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

Brandon Valenzuela, C, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Lake Elsinore   Age: 20   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 40
Line: 2-for-3, 2 BB

Notes
Valenzuela was in the honorable mentions section of last year’s Padres list as a notable teenage follow due to his athleticism and physique, both of which are uncommon for a catcher. He’s off to a strong start at Low-A Lake Elsinore with three hits (one a homer), four walks and no strikeouts in his first two games. Valenzuela switch-hits, he tracks pitches well, and the bat-to-ball and strike zone feel pieces were both in place already throughout 2019, but he’s swinging with a little more explosion now. Well-built players with a foundation of skills rather than tools are often a threat to breakout as those more overt physical tools come with maturity, and we may be seeing the early stages of that here.

Jose Salvador, LHP, Los Angeles Angels
Level & Affiliate: Low-A Inland Empire  Age: 21   Org Rank: tbd   FV: 35+
Line: 4.1 IP (relief), 1 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 12 K Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: He’s certainly *played* like a star the last 80ish games now. I’m not convinced that he’s quite that good, but he’s certainly proving me wrong.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I should note they have a 20-12 pythag record, which equates to a 101-win schedule. And that’s going to be far more predictive than their current record is

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t looked at injury rate compared to previous Aprils, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the weird 2020 made things riskier.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no one way to hit well, but there is one constant in hitting: batters swing too often. The intuition behind that fact isn’t hard to get to: if you swing at a pitch outside the zone, you’re taking a ball and turning it into weak contact (it’s hard to hit pitches outside the zone with authority) or a strike — that’s bad! If you swing at a pitch in the zone, you’re turning a strike into either a strike (if you miss) or contact. Swinging is so bad outside of the zone that it overwhelms the advantages of hacking in it.

I don’t mean to imply that this should extend to logical extremes — you can’t literally never swing — but the numbers are clear. In 2020, batters were worth 3,030 runs below average when swinging. They added the same amount when they didn’t swing. This isn’t a fluke: batters have already added 1,350 runs relative to average by taking pitches this year — you guessed it, they’ve cost themselves as much by swinging. In every full season since the advent of pitch tracking in 2008, swings have cost offenses at least 6,000 runs. It’s just a fact — hitters swing too frequently.

José Iglesias has probably never heard this advice. He’s in the midst of one of the swing-happiest seasons of recent memory, and he’s doing it in exactly the way that worries you — a mountain of chases. There’s just one twist — it hasn’t sunk him just yet, despite everything I said up above, and it’s fascinating seeing him survive.

The top of the chase rate leaderboard is filled with powerful hitters. Salvador Perez leads the way so far, with a 49.1% swing rate on pitches outside the zone. Luis Robert is in second. Javier Báez is in the top 10, as is Nick Castellanos. I don’t mean to say that you can’t be a good hitter when you get fooled that often — all of the batters I named are having good years. They’re producing in a particular way, though: plenty of misses, but loud contact when they do connect. Read the rest of this entry »

2021 must be the year for bizarro no-hitters. First, Joe Musgrove threw the first no-no in Padres history and was just a hit batsmen away from a perfect game. Likewise with Carlos Rodón’s no-hitter — one Roberto Pérez-sized foot away from perfection. Madison Bumgarner threw a seven-inning no-hitter that wasn’t officially a no-hitter. On Wednesday afternoon, John Means became the third pitcher to throw an official no-hitter this year, facing just 27 Mariners and coming oh so close to perfection.

A fan unfamiliar with the minutiae of the baseball rule book might wonder why Means’s dominant start wasn’t considered a perfect game. After all, he faced the minimum number of batters without allowing a walk, hit-by-pitch, or an error. For Means, his dalliance with perfection was thwarted by a wild pitch on a third strike, allowing Sam Haggerty to reach base. He was the 12th pitcher to face 27 batters in a no-hitter without throwing a perfect game. It was the first no-hitter in Major League history where the only baserunner reached on a dropped third strike.

Rule 5.05(a)(2) is an oddity that has lived on in the baseball rulebook for centuries. It’s a relic of a time when strikeout and walks didn’t exist and the batter simply had three attempts to hit the ball. After their third try, the ball was considered in play and the batter could attempt to run to first base to avoid the out. As the game evolved over time, and strikeouts were introduced, this archaic rule lived on, one that, in this author’s opinion, doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the modern game.

That dropped third strike rule was the only thing separating Means from the first perfect game since Félix Hernández threw his in 2012. That it happened in the third inning made it completely innocuous during the run of play. Haggerty was thrown out attempting to steal second a few pitches later and the game moved on. Except Means retired the next 19 batters in a row and that seemingly benign event became the only blemish on his otherwise perfect afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

What a month it has been for pitchers. We witnessed no-hitters by Joe Musgrove, Carlos Rodón and, just yesterday, John Means. Corbin Burnes threw a major-league record number of strikeouts without issuing a walk (49 punch outs and counting, though Burnes is currently sidelined). And Shane Bieber has pitched a multitude of double-digit strikeout games by. Oh, and Jacob deGrom and Gerrit Cole are just toying with hitters. On the flip side, it’s been a dismal start at the plate for most of the game’s hitters, though there are a few exceptions (here’s looking at you, Mike Trout and Vladimir Guerrero Jr.). Last week, Brendan Gawlowski covered April’s .232 league-wide batting average, an historic low. A combination of the highest strikeout rate on record and a below-average BABIP made the first month of the season one to forget for fans of offense and batted balls.

According to an anonymous GM recently quoted in The Athletic, the root of the league’s hitting woes is simple: “Pitching is too good.” The league-wide strikeout rate has been on the rise for several years now, but to see the rate jump like it has in the season’s first month is alarming and worth investigating. Are pitchers just getting better? Are hitters selling out for the long ball? It’s probably a combination of both. To dissect the strikeout problem, let’s look at how batters are striking out and what it reveals about how they are being pitched.

Not all strikeouts are created equal. To start, there are three ways a pitcher can earn a strike: a called strike, a swinging strike, and a foul ball (to keep it simple, I’m considering bunt attempts swings here). Going back to the 2015 season, a clear trend has set in.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Orioles ace John Means pitching a no-hitter and the dropped-third-strike rule that prevented him from having a perfect game, Tony La Russa’s latest managerial miscues, an umpire admitting he guessed at a call, the Yankees turning their season around after a slow start and the perils of small-sample team performance, heckling the Astros, Dylan Cease, Huascar Ynoa, and good and bad arguments for and against the DH, whether the zombie-runner rule leads to more or fewer balls being put in play, the Twins’ struggles in Manfredball games, and whether fans are being cheated by seven-inning games, plus a Meet a Major Leaguer on Angels utility man Jose Rojas and Brewers pitcher Alec Bettinger (and, indirectly, 19th-century Milwaukee catcher Alamazoo Jennings).

Audio intro: Sloan, "She Says What She Means"
Audio outro: Badfinger, "Perfection"

Link to video of Means no-hitter
Link to video of dropped third strike
Link to Sam on dropped third strikes
Link to MLB.com on dropped third strikes
Link to SABR on dropped third strikes
Link to James Fegan on La Russa
Link to Angel Hernandez play/quote
Link to story about Astros taunts
Link to Cease highlights video
Link to video of Ynoa’s grand slam
Link to Ben on the DH
Link to Ben on player talent over time
Link to story on Rojas
Link to BP on Bettinger
Link to MLB.com on Bettinger
Link to story on Alamazoo Jennings

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In past years, I’ve produced Daily Prospect Notes like this four times a week during the minor league regular season, combing through the box scores once all the games are complete and writing up a handful of the players who had great games for the following morning. While I expect others at the site will contribute to DPN this year, I’m starting the year off by experimenting with a new format. Here I’ve screen recorded myself going through the box scores. Rather than whittle down the notable performers to five or six guys, now you get to hear me talk through a lot more players. It’s not as swift as a quick, five-minute skim but it disseminates more info to our readers with less work for me. It also gives you a glimpse into the process by which I start to flag new names for analysis.

The way I talk about players’ backgrounds may evolve to suit readers more precisely as I do more of these, or I may just return to writing them like I used to. For now, please accept this maiden voyage and the recent minor league video I shot here in Arizona. Read the rest of this entry »

With a revamped lineup, rotation, and front office, the Mets were supposed to rank among the NL’s top teams, ideally while offering at least somewhat less dysfunction than during the Wilpon family’s tenure as owners. Given an offense that has wheezed its way to an NL-low 3.30 runs per game as the team has stumbled to an 11-12 start, however, the Mets’ brass decided to shake things up by firing hitting coaches Chili Davis and Tom Slater after Monday night’s 6-5 loss to the Cardinals. The pair have been replaced by Hugh Quattlebaum, previously the Mets’ minor league director of hitting development, and Kevin Howard, their director of player development. You may be shocked to learn that this move did not come off smoothly.

It’s not the fault of Davis, who was in his third season as the Mets’ hitting coach, or Slater, in his fourth season as the assistant hitting coach, that key newcomers Francisco Lindor and James McCann and holdovers such as Dominic Smith and Jeff McNeil have all underperformed on the offensive side. The latter duo had previously thrived under Davis and Slater, and currently Pete Alonso and Brandon Nimmo are knocking the stuffing out of the ball. Scapegoating coaches is a time-honored tradition by struggling teams, however. If you can’t fire the players…

The timing of the dismissals was curious, to say the least. The Mets had scored 18 runs over their previous three games, two of them wild weekend wins over the Phillies, snapping out of a skid during which they had scored just seven runs over their previous five games against the Nationals and Red Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

Cole Wilcox started to say “two-seamer” when bringing up the fastball he threw at the University of Georgia. The 21-year-old Tampa Bay Rays prospect then reversed course and called it a sinker, which it really wasn’t. Featuring mostly arm-side run, the high-velocity offering got only a modicum of depth. Given the grip, that kind of came with the territory. More on that in a moment.

Wilcox was selected in the third round of the 2020 draft by San Diego, who subsequently shipped the right-hander to the Rays as part of the Blake Snell deal. Seen as a potential first-rounder last summer — signability questions caused the sophomore-eligible draftee to drop — Wilcox spent time at the Padres alternate site prior to changing organizations in December. It was there that he restructured an arsenal that now comprises a two-seamer, a slider, a changeup, and a work-in-progress four-seamer.

Which brings us to the heater he’d featured in the SEC. Regardless of how one might define it, it’s now part of his past.

“It used to be a four-seam sinker,” explained Wilcox, who is beginning the current campaign with the Low-A Charleston River Dogs. “Really, the only thing good about it was that it was hard. That’s what I threw in college, but since I’ve been in pro ball, I’ve switched to a two-seam. It gets a lot more movement, a lot more depth.” Read the rest of this entry »