Free Agent Signings:
Carlos Santana
Mike Minor
Michael Taylor
Ervin Santana
Top 10 Prospects:
1 Bobby Witt Jr., SS
2 Asa Lacy, LHP
3 Daniel Lynch, LHP
4 Jackson Kowar, RHP
5 Erick Pena, OF
6 Nick Loftin, SS
7 Kyle Isbel, OF
8 Khali Lee, OF
9 Jonathan Bowlan, RHP
10 Carlos Hernedez, RHP [Reply]
Originally Posted by BWillie:
Everyone is enjoying Benintendi, but if you actually look at his stats, he's having the worst year he's ever had per OPS. (I don't count the Covid year or whatever that was, and it was only 39 ABs anyway)
Soler has always been a second half player, so I'm not ready to throw in the towel but he's usually not quite this bad in the 1st half either. Even the year he hit 48 his second half hitting stats were miles better, but he still hit homers throughout the year.
Hopefully it's not a Chris Davis situation, but it's hard to find guys who can hit that many homers, and I'm guessing the fact that he usually turns it on in the 2nd half is going to give him some extra rope. [Reply]
Originally Posted by tk13:
Soler has always been a second half player, so I'm not ready to throw in the towel but he's usually not quite this bad in the 1st half either. Even the year he hit 48 his second half hitting stats were miles better, but he still hit homers throughout the year.
Most Caribbean born players are better when the weather starts to warm. [Reply]
Originally Posted by :
To understand the fiasco of baseball’s 2021 season, which people around the game describe as sullied by rampant cheating to a degree not seen since the steroid era, all you have to do is pick up a ball.
Then try to put it back down.
One ball made its way into an NL dugout last week, where players took turns touching a palm to the sticky material coating it and lifting the baseball, adhered to their hand, into the air. Another one, corralled in a different NL dugout, had clear-enough fingerprints indented in the goo that opponents could mimic the pitcher’s grip. A third one, also in the NL, was so sticky that when an opponent tried to pull the glue off, three inches of seams came off with it.
Over the past two or three years, pitchers’ illegal application to the ball of what they call “sticky stuff”—at first a mixture of sunscreen and rosin, now various forms of glue—has become so pervasive that one recently retired hurler estimates “80 to 90%” of pitchers are using it in some capacity. The sticky stuff helps increase spin on pitches, which in turn increases their movement, making them more difficult to hit. That’s contributed to an offensive crisis that has seen the league-wide batting average plummet to a historically inept .236. (Sports Illustrated spoke with more than two dozen people; most of them requested anonymity to discuss cheating within their own organizations.)
From the dugout, players and coaches shake their heads as they listen to pitchers’ deliveries. “You can hear the friction,” says an American League manager. The recently retired pitcher likens it to the sound of ripping off a Band-Aid. A major league team executive says his players have examined foul balls and found the MLB logo torn straight off the leather.
In many clubhouses across the sport, the training room has become the scene of the crime: Pitchers head in there before games to swipe tongue depressors, which they use to apply their sticky stuff to wherever they choose to hide it, then return afterward to grab rubbing alcohol to dissolve the residue. Even that is not always sufficient. One National League journeyman reliever, who says he uses Pelican Grip Dip, a pine tar/rosin blend typically used by hitters to help grip their bats, has been flagged at airport security.
“They swab my fingers—and this is after showering and everything—and they’re like, ‘Hey, you have explosives on your fingers,’ ” he says. “I’m like, ‘Well, I don’t, but I’m sure that I have something that’s not organic on there.’ ”
The MLB rule book bars pitchers from applying foreign substances to baseballs, but officials have so far done little to curb the practice. (MLB declined to comment but says it is focused on the issue.) Meanwhile, as high-speed cameras and granular data have made it clear that doctoring the ball makes it almost impossible to hit, baseball has found itself dripping with sticky stuff.
“This should be the biggest scandal in sports,” says another major league team executive.
Royals traded right-handers Grant Gambrell and Luis De La Rosa as players to be named later, officially completing the trade.
Originally Posted by :
Gambrell, 23, is the more highly regarded of the two players coming over from the Royals and also much nearer to the big leagues. Kansas City’s third-round pick out of Oregon State in 2019, Gambrell has tossed 22 2/3 innings of 4.37 ERA ball in Class-A Advanced to begin the season, recording a 19.8 percent strikeout rate, 7.6 percent walk rate and 50 percent ground-ball rate in that time. Longenhagen ranked him 21st among K.C. prospects, noting that Gambrell used the off-time in 2020 to get into better shape and reported to camp in 2021 with a “totally different body” and improved velocity.
De La Rosa is even more of a lottery ticket than Valdez. Still just 18 years old, he signed as a 16-year-old in 2018 and carved up the Dominican Summer League a year later, tossing 38 2/3 innings with a 2.33 ERA, a ridiculous 52-to-7 K/BB ratio and a strong 48.9 percent grounder rate. Despite that exceptional short-season debut, De La Rosa isn’t ranked among the Royals’ best prospects, although he could certainly generate some further recognition if he can back up that dominant 2019 showing at a more advanced level.
