Mets » Jordan Humphreys

Don’t Scout the Statline, 4/28/17

Jeffrey Paternostro — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:05:12 +0000

It’s time again for “Don’t Scout the Statline,” a weekly look at how Mets prospects are performing. Think of it as an XL version of the Minor League Update from the mothership. Each week I—or one of our other BP Mets prospect writers—will take a look at notable performances from each affiliate over the past seven days. And remember, the least important information in this piece is the actual numbers, because—for all you kids out there—we don’t scout the statline.

(weekly statistics from games played from 4/20/17-4/26/17, season statistics through 4/26/17)

Las Vegas 51s (AAA)

Amed Rosario, SS

Last week: 11-22, 3 2B, 1 3B, 2 R, 3 RBI, 4 BB, 4 K

Season to date: .397/.444/.466, 4 XBH, 5 SB 10 K / 6 BB

Yes, we are revisiting Amed Rosario just three weeks into this column. This could be viewed as an indictment of the Vegas roster—and I won’t stop you from drawing that conclusion—but I want to revisit how ready Rosario is for the majors. I don’t actually know the answer to this of course, but a few things to consider.

He doesn’t have to be that good to be an upgrade to the current infield situation. I recognize that my Alcides Escobar comparison might not have gone over well with Mets fans for a few different reasons, so let’s try one I made on this week’s pod, Xander Bogaerts (who I have also heard as a Rosario comp). Bogaerts played 144 games as a 21-year old and hit .240/.297/.362. That’s not great. FRAA also had him as a well-below-average defender, which is likely not an issue with Rosario. The only thing worse than scouting the statline is adding up the WARs, but here we go: If Rosario put up the same line with average defense at the 6 (a conservative estimate), he’d essentially be an average regular. He’d also wildly improve the infield defense, allowing Cabrera to slide over to third base where his glove is a better fit. Even if Jose Reyes isn’t quite as bad going forward, it looks unlikely he’s an everyday option anymore.
Sometimes elite prospects are elite for a reason. It’s entirely possible Rosario will just come up and hit the ground running like Francisco Lindor or Carlos Correa or Corey Seager. He’s in that general class as a shortstop prospect and has mashed in the upper minors.
And if he struggles badly in his first pass at the majors, it is not a player development nightmare. Rosario is not a shrinking violet who has never experienced failure on the baseball diamond. If he hits .200 for a month, you send him back down with stuff to work on and you can claw back the Super 2 service time if you are so inclined—and the Mets usually are. It is unlikely to “ruin” him as a prospect.

Binghamton…sigh…Rumble Ponies (AA)

Luis Guillorme, SS/2B

Last week: 5-24, 2B, R, 2 RBI, BB, 6 K

Season to date: .313/.380/.391, 2 SB, 12 K / 6 BB

My third piece of advice for people who are serious about writing about prospects is to understand that you can’t be friends with the prospects. You can root for guys—although that had its own dangers as well—but understand that the time is going to come when you have to write someone up as “not-a-major-leaguer.” That’s the gig. They may read it—they all name search Twitter and ironic like those kind of things—but they are not your audience. Guillorme is a guy that I root for. This is not news at Baseball Prospectus. I didn’t jump on him a year early, or put my eye on the line with an aggressive 101 ranking. I didn’t even really write him up as a major leaguer, though plenty of 3s play in the majors. I talked to him once in Kingsport a few years back when he was translating for the Latin players. His father tends to unironically like my tweets about him. But yeah, I root for him.

I think it might be time to write him up as a 4. I didn’t really expect to be updating my priors much on Guillorme during my last look at him opening weekend. And a two-game look isn’t enough to do a full report, but he did look pretty much like Luis Guillorme. Good approach, opposite field hits, savvy base running, smooth actions in the field. Since then, all he has done is continue to hit, and oh, also stuff like this:

@MiLB @WSDashBaseball Looks familiar for fans of the @RumblePoniesBB and Luis Guillorme pic.twitter.com/iVU3aj5Ufm

— Astro (@Astromets31) April 27, 2017

Why didn’t I write him up as a 4 in Kingsport or Savannah? Well, there wasn’t much physical projection there and his extreme opposite field approach didn’t seem tenable long term. He was a below-average runner, so he wouldn’t be adding that many bunt hits or infield singles to the left of the shortstop against better defenses. He struggled enough with spin that it was tough to see an average hit tool. And there was no game power to speak of to keep major league pitchers from challenging him.

But Guillorme has gotten stronger. He’s kept hitting. He’s added what sure looks like above-average second and third base gloves to his C.V. He’s doing it in Double-A. The question the scout asked me a couple years ago was “could he hit .220?” The question I am asking myself now is “could he hit .260?” It’s getting harder to bet against him. He’s easy to root for, and that almost makes it harder to bump him a grade. You don’t entirely trust your instincts. But you have to write what you see, and he is starting to look more like a major league piece.

St. Lucie Mets (A+)

Jhoan Ureña 3B/1B

Last Week: 5-14, 3 R, 0 RBI, 6 BB, 0 K

Season to date: .343/.470/.507, 2 HR, 4 SB, 16 BB, 13 K

[normal brain]

Jhoan Ureña is putting up good numbers while playing mostly third base in a difficult hitting environment. He’s a sleeper prospect.

[smart brain]

Jhoan Ureña is double-repeating the level and is not particularly young for it anymore. Guys figure out how to hit a league with enough attempts; call it The Carlos Tocci Effect. A month of this doesn’t make a sleeper prospect. The body is high maintenance. And he’s not likely to be a third baseman long term either.

[really smart brain]

It’s an oversimplification to say that Jhoan Ureña is a double repeater. The initial assignment to St. Lucie was insanely aggressive given his age and experience. He lost most of that season to a hamate issue as well, which can linger and sap power. When you saw him in Brooklyn, he looked like he had the raw ability to do this in Advanced-A. If he had the same injury issues with a more normal assignment path, he might have still ended up starting his age-22 season in St. Lucie, and we’d be less skeptical of this performance.

[electric brain]

If you go to St. Lucie to see Jhoan Ureña, you can get the fried fish at Lola’s every day.

Columbia Fireflies (A)

Merandy Gonzalez, RHP

Last Week: 14.2 IP, 8 H, 0 R, 0 ER, 2 BB, 12 K

Season to date: 28.1 IP, 0.00 ERA, 15 H, 3 BB, 23 K, 0 HR

Jordan Humphreys, RHP

Last Week: 6.2 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 2 ER, 2 BB, 12 K

Season to date: 25.1 IP, 1.42 ERA, 15 H, 3 BB, 34 K, 0 HR

Here’s a few more stat lines:

Tyler Pill, 2012: 51.2 IP, 2.61 ERA, 56 H, 8 BB, 54 K, 3 HR

Logan Verrett, 2012: 64.2 IP, 3.06 ERA, 57 H, 9 BB. 67 K, 7 HR

Rainy Lara, 2013: 50.2 IP, 1.42 ERA, 39 H, 6 BB, 51 K, 1 HR

Luis Cessa, 2013: 130 IP, 3.12 ERA, 136 H 19 BB, 124 K, 11 HR

Gabriel Ynoa, 2013: 135.2 IP, 2.72 ERA, 123 H, 16 BB, 106 K, 9 HR

Rob Whalen, 2014: 62.2 IP, 2.01 ERA, 44 H, 19 BB, 53 K, 2 HR

Casey Meisner, 2015: 76 IP, 2.13 ERA, 59 H, 19 BB, 66 K, 6 HR

Granted, all of those lines were posted pitching home games in Historic Grayson Stadium, which was one of the most extreme pitcher’s park in organized baseball. Early returns suggest Spirit Communications Park only slightly favors the moundsmen. But the larger point here is all kinds of pitching prospects can dominate A-ball hitters. Now, there’s quite a few major leaguers on that list, but no one you would call an impact arm. The impact arms did well here too, mind you. Jacob deGrom also dominated Savannah. Michael Fulmer was quite good as well—though much younger than this cohort. If you can throw your fastball and breaker for a strike, you will get outs.

I like both Humphreys and Gonzalez as prospects. And I normally group them together in my mind because the profile is very similar: Stocky righties who are physically mature, fastballs in the low 90s that can touch higher, a curve that will flash average or even better, and existent changeups that they don’t really need at the moment. Both are too good for this level, and I don’t anticipate either being here past the 1st half break. But just keep in mind that even this level of dominance in the South Atlantic League doesn’t override the reports. And the early reports from this season haven’t indicated major changes from what I saw last summer.

Photo credit: Reinhold Matay – USA Today Sports

2017 Mets Affiliate Previews: Columbia Fireflies

Jeffrey Paternostro — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 10:00:53 +0000

The Fireflies kicked off their second season in Columbia last week, and it’s a much more prospecty team this year than last—even with Thomas Szapucki on the DL and Justin Dunn skipping the level. The rotation is still pretty interesting, split between young IFA arms and six-figure draft picks, but the lineup is even more intriguing, with three of our Top 20 Mets prospects.
The best prospect on the Fireflies Opening Day roster is 2015 second-round pick Desmond Lindsay (#6). The 20-year-old center fielder has struggled to stay on the field so far in his pro career due to a spate of hamstring issues that date back to his senior season of high school. When Lindsay has played however, he’s looked like the best player on the field despite being younger than the vast majority of his competition. He played the corner infield spots as a prep, but has the straight-line speed and general athleticism to theoretically handle center field. He’s also a more polished hitter than the amateur background and lack of minor league reps would imply. He’s shown an advanced approach, good feel for the barrel, and potentially average pop in my looks at him over the last two years. There’s a potential role 6 center fielder here, if the tools all play up on the grass and at the plate, but the bat might end up a bit light in an outfield corner if the defensive package falls short up the middle. We will know much more about Lindsay after—hopefully—a full South Atlantic League campaign in 2017.
I have been driving the Luis Carpio (#11) bandwagon since I saw him in Kingsport in 2015. I even ranked him over Dom Smith, Desmond Lindsay, and Robert Gsellman on our 2016 Mets Top 10. So that doesn’t look great in hindsight for a variety of reasons, but mostly because he ended up missing almost all of 2016 with a labrum tear in his right shoulder. His arm was already going to be a little stretched at shortstop, so I wasn’t terribly surprised the Mets used him almost entirely at second base when he featured this spring. That dings the projection, but there’s time to remedy that, as he’s still going to be one of the younger players in the South Atlantic League. Carpio brings more polished baseball skills than loud middle infield tools, but I really believe in the bat here, and he’s potentially a plus defender at the keystone. The comp I keep coming back to—admittedly one that will not enthuse Mets fans—is Ruben Tejada, but recall that Tejada looked like an above-average regular before a series of unfortunate injuries sapped him of his similarly limited athletic tools. Carpio won’t move as quickly as Tejada (#OmarsTeam), but I expect him to handle the low minors with sufficient aplomb to maybe even sneak his way back onto the 2018 Mets Top Ten list—I hear the author of it has a bit of a soft spot for him. His ceiling isn’t as high as Lindsay’s, but he’s about as good a bet to have some sort of major league career as you’ll find in a 19-year-old with a modest IFA signing bonus ($300,000).
If you could somehow weld two bandwagons together in some sort of Top Gear-style challenge so I could drive two at once, give me catcher Ali Sanchez’s (#14) as well. When the BP Mets prospect team eventually puts together a house style guide, one of the topline bullets will be: “Catchers are weird, man.” Sanchez clocked in at #10 on our 2016 Mets Prospect List and was in consideration for that spot again, despite only hitting .216/.260/.275 in Brooklyn as a 19-year-old. To be fair, he was dealing with a hand issue last summer, but that’s not the kind of performance that would normally keep you on prospect maven radars. But we don’t scout the statline, and Sanchez is a polished defensive catcher that gets good marks for his receiving and handling of his pitchers. I do think he will hit too; it’s a simple, line drive swing, and he controls the bat well. There will never be a ton of power here, and the arm has consistently popped well-below-average for me despite good caught-stealing numbers in short-season ball—again, don’t scout the statline—so it is a bit of an unusual profile, Or—if you prefer—weird. Because catchers are weird, man. The range of prospect outcomes here is vast, from, say, 2017 Carson Kelly to 2020 backup catcher on the Rumble Ponies, And as long as I am giving Mets fans disappointing comps, the one that keeps jumping to mind for Sanchez is Kevin Plawecki. That seems like damning with…uh…no praise, but there is a universe out there where Kevin Plawecki is a solid everyday backstop with a 55 hit tool, and it actually is spelled “Berenstein” Bears.
Left-handed pitcher Thomas Szapucki (#3) would normally be the lead for this preview, but he is on the shelf with a shoulder impingement. Every shoulder is its own beast, but the same injury cost Logan Verrett about two months of his A-ball season back in 2012. Szapucki was throwing on the minor league side by the end of spring, so he could be back in time for me to see him in Lakewood in the middle of May. That would put him on track for around 100 innings in his first full-season assignment. This isn’t ideal, but if the potential plus stuff is still there come June 1, I don’t think we’ll mind too much. This does make two straight abridged seasons for the young lefty—he missed the last month of 2016 with some back stiffness—and that, combined with his funky delivery, may give him the dreaded “reliever” tag. Now, I generally think almost everyone is a reliever, but I see a potential plus-plus fastball and plus breaker here, and there is already some feel for the change. I’d give him every chance to start, but it would be nice to see him on a mound for a full season at some point soon. None of us are getting any younger, including Szapucki, who was an older prep pick. Anyway, a lot of these concerns can get papered over with another few months of 15 strikeouts per nine. He certainly has the stuff to do that in the South Atlantic League.
With Szapucki on the shelf, the best pitching prospect in Columbia will be Merandy Gonzalez (#20). Gonzalez saw his velocity jump in 2015 in Kingsport, and he maintained it during a strong 2016 Brooklyn campaign. The 21-year-old righty can reach back for 95-96 with the four seamer, and the pitch can show late life at times. The two-seamer is more 91-94 with some weight to it, but both fastballs are a bit straighter than you’d like. On the plus side, he can hit all four quadrants with it and elevate it for a strikeout when he needs to. So there should be more than enough fastball here to handle South Atlantic League hitters. The curveball is his best secondary, and while it is inconsistent at present, it will flash plus. He will slow his arm speed and guide the pitch at times, and that version gets soft and slurvy in the upper-70s. When the armspeed is there and he really breaks it off, it’s a hard 11-5 offering in the low-80s that he can spot, bury, and even backfoot to lefties. The change was pretty crude in my looks last summer, which leaves him a two-pitch guy who lacks ideal size—he’s listed at 6’1,” 195. Add in that he’s already stocky and close to physically maxed, and well…yeah…like I said, I generally think almost everyone is a reliever. Gonzalez could be a major league one though.

Short Hops

The other Gonzalez in the rotation, Harol Gonzalez, is a joy to watch, with four pitches he can throw for strikes, and good feel for all three secondaries, the best of which is a slider with late cut. The fastball tops out at 90 though, and he has trouble holding even that velocity later in starts. There is enough pitchability here to beguile A-ball hitters, but it is tough to see a major league arm here without a significant velocity and stamina jump. The mini-Pedro aesthetic is fun though…The Mets tweaked 2016 third-round pick Blake Tiberi’s swing during his first pro summer, and that may have contributed to his short-season struggles. When his swing was right, the Louisville third baseman looked like the best hitter on that Brooklyn team. Expect plenty of Daniel Murphy—pre-Kevin-Long—comps if that happens more often in 2017…Jordan Humphreys is the less-polished version of Merandy Gonzalez, with a tick less velocity and a more inconsistent curve…shortstop Milton Ramos got $750,000 as an overslot third round pick in 2014 on the strength of his shortstop glove, but he struggled at the plate in his first go-round in the South Atlantic League, and may be stuck in a middle infield rotation with Carpio and 2017 fourth rounder Michael Paez…lefty Blake Taylor, who you may remember from the Ike Davis deal, will look to prove he is healthy after a 2015 Tommy John surgery. I liked what I saw in 2014 a bit, and he’s somehow still only 21.
Photo credit: Reinhold Matay – USA Today Sports

Notes from the Field: Short Season / Got No Reason

Jeffrey Paternostro — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 13:39:30 +0000

In my Twitter bio I used to include the line, “Watches too many short-season bullpens.” Well I have been at it again. So here are some more notes from the land of 1-6-2-5-2 double plays, and dudes shoving with 69 mph curveballs.

Desmond Lindsay, OF (Brooklyn Cyclones)

Lindsay has been battling leg injuries this year that limited him during Spring Training proper and kept him on the shelf even after short-season started. You might recall that he also missed most of his Senior season of high school due to a hamstring issue, which is one of the reasons he was still on the board for the Mets first pick in the second round. Multiple lower body issues for a player whose profile is a bit speed-dependent is concerning (Mets fans will no doubt remember a young Jose Reyes’s balky hamstrings), and even now Lindsay appears to be playing a bit compromised. He was moving at about 75 percent, and ran upright and stiffly. He was 4.7 down the line on a groundball you’d expect to get a good dig off of, and looked uncomfortable chasing down flyballs in the outfield. Unsurprisingly, he DH’d on the second of back-to-back looks.

The good news is the underlying profile here hasn’t changed. Lindsay still looks good at the plate. The bat speed grades out as plus, and he dropped the barrel on a low-inside pitch and parked major league fastball velocity. That’s power potential he didn’t really show last year. The approach is still more advanced than you’d expect given the swing-and-miss issues. And while more lost game reps in centerfield (a new position for him) are concerning, he still looks like a potential good regular, albeit one whose risk profile has gotten even murkier.

Peter Alonso, 1B (Brooklyn Cyclones)

Alonso, the Mets second-round pick out of Florida, is the guy that is going to get over-ranked on team lists this offseason. That’s not to say he is a non-prospect or anything, but people will get seduced by his stat line in a league that isn’t appreciably better than the SEC. The Mets like to load up their Brooklyn roster, and Alonso, among others there, could easily be at a full-season level right now. Would he have as much success there? Alonso’s stance is wide open and he stands well off the plate. He uses a medium leg lift to close, but he starts the whole process early and lets the leg hang a bit before getting it down. The timing here is inconsistent and often leaves his upper half trying to catch up. The swing itself has some length to the ball, the bat speed doesn’t jump out at you, and Alonso struggles with balls below his waist and spin generally. It’s a long-and-strong power profile, and those tend to struggle the first time they see higher-quality stuff. Even short-season arms have occasionally been able to exploit the holes (though they have many more times given him balls up in the zone he can both catch up to and get extended on).

Those concerns aside, dude is strong. I wouldn’t blanch at the suggestion that there is 70 raw power here. Alonso launched an F6 with almost seven seconds of hang time, and the next day casually poked a change-up into the right field bleachers. I thought it was a medium-depth pop-up off the bat. Here I will drop in the usual caveats about the pressure on the offensive tools for first-base-only college guys, though Alonso’s a better athlete than you’d expect, given that he is a very large man, and projects as at least an average defender at first. I half-suspect he shows up next April in full-season ball with a markedly different swing after a full spring of pro instruction, so perhaps I will be the one who “under-ranks” him.

Merandy Gonzalez, RHP (Brooklyn Cyclones)

It’s always nice to get a second in-season look at a pitcher. One start can show you what is possible, but subsequent ones help shade in some of the sparser outlines. When I saw Merandy in late June, I saw a shorter righty with a big arm, some command, and an advanced, if inconsistent, curve for the level. I liked Gonzalez as a prospect, but he wasn’t a hard scout. He reminded me a bit of 2012 Hansel Robles. Gonzalez is younger at the same level, and the raw stuff is a couple ticks better, but he is also rawer generally and lacks Robles’ feel for pitching.

In my second look Gonzalez struggled a bit. He lacked command of both the fastball and the curve in this outing and the issues got worse when he gassed in the fifth and sixth innings. However the change-up, which had been a total non-entity in the first start, at least flashed below-average a couple times. That sounds like damning with faint praise, but given what I saw in June (and the general state of offspeed in the Penn League), there is at least a bit of developmental potential peaking through. Early in this start, there were a lot more 95s on my gun than my previous look, and overall the four-seamer had a bit more life. The overall profile and projection hasn’t really changed, but the developmental path and potential pitfalls for Gonzalez are a bit clearer now.

Jordan Humphreys, RHP (Kingsport Mets)

The elevator pitch for Humphreys, the Mets 18th round pick in 2015, is something along the lines of: “He’s the version of Merandy Gonzalez you send to the Appalachian League.” He’s also a shorter, physically mature (almost stocky) righthander that works off a fastball/curve combo. His fastball only gets up to 94, and the curve is rougher around the edges, so you are going to need to squint and project a bit more to get the same end result out of the profile. On the plus side, the fastball has some life down in the zone, and the command wasn’t bad for rookie ball (although that and the velocity wavered some as he tired). The curveball (77-80) lacked a consistent shape, although his feel improved later in the start. Even the better ones showed a bit early, and were more of a lazy slurve. Humphreys did break off one good one, a downer 11-5 type. The changeup is firm (82-86), but functional enough for Kingsport. He maintains his armspeed well, but has trouble turning it over. In addition to the lack of projection, the arm action is a bit stiff, and he was working only out of the stretch, so the present-day screams ‘pen arm’ even more than Gonzalez. Still, I will always be a sucker for a pitcher with a bit of the ol’ Chad Billingsley ass.

Joseph Zanghi, RHP (Brooklyn Cyclones)

I was feeling lousy the last day of my Brooklyn look. Too much sun and not enough water over the first two games, combined with two 11 PM manhattans on an empty stomach Saturday night made for an unplesany ninety-minute subway ride to Coney Island on Sunday. I wasn’t going to miss Szapucki’s start, but I talked myself into bolting after he got pulled. I still had a two-hour drive home (after the subway ride back), and enough notes on the position players to fill out these blurbs. Inevitably though, I stayed in my seat for a parade of short-season relievers, as a low-scoring affair trundled along at a three-hour pace. Zanghi, the Mets 24th round pick out of a junior college in 2015, finished things off.

I hadn’t seen Zanghi yet, so I threw a gun on him. 91, then 92. Okay, that is better than most relievers at this level, but hardly special. Then a few 93s and 94s, a hard slider that flashed plus. There is some effort in the delivery, and yes, I’ve joked about the 91-94 with a slider relief arm before, but those guys do pitch in Double-A. So I am sure #MetsTwitter will be asking me about Zanghi when he is striking out a batter an inning in Bingo in a couple years. Good thing I stuck around long enough to have an answer.

Nabil Crismatt, RHP (Brooklyn Cyclones)

I enjoy watching Nabil Crismatt pitch.

The stuff isn’t going to leap out at you, although Crismatt has made tidy work of New-York-Penn-League lineups this year. It’s a fun profile though. He stays closed and gets low. There’s an aesthetically pleasing lollipop curve in the high-60s that befuddles hitters and good feel for the change-up. His fastball doesn’t light up the gun, topping out at 90, but Crismatt knows how to mix his pitches and is comfortable throwing anything in any count. He’s in better shape this year too, and I suspect he will continue to outperform his profile as he moves forward.

But that isn’t why I enjoy watching Nabil Crismatt pitch.

As you may have gathered, watching lower-level baseball can be a bit of a slog. Crismatt works fast and throws strikes. In a league where pitchers look utterly confused about to what to do with runners on base, slowing the game’s pace to that of a Superflex film, his half-innings just hum along, getting me back to Sunnyside on a Saturday night before the kitchens close.

He can’t really be held responsible for my decision-making while there of course.

Photo Credit: Steven Branscombe- USA Today Sports