Prospect writers Kevin Goldstein and Eric Longenhagen will sometimes have enough player notes to compile a scouting post. This is one of those dispatches, a collection of thoughts after another weekend of college baseball, minor league spring training, and big league action. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally incorrectly stated Cole Winn had had a Tommy John surgery. It has been removed. FanGraphs regrets the error.

Eric’s Notes

Chase Walter, RHP, San Diego Padres

Most of the teams that ended up signing several non-drafted free agents for $20,000 bonuses last year were the ones with thinner farm systems, like the Reds or Nationals. But the Padres inked several as well, and the first one to pop up and look like a real steal, at least for me, is Western Carolina signee Chase Walter. Walter sat 96-98 out of the bullpen in a minor league spring training game late last week. His breaking ball shape varied pretty significantly, looking like a lateral slider sometimes and a power overhand curveball at others. Regardless of its shape, Walter’s breaking ball bent in at 84-87, and the ones that had more of a curveball look to them were plus. He looks like a potential quick-moving relief piece.

Asa Lacy, LHP, Kansas City Royals

Lacy’s first career pro outing against hitters from another org lasted two innings (the second of which was rolled), and was more of a check-in to see where he’s at rather than a look that should alter anyone’s opinion of him. I went into this look knowing that some scouts had seen him throw a live BP about a week and a half earlier and that Lacy was pretty wild during that outing, which is totally fine considering he’s just getting going for the year. He was a little wild in my look, too, and to my eye seemed to have a noticeably lower arm slot while throwing some of his sliders, even during warm-ups.

Lacy came out sitting 94-96 in his first inning of work and then was 95-98 in the second. He doesn’t need to have precise fastball command because his is the sort of fastball that has huge carry and can compete for swings and misses in the zone. Maybe it’s because of the arm slot variation stuff, or because it’s a developmental focus for him, or just because Lacy faced so many right-handed batters, but he ended up throwing many more changeups than anything else during this outing. They were often in the 85-88 mph range and some of them were quite good, while others were not. He broke off a single plus curveball (his curves were about 80-81) that froze a righty hitter and landed in the zone for a strike, while Lacy’s sliders (86-ish) often missed well below the zone but still garnered some awkward swings. Read the rest of this entry »

To no one’s surprise, the Rockies are bad: At 5–12, they own the worst record in baseball. Take a look back at the preseason standings and you’ll see that was the expectation all along: Colorado was projected to finish at roughly 65–97, sharing the title of worst team in the majors with Baltimore.

Those paths have diverged, slightly, about 10% of the way through the season. The Orioles, at 8–9, have been playing decently, relative to their bottom-dwelling expectations. You shouldn’t expect that to last, as their .421 projected full-season winning percentage is still the third-worst in the majors. But at least it’s been somewhat of a fun start for Baltimore.

Colorado, meanwhile, has sunk right to the bottom, almost like something you’d see in an elementary school science class when a teacher is attempting to explain density. “Do we think this will float?” they might ask the classroom. The Rockies are the baseball version of a resounding “no;” they did not manage to float, not even for just a few games.

Read the rest of this entry »

The strike zone doesn’t exist. Not physically, at least; it’s a rough boundary that varies based on how each umpire looks at it and how each batter stands. Catchers influence the shape, too; smooth hands can turn balls to called strikes, while cross-ups tend to do the opposite.

This year, the zone seems particularly amorphous — maybe it’s just my imagination, but I feel like I can’t turn on a broadcast without hearing about an inconsistent zone. Of course, hearing isn’t believing, and there are botched calls every year. Just because there have been some memorable ones this year doesn’t necessarily mean the overall rate of missed calls has changed. Let’s find out if it has, or if it’s merely imaginations running wild with the backdrop of fan noise.

For a rough idea of ball/strike accuracy, I went to Statcast data. For every pitch, Statcast records a top and bottom of the strike zone, as well as where the pitch crossed the plate. Armed with that data as well as some constants like the size of a baseball and the width of home plate, I measured how far out of (or into) the strike zone each pitch of the 2021 season was when it crossed the plate.

This data isn’t perfect. The top and bottom of the strike zone are approximated, and the plate isn’t a two-dimensional object, despite the fact that our data on it is represented that way. We aren’t considering framing. But we have previous years of the same data, which is great news. We can use the previous years to form a baseline, then see if this year’s data represents a meaningful change. And because we have a huge chunk of data, we can at least hope that framing comes out in the wash. Read the rest of this entry »

When Mario Mendoza played his last season in the majors in 1982, he appeared in just 12 games and batted a paltry .118/.118/.118; his wRC+ was -41. If all you know about the former shortstop is that his name has become synonymous with failure at the plate, those numbers likely aren’t all that surprising.

During Mendoza’s time with the Mariners in 1979 and ’80, he struggled to keep his average above .200, inspiring teammates Bruce Bochte and Tom Paciorek to tease him, dubbing the elusive mark “The Mendoza Line.” The joke might have ended there, but Royals slugger George Brett caught wind of the phrase when he got off to a sluggish start to the 1980 season, to the amusement of Bochte and Paciorek. According to Mendoza, his Seattle teammates told Brett, “Hey, man, you’re going to sink down below the Mendoza Line if you’re not careful.” Brett later mentioned it to ESPN’s Chris Berman from ESPN; it spread from there.

There’s a bit of a poetic twist to Brett being the one who helped popularize the expression. He started the season telling Berman, “The first thing I look for in the Sunday papers is who is below the Mendoza Line.” And while his early-season returns were below his lofty standards (he hit .245 in April, albeit with a 137 wRC+ and just a .245 BABIP), by mid-September he was hitting .394 ahead of a series against the Mariners, with a real chance to finish the season with an average above .400. Brett only went 2-for-11 that series, though, with three hits robbed by Mendoza himself; he ended the season at .390.

In terms of the actual statistic itself, the Mendoza Line is generally understood to be the .200 batting average the shortstop chased in 1979 (he ended the year hitting just .198). What it truly represents, however, is the point at which a player’s offense makes them a liability to their team, regardless of their defensive abilities.  Read the rest of this entry »

Lucas Giolito is a terrifying pitcher. His fastball looks like it was fired out of a gun, and it isn’t even his best pitch; his changeup is one of the best in the sport, and his slider induced whiffs on over half the swings hitters took against it last year. He had a 2.55 ERA in his first three starts of this season, and that undersold how good he’d been: He was boasting the majors’ ninth-best FIP, sixth-best xFIP, and eighth-highest strikeout percentage. He’s as likely to throw a no-hitter on any given day as any other pitcher in baseball. And on Monday, the Red Sox mindlessly swatted him away like a fly buzzing around their ear.

Giolito retired just three of the 13 hitters he faced that morning in Boston, allowing eight runs on eight hits, two walks and two homers. He induced a whiff on just five of 31 swings, did not strike out anyone, and was knocked out in the second inning of a game the Red Sox went on to win, 11–4.

If you’re looking at this game in a vacuum, Giolito just had a very bad day. His fastball was poker-straight, and he couldn’t persuade his changeup to dip below the hitters’ thighs. The result was a complete inability to put guys away: Each of the first four batters he faced picked up a hit in two-strike counts. But the Red Sox have been turning in offensive monsoons like this with regularity this year. After getting swept by the Orioles in three games to start the season, they rattled off nine straight victories and entered Tuesday’s off-day winners of 12 of their last 15 games. In that time, they have scored double-digit runs in a game three times and averaged over six runs per contest. Overall, their 127 wRC+ this season is the best in baseball, and their 12–6 record is tops in the American League.

Read the rest of this entry »

So far this season, injuries have been just about the only thing to put a damper on the Dodgers’ fun. Even with center fielder Cody Bellinger and second baseman Gavin Lux sidelined by various ailments, and Mookie Betts in and out of the lineup, the team has bolted from the gate with a 14-4 record, giving them the best record in the majors — admittedly, something they were projected to have — and producing a start that places them among the best in franchise history and among defending champions.

On Tuesday, Julio Urías rode the hybrid breaking ball that Ben Clemens wrote about to a career-high 11 strikeouts while allowing just one hit and one walk in seven shutout innings against the Mariners. A third-inning RBI single by Corey Seager gave him all the support he would need, helping the Dodgers to a 1-0 win that snapped a two-game losing streak and bought them another day towards better health.

With Bellinger already sidelined by a hairline fracture of his left fibula after being spiked in a play at first base on April 6, and Lux out due to soreness in his right wrist, the Dodgers were without Betts in the wake of a rather terrifying moment from Monday night. In the ninth inning of their 4-3 loss to the Mariners, Betts took a 95 mph fastball from Seattle’s Rafael Montero to the inside of his right forearm. Despite crumpling to the ground in obvious pain, he remained in the game — which ended two pitches later, on a double play — to run the bases. Thankfully, x-rays were negative, ruling out a fracture. Read the rest of this entry »

Which players are most essential to their team’s postseason odds? While that list contains many of the best players in baseball, it’s not a strict ranking of the sport’s brightest stars. When looking at who is the most irreplaceable in the short-term, there are questions beyond just how good the player in question is. It becomes a matter of marginal utility. To a team already saddled with a doomed 2021 outlook, losing a star is unfortunate — obviously very much so for the player in question — but won’t really affect their chances of making the playoffs. The Colorado Rockies could build a time machine, kidnap Ted Williams, and stick a very confused Splendid Splinter in their lineup and it still wouldn’t change their near-term fate. And the same goes for teams at the opposite end of the spectrum — you can’t tip over your house with a leaf blower.

Of course, some teams are simply better equipped to deal with these kinds of nasty surprises than others, able to rely on enviable depth to weather absences. Two such nasty surprises have happened recently and illustrate the point well, albeit in opposite directions. Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals was placed on the Injured List with shoulder inflammation after a mess of a start that saw him caught rubbing his shoulder on camera. (For more on the Strasburg injury, check out my colleague Jay Jaffe’s piece discussing what it means to Washington.) Another scare involved Mookie Betts, who took a hard, high-and-in offering from Rafael Montero directly on his forearm.

Luckily, Betts’ injury seems unlikely to sideline his for long — Dave Roberts says he expects him back later this week — but even if it had meant a longer absence, the Dodgers would have had little need to panic. Even in the worst-case scenario, where the team loses him for the rest of the season, it’s hard to derail this playoff train; the ZiPS projections have their playoff probability collapsing from 99.6% to…97.5%. A drop-off of two percentage points is a relatively minor one, smaller than the projection change if the White Sox lost Adam Eaton or the Astros had to suddenly replace Yuli Gurriel. Presumably, we have unanimous agreement that Betts is easily the most valuable player listed here.

The Nationals, on the other hand, are very reliant on their stars. Should they lose any of their key players — mainly Strasburg, Juan Soto, Trea Turner, Max Scherzer — it would nearly doom their October hopes. Soto joined Strasberg on the IL yesterday after suffering a strained left shoulder. Losing him for the duration would cause the club to miss the playoffs in 81% of the simulations in which the Nats would otherwise make it.

As steep as that sounds, from a quantitative standpoint, losing Soto isn’t the biggest possible loss in baseball in terms of playoff probability; ZiPS already sees the Nats having an uphill climb at 12.2%. The teams that have the most to lose are those with two key elements: a playoff fate that is very much undecided and and a lack of ready replacements elsewhere in the organization. So, as of Tuesday morning, here are baseball’s most irreplaceable players. The below changes in playoff odds assume a season-ending injury and the use of an in-house replacement. Just to illustrate how changeable this list is, only two of the top 10 are repeats from 2020.

Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels (-35.5%)

As the best player of his generation, Trout has a way of finishing at the top of lists, but his placement here is actually fairly unusual. He has sometimes missed this ranking completely, as the Angels have an impeccable record of building inadequate teams around their franchise player. But the AL West is open enough, and the Angels are good enough, that this is the year they really can’t afford to lose him. Trout going down would already be a huge loss even if the Angels had an extra league-average outfielder hanging around the roster. But with the likely in-house solution being to shuffle around the outfield, resulting in more playing for Juan Lagares and some combination of Scott Schebler and eventually Taylor Ward, that’s not the team’s situation.

Gerrit Cole, New York Yankees (-29.5%)

That Cole ranks so highly is not a slight on the quality of the Yankees’ starting pitching. They’re actually quite deep with interesting, talented arms who could step in if the worst should happen and they lose their ace. What is a problem is that after Cole, the Yankees have a lot of pitchers with spotty injury records. ZiPS already assumes that the team will have to turn to that depth multiple times before 2021’s final pitch is thrown. To lose the guy they want to set-and-forget at 200 innings would be a big blow. Complicating the picture is that while the Yankees are still the favorite, their slow start does matter and means that they’ve already lost a good chunk of their margin for error over the Rays, Blue Jays, and Red Sox in the division.

Ronald Acuña Jr., Atlanta Braves (-28.3%)

Acuña wasn’t the National League MVP in 2020, but he’s certainly the player I’d least like to lose if I owned the Atlanta Braves. All the projection systems love him for obvious reasons, but none more than ZiPS, which sees him as the only player in baseball to have non-laughable odds of becoming baseball’s first 50/50 club member. Drew Waters, Ender Inciarte, and Guillermo Heredia could replace the at-bats, but none of them have the recipe to replace the awesomesauce Acuña uses to feast on opposing pitchers.

Alex Bregman, Houston Astros (-28.1%)

Houston’s rotation depth over the last four years has descended from utopia to yikes and now the team’s offense is absolutely crucial to the Astros playing October baseball. The franchise’s offensive core may have originally been led by Jose Altuve and then Carlos Correa and George Springer, but Alex Bregman is now The Man, the hitter they can least afford to have missing from the lineup. ZiPS sees Aledmys Díaz and Abraham Toro as better-than-replacement talent, but Houston’s unlikely to run away with the division the way it has in some recent seasons, making every win crucial.

Jacob deGrom, New York Mets (-25.0%)

deGrom drops from first to fourth on the list, but that’s not due to any decline in his performance. Rather, with the Mets under new ownership, the team didn’t go into the season with five starting pitchers who looked good on paper and a roster that couldn’t withstand injuries to the rotation. This time around, the Mets actually have options. None of them could fully replace deGrom, mind you, but plenty could at least be respectable fifth starters on a good team.

Carlos Correa, Houston Astros (-24.1%)

Given Correa’s injury history, the fact that he ranks highly on a list like this should greatly concern the Astros. ZiPS sees Bregman as the clearly superior player but also sees the options after Correa as less enticing. Díaz isn’t a particularly good defensive shortstop, and Toro wouldn’t be an option at the position. Alex De Goti has interesting power but is a massive downgrade from Correa. Houston would likely have to explore a trade if misfortune befell Correa, but the team may have other needs, so that’s not a great scenario either.

Luis Robert, Chicago White Sox (-23.2%)

From a straight-up projection standpoint, Robert falls short of most of the names on this list. Just on the Sox, ZiPS thinks Lucas Giolito is a significantly more valuable player overall, at least when he’s not pitching in the morning. But if something should happen to Giolito, Chicago has spare arms to patch up the hole. If the team loses Robert, let’s just say ZiPS does not have a case of Leurymania or Engelalia. The race with the Twins is likely going to be a tight one and the Royals have shown surprising spunk. The White Sox could ill afford an injury to their center fielder.

Byron Buxton, Minnesota Twins (-22.7%)

Is this the year that Byron Buxton finally stays healthy and is awesome? In just nine games, he’s already collected an impressive 1.5 WAR! Buxton will fall off from his 15-WAR pace, of course, but a lot of the scenarios in which ZiPS sees Minnesota taking down Chicago involve a solid season from Buxton. Even if his offense regressed hard toward his career 93 wRC+, the team would struggle to replace his glove, which has remained a major plus even through his various injuries.

Anthony Rendon, Los Angeles Angels (-21.8%)

To nobody’s surprise, Rendon isn’t quite the player that Mike Trout is. But the Angels have real playoff hopes, and even with the team having better replacements for injured infielders than outfielders, it would struggle to replace Rendon. Franklin Barreto’s elbow is enough to just squeeze Rendon onto this list, where he’d otherwise finish 12th, with Gleyber Torres taking the 10-spot.

Freddie Freeman, Atlanta Braves (-21.7%)

I love Pablo Sandoval, but not as my starting first baseman. Nor would Austin Riley playing first (with Johan Camargo, Orlando Arcia, and Ehire Adrianza pitching in at third) remedy the situation. Freeman’s the best first baseman in baseball, and even if the position isn’t as important as it was 40 years ago, he’s a crucial part of the lineup.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the brief lifespan of the soccer Super League, the gift of the Padres-Dodgers rivalry and Blake Snell vs. Joe Musgrove, position-player-pitching overload and the pitching performance of Willians Astudillo, whether the slow-starting Yankees are really doomed, the retirement of Jay Bruce, the end of Tim Locastro’s stolen-base success streak (and the unlikely basestealing prowess of an ancient Albert Pujols), player switcheroos in the minor leagues, whether MLB would air replay review deliberations, the celebration of Jean Segura’s 200th career double, the MLB return of Sean Kazmar Jr., the possibly precedent-setting NPB debut of Carter Stewart, and more, plus a Stat Blast about the most common and uncommon combinations of fielding position and lineup position.

Audio intro: Belly, "Super-Connected"
Audio outro: Hippo Campus, "Way it Goes"

Link to The Athletic on the Super League
Link to Ingenuity helicopter news
Link to Mookie catch video
Link to Emma Baccellieri on position players pitching
Link to video of Astudillo pitching
Link to Astudillo’s Instagram post
Link to video of Mercedes pitching
Link to video of Locastro caught stealing
Link to story about Pujols stealing third
Link to Lindsey Adler on the Yankees and Yankees fans
Link to Jay Jaffe on the Yankees
Link to Brendan Gawlowski on Bruce’s retirement
Link to video of Segura’s celebration
Link to video of Santana’s celebration
Link to story about Kazmar’s comeback
Link to another story about Kazmar’s comeback
Link to story about Stewart’s debut
Link to Stat Blast data
Link to 1900-2020 lineup spot chart
Link to 2015-2020 lineup spot chart
Link to DH era lineup spot chart GIF
Link to Trout’s hard-hit homer
Link to Ohtani return game story

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