biggentleben

I'd read about the Negro League thing, but excellent podcast for the rest of the interview, Cory!

They have. All season long. If you Google it, since his back stuff last year, Sano was quite upfront that he needed to be in top physical condition, and he's done such with diet and exercise. There are dozens of articles about it in the past year from the offseason, during spring, in season. Sano's been incredibly upfront on his diet, exercise, and forming new habits. Frankly, I took to watching a few game tapes from last season and different points of this year, and Sano is noticeably leaner in the waist and thicker through the legs and chest. Comparing video throughout this year, there is no notable difference all season in waist. His thighs were thicker, but thicker with more shape as well, so I would imagine he's added muscle. One thing we all should force ourselves to do in the current world environment - when presented an opinion (even mine here), background check it before just accepting it. Souhan's not got a great reputation among people in the game for presenting real information. In fact, one scout who was with the Rays when they acquired Garza mentioned that portions of the Garza/Twins "feud" were 100% from Souhan, and he printed it over and over so much that the player and team both questioned whether the other side had, in fact, said such a thing. That's horrid journalism - creating a rift just to create a story. It's despicable and deserves absolutely no readership.

That's just it. It's just like little league. You see during the LLWS that there are those unique kids that can tear through peers with their arms or bats because they developed early, not necessarily because of elite baseball talent. Heck, how many times have we had a LLWS star never heard from in baseball again? It's one of the reasons you hear those folks with the brain institute encourage no contact until high school. By then, most have hit at least one growth spurt and can begin to add the muscle to balance the size inequality. Sure, there will still be imbalance (I lined up as a 270-pound DT in high school against a 145-pound OG), but it's much lessened by then, and the body has also matured significantly in its natural protections for the brain.

That part is a complete misnomer. If you're doing consistent flexibility/agility work while you add the muscle and doing "skill" work while you add the muscle, you could actually be significantly better than without that bulk...

Kind of depends on what you believe a power hitter needs to be. Vargas isn't a guy who struggles blindly against anything of any quality that moves and crushes any fastball of any quality. That's what a lot of image of a power guy seems to be - the idea that when you see Aroldis Chapman come on the mound, you want your big, burly power hitter to stare him down is a prevalent one still around the game. It all depends on how you can work your way through the league. Vargas in the early 2000s would have been tremendous. The pitching quality at that time was so much lower at the back ends of rotations, and it would have fit him better to excel at that time. I truly think teams have better pitchers in their 4/5 slots of their rotations throughout the league now than 15 years ago, and that will keep Vargas from likely ever being a guy who can be a league-average hitter, but he will provide exciting moments when he does hit the ball because he has legit power in that swing that is impressive when it's all unleashed. So yes, it's not off in what he's produced so far, but it's how he gets there that is different for a guy of his power and stature than what you'd typically expect.

Warning - a bunch of scouting grades are about to commence: I was going to write a piece on Vargas before he got called up, and I decided to scrap it as it was getting too negative. I watched a ton of his plate appearances the last few years at the major league and minor league level and came up with this evaluation: 20-45 grade breaking ball (below average): Vargas has good zone and pitch recognition on these and can lay off them, though he doesn't frequently drive them well when he does swing. This level of pitch typically includes breaking pitches that frequently don't find the strike zone, don't have great break, and/or don't have sufficient velocity to be major league viable. 45-55 grade breaking ball (around average MLB): Vargas has good pitch and zone recognition on looping curves in this grade level and can lay off of them as needed. He does not drive them well when he swings, however. Spike curves in this range will almost always draw a swing, and Vargas is willing to expand the zone for them, but when he does make contact (which is not a great rate), he crushes them. Sliders at this level come in two varieties - good velo sliders without location and good location/break sliders without great velocity. Vargas has a much better pitch recognition of the latter than the former, but he gets much better results when he actually makes contact with the former (due to the higher velo), so he often swings. 60+ breaking ball (plus or better): Really the one pitch at this level that he handles well is a spike curve, but even then, he misses plenty on them. Excellent looping curve simply make Vargas look silly, though they can do that with near anyone. He loves to attempt to golf sweeping sliders from lefties, but I believe I saw one home run in probably 30-ish swings on a plus sweeping slider from a lefty. 45-55 fastball (average): Less than a 45 fastball rarely is something you see in the major leagues or even in the upper minors as guys typically have the location or movement to get a notch up enough to get the 45 number. This is where Vargas absolutely feasts. He recognizes pitches well at this level, drives them well, basically everything you want a power hitter to do well with a fastball, he does at this level of a fastball. 60-65 fastball (plus): This is where things start to get hairy for Vargas with fastballs. Typically, plus velocity is someone who can touch 97ish from the right side and 95 from the left side. A pure, straight pitch at those velocities, he can still tag, but it's that most pitches that get this level of grade have a bit of wiggle and usually the pitcher to get a grade at this level has good location of the pitch. That is where Vargas struggles. Typically it's not with swing and miss so much as getting less than ideal bat placement on the ball. 70+ fastball (plus-plus): Now and then, Vargas will get things going early and get everything in the right spots at the right time to nail a double-plus fastball, but it's rare. I did not see a ball perfectly hit that was in triple digits, but he did knock one out at that velocity (force plus force can still help him) in my viewings. However, if that fastball has more than just 99+ from the right side/97+ from the left side, as in, if it has any movement to it at all, Vargas is SOL'd. This is where he typically gets most of his fastball swing and miss that I saw. Offspeed pitches were near in line with breaking pitches, so I didn't really specifically note them. All in all, Vargas would likely feast once every 7-10 days on a fringy 5th starter type, scatter a few solid hits otherwise throughout the week when he happened to square well, and be a guy who was a fringy power bat with no defensive position (and I did watch a few games at first base - some of the worst first base defense I've seen. I had to go watch a few games of Jonathan Rodriguez to make myself feel better about minor league first base play in the org).

Every two seasons, affiliates do a shuffle based on their contracts being up. You can check out the list here that will be eligible after the 2018 season to move, but that's the soonest any affiliate would be likely to move. https://ballparkdigest.com/200905261902/minor-league-baseball/news/affiliate-dance-2012

The Braves own Gwinnett, so it's not exactly an affiliate in the same way, which puts the league in a different situation. The Twins could put out feelers to places like Sioux Falls, Fargo, and others to check on interest of doing a similar situation, but that would then put the city they go to in the spot of footing the bill for all of the facilities while having none of the ownership of the rights of the team (see Richmond with the Braves before they moved to Gwinnett).

Different perspective that might add/pile on/whatever... I'm baseball first, no questions asked. I turned the TV in the football rec room at the U to a baseball game during summer workouts between two teams I wasn't even a fan of (don't honestly even remember who!), and I remember getting a lot of crap for it. That said, I was in the rec room because I was playing football. Knowing what I know now, I won't have a son that plays football until high school in full pads. Many communities are going away from such below high school anyway, but it's certainly been shown that ahead of high school there is no amount of head impact that is okay, and while research is still very much in the infantile stages to finding causation of CTE, correlation between the earlier one starts playing football and the amount of CTE damage is pretty damning. I played college football, but if I wouldn't have been from a family situation where baseball ended for me at 14 (and a state without high school baseball at the time), I'd have kept playing baseball as my first sport. That said, I played baseball in a much, much different level of consideration to the game than many parents try to make it now. Playing baseball should be about having an open space, a ball, a glove, and a bat. It SHOULD be the second-cheapest sport for a community and family to put together behind basketball, but for many communities, the sport that ends up being cheap and gives a shot to actually play (5 on the court vs. 11 on the field) is football, so poorer communities frequently drift there rather than baseball as far as their attention and their community dollars. I've never personally had a favorite NFL team. I loved players for the Steelers because I was a center and studied the best centers, and the Steelers arguably have the top two, if not two of the top 3-5. The Steelers also had jerseys at the time I was in high school that perfectly mirrored our black jerseys, so that worked as well. My NFL "viewing" has long been fantasy-biased, but it's even more so now with Redzone channel. I turn that on Sundays, and I don't watch any other night of the week at the NFL level.

Best note I got on this - I was talking with someone who has been with ESPN for a bit and previously was a contact I had for other things. We were discussing the Chattanooga team and the rotation, specifically. I brought up that many online folks were disappointed when ESPN (and a couple other spots) listed Gonsalves as one of the starters Monday against the White Sox and it wasn't. His response back was legendary. He said that they got the information that it was going to be Gonsalves from someone in the Twins clubhouse. However, the source must have been the same one that Souhan uses...

In all seriousness, does the weight number itself matter, or is it the composition of what the weight is? Sano was incredibly open this offseason that he wanted to get himself in the right type of shape to be ready for 3B in 2017. He dropped fat, but he had also added muscle. More than one person has talked about him still doing weight training in season. If Sano had previously had minimal experience lifting, it would not be uncommon that in a year of lifting that he gained 30-50 pounds of muscle. Reporting a weight number means about as much as reporting a batting average with no context. If I tell you that Buxton is hitting .400 over the last week, that's good. If I tell you that Sano is hitting .150 over the last week, that's bad. Except that if Buxton had a .500 BABIP and Sano had a .100 BABIP, there'd be some things beyond just the batting average that led to whether or not Buxton or Sano had actually been good or bad at the plate in the last week. As far as his rehab, if he's been doing the lower body and flexibility work that was in a few articles I found through the magic of Google after this POS article came out, his weight number isn't going to be a major issue in the recovery as his body will have been built to handle his current body weight in much more stressful situations than injury recovery. What frustrated me more than anything was that I found no less than 17 articles with unique quotes from Miguel Sano from the point of his back issues last September to his current shin injury regarding weight and how important keeping his body healthy, flexible, and agile was to his success. Someone who has been that open about his body and his weight would no doubt have been quotable if Souhan had honestly intended to do a quality, researched piece. Instead, he wanted to shoot arrows from on high without having to get his fingernails dirty by wading into the muck of actually talking to a lowly player to complete an article.

I caught flack for saying similar about Rooker on Twitter the last few days on the Puckett's Pond site account. Now that I've dug through a bunch of video, I just don't like his defense anywhere. Working with Douggie baseball could give him at least a shot at 1B, but I'd still project DH.

Coming into August, the Twins were 50-53, Braves were 48-56. Not exactly a whole lot of difference. At the point when the first announcement of Jaime Garcia between the Braves and Twins happened, the Braves had a better record, but they were 10 games farther out of a playoff spot. Braves chose to bring up youth and put them in important spots for the rest of the year, immediately demoting Johnson from the closer role into no-leverage situations, and you see why. I think Snitker and Molitor will both be seeking employment this offseason - at least it'd be surprising if they both weren't.

No, I've spent my entire adult life conversing frequently with Braves fans from the South, including the deep South. This is by no means a pervasive sentiment. It's just the loudest one.

People on Braves Twitter are going ballistic. "He's making a major league start and they just got cash for him?!" People are funny sometimes.

Four of those (Enlow, Leach, Rooker, Lewis) are draft picks from June, so that's not surprising, especially with the #1 pick.

I'm glad you did the research and posted this. I cited it in an article I did for Puckett's Pond and credited your list here.

Those sorts of trades happen all the time. Heck, the PTBNL with the Braves/Mariners trade that involved Alex Jackson was based on a guy who was Rule 5 eligible or the deal would have been finalized ahead of time. I would wager 3-4 such trades happen every year.

Haley was able to be stashed as a DL guy until they returned him. Not exactly apples to apples.

I see systems currently not much differently than before the season (though some of the participants in each grouping has changed) with 6-7 teams that are "elite" systems, the same 6-7 that are "crap" systems, and everyone else at some degree of the middle. I'm curious to see how the Twins could move up by the end of the season.

Interestingly, this correlates well with the series I just did on Call To The Pen after talking in depth with the guys from Driveline Baseball. The article from today has a link to all of the rest, but the schedule was as follows: Monday: Baseball-specific training (and baseball-only athletes) Tuesday: Training Pitchers Wednesday: Weight Training, Program Design Thursday: The Swing Revolution, training hitters Friday: What's next?

Weighted balls wouldn't be the thing, though I did put out an article last winter after interviewing an orthopedist at Mayo about TOS. Basically, max effort movements over chest level cause the issue. Volleyball players and certain types of manual laborers also see a high occurrence of TOS.

The Mets make money hand over fist, however. The Wilpons can claim financial woes, but it's not due to the Mets losing anything.

One player has 190 home runs and 150 stolen bases by his 26th birthday - Trout. His OPS+ as he turns 26 is the highest of any RH hitter after their age 26 season (he's still technically in his age 25 season). So many superlatives that can be tossed around, but it's just astounding that the greatest player in the game could also be the most underrated and underappreciated players in the game.

I honestly hope they don't, just because I'm a big fan of Clayton Kershaw the player and the person, and Cody Bellinger is very possibly as good a person as Clayton. Easy guys to cheer for...