The Learning and Developing a Pitch series is back for another season, and we’re once again hearing from pitchers on a notable weapon in their arsenal. Today’s installment features St. Louis Cardinals rookie left-hander Zack Thompson on his big-bending curveball.

Drafted 19th overall in 2019 out of the University of Kentucky, the 24-year-old Thompson made his major league debut on June 3, and he’s gone on to log a 3.31 ERA and a 4.05 FIP over 16-and-a-third innings. Working primarily out of the bullpen, he’s allowed 13 hits, issued five free passes, and fanned 13 batters. No. 9 on our newly-released St. Louis Cardinals Top Prospect list, Thompson has thrown his arguably-best-in-the-system curveball 32.8% of the time.

———

Zack Thompson: “Growing up, my dad was always protective of me throwing breaking balls, so I didn’t start throwing one until I was a junior in high school. That’s when we began messing around with a curveball. We started out duct-taping two tennis balls together — my high school pitching coach, Jason Dudley, came up with the idea — and I just kind of flipped those to get the shape. It’s actually a lot easier to get feedback off of that. That’s kind of how it got started for me, and I ran with it from there.

“As I got older, I obviously started refining it more. The shape has essentially stayed the same, although I did have to cut down a little bit on the movement. That happened in college. Honestly, it was just too big. It was also too slow. Cutting down on the movement, my command got better, and the pitch also got a little bit sharper. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

Episode 981

This week, we talk to a reporter covering the St. Louis Cardinals before meeting the author of a book about the unique Cleveland team that won it all in 1948.

• In the first half, David Laurila welcomes Katie Woo, beat writer covering the Cardinals for The Athletic. The pair begin by discussing Woo’s favorite baseball memories generally as well as a few that have come from covering the St. Louis club so far, including the team’s 17-game win streak in 2021 and Miles Mikolas’ recent near-no-hitter. Woo also describes the experience of not only witnessing history, but sharing it with others. We also get insight into some players’ behavior during what has been a fun season, including Mikolas’ brunch opinions, Adam Wainwright’s “day-after-pitching old man walks,” and Albert Pujols leaning into a mentorship role. [3:27]
• After that, Jay Jaffe welcomes Luke Epplin, author of Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball. Jay recently read the book, which is about Larry Doby, Bill Veeck, Bob Feller, and Satchel Paige, and their World Series championship together. Veeck was known for his front office antics, Feller was a national sensation, and Paige was a walking legend, but all eyes were on Doby as he broke the American League color barrier in 1947. Epplin shares how Doby differed from the other stars on the team, how varied his relationships with some teammates were, and how his experience differed from that of Jackie Robinson. [28:53]

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 65 minute play time.)

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The Yankees and Mets have the best records in their respective leagues, but both teams took their lumps in the past week when the Astros came to town. Houston even threw a combined no-hitter at Yankee Stadium last Saturday while splitting a four-game series, halting the Yankees’ streak of seven straight series wins dating back to the end of May, then held the Mets to a grand total of one run in their two-game sweep. Yet the Astros didn’t escape from New York unscathed, placing Michael Brantley on the injured list due to right shoulder discomfort and shuddering as left fielder Yordan Alvarez and shortstop Jeremy Peña left Wednesday’s game after colliding in the outfield.

Alvarez and Brantley have split the left field and designated hitter duties pretty evenly this season; with the latter sidelined, the former got the call on Wednesday afternoon. In the eighth inning, Peña and Alvarez converged towards a shallow fly ball off the bat of Dominic Smith, with the shortstop making an over-the-shoulder grab but running into the much larger left fielder (Alvarez’s listed five-inch, 23-pound advantage seems conservative). Peña’s left arm hit Alvarez’s face, while Alvarez’s right arm hit Peña’s face. Both players got tangled up, went down hard, and stayed down for a few minutes while the Astros’ training staff tended to them.

Both players remained responsive and wanted to stay in the game but were pulled, with Alvarez, who missed all but two games in the 2020 season due to a torn patellar tendon, carted off the field; Peña walked off under his own power. Both players were evaluated for concussions, with Peña known to have additionally suffered a laceration in his mouth. Chas McCormick took over in left field for the remainder of the game while Mauricio Dubón assumed shortstop duties. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2022 KBO season halfway through, it seemed like a good opportunity to summarize the ins-and-outs of baseball over in Korea so far. Since I’m doing this in order of the standings, part one (in case you missed it) covered the SSG Landers, Kiwoom Heroes, LG Twins, KIA Tigers, and KT Wiz. Part two will focus on the remaining five teams: the Samsung Lions, Doosan Bears, Lotte Giants, NC Dinos, and Hanwha Eagles. Without further ado, here’s the latest on the Korea Baseball Organization.

Standings

Team Notes

Samsung Lions

What do you do when you lose Hae-min Park, your All-Star centerfielder, to free agency? Casually replace him with a 20-year-old prospect, that’s what. A second-round pick in 2021, Hyeon Joon Kim is filling in some big shoes with a .307/.401/.394 slashline so far. That doesn’t mean he’s an instant star, though. Contact-orientated hitters do fare better in Korea than they do in the States, but Kim’s utter lack of slug forewarns BABIP complications, and he’s not a particularly amazing fielder. Still, it’s great that the Lions have found a suitable replacement so quickly.

As for the Lions’ foreign players, Jose Pirela’s 167 wRC+ leads the team, dispelling the shroud of doubt created by his meager second half in 2021. The power hasn’t gone anywhere, and he’s even trimmed his already excellent strikeout rate. Since arriving in Korea in 2020, David Buchanan has gone from “solid No. 2/3 starter” to “bonafide ace.” And his latest partner, Albert Suárez, is looking like a successful acquisition (2.31 ERA/2.96 FIP). Most KBO teams have qualms with at least one of their foreign recruits; the Lions certainly do not.

But there’s a reason why they are in sixth place. Despite a career-best season in 2021, veteran lefty Jung-hyun Baek has crashed and burned this year and is practically unusable. Chae-heung Choi, a rotation stalwart, has left to complete his mandatory military service. On the position player side, rightfielder Ja-wook Koo looks nothing like his normal, hard-hitting self, and his trips to the injured list are likely to blame. What’s worse, the entire infield save for first baseman Ji-hwan Oh is on track for less than 1 WAR.

Looking back, it’s surprising that the Lions climbed all the way to second place last season. This feels more like a knock-back from fourth place to sixth. New contributors are providing the Lions a step forward, but the departures of old ones are dragging them two steps back. They aren’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination; it’s just that the losses have piled up. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Greetings all! I’ve recovered from the trendy malady of the 2020s more or less so we’re back on regular schedule.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Coke

12:01

Dan Szymborski: (the soda, not the drug)

12:03

Dan Szymborski: My appetite has been very poor over the last week. On the plus side, I’ve dropped 11 pounds

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot about two Yankees hitters recently. That’s less common than you’d think for me; out on the west coast, the TV isn’t overrun with Yankees highlights, and there are just so many baseball teams, so many interesting players to ponder. But I heard an announcer discussing one of my favorite baseball tropes, and it brought Giancarlo Stanton and Anthony Rizzo to mind.

“Hard in, soft away” is a pitching adage, and one that makes plenty of sense. There’s a mechanical aspect to it, for one: to hit an inside pitch on the barrel, a hitter has to rotate more, which naturally takes more time. On the other hand, a slow pitch has the best odds of eluding a batter’s swing, or at least the most dangerous part of the bat, if the hitter swings too quickly; in a regular swing, the barrel gets to the outside part of the plate first (on a plane to hit the ball the other way) before rotating around to the inside of the plate (on a plane to pull).

I’m not a hitting mechanics expert, and that doesn’t describe the whole story. The batter could pull his hands in to try to get the bat head through the zone more quickly, or employ different swings for differently located (or angled) pitches, or any number of counters. But the default assumption – batters want to get the bat around on inside pitches, so pitchers should give them less time to do that, and vice versa – is at least a decent approximation of the physical reality in play. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley are joined by Jake Mintz of Céspedes Family BBQ to talk about Twins pitching coach Wes Johnson leaving the team midseason to join LSU, why MLB teams are hiring coaches from college and why colleges are hiring them back, whether MLB teams should pay coaches more, the state of player development in college, Jake’s experience at the College World Series, his short summary of what non-college baseball fans should know about the just-completed college season, the arrival of Royals rookie Vinnie Pasquantino, the Astros’ extremely low-offense catchers, the importance of pitch-tipping, Rafael Devers heating up and sitting down, Clay Holmes’s improvement after leaving the Pirates, the unwritten rules of closer entrance song etiquette, Justin Turner’s walk-up song consistency, and more. Then (1:00:19), Ben and Meg banter about yet another Tyler Wade/Taylor Ward broadcaster mixup, how Freddie Freeman leaving Atlanta is like Ben leaving grammar school, and whether wearing two gloves could actually be legal, plus a Past Blast from 1869.

Audio intro: Shy Boys, “In Gloves”
Audio outro: Monophonics, “Let That Sink In”

Link to Dan Hayes on Johnson
Link to SI post about Johnson
Link to article about Fetter
Link to Ben on college player dev
Link to story on Twins’ college coaches
Link to ESPN on the CWS outcome
Link to Jake on Houston’s catchers
Link to team catcher offense
Link to Trout pitch-tipping GIF
Link to Jordan on Devers
Link to Speier on Devers
Link to article about Holmes post-Pirates
Link to Ben Clemens on Holmes
Link to Jordan on Holmes
Link to Cameron Grove on pitch usage
Link to Rob Arthur on pitch usage
Link to Rob on pitch usage again
Link to sinker usage leaderboard
Link to grounder rate leaderboard
Link to Ken Rosenthal on Freeman
Link to Jay Jaffe on Freeman
Link to Kershaw comment on Freeman
Link to article on Flores crying
Link to wicket-keeper wiki
Link to wicket-keeper image
Link to Richard Hershberger’s Strike Four
Link to 1869 story source

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On Monday night, the Orioles beat the Mariners, turning an early 7–0 lead into a 9–2 win. In the annals of history, a last-place team beating a fourth-place team in a midseason game won’t exactly be one that old baseball historians recount in future documentaries. But it did cause the O’s to cross a symbolic threshold, guaranteeing that they’d have their first winning calendar month since 2017 (counting a 2–1 March 2019 would be a scurrilous case of loopholery). That’s not exactly cause to break out a Melchizedek of the bubbly stuff, but it’s progress for a team whose rebuilding efforts seemed to be lacking that characteristic.

One thing that bedeviled the Orioles was how little of a boost they received at the start of the rebuilding process. Mike Elias may have been hired after the 2018 season to oversee the reconstruction, but it was the old brain trust who got the ball rolling with major trades, dealing away Manny Machado, Zack Britton, Kevin Gausman, Jonathan Schoop, and Darren O’Day and receiving 15 players in return. Until this season, it looked like the only one that would make any impact on the team’s future would be Dillon Tate, picked up from the Yankees in the Britton trade, who has made his home as a mid-tier reliever. You can make an argument that the best minor leaguer involved in an Orioles trade during the first year of the rebuild was a player who was traded from Charm City, not acquired, when the O’s sent minor league veteran Mike Yastrzemski to the Giants.

The lost 2020 minor league season was problematic for everyone on the planet, but in a pure baseball context, I’ve argued that it was especially so for a Baltimore team flooded with Triple-A tweener pitchers and not enough places to play them. Fast-forward to our second season of relative normalcy, and you start to see a real foundation start to come together. We were generally bullish around here about Baltimore’s farm system coming into the season; my colleagues Eric Longenhagen and Kevin Goldstein rated the team very highly, and ZiPS had the team with the best prospect in baseball both at catcher and on the mound. ZiPS is even more positive about the team’s future now as most of the top prospects have improved their stock, some massively, rather than see it slide. Let’s run down some of the projection changes since the start of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of Freddie Freeman’s starring role in the Braves’ championship run, the sequence of events that landed him in a Dodgers uniform was swift and shocking. Three months later, the 32-year-old first baseman still appears to be searching for closure, but for all the drama and the concerns about where his loyalties lie, he’s remained exceptionally productive even while the Dodgers’ offense has cooled off.

Freeman spent 15 seasons in the Braves’ organization, 11 as their regular first baseman (five times an All-Star, once an MVP), and last fall helped them win their first World Series since 1995. While most of the industry assumed he and the Braves would find a way to remain together once he reached free agency, on March 14 the team pulled off a blockbuster to acquire Oakland’s Matt Olson, abruptly closing the door on the Freeman era and underscoring that by quickly agreeing to an an eight-year, $168 million extension with the ex-Athletic. The suddenly jilted Freeman agreed to a six-year, $162 million deal with the Dodgers on March 16, returning him to his native California via the team that faced his Braves in the NLCS in each of the past two seasons. For as celebratory as the occasion should have been, in his introductory press conference Freeman described himself as “blindsided” by the Olson trade, adding, “I think every emotion came across. I was hurt. It’s really hard to put into words still.”

“I thought I was going to spend my whole career there, but ultimately sometimes plans change,” he said.

It didn’t take long for Freeman and the Braves to cross paths again. The two teams squared off for a three-game series in Los Angeles starting on April 18, with the first baseman punctuating the reunion by homering in the first and third games of the series and going 4-for-11 as the Dodgers took two of three. Not until last weekend did the two teams meet in Atlanta, providing the Braves with the opportunity to present the former face of the franchise with his World Series ring. Ahead of the ceremony on Friday, a teary-eyed Freeman said in his press conference, “I don’t even know how I’m going to get through this weekend,” and had to pause several times to collect himself when discussing his time with the Braves. After the team paid tribute to him, and manager Brian Snitker presented him with his ring, Freeman teared up again while addressing the Atlanta crowd:

Freddie's message to @Braves fans had us all crying. ?? pic.twitter.com/2a9GijKOni

— MLB (@MLB) June 25, 2022

It was, perhaps, a bit much for the Dodgers to stomach. In discussing the Freeman tribute with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Clayton Kershaw hinted at his teammates’ impatience when he said, “It was very cool (to see Freeman’s reception Friday night)… He’s obviously been a big contributor for our team. And I hope we’re not second fiddle. It’s a pretty special team over here, too. I think whenever he gets comfortable over here, he’ll really enjoy it.”

Freeman didn’t homer during the series but he he did survive the weekend, going 4-for-12 with three walks and an extra-innings RBI double in Sunday’s rubber match as the Dodgers again took two out of three. Read the rest of this entry »