Last April, the familiar sensations of spring still came around. Birds chirped at their full-throated volume, flowers bloomed, and pollen never stopped making me sneeze. One thing was noticeably absent though, enough so to make me question whether I actually knew what month it was. An April without baseball cast a strange and ill-fitting emptiness on an already bleak situation. No games to watch, no checking the schedule, and no bus rides downtown, surrounded by similarly clad folk, all of us on our way to watch the hometown nine.

This April, conversations of “getting back to normal” are dominating the zeitgeist. With an end table full of masks, a dry social calendar, and boxes upon boxes of takeout still piling up, I didn’t totally feel like we were getting back to normal until Opening Day. The yearly tradition of waking up on the season’s first day, staring at the slate of games with pulsating heart eyes, and settling in for the first 10 AM game on the West Coast, is something I cherish more than my own birthday. As many people can likely attest, missing out on that made it feel like last year didn’t even count.

It’s not just the act of watching baseball that delivered recognizable comfort, though. It’s also the minutiae of the broadcasts. Chuckling at Keith Hernandez saying “fundies”, or screaming “Ronald Torreyes!” at the Yankees’ in-game trivia question, is to remember what it was like to live our lives before they were halted. Sure, we eventually got those things last year, but to have them back on schedule, they way they always used to be, was the sweetest balm baseball could provide. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: April!

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Dan Szymborski: April.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Aprilteen

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Should be working now!

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This is Chet’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. He believes data is the most compelling storyteller and loves using analytics to attempt to demystify the game of baseball. He previously covered the Colorado Rockies for Purple Row. A graduate of Georgia Tech, he had the opportunity to participate in Danny Hall’s walk-on tryout in 2003, though he apparently failed to blow the legendary coach away with his 76 mph fastball. Chet lives in Lakewood, Colorado with his wife and two children, all of whom tolerate way too much baseball talk at the dinner table.

Trevor Williams headed into spring training at a pivotal moment in his career. Following two solid seasons of work in the Pirates’ rotation, he experienced a somewhat delayed sophomore slump in 2019. His performance declined significantly. He finished the season with an ERA of 5.38 and a FIP of 5.12 both more than a run higher than the average from the previous two seasons. His campaign to bounce back in 2020 never took off and he ended up on the wrong side of the small sample coin flip, ending the year with a 6.30 FIP and -0.4 WAR, career lows. He was designated for assignment in November.

Fresh off trading their former ace, Yu Darvish, the Chicago Cubs scooped Williams up on a low-risk, one-year deal for $2.5 million. From the Cubs’ point of view, the upside is clear. While Williams has had an awful go of it recently, he is only 28 years old and was once a capable fixture in a major league rotation. Williams (in the parlance of our times) shoved throughout spring training and earned himself the position as No. 4 starter in the Cubs’ rotation, but the question remains as to whether or not he can perform as he once did in 2017 and ’18.

Let’s rewind the tape a bit. Williams had a brief cup of coffee (one start and 12.2 total innings) in 2016 before starting the ’17 season in Pittsburgh’s bullpen. In the season lead-up, our own Eric Longenhagen had this to say of Williams:

“A lead-armed sinkerballer who dominated the International League with a low-90s fastball/sinker combo that he’d run up to 94, Williams made too many mistakes in the zone with that fastball and below-average changeup in his few big-league innings. He has an above-average slider and that pitch, down and in, is his best weapon against lefties. The command is going to need to come here if Williams is going to be more than a fifth- or sixth-starter type of arm.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Brown has helium. Under the radar until recently, the 22-year-old right-hander raised eyebrows during Fall Instructional League, and he continued to do so this spring with the Astros. A power arsenal is the reason why. Houston’s No. 3 prospect according to MLB Pipeline (our own rankings are forthcoming; he was ninth on last year’s list), Brown features a four-pitch mix that includes an explosive mid-90s heater and a hammer curveball.

His background befits the low profile he brought with him to pro ball. A Detroit native, Brown played collegiately at Division II Wayne State University, and he lasted until the penultimate pick of the fifth round of the 2019 draft. That he didn’t hear his name called earlier is yet another part of his underdog story.

Brown — currently at Houston’s alternate site awaiting the start of the minor-league campaign — addressed the path he’s taken, and the plus pitches that promise to take him to the top, shortly before the Astros broke camp to start the major-league season.

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Laurila: You played at Wayne State. How did that come to be?

Hunter Brown: “I had the opportunity to do a little bit of catching, and hopefully pitch, at Eastern Michigan as well. But I was told by coach Ryan Kelley, over at Wayne State, that I’d be able to come in and play as a freshman. I knew I wasn’t going to get that opportunity at Eastern Michigan — I’d probably be catching bullpens and redshirting my freshman year — and I kind of wanted to go somewhere and play right away. I also probably would have gone to Wayne State for academics if I wasn’t going to end up playing college baseball, so it all worked out. I really liked downtown Detroit, so it was a great fit for me.”

Laurila: When did you start realizing you had a legitimate shot to play pro ball?

Brown: “Well, I wanted to play pro ball from as young as I can remember, but probably my sophomore-year summer when I was with the Bethesda Big Train in the Cal Ripken Summer League. That’s when I started really believing, because I played with some guys from the SEC, and power-five schools, and had a pretty good summer. That’s where I thought I made that jump and would be able to play pro ball someday.”

Laurila: What clicked for you? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the St. Louis Cardinals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on my lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

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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, a prospect trade, and minor league co-op action in Arizona. Remember, prospect rankings can be found on The Board.

Kevin’s Notes

Waldy Arias, 3B, Campbell: 3-for-9, 3 BB, K, 2 SB, 2 HBP

If you are here for hardcore draft info, skip to the next paragraph. If you want to have fun for a minute, stick around. Arias is a little junior third baseman at a mid-major program who is slugging .290. Nobody is going to print a magnet with his name on it come July. My question is why does he have so many enemies? With two more hit by pitches over the weekend, Arias has now been hit 16 times in 21 games. That’s nearly once every six plate appearances, which was his exact rate last year, when he got hit 12 times in 15 games. Arias is a pesky slap hitter who crowds the dish. His high front elbow hangs out over the plate and the overall setup reminds me a bit of a mini-Carlos Quentin, who took a fair number of pitches to the body in his career. With access to some of the video and data tools pro teams have, I was able to click a few buttons and watch all 16 HBP. Here are the results:

1. Curveball: Foot
2. Slider: Leg
3. Fastball: Thigh
4. Fastball: Thigh
5. Slider: Foot
6. Fastball: Thigh
7. Fastball: Elbow
8. Fastball: Elbow
9. Slider: Head
10. Fastball: Elbow
11. Changeup: Shoulder
12. Fastball: Back
13. Slider: Elbow
14. Fastball: Elbow
15. Changeup: Hand
16. Slider: Shoulder

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Just a few weeks ago, Julian Merryweather was fighting for a spot on the Blue Jays Opening Day roster. A back injury suffered early in spring training pushed his Grapefruit League debut back to mid-March and he struggled to get up to speed in such a compressed timeframe. But then Kirby Yates went down with an elbow injury that would require Tommy John, a couple of other pitchers were sidelined to start the season, and Merryweather just barely snuck onto Toronto’s 26-man roster on March 31.

The very next day, he was pitching in the 10th inning in Yankee Stadium, trying to hold a one-run lead on Opening Day. He came one pitch away from throwing an immaculate inning and ended up striking out the side to secure the win. Three days later, he was thrown into the fire again, this time being asked to protect a two-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. He recorded two more strikeouts in that outing and earned the second save of his career.

When I wrote about what the Blue Jays bullpen might look like without Yates a few weeks ago, Merryweather wasn’t even on my radar. Jordan Romano and Rafael Dolis have definitely been in the mix for high-leverage work — they threw in the eighth and ninth of that Opening Day victory paving the way for Merryweather’s appearance in the 10th. The quality of Merryweather’s stuff has been a revelation and has helped him emphatically declare his spot in the bullpen pecking order.

Merryweather was acquired by the Blue Jays in August of 2018 when Toronto traded Josh Donaldson to Cleveland right before the waiver trade deadline. It was viewed as a light return at the time since Merryweather had blown out his arm during the previous season and was in the middle of rehabbing from Tommy John surgery. He got back on the mound in 2019 but another arm injury limited him to just six minor league innings. Last season, he made his major league debut in September, showing impressive velocity and a starter’s repertoire out of the bullpen, but another elbow issue cut his season short after just 13 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Carmen’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Carmen is an engineer living in the Bay Area. Born and raised in Connecticut, his inherited Yankees fandom (yes, he can hear all of your grumbles) and curiosity about math and science combined to foster a fascination with how players contribute to run scoring and prevention, as did growing up reading the venerable pages of sabermetric havens such as FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, and Beyond the Boxscore. The accessibility of pitch-by-pitch Statcast data has allowed him to dig deeper into player and team tendencies and examine how each approaches the opposition, which he has written about at his own website, Sabermetric Musings. He hopes to use his skills and interests to contribute to the baseball discourse at large, as well as the website that played such a big part in making him the baseball observer he is today.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is a supremely talented hitter. In this season’s early going, he has already hit a ball 114.1 mph, swatted a home run, and has a couple of RBI to his name. Prior to his call-up in 2019, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel rated him as the best prospect in baseball with a 70 Future Value. If you go to The Board, only five other players since 2017 have received such a grade: Wander Franco (now an 80), MacKenzie Gore, Gavin Lux, Yoán Moncada, and Shohei Ohtani. His specific combination of future tool grades, consisting of a 70 hit tool, 70 game power, and 80 raw power, is unrivaled in the dataset, a unique blend of elite bat-to-ball skills and game-changing power. At 19, he posted a 203 wRC+ in Double-A and a 175 wRC+ in Triple-A. The latter is especially impressive given that the average age of a Triple-A player is 28.

With those things in mind, you might say that what we have seen from the young phenom thus far is a bit disappointing. In 757 plate appearances through his age-21 season, Guerrero has posted a 107 wRC+. That places him 112th amongst all hitters since 2019 (for players with at least 500 plate appearances), sandwiched between the aging Robinson Canó and Omar Narváez. But I would note that context is key. Guerrero is one of only 10 players to receive 500 plate appearances through age 21. On that list, he ranks seventh in wRC+ behind Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr., Cody Bellinger, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Carlos Correa. One could argue that four of those guys are on a Hall of Fame trajectory while the fifth (Correa) has been one of the top talents in the sport when he is not struggling with injury.

Guerrero is in rare company given the amount of big-league time he has logged at such a young age; that is an accomplishment in and of itself. But we are still left wanting more. How can he unlock his generational tools and become the hitter we hope he can be? I would argue the most glaring potential adjustment is to his swing plane. In 2019 and ’20, Guerrero posted groundball rates of 50.4% and 54.6%, respectively. The following represents his rolling average groundball rate in 25 groundball samples:

A whopping 68.5% of these samples yielded groundball rates above the major league average. Over the past two seasons, major league hitters have produced a .218 wOBA and .244 BABIP on groundballs compared to a .500 wOBA and .344 BABIP on batted balls in the air. Among the group of players with 500 plate appearances the past two seasons, Guerrero ranks 15th out of 226 players in the cohort. The frustrating part of this phenomenon is that he hits the ball exceptionally hard, to the point where if he put the ball in the air at closer to league average rates he would be a candidate to place amongst the league leaders in home runs and overall production.

To get a better idea of how Guerrero compares to sluggers with his prodigious power, I pulled the batted ball data from Baseball Savant (via Bill Petti’s baseballR package) for a select few right-handed hitters who posted comparable maximum exit velocities to Guerrero in ’19 and 2020. This list includes the following:

Max exit velocity is our best indication of a player’s raw power. We do not have to worry about a sufficient sample of plate appearances to see how that power plays in the game; all we care about is how hard the player can put the ball in play if he makes optimal contact. You, the reader, might gripe that it is difficult to use max exit velocity to gauge a player’s power. How do we know this is truly the hardest he can hit the ball? To that I say, yes, smart reader we definitely do not know if a player’s maximum exit velocity is actually the hardest he will hit the ball. But, I will say, we can reasonably confident that we are in range fairly quickly, based on research from Alex Chamberlain.

The main comparison I am interested in is the differences in approximate attack angle between these players. The concept was outlined in great detail by Jason Ochart at Driveline in this 2018 post, but the TLDR is it is the vertical angle (which is associated with the launch angle of a batted ball) of the bat as it goes to impact the baseball. Hitters can measure it with bat sensors or by parsing video.

Unfortunately, we do not have this information for major league hitters in games because they do not walk up to the plate with sensors on their bats. Instead of throwing our collective hands up, however, we can approximate attack angle with the data we do have access to. And fortunately, that has already been done. Back in 2017, David Marshall wrote an amazing piece on the Community Research blog here at FanGraphs reverse engineering attack angle from Statcast data. He concluded his post with an elegant linear equation approximating attack angle based on the launch angle of the top 20% of a player’s hardest hit batted balls. Anthony Shattell has also posted about data of this nature in the past, and I would highly-recommend scrolling through his feed for some batted ball related visuals; he uses the top 10% of hardest hit balls for his attack angle approximations. For this analysis, I arbitrarily took the top 5%. One might quibble with such a choice, but I think it gets the same point across.

Here are the estimated attack angles for the hitters in the table above based on my filtering criteria:

Stanton has the flattest swing in this group with an estimated attack angle of 8.74 degrees. Guerrero is even lower at 8.71 degrees. Stanton and Judge stick out in that they hit a ton of home runs but have noticeably flatter swings then the rest of the group. They make up for those flat swings by hitting the ball harder than anybody else in baseball. In the Statcast era (since 2015), Stanton has hit 28 balls over 118 mph, the most in the majors. Judge sits second with 10 (he was not a full-time regular until 2017). Third, despite his lack of experience in the big leagues, is Guerrero. If you just look at 2019 and ’20, Vlad is tied for the most with Stanton. Guerrero and his power are in rare company. What’s more, Stanton and Judge have career strikeout rates of 28.1% and 31.4%. Guerrero’s sits at just 17.0%. Even though he doesn’t have quite the same amount of juice on contact as the Yankees outfielders, he makes up for it by putting the ball in play much more often, albeit on the ground. Stanton and Judge have career groundball rates of 42.2% and 38.5%, respectively, with the former about league average and the latter about a standard deviation below it.

Guerrero is still a step behind Stanton and Judge with regards to power, so any large increase in extra base hits (where he has been slightly above league average in terms of the percentage of his total plate appearances) will have to come from either hitting the ball harder or putting more balls in the air. In my own research, I found that maximum exit velocity peaks around age 26 and average exit velocity on balls in the air peaks around 30. So maybe there is some power Guerrero can still squeeze out of his bat. Given that he is already inside the top 1% in raw power, however, I am dubious of how much room for growth there is in that department. What about swing plane? There is precedence for young hitters changing their distribution of batted balls.

More often than not, these young talented hitters saw performance boosts when putting the ball in the air more. That is not to say Guerrero will definitely see a bump in production if he focuses on hitting the ball in the air. It could mess with his swing for all I know. But I do believe that there is room for him to add some loft in his swing, even at the expense of more whiffs. His strikeout rate is close to six percentage points below the league average. There is a trade-off to be had there that can make him the fearsome hitter we all believe he can be.

Guerrero is still very young and has a lot of room to grow as a hitter. The projection systems seem to agree. The FanGraphs Depth Charts projections see him putting up a .360 wOBA in 2021, 23rd in baseball. THE BAT X, which to my knowledge most explicitly leverages existing Statcast data, is even more optimistic. It sees a .376 wOBA in Vlad’s future, placing him 11th in the league and sandwiching him in between Yordan Alvarez and Judge.

When you consider his pedigree coming into the majors, his high-end bat control (as evidenced by his strikeout rate), and his nearly unmatched power, I still think these projection systems are a little light on what to expect from Vlad Jr. going forward. His combination of skills should put him in the conversation to be among the best hitters in baseball, the type who is in the MVP conversation throughout his 20s. Let’s hope he can make the necessary adjustments and grow into that kind of player starting this season.

The long Rougned Odor era in Texas has ended. On Tuesday, the Texas Rangers traded their second baseman, the incumbent since 2014, to the New York Yankees for minor league outfielders Antonio Cabello and Josh Stowers. The trade represents the final dismantling of the team’s longtime Odor-Elvis Andrus double play combo, a process that began last September when the cellar-bound team benched both players.

The interests are clear for both sides of this minor trade. The Rangers had already all but moved on from Odor despite the two seasons remaining on the six-year, $49.5 million contract he agreed to before the 2017 season. The second baseman didn’t even make the team’s final roster cuts this spring; he was designated for assignment last week. So getting two players in return for a guy they were willing to let go for free had to be attractive to the Rangers. In 2017, Odor was still just 23 and coming off two very solid seasons as the starter, albeit with some notable flaws. Odor’s power was always compelling, but his glovework was inconsistent, and though his contact rates weren’t that lousy, he still had abysmal strikeout-to-walk ratios. Odor never really developed an ability to leverage plate discipline into actual performance. For example, where the league tends to slug about .650 after 1-0 and 2-0 counts, Odor was only about 50 points above his career slugging percentage in these situations.

ZiPS didn’t anticipate much growth from Odor from age-23 on due to these issues, but thought he would at least plateau as a low-OBP hitter with excellent power for a second baseman and a below-average glove that wasn’t so abysmal as to force a move off the position. Read the rest of this entry »