As the 2024 minor league season has gotten underway this month, I’ve been busy as I typically have been the last two seasons: watching a ton of A’s minor league video and making game charts, collecting data on the A’s minor league players. I've also been hard at work completely overhauling the short-form reports on the site: the pitching ones are updated for early 2024 (though there are already multiple developments, some of which i reference below, from the last few days that I need to add in), and I'm 80% done with the position players and should get the last two dozen updated this week. As I wait for my data to attain a meaningful sample size–from which I can bring you some hard-hitting longform analyses–this week, I asked folks on social media to submit A’s system questions they wanted answered. I got a lot of questions! Here are a lot of answers!
It’s a good question, especially considering how much the A’s have liked to shuffle outfielders around between the three spots. He’s definitely been in outfields with other guys with rangy presences (Bolte, Buelvas, Pérez, Clarke, Trenkle), so it’s not as though the org has shuffled Thomas over to the corners in favor of someone who can’t stick in center.
I think there are two logical explanations one could have. The first is that the A’s might’ve played things cautiously with Thomas in 2023 coming off his knee surgery in 2022 by giving him the more conservative defensive assignment, and now in 2024 he’s on a team with four other center fielders (if you throw Jeisson Rosario in there, since he’s played ⅘ of his career games in center). Thomas may well be the weakest defender of the 5, to be honest (I haven’t seen enough of Rosario to really evaluate his D well), and that’s no knock on him–it’s a heck of a defensive outfield overall. And so it’s just sort of made sense to keep him in the corners, because there’s no alignment where he’s your best defensive outfielder if you’re manager Gregorio Petit.
The other explanation, probably equally likely, is that a lot of these developmental decisions come down to the personality of the player. It may be that the development staff wants Thomas to be focused on developing offensively and thus gives him easier defensive assignments to reinforce that desired focus, or perhaps Thomas is the sort of person who thrives more when he’s given a more consistent position and isn’t shuffling between four different assignments (if you throw DH in there). He played pretty much only RF in Lansing last year and now only LF in Midland. And hey, it’s working for him overall.
Can Thomas play center? Maybe–I really haven’t seen him out there, so it’s hard to say. I agree his speed is impressive, his arm can play there, and he certainly has the sort of all-out style one would associate with the position. I’d have to really see what his reads and routes look like. I’d guess he’d play a sort of Laureano-esque CF without the 80-grade arm–there are a lot of athletic and stylistic similarities between him and Ramón. That’d work okay, but he should be above-average in a corner, and a lot of the other outfielders may well have higher defensive ceilings.
Depends how you mean. If you mean who will play the shortstop position better in a defensive sense, though all three can bring good gloves to the table, Wilson’s gotta be the heavy favorite. He can really pick it out there. He’s also the most likely to be playing that position in the event that several of these guys make it as big league starters, as his contact-oriented offensive skillset might not be as valuable at other positions, whereas Muncy and Hernaiz’s more balanced profiles are cleaner fits at, say, third than Wilson would be (unless the power comes along, which, we’ll see).
Who’ll be the best player, though? That’s a tougher call, and it’s close. I think the interesting thing about it is that it’s the guy in his first full season who has likely the lowest variance in outcomes and the guy who we’ve already seen in MLB who has the highest variance. I’ve said several times in various forms on the site that the upside for Hernaiz is something like Marcus Semien, and as good as Wilson is, I think you’ve gotta squint pretty hard to see the path to him having three 6+ WAR seasons like Semien. Conversely, though, Hernaiz has a lot of rough edges to his game–I mostly concur with Eric Longenhagen’s assessment of them–and if he can’t make inroads on them, he could struggle to consistently get across the MLB borderline for years. Mind you, we’re talking about a player who’s done a ton to improve his stock over the last two years, so the odds of him just hitting a wall for the next half-decade aren’t super high, but they exist in a more straightforward way than they do for Muncy (though he’s had his own swing-and-miss inconsistency) and certainly Wilson.
So Wilson’s the most likely guy to have 2+ WAR/season value for several years, Hernaiz is most likely to be a star, and Muncy’s somewhere in between. If I had to pick one to be on a franchise? I think I’d roll the dice with Hernaiz because of his range of skills, rapid past improvement, and capacity to improve further. But it’s close between him and Wilson, and Muncy’s not far behind either for me.
It sounds to me like the org has soured on Milone at 2B/3B, though it could be a Jordan Díaz situation where they reintroduce other options once Milone is on the cusp of the bigs. I do think he’s a good first baseman on D…flexible on the bag, plus range. I’m not as out on his non-1B glove as I was with Díaz, but you’ve got Gelof at 2B and the other infielders near ready, so I think you’re looking at LF as option 2. He might have enough speed to do that, but I can’t do much beyond render a blind projection of “maybe” since he’s never played the outfield as a pro.
I’ve heard Hoglund’s velo is up significantly. Last year, there was one start midseason in Stockton where I was told he hit 94, but otherwise you rarely ever heard even a 93. I had 90.6 as his average in the data I compiled. Grady Fuson said on the AthleticsFarm podcast this week (which also includes the negative assessment of Milone's non-1B defense) that Hoglund’s now 91-95 and settles in at 92, which would be very significant, and I think he can get big-league outs at that velo, especially since he’s now got more deception in his delivery. Midland is at Amarillo next week and they have Trackman on the broadcast there, so chances are good I’ll have a more specific read two weeks from now.
When and where will Echavarria debut? Well, if we assume he’s healthy and in reasonable form…honestly it’s kind of hard to say, since we have so few recent examples of the A’s taking HS pitchers high. The number of teenage pitchers on A’s Low-A teams over the last 20 years is shockingly low–single digits easily. But it could just be an innings thing. I would guess Stockton in late May, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if they give him a couple June starts in Arizona and move him to Stockton in July assuming everything goes fine.
Puason made a productive mid-AB adjustment the other day that he’s stuck with since, which is neat. You can see the walk rate is up a bit, and he’s trying to work the count, but the actual pitch selection still isn’t there, and his outfield defense has honestly been disastrous. I really feel bad for the kid–it’s gotta be tough to go through year after year of failure after all the expectations and hope, and to do it all far away from home. He’s not remotely on the prospect map at this point, but I don’t want to turn any human being going through that into a punchline, no matter how frustrating it might be to watch him play baseball. The best thing for everybody involved at this point–while the A’s still have his rights for a couple more years–is to see how hard he can throw a fastball and go from there. If he’s willing to give that a go, anyway.
Well, first, I’m not sure I’m 100% board with the premise here. I’m also not sure I’m not on board with it, and I totally get where you’re coming from, but there are a few factors here that make evaluation of whether the premise is true quite messy:
A lot of the folks involved with developing players in the A’s org have been there a long time and were part of developing multiple generations of legitimate stars.
That said, there has been some turnover with the field staff in recent years, as well as scouting, so a number of the current key people involved don’t really have long enough track records to give a good eval of their efforts (this is especially true with the recent international scouting/dev area).
The A’s system has often been ranked as a below-average system talent-wise for much of the past decade, so in the abstract you might expect a larger-than-average ratio of marginal MLBers to stars. Of course, that reflects back on the scouting to some extent (though the scouting/drafting in the late 2010s looks significantly worse than what we’ve seen in the 2020s), but that’s separate from development, which was the focus of your question.
Anyhow, without detouring further into a drawn-out unpacking of each of the above, let’s proceed under the notion that the premise is true, or at least has a real level of validity to it. I’d point to two possible significant contributing factors.
The first–though probably the less important–is where the A’s Triple-A affiliate is located. A lot of this challenge of clearing the MLB hurdle coincides at least roughly with when the Aviators became the A’s affiliate. In the interview with Fuson I linked above, I think he explains the dilemma of all of this very well for pitchers, and we can see statistical evidence of it manifesting all the time. You get a few games in there and get hit around, so you start nibbling, and maybe that gets you avoiding barrels a bit more but it also puts more runners on base in that unforgiving environment. And then it’s culture shock coming out of there to a fair environment again. It’s all well and good for you and I and the A’s development staff to sit back and judge them by exit velo allowed and what not, but it’s harder to tell the pitchers themselves to not worry about it while they’re watching yet another runner cross the plate. I absolutely think Adrián Martínez would be an established big leaguer at this point if not for that Vegas environment, and Hogan Harris might be established by now as well. A guy like Estes who’s an extreme flyball pitcher is gonna be playing with fire there, too.
And for hitters, the friendly environment can reinforce bad habits and thus subject you to a very harsh reality check once you leave. Tyler Soderstrom’s big issue since 2022 has been swing decisions. Jordan Díaz has long struggled with his approach. Vegas is not a great place to learn that you need to make better swing decisions, because guys that talented can just show up and slug .500. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible–Soderstrom is making better decisions this year, Muncy is holding steady, and we’ve seen progress from Hernaiz there on the approach front–but it creates such a massive gulf in what you need to do to be successful at the plate relative to MLB that well exceeds even the normal AAA-to-MLB acclimation challenges.
As for the other reason, let me go ahead and tie in this question:
I’ve talked at length about various A’s organization developmental trends in the past, but for the purpose of staying (relatively) concise and focused, and to tie in with the above, let me frame it this way:
What the A’s are good at is making players more skilled. What they are not good at is making players more talented.
If a player has a lot of talent that is not manifesting into in-game skill, the A’s often help with that. We can see this trend very clearly in recently-acquired pitchers. Lucas Erceg, Joe Boyle, Joey Estes, Royber Salinas, and Luis Medina all made meaningful pitchability gains in the A’s org–Erceg, Boyle, and Salinas very quickly upon their acquisitions, the other two after a bit, but still. They can add pitches that make sense to add, like Medina’s sinker and slider, Estes’ cutter, and the adjustment to Joelvis Del Rosario’s slider they made last year. They’ve also improved the command of several draftees who entered pro ball with serious questions in that area, like Blake Beers and Jack Perkins–literally last week they fixed Mark Adamiak’s arm action in a way that made his command immediately go from 20-30 grade to out near 50, at least for the first two outings he tried it–and they’ve gotten some of the international signees to make significant gains in that area as well. Gil Patterson is a known advocate of the cutter, and he (or someone) successfully introduced that pitch to a number of A’s farmhands last year. We’re seeing some new splitters this year, too. The cutter is a really neat pitch in the sense that it's the easiest breaking ball to throw for a strike because it's so compact, and thus can give command-challenged pitchers a potential swing-and-miss pitch that they can still find the zone with.
On offense, a lot of what the A’s have managed to do is get players more direct to the ball, making more contact, and showing better approaches at the plate. Lawrence Butler is obviously a prime example, but we’ve also seen them make progress with a number of other high-risk hit tool guys; Muncy, Bolte, Clarke, Thomas, etc. have done very well in progressing.
What happens, I think, is that there’s no magically impossible hurdle to clear to big league value–look at Erceg, for instance. The A’s can develop big leaguers out of guys with supreme big-league talent, and they can do it very well. But they’re not an organization that has tended to do much that really increases the ceiling of a player.* You don’t see a lot of velo spikes among pitchers, and the ones that get them–Beers, Walkinshaw, Emanuels, Garrett Acton–often are known training fiends who probably got a lot of that on their own. And when’s the last time a hitter entered the system with below-average raw power and ended up being a significant power threat at any level? I’m struggling to think of one–when Kevin Richards hitting ten homers in Stockton in 2022 is the first thing that comes to mind, that’s not good. Sometimes you get a Brett Harris situation where the guy is strong and is able to turn that strength into extra-base hits more frequently than before, because again that’s about maximizing the talents, not increasing them. This might also play a role in why the international development has been so troublesome, because to get a 16-year-old Dominican to be a big leaguer, you almost have to increase his talent level significantly along the way.
*It should go without saying, but just to get out in front of any misunderstanding: These are tendencies, not hard and fast rules. There are plenty of high-ceiling guys the A’s have failed to actualize (e.g., Puason, though what his ceiling ever truly was is debatable) and some who have improved their ceilings in the organization (e.g., Blackburn).
So the A's are good at really maxing out guys like Schuemann and Jonah Bride at the plate and Jared Koenig and Ty Damron on the mound, in the sense that they can get them to what feels like would be their logical ceilings, but they don't have many examples of taking a player like that and really increasing the ceiling itself, in very recent, Vegas-AAA-era years anyway. But if the player has a strong big league ceiling, I think they can still get him there. Not always, of course, but keeping up with the MLB pack at least. And I think they didn't really lean into that tendency draft-wise of being ceiling-focused until 2021, which is why that draft class really stands out as a particularly strong one with their current strengths and weaknesses. 2022 made sense in a similar mold but didn't work out quite as well (from what we can say thus far) and 2023 might've been a bit of a departure, though they swung big on Naylor, Echavarria, and Miller and went for younger college players in several spots. We'll see.
I wish I had a better (and more fun!) answer to this question than I do. Top 100 is a high bar, and there are only so many prospects nowhere close to Top 100 status now that have a clear, visualizable path to getting there. It’s a lot easier to find guys not in most people’s org top 60 who could jump into the top 25 than guys not in most people’s org top 20 who could jump into the MLB top 100–the Max Schuemann story is way more common than the Lawrence Butler one, if you will. Colby Thomas is the easy answer if he counts, but he probably doesn’t at this point, and I suppose you could say the two high school pitchers the A’s took high in the draft last year, but neither has pitched in pro ball yet (and Cole Miller has had TJ), and I really don’t have anything to add on either of them at the moment anyway. Ditto for Darling Fernández, an outfielder who was the A’s biggest international signing in 2022 not named Luis Morales, but who only played for one week in the DSL in 2023 because of injury–he’s supposedly got a high ceiling, but I’ve never seen him play, so I can’t confirm or deny that.
But rather than take the easy way out and redirect the question, I’ll give it a shot under your parameters. The easiest name to pull out is probably Chen Zhong-Ao Zhuang, who to this day I’ve still never seen on an A’s prospect list other than my own, and I still think everyone’s missing the boat on him. In fairness, he’s pitched half a pro season and been hurt for a season and a half, but he’s now back and even better than he was before he went down. He sits around 94 and touches 97 with huge, explosive carry and upward plane, his changeup has been an easy plus pitch since he signed, his slider has looked really good in the early going, and just yesterday he trotted out a new cutter that looked filthy at times. He also–just for good measure–has a two-seam, a curve, and a splitter, because why not? Most importantly, the guy really knows how to pitch, especially given his limited experience. He’s gotta prove he can stay healthy, but if everything goes perfectly in 2024 and 2025…yeah, late 2025 he’s in Vegas and is one of the top two or three pitching prospects in the system, depending on future graduations and draft classes.
I’ll also take a huge stab in the dark and go with Ramón Landaéta. I didn’t get to watch him a ton on the DSL video streams last year since he got hurt early on, and there is obviously an array of things that could happen that could prevent him from ever being a successful full-season player, even–his aggression at the plate being one, the need to refine his defense being another, injuries being another. But he’s a catcher with plate coverage, big power already, and a good arm, and he looked like a solid leader on the field from what I could see. So you can imagine how the ceiling would come together. I do think you basically have to look at the Latin American teenage group, by and large, because that’s where the uncertainty is heightened enough you can start to squint to visualize those extreme outcomes. Three other names among that group are pitchers Jefferson Jean and Manuel Pérez and infielder Germán Ortíz, but for various reasons, I have a tougher time seeing them get near the top 100 than Landaéta.
The other guy who’s peeking into this area for the moment–again, if we’re swinging for right-tail-outcome longshots–is Will Simpson, who’s done nothing but hit since being drafted last year and looks to have an impressive combination of massive power, a good eye, and a surprisingly short and athletic swing for a big first baseman (let alone one drafted in the 15th round). Through 50 career games as I write this, he is kind of on the Paul Goldschmidt trajectory. But as a 22-year-old righty-hitting first baseman, Simpson has very little margin for error in terms of his prospect status, period, to say nothing of top 100 territory. He’ll have to keep it up for awhile longer and clear a whole lot more fences to get in that range, at which point–as it was for Goldschmidt–he’ll be knocking on the door of the big leagues. Speaking of which…
As the season’s gotten going and I’ve started to amass some data, I’m throwing around a shortlist of players to write deep-dive analyses on in May, and Simpson is there with Zhuang at the top of the list right now. I don’t have that much to say at the moment without more data, since Simpson’s prospectdom really hinges on data–first basemen his age and older are really evaluated on performance (as opposed to tools) more than any other position.
What I’ll say for now is that he passes the eye test. He seems to have some barrel control and a fairly compact swing for a guy his size, and he can really put a charge into the ball. In what I’ve watched to date, I’ve coded 9 of the 14 balls he’s put in play as hard-hit and the other 5 as medium, which makes my estimated exit velocity formula spit out 98.35 mph. For reference, the formula didn’t have anyone in the system (Midland and below–Vegas has Statcast of course) above 91 mph last season, so crude as it is, it’s not wildly miscalibrated. Obviously, Simpson isn’t going to carry 98 as his average forever, but he’s definitely punishing the ball. As of now, my questions about him have to do with how much he’s going to put that hard contact on a higher launch angle vs. a line-drive angle and how well he’s going to control the strike zone. I know the K/BB ratio has been stellar, and his approach is good, but he’s had some chases against sliders off the plate away and hasn’t been quite in the elite-approach territory the K/BB might suggest. He plays a solid 1B and is a solid athlete for a guy his size.
If he keeps anything like this up, expect to read a lot more about him a few weeks from now. I’m watching the next two Lansing series, so I should have a more nuanced evaluation and more interesting data to share after that.
If I recall correctly, my point about Trenkle in Midland last summer was twofold:
I was never blown away by how he looked in A-ball in the first place, so it wasn’t a huge letdown for me that he got off to a slow middling start in Midland.
Trenkle was just 22 and one year out of college. He was very young and inexperienced for the Texas League. At that point, you’re playing with house money developmentally–all the guy can do is impress. A letdown isn’t on the table at that stage.
And hey, Trenkle’s statline in Midland last year wasn’t too bad–it was middling, one might say. All told, if somebody had said on draft day that he’d have the 2023 he had at both levels, I think most anybody would take that for a 9th-round college junior.
The fact that he’s started 5-for-32 as I write this doesn’t really change that much for me in either respect. Trenkle has a broad base of skills, but his in-zone contact wasn’t great last year (I had it at 71% in what I watched). I don’t have much data from this year to share yet, seeing how early his season is, but in general he’s had some challenges staying back on changeups historically–he missed on just under half his swings against them in my data from last year. Since he’s not an overwhelming power guy, all that has to improve if he’s going to be a big leaguer, and that’s why I’ve generally had him projected on the good organizational/AAA player-to-MLB-bench outfielder borderline.
But Trenkle still hasn’t turned 23, he can play a solid center field, he has some barrel control, and there’s some juice in the bat. He’s got kind of the Max Schuemann skillset, only he hits lefty and can only play the outfield. Schuemann hadn’t even made it to High-A at Trenkle’s age and experienced further bumps in the road later, but he still got to the big leagues. There’s time. I’m giving Trenkle the full year to get that contact rate up and bring some pop into Double-A games. If there’s not much progress by the end of the year, then you’d say things are trending in the organizational player direction.
On a somewhat similar note…
In the final month of the 2022 season, Clarke hit .175/.320/.325 with a strikeout rate of 37%.
Last year, after one hot week to start his season, Clarke hit .176/.336/.316 over the next five weeks, with again a 37% K%.
Which is to say, this is a player who runs hot and cold. He has a lot of body to coordinate, and sometimes he’s got it down and is the most fearsome hitter in the league, and other times he’s a very easy out if you can locate at all. He’s started the year out of sync and, like he always has, is working hard on adjustments to get going again (this isn’t a platitude–you can usually see it when he adjusts something, and it’s happened several times in his career). He’s still in shape, has the bat speed, etc. He definitely isn’t making consistent in-zone contact–he’s down at like 57% in what I’ve watched–but you know who had about a 57% in-zone contact rate through two months last year? Max Muncy.
It’s a good opportunity to say something in writing I said a lot in audio form over the past two seasons: I’m a big believer in reacting more quickly to positive developments than negative ones. So many of the A’s top prospects have gotten off to wonky starts some year or other. In 2022 it was Soderstrom and Butler. In 2023 it was Muncy. This year it’s Clarke, and let’s not forget he’s coming back from shoulder surgery, which is exactly the sort of thing that might need a bit of time to get back in form from. It’d be one thing if there was an obvious decline in some area that I could see visually, but I don’t–really what I’ve seen, in addition to him just not having his timing, is there’s been some bad luck in there. He’s run a lot of 3-2 counts and then gotten a tough call or something–I’m not saying the bad start isn’t legit, just it’s a bit exaggerated. I know the K/BB looks extreme but his chase rate in what I’ve seen (about half of his ABs) is in line with the past two years (i.e., it’s in the low twenties), so it’s not like his approach has deserted him. And we’re talking about a level Clarke has proven he can hit at. You gotta give it time, or else you’re just reacting to the whims of the statline. Now, if he’s striking out half the time on June 15, then we’re in a different discussion. But for now? Obviously it’s not good news, and it’s something to keep an eye on, but “worried” would be overstating how I feel about it.
I think I covered the Milone defensive situation in an earlier question, so moving to Bowman…he could sneak into a couple Tony Kemp-type seasons as a starter–not quite the same skillset as Kemp (more power, strikeouts, and steals), but the same basic role. Something a bit more like Jon Berti feels more likely, but somewhere in that Kemp range is a possibility.
I just got back into the ranking exercise (not publishing anything at the moment; I’ll have a new Top 50 or Top X A’s Prospects sometime in June, probably) just to see where I thought everybody stacked up now, so this is fresh on my mind.
I’ll say that it was not easy to decide on # 3 for starters, and it was really hard to separate the top eight or so relievers, but I came up with these three starters:
Luis Morales
Royber Salinas
Joey Estes
and these three relievers:
Grant Holman
Alex Speas
Michel Otañez
Morales and Salinas are easy calls for me as the # 1 and # 2 starter prospects. I just don’t know enough about Steven Echavarria to put him third with confidence, but one could. I also thought about Ryan Cusick and Gunnar Hoglund, but Cusick’s recent oblique injury puts a pause in that and I think we’ve gotta see a bit more out of Hoglund. Estes’ velocity is down a bit to start the year and he just hit the IL with a blister, but I’m not really worried about that too much at the moment. All those Midland guys are intriguing but Estes has a higher floor than any of them while offering a fairly similar ceiling.
Relievers, you could argue for any of a ton of guys. I considered Eduardo Rivera a reliever for my own ranking exercise, as I feel that’s his likely destination, and I strongly considered slotting him ahead of the two Vegas flamethrowers, but we just haven’t seen enough yet. Stevie Emanuels’ stuff in his first Vegas outing was eye-opening, and if he can actually hold 96-97 mph velo through the season–and not just his first outing at a new level, all amped up–he might actually be the # 1 reliever in the system. Pedro Santos and Franck De La Rosa also offer lethal fastball/breaker combos, but as with Estes, I’ll take the AAA guys with those attributes over the lower-level guys for floor reasons. Holman outpaces all of them for me because he’s got the command to go with the stuff and I think his approach to pitching could be less affected by Vegas than some of the other guys, so he’s got a clean path forward if he can stay healthy. But it’s pretty close between all of them…Tyler Baum too. Someone could say their list was Santos, Baum, Rivera, or something, and I’d have no significant dissent. The hope has to be that a couple of them can really take a step forward in the command department and get into Lucas Erceg sort of territory where they separate themselves from the pack.
If you mean "projects" in the sense of like "who are the three relievers who'll be most interesting to watch develop," then it's probably Santos, Baum (for the backstory but also the uniqueness of his approach), and then...either Otañez for the heat or De La Rosa. Oh, honorable mention to DSL A's reliever Alvin Nova, who has one of the wonkiest deliveries in the system and throws three pitches that can really flummox hitters. And I guess if you're going to go with unusual pitchers, a David Leal mention is also imperative.
Ahh…this is like the Baseball America org superlatives. Fun!
I wish I had a more off-the-board answer than Jacob Wilson for best infield defender, but I don’t. Brett Harris is a better 3B than Wilson is a SS, though. Not by much.
There’s a big jumble for best outfield defender…I could literally pick almost anyone in the Midland outfield or Bolte, even Buelvas. Clarke has the highest defensive ceiling, followed by Bolte, but I think I’ll use arm as a tiebreaker and go Junior Pérez.
Best defensive catcher is either Conn or McGuire. McGuire’s ahead now on experience, but Conn has more upside. Javier Pariguan might have a better arm than any of them, but he’s raw otherwise.
Cooper Bowman is probably the best baserunner, followed by Carlos Pachéco and Pérez.
Depends what you mean by “high” ceiling, but obviously the Wilson/Hernaiz/Muncy trifecta would be the leading candidates for high-ceiling hitter with the highest floor, and I broke down how that goes earlier.
Best-case scenario for a 2026 A’s rotation…is Miller still closing? If we say he is, then, in no particular order, Waldichuk, Boyle, Estes, Salinas…hmm, would be down to Medina/Ginn/Hoglund…I’ll go Hoglund 5. If Miller’s starting then that knocks Hoglund out.
Most exciting players at each level are Hernaiz, Clarke, Bolte, Zhuang for me, full-season wise. If you want ACL/DSL ‘23, Ortíz and Landaéta. Honorable mentions would be Muncy, Thomas, Ángeles, De La Rosa, Ángel Rivéra, and Manuel Pérez.
This is actually pretty easy for most of them.
Cy: Luis Morales
MVP: Denzel Clarke
Batting title: Jacob Wilson
Gold Glove: Brett Harris
HR title: Clarke
ROY: Clarke
Lowest-drafted MLB: Blake Beers
A lot of this is an exercise in right-tail outcomes. Clarke’s not the most likely player to get 3 WAR in a season, necessarily, but he’s the most likely to get 7, ditto with 30 HR vs. 50. The same sort of thing is true for Morales, maybe not the most likely 3 WAR pitcher (just for injury/attrition reasons), but the most likely 7 WAR pitcher by a lot. I thought about Hernaiz for the batting title, Wilson for Gold Glove, and Henry Bolte for HR title. ROY is a tough one because it’s so dependent on when in a season the player is ready and gets a shot. Since Hernaiz is likely to exhaust his eligibility this year, it’s probably down to Clarke and Wilson for best odds again, probably in 2025. Beers is the easy call for lowest-drafted, though don’t sleep on former 36th-rounder Jake Walkinshaw if he gets healthy and starts missing bats in the upper minors. I’d love for it to be David Leal.
As for the others…probably the highest draft picks at risk of having no or a -WAR MLB career would be Davidson, Susac, Lasko, and Elliott; roughly even chance for the four of them, since the 1st rounders have higher floors than the 2nd rounders. I wouldn’t trade Bolte. Selling high…depends how you define it. If it’s basically “who am I lower on than the consensus,” maybe…Susac or Naylor. If it’s “who’s performing well right now but might be at a performance apex,” that’s trickier. Colby Thomas is an obvious one but I’m not sure I’d be thrilled to “sell high” there. Can I count Jordan Díaz? He’s not a prospect anymore, but he’s a 23-year-old in the minors, he's on his last option year, and I’ve just never been convinced he’s going to stick in the bigs, let alone in the current crowded A’s infield picture. If the organization can get some real value back for him, I think that would be a solid move.
Again, this is an exercise in right-tail outcomes. A WS-winning team’s gotta have the high-ceiling guys reaching their ceilings, after all, so it’d be something like
C: Langeliers
1B: Soderstrom
2B: Hernaiz
SS: Wilson
3B: Muncy
LF: L. Butler
CF: Clarke
RF: Bolte
DH: Gelof
You know exactly who’s on the mound–that’s the one thing we can count on, right?
The nice thing about this is that in theory–i.e., the A’s don’t trade anyone away in their arb years–all of these guys actually could be on the team at the same time. It’s not like I threw DSL guys in there on the same team as Brent Rooker.
I wanted to put Esteury Ruiz in there somewhere but he was the last guy out, followed by Thomas and Milone.
Well, as I indicated earlier, I think Zhuang is the guy that fits this criterion best in the A’s system. There aren’t a lot of others in the system because so many of the mid-level pitching prospects are guys already in Midland, so there’s less chance of a huge stuff and/or command breakout–and if there was, it would have them in the big leagues before you could make a Top 100 list. Jack Perkins is the one of those Midland guys who feels the most like he could still have a rise up the ranks left in him, but first he has to get healthy.
Outside of the A’s system, to be honest, there haven’t been that many huge popup guys for me, which is unusual–maybe I got bad luck with who I happened to be watching A’s affiliates play against. In 2022 I was huge on Emmet Sheehan and (pre-A’s acquisition) Joe Boyle, for instance, but last year I mostly remember being blown away by the obvious guys–Tink Hence, Misiorowski, etc. I’m hoping this year to get to watch more non-A’s stuff now that I’m not spending my entire week figuring out how to do a three-hour podcast. But…I’ve been impressed by Rockies righty Jace Kaminska, last year’s 10th-rounder, in the early going this year, but I don’t know if he’s quite got top 100 upside. Tyler Woessner intrigued me last year and he’s off to a good start in 2024. Noah Cameron’s got some serious pitchability and wild pitch shapes, so any bit of velo ascension could really catapult him. I wish there was velo on the ACL/DSL video feeds I watched last year, because if there was, I’d have so many more names.
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