With Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer fronting their rotation, the Mets were theoretically spoiled for choices when picking an Opening Day starter. Or at least, they would have been if deGrom hadn’t been hurt and Scherzer hadn’t picked up a few minor injuries of his own during the spring, throwing off his schedule a bit. Of course, New York also traded for Chris Bassitt during the offseason; he was the Oakland A’s Opening Day starter in 2021. They’ve also got a healthy Carlos Carrasco, who might have taken on the role during his Cleveland tenure were it not for Corey Kluber. Thus, it was rather surprising to see Tylor Megill take the mound last Thursday night.

While the start was certainly an honor for Megill, his throwing schedule also lined up most closely with the occasion. “It fit where he was. Not necessarily his pitch count, but his work load and experience factor,” said manager Buck Showalter after picking him. It’s a fun bit of trivia for the history books, but after the pre-game pomp and circumstance, Megill’s performance met the moment. He dazzled over five innings of work, holding the Nationals scoreless, allowing just three baserunners and striking out six. The biggest revelation of the evening was a fastball that was suddenly sitting 96 mph and that touched 99 mph, no doubt aided by the adrenaline of the first inning. In his second start of the season yesterday, Megill held the Phillies scoreless over 5.1 innings, allowing just three baserunners and striking out five. It’s just 10 innings and 144 pitches, but it certainly seems as though Megill’s entire arsenal — and not just his heater — has taken a step forward this year.

An eighth round pick in 2018 out of Arizona, Megill peaked at 25th on the 2021 Mets prospect list. His fastball sat in the low-90s in college and in his first taste of pro ball. After the cancelled 2020 minor league season, he showed up to spring training last year regularly throwing 94 mph, and that velocity increase stuck when he made his major league debut in late June. Now his fastball is up another tick and a half. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric and Tess Taruskin will each have a minor league roundup post run during the week, with the earlier post recapping some of the weekend’s action. Those posts will typically run Monday or Tuesday (since Monday is widely an off day for the minors), though they will occasionally be featured later in the week, as Eric’s notes are here.

Christian Encarnacion-Strand, 3B, Minnesota Twins
Level & Affiliate: High-A Cedar Rapids Age: 22 Org Rank: HM FV: 35
Line: 10-for-14, 3 HR, 2 2B, 1 SB, 15 RBI (!)

Notes
Wow! Encarnacion-Strand ended up at the bottom of our Twins list because we think he’s destined for first base and has more swing-and-miss going on than we’re comfortable with at that position. After transferring from Yavapai to Oklahoma State, he only struck out in about 19% of the plate appearances during his lone Division-I season, which is less than I’d have guessed based on my in-person notes on his contact ability. He certainly has big power, though. The universal DH helps Encarnacion-Strand’s cause since there are more 1B/DH jobs in the majors now, and teams are more open to platooning there and/or carrying a positionless bopper on their bench. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I ran down my favorite breakout candidates. Now it’s time for the darker side: the busts.

So what exactly is a bust? I don’t take it to mean that a player is awful or has no value. For me, a bust is a player who will step down a tier in performance or who is in a down cycle and has passed the window to get back to what they used to be. None of the players involved are literally without value, and some of them are still really good. But they’re all players I think will be well below their best, usually in a manner that makes me sad as a baseball fan.

Let’s start things off with a look at last year’s list of possible hitter busts and check how things worked out:

• José Abreu: .261/.351/.481, 126 wRC+, 2.9 WAR
• Jackie Bradley Jr.: .163/.236/.261, 35 wRC+, -0.8 WAR
• Justin Upton: .211/.296/.409, 92 wRC+, 0.3 WAR
• Kyle Lewis: .246/.333/.392, 107 wRC+, 0.3 WAR
• Charlie Blackmon: .270/.351/.411, 94 wRC+, 1.5 WAR
• Robbie Grossman: .239/.357/.415, 114 wRC+, 2.7 WAR
• Josh Bell: .261/.347/.476, 118 wRC+, 1.4 WAR
• Joey Votto: .266/.375/.563, 140 wRC+, 3.6 WAR

As you can see, I did much worse here than with the pitcher breakouts. I’m especially happy to have been wrong about Votto last year — my feeling was that there wasn’t another comeback left in him, but there was! I’m also quite pleased that Abreu didn’t slump back to league-average as I expected, staying a bit above instead, though well off his MVP performances. Lewis gets a pass since he was injured most of the year, and Grossman remained legitimately good, if below his 2020 rates. Read the rest of this entry »

Drew Rasmussen was a Rays success story last year. A key part of the trade that sent Willy Adames to Milwaukee, Rasmussen profiled as a plus reliever. But after initially serving as a multi-inning bullpen arm, Tampa Bay slotted him into the rotation for the last two months of the season, and he delivered 37 innings of 1.46 ERA, 2.76 FIP excellence. Sure, it was over 4.5 innings per start, and the peripherals weren’t pretty, but quality over quantity has always been a deal the Rays will take, and you certainly can’t argue with his run prevention.

Rasmussen did it despite what could charitably be described as a predictable arsenal. He threw his fastball 65% of the time and his slider another 30% of the time. If we’re being honest, it was more like 1.5 pitches — his fastball did a lot of the heavy lifting, and the slider picked up the pieces. It’s one of those spin-and-speed four-seamers that are all the rage these days. Rasmussen didn’t always locate it well, but simply put, it’s a hard pitch to hit.

He paired that fastball with a slider that featured two-plane action. It wasn’t a big movement pitch; it had drop and arm-side run in roughly equal proportion, but its main standout quality was that it was an offspeed pitch when hitters were setting up for 98 mph at the letters. If you’re trying to cover a high fastball, particularly one that struck you out last at-bat like this:

Then it’s hard to adjust to a slow and low pitch like this:

When you look at it that way, it’s a pretty good pitch. And hey, by some metrics, it was: hitters had a lot of trouble squaring it up, mustering a woeful .226 wOBA on contact (and a 41% hard-hit rate). On the other hand, it hardly missed any bats; Rasmussen was in the bottom 10% of baseball for swinging strike rate and bottom 15% for CSW rate. Eno Sarris wrote about the pitch in the playoffs and came away similarly unsure of its efficacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about NPB phenom Roki Sasaki’s 19-strikeout perfect game for the Chiba Lotte Marines, the historic crop of prospect debuts in the first week of this MLB season, the unprecedented career-starting hot streak of (and long-term outlook for) Cleveland’s Steven Kwan, A’s catcher Sean Murphy’s butt photogenically taking one for the team, Alec Bohm and the Phillies’ bad-defense, good-offense approach, an exposé on the Pirates’ (lack of) spending, Reds ownership saying the quiet part loud, public funding for sports teams and supermarket congestion in Buffalo, Brett Phillips’ attempt to combat position-player-pitcher fatigue, early, inconclusive indications that the baseball may not be flying as far as before, and Kelsie Whitmore signing with an Atlantic League team, plus a Stat Blast (1:01:03) about Padres pitcher Tim Hill blowing back-to-back no-hitters, Ripper Collins claiming to have spoiled four no-hitters, and the hitters who actually broke up the most no-nos (followed by a few updates and postscripts).

Audio intro: A Tribe Called Quest, “Da Booty”
Audio outro: Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, “Beautiful Steven”

Link to R.J. Anderson on Sasaki’s perfecto
Link to video of Sasaki’s 13 consecutive Ks
Link to highlights of Sasaki’s start
Link to best starts by Game Score
Link to Ben on top-prospect debuts
Link to viral Murphy HBP tweet
Link to Recker Facebook group
Link to video of Bohm errors
Link to video of Bohm comment
Link to story about Bohm
Link to Ryan Nelson’s tweet about Bohm
Link to video of ovation for Bohm
Link to Post-Gazette Pirates spending story
Link to Rob Mains on the Pirates
Link to new CBA’s revenue-sharing change
Link to Phil Castellini’s initial comments
Link to Castellini’s subsequent comments
Link to O’s statement about public funding
Link to statement about supermarkets
Link to Will Leitch on Buffalo’s stadium deal
Link to story about potential Nationals sale
Link to video of Phillips catch
Link to Twitter thread about the ball
Link to SI story about Whitmore
Link to MLBN Whitmore interview
Link to Ben’s old interview with Whitmore
Link to EW episode with Gauci
Link to Stathead
Link to Ripper Collins SABR bio
Link to Infinite Inning episode on Collins
Link to Collins Stat Blast data
Link to Stat Blast no-hitters data
Link to Mauer montage
Link to Kwan strikeouts story
Link to Madrigal strikeouts story
Link to video of Kwan’s almost-whiff
Link to photo of Manfred’s headphones gift
Link to 2015 MLB/Canada beer story
Link to 2018 MLB/Canada beer story

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There are so many good young shortstops in baseball these days that it’s easy to lose track. The oldest starter in the top 10 of our positional power rankings is Xander Bogaerts, and he hasn’t turned 30 yet. Eighteen of the top 20 shortstops are under 30. It can feel like every team has one of these guys. But that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable, and the Mariners clearly agree: they recently agreed to a contract extension with J.P. Crawford that will keep him in the Pacific Northwest through the 2026 season.

Crawford is, for lack of a better way to put it, an in-between Mariner. The team’s old guard – Félix Hernández and Kyle Seager, for example – is gone. The new guard – Jarred Kelenic, Julio Rodríguez, Logan Gilbert, et al. – are breaking in now. But Crawford debuted for Seattle in 2019, and saw his first major league action in 2017. He would have reached free agency after the 2024 season, awkwardly in the middle of what the Mariners hope will be their new core’s best years.

The solution seemed obvious, and the deal the two sides worked out fits the mold almost perfectly. The five-year, $51 million pact is straightforward; no options on either side, no escalators, and no buyouts. It will pay him $10 million in each of the first four seasons and $11 million in the last year. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week may have been highlighted by the start of the 2022 regular season, but it also featured a spate of contract extensions. Today I’m going to take a closer look at two such extensions, both involving glove-first outfielders entering their age-27 seasons.

We’ll begin with Myles Straw, the center fielder for the Cleveland Guardians, who signed a five-year, $25 million extension, according to Zack Meisel of The Athletic. The extension includes club options for the 2027 and ’28 seasons that would bring the total to $41.5 million over the next seven years. Remarkably, this is the Guardians’ third extension this month with the potential to keep a player in Cleveland through the 2028 season — the team also inked deals with star third baseman José Ramírez and closer Emmanuel Clase.

2021 was Straw’s first full season as an everyday player. He came over to Cleveland from the Astros at the trade deadline in exchange for Phil Maton and Yainer Diaz. After the trade, he continued to build on his breakout campaign. He ended the having posted stellar defense (11 OAA), great baserunning (30 steals in 36 attempts), and about league-average offense (98 wRC+). That well-rounded production quietly placed him among the best center fielders in baseball last season, finishing sixth in WAR at the position with 3.7:

That chart does a good job of showing how unusual Straw’s profile is compared to his peers’, as he’s the only center fielder on the list without a clearly above-average bat. These offensive limitations mostly come from a lack of power, and it is a serious lack of power at that, with Straw posting an ISO, Barrel% and HardHit% all below the fifth percentile. His max exit velocity is actually above average, which could be a sign that more consistently hard contact is hidden away somewhere, but there’s just not a lot to suggest that he’ll be putting up double-digit home run totals anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

Flipping through the slate of big league games over the past week has felt a bit like walking through the halls of my high school on the first day of a new school year, quietly taking stock of what and who had changed since I was last there. Who is suddenly wearing colors I’ve never seen them in before? Who’s hanging with a new crowd, or won’t shut up about their camp friends? Who spent time in summer school, and was that stint enough for them to keep up with the rest of their class? And of course: Who’s the new kid?

Last week, the Royals’ Bobby Witt Jr., the Mariners’ Julio Rodríguez, and the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson, all of whom rank within the top five of our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, made much-anticipated major league debuts, with each player surrounded by their own specific brand of pre-show buzz. And while it would be foolish to draw sweeping conclusions from a player’s performance in any one game or series, a big league debut seems as good a time as any to take a snapshot.

When Witt stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the eighth inning of the Royals’ home opener to face the Guardians’ Triston McKenzie, he’d yet to record a hit in the game, having flied out once and grounded out twice. He took McKenzie’s first offering – a 93 mph fastball, low and away – for a ball, then smashed the second pitch of the at-bat into left for a double, scoring Michael A. Taylor from second, a go-ahead run that would later become the game-winner:

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Hassell III is a confident hitter, and for good reason. No. 50 on our 2022 Top 100 Prospects list, the 20-year-old outfielder — in the words of Eric Longenhagen — “arguably wielded the most advanced bat of the 2020 draft’s high school hitters.” Drafted eighth overall that summer by the San Diego Padres, he’s lived up to that billing. Playing last year at Low-A Lake Elsinore and High-A Fort Wayne, Hassell slashed .303/.393/.470, with his left-handed stroke responsible for 33 doubles, four triples, and 11 home runs. Moreover, he swiped 34 bases in 40 attempts.

Hassell — back at Fort Wayne to begin the current campaign — talked hitting prior to taking the field for the TinCaps opener last Friday.

———

David Laurila: In your own words, who are you as a hitter?

Robert Hassell III: “Last season was the first time I played more than 50 games in a season — I played 110 — and after that, I definitely had a good idea — if I hadn’t already — of what I do consistently. It didn’t take me long. Even through last spring training, just getting in the daily reps, I knew that I was going to be a barrel guy [and] an on-base guy. That’s kind of what I’ve been my whole life, so it’s what I would self-identify as, for sure.”

Laurila: Define “barrel guy.”

Hassell: “I would say that a barrel guy isn’t a dude that can only hit fastballs, or only hit curveballs, or that he excels at one thing way more than the other. I wouldn’t consider that guy a ‘barrel guy.’ I see myself being able to hit every pitch, in any count. That’s what I mean by that.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that for every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason. Yesterday, I highlighted my breakout candidates among the league’s hitters. Today, I consider the pitchers.

Let’s start things off with a brief look at last year’s breakout pitcher list and see how they fared:

• Jordan Montgomery: 3.83 ERA, 3.69 FIP, 3.3 WAR in 157.1 IP
• Joe Musgrove: 3.18 ERA, 3.70 FIP, 3.3 WAR in 181.1 IP
• Zach Eflin: 4.17 ERA, 3.68 FIP, 2.2 WAR in 105.2 IP
• John Means: 3.62 ERA, 4.62 FIP, 2.5 WAR in 146.2 IP
• Ryan Tepera: 2.79 ERA, 2.73 FIP, 1.6 WAR in 61.1 IP
• Julio Urías: 2.96 ERA, 3.13 FIP, 5.0 WAR in 185.2 IP
• Dylan Cease: 3.91 ERA, 3.65 FIP, 4.4 WAR in 165.2 IP
• Jeffrey Springs: 3.43 ERA, 3.91 FIP, 0.2 WAR in 44.2 IP

Seven of the eight players here either tied (Musgrove) or beat their previous career best in WAR, so it would be greedy to complain that Means only had a good bounce rather than finding a truly new plateau. While I’d like to attribute this showing to some brilliance on my part, I’d also call these results luckier than average and certainly above any reasonable mean expectation of my perceptiveness. Read the rest of this entry »