Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Baseball America

Twice a month at BaseballAmerica.com, subscribers get exclusive access to BA writers to ask any question they want. Below are BA Mailbag excerpts from April. It’s crazy how little we hear about high school players for this draft. Is it possible the top 10 picks are all college players? It’s not a good year for high school prospects. It’s the worst I have covered, going back to 2017. The top 10 and the entire first round should be college-heavy. —Carlos Collazo Dylan Crews hit well in Class A last year after the draft, but we now have multiple months of him floundering at Double-A and in spring training. Does this push his ETA to 2025? The Nationals drafted Crews second overall last year out of LSU, one of the best…

PAGE 35 Six-foot-seven Henry Lalane has upside to match his height. Now, the Yankees lefthander will learn the finer points of pitching. A dominating—but unexpected—spring training appearance has the Tigers’ Jackson Jobe positioned for what could be a monster season. PAGE 34 Johnson Has Stuff And Athleticism To Shine Righthander Seth Johnson made his return from Tommy John surgery late last season to offer the Orioles a glimpse of the potential they acquired at the 2022 trade deadline. This spring, the full scope of the 25-year-old’s talent was revealing. “He’s just a very athletic, strong, explosive pitcher,” Orioles vice president of player development and domestic scouting Matt Blood said. “When he’s on the mound, he’s different in regards to the way he moves, and he’s cerebral, and he’s competitive. “He’s got all…

Luisa Gauci’s baseball career began with a happy accident, but every step since then has been wholly intentional as she has gone from Australian baseball fanatic to Brewers minor league hitting coach. Gauci grew up in Brisbane and attended an all-girls school. She played tennis growing up and decided to try softball in middle school. She tried out for the team but didn’t make it, so she told her mother she wanted to find another team to join. Gauci’s mother found a team that practiced at a field close to their home—and it was located on the route to her grandmother’s house, which the family visited weekly. The only problem? This was a baseball team. Gauci was eager to learn more about baseball and quickly became obsessed. She never missed…

An annual tradition at Baseball America is to build a team of projected breakout prospects ahead of minor league Opening Day. To qualify for inclusion, a player must not have appeared on our preseason Top 100 Prospects ranking. This year, Matt Eddy, Geoff Pontes and Dylan White all compiled breakout prospect teams. Here are some of our favorite picks to click, presented in alphabetical order. ALFREDO DUNO, C, REDS Low-A Daytona | Age 18 Baseball is in a golden era for catchers. Adley Rutschman, William Contreras, Francisco Alvarez, Gabriel Moreno and Yainer Diaz are all impact hitters who are 26 or younger. Duno follows in the rich tradition of Venezuelan catchers—see Contreras, Alvarez and Moreno above—and is coming off a strong pro debut in which he hit .303/.451/.493 with six…

PAGE 40 Mets secondrounder Brandon Sproat shined in a dominant Spring Breakout inning. New York thinks it can get that version more consistently. The Marlins love the upside potential of lefty Thomas White, who looked sharp in spring training. PAGE 39 Alexander Hits His Way Onto Roster Blaze Alexander entered spring training as a long shot to make the team, but there he was on March 28, starting and batting seventh in the D-backs’ Opening Day lineup. “He did it,” D-backs manager Torey Lovullo said. “He earned it. We didn’t just hand him this opportunity.” The 24-year-old Alexander steadily climbed through the minor leagues after being drafted in the 11th round out of IMG Academy in 2018. He first eased concerns about his ability to stick at shortstop, then in the past…

WHITEY HERZOG SET THE STANDARD IN ST. LOUIS No National League team won more games or more pennants in the 1980s than Whitey Herzog’s Cardinals. The colorful Hall of Fame manager popularized “Whiteyball,” a style of play that worked like a charm on the artificial turf in St. Louis—and also carpeted NL East road parks in Montreal, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The Cardinals played 67% of their games in those four parks. Herzog’s Cardinals won the 1982 World Series and narrowly missed adding titles in 1985 and ’87, losing in seven games both times. Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith epitomized the team’s style of play. For the entire decade of the 1980s, St. Louis led the NL in fielding percentage, batting average, on-base percentage, stolen bases and lowest strikeout rate.…

Fresno is more than 2,000 miles from Nashville, but the California community is a country music hotbed. As much as that may be true, Fresno doesn’t always manage to convince Nashville of its bonafides. For years, the Fresno Grizzlies have tried to bring top country acts to Chukchansi Park. For years, they have struck out. Whatever the reason, the Grizzlies couldn’t convince the best of the genre to perform at their stadium. Now, the Grizzlies have friends in high places. Last November, the Grizzlies were sold to Diamond Baseball Holdings, becoming the 26th minor league team acquired by the company. Once that happened, Fresno’s trouble landing top country acts disappeared. This October, Thomas Rhett, a singer with 20 No. 1 songs on the Billboard Country Airplay charts, will play Chukchansi…

The MLB 100 includes baseball’s brightest stars. Another dozen pitchers recovering from injury are mentioned up front. Beyond those groups, an additional 65 players received a 55 grade that would put them at the same tier as the last quarter of the MLB 100. Here are the most notable exclusions, grouped by type. Veteran starting pitchers: Jose Berrios, RHP, Blue Jays; and Joe Musgrove, RHP, Padres Veteran position players: Carlos Correa, SS, Twins; Paul Goldschmidt, 1B, Cardinals; Cal Raleigh, C, Mariners; and Christian Walker, 1B, D-backs Up-and-comers: Nolan Gorman, 2B, Cardinals; Jared Jones, RHP, Pirates; Nolan Jones, LF, Rockies; and Bryson Stott, 2B, Phillies…

For the fourth straight year we asked MLB scouting departments to grade the quality of the draft on a 20-80 scale. We asked scouting directors how they view the strength of each year’s draft class in an attempt to quantify the expert opinions of the group and create a more quantitative way to compare the perception of the best and worst parts of each draft class. There’s plenty that will change between now and July when the draft takes place, but this is how 13 scouting directors viewed the draft talent in the spring. This is our most generic and vague category, which should best capture the general view of a given draft class. It’s a reasonable start for the 2024 class, as eight scouting directors gave it an average…

HITTERS MOVING FASTER FROM DRAFT TO DEBUT Pitchers advancing quickly from the draft to the major leagues is a rare—but not uncommon—occurrence. Most recently, the White Sox rushed lefthander Garrett Crochet from the University of Tennessee to the MLB bullpen after drafting him 11th overall in 2020. One hundred days elapsed between Crochet’s draft date and his MLB debut. Seven college pitchers drafted in the last 25 years made their debuts even faster. But when the Angels called up first baseman Nolan Schanuel on Aug. 18 last year, they did something that hadn’t been done in 45 years. They called up a position player within 50 days of his draft date. The Angels drafted Schanuel 11th overall last year after he led Division I hitters with a 1.483 OPS as…

As a prospect in 2021, Reds righthander Hunter Greene never knew how many innings or pitches he was going to get to throw. Even though he was the hardest-throwing starter in the minor leagues, Greene was told to go get hitters out. Coming off Tommy John surgery in 2019, he threw five innings in his first 2021 start. He threw 99 pitches in his fourth start. He went 7.1 innings and 101 pitches in his fifth, then followed by going 106 pitches in each of his next two. In modern pitching development, that seems almost reckless. Greene could reach back for 100 mph whenever he wanted, and high velocity equals high stress on elbows. But as then-Reds pitching coordinator Kyle Boddy saw it, it would be safer for Greene to…