Loose ends: White Sox injuries, prospect rankings
Let’s start with the three original White Sox spring training injuries …
Gio González: He reported “big-time progress” with his shoulder after throwing on flat ground on Sunday, and he backed it up with a 20-pitch bullpen session Thursday.
Lucas Giolito: He threw sliders and curveballs during his bullpen session on Tuesday as he builds up after a chest muscle strain, and he’s scheduled for a side session today.
Yasmani Grandal: He was seen taking batting practice off Dallas Keuchel Wednesday. Daryl Van Schouwen just provided an update.
Grandal said the calf, which he injured about two weeks before the start of spring training while running, is not sore, but tests show it’s not 100 percent.
“That’s the problem,” Grandal said. “We want to get it sore and we can’t. So we’ve been hammering it out as much as we can and trying to see if I get tired or get sore.”
… followed by two new ones:
Jace Fry: We’d heard plenty about Aaron Bummer, but little about the White Sox bullpen’s presumed second lefty. It turns out he’s been dealing with a sore back, but he hopes to get back on the mound by the end of the week.
Edwin Encarnación: He was scratched from Thursday’s game with a stiff back, which opened a temporary spot for Nicky Delmonico, and theoretically clears a pathway for Yermínmentum! to build inertia.
* * * * * * * * *
Keith Law left Nick Madrigal off his top 100 prospects list, and also off his roundup of honorable mentions, making him an extreme outlier in a community that otherwise locked Madrigal in their top 50s.
Law eventually got around to writing up Madrigal with his top 10 White Sox prospects list, but just like Madrigal’s strike zone, it’s still lower than you think. His list is the first to slot Madrigal fifth, one behind Jonathan Stiever.
The rationale:
Madrigal never strikes out — his strikeout rate last year was just 3 percent, less than half of that of the second-hardest minor leaguer to strike out, No. 1 overall prospect Wander Franco — but the tradeoff is that he’s a singles hitter who struggles to get his isolated power figure over .100. He’s an above-average runner and plays solid defense at second base. I think he’s a longtime big leaguer, but he has to hit well over .300 to be more than just an average regular, and major-league pitchers are going to attack him in the zone because he doesn’t pose any threat of power.
This doesn’t necessarily strike me as disrespect for Madrigal’s game, but rather that Madrigal is an extreme example of the primary tension underneath prospect lists, especially ones that prioritize upside. Madrigal seems likely to have a top-30 career out of that prospect list, but that’s not what these lists really measure. Otherwise, you’d probably see Danny Mendick ahead of Andrew Dalquist. Madrigal poses an issue because his floor is very high, but his ceiling doesn’t offer much clearance. If you think Madrigal is a 2 WAR second baseman at heart, those guys are available on minor-league contracts.
I think Madrigal is weird enough at the plate, and effective enough in other facets of his game, to be more than that. But I can appreciate the value in imagining an underwhelming outcome, then reverse engineering how it got there in order to strain the sentiment from the mix.
Remember Tyler Danish? Scouts inside and outside the organization wanted badly for him to succeed due to his attitude, work ethic and unusual delivery. Some just couldn’t convince themselves that his delivery would stand a chance against advanced left-handed hitters without a jump in velocity, and sure enough, he could never find a way to pitch to lefties at Triple-A, or during his few cups of coffee.
With Madrigal, the told-you-so postmortem would say, “He’s undersized and couldn’t pull the ball in the air with any authority. What did you expect?” Most people are giving him some benefit of the doubt, but having a holdout or two paints a fuller picture.
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“To strain the sentiment from the mix” — talk about fun policing!
I know Law takes a lot of heat in these parts, but I think he’s a worthy voice in the prospect debate. I like that he’s not afraid to step out of the hive and form his own judgments.
I hope he’s seriously wrong about Madrigal. I look at Madrigal and see my avatar staring back at me.
Just weird….https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-1960-Crosman-Pistol-Rifle-Nellie-Fox-Chicago-White-Sox-Baseball-Print-Ad/153444925923?hash=item23ba07c1e3:g:emcAAOSwOLVbRmLg
Yikes.
That’s not really surprising to me. I read an interview with Jim Landis who described Fox as the leader of the “Red Ass” faction of the team which he and Bob Shaw hooked up with. It sounded like they were the 50s-60s version of the “Duck Dynasty” bunch on the 2015 Sox.
There’s a photo in our archives of Fox selling suits at a men’s store during the offseason. It was a different time.
Why is this weird, because he has his Sox uniform on in an ad?
IMO it’s less about being a worthy voice in prospect debate vs just kind of a being a dick or to be contrary. And I acknowledge he says he’s not doing the latter. Law is worth reading, but his demeanor comes across that he’d light his hair on fire vs. admitting he’s wrong at times.
It will also be interesting to watch him on The Athletic. The comment section is really not treated like the comment sections of say ESPN. The writers normally engage. You’d think after a million comments about leaving Madrigal outside the Top 100 he would have responded to one (any for that matter) explaining his take and rationale.
Madrigal is a plate crosser. That’s his value. I expect 100 plus runs every year from him.
Yeah. There has to be more to the game than slugging percentage and launch angle. I get the opinion, but why does he need to hit for such a high average to provide value? He hit .331 and had an OBP of .398 at Charlotte last year (albeit a small sample size of 120 ABs). This was his first full season of pro ball, too. Projecting that into a solid to above average MLB career is fairly easy.
If he works on upping the walks, he’ll be a fine player and a major pain to get out at the top of the order. He legitimately HAS to be one of the top 100 minor league players right now. Hope this one comes back and haunts Mr Law.
The thinking is that “upping the walks” is easier said than done if he doesn’t scare pitchers from throwing strikes. He could hit .280, but if it only amounts to .280/.315/.350, that’s a different kind of Yolmer.
Nicky Lopez wasn’t a prospect on the level of Madrigal, but his rough adjustment from Triple-A to the majors is the general idea.
It amazed me that people have a problem with evaluators not being enamored with Madrigal. We all know Yolmer is his median outcome, right? Anything he does on top of that is gravy. If anyone is penciling in perennial all star, you need to check your expectations.
All-Star? Hall of Famer is more like it.
I don’t think Yolmer is his median outcome. IMO Yolmer is his floor, David Fletcher is his median, and Dustin Pedroia is his ceiling.
whoa…Dustin Pedroia? Those are “palabras mayores“. I hope you are right, but if he is half Pedroia, that’d be great too.
I agree, Greg. Good hitters will develop power as they settle in at the major league level. I could easily see Madrigal as a 10-15 HR guy within 3 or 4 years.
Not claiming it’s easy, but the guy obviously has a keen eye and an advanced knowledge of the strike zone. So the improvement I’m suggesting for him is achievable, more so than for other prospects.
If he doesn’t start hitting more than singles, his only walks will come against pitchers with terrible control and there aren’t that many in the majors. No need to risk walking a guy, when the worst case scenario for putting the ball in play is he ends up on first.
That’s only mitigated if he bat with lots of guys in scoring position and that’s not too likely.
But in this hypothetical scenario where he walks only 6-7% of the time, & maintains his 3-4% K rate, he is putting the ball in play 90% of the time.
As long as he carries a 330 babip, pretty doable for a slap hitter with speed, that’s a 300 avg & 365 OBP with + bsr. Seems useful to me.
And then all the doubles, triples, & stolen bases are just gravy on top.
Throw in the defense and you have a very valuable player.
Pretty doable? Any proof or research on that matter?
Babip can show that a players has been lucky or unlucky and/or the player is just a bad one. I don’t think one can assume that a hitter go up there and “slap some” baseballs until the babip gods are on their side.
I do think Madrigal will be productive. I really doubt he will develop any power, but I am not a baseball scout. I saw his spray chart in the minors (Click here: http://www.prospectsforcash.com/2019/06/chicago-white-sox-2b-nick-madrigal.html) and his hits to CF rarely went past the CF. I think I didn’t even see a warning track hit in CF. Also, he does not pull anything. That is pretty awful power
Sure..there are a lot of contact there, and that is half the battle.
I think the argument may be that there isn’t much reason to throw anything off the plate, if you think he’s just going to hit an 80 mph grounder into a shift. Exaggeration here, but if nobody throws him 4 balls in an at-bat, the walk rate is out of his control.
“A different kind of Yolmer” has got to be like his 10% outcome, right? After absolutely raking in college, he’s been a productive hitter at every level. 110 wRC+ in A+ this year, 150 in AA, 117 in AAA. Steamer thinks his wRC+ will be 96 this year. For reference, Yolmer’s career best was 95, and was 74 last year.
Among MLB 2B, a 117 wRC+ would have tied for 6th with Ozzie Albies, just behind Gleyber and just ahead of Moustakas and Merrifield. I’m not suggesting he’ll do that in the bigs, but he won’t have to to be above average.
If Law is right, Madrigal will have to see a pretty enormous drop in his offensive production from literally every other league he’s ever been in.
I’m very very excited to see Madrigal against MLB pitching this season. He’s exceeded my skeptical expectations thus far. If he can come up and just hold his own at the plate, worst case scenario is a Yolmer Sanchez; in a lineup theoretically full of powerful hitters, you can live with that.
There hasn’t really been a guy like him as a prospect for as long as I’ve been following minor league baseball. Unique guys almost always end up struggling to produce, but Tim Anderson showed last year what can happen when it all comes together. While I still have my doubts, I’m excited to see if he can prove me wrong again; it’s been fun so far.
My feeling on Madrigal from the jump has been that he’ll overperform scouting expectations because the contact is so statistically anomalous. There are incredibly few major leaguers with a single tool that can carry them as far as Madrigal’s.
That said, I’d be very interested to read some research on whether other very unique (in a good way) profiles over- or underperform expectations.
Yep. Madrigal and Oneil Cruz are the most interesting prospects to me because they have such unusual profiles. I’m content to sit back and watch them turn into…whatever it is they will become.