WBC sensation Snelling signs with Padres
Hated rival Padres sign former Mariner! Snelling vows “great vengeance, furious justice” during June games.
Move comes as tickets for the June 23-25th series at Safeco Field become available! USSM event frantically planned!
Seriously, good for Chris, good for the Padres, may this be the season he goes nuts on the league.
WaPo report: M’s agree to trade Snelling, Fruto for Vidro
The Washington Nationals took a major step toward freeing room on their future payroll and breaking loose a logjam in the middle infield, agreeing to trade second baseman Jose Vidro — who has spent his entire career with the Montreal-Washington organization — to the Seattle Mariners for a pair of prospects that could contribute to the 2007 team, Vidro said in a telephone interview tonight.
The trade — which is pending a physical for Vidro, expected to take place Thursday
I guess we hope Vidro blows that physical like a horse in Enumclaw, because this is crazy.
Chris Snelling is a 25-year old corner outfielder with an injury history and a plus arm who hit .250/.360/.427. Based on his PECOTA projections, he’s one of the best hitting prospects in baseball. He was the third or fourth-best hitter on the team last year (performance, not taking playing time into account).
Fruto’s a 22-year old reliever. He’s a big boy. He’s got a ridiculous change and through his whole career in the minors he was as stingy giving up the home run as you could possibly hope for.
Jose Vidro is a 31-yr old second baseman who hit .289/.348/.395 for the Nationals last year.
Does this bode ill for Jose Lopez? It does.
Nearly as important for Washington, however, is that Seattle has agreed to pay $12 million of the remaining $16 million left on Vidro’s contract for 2007 and ’08.
You don’t take that on if he’s going to sit.
The Mariners have traded two players, one finally healthy and tearing the cover off the ball who can play right or left, and a still younger, cheap, effective reliever in order to acquire a 31-year old passable hitter who plays a position where team has another cheap, effective player (if Hargrove would just stop telling him to ground out over and over).
I’ve tried to come up with a justification for this, and I can’t. There must be another deal waiting, which makes this hard to justify in isolation: at least one of Broussard/Lopez/Sexson is going to be booted.
But this move hurts the team. More than just next season: Snelling and Fruto were both the kind of players who could be parts of the next Mariner championship team. Snelling in particular could be one of the best hitters on any team (if he stays healthy, of course), and he’s under team control for years for very little money. Jose Vidro’s a declining, increasingly immobile player on the wrong side of his peak who’ll be paid an immense amount of money. Vidro will not help the M’s win a pennant. If it comes to be, this will be one of the worst trades the team’s ever made, even if Snelling never plays another game and Fruto doesn’t throw another strike.
This is ridiculous garbage.
Update: Geoff Baker at the Seattle Times writes
Another offensive upgrade for the Mariners is to be finalized later this week when Jose Vidro joins the team as its full-time designated hitter.
No, but whatever.
“I think this is the best deal for me,” Vidro said in a telephone interview tonight from his home in Puerto Rico. “By me becoming the DH it will give me the chance to focus exclusively on my hitting and not have to worry about all that other stuff.”
So DH it is, which means the team’ll be paying him a ton of money to be a below-average DH. Broussard’s then the obvious next move.
Update: the hot rumor is that this also involved picking up Vidro’s 2009 option, which is a dingleberry topping on the shit frosting on today’s shit cake. Whee.
Big what’s up to my man Snelling
“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?”
— Yoda
I didn’t find out they called up Snelling until after today’s game, and I’m almost glad, because it means I didn’t sit there all game hoping to see him only to be disappointed. Now I have something to watch for every game.
I broke my Snelling jersey out of the closet, where it’s been patiently waiting for the last couple of years, coming out only for USSM gatherings. He’s taken #32, same as last time, which makes me happy, because I don’t have to order a second one.
I don’t know what happens now — if Doyle’s going to get the Choo treatment, or if Winn’s about to be moved to make room for him to get regular playing time. I certainly hope he’s not just a replacement Dobbs-style bat, because he needs to get his playing time more than anyone else in the system.
But this is a big step.
In this year’s BP, I wrote
First, let me note that I’m a huge fan of Snelling, and there is nothing I want more in baseball than for him to become durable, healthy, and enjoy a brilliant career.
Snelling is like Nick Johnson if Nick Johnson was raised in Australia, lithe, shorter, with a little less power and walks.
And yet… my appreciation for Snelling has deepened. Because he’s friendly, funny, has an accent, and was into Yoda, his reputation was fluffy and light-weight, more a novelty story than an interesting and potentially good player. With continued health problems his story’s been dismissed, but Snelling’s still out there, fighting his way through rehab, avoiding sharp objects, with no one writing about him.
There’s no way to say whether Snelling’s ever going to be healthy enough to progress, or if the lost development time’s too great a deficit to overcome. But I want to see what happens next nearly as much as Snelling does. As you read this, he’s in rehab or… wait… no, he’s hurt himself again. Dammit.
That last part was weirdly prescient, as he went on the DL when the book came out (part of why I went into Doyle-mode).
Even that write-up, though, doesn’t cover it. Some prospects never become what they might because they’re lazy, or they don’t have the patience or pain endurance to come back from injuries. Snelling, this funny, cool, laid-back seeming guy, has been unstoppable. Fate keeps knocking him down and he gets up and returns to working towards getting back into the game.
As Mariner fans, we’re a little spoiled from having seen the almost effortless ascent of stars like Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez, guys with immense natural talent who were blessed with good health early in their careers. And as much as I enjoyed watching them, I admire Snelling more for his perseverence and his humility and self-confidence in the face of so many serious setbacks.
I don’t know what happens next, if Winn or Ibanez gets moved to open up some LF/DH playing time, or what the team has in mind. But if you’re a hard-core Mariner fan, someone who’s followed the ups and downs of the franchise and its players and take joy in the victories and triumphs of the good guys, this is a fine day.
Go get ’em, Chris.
And folks, if you want to spot me at a Mariners game, I’m one of two people at the park wearing a huge grin and a jersey with “Snelling” on the back.
Snelling out six weeks
You knew that when the words “Snelling” and “MRI” were said so close together, the word “surgery” had to soon follow. Chris Snelling has torn a meniscus, and will go under the knife.
Snelling nooooooooo
Well, King 5’s subscription site is reporting “Hargrove also said injury-prone outfield Chris Snelling will undergo an MRI exam on a sore knee.”
At this point, if I saw an article that said Snelling burst into flame sitting on the bench, suffering severe burns all over his body and was expected to be out 3-5 months, my first reaction would be “so it’s come to that” and not “spontaneous human combustion? I doubt that.”
Ahh, Snelling
Many people have asked us what happened to Chris Snelling this off-season. He went home for the first time in years to spend time with his family and friends. So on a whim he and his brother he spent two months adventuring in the Outback (the real one, not the steakhouse) and all over the place.
M’s Take the Easy Way, Re-assign Jarred Kelenic
The M’s made it clear, as soon as Jarred Kelenic came up limping a bit after trying to beat out a ground ball, that his chances of making the opening day roster were non-existent. Pay no mind to the comments made by disgraced ex-President Kevin Mather; this was nothing to do with service time manipulation, you see, and everything to do with lost in-game at-bats. Missing a couple of weeks left him behind in his development compared to his older rivals. It’d be for his own good.
Yesterday, the M’s followed through, re-assigning Kelenic to minor league camp. As Daniel Kremer’s story at MLB.com notes, he’ll stay in Arizona after the end of the Cactus League, as teams are trying to quickly schedule some games at the complexes. With the minor league season delayed, assigning him to the “alternate site” would mean another month of workouts and scrimmages, but no actual games against other teams.
But if another month of batting off of Ljay Newsome wouldn’t do his development any favors, it’s not quite clear that playing against, say, Texas’ A+/AA relievers is any big step up. Most of the prospects who are nearest to the big leagues will probably be in the alternate sites, after all. The move also opens up a possibility that I’d joked about on Twitter: that the M’s will leave him down long enough to gain another year of club control, then call him up *before* the minor league season actually begins. As good as Jerry Dipoto is with the media, that’d be tough to spin.
A young player without a lot of minor league PAs being sent down isn’t the end of the world; it’s routine, and in most cases, absolutely justified. That said, the M’s are trying to compete in a near future that never quite materializes. They’re trying to build around a core group of players they can count on for years to come. There’s no doubt that an extra year of club control on Kelenic could help the M’s, but if this spring showed anything, it’s that he can help them right now. If the M’s had LF locked down with established veterans or something, no one would note this move. Instead, M’s left fielders are projected for *negative* WAR in 2021, a year after a disastrous year with Dee Strange-Gordon, Tim Lopes, Jose Marmolejos, and, yes, to be fair, some Dylan Moore starts. The M’s themselves have made it extremely easy for Kelenic’s eventual grievance: Kelenic would help this team from April 1st, and everyone knows it.
Years ago, Bill Bavasi – for all of his faults as a GM, and there were many – recognized that you gained some good will just by not picking stupid fights with players. Thus, the M’s under Bavasi never took a player to an arbitration hearing. Those hearings can be brutal, as to win, teams need to essentially tell an arbiter just how bad they think he is. They’re adversarial, by nature, and the stakes are generally so *low* that Bavasi found the financial juice not worth the squeeze. Likewise, he promoted oft-injured Aussie and one-time USSM fave Chris Snelling *after* he suffered an injury, putting him on the MLB injured list instead of the minor league one; this did nothing but give Snelling some service time and provide him more money. It made no financial sense, and he was under zero obligation to do it. But he did.
If Jarred Kelenic is who we all think he is, the M’s will want to sign him to a long-term extension. To say that the relationship between Kelenic and the M’s has been a bit strained is an understatement. After Mather’s comically awful performance in front of the Bellevue Rotary Club, the best thing the M’s could do for a while is to show that they can be a good employer. No, that doesn’t mean doubling everyone’s salary or extending Kyle Seager for another 10 years. It means trying to put the best team on the field, and it means not falling back on the true-but-weak “the CBA allows us to do this,” excuse. You don’t have to do everything the CBA allows you to do.
Baseball players are notoriously competitive, and as I’ve written before, there’s a large and growing gap between player competitiveness and team competitiveness. Teams don’t need to be good to make money, and club control seems to be of equal value to teams as, you know, skill at playing baseball. That tension between the baseball side of the house and the financial side grows when teams do this, and the fact that the Players Union’s agreements allow it doesn’t make it feel any better to, say, Kyle Seager, who knows that the M’s are putting out a worse team than they could. Again.
If the M’s are going to compete next year, they simply can’t be as bad as many of their projections think they’ll be. They can’t be a 73 win team this year and transform things in an off-season. The M’s themselves tend to think that their pitching is much better than projected, and they may be right. But if they are, if they’re closer to .500 (78-81 wins), then weakening themselves for a month is even more dubious. Yes, Kelenic’s age-27 season has a lot of value to the club, but so does this season.
Kelenic led the M’s in OPS this spring, and struck out just one time. It was an open question as to how he’d respond after a year stuck at the alternate site. He answered them about as convincingly as possible for a kid who only had 9 games. It’s not a shock that he’s been sent down, and he handled it quite well. All of this is by the book. But it just highlights that the “book” is not about winning.
Game 72, Mariners at Athletics – And Opening Day in the Northwest League
Marco Gonzales vs. Chris Bassitt, 6:37pm NOT 7:05 as I had previously posted!
There are not a lot of surface similarities between tonight’s two starters. Bassitt’s a righty, Gonzales a lefty. Bassitt throws 94 with a lollypop curve that may be the game’s slowest non-knuckleball pitch. Gonzales throws 88 with a change-up that was once a true weapon, or at least projected to be. And that made Gonzales a first-round draft pick, while Bassitt lasted until the 16th round out of a non-power-conference school.
All of that said, I think it can be kind of interesting to view them as two sides of the same coin, or maybe as a couple of different pathways through a pitching career in the modern game. Both debuted in 2014, at the tail end of the little batting ice age, when run scoring and home runs were way down. Both posted ERAs right around 4 that year, with Bassitt’s mediocre K:BB offset by the fact he didn’t allow any dingers. Gonzales missed more bats, but missed the strike zone too much, leading to a surfeit of walks. He also allowed a few HRs, but his fly-ball ways and a good defense behind him limited BABIP and runs-allowed. Gonzales’ injury woes kicked off the next year, and he was lost to TJ surgery until 2017. Bassitt had a fine 2015, as it marked his highest IP total, split between AAA and Oakland, the team the White Sox traded him to in the Jeff Samardzija deal.* His line was again helped by HR-avoidance, and his K:BB and overall stuff weren’t much to look at, but he produced. And then he, too, followed Marco into TJ surgery and rehab.
At this point, Bassitt’s 30 years old, three years older than Gonzales. His velo’s finally back up to the 94 he sat at in 2014-15, and he’s made some subtle changes – like taking some velo off of his curve, using a few more four-seamers, and turning his slider into more of a cutter – but he’s now pitching better than ever. His whiff rates are up to career highs on essentially all of his pitches, and that’s pushed his K rate way up as well. He’s stopped walking so many batters, so his K-BB% is 4 percentage points higher than last year, and about 9 percentage points higher than when he broke in in 2014. We’ve learned so much about player development since 2014, and Bassitt may be a great example – a non-prospect, or minor prospect, late-bloomer with lots of time missed due to injury and no real stand-out pitch becomes a serviceable middle-rotation guy thanks to velo development/maintenance and a new plan of attack. Meanwhile, Gonzales, who’s further from his surgery, younger, and more of a heralded prospect, is stuck in neutral, with an RA/9 over 6 (thanks defense!), and a velocity down at least 2 MPH from 2017. His last start was encouraging – as was Yusei Kikuchi’s – but you can’t keep looking at opponents like Bassitt and feeling good about what’s going on with the M’s. Gonzales (and Kikuchi) are flat-out better than they’ve pitched this year, and I expect they’ll climb out of this slide at some point. But when his velocity, K%, BB%, and GB% all decline, and when there’s no recognizable sense that things are changing, you tend to adjust where you think he’ll regress towards once he does pull out of this tailspin. This doesn’t look like a #2 starter, any more than Kikuchi does. And while there was considerable marketing puffery from the M’s in making Marco out to be more of an ace than he realistically is, it’s undeniable that some team could get solid #3 production from him. I hope the M’s can one day.
In happier news, the Everett AquaSox open the Northwest League season today. The Sox start with a series in the Tri-Cities to face the Dust Devils, a Padres affiliate. Everett’s roster’s worth watching, largely due to the pitching infusion the draft’s brought the org. #1 and #2 picks George Kirby and Brandon Williamson will suit up for Everett, as will Bellingham-native and 5th-rounder Austin Shenton. Today’s game’s started by Juan Mercedes, who’ll face off against Dust Devils’ Nick Thwaites, a 19-year-old 2018 draft pick who was solid in the AZL last year. Mercedes is 19 as well, but only got a handful of AZL innings last year. He had more of a track record in the DSL, where he pitched the previous two seasons.
Speaking of teenage hurlers, Deivy Florido gets the start for West Virginia today against Hagerstown.
The biggest story of the minor leagues today involves the Rainiers, who’ll start Felix Hernandez (Happy Felix Day) against new AAA team, the San Antonio Missions. Old heads remember the M’s had San Antonio as an affiliate back when they were a AA Texas League franchise, and they were one of the stops Felix made on his way up to Seattle, pitching for them in 2004. The 2003 Missions was one of the better MiLB teams the M’s had; they went 88-51, posted nearly a +200 run differential, and featured a young Jose Lopez and Chris Snelling. Aussie lefty Travis Blackley went 17-3 with a 2.61 ERA in 160+ IP, Clint Nageotte was a huge prospect, Cha-Seung Baek was solid in 50 IP, Bobby Madritsch came out of the indie leagues to dominate on his way to the majors, and their second indie league steal, George Sherrill, started his ascent by being essentially untouchable in 27 IP (his ERA was 0.33). Shin-Soo Choo was around with Felix in 2004, and 2005 brought Adam Jones and Ryan Rowland-Smith, and then 2006 saw Jeff Clement, Wlad Balentien, and Matt Tuiasosopo (Asdrubal Cabrera skipped AA and went right to Tacoma). Fun times!
1: Smith, CF
2: Seager, 3B
3: Santana, RF
4: Vogelbach, 1B
5: Narvaez, C
6: Beckham, DH
7: Crawford, SS
8: Gordon, 2B
9: Williamson, LF
SP: Gonzales
Welcome back, JP Crawford! He’ll take the 25-man spot of Brandon Brennan, who hits the 10-day IL with a sore shoulder. Felix starts his rehab assignment, and Shed Long’s been optioned back to Tacoma in exchange for Matt Festa.
Every time Edwin Encarnacion’s not in the starting line-up from here on out, we’ll all frantically search twitter to see if a deal’s announced. Nothing yet.
* It’s never going to get as much attention as one of those huge, franchise-making deals, but holy crap has this deal turned into a massive steal for the A’s. Samardzija was in his last arb year, meaning the Sox were only paying for one year. The A’s got a so-so 2B in Marcus Semien, who went from nearly-unplayable SS to defensive ace and lead-off hitter. They got C Josh Phegley, who’s (finally) putting it together, with a batting line north of league average as the A’s primary backstop, and they got Bassitt, who’s showing that he’s perhaps more than rotation depth. The Sox got a down year, and then watched Samardzija leave in free agency in the off-season before 2016, one marked by open feuding between players and management, and a hastily-organized rebuild that continues to this day.
2019 Arkansas Travelers Preview
Here we go for a third season in Arkansas with the Travelers. They have a possum and a horse for mascots. Big fan. More of the possum than the horse. Big on hissing at stuff and playing dead to avoid threats. What were we talking about?
This team is, like the West Virginia squad, a rather talented group and so I found myself with a bit to say. Sure, the catching is a repeat of last year, but that may bring with it some added polish with which to direct the pitchers. For the rotation we have two, two-and-a-half guys who could be strong contributors if things break right for them, though the others are nothing to dismiss. The bullpen has a few standouts and is certainly a diverse bunch of velocities, angles, and ways of getting results. The infield has Evan White plus some likely producers, but the outfield could feature three viable major leaguers in any given day and that’s exciting. Potential and aptitude make for some entertaining baseball.
2017 Arizona Fall League Rosters Announced
It says something, either about my habits, or attitudes towards the present season, or suspect mental state that I would have already narrowed down probable dates for Arizona Fall League rosters to be released to this Wednesday. And hey, what do you know? Headlined by first-round pick of yesteryear, center fielder Kyle Lewis, the Mariners will be sending eight players to fall ball. Joining Lewis will be RHPs Matthew Festa, Darin Gillies, Max Povse, and Art Warren, catcher Joe DeCarlo, utility man Eric Filia, and center fielder Braden Bishop. You may notice here that the AFL roster selection rules seem to have changed because that’s a lot of Cal League representation, if not currently, then earlier in the year. They’ll also have Yoel Monzon as a pitching coach on the staff, presently the pitching coach for the Peoria Mariners. Heck, he may not even bother with cleaning out his locker.
Lewis is probably where most people would start out, and rightly so. The 22-year-old probably still holds onto his spot as the system’s top prospect on athletic potential alone, but if you know the name, then it’s likely you also have a grasp on the history: A collision at the plate due to the catcher blocking the lane– the same type of collision now banned in the majors– resulted in him blowing out his ACL as well as his medial and lateral meniscus. For a guy who was hoped to be a centerfielder, that’s a big blow. Lewis didn’t get game action until June and then almost immediately banged up his knee again trying to play all-out defense on a play, and then disappeared for a couple of weeks. For much of the season, he’s been locked into the DH position to curb any Chris Snelling-like tendencies to hurt himself doing too much, but between the injuries and limited on-field performances, we’re only just now hitting a sample size in Modesto equal to what he had in Everett. August has been a lackluster month for him in the box as well, with an OPS in the mid-.600s, even as he is finally getting an opportunity to run around and play in the outfield. There are really two cases to be made here, the one that hopes that Lewis stands a better chance of getting back on track with rest and time, and the other that wants to see sustained offensive development. That being said, I’m not too surprised to see him here.
The second-greatest prospect of intrigue would probably be Braden Bishop. The one thing about having Bishop and Lewis on the same roster is that if they end up in the same outfield, whatever pressures are on Lewis to defend are scaled back dramatically. Based on .gifs and minor league video I’ve seen, Braden Bishop has a tendency to play defense as if he’s the only outfielder on staff and will routinely come out of nowhere to make plays. People have talked about him as a potential Gold Glove out there, perhaps in the Kevin Pillar mold, but for much of the season what we’ve talked about is Bishop’s offense. In college, he was a slap hitter, and a slap hitter he remained starting out. This past year, he trained in the offseason with fellow former Husky Jake Lamb and appears to have gotten stronger and is coming at the plate with a different setup. Baseball Census has an excellent side-by-side comparison of his two seasons in the Cal League and it’s my opinion that Bishop has probably done more to solidify his prospect status this year than anyone else in the system. The beauty of his skill set is that he can add a lot of value with the glove alone, but any increase however incremental in his hitting abilities means more stretch-doubles and runs scored. I could see him contributing, maybe not next year, but 2019 seems like a reasonable estimate.
Between Bishop and Lewis, those are two prospects that you’re potentially going to have in the top five, locked for the top ten minimum. Where Povse slots may depend on your opinion of him and how he’s used, but he may be a top ten as well by some reckoning and will retain rookie status headed into 2018. One of the stories of earlier in the summer was that Jerry DiPoto had the clever idea that the Mariners bullpen needed a Chris Devenski, a guy who could do short to medium relief and fill in innings with strikeout potential. Povse was initially tabbed as that guy and fast-tracked into debuting in late-June. Of course, since then, the Mariners have seen the emergence of another pitcher who can fill a similar role in Emilio Pagan, who has not started games in the minor leagues at all. Taking the pressure off Povse to be that guy may be good, as he’s the 6’8″, long-limbed Tall Wall who has had some difficulty getting his mechanics in order. As a reliever, the need for extra pitches would be minimized, but the boom-and-bust of “some days he has it and some days he doesn’t” is magnified, and moreover the team needs starting pitching in a bad way at the moment. For Tacoma, Povse has made three of his last four appearances as a starter and the most recent two embody that intriguing potential of his and the accompanying risk. One outing was four and two-thirds frames of no-hit ball with a 7/1 K/BB, the next, four frames with two runs allowed on three hits, a hit batter, two walks, and four strikeouts. It’ll be hard not to take what role he’s used in the AFL as indicative of Something, but give precedence to what’s said about him.
After Povse, who has already pitched in the majors, Festa might be the next closest. Festa was the smaller of our D-II selections in the first ten rounds of last year, but the stuff is very much real and he tops out at 96 mph. The repertoire is also deep enough to handle multiple innings, but then this is one of multiple notes about him that really make you stop and look at his statline and think, “wait, what?” The 24-year-old has kind of been a sleeper due to age and expectations, but he’s thrown 66.2 innings in thirty-nine appearances and over that span has a 96/19 K/BB. No, those aren’t typos, that’s nearly a K and a half every inning and a walk maybe every three or more. Given all the other happenings in system, the Mariners have demonstrated remarkable restraint in not pushing him to double-A. Still, he’s one guy that I wouldn’t be surprised to see next season, even if ideally, we won’t have to make as many calls out that direction as we have this year.
Speaking of interesting statlines and modest draft profiles, we also have another recent (current, actually) Modesto Nut on the roster in Eric Filia. You may know the story here, but to refresh, he had taken some time away from school and came back to UCLA looking like a bonafide prospect. The slugging this year has been lower than where he was in Everett, but he remains very difficult to strike out and has only done so about every eleven ABs this season. This leaves him as the rare bird with a lop-sided K/BB at 42/63. While some players with elite plate discipline end up going on to develop power later in their careers, such has not yet been the case for Filia, who has fewer dingers in the Cal League than he did in the NWL and in far more plate appearances. Putting aside the offensive profile aspects, the eye-catcher here is his listing as an infielder. Filia has played the outfield corners in the past, but has been increasingly seeing time at first. While he does swing lefty, the fact that he throws right-handed opens up more options for him on the field as a utility player. If Filia manages to show as much defensive versatility as say, a Danny Valencia, or worst-case, first and the corners, that still opens up more options for him where the bat can continue to do what it does well, namely slap the ball around. He’s another guy who has a fun little Baseball Census profile, so give that a look as well.
Warren has served as an off-and-on closer for Nuts and also boasts about a K per inning in his pitching lines. Yet, the advanced metrics don’t like him all that much. Statcorner has him in the red with a nBB% of 11 and a K% of 24, and that helps to explain some of it, as does the fact that Warren gives up hits a bit more readily. I know I’ve been plugging them a bit in this post, but I think it’s deserved because I wouldn’t really know much about Warren had I not read yet another Baseball Census profile on him. The story is fairly similar to any other you’d expect to find in spring training: A changed diet, a changed workout regiment, BSohL. These would be platitudes without the results, which Warren has, having gone from a high-80s starter to a low-to-mid-90s reliever. Like Festa, the arsenal is deeper than average as well. I’m wanting to see better command before I’m totally comfortable with him as a potential contributor.
For DeCarlo… well, one more Modesto Nut, one more guy you can find info on online? DeCarlo’s was one of the Mariners-like picks that I had grown accustomed to in that he was a second selection as a big-bodied prep infielder who played short in the past but hey so did Jim Thome when he was in high school. In DeCarlo’s case, he’s been following the same track as fellow farmhand Marcus Littlewood, another kid drafted at short who had good instincts and not-great wheels until the organization decided to try him out as a backstop. And why convert one shortstop to the Tools of Ignorance when you could convert TWO? Part of this is representative of a dearth in organization depth spurring the move. DeCarlo doesn’t look great out there yet. In forty-six defensive games, eighteen passed balls and a 26% CS rate. Yet he’s also doing an entirely new thing and his offense, while suffering, has not cratered, with a loss in average almost entirely accounting for the drops in OBP, SLG, and OPS. What’s been good about DeCarlo as a minor leaguer is that, while he doesn’t have the tools to hit for high-average, he absolutely can take walks and hit for power now and then. The secondary averages, as such, have been solid despite a high-K rate. More reps can only help him, yet I don’t find myself thinking that he’s a risk to be Rule 5’d just yet because of the SSS and lack of time in the high minors. We’ll muse on that next year, depending on how he takes.
Our last but not least is Darin Gillies, which is one R and two Ls for your reference there. Gillies is not much written about, being the guy in the tenth round of 2015 whom they threw $10k at in the hopes of saving top ten pool money elsewhere. That being said, you wouldn’t expect him to be in double-A and holding his own, and yet he is. Gillies has been on an aggressive track, but it’s double-A that has presented something of a challenge for him. Whereas last year, he had a .186 combined average and a 75/18 K/BB through 66.2 innings, he’s now at a .229 average against and a 44/24 K/BB in 56.2 innings in double-A. That’s not as impressive, but again, our data is limited. We know he was at ASU and in and out of the bullpen for his four years there. We know that he threw 90 mph or so in HS. If nothing else, the AFL selects for the willing, but Gillies may be a guy that we soon have more data on, and more data is always welcome.
The season will commence on October 10th, as the Javelinas play a day game against the Desert Dogs.