Three 19-year-old pitchers rank prominently on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list. Simeon Woods Richardson is most notable, at No. 2, while Adam Kloffenstein and Kendall Williams are 12th and 13th respectively. Right-handers all, each possesses a high ceiling, yet is years away from progressing to the big-league level.

Their developmental situations are currently quite different. Woods Richardson is in Toronto’s 60-man player pool, and thus is at the club’s alternative training site. Kloffenstein is playing independent ball back home in Texas. Williams is also home, but doing the bulk of his throwing in side sessions, relying on a Rapsodo rather than the reactions of opposing hitters to gauge his progress.

I recently asked Blue Jays farm director Gil Kim how the organization is handling player development sans a minor-league season. Prefacing his answer by saying the top priority is ensuring the health and safety of all involved, he said there are a lot of Zoom calls, and that each player has a small support staff that checks in on a regular basis. A show-your-work component exists within many of the exchanges. Player plans being paramount, videos of the work being done are being shared. As Kim explained, “There’s more of a technical and mechanical focus for a lot of those players, especially the younger guys who are not at the alternate training site right now.”

In that respect, Woods Richardson is fortunate. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. is the superstar baseball needs in 2020. Countering the multitude of anxieties that come with enjoying baseball amid the coronavirus pandemic, his towering home runs, bat flips, and celebratory dancing are as pure a distillation of the joy and excitement as the game can provide right now. Limited to 84 games in his rookie season due to injuries, the buoyant 21-year-old shortstop is off to a red-hot start, propelling an engaging Padres team to a 10-7 record while lighting up social media along the way. Unless you’re an opposing pitcher, it’s nearly impossible not to break out in a smile watching Tatis play.

On Sunday, Tatis crossed paths with a hanging curveball from the Diamondbacks’ Madison Bumgarner. Left fielder David Peralta couldn’t even be bothered to turn around to view the damage:

Admittedly, it wasn’t Bumgarner’s day — he served up a career-high four home runs in just two innings before departing due to back spasms — but it ran Tatis’ streak of consecutive games with a homer to four. The streak ended on Monday night at the hands of the Dodgers, who held him to 1-for-4 with an infield single, but the Padres’ 2-1 victory pulled them within 1 1/2 games of the NL West lead. Read the rest of this entry »

McBride, British Columbia, population 616, is a town that has lived and died by the railway. Nestled in the Robson Valley, in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies’ highest point, it is a town that draws life from the railway. And when I stopped there, as I did last week on my way home from the wilderness, it was the features of the railway that immediately drew my focus. There was the train station, which was also the cafe, which was also the gift shop. An antique caboose with a bright new red coat of paint sat outside — a plaque from the person who donated it, a longtime railway worker, described the caboose as the subject of a lifelong dream. There were the train tracks, and on them, the trains, all ringing bells and screeching wheels, thousands of gallons of gas in tanks heading south.

But just across the street from all of that, something else caught my eye: a ballpark. Of all things for there to be in this town, there was a ballpark.

The grass was dry and weedy, and a lone crow picked at the infield dirt. Tall, shiny fences loomed along the outfield, and along the baselines were two wooden dugouts for the absent teams to shelter in, blue-roofed and mesh-windowed. Behind home was a small set of wooden bleachers, the same chipping blue as the roofs of the dugouts. A sign with the flags of B.C. and Canada, rippling in the alpine wind, announced: BILL CLARK MEMORIAL PARK.

I stood there under the sign for quite a while, just me and the crow and the memory of Bill Clark. A thousand kilometers away from home with no one else in sight, baseball can still find you in the form of a field and an arrangement of dirt.

***

The blog Ballparks Around the World posted its first image in July of 2016, a picture of Dodger Stadium. Since then, it has accumulated 202 pages of content. Essentially all of the blog’s posts follow the same format: an unsourced image of a ballpark, followed by a caption including only the ballpark’s name and its location. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about a realization about fake crowd noise discomfort, a disastrous start to a Derek Holland outing that recalled an earlier podcast discussion, whether Fernando Tatís Jr. will ever have a moment as remarkable as Fernando Tatís’s two-grand-slam inning, outfielders showing up pitchers, and more, then bring back the “Is This Guy Good?” Game, in which they attempt to guess whether randomly drawn relievers are having good seasons so far.

Audio intro: Boat, "Be As Good As You Want to Be"
Audio outro: The Hold Steady, "You Did Good Kid"

Link to Adell video
Link to episode with interview about fake crowd noise
Link to story about drone delay
Link to episode with home runs hypothetical
Link to Holland game play-by-play
Link to Tatís’s two-grand-slam inning
Link to Bumgarner/Tatís home run video
Link to first “Is This Guy Good?” Game episode
Link to Is This Guy Good? website
Link to Ben on the low BABIP mystery

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Heading into this season, the NL West looked like a three-team race. That’s not completely fair — it looked like a one-team race for first with two other solid teams — but with a 16-team playoff field, somewhere between two and three teams from each division are headed to the playoffs, leaving it a three-team race for either two or three playoff spots.

Fifteen-ish games later, there are indeed three NL West teams in playoff position. The Dodgers are there, of course, and the Padres — no surprises here. But then there are the Colorado Rockies, 11-4 and leading the National League. It’s early — although with a quarter of the season already in the books for many teams, how early is up for debate. But regardless of the time of year, the Rockies are in first place, and I wanted to learn more.

One thing I could do to learn more is look at the Rockies’ individual performances, particularly on the pitching side. Charlie Blackmon is off to a hot start, though looking at a player with a .500 BABIP is rarely compelling 15 games into his season. For whatever reason, neither of those paths grabbed me. I thought I’d take a look at whether we could have expected this, and how surprised we should be. Read the rest of this entry »

“They already have their own helmets.” — NASA recruiter, The Right Stuff

When word arose that the Marlins were so desperate for players in the wake of a coronavirus outbreak that sidelined more than half of their Opening Day roster — and threatened the viability of the remainder of the 2020 season — that they were calling up an Olympic speed skater, it felt like the scene in The Right Stuff where Jeff Goldbum and Harry Shearer pitch President Dwight Eisenhower, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, and NASA bigwigs on the possibility of using race car drivers, circus acrobats, and other daredevils as astronauts. “Besides turning left, I don’t think there’s much similarity,” said 30-year-old second baseman Eddy Alvarez of the similarity between baseball and short track speed skating, the sport in which he won a silver medal at the 2014 Winter Olympics as part of Team USA’s 5,000 meter relay team.

One of 17 players added to the Marlins’ active roster at various points last week as the team returned to play following the postponement of seven games due to the outbreak, Alvarez debuted on Wednesday against the Orioles, becoming the first Winter Olympian ever to reach the majors, and the first non-baseball Olympian to play in the majors since Jim Thorpe (1913-19). He entered Sunday having gone 0-for-9 with five strikeouts, but collected his first big league hit off Met ace Jacob deGrom, a hot smash that third baseman J.D. Davis could only stop. It was one of his three hits in the game, accompanied by another infield single off deGrom, and a double off Edwin Díaz; Alvarez reached on an error in his other plate appearance, and also added a stolen base and a great diving play at second base. Have a day, Eddy.

Despite Alvarez’s banner day, the Marlins lost, 4-2, but even so, a team that went 57-105 last year finished the weekend with a 7-3 record, putting them into a tie with the Braves atop the NL East. Just what in the name of Don Mattingly’s sideburns is going on?

By now, the contours of the Marlins’ mess, the largest outbreak on any team to date, are at least somewhat familiar. Just before their Opening Day game against the Phillies on July 24, they placed catcher Jorge Alfaro on the Injured List for undisclosed reasons. Then, just before playing the Phillies two days later, MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that starting pitcher José Ureña was scratched due to a positive test, and soon afterwards, he added first baseman/designated hitter Garret Cooper and right fielder Harold Ramirez to the list of positives. Even so, the team went ahead with the game; it was initially reported that they did so after deciding to play via a group text centered around shortstop Miguel Rojas (Phillies general manager Matt Klentak clarified that the decision came from MLB). A day later, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that eight more players and two coaches had tested positive, and the hits kept coming; by July 31, the count included a staggering 18 total players — more than half the active roster. Read the rest of this entry »

Except for a few who were plucked from the Mexican League, signing bonus info for all 1,300-ish players I consider to be prospects can now be found on The Board for your research, reference, and perusal.

The current chronological and structural limitations of The Board leave two holes in today’s chunk. First, this is not yet a comprehensive historical record of signing bonuses. That’s a possible long-term feature — one that will require some retroactive Board-building — but for now, there are some important flashpoint bonuses from recent drafts (Brady Aiken’s, Mark Appel’s) or deals that illuminate important and consequential trends in the amateur market (Stephen Strasburg’s, Josh Bell’s) you can’t view in the same space as recent pillars.

Second, for the time being, as players graduate, they’ll take their bonus amounts with them. This violates a “don’t take information away from readers” principle I try to adhere to and makes it more important to eventually build a catalog of this stuff that can be easily sortable, searchable, and compared to the current prospect environment.

In addition to the new info, I’ve made a few changes to the rankings on the pro side of The Board based on big league action. Without any minor league games or a reliable way to source info from the offsite camps, the big leagues are where changes are most visible right now. Scouts from other teams are not currently allowed at the alternate sites, and teams do not yet have a campsite data-sharing agreement in place. As a result, any dope coming from the campsites is coming from internal team sources, which creates an incentive/objectivity issue for prospect writers. Sources are also harder to protect because few personnel have camp access. With all that in mind, let’s touch on today’s changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Higashioka never walks alone. The 30-year-old New York Yankees catcher is an ardent Liverpool FC supporter, having adopted the English Premier League team in 2007. A California prep at the time, Higashioka “stumbled across some Steven Gerrard highlight videos on YouTube” — this shortly after Liverpool had lost a Champions League final — and the die was cast. He’s been hooked ever since.

There is irony to his infatuation. Higashioka was drafted and signed by the Yankees in 2008, and two years later, Liverpool FC was purchased by the John Henry-led Fenway Sports Group. Yes, Higashioka lives and dies with a soccer club that operates within the Red Sox umbrella.

He’s not apologizing. Pointing out that Henry was once a minority owner of the Yankees, Higashioka stated that supporting a baseball team and supporting Liverpool are two completely different things. Moreover, he “started liking [Liverpool] before the Red Sox owners bought them; it’s kind of the luck of the draw who owns a team.”

A fair-weather fan he’s not. Along with staying true during the downtimes — “the Roy Hodgson days wren’t great” — Higashioka has gone out of his way to watch matches. Greenwich Mean Time and the Pacific Time Zone differ by eight hours.

“Living in California, I would meet up with the Orange County Liverpool Supporters Club,” explained the Huntington Beach native. “I remember an opening-week match where I met them at the pub at 4 a.m. to watch a game against Stoke.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a bad fun fact on a baseball broadcast, a case of copycat pitching involving Jake Diekman and Chaz Roe, how MLB may amend eligibility for the Rookie of the Year award in 2021, a Wade LeBlanc balk and why balks remain mystifying and debatable, plus a Stat Blast on the longest hitless innings. Then (36:52) they talk to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about what he learns about prospects after they’re promoted, how teams are approaching prospect promotions in a shortened, pandemic-endangered season, why prospect evaluators missed on Shane Bieber, what to watch for with Luis Robert, Jo Adell, Nate Pearson, and several other top prospects who’ve made their MLB debuts, 2019 rookie arrivals who are having impressive sophomore seasons, how shorthanded teams like the Astros and Marlins are restocking their rosters, how teams might handle information deficits at the trade deadline, and how prospect evaluators are doing their jobs in the absence of minor league games.

Audio intro: The Posies, "It’s Great to Be Here Again"
Audio interstitial: The Rutles, "We’ve Arrived (And to Prove it We’re Here)"
Audio outro: The Weakerthans, "A New Name for Everything"

Link to Marlins broadcast “fun” fact
Link to Diekman/Roe story
Link to Stark on rookie eligibility
Link to LeBlanc balk tweet
Link to Sam on balk rules
Link to Jon Bois’s balk rules
Link to real balk rules
Link to Facebook group discussion of LeBlanc balk
Link to Mariners balk commercial
Link to Budweiser balk commercial
Link to Zach Nahlik’s Stat Blast song cover
Link to Stat Blast spreadsheet
Link to 1962 Mets-Dodgers play-by-play
Link to 2008 A’s-Orioles play-by-play
Link to 1994 Mariners-Yankees play-by-play
Link to Bois’s Mariners Dorktown documentary
Link to Ben Clemens on Bieber’s new pitch
Link to Craig Edwards on Luis Robert
Link to FanGraphs prospect rankings board
Link to Baseball Prospectus “Call-Up” posts
Link to Future Value
Link to Rob Arthur on the 2020 baseball

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