A few days ago, there was a question raised on Twitter that sparked a good amount of discussion:

Which is most important for a hitter?

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) March 4, 2022

It’s a straightforward premise with a not-so-straightforward answer. Bat-to-ball skills came out on top, but there’s a convincing case for each option. Bat speed matters most due to a strong correlation between exit velocity and overall production. Bat-to-ball skills matter most because without a sufficient rate of contact, it’s difficult to translate raw power into in-game power. Swing decisions matter most because good ones lead to favorable counts, which in turn lead to favorable results.

This author leans toward bat speed. It’s also the option that received the fewest amount of votes. This isn’t to say one side is in the wrong — the truth is that all three skills are integral to offensive production — but I’m here to defend what seemed like an unpopular choice. As far as I can comprehend, the remaining two are predicated on, or at least amplified by, the existence of bat speed.

Onto the case! It’s a little unorthodox, though, because I didn’t start off to prove a point. Before seeing that poll, I’d been working on a metric to evaluate a hitter’s swing decisions. It didn’t turn out as hoped, so I’ve put it on hold for now, but at least all that effort didn’t go to waste, because how hitters perform according to that metric indirectly reveals the importance of bat speed. Specifically, I’m going to narrow in on 0–0 counts, for three reasons: They’re the most ubiquitous; this article can’t go on forever; and the numbers get a bit wonky in other counts. See, there’s a reason why it didn’t work out. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorites paintings is René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. Basically, it’s a painting of the pipe with “this is not a pipe” written on it in French. While interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, one can argue that it makes two points. First, there’s the wordplay; a painting is not a pipe. But there’s a double-meaning you can take, too: the frequent incongruity between what a word says and what a word actually is. (If you’d like to read a lot more about this painting, Michel Foucault has just what you need!)

MLB’s competitive balance tax has a lot in common with Magritte’s pipe. It says it’s about competition, but without any mechanism to ensure that the proceeds improve competition. It says it’s about balance, but it has no way to ensure that balance. It’s described widely as a luxury tax, but it’s not that either. Luxury taxes, historically, have been directed at what economist Fred Hirsch termed “positional goods,” or goods that are highly prized based on their scarcity and prestige value. Labor costs in a labor-intensive field, though, aren’t really a luxury good, and MLB’s business is mainly putting teams of baseball players on the field. Everything MLB does stems from those games; if the teams didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be as much clamor for t-shirts with cardinals sitting on a wooden stick or ice cream served in a small plastic helmet with a creatively spelled abbreviation of “stockings” on it. Players are no more luxuries for a baseball team than leather is for a shoe company.

But let’s get to the competitive balance side of things. MLB’s argument is that the CBT is needed to increase competitive balance. Yet there’s very little evidence that it actually has increased competitive balance, and if anything, teams are farther apart since the CBT was implemented, not closer together. From 1984 to 2001, leaving out shortened seasons, the standard deviation of winning percentage was about 67 points. From 2002, the first year of MLB’s modern CBT, to ’21 (excluding the shortened 2020 season), that increases to 74 points; since the start of 2016, when salaries have been static, it’s 80 points. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Wallner has taken a circuitous route in his quest to play close to home. Geographically speaking, it might be better-described as an oblong route. The 24-year-old Minnesota Twins outfield prospect grew up thirty minutes northeast of Target Field, then circumstances sent him to Hattiesburg, 17 hours south. Since being drafted 39th overall in 2019 out of the University of Southern Mississippi, Wallner has played in Elizabethton, Tennessee and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the latter of which sits four-and-a-half hours southeast of where he started.

Exposure-wise, the shape of Wallner’s boomerang journey changed when his intended destination out of high school dropped baseball. The left-handed-hitting slugger — No. 10 on our newly-released Twins Top Prospects list — had planned to continue his studies in Grand Forks, North Dakota, four-and-a-half hours northwest of the Twin Cities.

“[The University of] North Dakota cut baseball in April of my senior year,” explained Wallner, who battled back from a hamate injury this year to log a 131 wRC+ and wallop 15 home runs in 294 plate appearances at High-A Cedar Rapids. “I had some connections to Southern Miss through the North Dakota coach, so I went for a visit and fell in love with it. Playing college baseball when it is warmer than 30 degrees was enticing.”

Belying the fact that he considers his freshman fall at the Conference USA school “the biggest jump I’ve ever had to experience,” Wallner went on swing a hot bat in his first taste of high-profile collegiate competition, compiling numbers that included 19 dingers and a 1.118 OPS. He went on to set Southern Mississippi’s career home run record, going deep 58 times in three seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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.

Editor’s Note: Ronny Henriquez was added to this list following his acquisition from the Texas Rangers as part of the Mitch Garver/Isiah Kiner-Falefa trade.

Francis Peguero was added to this list following his acquisition from the Cincinnati Reds as part of the Sonny Gray trade; Chase Petty, previously ranked 14th here, was the return.

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The Competitive Balance Tax threshold has been central to the contentious collective bargaining agreement negotiations and the ending of the owners’ self-imposed lockout. The league and the players union have been further apart on that issue than on any of the other major ones, which helps to explain why last week’s optimism regarding a last-minute deal proved to be unfounded. Even with the owners’ offers to raise the minimum salary and improve the lot of pre-arbitration players — albeit not to the levels that the union was seeking — the minimal growth of the CBT threshold meant the owners’ final pre-deadline proposal was dead on arrival. Yet according to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, four of the 30 team owners objected even to those threshold levels.

As noted several times in my coverage of the negotiations, the CBT threshold has not kept pace with revenues over the past decade and has increasingly been treated as a salary cap by owners. Recall this oft-circulated graph from The Athletic”

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Every week, we will recap amateur baseball happenings in a post like this, with a focus on how the action impacts the next three draft classes, especially this year’s. You’ll find a primer on our approach, as well as our observations from Week 1, here. Now on to this past weekend’s notes.

Ben Joyce, RHP, Tennessee Volunteers: 0.2 IP, 1 H, 1 BB, 1 K (Current Rank: College Pitcher of Note, 35+ FV)

That line next to Joyce’s name actually represents the composite of his Saturday and Sunday showings, as he faced just four batters combined. Joyce has become a Twitter darling by frequently getting into the triple-digits with a fastball that has touched an eye-popping 103 mph, but after missing the 2021 season due to Tommy John surgery, and with just three innings in the books so far this year, scouts are still very much in the to-be-determined phase of figuring out where to line him up on draft boards. While we haven’t seen this kind of velocity since early-career Aroldis Chapman, teams are still trying to determine what else Joyce can do. So far, he’s been hovering around 90% fastball usage while generally finding the zone with the pitch; maybe we’d all lean that heavily on our heater if we could throw it as hard as Joyce does. Still, while his low-to-mid-80s slider flashes solid sweeping action, of the four he had thrown on the season entering Sunday’s game, none were in the zone, and to be honest, they weren’t particularly close. Even at 100-plus mph, you can’t live on fastballs alone, and many will be watching Joyce for the remainder of the spring in an attempt to figure out exactly what the entire package looks like. –KG Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago was Prospect Week here at FanGraphs. I didn’t contribute any analysis to it, because a) it was packed with really good analysis already and b) I wasn’t done compiling the thing I wanted to contribute. With some time to finish up my work — and not much else going on in our lockout-plagued sport — I’m ready to provide a bit of bonus analysis.

Last year, I used a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I thought stood a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. This year, I’m … well, I’m using a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I think stand a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. But this time, I’ve spent a bit more time refining my methods.

Here’s a quick overview of those methods. I used a variety of simple models based on historical minor and major league data. In each of them, I looked at a variety of key indicators in minor league hitters: statistics, age, position, level — anything I could download, essentially. I linked those minor league seasons to that player’s eventual major league career (or lack thereof).

This methodology carries many limitations, only some of which I have time to detail here. Baseball isn’t the same as it was in the past; while I think I’ve done a decent job of picking performance metrics that are stable over time, player development and the skills that are necessary to stick in the major leagues don’t look the same as they did 10 or 20 years ago.

That particular problem is inherent in everything that uses the past to predict the future, but don’t worry: my methods have way more shortcomings. For one, 2021 was a strange year to look at minor league statistics. With no 2020 season to gauge players’ skill levels, competition seemed far more variable within each league. I’m also basing much of this data on leagues that don’t exist anymore, as minor league realignment changed the makeup of the minor leagues significantly and also messed with my rudimentary park factors. I didn’t use Statcast or Trackman data, both because I don’t have a complete picture of it for 2021 and because it doesn’t exist at all in most of the years I used to train my various models. Finally, I’m using the position that each player played most in 2021 to give them a position, rather than where they’re projected to end up or what our prospect team thinks they’re best suited for.
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Danny Coulombe features a lot of breaking balls, and he does so with scant fanfare. In 28 relief appearances and one outing as an opener, the 32-year-old Minnesota Twins southpaw threw 41.8% sliders and 24.8% curveballs last year. He was also quietly effective. Taking the mound for a team that performed well below expectations, Coulombe logged a 3.67 ERA and a 3.75 FIP while fanning 33 batters and issuing just seven free passes in 34-and-a-third innings.

Emblematic of the lefty’s lack of fanfare is that I talked to him last August, and while I did include a few of his quotes in a September column — these on an online project management class that had him regularly visiting FanGraphs — I am just now sharing the crux of our conversation. What we delved into was the evolution of his breaker-heavy repertoire.

“I was predominantly four-seam/curveball when I got drafted,” said Coulombe, whom the Los Angeles Dodgers took in the 25th round out of Texas Tech University in 2012. “Coming up through the system I was mostly a curveball guy, and in 2014, a pitching coach I had, Scott Radinsky, told me that I needed something that looks like a fastball and moves. He said, ‘Right now, if a hitter sees a pop he knows it’s a breaking ball, and if he sees it straight he knows it’s a fastball.’ So we worked on developing a slider that year. I’ve always been able to spin a baseball, and now I’m probably about 70% breaking balls, curveballs and sliders.”

For Coulombe, maintaining a consistent differential between the two is a matter of mindset and grip. The latter required an adjustment, which was necessitated by unwanted blending. Read the rest of this entry »