Archive for arizona diamondbacks

Don Baylor was equally adept at hitting baseballs and getting hit by baseballs. The erstwhile slugger was plunked 267 times, ranking him fourth all-time, and he banged out 2,135 hits, including 338 home runs. In 1979, as a member of the California Angels, he led the American League with 139 RBIs and captured the MVP award.

Baylor is also adept at teaching hitting. Currently in his third season as the hitting coach for the Arizona Diamondbacks, he previously served in that capacity for the Brewers, Cardinals, Braves, Mariners and Rockies. He managed the Rockies from 1993 to 1998 and the Cubs from 2000 to 2002.

Baylor shared his hitting philosophies — including what he learned from Frank Robinson and Tony Perez — in a spring training conversation last week.

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David Laurila: What was your hitting philosophy when you played?

Dan Baylor: Going all the way back to when I was in high school, I didn’t strike out a lot. What I swung at, I usually hit. I popped up, grounded out or hit a line-drive somewhere. “Bat, meet ball,” was my philosophy.

When you play in the minor leagues, you kind of get an idea of who you are, and by the time you get to the big leagues they have expectations for you. When I was coming up with the Orioles, Frank Robinson was in right field. He was well into his 30s by then and I was kind of picked, along with Merv Rettenmund, to take his place. As a young guy, all of a sudden you have that pressure of 30 home runs and 100 RBIs. That’s kind of how the baseball world evolved for me.

DL: Was Robinson a mentor to you?

DB: Frank was a great mentor for me. He was for a lot of young players — and for veterans, as well. He taught you what to do in certain situations. He was a clutch player, there’s no doubt about it. With the game on the line, he wanted to be the guy. I kind of grew into that. Come the seventh, eighth, ninth innings, I wanted to be the guy to decide the ballgame.

DL: Tony Perez has said that with a runner on third base, all he cared about was the RBI. It didn’t matter if he made an out in the process. Is that a good approach? Read the rest of this entry »

Kevin Towers is smarter than the so-called experts. That isn’t meant sarcastically. The Arizona Diamondbacks’ GM knows what he’s doing, and has both the background and track record to prove it. Skeptics panning his recent moves don’t have his 16 years of experience as a big-league general manager, nor have they been a minor-league pitching coach or scouting director.

Why did Towers trade highly-regarded pitching prospect Trevor Bauer for a young shortstop many feel has a limited offensive ceiling? He has addressed that question myriad times, but a truer understanding goes beyond the specifics of any individual deal. It lays in his overall philosophy, which he discussed shortly before taking time off for the holidays.

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On Oct. 30, 2001, the New York Yankees hosted the Arizona Diamondbacks in the third game of a World Series played just seven weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Left-hander Brian Anderson was on the mound for the D-Backs. Derek Jeter batted second in the Yankees lineup.

Eleven years later, Anderson, who finished his career with 82 wins, does color commentary and play-by-play. Jeter remains a marquee player, although he suffered a broken ankle on Saturday, shortly after recording his 200th post-season hit.

Not surprisingly, Jeter was a primary focus for Anderson when he took the mound. The Yankees shortstop went 1-for-3 against his slants, and his team won the game 2-1. Arizona went on to win the Series in seven games.

Anderson talked about his game plan against Jeter — and what happened in each at bat — earlier this season.

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Anderson on the game plan: “I had faced Jeter a number of times and everybody knows he has the good inside-out swing. He’s a guy that if you stay away, stay away, stay away — even if you’re changing speeds — he’ll shoot you. He’s happy to take his hits to right field. Everybody knows that. Then, if you’re going to come in on him, you really have to get it in there.

“A lot of times, you try to get him leaning, looking to go the other way, and then try to jam him. Sometimes that’s difficult, especially if you don’t execute the pitch properly. He had such a good inside-out swing that if the ball stayed middle-in, he could kind of fight it off and push it. He’d get those little bloop hits out into right field. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor Bauer doesn’t really need an introduction to FanGraphs readers. The top prospect in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization already had a well-earned reputation when he was drafted third overall last year out of UCLA. A 21-year-old right-hander, Bauer is known for his in-depth knowledge of sabermetrics and pitching mechanics just as much as he is for having an extensive repertoire that includes an overpowering fastball.

Bauer, who is currently pitching for the Triple-A Reno Aces, recently addressed several aspects of his unique and highly cerebral approach. Among the topics covered were pitch sequencing, video and visualization, and why velocity is more important to him than location.

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Trevor Bauer: “Pitching can be as simple or complicated as you choose to make it. It goes from being as simple as the catcher setting up outside and you throwing the ball. It can be fairly simple on the brain, or it can be knowing which pitch you want to throw in what situation, and why. That’s from the mental side of things.

“Physically, it’s pretty complex. Obviously, you have a lot of moving parts. You need to have everything in sync — everything working together — and that’s pretty complicated. I guess it just depends on how you choose to look at it, and what your preference is as an athlete — how simple or complex do you want to make it?

“Most people looking at my approach on the mound would say that it’s very, very complex. I’ve been doing it for so long, and I’m so familiar with it, that it just kind of occurs naturally. But I’d say I’m definitely more to the extreme of being complex. I pretty much take everything I do, pitching-wise, and try to figure it all out. I find the last little bit of information that is going to help me out.

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Jeff Luhnow is at it again. The Houston Astros general manager has flipped starting third baseman Chris Johnson to the playoff-hungry Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for two fringe-B-level prospects.

The approach being utilized by Houston is an excellent one. The organization does not have highly-sought-after commodities to trade (Carlos Lee, Brandon Lyon, Wandy Rodriguez, Johnson) so they’re seeking former highly-regarded prospects that have fallen in value but remain promising.

From Arizona, Houston acquired two outfielders that were taken within the first 64 picks of the 2009 amateur draft: Bobby Borchering (16th overall) and Marc Krauss (64th). Neither player is a sure-fire big league regular but both should see time with the Astros and the 27-year-old Johnson is not a regular third baseman; he didn’t play the hot corner, he played a lukewarm corner.

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The Arizona Diamondbacks have gone fishing for a replacement for injured outfielder Chris Young. The organization purchased the contract of prospect A.J. Pollock from triple-A.

Prior to the 2012 season the outfielder ranked as the 13th best player in the minor league system, which has one of the strongest collection of prospects in the game. He was the club’s first round pick (17th overall) out of Notre Dame in 2009.

Pollock, 24, has faced some adversity in his career and missed the entire 2010 season after elbow surgery but he has rebounded admirably. The right-handed hitter came back last year and hit more than .300 in double-A with 41 doubles and 36 steals (43 attempts). Moved up to triple-A in 2012 he was hitting .340 with six doubles in the 12 games prior to his promotion. The knock on the outfielder is that he lacks the range for centerfield but doesn’t possess the power that teams typically covet with their corner outfielders. His ceiling currently sits at platoon or fourth outfielder.

With Jason Kubel and Gerardo Parra swinging from the left side, Pollock could be a nice complement (along with Justin Upton) from the right side. The time frame is currently unknown for Young’s return from a torn ligament in his shoulder but Pollock should have a significant opportunity to prove the scouting reports wrong.

Look for him to provide the Diamondbacks offence with a decent average with a good number of doubles and some steals mixed in. Despite the fact that he’s a rookie, Pollock is a better top-of-the-order option than either Willie Bloomquist or Aaron Hill (although Pollock could stand to be a little more patient).

We’ve heard a lot about Valley Fever this year. Last week, Bob Uecker’s son passed away due to complications associated with the disease. And back in March, when doctors suspected that Ike Davis was suffering from symptoms of Valley Fever and some worried that Mike Trout might have fallen ill as well, Wendy Thurm asked a timely question: “Should MLB Be Worried About Valley Fever?” She concluded that the answer was, basically, no:

Although Valley Fever doesn’t appear to present a significant health risk to players who live or play in Arizona, with two reported cases among major leaguers in the last three years, MLB should take steps to educate teams and players about the disease and how to lower the risk of infection.

Of course, the number of reported cases of a disease is generally lower than the number of actual cases, particularly in the case of a disease like Valley Fever, whose symptoms often resemble those of the flu. Valley Fever is caused by a fungus called coccidioidomycosis, or cocci for short. Cocci grows in the soil, and so its endemic region is almost entirely confined to a very specific, arid area: the San Joaquin Valley of California that gave it its name, and the desert region of southern Arizona. (Most of the state’s population lies within the endemic area, though much of the state is cocci-free, including the Grand Canyon.) The Phoenix-Tucson corridor of Arizona contains the majority of the population exposed to Valley Fever, so much so that local public health advocates have started to refer to it as “Arizona’s Disease.”

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The Diamondbacks had two of the first seven picks in last June’s amateur draft, and to say that scouting director Ray Montgomery is excited about those players is an understatement. You can’t blame him. Right-hander Trevor Bauer, who was taken third overall out of UCLA, is already close to big-league ready with the potential to become a perennial all-star. Archie Bradley, a 19-year-old right-hander, came out of Broken Arrow, Okla., with a high-90s fastball and an equally good chance to become a dominant front-line starter.

Montgomery gave scouting reports on both pitchers. He broke down their deliveries, their repertoires and their mindsets.

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Montgomery on Trevor Bauer: “I think you can start with the fact that prior to us re-signing Joe Saunders, Trevor was going into major-league camp with designs on that fifth-starter spot. That says a lot about his talent.

“He’s a four-pitch guy. He’ll tell you that it’s six pitches, but I think that four is what he’ll end up throwing once he moves into the upper echelon. They’re all average to above. He works off his fastball, which is plus-plus at times.

“He throws a plus fastball, a plus-plus curveball, a tick-above-average slider — which is almost a cutter — and a split-changeup. The fifth is kind of a screwball, which he calls a ‘reverse.’ Basically, it’s a changeup with screwball action and he’ll throw it to both right- and left-handed hitters. He throws variations of his pitches, which sort of accounts for what he means when he tells you it’s six. Read the rest of this entry »

For a prospect who has spent the past four seasons steadily ranked between numbers 29 and 46 on Baseball America’s top-100, the discussion surrounding Arizona Diamondbacks pitching prospect Jarrod Parker has varied wildly. From Tommy John surgery, to questions surrounding his recovery, the past couple of years has brought more questions than answers about the young right-hander.

In mid-July, I had the opportunity to scout Jarrod Parker in Chattanooga against recent Dodgers call-up Nathan Eovaldi in a battle of mid-90s hurlers. And while Eovaldi burst back onto the prospect scene this season as one of the best starters in the Southern League, Parker was better. Using predominantly fastballs and changeups, Parker dominated the Lookouts allowing only one earned run and two hits over five innings pitched. The outing was impressive enough for me to rank him in the top-15 amongst players I’ve ever had the opportunity to scout.

Video after the jump.

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The first ten games of Justin Upton ‘s age 23 season have gone pretty well. Through his first 46 plate appearances, Arizona’s prodigy has a .300/.391/.575 triple-slash line and a .411 wOBA. This comes even without the ever-present sky-high BABIPs that tend to characterize early season success. Instead, Upton’s BABIP sits at .290, well below his career average of .343. Upton’s success is coming with walks, heavy doses of contact, and Power.

That’s Power with a capital P. Upton hit his third home run of the season last night off Cardinals ace Chris Carpenter. It went far.

(Click to embiggen, click this for video)

According to HitTracker, Upton’s bomb traveled 478 feet, the best of the young season by 16 feet.

This kind of elite power was missing from Upton’s 2010 season, where he posted a rather human .349 wOBA and 3.1 WAR. As annoying as the small sample size caveat can be early in a season, I’m not invoking it for this year’s numbers. Instead, I prefer to give a reminder that power numbers barely even stabilize over the course of a full season. The numbers presented by Eric in that link say that SLG only stabilizes after 500 PAs and ISO after 550, a number that Upton barely passed in 2010 (571 total PAs).

Upton isn’t likely to continue to homer on one out of every four fly balls he hits, but mammoth shots like the one above tell us that his true talent probably isn’t too different from the 2009 season, when he posted a .232 ISO and 26 home runs in just under 600 PAs. And, of course, at only 23 years of age, there’s plenty of room for growth as well.

The other thing to watch for Upton as his year continues is his strikeout rate. So far, through 46 plate appearances, Upton has only struck out in 15% of his at-bats, nearly half his career rate. It only takes 150 plate appearances for strikeout rate to begin to stabilize, so we should be able to get a good beat on Upton’s progress in three weeks or so. The strikeout rate is the last thing keeping Upton from moving into the truly elite tier of hitters – just imagine what a player with that kind of power could do if he made contact on 80% of his at-bats instead of 70%. Upton didn’t get much experience in the high minors, but in the low minors, he had strikeout rates hovering around 20% instead of 30%, so it’s possible that his development in the majors could lead to a lower strikeout rate this year.

Hopefully one slightly down year as a 22-year-old Major Leaguer didn’t fool anybody. Justin Upton is here to stay, and he should be an MLB force for years to come. With what we’re already seeing from him at such a young age, we shouldn’t be surprised if Upton continues to impress with his power and with his other tools as well.