It’s time for another A’s system Q&A! As always, I asked for questions about the A’s system on social media, and man did I get some interesting ones. As I often like to do in these, I’m starting off with some more overarching questions that invite a lot of depth in response before moving to some more targeted player-specific inquiries later on. In a couple of places, I got questions that overlap with each other to some extent, so I’ve grouped them and then tried to cover the various points on that topic in response.
Let’s get started.
Well, first, you can chase yourself around in circles for awhile trying to discern whether the system has/to what extent it’s improved. As I write this, indeed, A’s affiliates are 75-73 collectively, up from a .451 winning percentage last year, .426 the year before, and .436 the year before that–the system hasn’t been above .500 since 2018. On the other hand, they’ve been outscored by about half a run per game collectively, which is about on par with where the non-DSL affiliates were last year. But then, even though it's a better predictive metric than W-L generally, in a minor league system, run differential can sometimes be distorted by end-of-the-roster guys, particularly pitchers who are really struggling with command, so that’s not necessarily a great representation. But then if you try to just focus in on the top prospects, there have been some notable struggles (Clarke, Susac, Lasko, etc.)...but then there have been some big late-round breakouts to contrast those. And then, you've gotta consider that the system’s overall record and run differential were affected by really poor starts for Stockton (often typical in recent years) and Las Vegas (much more atypical); now, though, all the affiliates have been playing pretty well for the last three weeks or so. So there’s some evidence pointing in all sorts of directions, and as fun as it’s been to have watched more games where the A’s affiliate won this year than games where they lost, I do still think it’s very much an open question as to where things stand overall.
That said, if it does turn out that things indeed continue to resolve in a promising way, I think it’s a mistake to think that improvement would be a result of something 2024-specific. More than anything, it would be a culmination of stuff that started happening a few years ago–stacking some draft classes, developing those players well from the outset, and beginning to make headway on the international front. Lansing’s fielding perhaps their most competitive team as an A’s affiliate, and this might be the best Low-A-era Stockton team as well (not that that’s saying much from a W-L perspective, but improvement is improvement). Unlike, say, Vegas–since that team is always staffed by a plurality of guys who come in through minor league free agency–the improvement at the lower levels is just the culmination of a few years where finally, nothing has gone seriously wrong à la Kyler Murray or Robert Puason. Not everything’s been perfect, but the international group is probably something other than dead-last in MLB (and could continue to strengthen as the current group in Arizona starts to move up) and there have been no insta-regrets on first-rounders or key international signings. That goes a long way. It’s also worth noting that the health situation for A’s affiliates–though not perfect by any means–doesn’t seem too bad. How many well-known pitching prospects in the system are currently out with Tommy John or other major arm surgery (knock on wood!)? If more of your talented players can stay on the field than other organizations can get out there, you’ll have an advantage in results.
I’ll be doing my A’s top prospect list in about four weeks and will have a bunch of associated content with that, including a check-in on how the system’s results have been to that point. That will be a time to draw some slightly firmer conclusions, I think.
There are two ways I can interpret this question, and I’m not sure exactly how well-equipped I am to answer either, but I’ll give them both a go with what I’ve got. If you mean this as “How do the A’s minor league pitchers, as a collective of talent, stack up against the other 29 organizations?” then…probably somewhat below average, though not terrible. I’m not going to try to get super-specific about this relative to other orgs because I just don’t have an intimate-enough knowledge base about them to make a perfect comparison, but I’ll make three points that inform my estimate:
Right now, the A’s don’t have a lot of pitchers that have a clear path to pitching near the front of a big league rotation. There’s Luis Morales, who is himself pretty unproven, and then who? Royber Salinas? More on Salinas a bit further down the Q&A, but you’ve gotta project pretty heavily on several of his attributes to see him as like a 4+ WAR starter. All the other guys who get thrown around as top 10 arms in the system similarly don’t project to bigtime rotation impact unless a number of things really go right. Maybe Steven Echavarria, but he’s 18 and has made three pro starts, so him being an impact guy is obviously a long way off.
That said, things are in a much better spot than they were in, say, 2021–the last time the A’s system was said to be bottom-5 overall, where some people have it now–in terms of depth. Like, let’s take Stockton as an example. Even setting aside the fact that three of their ten Opening Day starting pitchers (they use a tandem system, for those unfamiliar) are on the IL, of the nine they have now: I’d offhand say the top six (as prospects) in order are Echavarria, Zhuang, Finley, Jean, De La Rosa, and Dicochea. Yunior Tur–who sits 93-94 with life and extension, shows a solid changeup, and has some feel for pitching–doesn’t make that list. A guy with that skillset would’ve been one of the top three pitching prospects on the 2021 Ports, at least among guys who spent the majority of the season in Stockton. The other two guys I didn’t mention–Ryan Brown and Tzu-Chen Sha–would be among the better pitching prospects on the 2021 Ports as well. And you could say the same thing about Lansing's rotation relative to the 2021 edition, to say nothing of the stacked Midland rotation (the 2021 RockHounds rotation was almost exclusively minor league vets) and the overall upper-minors relief depth. The competitive arm strength and stuff of A’s pitching prospects, organizationally from top to bottom, is in far better shape than it was three years ago, and it hasn’t changed a whole lot from when the system’s reputation was at its (recent) peak in early 2022...if anything, I'm happier with it now than I was then.
Part of the reason things are probably in below-average shape is the A’s drafting philosophy, which almost never takes pitchers in very high rounds. The last eight A’s top-two-round picks have all been position players, and most top international prospects in general are position players (the A’s managed to maneuver to get Morales, at least, who was a rare exception because of his Cuban background and thus slightly older age than typical top international prospects). So to the extent it’s below average, it’s largely that drafting plus the graduation of a lot of young guys off of prospect lists, which leads me to the second possible interpretation of the question…
..which is “How good is the way that the A’s develop pitchers?” I’m in even less of a good position to answer this, in some respects. After all, I track A’s pitchers closely enough that I’m keenly aware of when anyone changes anything, but I’m far less likely to be able to observe pitching prospects in other systems really develop. Nevertheless, I can at least offer the feelings I do have on this, again via three points:
Pitching coordinator Gil Patterson has been doing this a long time, and he has nothing but a sterling reputation in the industry. Nobody I’ve ever talked to about him has had anything negative to say about him or his ability to do his job. Of course, as a guy who’s been around for decades in a rapidly-changing industry, particularly in an organization that (because of ownership) has been slow to adapt to the technological climate of player development, he’ll always face accusations of the game having passed him by anytime there’s a downturn in his pitchers’ fortunes, but as a leader, I don’t think you could ask for a guy with better credentials.
Personally, I’m not crazy about a lot of the org-wide philosophy about pitching development, particularly when it comes to the fact that almost no pitchers in the system below Triple-A throw non-fastballs as their primary pitch. I also have some skepticism about Grady Fuson’s tandeming initiative at the A-ball levels. Nevertheless, though I’m not in love with either organizational tendency, I’m also not really hostile to them either. There are a lot of folks out there who argue pitching development should be about optimizing your arsenal from the start, and I lean that way, but I see the argument for the start-by-figuring-out-the-fastball approach too, and if they can make it work, great. The tandeming has some obvious pluses and minuses–it feels to me like it might be a little more trouble than it’s worth, but I’m keeping an open mind about it and we’ll see how everything’s worked out at the end of the season. Might be a good subject for an end-of-season article.
What I am really pleased about, though, is the aggressiveness to which Patterson and his dev team go about trying to improve their pitchers. That’s really ramped up in 2023-24 compared to 2021-22, to my eyes. I’m seeing a lot more adjustments to arm actions and a lot more new pitches/arsenal adjustments, and many of them have been transformative. Back when I did some stuff for Melissa Lockard at the old OaklandClubhouse site now some fifteen years ago (gaaah, time!), Melissa often mentioned how Patterson was renowned for teaching so many guys the cutter, yet when I started watching all this A’s system video three years ago, there were very few guys in the A’s system who threw that pitch. Now, lo and behold, like a dozen pitchers have added cutters over the last year, the majority of which have really proven to be important pitches in their arsenals.
So on that front, all told, I’m generally happy with Patterson’s work running pitching development in the A’s system. I don’t always love the game-to-game approach of how the A’s have guys develop as pitchers, but generally speaking, they do end up figuring out what each guy needs and actively work to solve both arsenal and command problems. Not every pitcher works out, of course, but I can only think of two in recent years–Reid Birlingmair and Charles Hall–where I was really dismayed at the adjustments the A’s made.along the way in their development. There are far more where the adjustments were productive. How that compares to the other 29 organizations, I don’t know, but that doesn’t feel like a track record I can be upset about. If the consistency in drafting and the international work can continue, and the org continues to draft more pitchers highly like they did in 2023, it wouldn’t surprise me if the pitching group becomes a lot more well-regarded again.
This is a great question, albeit one for which the answer has to come with a lot of haziness around it since we don’t know what the offers were, who else the A’s could’ve gotten from their eventual trading partners, and–I suppose it's possible to know this part, but I’ve never thoroughly investigated it–exactly how all the players they got looked in their previous organizations.
Off the top, I don’t know that I see a massive difference in the thinking behind the moves. I’ve talked about Forst & co.’s prospect trading preferences (which date well back into the Beane era) at length before. They like getting proven upper-minors guys who are theoretically one tweak away from big league success, and if they’re gonna get a lower-minors guy or two thrown in there, they want potential fast movers. It’s a strategy that served them well in multiple retools in the past, but the A’s probably had an analytics advantage over many other orgs in those times, whereas now they likely don’t. And the evals of upper-minors guys like Ruiz, Pache, and the non-Hoglund Chapman-trade guys are going to be a lot more analytically heavy than the evals of guys like Estes and Salinas.
Though Chapman was the least valuable player of the three from a trade perspective, I’ve always been least happy with that trade because it’s most emblematic of the faults of that approach. And like you said, it’s not even a rank-the-returns thing because in theory Hoglund could still make as much of a contribution with the A’s as Chapman did with Toronto–7-8 WAR doesn’t feel likely, but there’s a path to it. He could be basically a righty JP Sears, who’s got 4 bWAR for his A’s tenure already. But the other three guys were out of the org in under two years from the trade, because if you can’t make that one tweak to get them big-league success (Smith) or it turns out they need more than one (Logue), you’re almost immediately out of time.
The same thing is true with Pache of course, and more visibly at that, but other than him, the Olson return is least subject to that issue, so it’s the one I’m generally least critical of. When Langeliers, Cusick, and Estes arrived in the A’s org, only Shea had to be added to the 40-man by the end of that season, and it was clear he was on a big-league track by then anyway. With all three guys, you could see the upside there–Atlanta definitely sold high on all three, but it wasn’t one of these things where the only paths to their success were to unlock some secret upside that was hard to see previously (e.g., Canha, Blackburn, Bassitt). The ceilings were there, and the A’s had time to help each reach them. It’s obviously been a little touch-and-go with all three in the intervening years, but positive signs remain on all three even now.
Murphy is sort of in the middle, in that Ruiz/Muller/Tarnok could run up against the out-of-time issue again like Smith/Logue/Snead did, but because Murphy was a bigger trade asset than Chapman, naturally the trio of near-ready guys who came back for him felt far more likely to hold onto 26–to say nothing of 40–man spots for awhile and thus be able to survive developmental bumps in the road and potentially find their way to that sort of Bassitt/Semien/Canha/Blackburn late-twenties surge even if things didn’t immediately click. They certainly didn’t, unfortunately, which combines with the other moves to really cast doubt on the org’s ability to outthink others where these analytically-heavy evals are concerned (a ton of discussion happened around this with respect to Ruiz, as many know). But we’ve started to see some progress with Muller and Ruiz this year–we’ll see about Tarnok, since he’s been hurt so much–that at least lends some support to the notion that the A’s can implement good fixes at the big league level if they have some time (along with other guys like Rooker and Erceg helping reinforce that possibility). But who’s the one guy in that trade (other than Murphy himself) who’s seen his value increase since the deal? It’s the guy who wasn’t near-ready at the time of the trade: Salinas.
Salinas’ reputation has gone up, as have Estes’ and Darell Hernaiz’s. The A’s track record with the younger, lower-minors guys isn’t perfect either–Euribiel Ángeles’ development can best be categorized as “fitful,” Hoglund and Cusick have been hurt a lot, and Cooper Bowman has been about as advertised but hasn’t broken out or anything. But overall, it’s a decent recent track record the A’s have when it comes to acquiring these further-off guys, which is why the focus on upper-minors players doesn’t seem like it’s been playing to the org’s evaluative strengths at present. That's the thing–it's not like getting near-ready players is an inherently flawed idea, but you've gotta be able to execute it, and there's not a lot of recent history of the A's nailing that execution, whereas they do fine in getting Hernaiz or finding Joelvis Del Rosario in the minor league Rule 5. Of course, it worked before, and even the 2022-23 group of trades is a fairly small sample of players, all told. It does also feel like–confronted with real sustained failure for the first time–the front office is learning from their mistakes and making some adjustments, so the next near-ready return might have some small but meaningful positive differences from these past ones. But that’s generally where my thinking is about those trades specifically and how they fit in with the overall organizational picture.
Next, I got some questions about the trio of pitchers that recently got moved from Midland upwards...
…so let’s talk about them now. I’ll try to hit all of the relevant points in the above questions as I go along.
The question about whether we’ll see any of these guys in Oakland has already aged a bit, what with Basso set to make his big league debut. Granted, I think that’s a function of scheduling–Hogan Harris pitched Sunday, and Osvaldo Bido presumably still needs a couple extra days to get over his blister issue–more than it is a reflection of Basso’s readiness, particularly given how his Triple-A debut went last week.
Let’s start by talking about Basso a bit, particularly to set the stage for his debut. I’ve been a fan of the guy since early in the 2021 season, before I even came back to baseball writing and started this site. I watched some of his outings in 2021 and had the impression a lot of people have now: “Wow, this dude has four pitches and a super-clean delivery with clear feel to pitch. What a steal in the 16th round. What’s stopping him from being a back-of-the-rotation starter?”
The scouting report remains basically the same now as it was then, and he’s had nothing but success since, albeit interrupted for almost two full years by Tommy John. The thing that’s interesting to me about his prospect stock, as someone who’s been on him for three years, is I feel like I’m now lower than most on Basso if anything, particularly in terms of how he would fare in the big leagues if he were to get ten turns in the rotation right now.
The reason for that is that Brady Basso has precious little experience as anything like a normal starting pitcher. He didn’t start in college, was just getting stretched out in a tandem role in 2021 when his UCL gave out, and he was handled extremely cautiously coming back last year. Therefore, between college and his pro career, Basso has gone five or more innings a grand total of six times.
That matters, because as solid as his command and feel for pitching are, Basso is only just now beginning to diversify from the strategy that generally got him through three-inning outings successfully in 2021 and 2023, which involved throwing a ton of 91-94 mph carrying fastballs and 87-89 mph cutters belt-high on or off the gloveside black, then occasionally changing eye levels with his big mid-70s curve. All three are average big league pitches and he hits his spots with them, but none of them are true scary bat-missers, which is why he’s really got to have a more diversified location strategy if he’s going to survive facing the top half of a big league batting order three times. Basso has started to throw more changeups this year after you’d see maybe five a month from him in 2023–he’s actually thrown it more than the curve his last two outings–and that pitch might unlock more east-west possibilities to righties as time goes on, but the pitch and its deployment are very much in a developmental stage at this point.
Could his existing gloveside-heavy strategy work in the big leagues anyway? Maybe, but I’m not confident in that. Could he adapt very quickly on the fly if it doesn’t? Also maybe. I think the more likely scenario is he needs another dozen starts or so in the upper minors, now that he’s finally able to go 5-6 innings if he’s efficient, to continue figuring out the changeup and the third-time-through-the-order nuances. All of which is to say that I’m somewhat bearish on any early success from Basso, but you also shouldn’t write him off if he initially struggles because he’s way earlier in that particular learning process than most pitchers his age are.
As for Ginn and Salinas…I actually think Ginn is the most big-league-ready of this trio–he might also have been in consideration to debut this week, but he’s not on full rest today either. I do think even he could use more seasoning, though.
It’s interesting you bring up Ginn’s velocity, because I watched his final two Double-A starts in Amarillo the week prior, and he threw a lot harder on the Trackman there than he did in Round Rock. So did Salinas and (to a lesser extent) Basso, though Salinas’ Round Rock start was a day game so I’ll largely discount the lower velo there. Makes me wonder if the Trackman in Round Rock is a touch slow or Amarillo is a touch high or something, so I’ll be monitoring that as more data come in. Could also be a travel thing for those guys. I had Ginn at an average fastball velocity of 93.76 mph in what I’ve tracked, which is well above the ~92 he had Saturday. Salinas I have at 93.67 and Basso 92.94.
Ginn sitting 92-95 is very different than 90-93, of course, but he was obviously very effective Saturday even at the lower velo. He’s still throwing a lot of strikes and getting a ton of grounders, and his slider has been very effective this year. The sinker also has missed more bats–both this year and historically–than most sinkers, so it’s not solely a weak-contact pitch (usually around 10% SwStr). For me, the bigger question is that he’s barely thrown his changeup this season, usually just 1-4 times per game, leaving him basically just a two-pitch guy. Lefties haven’t hit him particularly hard even though sinker-slider is traditionally a big-platoon-split repertoire, though he has just an 8/6 K/BB against them this year (30/6 vs. righties).
Brady Singer’s pitch usages are almost exactly the same as Ginn’s, so he feels like, if not a pure ceiling comp, a reasonably-good-outcome comp for Ginn, particularly in the near term. The changeup has flashed in the past, and he’s occasionally wrinkled in a cutter here and there over the years, and he (at least before Saturday) was throwing harder than Singer this year, so there are some further possibilities that could materialize beyond that, but let’s see him just stay on the field and hold his velocity and command for a few months first.
Ginn’s groundball-heavy approach should make him a little more immune to some of the Vegas/PCL challenges than other guys, and though he doesn’t quite have Basso’s command and has lost a lot of developmental time to injury himself, he does a better job than you might think changing eye levels with his limited repertoire and keeping guys off balance. At least, that’s been true in 2024 and in fleeting moments late in 2022, which are the only times he’s really looked “right” in the A’s organization–all other outings seemed to be right before or after getting injured, so I tend to discount them when thinking about Ginn’s identity on the mound. With all that in mind, he’s the pitcher of the three most poised for success in Vegas in May, anyway, which probably would put him first in line for an Oakland look if it weren’t for the fact that he’s the only one of the trio not on the 40-man. I think that if he stays healthy, the odds Ginn pitches in the bigs this year are…69%.
Salinas is the best prospect of the three because he has the most clear weapons to play with. He’s also the youngest and has the best health track record, not that that’s saying much. Salinas’ slider is better than Ginn’s and just looked overwhelming in Midland, and his curve–which he doesn’t use enough–is strong as well.
The fastball shape is an interesting point. I tend to work backward from SwStr% on fastball shape, because it’s not one-size-fits-all. If the pitch is missing bats, the shape is playing–not that we shouldn’t keep the shape in mind too, but especially when talking about near-ready guys like this, I prefer to have the results squarely front-of-mind.
Now, had you asked me prior to that AAA start what Salinas’ fastball shape was, I don’t think I would’ve said cut/sink. I would’ve said “kinda nondescript with some carry,” at least in terms of what his main fastball was. I hadn’t gotten a great look at it this year–Amarillo’s broadcast is great because it has the Trackman velo (to two decimal places!!!) and Chris Caray’s brother Stefan on the call, but its new offset-toward-1B-side camera angle does not give one a great look at fastball shape–I did manage to parse out that he was now throwing two fastballs and one of them cut, but I didn’t really get a good look at the vertical action. It wasn't pronounced enough in the home start I watched earlier in the season for me to take huge note of it either.
The interesting thing, then, is that in the two starts I’ve charted this year, Salinas has just a 5.56% SwStr% across the fastballs, whereas last year, when I had it as one four-seam fastball with some carry, it was 17.22% in what I watched. That reinforces the idea that this movement is new to 2024 and not working very well, at least for now. It does feel like it’s setting up the slider well, though, because the swings guys take against that are significantly more uncomfortable than last year (and the SwStr% of that pitch, in admittedly not huge sample sizes either year, has nearly doubled), so maybe that’s an okay tradeoff? If it proves not to be, perhaps the A’s can restore the old version, as they did with Ryan Cusick as 2023 progressed.
Salinas still has reasonable upside even if the fastball doesn’t miss a ton of bats–though it better be 93-95 in that case, not the 91-93 it was last Tuesday–because the slider is so good he could probably take a Jack Flaherty sort of approach and throw a ton of breaking stuff and still get through a lineup three times. He rarely has thrown his changeup in the A’s organization because he has the curve to lefties, but that’s got upside as well, so he could conceivably hide the fastball with those three offspeeds if he needs to.
The question with Salinas, beyond the fastball shape now, is just his inning-to-inning consistency. Last year, he had enough outings where he would give up a crooked number in the first inning and then throw a shutout into the sixth that you couldn’t dismiss it as a fluke. This year, he’s been better in opening frames but has still tended to run into the one big inning, and part of that is that the posture in his delivery is unusual and he can get off balance going down the mound, particularly out of the stretch. It’s good that he usually is able to limit the issues to a single inning in a game, but I’m not sure he’s going to be able to be consistent enough to stick as a starter with his current delivery, especially if the fastball shape gives him a diminished margin for error relative to 2023. He’s definitely been more consistent in 2024 than 2023, though, and he’s in better physical shape this year, which lends some hope he can repeat the motion throughout full outings better than he previously could.
Because he’s got more upside, Salinas is the pitcher of the trio here who is more feasibly one little adjustment away–maybe the fastball shape, maybe mechanical–from firmly being a major league starting pitcher, but he also might be the least suited to take a big league mound this week. I’m relatively optimistic that a full season of health and upper-minors reps can get him more or less ready for the big leagues by the end of the season/Opening Day 2025. Odds he pitches in the majors if he stays healthy…58%.
I think I covered all the relevant angles in these questions there. Let’s turn to the other player who I got multiple questions about. Of course I did!
Do I have concerns about the exit velocity? Sure I have concerns about the exit velocity. It’s a razor’s edge. Did you know that Nick Allen’s max exit velocity last year was 3.1 mph harder than Arraez’s? I didn’t, but I just looked it up. After all, Allen’s Vegas statline last year was pretty Arraezian, but even with his vastly superior defense, he’s been the vastly inferior big league player. Why? Because even though Allen’s max was higher, his average exit velocity was 3.5 mph lower. We can all opine one way or the other all we want about whether the EV of a player like this is gonna be an issue, and ultimately there’s a chance it’s going to be Allen’s 84.8 (tough to profile, but possible in the right circumstance) and a chance it’s gonna be Arraez’s 88.3 (likely All-Star level given the other pluses). Anyone proclaiming certainty one way or the other is foolish. Prospects, even can’t-miss ones, are not certainties, unfortunately.
I do think Jacob Wilson has special hand-eye coordination that should continue to enable very low strikeout rates. I also think his defense may well rival Allen’s at shortstop and that he could be a Gold Glove candidate there–the national evals you tend to see that paint him as a capable but unspectacular defender do not match with what I’ve observed–and that he’s a virtual lock to be an above-average defensive shortstop for years to come. Like you said, his speed is good as well. Overall, he just has tremendous feel for the game–the way he makes very difficult acrobatic defensive plays look routine is incredibly rare for a player new to pro ball. He doesn’t have to push all that far above Allen’s exit velocity to be a near-guaranteed starter, and he’ll be a star if he’s getting into that 88-89 mph area.
There are functionally two questions at hand when it comes to the exit velocity: his physique and his approach. He was extremely skinny to the point of looking somewhat frail when he was drafted. The A’s say he hit the weight room hard in the offseason and put on 10 pounds of muscle, and I think he could stand to double that, easily. If he can, that’ll help. I don’t think he’s ever going to be a big homer guy even if he hits the ball 90 mph on average because he’s such a groundball-style slasher, but make no mistake: this isn’t some Luis Castillo-style 2000s-era slapper up there. Wilson swings very hard and has real bat speed. It’s just that a lot of his hits are these weird choppers that forcefully bounce over infielders’ heads, which…hey, it works. For now, at least.
Where the Arraez comparison loses steam somewhat is on the approach front. Look, contact hitters don’t walk much–when you’re so good at putting the ball in play, one swing in a plate appearance usually ends the chance of a walk. Fair enough. But Arraez came up as a fairly discerning hitter and walked nearly 10% of the time as a rookie even with all that ability to quickly end plate appearances in one swing. Wilson’s walk rate this year is under 3%. I had him at a 33.85% chase rate in Midland in what I watched. That’s higher than you’d like (though not extreme–Colby Thomas and Daniel Susac are over 40%), but you try telling a guy hitting .450 he shouldn’t swing at those pitches. His contact rate was 89% in spite of it. The thing is, he’s just so good at getting bat to ball that it’s kind of hard for me to diagnose the chasing–is it just overaggressiveness or does he actually have a pitch recognition issue or something?
I had Wilson’s estimated average EV at 84.5 mph in Lansing last year and 85.29 in Midland this year. Thus far in Vegas, it’s 83.74 on Statcast. That’s very low by MLB standards, though there are very significant differences in average EV between minor league levels and Wilson’s profile is both in line with typical A-ball hitters (which are his age group!) and already above the 81-82 mph metrics that predraft reports said were typical of him in college (maybe a testament to the increased muscle). So it’s fair to cut him quite a bit of slack, especially when considering how quickly he’s blazed through the minors. But that’s where the selectivity really comes in. Arraez has the average EV he does because of the legendary consistency he can hit the ball ~90 mph. Wilson seems to have more of a mix of 100-mph ropes and little topspinning rollers and flares. Some of those fall in for hits–a 65-mph batted ball is more likely to go for a hit than an 85-mph one!–but it’s definitely not as comfortable a mix of contact to bet on to translate to the big league level in the short term as the Arraez one.
If we’re going to compare Wilson to famous mavens of contact, there’s something that actually feels a little more Ichiro-y about him than Arraez, in that Wilson’s so idiosyncratic in the box and brings such a quirky bat-control authority to slashing. The brand of excitement he has is more borne of that uniqueness (and the hand-eye, of course) than Arraez-style consistency and mechanical directness. Obviously I’m not saying Ichiro is a skillset comp, it’s just more a stylistic reflection of Wilson as a hitter, minus Ichiro’s run-to-first-while-swinging thing, since Wilson hits righthanded.
Thus, betting on Wilson to make it big is either a bet that he muscles up, shrinks his hitting zone, or has the generational bat control to turn a ton of low-EV contact into base hits. Steven Kwan has an average EV of 84.4 this year and is hitting .353, so that last possibility isn’t just theoretical. Wilson’s got a chance at all three possibilities, and he probably only needs one to be a solid big league contributor; for that reason, he’s a clear top 100 prospect. Until one of those three paths is definitively taken, though, the questions about Wilson will still be fair ones.
Well, because of Wilson’s presence, Muncy likely isn’t going to be an everyday shortstop for the A’s unless Wilson goes 0-for-3 on those above possibilities. If it weren’t for Wilson (though Hernaiz would be tough to fight off too), there’s no reason Muncy couldn’t play there. You’re starting to see national evals on him coalesce that he’ll be average or better defensively at short in time and that’s been my opinion for a while. He’s not in Wilson’s caliber defensively, though.
Muncy’s got a plus arm and pretty quick reflexes, and it’s not like he’s a huge speedster, so I think third base would maximize his defensive skillset more than second, though he could clearly be plenty good at either. If he ends up being the utility guy because Gelof is at second, Wilson at short, and Hernaiz or Brett Harris proves to be a worthy everyday third baseman–to say nothing of Logan Davidson, Max Schuemann, etc.–that would be a heck of a potential two-way infield. The organization’s infield depth behind those guys is starting to get thin at lower levels, but fitting that talent together is a good problem to have.
I’d give him the inside track on the 3B job Opening Day 2026, though a lot can happen between now and then for all involved.
Well, there’s no question Santos has better stuff than all of them, and better stuff than any reliever in the A’s organization other than Erceg and Miller at this point–maybe even above Erceg, to be honest. The only question is the strike-throwing, as it always has been. Santos has the sort of command where he pitches at 40-grade two out of three outings–more than enough given the stuff–but then 20-grade the other one. He obviously survives doing that in Midland; the question is whether the ratio gets worse at higher levels. For pitchers like this, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. I think he’ll get it together enough at some point by the end of 2025 to get a big league look, but it’s hard to predict exactly when.
Baum is pretty similar to Jackson in a lot of ways, in that so much of his success comes from the over-the-top deception, and the command comes and goes on him. It seemed like he got out of sorts in the Vegas environment and his velocity was down a bit, though it ticked back up in his final outing there and I thought that might be something to build on. He pitched a lot off his breaking stuff in Vegas, which struck me as strange, given that that’s always been the weakest part of the arsenal, and it didn’t seem to help him find the zone. He’s gotta find consistency and has slipped down the relief depth chart a bit for me–can only afford so many missteps at 26–but he’s bounced back from far worse before, of course. Still, I think he’s clearly behind Holman, Santos, and Emanuels in terms of the A’s-developed relievers, and there’s also guys like Michel Otañez who could factor in. When he’s on, he’s right there with all of them, but he’s got to fight his way through all of these guys at this point. The next couple months are going to be big for him.
Holman has a more straightforward path because he’s not a guy who’s really ever struggled with command. Vegas seems pretty imminent, maybe June, and then if that goes well (hold your breath!), he could get innings in Oakland in the July-August timeframe. If he succeeds in Vegas but doesn’t get to Oakland, he’s gonna be a tough 40-man call.
Will any of them get a look before Jackson or Jiménez get new chances? Maybe? I’m not sure how easy it’ll be for Jackson to get back, period, because of the presence of guys like Otañez and Emanuels in Vegas. Jiménez feels more likely to get another look before the Midland guys are in position to get big league chances unless he’s a DFA victim before then, but that’ll depend on him staying consistent in Vegas, which is never a given.
I’m a big believer in Bolte. For me, it’s more that he is very high in my rankings but there remains considerable hit-tool risk until he proves otherwise, so it’s less about getting up there and more about proving he should stay up there, as it’s been with Denzel Clarke the past couple years. We’re talking about a premium athlete with huge raw power (I cannot tell you how excited I am to see him take BP in Lansing next month, assuming he’s still there when I go) who plays a good center, hustles his ass off on the bases, and has made the best swing decisions on the Lugnuts at just age 20. The swing path is pretty good and he’s got bat speed to spare. That is so much to like.
What remains–the reason he still strikes out a lot–is timing. That was the issue in Stockton last year and it remains the issue in Lansing. Bolte’s balanced in the box; he just seems to take a while to make up his mind to swing or not to swing and just comes across as still figuring out the mental process a bit. As good as the decisions are, then, the impact of that decision quality isn’t what you’d like, yet. In both 2023 and 2024, though, he’s improved throughout the year. He was running like a 56% Z-Con through the first few weeks in the Lansing cold and has brought that up to about 69% now–still a long way to go, but that means he’s been hovering in the mid-70s recently, and that’s not far off from where he can really be impactful (and he’s been effective in a triple-slash sense at both A-ball levels even with the swing-and-miss). This is a lot like where Lawrence Butler’s profile was in 2021, and Bolte should have more defensive/baserunning value than Butler. The other thing to note is that his groundball rate has stayed over 50%, though it’s at least not approaching 60% anymore like it was in Stockton (note the pull rate going way up this year, too, a result of the timing beginning to come around: he’s no longer deciding to swing so late that all his contact goes screaming between first and second base). You’d like to see that down closer to 40 given Bolte’s power, not that some grounders mixed in can’t be reasonable since he’s such a terror running down the first base line.
So, yeah, a lot to like here, and I can’t emphasize enough how good the swing decisions are. The notion that Bolte is some sort of high-volume chaser has been patently untrue from the moment he got to Stockton. Doesn’t mean there isn’t risk, because like Wilson’s exit velocity, just because there are reasons for optimism doesn’t mean positive developments aren’t necessary for the player to come anywhere near his upside.
But I’d say this: if I played keeper-league fantasy baseball (which I don’t), Bolte would be the well-known A’s prospect I’d most want to buy stock in relative to the consensus. The next year and a half are going to be key to him proving that right.
Clarke and Bolte have enormous ceilings if everything clicks. Clarke probably has the higher 95th percentile outcome, but Bolte might have the higher 90th percentile outcome, if that makes sense. Thomas has a bit more of a floor. Right now, Lasko’s got a lot to prove, so he’s a long way behind the other three. Definitely has some skill, but absolutely has to prove he can hit stuff in the upper half of the zone. He’s made a bit of an adjustment that’s helped some, but there’s more work to be done there.
I’ll have a lot more on Simpson later this week on here, so I’ll save the hard-hitting analysis for that. But to focus on the timetable aspect: He got hurt over the weekend but seems to have avoided the IL and should be back this week as a result. There’s definitely still stuff for Simpson to work on and I wonder how Midland is gonna go, but I also don’t really think Lansing is testing him enough for him to learn a whole lot more there. That said, you’ve also got to consider the roster management here. Simpson is in High-A in his first full season and isn’t Rule 5 eligible until after 2026, so there’s not a particular need to rush him.
I’d say midseason-ish to Midland feels right. It’ll depend as much on the logistics around Brennan Milone and/or Shane McGuire moving to Vegas as it might about Simpson–could be this week, could be mid-July, or anywhere in between. From there, it’ll really depend on the maintenance of the walk rate and the ability to clear fences…more on that in the upcoming longform.
I’m not losing sleep over it. Ross Stripling has a 3.90 xERA and a 4.08 FIP. FanGraphs says he’s been worth half a win above replacement already. When you consider what a mess the A’s pitching staff was last year, you can’t blame David Forst for trying to address it. Stripling is certainly not anyone’s idea of an exciting pitcher and does already feel a bit redundant given how much better the pitching staff is, but that’s a happy situation to be in–and given the recent injury stack, he may yet prove more valuable to the A’s than he’s been thus far. A guy like that who can take the ball every fifth day, throw strikes, and get you through five innings can be really helpful as injuries mount.
I just spent the week watching video of Cox’s Low-A team take on Stockton (and I watched a bit of him with Stockton last year as well), so he’s fresh on the mind. He’s a fun sparkplug sort of player who’s indeed excelling as San Jose’s leadoff man, but he turns 23 in August and has a sub-.100 Isolated Power in a hitter-friendly Low-A league. Does he have big-league upside? Sure. Is he likely a starting center fielder in the bigs? I don’t think so–he profiles as a bench type for me as of now. If he’s the Giants’ fourth outfielder for a few years late in the decade, fine, but the A’s have plenty of other options to fill that role internally and will have many future chances to address it as well.
That’s not to say I particularly liked the move at the time or particularly like it now. I think how you evaluate the move really depends on what you want the A’s to be doing. We’re talking about a front office that has accused by many people of fielding deliberately bad teams for the last few years–in my opinion, an oversimplification at best, a gross misrepresentation at worst.* If you want to ensure that, even amidst a rebuild, the major league team remains a presentable one, then this is exactly the sort of move you should like–here’s a competent back-of-the-rotation starter for a prospect who isn’t likely to make you deeply regret the trade unless he hits like his 90th percentile outcome. After all, many 6th-round college guys will get off to big professional starts like this, but only about three per year will prove to have 3+ WAR careers, historically.
*Here I’m speaking strictly In terms of what Forst and the baseball ops people were trying to do. Fisher obviously did not want them spending much at all (arb/FA, etc.), plus the way the org historically tends to recoup value is to trade players rather than letting them walk, since he won’t extend guys. So ownership/the business side obviously did not fund a competitive team, and the strategy that the baseball ops folks thus opted for was a rebuild. There wasn’t anything all that unique about the A’s rebuild strategy vs. that of other rebuilding teams once the course was charted that way. Now, the ticket prices and all the business stuff? Very likely a different story.
On the other hand, if you prefer a “no half measures” approach to rebuilding and want every move made in the interest of the future–an attitude that would probably be more common in the A’s fanbase right now if it wasn’t for the move, I’d guess–then yeah, you’d rather have Cox. I tend to lean this direction personally, but in a case like this where neither player is some sort of massive franchise-changer, I’d defer to what the fans in the Bay Area want for the last (for now, we can hope) season in Oakland. If it’s better for the community to have that extra win in there courtesy of Stripling, I’m all for it. If it doesn’t matter, I’d probably rather have Cox given where the organization is in its build, but it's not as though I spent the series watching him being furious about the trade, effective as he was on both sides of the ball.
I think I’ve covered Wilson, Salinas, and Basso in depth above. As for the other guys…
With the hitters, two words apply to several of them: “swing decisions.” Soderstrom seems to have made real progress on this front this year, so if that holds, he’ll never go back to the minors unless he’s on a rehab assignment. Don’t forget that Hernaiz’s xwOBA in Oakland (.299) was almost 100 points over his wOBA, so there seemed to be progress there too. He could also stand to raise his launch angle a bit–his time in Oakland featured a grounder/liner ratio that got a bit too high and thus prevented him from amassing extra-base hits. I believe he’ll get it together. Colby Thomas, on the other hand, swings at seemingly everything and is prone to chasing breaking pitches in the other batter’s box. He certainly doesn’t get cheated up there, and he has very good in-zone plate coverage that allows him to still make a lot of hard contact in Midland, but it’s hard to see how running a chase rate north of 40% is going to optimize his skillset in the bigs. He’s been a bit better in that department before, and I tend to ascribe it to more of a mindset thing than not recognizing pitches, but he’s got to prove that more emphatically.
Clarke, on the other hand, makes great swing decisions but struggles to cover his whole big strike zone with his swing. He has some of the timing issues à la Bolte, because he’s struggled to shift his weight and coordinate his long arms in the box, combined with an awkward way of loading his hands that leaves him very vulnerable to high fastballs. These are career-long issues, but they’ve really been exacerbated in 2024 because of rust and coming off shoulder surgery, so I think he’ll get back in his previous form, but there are still going to be further steps he needs to take once he does. I believe in his athleticism and work ethic, so I have some optimism, but he definitely has stuff to prove.
With Muncy, I think it’s more about consistency and then finding the superlative. He’s had times in his career where his contact rate has been good and others where it’s been awful. Same with his chase rate. Same with his power production. It seems like the consistency has come along since last June, so now it’s about maintaining that. Statistically, the things that show up as points of concern in the Vegas data are the in-zone swing-and-miss and the exit velo against offspeeds, but given Muncy’s age relative to that level, I think he’ll make inroads there. Beyond that, it then just becomes about what identity he’s working toward. Is he a sub-20% K% guy? Is he a 20-homer guy? All of a sudden he’s facing questions about his power this year; he hit 19 bombs as a teenager in 2022 and definitely has plenty of raw juice in there, so can he recapture that? Or would recapturing that balloon the swing-and-miss again? The guy has a renowned work ethic and has come a long way in the past year, so I’d bet on him to figure something out productively.
Lawrence Butler is another massive-gulf-between-xwOBA-and-wOBA guy, so I’m not really worried about him. It’s interesting with the new bat-tracking data that he’s got the fastest swing of anyone who’s worn the green and gold this year without it being all that long of a swing. He’s swung and missed a bit too much at high heat but it’s nothing alarming. He’s definitely got more to prove in that what’s-the-superlative sort of way if he’s going to be more than a complementary player, but he’s still just 23 and has come such a long way in his career that I certainly have optimism he’ll get his wOBA to where his xwOBA is.
As for the pitchers…well, Waldichuk has to go through a long rehab now. Once he returns, he’s just got to be a bit more consistent command-wise…half a grade there would go a long way. I’d love to see more changeups from him. Medina is in that Joe Boyle camp of, now having flashed the ability to be a consistent strike-thrower, now he’s got to go from flashes to that being the norm. He’s got to nail down his repertoire, too–he came up as a fastball/curve/change guy, but the sinker and slider the A’s added midseason last year proved to be his two best pitches. What’s the right repertoire usage for him going forward?
Tarnok we’re in wait-and-see mode on, but he’s also got command questions that stem from how his arm action works, much like the sort of stuff I talked about with respect to Will Johnston last week. The other thing with him is that the changeup was his money pitch in the Atlanta organization, but the A’s had him throwing more sliders, and I’m not convinced the slider isn’t behind both the change and the curve among his offspeeds. His velo is already back, so that’s not a concern at least. If he’s healthy, in the zone, and employing that changeup, he’ll have a big league role, though it looks like he’s headed to relief work at least for now.
Hoglund’s velo is up relative to last year, plus he’s added more deception in his motion and the slider looks better. He still sees the velo taper off late in games, now that he’s going much deeper than he did in 2023, so his average fastball still ends up below 92 even though he’ll show a lot of 93s early after barely ever touching that radar reading last year. A half a tick–arising from better stamina more than anything else–would go a long way. The other thing is that I thought Hoglund’s changeup was actually better than his vaunted slider in 2023, but it’s demonstrably been the other way around in 2024. He’s got to find that plus changeup again; it doesn’t appear he’s had a whole lot of feel for it this season. Given how few pro reps he’s had, I definitely think there are real possibilities for things to come together, but he has yet to have everything working at once, even as he’s found more effectiveness.
For Holman it’ll be about the precision of his in-zone command, which will obviously be tested in Vegas. He comes right at guys aggressively with the fastball at 94-96, and he can throw his splitter for strikes unlike most guys, but he will throw both in hittable locations a bit more than you’d like. The other issue he’s had in his career has been his breaking ball being too slow and loopy, but he’s tightened it some this year, which gives him a third pitch that he can weaponize. I don’t know that he’s got a massive ceiling, but him finding some measure of bullpen success is more likely than any other reliever in the system doing so.
You both know more about these guys than I do. I’ve never put the time into getting to know the amateur baseball landscape–like how aluminum-bat swings translate to wood, etc.–and without lengthy, careful study of it, I don’t think it’s fair to amateur baseball experts for me to swoop in and act like I know anything. Therefore, my instinct when I’m asked a question like this is to say something like “Yeah, Burns would be interesting, since the A’s haven’t taken a first-round pitcher since A.J. Puk. Need upside in the rotation, would be a nice change,” even though I know drafting for need is a silly notion. I’m just a lot more confident in my assessment of that need than my assessment of those players, at least without taking several hours out to really study each of them.
The thing I think is at least a useful reminder, though, is something I said last Q&A. The A’s are good at making players more skilled, not more talented, relative to other orgs. So all else equal, I’d want the guy who fits in with the org’s developmental strengths. I’d certainly trust them to dial in a workable swing for a long-swing guy more than for them to get a guy from a 10-HR projection to a 20-HR one. Same with finding the right third pitch for a pitcher vs. getting him to add 2 mph. Just in a quick scan of the reports on some of these guys, that means you’d break a tie between, like Caglianone and Seaver King in favor of the former. Maybe Burns over Smith on the mound in that sense? Since the top of the draft is so 1B heavy and then mixes in a bunch of power arms rather than the more Aaron Nola/Andrew Heaney types, it does feel to me like the A’s are likely to get someone who fits well into their organizational strengths–and hey, Wilson didn’t and that’s worked so far anyway. Seems like they’d fill some kind of organizational need, too, though that’s again really more a random musing than a notable aspect to consider.
But that’s about as far as I can help at the moment, unfortunately. I am looking forward to seeing what the A’s can do with their draft class. 4 this year seems to–anecdotally to me at least–feel like a better spot than 6 did last year, where Wilson then became a savings pick that ended up freeing up money for Echavarria and Cole Miller. To bring things full circle back to question 1, a good draft class would go a long way toward cementing some of the gains in overall system-wide performance, particularly after some of the players I’ve discussed throughout this piece graduate.
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions! I hope my answers were illuminating. Let’s do this again next month!
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