These are notes on prospects from Brendan Gawlowski, who will be chipping on Daily Prospect Notes once a week. Read previous installments of the DPN here.

Today, we’ll review some live looks, watch at a little video, and head off the beaten path for a bit. It should be fun, and apologies in advance for highlighting a few performances from earlier in the week. Onward!

CJ Van Eyk, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays
Level & Affiliate: High-A Vancouver Age: 22 Org Rank: 10 FV: 40+
Line: ⅔ IP, 4 H, 7R, 1 SO, 3 BB

It was a night he’d like to forget. The line probably oversells how rough he looked — a couple of gork singles extended the inning — but Van Eyk’s primary developmental goal this season is to pound the zone, and only 17 of his 33 pitches were strikes on Tuesday night. He often missed badly to his arm side with his fastball and curve, and a lack of competitive pitches limited him to just one true swing and miss.

Mechanically, Van Eyk has a loose arm, clean arm swing, and still head, all of which should help him throw strikes. His landing spot is very inconsistent though, and that seems to affect his ability to throw strikes. Sometimes he lands in a clean fielding position; on other occasions his left foot lands so awkwardly that he practically falls off the mound toward the first base dugout (you can see footage of that in action in Tess Taruskin’s notes from a few weeks back). Up to 94 with a curve that flashes plus, there’s good stuff here if he can find a delivery that facilitates more strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees are in a precarious position; at 41-39, they’re 8.5 games back of first in the AL East and 5.5 games out of the second Wild Card spot. Sometime soon, they’ll have to decide whether they plan on adding major league talent for a playoff push this year or retooling for the future. Today, they made a trade that doesn’t really do either, but is still a ton of fun. As first reported by Lindsey Adler of The Athletic, the Yankees acquired Tim Locastro from the Diamondbacks in exchange for minor league pitcher Keegan Curtis.

Locastro is a deeply strange player. He’s one of the few true oddities left in a game that’s increasingly moving towards multi-position mashers and fluid-role strikeout pitchers. His two standout skills are getting hit by pitches and stealing bases successfully, which is about as weird of a combination as it sounds. But they work together quite well — or at least, they did until this year, when everything has gone south in a hurry.

Getting hit by pitches doesn’t feel like a skill. If you needed any confirmation, just look at the way we describe it — it’s something done to you, rather than some great feat. You draw a walk, or hit a double — but you get hit by a pitch. Year in and year out, though, Locastro gets hit at a ludicrous rate. In the minors, 6.2% of his plate appearances resulted in a HBP. In the majors, he’s been hit in 7.5% of his plate appearances — the highest rate in league history.

That’s mostly hilarious — how can this guy be so good at something that seems so out of his control? — but it’s also real value. Across the majors, batters get hit in roughly 1.1% of plate appearances. That’s an additional 6.4% of the time that Locastro gets on base for free! His career 6.3% walk rate plays more like a 12.7% walk rate, which is downright elite.

The Yankees could use a center fielder who can get on base. With Aaron Hicks on the 60-day Injured List, they’ve given the majority of their starts to Brett Gardner, and his .318 OBP would be the lowest mark of his career. The daily rigors of playing center also aren’t optimal for a 37-year-old — he’s held up well defensively so far, but he can’t play every day, and using Aaron Judge to soak up some of the defensive innings isn’t a great solution either. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Waldichuk has been a strikeout machine in his first competitive professional season. A fifth-round pick in 2019 out of St. Mary’s College, the 23-year-old southpaw boasts the third-highest K/9 in the minors, his 15.8 mark topped only by those of Reid Detmers and Carson Ragsdale. Waldichuk’s dominance, which includes a 1.18 ERA, has come in 10 starts — seven with High-A Hudson Valley and three with Double-A Somerset.

Flying well under the radar entering this season — he’s No. 45 on our Yankees Top Prospects list — Waldichuk was described by Eric Longenhagen as a “lanky lefty who… generates nearly seven feet of extension and has big carry on his fastball.” I asked the 6-foot-4 San Diego native if he agrees with that assessment.

“I do get good carry, although I’m not too sure about the extension,” Waldichuk told me. “I’m not really sure what creates the carry, either. I’m not really too good with all the analytics stuff. But I do understand some of it. The way I spin it makes it play well, up.
”

The carry is something Waldichuk has always had. What he’s learned since signing a professional contract is how to better avoid having the ball “spinning more sideways,” as opposed to getting the true backspin he wants. His heater typically sits around 2,400 rpm — “I’ve been as high as 2,700” — and in his penultimate start he “averaged 17 inches of [arm-side] horizontal and 16 inches of vertical movement.” His velocity averaged out at 92.2 [mph].”

Waldichuk also throws a slider, a slurve, and a changeup. Each is interesting in its own way. Read the rest of this entry »

Content Warning: We do not discuss the details of the case, but do talk about the Trevor Bauer situation, so there are mentions of sexual violence and abuse. If this is something you understandably want to avoid, the discussion begins at 27:25 and ends at 56:15.

We’re here for the 20th time as Chin Music returns with special co-host Tim Marchman, former editor-in-chief of Deadspin and current features editor for Motherboard under the Vice umbrella. We start light with talk of sticky stuff suspensions and player beefs, before moving onto the mysterious world of NFTs, which Major League Baseball dipped its toes into last week. Then it’s a more serious discussion concerning Trevor Bauer, as Tim offers what might seem like a counter-intuitive suggestion about how this should be handled based on his reporting on similar subjects and talking to victim advocate groups. From there, we have a pair of special guests, beginning with Harry Marino, the executive director of Advocates For Minor Leaguers, who explains the purpose behind the organization and the good fight they are fighting. Then we are joined by Kendall Rogers, managing editor of D1 Baseball, who discusses North Carolina State’s COVID-based elimination from the College World Series. From there it’s the usual endgame, chatting about Eddie Gaedel, the world of tech journalism, Tim’s favorite album of all-time, zombie-based entertainment and more.

As always, we hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.

Music by Lung.

Have a question you’d like answered on the show? Ask us anything at chinmusic@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

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Episode 929

On this week’s show, David Laurila has a pair of interviews with pitchers eager to discuss the nitty gritty of their craft.

• In the first half, David welcomes Janson Junk, a 22nd-rounder in the Yankees system who is currently dominating Double-A. The pair talk about his hot stretch and what got him there, including being an early adopter of Driveline research. Junk details each of his pitches and the design work he’s done on them, such as improvements to his consistency, pitch shapes, and strategy. They also discuss Junk’s college teammate Tarik Skubal, who is now in the Tigers rotation. [2:32]
• After that, David is joined by former major leaguer Clayton Richard to talk about the many things about pitching he wishes he knew when he debuted. The left-hander is currently focused on his children and youth coaching, but he has done a lot of pitching research in recent years. David and Richard also discuss pitching with conviction, how Mark Buehrle would have felt about modern pitching analytics, and Richard’s possible path as a quarterback. [18:09]

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about passing the halfway point of the regular season, the early effects of the sticky-stuff crackdown, a historically high-scoring day, the white-hot Brewers (and Willy Adames) and the red-hot Nationals (and Kyle Schwarber), a Germán Márquez gem, and a study on how kids become fans that helps explain how Ben and Meg became co-hosts. Then they talk to two academics who have used baseball data to study psychology: Professor James Archsmith of the University of Maryland (33:37) on umpires and decision fatigue, and Professor Hengchen Dai of the UCLA Anderson School of Management (56:33) on midseason trades and performance resets (plus a postscript about foreign-substance beef between Josh Donaldson and Lucas Giolito).

Audio intro: Cheap Trick, "Hard to Tell"
Audio interstitial 1: Kelley Stoltz, "Decisions, Decisions"
Audio interstitial 2: Tri-State, "Start Again"
Audio outro: Lucy Dacus, "Going Going Gone"

Link to Jeff Sullivan on preseason projections
Link to Jeff on predicting second-half records
Link to Eno Sarris on sticky stuff
Link to Rob Arthur on sticky stuff and the Dodgers
Link to Ben on the PED era
Link to Will Sammon on the Brewers
Link to Brewers predicting a home run
Link to Brewers predicting a comeback
Link to Eric Cummings data on defensive turnarounds
Link to Sam Miller on “True Wins”
Link to study on age and fandom
Link to Professor Archsmith’s website
Link to paper on umpires and decision fatigue
Link to study on umpires and air quality
Link to article about umpires and air quality
Link to study on umpires and racial discrimination
Link to article about discriminatory umpires study
Link to study on umpires and status bias
Link to study on umpires and the Gambler’s Fallacy
Link to Freakonomics on umps and the Gambler’s Fallacy
Link to study on players and rational inattention
Link to Rob on pitchers taking their time
Link to Rob on hitters taking their time
Link to Professor Dai’s website
Link to study on trades and fresh starts
Link to article about trades study
Link to Donaldson/Giolito story

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s experience attending the worst start of Shohei Ohtani’s MLB career, then (15:04) discuss the Dodgers’ and MLB’s response (and their own reactions to) this week’s serious assault allegations against Trevor Bauer. (Warning: This episode contains some swears, starting at 18:18.)

Audio intro: Vanessa Peters, "Rather Bad Day"
Audio outro: Teenage Fanclub, "Tears Are Cool"

Link to Jay Jaffe on the Ohtani game
Link to Twitter thread on traveling to see Ohtani
Link to the RAINN hotline
Link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline
Content warning: Some of the links below include detailed descriptions of alleged sexual and physical assault.
Link to TMZ report about Bauer
Link to The Athletic on the restraining order
Link to The Athletic on the Dodgers, MLB, and Bauer
Link to The Athletic on Bauer’s scheduled Sunday start

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A couple of weeks ago, I examined the 2021 home run environment and concluded that despite the slightly deadened ball, this season’s home run rates are still among the highest we have on record. As part of that piece, I looked at the number of players who were on pace to hit 40-plus home runs, of which there were seven. One name that wasn’t on that list, though, was Kyle Schwarber, who has hit 16 home runs since June 12 and is now at 25 on the year. I want to take a closer look at his historic power surge and the adjustments he made to get to this spot.

Schwarber’s potential as a hitter has long been evident. You saw his plus hit tool in action when he improbably returned to the Cubs’ lineup during the 2016 World Series after having missed all of the regular season with a torn ACL — he reportedly prepared for his return by watching thousands of breaking pitches in the batting cages — and slashed .412/.500/.471. But while he was solidly above-average over the next three seasons, each year putting up a wOBA of .340 or better (and topping out at .372 in 2019), he crashed in 2020, putting up an anemic .188/.308/.393 triple slash and career-worst 91 wRC+ across 59 games. That got him non-tendered last winter, with the Nationals picking him up on a one-year, $10 million deal with a $10 million mutual option for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — After living up to the hype and the history for the better part of the season’s first three months — capped by an extension of his recent home run spree with three in his first two games in the Bronx — Shohei Ohtani made a rare misstep on Wednesday. On a night where he doubled as both the Angels’ leadoff hitter and their starting pitcher, Ohtani allowed the first five Yankees he faced to reach base, failed to escape the first inning, and was charged with a career-high seven runs. Rather than send him out to right field after his start as planned, manager Joe Maddon had little choice but to pull his two-way superstar from the game entirely.

Not that many in the Yankee Stadium crowd of 30,714 complained. Quite the contrary. For as happy as they might have been to get a glimpse of the eighth wonder of the world, the sight of the Yankees’ recently-dormant offense continuing the previous night’s 11-run onslaught — one more run than they’d scored during their four-game losing streak — was even more welcome… at least until the plot twisted.

“Frustrating. Disappointing. Terrible,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone afterwards. Boone wasn’t referring to Ohtani’s outing, but rather the similar lapse of control from closer Aroldis Chapman. On a sweltering night that saw a temperature of 92 degrees at first pitch before a pair of rain delays cooled things off while adding a couple of extra hours at the ballpark, the Yankees frittered away their 7-2 first-inning lead, with Chapman ultimately walking the bases loaded in the ninth inning and serving up a game-tying grand slam to Jared Walsh. The Angels added three more runs against Lucas Luetge and escaped with a surreal 11-8 victory that Maddon called, “probably the craziest, best result we’ve had” during his two-season tenure. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I assessed the state of each org in the American League ahead of this month’s trade deadline, detailing what effect June might have had on their approach and what they might look to achieve come the end of July. Today, we’ll consider the senior circuit.

NL East

New York Mets
June Effect: Up slightly. For all the understandable concern over the Mets offense, the team has seen their chances of reaching the playoffs creep up a bit into the 75% range.

Current Tenor: Buying.

What They Are After: On paper, the Mets need to do something about their moribund offense, but they are much like the Yankees in that what they actually need is for their exiting lineup to get/stay healthy and start producing like one would expect. A center field upgrade would be ideal, but there aren’t many candidates out there. Some rotation depth to help get to the playoffs would also be nice.

Behavior: With a first-year owner and a first-year GM, clubs are still figuring this one out. The team has money and Steve Cohen wants to win, so they are expected to be aggressive. Read the rest of this entry »