These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Nolan Jones, 3B, Cleveland
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Columbus Age: 23 Org Rank: 2 (66 over) FV: 50
Line: 2-for-4, HR, SB

Notes
Jones got off to a poor start and his overall line hasn’t yet recovered (he’s slugging just .405 on the season, the lowest since his first pro summer back in 2016), but he’s hit .253/.374/.495 over the last month, which is enough to quell overall concerns about him right now. He is a three true outcomes type of player and there may be long stretches where his average is hovering close to the Mendoza line but he’s going to walk a ton and hit for power while playing poor defense at several positions. Jones can be beaten with well-located fastballs at the top of the zone and he’s swung through a lot of them this year, but his swing decisions are typically very good. Per Synergy Sports, he has just a 19% O-Swing% so far this year, which would put him in the top five of qualified big leaguers. There’s real, elite plate discipline here and 70-grade power, but also a clearly exploitable hole in the swing at the top of the strike zone. How those things will interact at the big league level I truly don’t know, though it feels like that hole in the swing is a load-bearing Jenga block against big league pitchers who throw hard and often work at the top of the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 3, 2020, J.D. Davis hit a hard grounder between second and first, fielded cleanly by Freddie Freeman for a simple force out of the runner heading to second. This routine play might have been forgotten if not for the fact that Mike Soroka, the Braves’ consensus ace after a sterling rookie campaign in 2019, took an awkward step while trying to cover first base and limped out of the game. Nearly a year later, Soroka has not returned to a pitcher’s mound, and now, it’ll likely be at least another year until he can do so again, as a torn Achilles tendon — a repeat of the injury that knocked him out last season — will shelve him for the rest of ’21 and probably into ’22.

Last August, Soroka was immediately sent off for an MRI, which revealed that he had torn his right Achilles tendon. You know an injury is serious when a team’s rivals are offering their condolences nearly instantly.

“It kind of makes you sick, honestly,” Mets outfielder Michael Conforto said. “I can tell you a lot of us felt that way, just the way he went down and what we were hearing it was. … We heard it was the Achilles. He’s a bright young star, and we know he’ll come back and be the same guy.”

This wasn’t Soroka’s first major injury setback. After debuting in early 2018, shoulder inflammation shut him down quickly, costing him the rest of that season. He showed few signs of that malady in 2019, throwing 174 2/3 innings with a 2.68 ERA and 4.03 FIP for an even 4 WAR — good enough of a year to rank him highly among other young pitchers in Braves history.

I was an NL Rookie of the Year award voter in 2019, and though I gave my first-place vote to Pete Alonso, I wasn’t too far from giving it to the young Braves hurler instead. As you might expect, ZiPS was also a huge fan of Soroka going into the COVID year.

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We’ve now reached the true halfway point of the season and the best teams in both leagues have continued to pull away from the pack. It’s looking like the Wild Card teams in both leagues will need to win around 95 games to ensure their playoff spot. That’s a lot of ground to make up for the squads that are well off that pace and the group of teams on the bubble has started to shrink as teams start to drop out of contention.

A quick refresher: my approach takes the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (50%/50% FIP- and RA9-) — and combines them to create an overall team quality metric. I add in a factor for “luck” — adjusting based on a team’s expected win-loss record — to produce a power ranking.

The top tier grew after the Padres, Rays, and Astros had really strong weeks. The six teams that make up this tier each have a run differential of at least +77 and hold a commanding grip on a playoff spot.

After holding the best record in baseball for the last few weeks, the Giants finally moved into the top spot in these rankings. They swept the Angels in a two-game series early last week and won their series against their Bay Area rivals over the weekend. They’ve won 10 of their last 12 games and have scored 6.9 runs per game during this hot stretch. With a Rays-esque roster that’s incredibly flexible and a fantastic rotation led by Kevin Gausman and Anthony DeSclafani, they’ve proven their success this year is no fluke. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Trevor Bauer had a rough start. In six innings, he struck out 10 Padres, but that’s where the highlights ended. He walked four and gave up three home runs, pushing his season total to 17 homers allowed. They were all solo shots, which limited the damage, but still: three home runs isn’t a good day’s work. After the game, Bauer was understandably defensive:

"I have the worst home run luck in the league. Every time I make a little mistake it leaves the yard." — Trevor Bauer on his 3 solo shots allowed tonight. #Dodgers

— Michael J. Duarte (@michaeljduarte) June 24, 2021

Now, “little mistakes” are hard to measure. Consider this titanic Manny Machado blast, for example:

Mistake? Maybe. But how do you define a mistake pitch? That was an 82.6 mph slider, roughly two ticks faster than Bauer’s average for the pitch. Per Statcast, it had 16 inches of total break (against spin-less movement), roughly 1.5 inches less than his average slider breaks. He left it over the plate, but not excessively so; five inches above the bottom of the zone. He doesn’t locate sliders there often, but the previous three had resulted in two swinging strikes and a pop out.

So was this a sublime effort by Machado or a bad pitch by Bauer? I’d lean towards the former — though Bauer would have a better argument on his pitch to Victor Caratini later in the game. But that’s hardly a scientific way of looking at it, and I wanted to do at least slightly better. Otherwise, how will we evaluate Bauer’s claim that he’s the unluckiest man on the planet, at least when it comes to home runs? Read the rest of this entry »

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Shohei Ohtani’s amazing season aside, not too much has gone the Angels’ way thus far. Mike Trout is injured, Anthony Rendon has struggled, Albert Pujols has been productive — but only after being cut by the Angels and picked up by the Dodgers — and the team’s defense has been dreadful enough to undo a rotation that appeared to be solid coming into the year. Justin Upton contributed to their miseries by playing quite badly on both sides of the ball in the early going, but after a torrid month, he’s landed on the Injured List with a lower back strain.

The 33-year-old Upton exited Tuesday night’s game against the Giants after two plate appearances due to lower back tightness. He didn’t play on Wednesday, and when he wasn’t included in the lineup on Friday, manager Joe Maddon said that he anticipated Upton returning this past weekend. When he arrived at the ballpark and underwent testing, however, trainers determined that he would need more time to heal, and so the Angels placed him on the IL, backdating his stint so that he will be eligible to return on July 3.

Upton is hitting .247/.336/.480 with 14 homers overall; his 125 wRC+ is his best mark since 2017, and fourth among Angels regulars behind Trout (193), Ohtani (174), and Jared Walsh (143). That’s quite a turnaround given his descent into replacement territory in the previous two seasons and the first part of this one:

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After hitting 62 home runs over his first two seasons in the big leagues — his age-21 and age-22 seasons, no less — Gleyber Torres was hailed as baseball’s next superstar. Even in lineups featuring Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, and Gary Sánchez, no Yankees player hit more homers over the 2018 and ’19 seasons than Torres. And while subpar defense limited his overall ceiling, his 5.6 WAR over that stretch still represented an impressive output for a player that young.

In 2020, however, the power that defined Torres’ offensive production all but disappeared. Torres, who posted a .235 ISO in 1,088 plate appearances over his first two seasons, slashed just .243/.356/.368 last season, good for a .125 ISO. He homered just three times in 160 plate appearances, but improved plate discipline — his walk rate jumped 5.5 points compared to his career averages, while his strikeout rate fell 5.6 — drove what remained above-average offensive output. Torres still posted a 106 wRC+, but he couldn’t outhit his defense like he had the two years prior and posted just 0.2 WAR.

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Some of my fondest memories of baseball have nothing to do with the game being played on the field. Every summer like clockwork, my best friend and I set out on a new baseball adventure. We wait eagerly for the arrival of the next season’s schedule and make our travel plans accordingly. One year it was driving north through Florida to visit the stadiums in Miami, St. Petersburg, and Atlanta. Another year, we melted our way through the heat of July in the Midwest, seeing Kansas City, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

The first time I ever took a solo road trip I did it to see baseball, visiting six stadiums and numerous baseball-themed attractions along the way. I survived traffic in Pittsburgh and scientifically determined the best cupcake shops in Washington D.C. (Red Velvet Cupcakery, though if you are a fan of sweeter, richer cupcakes, Baked and Wired is for you).

In Baltimore, a stranger gave me tips on the best place to try crab. In St. Petersburg, a friendly season ticket holder named Sherry overheard me telling the guest services attendant it was my first Rays game. She insisted on bringing me and my friend into the season ticket holders area and showing us around, as if being a Rays ambassador was her job (it should be). In Kansas City, I befriended a local so lovely that she invited me to come back and stay with her the following year to enjoy more games and more BBQ, and we went on a tour of Kauffman stadium. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitchell Kilkenny is quietly having a stupendous season. A second-round pick by the Colorado Rockies in 2018 out of Texas A&M, the 24-year-old right-hander boasts a 1.47 ERA over eight starts with the Low-A Fresno Grizzlies and the Spokane Indians. Moreover, he’s fanned 54 batters and issued just five free passes in 43 innings.

His plus command is a much-needed asset. Kilkenny is more finesse than power, his fastball ranging from the upper 80s to the low 90s. At least for now. Kilkenny threw harder as a collegian, but then came Tommy John surgery shortly after he was drafted, and last year’s cancelled minor-league season only muddied the waters. No matter. He fully expects his velocity to tick back up in time, and even if that doesn’t happen, his ability to mix, match and tunnel two- and four-seam fastballs, a slider, a curveball, and a changeup has proven to be plenty effective. As Kilkenny put it, “I might not be bright and flashy, but I’m having success.”

Prior to matriculating at Texas A&M where he double-majored in Renewable Natural Resources and Forestry, he excelled in English class at Houston Christian High School.

“My one fun fact is that I won two awards in creative writing contests,” Kilkenny told me. “One was for a class project where we were to write to a favorite author of ours. I picked Bill Watterson, for Calvin and Hobbes, because that was my favorite comic growing up, I love Calvin and Hobbes. Anyway, it was just a little piece about what the author had given me, which was some of the insights you can get out of a simple comic.” Read the rest of this entry »