Hi everyone! I’m back with the third A’s System Q&A of the 2024 season here. I had hoped to get to do one in June, but I’ve been busy trying to keep up with the A’s system while moving from Pennsylvania to Georgia, and it’s been hard to find the time to squeeze content in. Anyhow, I’ve found the time to get this in now, and I’m hoping to get a couple more things up in the coming weeks amidst everything else I’ve got going on.
As always, y’all came strong with the questions, and I had a lot to say in response. Here goes!
There are a couple of things to dispense with off the top here. First off, something as complicated as top-end pitching development is never going to be reducible to one variable. There are a lot of different things that feed into it, and they all impact the overall picture. Secondly, the tough part of answering this is that outcomes of development often lag behind the development process itself. I say this all the time about the A’s struggles with international scouting and development, where a barren picture in the last couple of years (thankfully improving some in 2024) largely is the result of signings made in/early development from 2017-19. The pitching stuff you’re asking about isn’t necessarily that much of a lagging indicator, but it reflects 2020-21 era stuff as much as it reflects 2024 specifically, and that still makes picking it apart a challenge.
Still, okay, let’s give it a go. First off, I do think Steven Echavarria has legit upside; maybe Cole Miller does too, although there’s really no telling about him thus far. I also think Jack Perkins has a very significant shot to exceed a pure back-of-the-rotation projection if he can stay healthy, but yeah, beyond that…it’s not like there’s no ability to visualize better outcomes than that for other pitchers, but they’re definitely toward the right tail of the probability distribution, so the overall idea that the A’s are thin up top on pitching isn’t off base.
If we’re going to examine why, I do think there are several causes. First off, yeah, injuries are a real factor. Almost none of the top pitchers in the system have been consistently healthy dating back to even the start of 2023: Morales, Zhuang, Perkins, Cusick, Ginn, Hoglund, and Salinas have missed a lot of time in there. The good news is none of them have had career-altering injuries as far as we know, but it’s a lot of interrupted development, and obviously several of these guys have had recurring issues that have often prevented them from getting much momentum.
Secondly, it’s not so much that the A’s have drafted poorly, but more that they don’t tend to emphasize pitching in the draft. They haven’t taken a pitcher first since A.J. Puk. The 2021 draft saw Mason Miller be the only pitcher the A’s took in the first five rounds, they didn’t take a pitcher until the fourth round in 2022, and they didn’t take a pitcher with any of their first three picks last season, though they did give Echavarria late-first-round money in the third round and went over slot for Cole Miller as well. Now, in fairness, they have acquired highly-drafted pitching with Hoglund, Cusick, and Ginn, so that sort of supplements it in theory, but even with those guys included, the top halves of A’s drafts tend to be bat-heavy. It’s not as though you’d look at some of their highly-drafted pitchers in recent years–Mason Miller, Grant Holman, Perkins, Echavarria, Jacob Watters–and think the org can’t evaluate pitching at all, plus they’ve had some good late-round selections in guys like Blake Beers and Will Johnston, so I’m more inclined to look at the selection philosophy as a driver of this more than any real concerns about the actual scouting.
Finally, there is the developmental history. How do you get high-upside pitching prospects if you’re not drafting a lot of guys really high? What you do is collect a ton of solid pitching prospects and hope a few of them can find another level. Three years ago, the A’s system just didn’t have the depth to facilitate that–most of their minor league rotations had a lot of finesse guys. There were a ton of late-round selections left over from the 40-round draft era and a number of minor league free agent veterans in Midland. Several of the few “power” (i.e., touching 94+) arms that were around in those days–Brady Basso, Pedro Santos, Wander Guante, and a few guys now in other organizations–actually ended up developing fairly well, but the organization pretty much had to start from scratch at that point in terms of developing potential top-end arms. Almost all of the organization’s top pitching prospects have been acquired since then.
I do think the A’s pitching development has actually been pretty good the past couple of years. I wasn’t happy with where it was circa 2021-22, but I’ve been pleased with the org’s aggressiveness in mechanical changes and pitch design since the onset of 2023, which has improved a number of their pitchers and seen a reduced number of significant letdowns from a projection perspective. But doing relatively well on that front for 1 ½ years doesn’t turn everything around, because this really is a seven-year enterprise. There’s also what I’ve said before about the A’s being better at getting pitchers to be more skilled (command, pitch design) than more talented (velo, spin), which would tend to raise floors more than ceilings among the organization’s pitchers.
So overall, a mix of being in very rough shape three years ago, historical draft philosophy, some bad luck with injuries, and floor-over-ceiling development. Two of these four factors (draft philosophy and development philosophy) do persist now (as far as we know), but the system has so much more depth on the mound than it used to, so it’s only now in a position where turning a few additional pitchers into higher-upside guys is probabilistically feasible. We’ll see how things go over the next year or so, and obviously the upcoming draft will also factor into this picture heavily. More on that at the end of this Q&A.
Thomas Nestico makes a pretty succinct case in one image here (note the xwOBA and other blue boxes):
It’s a handful of games, it’s Vegas/the PCL etc.
That’s the short, right-now version. I can, as I tend to do, construct a longer version, though. Note before I begin that this is not me saying there isn’t also a fairly lengthy pro-promote-him-now argument that could be constructed, but if you’re asking for the case against an immediate promotion, here it is.
Personally, I think about managing minor league rosters as a balance of two things: finding out valuable information and meeting benchmarks. The valuable information in question is how good a player is relative to his age/experience peers, and the benchmarks in question are things like Rule 5 eligibility and minor league free agency that understandably change the evaluative timetable (particularly for international players and high school draftees). To me, each player basically has a test in front of them in each season, and if they excel at that test, I’m happy, because that’s given me good information. I wouldn’t feel compelled to give them another test, though it may often turn out that that’s how things work out.
For instance, Henry Bolte’s test this year was continuing to dial things in in High-A. He passed that test, and I’d have been fine with the A’s leaving him there all year despite his excellence. Because he’s so young and talented and Double-A is such a stretch, Bolte cannot “fail” Double-A for me the rest of this season: that’s his 2025 test in my eyes. He's basically playing with developmental house money, so to speak. The only thing he can do that would really change my evaluation of him the rest of 2024 is get better there and thus push himself into MLB top 50 prospect territory. Conversely, the A’s have had a number of older pitchers succeed in Lansing this year–Grant Judkins, Mitch Myers, Jake Garland, Colton Johnson, Hunter Breault–and even though none of them are anywhere near the same organizational priority as Bolte, they all really need to take the Midland test, because they all show intriguing talent at times and it behooves the A’s organization to figure out if they’re actually upper-minors caliber pitchers right now. If they are, they should have guaranteed roster spots in the org coming into the spring, if they aren’t, they come into March fighting for spots. So I’m often more focused on those guys taking the relevant test than on top prospects taking excess ones.
(I could go into way more detail on these ideas, but I want to stay on topic and hopefully the above is enough to give a flavor of where I’m coming from)
Jacob Wilson doesn’t really need to take any more tests. He’s an elite minor league hitter in his first full pro season, and like Bolte, potential struggles at the next level wouldn’t really change how he ought to be evaluated. He’s not Rule 5 eligible until after 2026, so there’s obviously no external pressure to move him along, and promoting him and then optioning him later in 2024 would burn one of his option years (like Soderstrom last year, which felt like a misstep to me, though he's course-corrected enough this year that it may not matter). The A’s do have many other infield options who are important to evaluate in the present: Brett Harris is getting another turn, Armando Alvarez is getting a deserved chance, Logan Davidson continues to hit well in Vegas, and even Cooper Bowman is worth at least a pause to think about since he’s Rule 5 eligible after the year. Trying those guys out for 40 games could determine whether they’re on the 40-man or even in the A’s organization next year. Wilson, on the other hand, is the odds-on favorite to be the Opening Day 2025 shortstop unless his Vegas performance nosedives from here forward; you learn less from promoting him than you do from promoting someone like Alvarez or Davidson.
I know that the previous paragraph might read a bit like an argument for service time manipulation, but that’s not how I mean it. For one thing, I don’t think that’s a fair notion to invoke on a player with 15 Triple-A and 68 pro games, but the other important component is that Wilson’s obviously an important part of the A’s future, and I’m a big believer in bringing guys like that up when you’re prepared to give them a long runway. What you don’t want to do is bring the guy up, have him slump for two weeks, go “Oh, I guess he needs more seasoning,” send him back to Vegas for a month (where of course he hits, because Vegas), bring him back up, and potentially have more yo-yoing further down. You want to–particularly if you’re in build mode, as the A’s are; they have the luxury of getting the timing on their terms–bring the guy up when you’re fully confident that there is no “more seasoning” required, and that whatever he needs to learned will best be learned in a big league uniform. There are no true guarantees of such things, of course, but you’ve really got to be ready to truly hand him the keys rather than just try him out.
The bottom line is that with such a small sample and enough Triple-A indicators around to suggest the possibility of a Nick Allen-esque gulf between Vegas and Oakland performance in the short term, I certainly don’t feel compelled to rush Wilson up there. It is a true gulf in difficulty, Vegas to Oakland, and not just for guys like Allen. Recall how the A’s left Shea Langeliers to tear up Vegas for several months in 2022, over a lot of fan impatience. They brought him up on about exactly the timetable I tend to favor–after 92 strong Triple-A games and thus with no question that he was sticking around–and even then he was just a replacement-level contributor the rest of that season and needed nearly two years to round into starting-catcher form. We’ve seen Soderstrom and Gelof have their ups and downs, Hernaiz had some trouble adjusting in his look earlier this year, etc. Almost all these guys were way more experienced, both in Triple-A and pro ball as a whole, than Wilson. Just because Wilson’s numbers haven’t been sullied yet doesn’t mean he’s immune to running into any number of challenges.
In sum, look, Wilson’s doing everything he can to prove he deserves an absurdly expedited timetable, and if the A’s make that move, I won’t really disagree with it and I’ll be as excited as the next guy to see what he does. But I don’t see why it’s something that needs to happen right now. I don’t think it’s as simple as saying “well, he’s obviously the best shortstop in the organization right now.” He may well be, but given the timetable involved and the other players worth giving playing time to, I’m fine waiting until he makes it obvious. That may well be in a month, and the argument for keeping him in the minors may well be indefensible by roster expansion, but we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves because of 15 games, just as we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves in the other direction if Wilson’s first month in the majors sees him hit an empty .200. He’s passed all the relevant tests for his 2024 season, and that’s going to be the headline takeaway regardless of what lies ahead in Wilson’s immediate future.
Plausibly! I’d like to see it, as Bowman is deserving of a try in Vegas. Then again, Jack Winkler and Jordan Groshans are there too, and Jeremy Eierman just won Texas League Player of the Week and is playing the best baseball of his career, so all of a sudden there’s actual competition for that hypothetical spot. Of course, Max Muncy is soon headed back up to Vegas himself, which will crowd the picture a bit, and you’ve also got Darell Hernaiz on the mend. Bowman would be at the top of my priority list among those Midland infielders, though I’m still figuring out Groshans, who’s off to a good start in the A’s organization and showing a plus glove at third base. He’s obviously had a lot of AAA time in the past and has some chance to leapfrog Bowman on the depth chart.
Whenever Bowman does get the call, I still want him to get some run in center field. He obviously can’t get any time out there on a team with Denzel Clarke, Junior Pérez, Henry Bolte, etc., but I maintain that establishing that as a place he can play is going to be key to his big league future. I think he can do it, but he’s obviously going to need experience there before he’s reliable in the outfield.
Well, it’s hard to say about all time, and forgive me for not putting hours of Baseball-Reference trundling into this answer, but we can at least do a quick-and-dirty “since 2006” look courtesy of the FanGraphs minor league data. That immediately puts the 200+ wRC+ in rarefied air–only seven times has that been accomplished with a minimum of 250 PA at a level since 2006, though the dataset here has the drawback of not counting players who spent, say, 200 PA each at two different levels. A number of the top seasons are in Rookie ball, anyway, which doesn’t feel quite in the spirit of the question.
Now, Wilson is hitting .461/.494/.731 this year, which is pretty similar to Ty France’s .399/.477/.770 in 2019. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. had the remarkable 2018 where he hit .381/.437/.636 across three (mostly pitcher-friendly) levels at age 19, good for a 194 wRC+. Kyle Schwarber had truly spectacular years in 2014 and 2015, and Kris Bryant’s 2014 was massive as well. Chris Parmelee topped a 200 wRC+ in 2012 in Triple-A. Current Lansing hitting coach and former A’s third baseman Kevin Kouzmanoff put up a 205 mark in a ridiculous 2006 campaign in A-ball.
It’s fair to expect that if Wilson were to play out the whole year in Vegas, his stats would regress to the mean a bit, so I don’t think it’s fair to actually give him the title of best wRC+ season in recent history: though he’s currently on pace for it, it’s just 180 PA because of his time lost to injury. However, most of the players in the above paragraph were bat-first corner guys, and none were plus defenders at shortstop. There is Matt Wieters’ 2008, where he put up a 182 wRC+ while playing good catcher defense, and Bo Bichette had a 180 wRC+ as a teenage shortstop, so that’s about the top end of offensive performance from up-the-middle guys. Without getting into the headache of trying to ballpark how much of the difference in offense between say, Wieters and Kouzmanoff would be made up for by glovework, I think it’s fair to say that if Wilson is significantly above Wieters’ offensive output his case gets harder and harder to deny.
So if Wilson were to maintain something like a 190 wRC+ over 250+ PA, he’d have to (at least superficially) be the strongest candidate for the best minor league season since at least 2006 from a WAR/150 perspective. Even at like 175, it’s arguable because his glove is so good. If you throw adjusting for age in to try to get a more “prospecty” feel to the enterprise, Guerrero, Jr. and Bichette are tougher competition, along with a few others.
I suspect that there are some historical seasons that outshine Wilson’s in the more distant past, no doubt a result of different approaches to minor league movement and player development at the time, but if he can maintain this pace, his 2024 would certainly be toward the top of the recent minor league pantheon.
In terms of just shortstop defense, you’ve basically got three tiers:
Wilson & Allen–plus defenders
Muncy & Hernaiz–solid albeit with some inconsistency
Ángeles, Winkler, & Schuemann–fundamentally sound infielders who look stretched at SS at times
You could argue it’s actually four tiers and split Muncy and Hernaiz, particularly since we don’t know how Hernaiz is going to look coming off the ankle sprain. Hernaiz is the toughest to forecast since he has highlight-reel plays but isn’t always consistent, so he could conceivably end up down in the third tier as more of a 2B/3B or end up as a legit above-average shortstop and neither would shock me.
Kind of wild that the actual big league starting shortstop is last on this list, but hey, Schuemann’s done enough to cross the 1 WAR threshold according to both FanGraphs and B-Ref, so there’s that. I made the keep-Wilson-down case earlier, but one of the key points of a promote-him-now case would be that Schuemann’s glove would be more valuable in almost any other role compared to “starting shortstop.” All those third-tier guys can play good defense elsewhere, but Ángeles and Schuemann’s arms and Winkler’s actions provide enough limitations at short that I wouldn’t want to construct a roster that features them there every day.
Off-topic a bit, but let me just throw this in: Casey Yamauchi’s second base defense is ridiculously good, like almost as good as Wilson’s is at shortstop (same absurd instincts and body control, just a few more errors than you’d like to see, thus below Wilson). Even though the A’s don’t really play him at short, I’m not convinced he can’t be solidly middle of the pack in that category. And he has near-Wilson-level contact rates, albeit as a fifth-year senior sign in A-ball. Still, heck of a player to grab as an undrafted free agent last year.
I’m grouping these since they’re related. I think on the DH front it’s hard to say, because it’s not like there necessarily needs to be a full-time DH on a roster like this: it might just be a way to get different bats in the lineup. Could Jordan Díaz get another look there? Yeah, he could. He’s crushed the ball since his DFA, and since he was DFA'd, he’s a free agent after the year if he’s not re-40’d, so if the A’s think there’s reason to give him another go, the time is going to be sooner rather than later. I don’t see Hernaiz turning into a full-time DH: his bat isn’t ready to carry that kind of load yet, and he’s too valuable a defender, anyway. If he’s up, he’d be more likely to, say, bump Schuemann to the outfield and then Miguel Andujar to DH or something. That is, if Andujar’s not moved too.
As for Hernaiz’s future specifically, I can understand where you’re coming from in that those guys feel like headline names while Hernaiz feels a bit lost in the shuffle, though some of that is definitely just that he’s been off the radar a bit while rehabbing the ankle. Hernaiz is definitely a far more valuable defender than Soderstrom (provided Soderstrom isn’t catching) and he’s a more exciting hitter than Harris, but otherwise it is starting to feel like a future infield is beginning to shape up and it’s hard to figure out where Hernaiz fits.
But the thing about Hernaiz that’s nice here is that he’s versatile. Soderstrom, barring further positional experimentation or a return to catching, is just a first baseman. Gelof, having struggled at third earlier in his career, is just a second baseman. Harris only has a plus glove at third. It’s hard to imagine Wilson playing anywhere other than shortstop.
Hernaiz (and to some extent Muncy), on the other hand, can slot in wherever with the glove and fit in okay, and he may well have the offensive skillset to profile at a number of positions. You’re not penciling him into one specific spot, sure, but that can be a feature, not a bug, with the A’s roster construction. If Harris doesn’t hit enough to be a starting third baseman, Hernaiz has a real shot to do it. Sure, maybe Muncy’s first in line for that and then you’d just have a Muncy-Wilson-Gelof-Soderstrom infield, but it’s possible Hernaiz could end up outhitting one or more of those guys and claim a starting spot, and even if he can’t, his versatility becomes very valuable in the event of injury and/or as a bench player.
It’s funny how, as much as the A’s have struggled recently, it does feel suddenly difficult to fit good young players like Hernaiz into the future roster picture. But I do think it’s largely a case of yes, there being a few really good players in the infield mix but also the tendency to forecast toward best-possible outcomes with health and projection. I think Hernaiz has a pretty strong chance to become a valuable player for the A’s soon and hold down a roster spot for a long time. What role will he play, exactly? I don’t know, but there are a variety of solid ones, and that’s a nice contrast to players like Gelof and Harris who really fit in one exact way.
There are a number of similarities between Bolte and Clarke as A-ball graduates. They’re obviously both super-tooled up guys, yeah, but neither one got enough credit for their feel for the game. They’re both pretty savvy in terms of pitch selection and ID and working counts, and neither of them get enough credit for that–people see the high strikeout totals and say they need better approaches, and that’s absolutely never been the case from Day 1 of their first full seasons. They’re both athletic marvels in the outfield who graduated A-ball needing to clean up routes and throwing mechanics–Clarke mostly has now, and I expect Bolte will be good rangewise. Bolte’s throwing stroke is a bit strange–he’s got a very short arm action for an outfielder, and though he gets a lot of credit for a plus arm in reports, he wasn’t showing functionally plus arm strength with any consistency in Lansing, including when I saw him take throwing drills a month ago. I’m sure it’s in there, but he’s got to unlock it.
At the plate, both guys’ issues center on timing. With Clarke, that’s more a function of lever length and his very wide stance, and he’s always had issues with his somewhat awkward, twisting load. Clarke also has such a wide strike zone to cover, and his swing path doesn’t tend to get to high heat very well. Throw in the timing issues where he’d get out front on breaking stuff down and he came across very beatable when he graduated A-ball, but his power on contact was so absurd that you trusted he’d just punish whatever he did hit so much that he’d still be impactful at subsequent levels. He has so far.
Bolte, however, doesn’t really have those mechanical quirks, nor does he have gigantic limbs or a gigantic zone (though he is on the taller side at 6’3”). Really, his whole operation is very quiet, and he projects to much cleaner zone coverage than Clarke ever will. The thing with Bolte is he’s such a cerebral guy in the box, he outthinks himself. He has a good two-strike approach in the sense that he doesn’t expand with two strikes any more than he does at any other time, but he gets very tentative in his weight-shifting when he doesn’t know what’s coming and ends up way late on in-zone fastballs with two strikes. The book on him toward the end of his Lansing time thus started to be to pitch him backward: get a couple of breaking balls over and then finish him off with a belt-high fastball. I think it’s really just a matter of him getting more used to facing high-level pitching and getting more confidence to just explode on the ball and react to pitches in flight–there’s no mechanical reason or pitch-ID reason he can’t, and he’s starting to flash the ability to do it more over the past month or so, including in his early days in Midland.
Bolte isn’t quite the power-on-contact threat Clarke was when he got to Midland (though who is?), partially because he tends to roll over the ball more with his top hand, particularly to the pull side. But he’s also such a terror flying down the first base line (at max effort every single time) that he piles up infield hits doing that anyway.
Overall, they’re pretty similar in terms of the sum of the evaluation at the arrival-in-Midland point. Both are guys who are incredible athletes with some rawness but also a lot of actual feel for the game, feel that just hasn’t been fully translated into results. Clarke got to Midland as a bit more of an actualized version of himself than Bolte did (no doubt largely because of age), and he had the more extreme athleticism-driven upside (as high as Bolte’s is), but he also had more significant mechanical/zone coverage issues to work on, issues he’s only really beginning to sort out now, a year and a half later.
In terms of Clarke now, you're starting to see him get his timing down and get to those high fastballs and low breakers a lot more consistently, hence all the dominance over the past month-plus. It kind of reminds me of what we saw from Lawrence Butler in 2022: a listless first two months and then all of a sudden, there're the hands loading on time and then it's ropes everywhere. Clarke doesn't have the same challenges of getting his body to do what his brain wants it to do, because he's seen pro pitching for longer (and college before that); for him it's always been more about the mechanical side, so with mechanical improvements come big results. Hopefully it sticks, because Clarke tends to mess with his setup at the plate all the time. At some point he's gotta find one thing that works and trust he can bust out of a slump without overhauling everything, though the work ethic behind that adjustment is admirable and it's conversely good to know he's not a player who will ride bad habits into the ground.
There’s no smoking gun on this, per se, as Hoglund’s got basically the same stuff and mechanics he’s had all year. The notable changes really were between seasons, as his velocity famously rebounded some from its 89-91 range last year into the 91-93 area in 2024, and he exaggerated the hip turn in his motion to give him plus deception. He’s held that velo–and actually was 92-94 last week at Amarillo, albeit in a rain-shortened outing–as the year has gone on, but he’s still the same run/ride fastball, slider, changeup pitcher he’s always been. He did lean notably very heavily on the slider in that Amarillo outing, where he used his fastball by far the least I’ve ever seen from him, but his previous start in San Antonio didn’t have that pattern, so I’m hesitant to make too much of it (admittedly, prior to the San Antonio start I hadn’t watched Hoglund in about a month, during which he was excellent as you note, but at least I have these two recent outings as points of comparison now). The only other helpful note I have regarding his in-season development is that he didn’t look to have good feel for his changeup–which was his best pitch in 2023–in April, but has since mostly regained it.
I think it’s important to remember that this season hasn’t come out of nowhere as much as it might seem. I noted several times last season that Hoglund’s swinging strike rates were dramatically outpacing his strikeouts in Stockton–even with his very diminished velocity, his fastball was generating swinging strikes a solid 10% of the time, and both of his offspeed pitches missed bats at strong rates. Now that he’s throwing a bit harder, everything’s working that much better. Here’s what I’ve tracked in various outings of his this year:
He has gotten less fastball-dominant than last year, when he leaned heavily on the heater (likely at least partially for health reasons) and I suspect there probably has been a bit of taking the training wheels off as the year has progressed, but I’m not sure that coincides all that neatly with the strikeout jump.
As for what he needs to do to be more than a fifth starter, I think there are two ways to look at it. The first is that Hoglund might be the sort of pitcher who finds a way to just get more out of his stuff than you might think. He’s got the deception and the command, everything moves, and again, it’s not like the fastball is just a sitting duck out there given these whiff rates. I think I’ve mentioned Aaron Nola as a comp–not that Hoglund is going to be as good, but that he’s got some of those same traits that make Nola a more effective pitcher than, say, his Stuff+ would have one believe is a possibility. That doesn’t mean that’s going to happen for Hoglund, but it does mean I’m allocating a real part of his probability distribution of outcomes to that. I usually explicitly leave the “maybe the stuff just magically plays better than you’d think” outcomes off any analysis of a pitcher, because that’s true for everyone and not really helpful to consider in most cases, but I think it makes sense to amplify those probabilities with Hoglund because of the pitchability and particularly the deception.
But if Hoglund does need to improve something, it’s probably just taking pressure off the fastball. Maybe more slider/changeup usage does that, maybe more velo comes back with time, who knows. I think the most straightforward thing is adding a fourth pitch at some point, a cutter or curve. Pre-draft reports had him throwing a curve in college, but he’s been strictly three-pitch as a pro, and adding a fourth would probably cut into the fastball usage almost by default and further help the pitchability play up.
Can he be an effective starter in the next two years? There’s a real chance, yeah. It’s one of those things where the stuff sort of either plays or it doesn’t, you know? Either big leaguers will find a way to feast on the fastball or there’ll be enough there that he’s able to settle in pretty quickly like JP Sears did. I’m not sure Hoglund would be particularly overmatched if he got an emergency start next week, to be honest–it would just be a bit of sequencing to polish up, if the stuff is good enough. Assuming health, he could be a real competitor for a rotation gig in the spring, particularly since he’s a 40-man call over the offseason.
I’m not really all that concerned about this, to be honest with you. Vegas is such a weird environment and it just gives such poor reads on how ready pitchers are for the bigs–look how much better Joey Estes and Hogan Harris have been in Oakland than Vegas this year, for instance. That doesn’t mean you give up and don’t look at any results there, but I’m more inclined to just focus on the stuff and strike-throwing along with maybe a peek over at exit velocity allowed. GB% isn’t all that stable in medium samples like this, so basically you just go over to Ginn’s AAA data, verify that his fastball still sinks a lot (it does) and go “huh, whatever.” Or at least I do.
Nevertheless, I think there are two reasonably functional interpretations of the trends you’re citing. The first is just dismissing it as statistical noise, which isn’t all that hard to do: HR/FB% is prone to fluctuations, his is a ridiculous 22.5%, and the PCL is a ridiculous place to pitch. His exit velocity allowed is just 88.05 mph, which doesn’t indicate he’s being raked over the coals out there.
The other is to think about the weaknesses Ginn has and see if it makes any sense to tie these indicators to them. Right now, the main weakness he has is that he’s fairly predictable as a pitcher. He doesn’t have a ton of confidence in his changeup (often for fairly good reason) and throws it basically only to lefties. Since he’s a sinker guy, he tends to work heavily down in the zone, though he does incorporate some four-seamers (again, mostly to lefties). So he’s a pretty predictable two-pitch down-in-the-zone guy to righties, and his sinker/slider-heavy mix is the sort that tends to have big platoon splits, also making him vulnerable to lefties. Does that all make him a bit easier to figure out than the typical starting pitcher, especially the third time through the order, and then allow hitters to tee off? There’s a chance.
Am I convinced that the second explanation gives these trends a ton of legitimacy? Not really, though it’s not an unreasonable connecting of the dots. Ginn’s starting to throw the changeup more, and he just had one of his best starts of the year this past weekend (where his velo was up a bit, closer to where it was in Midland in May). I don’t think the GB% dropping below 50 is a permanent thing, nor do I see Ginn’s AAA time as a whole really eroding his chances of being a capable big league starter. If anything, I take pretty encouraging signs from his continued health and the tremendous results he’s getting from his slider (21.3% SwStr, 82.8 EV against), allowing him to post impressive strikeout numbers. But to the extent there are underlying worries here, it’s about the predictability and the changeup, so that’s what to watch for.
I had Holman 20th on the Midseason Top 50, which was the highest I had a reliever in the system, so I obviously like him a fair bit. He’s long been a fixture in my organizational top 30, in fact, and has been one of the most consistent performers among A’s system pitchers over the last three years when his health has held up. His performance to date this season has really been something, what with the not-allowing-a-run-til-June-28th stuff, so I understand the enthusiasm here, too.
Am I surprised he hasn’t been promoted? Not really. He’s not Rule 5 eligible until after the season, and he’s another guy where you don’t necessarily want to add him to the 40 in 2024 unless you’re really sure he’s better right now than Tyler Ferguson or Michel Otañez or whoever; otherwise you’re probably burning an option for little reason. He’s still pretty new to Triple-A and hasn’t been super precise command-wise (16/9 K/BB), so I’m not necessarily there yet on him being the best reliever to translate to Oakland. I prefer getting looks at Ferguson, Otañez, and probably Gerardo Reyes for now. Holman would be next on the depth chart beyond Reyes for me, so if the A’s need to dip that far down, that’s when opting for anyone else would really be passing him over.
The thing with Holman is he’s not really all that exciting. He sits about 94 with a low-spin four-seamer and throws some gyro-y sliders that he’s improved but still aren’t all that effective. He’s got the plus splitter, but he only throws it a touch over 20% of the time. Now, he’s an imposing, physical guy who gets good extension and commands everything pretty well, but as I see it, the route for him to be anything beyond a capable middle reliever involves either a dramatic uptick in splitter usage (which is possible because he commands it well, though it’s hard to say exactly what a splitter-heavy Holman would look like) or some unexpected positive development (velo spike/new pitch/unaccounted-for deception or command). He’s probably an offseason 40-man add, but he’s not the sort of player that I think you rush onto the big league roster and start sending on the big league/AAA shuttle before you have to. He only just turned 24 and is shy of 150 career innings. Seeing what you have in the guys who are already on the 40 or are free agents after the season is more important, much like my discussion of evaluating Jacob Wilson vs. the other infielders in an earlier question.
I can’t say I do. I have a hard time forecasting Simpson as having a shorter path to the big leagues than Brett Harris did, since he’s basically done the Harris thing as a senior sign who busted out at Lansing in his first full season. Harris was older than Simpson (since he was a fifth-year guy and Simpson is actually quite a young senior sign), he moved to Midland a lot more quickly, and had the plus glove over at third base and a more dialed-in approach, and it still took him until his third pro May. If Simpson is a big leaguer May 1, 2026 I’d be surprised. I see him as probably needing much of 2025 figuring out how to excel in Midland, maybe getting to Vegas late that year and most likely breaking camp in Triple-A in 2026 at age 24. 2026 is his Rule 5 evaluation year. If things go well with him controlling the strike zone (and perhaps learning a non-1B position), he could find his way up at some point before the end of that season. Even if it’s a slower burn, he’s not a bad candidate for a Seth Brown sort of path through the minors.
Yeah, the odyssey of the pitch mix with Zhuang is a bit puzzling, though he’s obviously dominated regardless. It seems like the harder breaker has mostly been a low-80s slider in Lansing rather than that harder cutter that pushed into the 86-88 range in Stockton. He’s definitely thrown the big slow curve more than the slider in Lansing, though he actually featured the slider pretty heavily in his return from the Temporarily Inactive List on Sunday, so I’m not sure that the curve-heavy approach will necessarily be retained going forward.
Having seen Zhuang on the Lansing Trackman unit for a bit, I can say that the curve does spin more than I would’ve guessed given its bloopy appearance–often around 2800 RPM–and it has had some moments of looking a bit sharper here and there, both on video and in my in-person look in June. Still, though, for me to move off my assessment of it as just a show pitch, it’s got to get results, and it hasn’t really done that. Then again, the slider hasn’t exactly dominated either, though I don’t have a huge sample on either pitch or the cutter (the cutter has the best data of the three, for what it’s worth, in addition to my most positive visual eval).
It’s of course always hard to differentiate between a pitcher adopting a certain approach for developmental purposes vs. thinking that’s his best approach right now. I think the one notion the curve has going for it is that it probably tunnels better off the high-fastball approach, but I think that only works if he can throw it with real oomph. The moment Zhuang throws an 80-mph curve, I’d probably be all-in on such a thing. With Zhuang specifically, there’s also the question of keeping him healthy after all the injury stuff in 2023, and perhaps he or the organization think the harder breakers are more stressful than the curve or something. I have no idea, but you can’t rule anything out.
Ultimately, though, where I’m at is that I’ve seen Zhuang throw that good cutter in the past, the slider looks okay, he’s working on the curve…we’ll see where it all ends up, but he can spin the baseball reasonably well, and I’m reasonably optimistic he’ll figure out some competent breaking stuff in time. There tends to be a lot of focus on the exact breaking-ball shapes guys have at this developmental stage even though it’s incredibly common for those shapes to change as guys approach the big leagues and fine-tune their arsenals. Maybe the lead breaker for Zhuang will be the resurrection of the cutter, maybe it’ll be the slider, maybe he’ll add power to the curve, but I think he’ll have something playable in there.
I’ve never encountered a draft expert who has ever advocated for drafting for need in the first round, and though I’m not a draft expert by any stretch, I’m not going to do that either. As I noted in the first question of this piece, minor league development is a lagging process. The A’s biggest organizational need now can be filled any number of ways, and their biggest strength may become a weakness by the time the # 4 pick is big-league ready. Stuff happens. You absolutely take the best player available and let things sort themselves out from there. When you’re knocking on the door of the playoffs and need to find a second baseman or a lefty reliever or whatever, then you try to balance everything.
Where you might draft for need is more in the spirit of Jesse’s question. There’s potentially a huge difference between the fourth-best player in the draft and the eighth-best, and there’s a pretty real difference between even the 74th-best and the 80th-best, but there’s not much of a difference between 12th-round picks. This is much as there’s a big difference between the A’s # 1 prospect and # 6 prospect, and still a difference between # 12 and # 18, but little difference between # 50 and # 65. That’s where you draft for need, and you start to do things like mock up a potential 2025 Stockton roster. Who needs to repeat there? Who’s ready to move up from the ACL? What spots remain?
I’ll turn to that in a second, but first let’s think about the area of greatest need. Yeah, starting pitcher is a good shout, for all the reasons outlined in the first question of this piece. It’d be an interesting curveball if the A’s go that direction for the first time in years with such a high pick, but I wouldn’t mind it. Beyond that, it gets sort of strange. It definitely isn’t catcher even with Tyler Soderstrom’s apparent move to first base–even if Shea Langeliers end up Sean Murphy’d out of the A’s organization in a couple of years, Daniel Susac is around, plus plenty of additional depth. Infield feels more settled than outfield, what with the Soderstrom/Gelof/Wilson/Muncy/Hernaiz core and other options behind them, but there’s not a lot of depth there and the lower levels could really use some infield replenishing. Outfield has a less-settled big league picture over the next year or two but feels a lot deeper, from big league guys like Lawrence Butler all the way down to Ryan Lasko and Nate Nankil. So if it happened to fall that way, the A’s going with a lot of pitching early and then infield depth mid/late–with a few outfielders and maybe one catcher mixed in somewhere–would probably be the haul that would most balance the system overall. The A’s don’t necessarily need a lot of pitching, but it’s that high-upside pitching, yeah.
So in terms of the position distribution, how’s this:
4 SP
6 RP
7 INF (1 1B, 1 3B, 5 MI)
4 OF (2 CF, 2 corner)
Let’s go catcherless, why not? Catching depth abounds through the system and I’d like to see Mario Gómez, Cesar González, and Ángel Rivéra all move up to Stockton next year. Maybe a high school catcher who can go to Arizona as a developmental guy, but I want to see those catchers finally moving up. Relief depth has been a weakness in A-ball this year and I’d like to see the A’s get some power relievers moving through the lower levels again. I’d love to see some more lefty pitchers (and lefty hitters, while we’re at it) mixed in as part of this, too. But really, this distribution only should really come into play on Day 3; even if it results in an unbalanced system, infusing the organization with the best possible talent has to be the clear-eyed focus.
Thanks as always to everybody who submitted questions for this! I hope my answers illuminated these topics as much as is reasonable. Let's do this again in August!
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