With six weeks until the draft, things are more muddled than ever at the top. If anything, the range of possibilities is continuing to widen. There is still an entire college postseason left to go, as well as what are sure to be some difficult signability discussions that move individual needles significantly. In a dramatic turn of events, it suddenly looks as if the Pittsburgh Pirates are focused on positions players over pitchers with the first pick in the draft. Instead of doing a mock this early (we’ll have one soon, though more to share information than to try to pull a Kreskin with so much time until Day One), I decided to set the current odds for the first overall pick.

The Odds

Marcelo Mayer, SS, Eastlake HS (CA): 3-1

“Marcelo Mayer or Jordan Lawlar?” is the most pressing question for those considering the first pick in the draft, and when I polled top scouts and executives, there was a nearly 50/50 split in their responses. “Mayer should be 1-1, and I don’t think it should really be a conversation,” said one scouting executive. “In terms of pound-for-pound talent, he’s the number one guy. Left-handed, good stick, future power, and plays up the middle.” Among his detractors, there are some questions concerning the up-the-middle aspect of Mayer’s game. While he makes every play and at times can be a flashy defender with plus hands, smooth transfers, a well above-average arm and excellent instincts, he’s also a big-framed kid with below-average run times coming out of a slightly awkward gait. For scouts concerned about this, Mayer becomes a future third baseman; for those who believe in all of the defensive tools beyond the twitch, he’s more comparable to Carlos Correa or Corey Seager. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Packy Naughton, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Salt Lake Age: 25 Org Rank: TBD  FV: 40
Line: 7.2 IP, 1 H, 0 R, 1 BB, 8 K

Notes
After he was sitting in the mid-80s in the time surrounding the 2020 shutdown, Naughton’s velocity has rebounded and he’s once again living in the 90-92 range with his tailing fastball. He’s another lefty of the east/west variety, relying on some mechanical funk, working his tailing fastball to both corners, and mixing in three secondary pitches. While Naughton locates his slider to his glove side very consistently, the same way a lot of over-achieving, soft-tossing lefties do, many of them have been a little too far away from the zone to be competitive and the pitch is average on its own. The same is true of his changeup. Naughton’s changeup execution is less consistent than is typical for pitchers who throw this hard but still end up as successful back-of-the-rotation types. He’s looking more like a depth starter than a true No. 5 at this point, but it’s good to see that his velocity has bounced back and that he’s pounding the strike zone like usual. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an understatement: Jesse Winker had a pretty solid weekend. On Friday, he collected four hits, including three home runs, and a walk. On Saturday, he only went 1-for-4, but added another homer. And on Sunday, he homered again, bringing his weekend total to five and his season total to 13. His wRC+, which entered the weekend at a cool 166, jumped 26 points to 192; by this metric, he’s now the third-best hitter in baseball. His .463 wOBA, meanwhile, ranks first.

To say that Winker has broken out this season would be inaccurate. He has always been a very good hitter, particularly against right-handed pitching. Plus, his numbers have seen a significant uptick over a fairly large sample. In short, it’s not just 2021: Over his last 162 games, dating back to May 22, 2019, he is hitting .306/.401/.563 with 31 homers. In that span, he has been the seventh-best hitter in the majors by wRC+, at 154.

He really put everything together during his 2020 season, with his once-extreme platoon splits (we’ll get to those in a moment) dissipating in the shortened campaign. His 146 wRC+ was a “seasonal” career-high, and his .289 ISO was eye-popping for a hitter who had posted sub-.200 marks for his career to that point. Winker, who had rarely been considered a power hitter — he graded as having 30 game power in his last prospect scouting report back in 2018 — posted the same 2020 ISO as Teoscar Hernández.

Winker’s 2020 season did turn heads, as did his hot start to 2021. But we’re admittedly still dealing with small-ish samples for this new slugging version of him. His ISO, which was only .181 going into 2020, is .320 so far this season. And we’re starting to see the projection systems more fully buy in. Here are the largest rest-of-season ZiPS ISO increases, compared to the pre-season projections:

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In past iterations of this column, a combination of pressing narratives and fatigue with certain pitchers and their respective teams, or a straight up lack of interesting matchups have forced us to get creative. Not so this week, where the first three days of the week each feature games with giant WATCH ME signs stapled to their probable pitchers. Beginning with the Padres-Brewers series, the final week of May has gifted us some undeniably fun fixtures.

Monday, May 24, 7:40 PM ET: Blake Snell vs. Brandon Woodruff

In his first year in San Diego, Blake Snell seems to be learning his new city using a method that many non-pitchers find helpful: a lot of walks. Snell has already issued 25 walks in 40.1 innings (13.7 BB%) and allowed hitters to reach base at a clip comfortably above the league average. The former Ray has a .330 on-base percentage against him, while the rest of the league is at .313. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve still got a week to go in May, a month that has included four no-hitters, including two last week on back-to-back days — the Tigers’ Spencer Turnbull against the Mariners on Tuesday, and then the Yankees’ Corey Kluber against the Rangers on Wednesday, plus two that were just two days apart earlier this month. That brings this year’s total to six no-hitters of the nine-inning variety, plus a seven-inning one by Madison Bumgarner that The Man doesn’t want you to count. Particularly because the major league batting average of .237 is in a virtual tie for the all-time low mark set in 1968, these remarkable achievements are threatening to lose some luster.

That’s a shame, because the experience of actually watching a no-hitter from start to finish, rather than just flipping over to rubberneck for the final three or six outs, is still one of the most gripping in all of sports. The dawning of the possibility at some point in the middle innings — individually, we all have our thresholds for when our antennae go up — and then the batter-by-batter, pitch-by-pitch suspense, knowing that this gem could disintegrate either though one bad pitch or one bad break, makes a no-hitter a thrill to watch. Every single one of them is meaningful to its participants; for the pitcher and probably the catcher as well, it’s the pinnacle of performance. It takes a heart of coal not to be moved by the likes of Turnbull or Carlos Rodón having that one day of untouchability after years of ups and downs.

That said, some no-hitters are more impressive than others, with strikeouts galore and maybe just a walk or two separating them from perfection. Particularly given the current conditions, under which three teams have been no-hit twice — Cleveland, Texas, and Seattle — it’s obvious that there are varying degrees of difficulty when it comes to opponents as well. No-hitting the Mariners, who entered Sunday with a team batting average of .198, isn’t the same as doing it to the Rangers (.236), and neither of those are the equal of, say, Sean Manaea no-hitting the 2018 Red Sox, who hit .271. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries continue to wreak havoc on nearly every team in baseball. With the shortened season still close in the rear-view mirror and the realignment and delayed start to the minor leagues, teams have had to scramble to fill their major league rosters. Some teams have been able to weather these issues with extraordinary depth while others have been forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find replacements for their injured regulars.

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 got a lot bigger this week. The Red Sox continued to play well last week but the White Sox stumbled a bit. They were swept in New York over the weekend and won just two of their six games. The real reason this tier has grown so large is because the other three teams are playing out of their minds right now. The Rays, Padres, and Dodgers have won 10, nine, and six games straight, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

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A lot went wrong for Pittsburgh last season. Josh Bell tanked his trade value with a career-worst season. Gregory Polanco showed rather conclusively that he can’t hit. The team finished last in the NL Central for a second year in a row and has spent the last few winters demonstrating a disinterest in climbing out of the cellar anytime soon. There are enough problems with the Pirates that a sudden decline by young outfielder Bryan Reynolds was more or less reduced to a footnote.

Reynolds, a former second-round pick who was acquired from San Francisco in the Andrew McCutchen trade and finished fourth in Rookie of the Year voting in 2019, hit an abysmal .189/.257/.357 (72 wRC+) in 55 games last year. That line allowed him to blend in with pretty much everyone else in the lineup not named Ke’Bryan Hayes, but it was still an unwelcome development. While Hayes is clearly the player Pittsburgh wants to build its next good team around, having a second foundational player in the lineup is always going to make things a little easier down the line. Reynolds seemed like that player after his rookie season. Fortunately for the Pirates, he now looks like that player again.

Through 44 games, Reynolds is hitting .298/.389/.472 with four home runs, good for a 139 wRC+ and a team-high 1.4 WAR. He’s been on a particular tear in the month of May, hitting .324/.400/.549 with 10 doubles in just 19 games. Last Thursday, he took Drew Smyly deep with a game-tying homer to center in a game the Pirates would go on to win in extras.

Reynolds’ start to 2021 looks awfully similar to the performance he gave in 2019, when he hit .314/.377/.503 with 16 homers, a 130 wRC+ and 3.1 WAR, and he’s having success for a lot of the same reasons. He hits lots of line drives, picks up extra bases by putting balls in the gaps, and provides modest over-the-fence power. The consistency of his numbers in 2019 and ’21, though, brings up one question: What the heck happened last year?

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