Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1377: The Prospects Are Here

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the bounceback of Chris Davis, which Statcast stats they would most want to have for the entirety of baseball history, which aspect of instant replay review most dramatically changes the game, and the new-look Josh Bell and Tommy La Stella, then (28:36) talk to FanGraphs prospect analyst Eric […]

Here, at the top of our street, I was somewhat like him, I was somebody. Come back here, come back here, come back here, let me look at you. Hello and welcome to episode 1377 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast brought to you by Fangraphs and our Patreon supporters. I am Meg Rowley of Fangraphs and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. How are you, Ben? Hello, I'm doing well. One take Meg. Yeah, that was good. Did you practice in the intervening week or did you not think about it at all and just go in cold? I think that sometimes you just get in your own head or did you not think about it at all and just go in cold? I think that sometimes you just get in your own head a little bit too much about this. This is probably not an experience that you have had as a person with short hair.

But sometimes if I am braiding my hair and I start thinking about the movement of doing that for even one second, I mess it up. Even though I can just stand there and like talk to someone and do that at the same time, because I've done it so many times and you have the muscle memory in your fingers. But if you think about it for even a second, you end up with like a knot of hair. So I think it's like that. Yep. I think it's very much like that. Well, it went well this time. So your troubles are behind you. Yes. My intro yips are done. We're going to talk for much of this episode to Eric Langenhagen of Van Graaff's Prospect Analyst because it's prospect season. Suddenly all the prospects have arrived. Just about everyone will talk about this, but almost all of the prospects who were expected to come up and

make some sort of impact this season have already come up and some of them have come up very recently. So we'll talk to Eric about why that is, why we have this cluster of prospect promotions, and then we'll get into individual guys and what we should expect from them and the difficulty of projecting prospects with the new ball in AAA, increasing home run rates, and then we'll do a little draft preview. So it's a little bit of everything. segment gotta please the prospect people from time to time yeah and people should and we'll say this during our segment with Eric I'm sure but I'll say it again here

people should go and read all the prospect coverage at Fangraphs because it's really good we are recording this on a Thursday and so tomorrow Friday fans of the San Francisco Giants will be able to read a list about the San Francisco Giants and all their guys. So people should check that out and check out our other lists and all of the good draft coverage that's coming out now.

The guys released their second mock draft going all the way through the first round on Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday. It's still the most popular thing on Fangraph, so it's good that we're talking prospect stuff because people are into it. It is the season. Yeah. Is that a demoralizing thing or an encouraging thing to you that mock drafts are such a traffic force, even though even mock drafters will acknowledge that there's probably a little predictive power in the actual mock draft order, especially when we're weeks away from the draft. I'm going to choose to be excited that people like to read things at Fangraphs. And I do not say what I'm about to say to denigrate the quality of the scoop that other very smart observers get when they put together their own mock drafts. But I will say one of the things that I really appreciate about our mock drafts is that I think that the guys do actually get very good information. And it's pretty fun to see how they change over time, you know, as picks become closer to consensus or as guys rise and

fall or, you know, we start to get a sense of what boards actually look like. So I'm not discouraged because I think it's, you know, it's a fine exercise if you understand what it is. And, uh, you know, at the end of the day, none of it really matters at all, any of it at all that we're doing. None of nothing we do matter. So, uh, except it matters a lot, but it doesn't really matter that much. So, uh, I'm fine with it. I think it's what I've come around to. So I don't know if you have banter you want to get to before eric i have one thing i wanted to bring up because i thought you might want to talk about it the chris davis sans the davis sans this seems like something that

might be up your alley i i talked to michael bauman a bit about this on the ringer podcast a couple days ago and after that podcast so on Wednesday the Orioles played a doubleheader and Chris Davis in those two games combined went one for six with four strikeouts which is not so great that's kind of typical Chris Davis except that I mean a few weeks ago he would have killed to go one for six that would have been the happiest day of his life but that was a down day for him recently because since that day when he broke the 0-54 streak, he has a 140 WRC+. Even after the 1-6, he still has a 279, 355, 544 line in those 76 plate appearances. And that's would happen. I have been struggling to figure out when I want to write about Chris Davis and not just because I've been busy, you know, for instance, editing a Giants list, among other things, because I don't like

writing about guys when they're in that kind of extreme failure. I mean, we talked about this with Cole Calhoun. It just feels, you know, there's a way to do it well. And like we wrote, we've written about Chris Davis at Fangraphs. Jay wrote about him a little while ago when it was, the free fall was sort of still in process. And, you know, I think did so in a way that didn't feel overly mean or anything like that. But I don't like to write about them when they're failing. And then when they first start succeeding, everybody's like, oh, I gotta write about this.

So then you're like, eh, what's the new thing to say? And now, you know, Mike Petrillo is saying that he might be an all-star. So I don't know when my Chris Davis moment comes, but I'm very happy for him, and I wonder, I don't know if we'll have a good answer to this, I wonder if his sort of renaissance came early enough

in our impression of the season that we might forget the very bad start, like are we going to look at him and say like, oh yeah, he ended up having like a, he had a good year, he was really good, are we going to forget or are we going to continue to him and say, oh, yeah, he ended up having like a he had a good year. He was really good. Are we going to forget or are we going to continue to fixate on the bad start? That's what I wonder about.

I think we won't know for a little while. But right. I mean, I don't think you forget an 0 for 54. I don't think that's ever going away. That could be the in the first paragraph of his obituary. That could be in the first paragraph of his obituary, for all I know. I wonder which would be higher, not to dwell on his death, which hopefully is decades away, but do you say Chris Davis, who led the majors and homers two times?

He was a two-time home run champion. Or do you say Chris Davis, who had the longest streak of hit lists at bats by a position player ever, at least at the time? I think that you, I think you mentioned both in the first sentence, but I think you start with the home runs. I hope so. I would, as an editor, I would say, you know, he just died and his family is sad. So like, let's start with this thing. And we have to mention the other thing because it is uh remarkable right in every sense of the word it is a thing upon which you should remark but maybe not right away when a man has just died it seems terrible i wonder what his line i think you're right we're not we're never going to forget the O for 54, but you know,

where his WRC plus ends up at the end of the year, I wonder how much of it we will mentally adjust like five years from now saying, okay, he ended up having a, let's, let's say he continues to hit. Well, let's say he is able to raise his season long WRC plus two to league average, which would indicate that, you know, he overcame that over 54 and he continued to hit pretty well the rest of the way. Five years from now, when we maybe don't remember the beginning of the season with perfect clarity, will we say, oh, well, actually, you know, after that slump,

it was a lot better and mentally adjust him up or will we just look at him and say like, oh, he's probably just like a league average hitter that year. He set the bar about as low as you can set the bar 46 last year a 46 wrc plus not just the over 54 which stretched across the offseason but just the entire last season right and not just the entire last season but i think also like the second half of the previous season too so he had been very bad for quite some time so i'm definitely grading him on a curve like his current hot streak is it's a pretty good hot streak just in general but given what it's coming

after it's the hottest streak i mean yeah i think because and i mentioned this to michael like the the people that davis surpassed with his 0 for 54 so there there was the Craig Council 0 for 45, and there was the Eugenio Velez 0 for 46. And both of those guys were just done after those streaks. It wasn't just a blip. That was the end of their careers. I think Council had 40 more at-bats after the end of that streak, and that was that. And Velez's streak is still active. He has never gotten the hit. He just, his career ended after that. So when you have an 0-54 coming on the heels of like a negative three war season and a bad second half before that, you just kind of figure like there can't even be a bounce back coming. coming so yeah do what davis has done even over you know a seventh of a season or something i mean it's it's pretty impressive it's more than you possibly could have expected and it's nice to see and i know that he was hitting okay even before he broke the streak like he had a bunch of hard hit balls which made it even more painful that he just couldn't get one of them to fall so

maybe there was something there that the Orioles saw. And we talked to Joe Trezza on our Orioles preview segment about how they kind of remade his swing and his approach a little bit or tried to, or they wanted to have him embrace data a little bit more than he had in the past. And I guess to their credit, they stuck with him. I don't know if it was a sunk cost thing or if it was a we actually believe that he might be better thing, but either way, they're being rewarded. Yeah, no, for sure. I think that I guess in some ways he is always now going to be playing with house money a little bit because...

And also real money. And real money, that part too. Literally the house's money, if we want to extend the metaphor here. But he'll never, well, I'm going to say a thing that is likely to be true. And then you watch Chris Davis will take me, he'll take the dare and he'll do the dare. But he is likely to never hit that poorly again ever in his career. And we know he did it. So it's like you said, we're going to grade on a curve. And now it's just like, we're going to be happy with not any level of performance, but we're just going to, you know, it's like when, it's like when, when children fall down, when they're very small, you know, when they're like

learning how to walk, like when my niece would fall down when she was still toddling, and then she would walk around a bit, we would all clap and we'd be so excited. And I'm sure that if her little baby brain could have formed these words, she would have said, like, okay, you could stop being so impressed because I'm just doing this thing that horses can do right after they're born. We're going to look at Chris Davis and be so happy. We're just going to be so happy because it's so painful to watch someone fail that profoundly, and now we don't have to do it anymore. And he'll never make us watch him fail that profoundly and now we don't have to do it anymore and he'll never make us watch him fail that profoundly ever again so he's given us this little gift and in return we

just get to be happy for him so i think that he might be my favorite baseball player is what i'm coming around to because there are very few things that i feel more um viscerally upset about than watching that kind of prolonged failure because it makes me so uncomfortable and I feel so badly for a stranger and I have no mechanism by which to make them feel better because I don't know them. And now I'll never have to do that with Chris Davis ever again. And he gave me that little present.

And now he gets to be on his way to maybe looking like a league average hitter when it's all said and done. And outwardly, he seemed to hold up fairly well under that strain. I mean, inwardly, I'm sure it was pretty terrible. But he seemed to have kind of a philosophical attitude about the whole thing. He wasn't like visibly distressed, even if he was on the inside. And for the most part, it seemed like the fans were not as hard on him as you might have feared that they would have been because of the contract and because of the struggles like

there were times when he was getting cheered when people were rooting for him to break that streak which is nice you would have maybe expected them to pile on and just boo and i'm sure there were boos but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. So there was kind of a rooting for him aspect. And yeah, I mean, he has picked himself off the mat and he has turned himself back into a productive major leaguer, at least for some time. And that's an inspirational story, given that he's coming from as bad as you can be on a major league baseball field and he has gone back to being good so yeah i like the chris davis story now i didn't like the chris davis story before but it sort of has a happy

aftertaste now yeah i think that there is a uh i think we've learned something about uh human beings and their capacity for empathy because i think you're right that like fans fans did not turn on him in a monstrous way, and they could have been monsters. I mean, I think they are helped by the circumstances they find themselves in. They're rooting for a team that is not good, and they knew it would not be good. And the reason that it's not good is partly Chris Davis,

but it's so much more than Chris Davis. And so it's not as if he was the thing holding back a team that would otherwise be on the brink of a playoff spot or something like that. That was not in the cards for the Orioles. And so when your stakes are lower like that, I think it's a lot easier to be kind. But also it's nice to be kind even with low stakes because you never know, you might be a monster.

So yeah, I think we can now feel good about this. We have finally found a good baseball story in 2019. We did it. So Sam and I did emails yesterday. I did save one that I know you wanted to answer. And I suppose we could answer that one now. It's from Jeff Walter, one of our Patreon supporters, and he asked which StatCast category would be most informative or interesting if we had it for the entirety of baseball history. So did you have one in mind?

You know, I said I wanted to answer this email, and then I forgot that I said that. And I didn't think about it for even one second longer. But I've been vamping for a couple of seconds now and so I think that I'm going to be able to say that I would like to I would really like to be able to look back historically and know how fast people were I think that's the thing that I would find I would find the most interest and intrigue in I think that it would tell us a lot about how baseball has changed and how the typical person who plays baseball has changed. Because I think that, well, I don't know. It could be, I could be totally wrong.

And this is why it would be good to have the data. But I think it would be interesting to see, like, on average, I suspect that major leaguers now are faster than major leaguers used to be. Because major leaguers now sometimes look, you know, like they run fast and they have good conditioning and nutrition and major leaguers used to like be Babe Ruth and be made of like booze and venereal diseases. So I think that things are better now in terms of athlete conditioning, but I don't know for sure that I'm right about that. So I think in the 30 seconds I have spent thinking about a question that I

had meant to spend like a good half hour on, I think that's where I'm landing. I'm so sorry. See, I got one take Megan, and that was my good deed, and this is offsetting it. Now I feel terrible. Well, I didn't think about it that much longer than you did, but I think my answer is along similar lines. But I think my answer is along similar lines. I mean, you can think of just an endless number of curiosities that you would want to satisfy about individual players, for instance. I mean, I would love to know if, like, Gary Sheffield hit the ball as hard as Aaron Judge or John Carlos Stanton because it sure looked like he did. So I'd like to know that kind of thing.

that kind of thing or I'd like to know you know the legendary pitches of your and whatever Sandy Koufax's curveball and Steve Carlton's slider and Randy Johnson's slider I'd like to know the stats on those and see how they compare to today's but if I only had one thing I think I would take fastball speed as opposed to person speed just for similar similar reasons, I think, in that I think that would be a good baseline measure to try to assess the league talent level. There's so much speculation about that. I mean, for one thing, it's one of the most common questions about baseball history. Who threw the hardest? Did Walter Johnson throw 100? Did Nolan Ryan throw more than 100 like are today's fastest pitchers actually as fast as we think they are is the league average that much higher than it used to be we know it has increased significantly just in the time that we've been able to measure that so what does that mean about the decades and century that we weren't able to measure it were guys throwing 80 I mean what was the league like? So I think that would probably be the most telling

or at least one of the most telling ways that you could assess that in a single stat. So you get that, you get to answer the question of who's the hardest thrower in history. And a benefit also that just occurred to me is that you could also use that data to do the Rob arthur method of assessing the drag on the baseball just by seeing how much the speed decreases between the pitcher's release

point and home plate and that would give you a sense of whether something was going on with the ball at various times so like the mysterious years where there was a rabbit ball or 1987 and others throughout history where it's still unexplained. And also the so-called steroid era, which I still think had a lot to do with the ball. That wouldn't necessarily tell you about the construction of the ball. Maybe exit speed would be more telling in certain ways, but that would at least tell you how the ball was carrying and that would be valuable information to have so i don't know there's such a long list of things that i wish we could know but i think that's at the top of my list and i'm also just really happy that we have this now and that every player who comes up now

like we're about to talk to to eric about all these great prospects who are coming up and their entire careers will be covered by stack cast which, which is really cool. And StatCast may not be consistent. In fact, it seems to be changing like currently MLB is evidently switching over from TrackMan to Hawkeye, the system people are familiar with from tennis. And that may be complicated and change the baselines and you'll have to adjust from like PitchFX to StatCast and then StatCast to Hawkekeye and that'll be kind of a pain but it's supposedly even more accurate if anything so anyway i'm just happy that all these questions that i would love to have answered for players in the past will just be answered now and we can i think like clayton kershaw i believe his whole career is covered by pitch fx i think he came up at just the right time that we have virtually all of his pitches saved. And that's kind of a cool thing. So you can look

back in 50 years and the legend Clayton Kershaw, you can just look at all of his pitches and break them down in a somewhat similar way to what you'll be able to do with contemporary pitchers. That's really great. That answer is way better than mine it's like so much better than mine but you did spend time thinking about yours and i spent no time thinking about mine so i feel a little bit better about the difference in quality but yours is way better that is that's the real answer that's the answer that's not the official answer of the effectively wild podcast because yes pitch speed would yeah that velocity would be better that'd be a better thing because i don't care about speed would be similar i think

in terms of assessing the talent level i'm sure but yeah but not really because like really who cares about how fast they run that's not true we care a lot but we don't care as much as we care about how hard a guy throws we care about that that so much more. That is such an obviously better answer. You are Chris Davis after the 0 for 54, and I am firmly in the 0 for 54. We're just going to go with it. Well, there's another listener email that I also saved here because it's very related to this question.

It's sort of the same kind of question. And so maybe we can answer this one too. This is from Sean who says, Your discussion of the legitimacy of home run robberies depending on camera angle had me thinking which statistic would be most affected, positive or negatively, by there having been replay in the pre-replay era. Stolen bases, home runs, singles, manager ejections. Apologies if this has been discussed before. No need to apologize. I don't think it has. So if we could retroactively have replay for all of baseball history, what would that most change, I guess, under the current replay rules? Like, obviously, there would be certain famous plays, the Don Denkiger type plays that maybe

would be changed, and that would change all baseball history. But in general, is there like a type of replay that we see now that, or a reviewable play that would make the most impact? I mean, what makes the most impact currently i guess is another way to look at this i think that the obvious answer apart from any particular play but just as a category of play would be you know coming off the bag over sliding um and so maybe like advancing generally whether it's because you're just advancing in the course of normal play or stealing a base because there there were outs hiding there for a long, long time.

And we just didn't know. And now we can zoom in and see that a guy's hand has come off the bag for a hot second when he collides with it because that's what happens when physics works. So I think it would be that. I think there would be a whole bunch of reversals throughout history. We might end up with, you know, I imagine we would end up with like the historical leaderboards for stolen bases and whatnot looking pretty much the same in terms of the human beings involved, but the rankings might end up changing pretty dramatically depending on how many get reversed, right? Because the fast guys are still going to be fast. So you figure

they're still in that general category of fast guy, but some of them might end up having a bunch of stuff taken back or what have you. So I would imagine it's that. I feel good about that answer. So I'm excited for you to have a better one and then I'm going to feel terrible again. I think that's a good answer. Yes. I was just thinking like in terms of the sheer quantity of calls, probably like first base

timing plays, like did the ball beat the runner to first base? That has to be one of the most common plays, I think. I found a Sabre article from 2015, so this is a while ago, but at that time they did a little breakdown of the type of plays that get reviewed and then the percentage of them that get overturned. And so it looks from this list that the most common one, I guess this is encompassing everything. This is just safe out. So safe out is the biggest category, but I guess that would include tag plays too, probably. And according to this data, there were like 954 replays at that time and 451 of them were affirmed. So that's actually a low percentage, lots of overturned calls there. those were affirmed and there weren't as many of them. And then like hit by pitch or foul,

there weren't that many of them. More of those were affirmed. Catch trap, there just weren't a lot of those. So yeah, safe out seems to be the kind that is overturned most frequently and is also challenged most frequently. And I don't know what the breakdown is between like plays at this base or that base or steal plays or force plays but there are an awful lot of force plays at first base that get challenged and overturned and I guess they're not always that consequential because it's a runner on first but sometimes whether the runner on first is safe that determines whether someone scores or whether the inning continues so that's that's up there I would say that's pretty common but I like your answer okay i don't feel like i'm in a slump anymore i'm i'm coming out of this we're all so excited is there anything else you wanted to banter about anything else on

your mind i have a new player i'm realizing is good who's that uh a tradition unlike any another any other i am not the only person i'm sure who is realizing this uh but uh it's probably time for us to write about josh bell yeah you've been paying attention to josh bell it's hard not to because every day there's a highlight of him hitting a homer like 450 feet so that kind of gets your attention yeah yeah josh bell josh bell already has 12 home runs josh bell has a 184 wrc plus uh you know the early season defensive metrics don't love his defense but whatever uh that that happens he is uh 12th let's see what is he where's he at just in the nl he he is is behind only Cody Bellinger, Christian Yelich, Paul DeJong, and Javier Baez. He is tied with Chris Bryant at 1.8 wins. So, you know, this is all basically the same thing. So like Josh Bell. When we're done with this, I'm going to go into the fan graph slack and I'm going to be like, hey, guys, somebody should write about Josh Bell.

I made Jay Jaffe write about Tommy LaStella. I was just going to say, Josh Bell's like the Tommy LaStella of the National League. Yes. Yes. Which is a good thing now. That's a great. Yes, that is a good thing now. 2019 is wild.

I love 2019. It is a good thing. Jay wrote that and then Tommy LaStella hit another home run. He was just like, like hey jay i know you wrote about this and it'll give you a good reason to retweet your article and not you know you won't feel gross about self-promotion even though we all have to do it but we all feel kind of yucky about it because it feels like we're saying hey look at me hey look at me because tommy listella hit another home run maybe josh bell will be similarly accommodating i'm excited it's an exciting time to watch baseball. Not only are the players better than ever before, and not only are their new excellent players arriving all the time, as we're about to talk about, but some of the old

players who didn't seem so good suddenly are good or are good again. So Tommy LaStella, Josh Bell, Matt Boyd is good now. Martin Perez is good now. Hunter Pence is good again. It's all like swing changers and launch ankle guys and new pitches and throwing better pitches more and going to driveline over the winter and coming back a changed man. It is an exciting time. Player development. It is something someone should write a book about. And then other people should buy that book

and maybe in June. Yeah. June 4th. June 4th. That sounds like a good day for that book. Okay. Alright, so we'll take a quick break and we'll be right back with Eric Long and Hagen to talk about all the prospects. Of a new day I heard that your trouble Won't get it to sleep I feel something special

Spill it out of me You're the best When your troubles pass Dance all night Start right now so baseball is increasingly a young person's sport and some of the most promising of those young persons have arrived very recently you know course, the top prospects who started the season in the majors, Fernando Tatis Jr., Eloy Jimenez, Pete Alonso, Chris Paddock. We have talked, of course, about Vlad Jr., who broke out with a multi-homer game this week. But there's been a wave of top prospect promotions just in the past few weeks here. And even in this week alone in a very concentrated

fashion i'll just list them off here i have the fan graphs top 100 prospects list from this february up which was actually a top 132 prospects list and so the recent arrivals in the majors who were on that list we've got nixon zell number seven kestonura, number 13, Carter Keeboom, number 18, Brendan Rogers, the most recent arrival, number 28, Austin Riley, number 33, Corbin Martin, number 50, Cole Tucker, 83, Griffin Canning, 101, Shed Long, 132, and that doesn't even count some of the team-centric prospects who've come up like Michael Chavis and Nate Lowe and Sean Anderson and Nikki Lopez. There's a litany of prospects here. And to introduce us to these new arrivals, to tell us what we need to know about them,

we are joined now by Fangraph's prospect analyst, Eric Langenhagen. Hey, Eric. Hello. How are you? We're doing well. That's good. Yeah, like it's been a lot lately. And like some of the guys who have come up, even individuals who you didn't list who are not – Oh, man.

I missed them. It's like corner case guys who are weird like Jared Walsh. It's another Angels two-way player. Yeah. A guy whose career went back and forth from the mound to hitting while he was in college and then just did nothing but hit for a while and pro ball like has only been doing the two-way thing as a pro for about a year like this all came together very quickly uh and now he's here and like maybe we'll see how he sets a precedent for usage in this type of role which like might be coming more pervasively so like yes it is a pretty cool time to like be

thinking about prospects and reading about prospects. And it seems like, and you can tell me if my sense of this is just wrong, but it seems like we are seeing a lot of these guys maybe a little earlier than we would expect to. Like we, I think we're all used to there being a wave of guys sort of of this profile in say mid June when the Super 2 stuff is a little more sorted out. And it seems like they're early or at least clumped together. Is that sense accurate? Do you have a sense of why that would be that we would be seeing so many of these guys coming up and sort of early to mid-May? I think some of it is, some of it's just random.

And then some of it is, I think that we have an unusual number of contending teams who are also young and have incentive to promote Nate Lowe, to promote Corbin Martin, to promote Keston Hura. Well, it's early enough for them to make more of a fuller season's worth of impact, I guess. Sure. And then there's also just been a need recently, right? then there's also just been a need recently right like it's the brewers need a second baseman now and like the reds needed a center fielder and and you know forced a positional change like so they had one and so like i just think that there's a confluence of variables occurring in each situation and um just for every team it's you know the angels have had rotation issues as far as health is concerned you know so it's um

and some of it are foregone conclusions right like vlad jr and some of the more talented individuals like to just force their way up because they're that they're that good and we're well clear of you know service time dates and so like it's just time to start seeing most of these guys yeah and i don't know how much time you have to pay attention to prospects closely once they make the majors because i remember remember when Kevin Goldstein was still at BP talking to him about that, where there's this weird divide where he'd pay incredibly close attention to everyone until they made the majors. And then it was like they were almost off his radar at that point. It was like they made it. And that was kind of what he cared about. And he didn't see them quite as often. I'm sure that's different today, but are you like that? And if you have had a chance to follow any of these guys very closely in the majors, have you been surprised by any of them in either direction? Just someone who has looked great immediately, someone who has sort of scuffled out of the gate in an unexpected way? Yeah. So for a while, that was an issue for me as well.

I've since put a few devices into the structure of the way I live that has enabled me to keep up with what these guys are doing at the big league level. But the first year and a half, two years that I did this job full-time, yeah, that became kind of an issue. And so I try to go see a big league series once a month. And so, like, I'm seeing guys in person at the big league level and, like, do other things that, like, make sure I'm watching prospects that are in the big leagues. But yeah, like, Brian Reynolds, Brian Reynolds with the Pirates, I think the Pirates kind of

sneakily have a few potential franchise cornerstones at the upper levels of the minor leagues. Like, Mitch Keller, pitching prospect, has been near the top of everyone's prospect list for several years. But Brian Hayes, Cole Tucker, and Brian Reynolds, who's sort of... Reynolds himself has had a pretty uneven career dating back to his time at Vanderbilt, where there have been a lot of strikeouts at times. And then at other times, he's a center fielder with power who walks a lot. And so that on its face is very interesting, even though the red flag strikeout issues have been there in the past and not everyone thought he'd play a viable center field.

But he's playing very well. The peripherals are a little bit concerning, but he's a center fielder with power. And then Cole Tucker and Hayes are two I think like future all-stars Tucker's debut was news here in Phoenix because he went to high school here and then the Pirates immediately came here to play and so he's had like a huge contingent of fans at all the D-backs games and so like it is a thing that is being talked about here in Arizona is Cole Tucker and he seems to be of interest to Pirates fans as well, like more than I thought he

was going to be, because for a while it looked like this was just an athletic defensive shortstop. And then during last year's Fall League, he started to show power, like he's a big, well-made 6'4 kid. So even at this age, there's probably more power coming, and he seems so athletic that no matter how much comes, like he'll be able to stay at shortstop, especially given what teams are more willing to put there now. And so like that group and Hayes hasn't debuted yet, but Reynolds and Tucker and what the Pirates have coming, I think is very, very exciting. And some of the stuff that Reynolds has done in just 20 big league games is like, it's maybe more confident that, yeah, like this group to speed on some of these dudes specifically we can start with a broader question which is of this group that has recently come up who are you the most

excited about seeing like and who should fans potentially be the most excited about seeing and we can start that way and then you can say some names and then we can ask you about some other names so let's do it that way uh yeah well jared walsh is is definitely one of those because it's just a weird role uh nikki lopez with kansas city nikki has been overshadowed for a while he was a fifth round pick out of creighton uh which has produced like a sneaky number of big leaguers over the last like five to ten years or just interesting prospects and Lopez is one of those guys who the he's he is small physically he's a diminutive guy uh doesn't have a lot of raw power but plays a good shortstop and like his peripherals are ludicrous like he doesn't strike out and so

when we did the royals list at the site and looked at at Dan Zimborski's three-year zips for Lopez based on his AAA numbers, that's one of those statistical red flags where it's like, hey, this might be a sneaky top 100 type of prospect. contact and the sort of value he would generate, I think is going to be very interesting to see how he competes physically at the big league level, since like that is the question as to whether or not he can do that. Shed Long, who doesn't really have a defensive position, but- That is such a generous way of saying that. Right. Yeah. So I think what's interesting about Shed is like he was a catcher and then he moved to second base. And so it was like, okay, we're waiting to see if he can actually play second base. And then a few years go by, and he didn't really get much better. So now what it seems the Mariners are doing is just hiding him day to day, second base, third base, left field.

Where will the ball be hit the least today? That's where Shed should play. And I think that's a good idea. I just think he's going to hit for power and for contact and just be that type of role, sort of a position. If positionless baseball to a degree exists, this is what it looks like. This is the type of thing that I think the Rays have experimented with, moving some of their prospects around to those positions, second, third, left field. They've done it with Brandon Lau. They've done it with Nick Solak. How can we just get all the guys who hit the best into the lineup, even if it means hiding guys who can't play defense? I think that's what we'll start to see Seattle do with Shed. And then, yeah, I mean, who's not interested in watching Vlad

and Darwins and Hernandez and Travis Lakins, who both came up in late April. Darwin's and Hernandez and Travis Lakens, who both came up in late April, they're two homegrown Red Sox relief pieces, in my opinion. Hernandez has what could be like top 10, top 5 relief pitcher stuff. And Lakens is that four-seam fastball, 12-6 curveball, swing and miss. Like, he's got a cutter. He has like a split change. It's a four-pitch reliever who's only there because he has a like a split change it's it's a four pitch reliever who's only there because he couldn't stay healthy as a starter and so like this might be what everyone was hoping the red sox would do in free agency to fix the bullpen like these these might

just be the guys who do it so that's like a group of uh maybe not top 100 types because of you know relief value or whatever but those those few few are interesting just because they're weird. Their usage might be weird. I want to talk about some of the blue chippers here and just do kind of a getting to know you segment because I know these are household names among prospect people. But to a lot of listeners, I'm sure they're just names and rankings on a list or their names on a waiver wire. Maybe they haven't seen them play yet or don't know a whole lot about them. So the top guys who've been called up, Nick Senzel, who came up with the Reds a couple of weeks ago, Hura, who just arrived with the Brewers and had a multi-hit

game. You have Austin Riley with the Braves who homered in his first game and then Keeboom with the Nats and Brendan Rogers who reportedly will join the Rockies as the most recent arrival these are all like top 30 preseason prospect types those are big names so I don't know if you want to take them in order of ranking or in order of who piques your interest the most just kind of give us a capsule scouting report what kind of players are we talking about here okay yeah Nick Senzel Senzel came into his draft year at Tennessee as this might be the top pick or he might fall late in the first round. He had a very inconsistent sophomore year defensively and no one was sure where he was going to end up playing. And he hit as a junior and really everyone should

have just been totally in on the bat, and that was it. You could probably argue in retrospect that this probably should have been the first pick in his draft year. But yeah, so now he's so athletic that he could arguably play anywhere. And so he's playing center field. He's going to hit. He's going to hit for power. We'll see how quickly he takes to center field. I do ultimately think he'll end up moving back to the infield eventually. But for now, we'll see how quickly he takes to center field. I do ultimately think he'll end up moving back to the infield eventually.

But for now, we'll see how this goes. I think there are people who would say a defensive change like that will bleed into his offensive production because his routine is disrupted or whatever. And so I don't know if that's true. But certainly from a talent standpoint, this is a well-rounded offensive player. Keston Hura, same thing. The plate discipline aspect of Keston Hura is questionable. He's got a 10% walk rate this season, but historically it's been considerably lower than that,

like more in the 6% range. But just from a bat-to-ball standpoint, his hands and Carter K Keboom's hands are really strong, really fast. Bat control is exceptional. He's going to hit. He's going to hit for power and face similar defensive question marks his draft year, also probably a reason he fell, except this was injury related. He wore a DH and basically didn't play defense anywhere his junior year at UC Irvine. Basically, he didn't play defense anywhere his junior year at UC Irvine. And he played the outfield on collegiate team USA. No one saw him play second base for a year and a half because he had an elbow issue.

And so his draft year was, well, this might be a DH. This might be an up-the-middle player. And so he fell. It turns out he can play second base just fine. His elbow turned out to be fine. So he's going to be an all-star, I think. Carter Keeboom, we ranked really high. There was some pushback from teams about where we had Keeboom. He did not look good defensively in the fall league last year. It was just clear to everybody who saw him that he was not a shortstop. And it seems certain that he wouldn't play a whole lot of shortstop early on just because of Trey Turner's presence.

But we thought someone eventually would just stick him there. We would just see who else plays shortstop now and just think he'll play there. And that's another, you know, it's a shortstop with plus power. He would get a lot of Troy Tulewitzki comps, which I don't think – I think offensively is possible, but defensively, young Tulo was just much better than Kibum. Brendan Rodgers, yeah, coming up today. Rodgers has just been good every year since he was a high school sophomore.

He's just been the best. He's just been a totally fine middle infielder who definitely was going to hit and had above average power, and he's basically been that every year since his sophomore year of high school. He was always the most consistent hitter on all the showcases, facing good high school pitching in Florida every year. He has just been what everybody has expected every year of his career since he was 14.

So there's no reason to think he won't continue doing that. And then who else did you mention? Riley. Oh, Austin Riley. Yeah, Austin Riley, third baseman with power. It's like 70 power. Str, struggled early in his career, got very heavy very quickly after high school. There was some thought that he'd have to be first baseman, but that has stabilized. He's just fine at third base. And yeah, he has a ton of

power and he's young and he has a track record of hitting at every level, including AAA, even though he's like the age of a college junior. I don't know where his ultimate defensive home will be. If there are better alternatives at third base defensively, I think there certainly could be. But yeah, I think he'll be helpful. I think he'll come up and hit right away and be helpful for the Braves right now. So when we did our rankings, well, we haven't done a formal farm system ranking yet. our rankings. Well, we haven't done a formal farm system ranking yet, but as we think about sort of the best systems in baseball, we released two Proustian length lists for both the Rays and the Padres that are very good, and everyone should read every single word of them. But these are

the two best systems in baseball in whatever order you want to take them, and they are also incredibly deep. I know that we're talking about call-ups right now, but can you kind of give listeners a sense of what the consolidation picture might be for these two teams and what it might end up meaning for them going forward? Because they have way too many guys than they're ever going to be able to field. What a nice problem to have. this problem of having too much talent such that it spills over into places like the Rule 5 draft. And ideally, you'd like to get something back for those guys. And so, like, we've seen the two ways of doing it are you can churn, you know, the verb to churn, where you just flip someone who requires a 40-man spot sooner and usually immediately for someone who doesn't need one for several years. So the Padres started doing this last offseason, acquiring Esteban Quiroz and Ignacio Feliz, two pretty interesting prospects for various reasons. And like we've seen the Yankees do it,

and like the Yankees are notorious for losing guys in the Rule 5. And so we'll see that happen with both clubs, but also they're fortunate that they're competitive now. And so you can just package some of these prospects together for big league help right now. It's like, you know, push you over the proverbial edge of contention. So I think that that's what both teams will start to look to do. I think this is where it becomes as important to evaluate your own farm system as it is, if not more so, as it is to evaluate the others, like when you make this turn. If we think about all the prospects that teams have traded

in like the last 10 years in blockbusters, right? Like the Roy Halladay trade and stuff, the ones who have and have not panned out the Kyle Drabecks of the world. That's because that comes from knowing your own farm systems. So yeah, I think that those teams are probably doing internal evaluation right now and figuring out who they'd rather get rid of than not. Ben is hoping that the Rays trade one of the Lowe's or Lowe's because he is tired of having to remember which one's last name goes with which.

Yeah, it's a problem. And I think what will happen now is that someone from the rays will listen to this podcast and will intentionally trade uh with los angeles for sauron lau whose last name is pronounced lau but spelled in a different way um get on it jeff yeah counting on you so go ahead and do that i know there are multiple members of the race front office who listen to this podcast but i'm not sure that the former co-host is one of them. But maybe they'll let him know. Hi, Jeff. So I saw Griffin Canning. He's one of the other ranked guys we haven't talked about yet. I've seen him almost inadvertently while watching

Mike Trout and Shohei Otani. And he's looked impressive in some ways. He's given up too many homers, but he's struck out a lot of guys. And it's encouraging to see an angel starter who is seemingly pretty promising and talented and also healthy for now. So what can you tell us about Canning? Yeah, Canning, all the UCLA pitching prospects, and every year there are many, kind of look the same. It's four pitches, two different breaking ball variants, and they work off of them a lot, like especially the breaking stuff in college. And a lot of them have good change-ups that scouts wish they used more. James Kaprelian was this way. Griffin Canning was this way.

Ryan Garcia, who will probably go on day two of this year's draft, is this way. Ryan Garcia, who will probably go on day two of this year's draft, is this way. And Canning especially was interesting because his stuff was down before the draft. He was used really heavily as a sophomore and a junior. I saw one of his sophomore starts where he threw like 130 pitches, which wasn't the only time he did that that year. And so there were some teams who were totally scared away, He did that that year. And so there were some teams who were totally scared away and others who just thought he was on talent,

like the second or third best college arm in that draft. And the Angels took him and just shut him down. He did not pitch the entire summer after he was drafted. And then the following spring, the velocity was up. Like he was 94, 97 early during the spring of 2018. And then things tapered off to where you see him now. He'll sit 92, 94. The changeup is more a part of what he does, but still not a huge part. But he is working heavily with the secondaries. I think that's where the walks are still kind of creeping

in. It's a lot of off-speed stuff. He's pitching backward a lot. I think he's sort of designed to go twice through the order and that's it. So I don't know how much – he might be taxing to the bullpen because of how efficiently he works. But I agree with you. I think it's working. He'll be up. Jaime Barilla I like and Jose Suarez who started the year in extended due to – I think it was a shoulder issue. He's back at AAA.

He's also like a quality secondary pitch guy with like a fringe fastball. Like he'll work two to four, but the changeup is plus. The breaking ball will flash plus. And he works with those a lot, knows how to pitch. So I think the Angels have like young rotation help. It's here in Canning.

Yeah, Canning's the most famous of that group. We've talked in the past about how the change in the baseball at the major league level makes it more difficult possibly to evaluate and projectning. Yeah, Canning's the most famous of that group. We've talked in the past about how the change in the baseball at the major league level makes it more difficult possibly to evaluate and project prospects because suddenly you get to the majors and it's a different ball and it's much more powerful and it flies much farther and you have these guys who didn't show a ton of power in the minors suddenly hitting for more power in the majors, which is weird. But now you have the same ball in AAA and offense and

homers are way up there too. I know not every top prospect goes to AAA, but has that changed anything in terms of projecting how a prospect will translate to the majors or even in terms of assignments, like when you're deciding whether you want a prospect to go to AAA or not, is it more advantageous now to send a prospect to AAA to get acclimated to the conditions in that sense? Yeah, I think there are definitely questions that I haven't even asked myself about what to do about what's going on at AAA. But it is, yeah, it's confusing. And if you look at some of the raw data, like the uptick in home runs, it's almost like twice as many home runs are being hit right now. I think there's probably a multiplicative effect because the hitting environment at a lot of the PCL parks especially was already warped.

And so, yeah, I'm not really sure how to handle it from evaluating the statistics at AAA, which are just more important. It's just more important to look at statistical performance at AA and AAA as a means of evaluation than it is in the DSL and the AZL. You just don't care about statistics as much down there. The stats are more a part of it at the upper levels. And so now this has forced us to ask, how do we adjust? And yeah, you're right. From a player dev perspective too, it's probably being asked. There are instances of teams, the Brewers AAA affiliate for the last several years, but not anymore this year, was at Colorado Springs. And some of their pitchers, if you go look at Corbin Burns' ERA there, at Jeff Hoffman's ERA there, at Jorge Lopez's ERA there, Hoffman's ERA there, Jorge Lopez's ERA there.

Some of the guys who have pitched at higher elevations in these PCL ballparks, Colorado Springs included, Albuquerque is another one. It's hard to know if they're any good. And then some of them get kicked back to AA to pitch it at a place that is more stable developmentally because they think a lot of them are learning bad habits at some of these weird band boxes. And so, yeah, I think Colorado specifically, I think, has made it so that each of their minor league affiliates is a hitter-friendly ballpark to force their pitchers to learn how to deal with it. And so I don't know if it's affecting player Devin that way right now. There are definitely, when the carousel, the minor league affiliate carousel occurs at the end of every year,

it's clear which affiliates teams would rather avoid. And a lot of them are when the offensive environment is like this, like it's just not good for developing players. And so I wonder if now that things are so weird at AAA that teams will try to move away from that baseball or I don't know, it feels like it should just be consistent

across professional baseball, in my like yeah the idea of electronic strike zones at the major league level and then not being able to implement it at the minor league level at least overall like unilaterally across all the levels like that in and of itself concerns me and so that the baseball is different here and there like is also kind of bothersome and yeah makes it harder to sift through what is what is also kind of bothersome. And yeah, it makes it harder to sift through what is statistical noise. Of the folks who have not yet come up, so the guys who are still in the minors, but who we might see get some meaningful time this year, who are you excited about? Who we haven't yet seen?

Oh, that's a good question. I guess, yeah, it's always hard to know who's going to come up and who is not, right? Because the reasons for it vary. Sure. been up. I'd like to see, it'd be really nice if someone like Alex Kirilov or Royce Lewis forced Minnesota's hand, like was so good. Like one of those guys, a meteoric rise, Joe Adele comes back from his spring training injury and forced, like he just makes it so clear that he's one of the Angels' best 25 players that like he has to, they have no choice but to bring him up. Like something like that, I think we will still see happen. Who it will be, I don't know. Like Royce Lewis with the Twins

is a candidate for something like that. Joe Adele. Jordan Alvarez, talk about someone whose AAA statistics are like no doubt warped by the baseball. Go look at what Houston prospect Jordan Alvarez has done to AAA this year. Like it could be someone like that who just comes up and, oh,

it turns out this is real. And he has like 20 homers in the second half or something like that. We've seen Pete Alonso. I'm just looking at our top 100 now too. Yeah, like Eusniel Diaz would be interesting to see if some of these pieces of Baltimore's potential rebuild, like who is a real long-term piece for Baltimore, whether it's Diaz or Ryan Mountcastle, any of those guys might come up

and we get to see the start of maybe a competitive team in Baltimore. So yeah, there are a lot of guys. Anyone who has a 2019 ETA on the board, I'd be interested to know how they perform just because I've learned and written about them all. Yeah, and presumably Luis Arias will be back soon, right? Because he was up for 11 games with San Diego and he did not hit, but since he's gone back down to the minors, and this could be a PCL plus baseball situation too, but he's at like a 12 somethingPS, and he's not really blocked by anyone because he's not hitting.

So I assume that he will be back in that infield of the future. We'll all be together sometime soon. He's ready, right, even though he struggled in a small sample. Right. There's another individual who is just the age of your average college junior. Most of the guys who are going to get drafted in a couple weeks are just as old as Luis Urias is. So it's not shocking or problematic that he's struggling in the big leagues. Yeah, I'm with you.

The power, you know, it's probably a caricature of what he's going to be able to do realistically in the big leagues. But this is what they've tried to do lately, right? Like you see the uptake and strikeout rate over the last two years. He's not ditching the leg kick with two strikes anymore. I think the Padres have said, leave that in. Let's see how much power we can get you to hit four. And so, yeah, maybe there's more in there.

And he's showing evidence of that AAA. Like who else? I'm kind of curious what else you guys are looking forward to, like some of the names that have come across your radars that you hope to see at some point this year that you think is realistic. Oh, gosh. You're asking me about specific prospects? You're talking about putting us on the spot.

My goodness, that's what you're for. I love to turn the open-ended prospect question on people because I do think we will have over 1,000 guys on the board in the next couple days. And so open-ended prospect questions, even for me, it is hard because it's just like, okay, no, it's okay. I don't care. It's fun to try to figure it out. In the moment, it is fun to try to do that. But yeah, I am also just curious with the layperson, the casual prospect observer, what they want to see. Because I missed – it was either – yesterday for me was either do a podcast with Jeff Passaner, watch a 19-year-old Rockies lefty who I've heard throws hard.

I know which one I went and did. So I want to know what normal people consider interesting. I don't know that I count a a normal observer of prospects i have such a weird i sit in such a weird seat as a prospect observer as someone who edits all of your guys's words so i'm going to use that to get out of this question entirely and make ben answer it but we've been for a little while. We gave you time. I think Ben sort of indirectly answered it by asking about Louis Sirius. There you go. Yeah, sure. Okay. And I wanted to also ask about Michael Chavis because he's someone whose name I was not very aware of and wasn't really looking forward to, but he has been huge for the Red Sox

and his coming up has kind of coincided with their riding the ship. And he was a first baseman, right? He was third on your Red Sox list this year. And then they started playing him at second, which has come in handy because the Red Sox really needed a second baseman. And so he's come up and he's got a 986 OPS right now. But what kind of player is he actually? Chavis? Yeah, Chavis was like one of those guys who was a high school shortstop and then got bigger

and bigger and bigger. And yeah, I think he's just the first baseman. He was on our 100 before his PED suspension. And then we just rounded him down a half grade. Like if you're evaluating all of these guys uniformly, like we had a 50 future value on Peter Alonso. This Chavis has like that kind of in-game power. Like it's not that kind of raw power, but you've seen the way he swings, right?

Like he's getting to all that power in games. Like he's making sure of it. He's really entertaining free, like hard swinging, slow pitch softball, like just trying to hit a home run almost every time he swings guy. I think, yeah, he's, I think he's an average everyday first baseman, but just when you're lining all the guys up and you're like, okay, I think over the span of six years, like that's ultimately what Peter Alonso will be. He's like a, you know, two and a half, three win a year first baseman.

This guy probably is that type of thing too. But now there's this question of PEDs and I didn't know, you know, like how do we evaluate this power that we've seen to this point? And it was, you know, we just rounded down. So yeah, Chavis, I think he's hit for power long enough now post suspension to buy that this is just how much power he has. And so yeah, he's walking much more than I would have anticipated to this point. And I think that will regress. But yeah, he's got huge power. Yeah. One reason why we're struggling to come up with names we're anticipating, I think, is that I'm looking at the 2019 impact prospects list that Kylie made during your prospects week rollout.

And it looks like the top 11 of them are all in the majors right now. And a couple of the next guys are just hurt or trying to come back from injuries. So, I mean, we've kind of crossed off to the guys he would have expected to be the big call-ups already this year. So I guess like,

I want to see what Forrest Whitley does when he comes back. He's, is he back from the suspension? He's yeah. He's he's back. He's not pitching well. Yeah. He's not pitching well. he's not pitching well he's

back but um but yeah a lot of the pitching like Brent Honeywell it seems like has been shut down again Jesus Lizardo is here in Arizona rehabbing from shoulder stuff it sounds like he'll he's still a few weeks away uh AJ Puck is throwing I, two more simulated games here in Arizona that I'm going to try to sneak in and see before he gets sent to Stockton to like rehab in earnest. So yeah, like some of the pitching is not there. Alex Ray has punched something and I don't even know what he's up to. Yeah, like some of the pitching has not really come up. But yeah, everyone is up. One guy I bet Meg was looking forward to is Justice Sheffield,

who has not looked so great. He was up for one game in Seattle, but mostly he's been at AAA, and he has walked almost as many guys as he struck out, 25 walks, 26 strikeouts, and 31 and a third. That's not what you want. So what's going on with Justice Sheffield? Because he seemed like he might be a ready right now type of guy. I would like to say for the record,

and Eric can tell you that this is true because he was standing there, when we saw Sheffield in Arizona throwing an inter-squad game against Ichiro, we saw that fastball, and I went, Ruh-roh, I made that sound out loud. Eric was there. He can testify. So I've been concerned with a capital C for a little while now. Thank you.

So yes. So yes, it is true. We were there. But I don't know. Sheffield's one of those guys where it's, I wish that people could really see all the beats of it. Like when Cleveland drafted him, that was the summer I moved to Arizona. So I saw him that summer in the AZL and he did not

have a slider. Like he was throwing a curve ball at that time. And then he was traded and he had, he was so incredible during his fall league here, but was wild that the summer before with the Yankees. And so like, this is just one of those guys who, depending on when you've checked in with him, he has either looked like a future number two starter or a reliever. And it has just been up and down with the command and the velocity, the entire career. And so like the version of Justice Sheffield that the Mariners have gotten, the one that Meg and I saw on the backfields that day was like 91-92 with a good change up and a good slider and like average command. And then the version that he's been since the season started is the command is way below. And I don't know, like it seems like that's it. Like everything else is kind of the

same. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen here. It has been at times utterly dominant and then at other times very frustrating to watch Justice Sheffield. I have one more name to ask you about. Maybe we'll close with the draft question. But before that, a question about one of last year's draftees. In fact, the first one, Casey Mize, last year's number one overall pick. He has been fantastic so far this year. I don't know that there's any way we would see him in Detroit. They certainly don't need him right now, even if he's ready. But looking at the numbers, he's pitched 50 and two-thirds innings. He's walked five guys, struck out 48. He's allowed 22 hits in 50 and two-thirds innings. That's pretty extreme. And he's already made it up to AA, and it doesn't seem like he's having any trouble there either. So what's the ETA? What's the timeline for him? Just, I guess, both in terms of talent and in terms of when Detroit might actually want to summon him, because those might be two different things.

Right, yeah. That was one of the things that last year before the draft, teams were talking about is like, hey, this guy doesn't really fit with Detroit's competitive timeline. And they're starting to talk about that with Baltimore and Adley Rutschman now too. And we can never tell if it's an actual concern and something people should care about or if it's just something that someone, a few picks below number one, is trying to sort of, you know, feed into the zeitgeist so that

Casey Mize falls to number three and the Phillies, you know, who had a lot of, Casey Mize would have been such a great fit for a Phillies team that knew that they were going to be competitive very soon. You know, they would be the team who would be like, yeah, maybe this is a good idea. You should write about this. But yeah, Mize, and this is like kudos to Detroit because I think a lot of people don't think Detroit is at the forefront of any of this stuff, but it's not like Casey Mize was bad, but this is a pitch design success story.

There's more demarcation now between Mize's cutter and slider as far as like the vertical movement is concerned. So yeah, he is, it's mid-90s, plus-plus cutter, plus-plus splitter. The slider was closer to average or above in college, but now that's playing better because it has added vertical depth. So yeah, we're like looking at four plus or better pitches and command. And there was some medical stuff with Mize when he was a sophomore at Auburn, but he has, his stuff has been really good for the last two years now, and he hasn't been hurt. So it seems like that is behind him as well.

Yeah, I don't know when he's going to be up because obviously Detroit just doesn't care to compete and start his service clock. But he could probably get big league outs right now. So yeah, if they promote him to AAA aggressively, then maybe we'll see him in September. Watch the pacing of his promotion. If it looks like they're kind of doing it in a way where it was six weeks in high A, six weeks in AA, six weeks in AAA, then maybe we see something. If it's very even, maybe they're just sort of trying to plan to have him up in September for a little bit. And he seems like a very data-driven, tech-friendly, open-minded type guy, which if you take someone who has the raw talent to get picked first overall, and then you couple it with that aspect of things, that's pretty scary. Well, think about where some of the hires for pitching coaches last offseason came from. Yes. Yeah. College, exactly. Right. coaches last offseason came from you know yes yeah college exactly right yeah the sec the sec is at the forefront of a lot of stuff like this uh further than a lot of further than a lot of big league player dev uh groups are you can read about that in my book which comes out during the

draft actually so in case people are too distracted to prepare for the draft because they're so excited about the mvp machine coming out on juneth. Can we just do a quick draft preview and hopefully we'll have you and or Kylie on to recap what happened and tell us who these players we've never heard of are. But just like very broad, general setting up the draft questions. Like you mentioned Rutschman, is he the consensus best player? Is there a clear consensus best player? What kind of draft is this? Is it deep? Is it thin? Is it pitching heavy? Is it position player heavy? And I guess also like which team has the most at stake in this draft in terms of like a bunch of early picks that they could really make a killing on? a bunch of early picks that they could really make a killing on. So yes, in my opinion, Adley Rutschman is head and shoulders the best prospect in this class. Because Baltimore is picking one, and what Mike Elias did while he was running drafts in Houston was to cut a deal at one and spread bonuses around throughout the rest of the draft. No one is

totally sure if Rutschman will be pick one, although there is starting to be buzz that like it is becoming a sure thing, like maybe a very sure thing that is already surely sure. But yeah, so like it is against Elias' MO to just take the best guy and give him slot. But in this case, he kind of might have to because this guy is really good. And then the next storyline right now, and this may not hold water over the coming weeks, is like, where does Andrew Vaughn go? Andrew Vaughn is a first baseman at Cal that won the Golden Spikes as a sophomore and might do so again as a junior, although my money is on Rutchman. college hitter of all time. He plays first base. It's a right-handed hitting first base profile. That has been successful more frequently lately. Alonso, Reese Hoskins, Paul Goldschmidt. So after there had been a long period where Eric Karros was the only guy,

and now a bunch of right-handed hitting first base college prospects have succeeded. So Vaughn is part of that group. He might not have a home for a little while. Like if he doesn't go three to the White Sox, there might not be someone who is really on him for like a little while. So he might fall. Like it's likely that someone is just like, hey, like this is good value and they take him.

But we're tracking that situation. And then like, as far as teams with a lot of picks, Arizona's draft pool is over 16 million. They have deployed every member of the Diamondbacks scouting staff, pro or amateur, whose face I recognize, I have seen at high school or college games at some point during the spring. I've seen Mike Hazen at games. I've seen Amiel Saude at games. I've seen members of the pro scouting department at games. Zach Granke hasude at games. I've seen members of the pro scouting department at games. Zach Greinke has been at games.

Like, it is all hands on deck for the D-backs because they have all these picks from not signing last year's first rounder and from trading Paul Goldschmidt for a comp pick and from losing Corbin and AJ Pollock in free agency. So they will have a monster draft class that will move their farm system into the top 10. Like we've kind of looked at where we have everyone lined up and what we expect the D-backs to add via the draft. And they will instantaneously become a top 10 system. So that will be very interesting. And then as far as like the quality of the talent, it's just in my opinion, it's like a slightly above average class. College pitching has been very middling. There's not like a top college arm, like a Strasburg or Cole or Bauer type of arm at the top of the draft. And there's not really like, there's not a Casey Mize,

for instance. There are problems with just about every college arm, even the ones that are going to go in or close to the top 10, whether it's medical stuff or command or the delivery looks weird or whatever it may be. Everyone's got some sort of wart. And then the college position group was, some of them were a little bit disappointing from a performance standpoint some of the sec short stops uh cameron meisner and outfielder very toolsy outfielder at the university of missouri like didn't really hit this year and so we'll see where those guys go and then like the group of late risers like there are uh it's it's just my theory that like teams who are model-driven run the model and then there are draft meetings right around this time of year, like right now. Most of them just ended.

And when people come out of those meetings and have seen the draft board for the first time and have seen what the model has spit out, a bunch of names will stand out to scouts like as being higher than they expected. And then that information comes to Kylie and I and like Keith Law and Jim Callis and those folks. We start to hear like who are those names? And it's almost always the very young high schoolers. And so those guys this year are Gunnar Henderson, an Alabama high school shortstop. Kyron Paris, a Northern California high school shortstop. Blake Walson, a North Carolina left-handed pitcher. And Brooks Lee, a shortstop in like central Southern California.

So those guys are in my – this is just my theory. They're all guys that the model spit out because they're young and they're all higher on everyone's board than they anticipated. And the reason we're like, oh, wow, we have to move these guys up now is because we're just hearing about it now because draft meetings have just happened. And so I'm interested to see where those – the names that we're hearing now as like, hey, they're rising even though Kyron Paris hasn't played a game in a week. Why? Like this is why I think why and I'm interested to see where these guys get picked.

Well, so am I. This concludes my draft prep and yours will continue. You are already working on mock drafts. You've done a couple mock drafts with Kylie. So you'll be writing about the draft. You'll be writing about Major League prospects. You can find it all at Fangraphs. You can find Eric at Longenhagen on Twitter.

And I'm sure we will talk to you again soon. So thanks for the prospect roundup. Thank you for having me, guys. All right. That will do it for today and for this week. Thanks for listening. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already pledged their support and are helping keep the podcast going. Robert Goldstein, Kyle Talley, Ethan Daniel Gong Norton, Timothy O'Toole, and Ian Darius. Thanks to all of you.

You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. And you can rate and review and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fan graphs dot com or via the patron messaging system. If you're a supporter. Thanks as always to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance i've already teased the book a couple times in this episode but you can pre-order the mvp machine which again comes out on june 4th go get it now wherever books are sold or about to be sold and if you do pre-order you can qualify for pre-order goodies a bonus chapter a conversation about the book between me and tra, some other cool goodies that we'll be stuffing in there.

You'll get those on June 4th along with the book. So place your pre-order and send us some confirmation that you placed your pre-order to the MVP machine at gmail.com. We hope you have a wonderful weekend and we will talk to you you next time. Bye.