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Kiley McDaniel: There was some important content on the FG prospects social channels today   FanGraphs Prospects @FG_Prospects   One of the top prospects we’ve captured on the high speed is Kiley’s puppy Scout 7 Aug 2019

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On the heels of a 95-loss season, the Rangers’ 2019 campaign has been a pleasant surprise. The team is 58-54, and if they don’t exactly look like Wild Card contenders — their playoff odds are just 0.2% — then at least the stellar performances of Mike Minor, Lance Lynn, and Joey Gallo have offset disappointments like Nomar Mazara, Rougned Odor, and, well, Joey Gallo’s oblique muscle and hamate bone. But one of the most unlikely breakouts has come from a player who spent the better part of the past four seasons burrowing below replacement level when he wasn’t shuttling between Triple-A, the majors, and the disabled list. If you didn’t know that Danny Santana was back in the bigs and thriving as a super-utilityman, you do now.

Since the start of July, the 28-year-old switch-hitting Santana has been red hot, batting .380/.394/.740 with 14 multi-hit games in 22 starts. Overall, he’s hitting .321/.349/.589 with a career-high 17 homers, 12 steals, a 133 wRC+, and 2.0 WAR. His slugging percentage is high enough that he cracks the AL top 10 even with the addition of 28 phantom at-bats (he’s got 319 PA and needs 347 to qualify), and among AL players with at least 300 PA, his un-adjusted slugging percentage is in a virtual tie for third, his batting average in a virtual tie for second, and his wRC+ 16th. He’s done this while playing all over the diamond: 20 starts at first base, 16 in center field, 15 at second base, eight in left field, five at shortstop, and four in right field. Eleven times, he’s switched positions mid-game, and he’s taken four different positions after entering as a pinch-hitter. Lately, he’s been working out at third base, and playing time there appears inevitable given the recent release of Asdrúbal Cabrera and the fact that he’s played the hot corner six times in his major league career.

If you can’t quite place Santana on the space-time continuum, you’re forgiven, as it’s been awhile since he was relevant. In May 2014, as the Twins were busily beating a path to their fourth straight season with at least 92 losses, they were receiving very little production from both shortstop Pedro Florimón and center fielder Aaron Hicks. In early May, they recalled the 23-year-old Santana, whom they’d signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2007, and initially used him at shortstop, but when Hicks continued to struggle after suffering a concussion induced by his crashing into an outfield wall, they gave Santana a shot at center, a position he’d played all of 23 times in seven minor league seasons. Thanks to his natural athleticism, he held his own in the middle pasture, and just kept hitting. By the time the season ended, he owned a .319/.353/.472 line with seven homers, 20 steals, a 132 wRC+, and 3.9 WAR, that while making 62 starts in center field and 31 at shortstop. He got a bit of down-ballot consideration in the AL Rookie of the Year voting, finishing seventh while Jose Abreu won unanimously. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseballs are flying in the major leagues this season. Due to a few irregularities on the outer surface of the ball, everything hit in the air is carrying much farther, all else being equal, than at any point in the game’s history. Home runs are up 15% from 2018 and hitters are on pace to shatter the league’s record for dingers in a season.

As many of you also know, Triple-A teams are playing with the same ball. Previously, all minor league teams used a different, less expensive model, one with a flight pattern that more closely resembles the pre-2015 major league pelota. This year, while all other levels still play with the cheaper model, Triple-A teams are using the big league ball. As you’d expect, the home run rates from Double-A on down look very similar to how they did last year. As you’d also expect, the Triple-A home run rate has exploded:

Much has been written about the ball this year: why it’s different, how different it is, how it’s playing in Triple-A, how the league is addressing the controversy, whether or not this is any good for the sport. There seems to be a gap in there though: How are teams themselves responding to the upheaval generated by the ball?

In some sense, the response has been relatively muted. As the year has gone on, we’ve seen individual players like Justin Verlander and retired pitcher Brandon McCarthy express frustration. Other pitchers have clearly noticed, and some of them have been snarky on Twitter, but hurlers have by and large gritted their teeth and kept their heads down.

Similarly, if any teams have expressed concern to the league, they’ve done so very quietly. There’s no outward evidence of any support or derision toward the ball, and front offices have appeared mostly to have noticed and tried to adjust on the fly. In one early-season conversation with a baseball operations analyst, I asked if he or anyone with the team was doing any testing on the ball; he said no, and that he was just waiting for the next Rob Arthur article like everybody else.

In part, that may be because the ball hasn’t redirected the game’s trajectory much. Generally speaking, the trends exacerbated by the 2019 ball — more homers, fewer stolen base attempts, and so on — are just an extension of where the game was already heading. While this year’s ball is extreme, we’ve seen several alterations to the ball’s drag since 2015, most of which have boosted home run totals. Additionally, teams have been trying to get their personnel to hit more balls in the air for years now. The new ball may reward that approach more now than in previous seasons, but it hasn’t significantly altered how hitters go about their work.

More interesting is how teams are coping at the Triple-A level, where we’re seeing a much more dramatic change in gameplay. Jeff Manto, Baltimore’s Coordinator of Minor League Hitting, has noticed that batters are responding to the obvious incentives right now: “The hitters know what’s going on. They all see the ball flying and they want to be part of it. The approach right now is to let it fly.”

That’s resulted in a lot of very similar looking swings. “It’s hard to get guys to be pure mechanical hitters right now,” says Manto. “It’s a high risk, high reward swing, and guys are going for it. There’s certainly no more two-strike swing anymore.” For Manto, his concern is not so much that hitters are trying to put the ball in the air more often. Rather, it’s that the swing equips hitters to only do one thing — and future ball adjustments may leave them unprepared for a more normal home run environment. “The ability to hit every type of pitch and pitcher, that’s what makes a great hitter. At some point the ball’s going to come back to normal.”

In one sense, the ball has actually been helpful for teams. One executive I spoke with said it’s now easier to project a player’s raw power. “You would see players get called up from the minors and show much more power in the major leagues,” he said. “Batting practice is (one) way to evaluate a player’s raw power and I would have to mentally add 10-15 feet to a ball’s distance prior to the switch to the major league ball.”

One surprise was that pushback on the ball was basically a partisan issue. “I’m a pitching coach so you can imagine how I feel about today’s baseball,” said one minor league coach who preferred not to elaborate from there. While most of those I spoke with guessed that the ball would eventually return to a more traditional flight pattern, the hitters didn’t seem to be in any hurry: “You know, as a hitter, I love seeing the ball fly out of the ballpark,” said Manto, who played nine years in the big leagues as an infielder.

Clubs are also responding by handling Triple-A a bit differently as a developmental level. Some organizations already make limited use of Triple-A as a proving ground, preferring to use that team as a taxi squad for the big league club and a home for quad-A type prospects. But a few teams seem to be leery of letting their struggling pitchers take too many lumps.

This is especially significant for teams with affiliates in the Pacific Coast League, where half the circuit either plays at altitude, in a bandbox, or both. The Mariners, for example, sent struggling starters Justus Sheffield and Nabil Crismatt back to Double-A instead of letting them get whacked around in Tacoma, and have promoted a couple of pitchers directly from Arkansas to the big league club this season. The Nationals also regularly shuttle arms from Double-A to the majors, though the logistical hurdles of having their Triple-A team 3,000 miles away in Fresno has influenced that pattern as well.

Still, you can expect this trend to accelerate in future seasons. A National League analyst said that he expects any major shifts in how teams use their Triple-A affiliates to become more apparent next season. “This year, guys got their assignments before we knew something was different with the ball,” he explained. “It’s hard to send a guy back to Double-A just for that, but next year, you might see more arms jump from Double-A to the majors.”

For this analyst, the ball has made it tougher to evaluate the level. “You get guys where there are no major changes in their peripherals, and they’re doubling their home run totals. How do you evaluate that?”

Others just wanted a bit more predictability. “The biggest thing I would prefer would be to avoid large fluctuations in changes to how the ball acts,” said an American League executive who preferred to speak off the record. He also wanted to see more transparency going forward: “If changes are going to be made, make the public aware of any changes of time. So if we go down the route of ‘deadening’ the ball at some point, give teams and the public knowledge of that well in advance.”

Of course, predictability doesn’t mean a return to the past. Asked about what kind of ball he’d like to see in play, the aforementioned executive was sanguine: “I don’t have a major preference. I don’t mind the three true outcomes type shift. I personally think strikeouts and homers are some of the most entertaining plays in baseball.”

Whatever everyone’s opinion on the new ball, a few things are clear: it’s a topic of discussion, and it is changing how analysts and executives operate. It’s also not a discussion that’s losing momentum. As I was wrapping up this article, I got a text from a source I had spoken with earlier in the day:

“We’re literally talking about the difficulties evaluating Triple-A hitters right now.”

2:01	Dan Szymborski: IT IS CHAT TIME

2:01	Dan Szymborski: It’s possible, lol!

2:02	Dan Szymborski: My favorite thing about the Mets is that they essentially had a terrific deadline (picking up Stroman and NOT trading Thor or Wheeler) because they failed their second part of that plan.

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Making fun of the Mets’ peripatetic approach to roster construction has become a cottage industry. This offseason was a bonanza. Look! A wild Edwin Díaz has appeared, and he brought Robinson Canó with him. Look! Dominic Smith is somehow playing the outfield in the major leagues on a team with Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo on the roster. Look! The team added Jed Lowrie to fully bury Jeff McNeil on the depth chart.

Over the last week before the trade deadline, it felt like more of the same. The Mets were going to ship out Noah Syndergaard, one of the most electric pitchers in baseball. They were trading Díaz, only half a season after paying a king’s ransom for him. They were buyers! They acquired Marcus Stroman, after all. Maybe that was just a tactic, though — Syndergaard rumors continued to pop up, and there was enough smoke around Díaz to the Red Sox that it was easy to assume there was a fire somewhere.

When the dust settled on the trading deadline, the unthinkable had happened. The Mets held on to their most obvious trade chip, Zack Wheeler. Only two months from free agency, Wheeler won’t be helping the Mets in 2020 without a new contract. He’s also in fine form this year, and might bring back some prospects to replenish a farm system depleted by trades and graduations. When the deadline buzzer sounded and Wheeler was still wearing blue and orange, the take mills started up. What was Brodie Van Wagenen doing, and how could it best be played for comedy?

It might be time to put away your LOLMets kazoos and pom-poms. The Mets are surging, winners of 15 of their last 20 games, and they’ve run their playoff odds up from 3.9% to 32.7%. A team that earlier this summer felt like a punchline now has better odds of making the playoffs than offseason darlings like the Brewers and Phillies. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday night, in their 114th contest of the season, the Red Sox lost their 55th game. Normally, this might escape notice — 16 teams beat them to that particular punch — but last year, the Sox didn’t lose their 55th game until October 6 (Game 2 of the AL Division Series against the Yankees), that after storming to 108-54 record during the regular season. They would lose just three postseason games, one in each round, en route to their fourth championship of the millennium. This year’s Red Sox do not appear destined to increase that total.

Sunday’s loss was the Red Sox’s eighth in a row, all within the AL East; after taking the first three games of a four-game set from the Yankees at Fenway Park from July 25-27, they lost the series finale, then three straight at home to the Rays before being swept in a four-game series in the Bronx, which knocked them to 14.5 games behind their New York rivals. The skid — which ended with Monday’s 7-5 win over the Royals — was the team’s longest since July 2015; no Sox team of the past three seasons lost more than four straight, and last year’s powerhouse never lost more than three straight.

As a result of the slide, Boston’s playoff odds have dropped precipitously:

Through July 27, the Red Sox were 59-47, eight games back in the AL East (the closest they’d been since June 25) and tied with the A’s for the second AL Wild Card spot. Their playoff odds stood at 64.6%, with a 6.5% chance to win the division and a 58.0% chance of retaining a Wild Card spot; their odds of winning the World Series stood at 6.2%, higher than every team except the Astros (23.6%), Dodgers (18.8%), Yankees (15.7%), and Twins (7.3%). After Sunday, their odds were down to 15.9%, with just a 0.2% shot at the division, and just a 1.4% chance at winning the World Series, lower than 10 other teams. With Monday’s win, which isn’t reflected in the above graph, they’re back to 20.7%, but no closer to the division lead; it’s Wild Card or bust.

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Walker Buehler is elite — he has a 3.08 ERA and a 3.11 FIP in 278 career innings — and his curveball is among the reasons why. The 25-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander can spin it with best of them.

It hasn’t always been the same curveball. Buehler changed his grip partway through last season, and made a good pitch even better. Why and how did he go about doing so? The Vanderbilt product explained just that, plus his curveball’s beginnings, when the Dodgers visited Fenway Park in mid-July.

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Walker Buehler on his curveball: “I started throwing a curveball when I was 10 years old. I learned it from a guy named Brad Bohannon, who is now the head coach at Alabama. He was a volunteer assistant at [the University of Kentucky] at the time. He was my first coach.

“We worked on it, worked on it, and for a long time I threw it the same way. Same grip. I never really changed much, not even in college, but then when I had Tommy John, I talked to Carson Fulmer, and to another kid we had [at Vanderbilt] named Hayden Stone, who had a really good spiked breaking ball that played more like a slider.

“I saw the surgery kind of as a fresh start. I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to learn how to throw this spiked one; I think it will be a better pitch than the one I throw. Now that I’ve had a year off, I can work on it and try to get the feel for it.’ That’s what I did. I threw that one up until about halfway through last year. Then I started messing around with a traditional one, and went back to that. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cardinals beat the Cubs 2-1 last Tuesday, the team took control of first place in the National League Central by one game over Chicago and two games over Milwaukee. That was the last game for St. Louis ahead of the trade deadline. While the season had been an up and down one for the Cardinals, with a great April, a terrible June and July, and a big surge after the All-Star break, the team put itself in position to make a run at the division title. While the offense had struggled for a few months, the club didn’t really need a bat to fortify itself, and there wasn’t much help available at the trade deadline, anyway. The bullpen had been a somewhat unexpected strength all season, and even with Jordan Hicks out, Andrew Miller‘s resurgence, Giovanny Gallegos‘ rise, and Carlos Martinez’s move to relief (plus the arms available in the minors), meant the relievers didn’t need a lot of help, even if another lefty would have been acceptable. But Cardinals had a very clear need in the rotation, and they did nothing to address it.

St. Louis’ front office has gotten a lot of criticism for the team’s failure to make the postseason the past three years. Some of that criticism is deserved, but sometimes, it misses the mark. It’s true that the Cardinals haven’t been very active at the trade deadline in recent seasons, but then, there hasn’t been much need for a lot of activity. The table below shows the Cardinals’ playoff odds on the day before the trade deadline, since 2014:

The Cardinals haven’t had more than a 25% chance of making the division series, or even a 10% chance of winning the division at the trade deadline, since 2015. In that season, the team was virtually assured of a playoff spot, so they added a few relievers and a bench bat. Without going over all of those seasons in detail, the Cardinals haven’t found themselves in a position where an infusion of talent at the trade deadline would have meaningfully tipped their playoff odds since 2014, when they traded two young players off their active roster in Joe Kelly and Allen Craig for John Lackey, who was signed through 2015. The Cardinals’ failure to address their needs this trade deadline is a departure from past seasons, not a continuation. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Chicago Cubs
8/4/19: C Willson Contreras (strained hamstring) placed on 10-Day IL, retroactive to August 3.

Contreras will likely be out until early September. Victor Caratini, who has an .803 OPS in 140 plate appearances, will be the starting catcher with Taylor Davis serving as his backup. Nick Hundley and Jonathan Lucroy are free agents who the Cubs could consider signing.

Roster Resource

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