Below you’ll find a roundup of notable moves from the past few days, as well as future expected moves and a Minor League Report, which includes a list of recent major league debuts, and top prospect promotions. For this column, any lineup regulars, starting pitchers, or late-inning relievers are considered “notable,” meaning that middle relievers, long relievers, and bench players are excluded. You can always find a full list of updated transactions here.

Lineup Regulars

Arizona Diamondbacks
8/24/19: OF David Peralta (AC joint inflammation) placed on 10-Day IL, retroactive to August 24.

For the third time this season, Peralta has been placed on the injured list with a shoulder issue. He’s still managed to slash .275/.343/.461 with 12 homers and 29 doubles in 432 plate appearances, but he has only nine hits in his last 46 at-bats. With the Diamondbacks’ playoff hopes all but gone, they could just decide to shut him down for the year and take a long look at rookie Josh Rojas in the outfield.

Roster Resource

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After struggling for the first few months of the season, both José Ramírez and Cleveland broke out in a big way with Ramírez discovering his old form and Cleveland going on a big run to catch the Minnesota Twins for first place at one point this month. Cleveland couldn’t quite keep up that pace over the last few weeks, falling a few games back of the Twins, but still looked to be in great shape for the wild card race. With news of a broken hamate bone and the resulting surgery for Ramírez, the team is losing their best hitter for the rest of the season, leaving a massive hole in the lineup and at third base. The club’s path to the playoffs just got a lot more narrow.

Just two weeks ago, I discussed the remarkable turnaround Ramírez made in his game, eschewing an approach designed to be beat the shift but costing him power and going back to the pull-heavy, fastball-hunting approach that made him a star in the first place. In the second half of the season, Ramírez has put up a 168 wRC+ to go with 2.3 WAR that ranks behind only Anthony Rendon, José Altuve, Mike Trout, and Ketel Marte among position players. On the season, Ramírez had finally moved his wRC+ up to 100, and with solid baserunning and fielding, he was up to 2.9 WAR on the season. These totals are a huge drop from the 6.4-WAR average he produced over the three previous seasons, but 2019 was still shaping up to be a productive year despite his awful start. Unfortunately, Ramírez isn’t likely to get any more time to improve his numbers further.

One month of any one player isn’t likely to matter a whole lot to a team’s playoff chances over the course of an entire season, but when there’s only 31 games left and the player in question was set to be worth a full win over those 31 days and his substitutes are replacement level, that month can matter a great deal. To provide some sense of what Cleveland loses in terms of projections and playoff odds, here’s where the club stood after Saturday’s games compared to where they stand now with Ramírez’s injury factored in. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — They own the majors’ best record since the All-Star break, but the 2019 Mets remain a work in progress. Winners of 27 out of 40 games in the second half, they’ve played themselves back into contention for a postseason berth, and energized Citi Field, but after winning 10 out of their previous 12 series, they spent this past weekend making mistakes, missing opportunities, and ultimately dropping their second series in as many weeks to the Braves — this time via a three-game sweep at home.

In Friday night’s 2-1 loss, the Mets squandered a seven-inning, 13-strikeout gem by Jacob deGrom, who provided the team’s only run of the night on a solo homer, his second of the year. For as well as the reigning NL Cy Young winner pitched, opposite number Mike Foltynewicz — who entered the evening with a 6.09 ERA and a 5.82 FIP, numbers more than double those deGrom — yielded just one other hit besides the homer over his seven innings. The 1-1 tie carried into extra innings, and after the scuffling Edwin Díaz stranded pinch-runner deluxe Billy Hamilton at third base by striking out both Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies in the top of the 10th, the Mets got the winning run to third in the bottom of both the 10th and 11th themselves, but failed to convert; the team went 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position on the night. Ultimately, a 14th-inning single by Hamilton (who entered hitting .211/.275/.269) off Jeurys Familia brought home the deciding run.

In Saturday night’s 9-5 loss, Zack Wheeler was knocked around for his third straight start, putting the Mets into a 4-0 hole by the middle of the third inning. They clawed their way back, and took a 5-4 lead when Pete Alonso walloped a 451-foot three-run homer into the black batters’ eye, tying the franchise’s single-season home run record — 41, previously reached by Todd Hundley (1996) and Carlos Beltran (2006) — and reaching 100 RBI in one fell swoop. Two significant defensive mistakes, an error by third baseman Todd Frazier on a grounder down the line by Francisco Cervelli in the sixth inning, and a lackadaisical relay play by left fielder J.D. Davis in the eighth, both led to runs, while a baserunning out at third base by Jeff McNeil, that after a pair of bunt attempts by hot-hitting Amed Rosario, snuffed a potential sixth-inning rally.

In Sunday’s 2-1 loss, the Mets could do little against Braves starter Dallas Keuchel, who shut them out for seven innings while allowing just four hits, all singles. Steven Matz answered with six innings of two-hit ball, but one of those hits was a Josh Donaldson homer, and the Braves’ third baseman greeted reliever Paul Sewald with another one in the seventh inning. The Mets broke through in the ninth inning against Mark Melancon, albeit on a fielder’s choice off the bat of Frazier that nearly became the team’s fourth double play of the afternoon. Ultimately, the tying run was stranded at second base, the last failure in a 1-for-8 day with runners in scoring position. So it goes. Read the rest of this entry »

Gio Gonzalez is expressive on the mound, there’s no doubt about that. He tends to wear the result of the most recent plate appearance on his face. So if I told you that he threw a 3-2 pitch to Javier Báez, and followed it by looking like this:

What would you think happened? A double off the wall? A home run? Perhaps a smashed line drive that miraculously found a glove?

What if I told you that the pitch was a fastball that ended up here?

Okay, now you have a good guess. You’d make that face too if you walked Javy Báez on an uncompetitive pitch. There’s not much good to say about a pitch that missed the outer edge of the plate, per Statcast, by 13.2 inches.

Ha, I’m joking. It’s Javy Báez. That was a strikeout:

You might think, after that intro, that this is an article that will take issue with Javy Báez’s plate discipline. It is most emphatically not that. This is a paean to Báez’s singular, tremendous talent. Who else in baseball can swing at that pitch and also be a star? Who else can swing at that pitch and even be a major leaguer?

The book on Báez has always been that he has all the power in the world and none of the plate discipline. In the minors, he had unheard-of pop for an elite, up-the-middle defender — the kind of tools prospect evaluators drool over. There was just that one little thing: as his Triple-A manager, Marty Pevey, said when he was called up: “It’ll be a learning curve for Javy. He’ll want to hit every ball 600 feet. He’s such a great competitor.” Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: G’Afternoon!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: If only I had such powers.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Pretty highly. He’s getting a power boost even for power boosts

Read the rest of this entry »

I think there are too many home runs. That’s an aesthetic preference, of course, and one you don’t necessarily need to share to continue with this article. I mention it only to help you understand why I became interested in how many multi-homer games the 2019 season has brought us so far, and whether that number was unusual. The reason is simple: I got sick of hearing about them. One of the first things I do each morning, at least with respect to baseball, is fire up At Bat and watch the first 10-15 highlights of the previous day’s games. I find it’s a good way of keeping up to date, if not with the broad trends shaping the game, then at least with the moments driving that day’s news. And almost every day, I’ll see something like this at or near the top of the highlights list:

Or, at least, I thought it was almost every day. It certainly seemed that way to me. But maybe I’d just developed a severe case of early-onset grumpy-old-man-itis. Maybe my aesthetic preference for fewer home runs was bleeding into my perception of the quantity of multi-home run games. When you hate something, everything about it annoys you, including how much it’s around. So I asked my colleague Sean Dolinar to run some numbers for me (all 2019 stats in this piece are through August 23) and set me straight. And it turns out that even though I absolutely do suffer from grumpy-old-man-itis, I’m not wrong about the number of multi-home run games this year. They’re up — by a lot:

Read the rest of this entry »

For a losing team, the Cincinnati Reds have been busy. It’s not just trading players either, as Cincinnati made one of the biggest deadline moves while many contenders slumbered in near-stasis, picking up Trevor Bauer with an eye towards retooling for the 2020 season. Only three of the eight players in Wednesday’s lineup were also in the lineup on Opening Day: Tucker Barnhart, Eugenio Suárez, and José Iglesias. Chief among the new additions is the recently called-up Aristides Aquino, a big slugger lurking far back from the head of the team prospect lists coming into the season. After a fairly unimpressive minor league career, Aquino has feasted on the major league bouncy ball in 2019, slugging 28 homers in 294 AB in the formerly pitcher-friendly International League and then a shocking 11 homers in just 20 major league games.

Aquino was not some elite prospect finally being called up. The Reds have only received the benefit of getting a look at Aquino because they decided to use their ABs in a now-lost season in a productive way. If the team hadn’t dropped Matt Kemp or traded Yasiel Puig, choosing to go with the known quantity in a mistaken attempt to goose attendance (there’s no evidence this actually works), there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities to assess Aquino or Josh VanMeter or Phil Ervin in the majors. They now have more information on these players — how they’ve played at the big league level — and that information can have a positive effect on the decisions they make on how to win the NL Central or a wild card spot in 2020. Even picking up veteran Freddy Galvis, a 2.0 WAR player, for free has a value to a team like the Reds given his one-year, $5-million option for 2020. Scooter Gennett was always likely to be gone, but Galvis may not be, and now the Reds have another player who they can choose to start in 2020 or trade over the winter.

The Reds have been fortunate in these decisions, but I would have been in favor of this calculus even if Aquino/VanMeter/Ervin had been terrible. My fundamental belief is that among hitters and pitchers, teams have roughly a combined 12,000 plate appearances/batters faced to work with every year, and as many of them should be devoted to trying to win games as possible. Maybe they’re not 2019 wins — maybe they’re wins in 2020 or 2023 or 2026. But even players not working out gives you information; if Aquino came to the majors and hit like Lewis Brinson, it would still give the Reds data they didn’t have before. You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge when you’re a 90-loss team still penciling Billy Hamilton or Chris Davis into the lineup on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Logan Morrison’s birthday today. Now 32 years young, “LoMo” is in his tenth big-league season… albeit just barely. He’s seen action in just seven games this summer, having toiled exclusively in Triple-A prior to being called up by the Phillies on August 14. Two years removed from a 38-home-run campaign with the Tampa Bay Rays, Morrison has essentially morphed from a bona fide slugger into a player barely hanging on.

His winter had been a waiting game. A free agent as of Halloween, Morrison received a few non-roster invites, but coming off of hip surgery he didn’t want to risk “showing up and then getting cut from camp.” In search of more security, he bided his time.

Morrison eventually signed with the Yankees in mid-April, joined Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre in early May, and played there until July 1. At that point, with his chances of a promotion seemingly scant — this despite a healthy .999 OPS — he executed the opt-out clause in his contract. He then hooked on with the Phillies following the All-Star break.

Never a shrinking violet when it comes to expressing an opinion, LoMo was candid when addressing the limited interest he received over the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about beer and the mercy rule, a 12-minute game finish at Fenway, whether baseball players have high job satisfaction, compelling playoff races and especially lucky and unlucky contending teams, robot ump implications (including measuring player heights, determining the shape of the zone, and preserving receivers’ sense of self-worth), and the Angels’ unorthodox rotation and the future of pitching staffs and Shohei Ohtani.

Audio intro: The Beths, "Happy Unhappy"
Audio outro: Derek and the Dominos, "Tell the Truth"

Link to Freaks and Geeks beer scene
Link to happiness study
Link to cluster luck rankings
Link to USA Today Atlantic League article
Link to Baseball America Atlantic League article
Link to Baseball Prospectus Atlantic League article
Link to info on online dating and height
Link to study on sock height and the strike zone
Link to Ben on Kratz and catchers making noise
Link to order The MVP Machine

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As we approach the 2019 minor league season’s September epilogue, we’re making our last few changes to THE BOARD before cementing the rankings until offseason lists start rolling out. We focused this week on curating the top 100’s midsection, which resulted in us moving around about 10% of 50 FV and above players, which we’ve found to be typical each time we’ve made a concerted effort to refine the very top of the roughly 1250 pro players on THE BOARD on whom we have thoughts. Note that most of the action is taking place on the seam between the 50 and 55 FV tier, a sort of weigh station for rising potential stars, and players with issues exposed at the upper levels.

Let’s quickly touch on the handful of players in this area who have moved down from the 55 FV tier into the 50s. Recent Marlins RF acquisition Jesus Sanchez continues to have below average discipline and trouble lifting the ball consistently. Perhaps a change of scenery will prove meaningful for one or both of these traits, but they’re relevant issues for a corner outfield prospect.

We also slid Braves pitcher Kyle Wright and Pirates pitcher Mitch Keller down a bit due to our doubts about their fastballs missing bats as currently constituted, despite their respective velocities.

We also dropped some players who we consider higher probability, lower impact types — like New York’s Andres Gimenez, Washington’s Luis Garcia, Philly’s Adonis Medina, Baltimore’s Yusniel Diaz, and Cardinals catcher Andrew Knizner — down below 50 FVs who we think have a wider range of potential outcomes, and more ceiling. Their FVs didn’t change at all, but we prefer players who have more obvious growth potential due to bigger tools, more projectable frames, and other physical traits almost always present in top big leaguers. Read the rest of this entry »