later, the living room carpet is long gone. The TV remains, although it’s wildly out of date. That new puppy is now officially geriatric, with greying fur and two bad hips. My father would prefer I no longer jump into his arms; he gets enough of a workout carrying our 50-pound dog up and down the stairs.

Forty different players took the field for the Phillies in 2008. Thirty-nine have since retired. Hamels, however, isn’t quite ready to submit to the passage of time. On Thursday afternoon, the veteran left-hander signed a minor league deal with the Padres and will head to Peoria as a non-roster invitee, hoping to make his way back to the big leagues at 39 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball will look significantly different in 2023 due to several new rules, but there’s another change that won’t attract as much attention as a pitch clock or all that steamy base-on-base action. Ten veteran umpires have retired and 10 new ones will be taking their place. I’d like to explore the effect these new umpires might have, but first, let’s look at the state of umpiring right now.

The short version is pretty simple: Since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have improved their accuracy in calling balls and strikes every single year. Accuracy has gone from 81.3% to 92.4%. If an improvement of 11.1% in 15 years doesn’t sound particularly big, consider it this way: incorrect calls have been cut by nearly 60%.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the 2023 NCAA baseball season gets underway, so too does this year’s Prospect Week, which begins with a fresh coat of paint on my 2023 draft prospect rankings. I asked around the industry for thoughts about how many prospects it makes sense to ordinally rank at this time of year, and scouts’ and executives’ answers ranged from as low as 30 to as many as 75, with most answers falling close to 50. Typically, there are enough 40+ FV or better prospects by draft day to fill the first two rounds of the draft. For this update, I worked back through the players who already populated the 2023 rankings on The Board to revise their grades and reports, revisited my 2022 summer and fall in-person scouting notes, and integrated data from last season to identify and then help evaluate college prospects who weren’t already on there. I did that until I stopped finding players who comfortably hovered around the 40+ FV line or above.

Ideally, my draft list will eventually include all of the eligible players who are talented enough to make a pro team’s prospect list. Usually about 150 players end up migrating to the pro side of The Board right after the draft, a good many of whom haven’t even popped up yet. For a handful of them, the draft itself is my means of identification, with post hoc analysis generating their grade and ranking. Players who I already have notes and opinions about but who exist beneath the 40+ FV scope that I have hard ranked right now still make sense to have on The Board, just not yet with an ordinal ranking. The number of players in the 40 FV tier (future fifth starters and middle relievers, low-ceiling bench hitters, and volatile high school pitchers) and below is so substantial that it’s almost impossible to maintain a precise ranking into the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds of the draft (we’re talking about 200 rapidly changing youngsters at that point) since chunks of that would be rendered obsolete as early as this weekend. I have a few of these kinds of players bucketed by demographic below the ordinally ranked guys, as I have on past draft lists. Players will be added to those buckets, and the depth of the ordinal rankings will increase as the spring marches along and these players can be assessed with greater precision. Read the rest of this entry »