There is no game today so we can live in blissful ignorance for a little bit of time. Apologies for the site being down for a week. I still am not sure of root cause, but it is back up and I definitely fiddled with enough things to have changed some things I probably did not intend to change. Anyway, just some minor things across the minor leagues in the last few days.
Arizona Fall League Roster Updates
Aidan Miller and Carson DeMartini are out and Dylan Campbell and Bryan Rincon are in. Miller reportedly has some minor injuries and wear and tear from the season, while also finishing on a high note, and so he gets to start his offseason. It sounds like DeMartini’s injury that ended his regular season required further attention, and so he won’t be back healthy for some AFL time. A slight worry for him heading into the offseason. For Miller this doesn’t given him a chance to develop a further hype cycle into the offseason rankings, but I am not sure how much it would have actually changed things for him.
Rincon is making a return trip to the AFL, and after hitting .181/.304/.298 on the season is probably is real need of putting together a good month of being more aggressive at the plate and driving the ball more. Campbell is a classic fall league case. He split his year between hi-A and AA, and was inconsistent at both levels, and was especially poor against right handed pitchers. He could use the reps both on offense and defense.
Baseball America Stuff+ and Velocity
Over the last few weekdays Baseball America put out their Stuff+ rankings by pitch type and then overall pitcher pitch types. This data includes both public data and industry only data so we can get some of a glimpse behind the data curtain. Stuff rankings are also subjective to the model maker, so there is no one true ranking. You can read the full pieces (behind a paywall); fastballs, breaking balls, changeups/splitters, and overall.
It is always good to see obvious answers are obvious when it comes to this.
- Griff McGarry had the second best four-seam fastball behind Jacob Misiorowski and was top 5 in the ranking both by stuff and by normalized stuff (more thoughts on that later). It wasn’t just the command that bounced back for Griff this year, but his stuff itself was much better too.
- It wasn’t top of the charts, but Andrew Painter rated out well for his two breaking balls and overall. Painter’s fastball shape and outcomes will be talked a bunch about this offseason.
- Alex McFarlane rated out very well for two-seam fastball usage.
- I was a little surprised that Jean Cabrera wasn’t on the changeup rankings, but I also think his plays more in deception than movement, but Ramon Marquez, Wesley Moore, and Alan Rangel all getting flagged for good changeups was unsurprising. Marquez in particular has a chance to turn heads.
- Titan Kennedy-Hayes got good marks for his slider. His fastballs velocity and shape were inconsistent this year, but his breaking ball is a very good pitch, and maybe a second year of pro ball could see his command catch up.
There weren’t surprises on the individual pitch rankings, but there were three on the overall Stuff+ rankings. RHP Ryan Degges does not rate out great on Rob Orr’s stuff rankings, but occasionally in a start the 2024 17th round pick would look great. He rated out well on BA’s model and is an interesting test case for development as he really has never been a starting pitcher before this year and looks like he has real room to grow. A name that has been around a while is Estibenzon Jimenez who wasn’t always great this year, but will really look the part at times. He had real success in a rotation spot in 2025, but he looks like a reliever. The last name was Zack Tukis who rated out really well in BA’s unnormalize Stuff+, but not in normalized. Essentially the difference being that breaking balls often rate out better so they also took each pitch type and normalized it against others of its type, but not overall. Using Rob’s model we see that Tukis’s sweeper is a very good pitch and his slider is ok, but his fastballs are a very weird dead movement profile and getting crushed. This is a good way to see a pitcher with a very specific development problem that the Phillies need to address.
The other thing that Baseball America put out was pitchers that have throw 100+ in a tracked game (article). Of the 6 Phillies on the list, 5 were obvious (once you remember that Jose Alvarado had a minor league rehab appearance) in Alvarado, Alex McFarlane, Andrew Painter, Guillo Zuniga, and Andrew Bechtold. The surprise was that the highest velocity on the list was Casey Steward at 101.2 mph. This 2 mph harder than I have ever recorded for Steward and really shows the raw arm strength. At the end of the year it looked like he was trending up in a bullpen role, and each new data point really points to that being his logical position. If he takes to it, he could be a fast moving and throwing arm.
Paul Owens Award
I didn’t touch on Otto Kemp and Griff McGarry winning this year. I plan on doing some deep diving on Griff soon, so I will just say that there might really be something there. When it comes to Kemp, he was completely deserving, even if I went with Reyes on my fake award, and it actually is his second great minor league season in a row (I looked back and I gave him my award over Crawford last year). He is a flawed major leaguer, but he has now started a postseason game and locked himself into being a major leaguer for at least his next two option years which is a great dev outcome for both him and the organization.