Bertz

I believe this is something that Cleveland has led out on across the league, and it was hypothesized that Hawkins would bring over. Speaking of things Hawkins potentially brought over... https://twitter.com/drivelinebases/status/1536522037698605056?t=41QkGkbNnWkbe5hPq188Tw&s=19

I think most encouraging to me is the times through the order penalty is getting less stiff for him. 1st time through the order: 2.79 xFIP 2nd time through: 4.14 xFIP 3rd time through: 2.81 xFIP The fact that his 2nd time through numbers are now perfectly fine and his third time through numbers are great is encouraging. While those 3rd time through numbers especially won't keep up it hopefully shows that he has the repertoire necessary to stay a legit starter. On the other hand the velo loss within starts kind of terrifies me. He didn't crack 91 his last two innings last night. If he was 93-95 the first few innings and 91-93 at the end of the night that'd be fine, but he drops down as low as 87 at points. The results aren't as horrible as you'd expect, but it sort of feels like a matter of time?

I mentioned this a while back in the minor league forum, but I think 40 Man roster considerations are going to have a significant impact on the next six months of transactions. There are so many prospects eligible for the upcoming Rule 5 draft that even with all of the dead weight on the roster there's a pretty significant crunch coming up. Right now, the 40 man roster is obviously at 40 names. With 6 guys on the sixty day IL, and 9 impending FAs, that means the roster will be at 37 at the start of the offseason barring any trades or cuts. From there, 4 prospects absolutely have to be added to the roster: Brennen Davis, Bryce Ball, Kevin Alcantara, and Yohendrick Pinango. Another 6 probably should be added: Chris Clarke, Cam Sanders, Ryan Jensen, Riley Thompson, Bryan Hudson, Kohl Franklin. On top of that I count another 8 names that you probably wouldn't add today, but have a pretty reasonable path to getting there over the next three months: Darius Hill, Cayne Ueckert, Chase Strumpf, Cole Roederer, Eury Ramos, Brendon Little, Yonathan Perlaza, and Danis Correa. That's 55 (!!) names you could reasonably argue onto the 40 man roster. That's before any trade deadline acquisitions, and precludes any free agent signings. Several of those names, particularly from the last group, are going to wash out over the next three months. But even still we're likely to need to free up 8-10 roster spots. The good news, well not really it's why the team sucks, is that there's a lot of dead weight on the roster. I can see 12 potential/likely cuts: Leiter, Swarmer, Rivas, Hermosillo, Heyward, Schwindel, Rucker, Stout, Higgins, Wieck, Mills, and Bote. I'd probably dump all 12 today, though odds are a few play themselves back into being worthwhile components to a roster. Given all of the above and knowing that the trade deadline is fast approaching, there's two things I'd like to see the Jed do: 1. Eschew quantity and focus on highest possible impact pieces attainable. The most obvious way of going about this is packaging guys together. Like if the Mets would trade their #3 and #7 prospects for Contreras and Robertson respectively, could you get #1 or #2 for both together? Alternatively, Jed should throw in prospects relevant to the 40 man crunch (e.g. Anderson Espinoza) along with the rentals to increase the return 2. Make an actual buy move this deadline. My thought is a pre-FA SP, but it doesn't particularly matter the what. While obviously the hope is it improves the competitive outlook, the immediate-term goal is to in essence trade four quarters for a dollar bill to abate the roster crunch. The org has a lot of outfielders and a lot of quality pitchers (though they certainly over-index in multi-inning relief), let's use some of that surplus Jed did #1 to a tee with Javy last year, so while I'd prefer some nearer term impact it does seem to be something the FO is comfortable with. I'm hoping they make an attempt at #2, rather than just doing a couple of small deck-clearing moves in late November like the Rays and Guardians tend to do in this situation.

Two fun Matt Mervis facts: 1. He has an 1.154 OPS against right handed pitching this year 2. Steamer thinks he's already a league average hitter At 1B more broadly, I would like to see the team be pretty aggressive in cycling through the 1B prospects in the org. Rivas is done, good to know. Now let's see Jared Young. Similarly it won't take long after Maldonado gets going that I'd like to see him come in for Schwindel. And so on. It's a good but not great 1B FA class coming up, which makes me nervous investing there. If we have the possibility of a ~115 wRC+ from internal 1B options next year, you don't even glance at the FA market. Let's find out if we can plan for that!

Like Menez a month back presumably a guy they can get 2-3 innings out of if a starter goes short again in the next few days and then DFA without worry.

Was one of the other three PCA? Yeah, Jackson Chourio (he's gonna be a problem), PCA, and Marcelo Mayer.

Coming into today, exactly 10 Carolina League hitters with 50 or more PAs had a .900 or better OPS. Only 3 of them doing so are younger than 21. Kevin Alcantara now has an .899 OPS and is still only 19 years old.

Tommy's time being unemployed would be measured in hours, not days, if the org was dumb enough to fire him (and they're not).

Adding ~50 points to your slug in one day in June is absolutely insane Did Preciado get hurt? I assume Made getting pulled was just to get him off his feet but Reggie was pulled before things got out of hand

Swarmer now with 9 homers allowed in 17 IP lol

Canario got absolutely worked his first two weeks in AA. I'm going to guess that not coincidentally, one of those weeks was against the Rays. Since then: .241/.328/.500, 112 wRC+, 9.8% BB rate, 27.9% K rate

I'm curious to see how long Kevin Made stays in MB. It's not unreasonable for him to still be there, but with his fairly long run last year and so far this year, he's approaching 100 games at the level. I do appreciate him providing an obvious and notable illustration of the importance of age relative to league. Hopefully that will head off some of the histrionics when Cristian Hernandez and Kevin Collier don't light it up at Myrtle Beach next April.

I think the new bat #s are likely confounded by A) the early season weather and B) that insane 2 weeks of Braves-Brewers-Sox-Dodgers-Padres that ended shortly before the change. It's probably not really a thing. That said, yeah we're now a full year in of Wisdom being a 115 wRC+ guy. And the peripherals are generally better this year, so it's looking more and more sustainable. I'd like to see him clean up the recent defense at 3B a bit more to be where it was last year, but he looks like a pretty good bet for ~2.5 WAR for the medium term. Speaking of small samples suddenly not being so small anymore, Nico Hoerner is approaching 600 career PAs as well and will likely be right around 4 WAR at that point. And the projections think that is indeed north of 3 WAR on a per-inning basis.

It's hard to peg Willson's exact value, because you have the competing forces of "teams hate trading for catchers mid-season" and "very strong sellers market.". But I think by default we should expect something in the neighborhood of what we got for Javy/Bryant/Rizzo. So taking learnings from those, you'd expect the going rate to be someone in or near the back of the top 100, plus a notable 2nd piece. By Fangraphs' Future Value parlance a 45 or a 50 (higher end of that scale the further out from MLB they are), and then another 40. With that framework in mind I think from the Mets Vientos and Diaz sounds about right. That's not enough for Robertson too though. A lot of people do, but I don't have a problem with packaging guys as a seller. That said, I feel like if you're going that route you need to unlock a higher tier of headliner. You don't package guys unless there's some sort of synergy gained from doing both together.

Yeah I think coming into the year I'd have bought that it was 50/50ish whether Heyward or Ortega were better suited to that LH platoon OF role. Heyward appeared to be the better defender, and while he was a mess last year was very strong in a platoon role from '18 - '20. And with the mess that the 40 man was in due to all the injuries, as well as the 11 games in 9 days, I can buy why he actually made it off the IL. What I don't buy is why he's currently starting every day, or how/if he survives Seiya coming off the IL. Brett brought up the point of maybe out of respect they're giving him one final shot to turn it around? But again even doing as much mental gymnastics as possible it's essentially impossible to justify him making it to Monday.

I don’t think his stuff is #3 caliber. FB velocity has been low 90s last year and so far this year. That's unfortunate. I had half-remembered 93-95 (so a grade ~55 fastball) with a plus curve. But yeah if he's a grade below that FB wise that cuts the excitement significantly. Probably still a MLBer but like TT alluded to with the Swarmer comp more of a "valuable for exactly as long as he has MiLB options" type.

Might be time to start paying more attention to Chris Clarke. He's getting BABIP'd to hell, which you can't always take for granted as luck in the minors, but the numbers otherwise are very strong. And the stuff I believe is roughly #3 starter caliber?

I'm looking forward to having a guy with outrageous Soriano-esque hot streaks again. Can't make the whole team out of those guys but having one or two is fun as hell.

We're now at damn near 100 PAs of star level performance. That's not enough to say he is in fact a star, but it's getting closer to us being able to confidently say he's a legit MLBer.

The pathological inability to admit fault stops being cute when you're not winning 95+ games

Do we know how Darius Hill is tools-wise? Because the numbers are pretty fun and he's not *that* old so if he's like an actual CFer then after another month or two of taking at Iowa he should be breathing down the necks of Heyward and Ortega.

Good pitching day. Excited to see how Herz follows up his career day last week. And Clarke's peripherals have stayed pretty strong at Tenn, hopefully he can start managing contact a little better from here out.