Jamie Cameron

Ohl has been in AA two seasons so I'd expect him in AAA. For Wichita, something like Christian Macleod, Kyle Jones, CJ Culpepper, Connor Prielipp

Spring Training is here! It’s time to get reacquainted with the Twins' 2024 draft class, ahead of their first full season of professional baseball in 2025. Next up, Billy Amick Image courtesy of © Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK Draft Context, Scouting and Signing Billy Amick sat at the back end of the first round on most draft boards. Instead, he ended up falling to the second round (60th overall), where the Twins took him—despite not typically investing higher picks in prospects with contact questions. Power is the calling card in Amick’s profile, with good bat speed in a loft-oriented swing designed to generate pulled fly balls. There aren't a ton of other tools to write home about for Amick. A solid throwing arm is offset by a need to improve his actions at third base. A move to first base seems likely, but let’s stay open-minded about possible defensive improvement. If Amick can hit enough, the power is legit, and there will be value there. It’s a big "if". At 60th overall, however, it’s a sensible enough lottery ticket to buy, on a prospect who deviates from the Twins' usual hitting archetype. 2024 Pro Debut: Strengths and Opportunities 2024 Stats (A): 18 games (77 PA), .222/.351/.413, 3 HR, 15.6 BB%, 19.5 K%, 121 wRC+ After a slow start at Fort Myers, Amick rounded out his season with an excellent final few weeks. The power was evident from the outset; Amick’s 104-mph 90th-percentile exit velocity was well above average for the level, but a 70.1% contact rate and 18% whiff rate within the strike zone give him significant hit tool risk. One aspect of his profile that will be worth monitoring in 2025 is his approach. There’s some chase in the profile, too, particularly against breaking pitches (35% in 2024), but Amick showed an improved ability to take a walk in his pro debut, albeit in a small sample. Amick never walked more than about 10% of the time in college, but his 15.6% mark in his pro debut would represent a raising of his floor for me, as it would offset some of the swing-and-miss. There’s lots to like about Amick’s swing, with great rotational acceleration, but he’ll have to improve either his propensity to chase or the in-zone miss, or he may just never hit enough as a pro. Expectations for 2025 Individually, I see Amick has a fairly high-risk profile (for a college player). He’s a power-reliant corner defender with hit-tool risk. It’s still safe to say the Twins saw value in him as he slid, though. Drafting a prospect with a 1.026 OPS coming off a 23-home run college season and a national championship is an easily defensible pick. Globally, I’d cluster Amick with the other college bats (Kaelen Culpepper, Kyle DeBarge, Jaime Ferrer) who the Twins will hope move quickly and sure up the foundation of a farm system that has more impact in the upper levels of the minors. Prospect Preview: Kaelen Culpepper Prospect Preview: Kyle DeBarge View full article

Even if their pitching contingent from this draft mostly ended up as relievers, there's a ton of value in that class, totally agree.

Hundred percent agree.

Another developmental arm is knocking on the door of the Twins' big-league rotation. What is he focused on, heading into 2025? What are areas he can improve upon? Let's dig into one of the least-discussed Twins pitching prospects. Image courtesy of William Parmeter "Consistency, you know? Prove that I can be consistent." That's what Twins right-handed pitching prospect Andrew Morris told Twins Daily's John Bonnes in Ft. Myers recently, when asked what he needs to show in 2025 to make an impact on the big-league ball club. It’s clear that Morris sets a high bar for himself. One could make a good-faith argument that consistency is all he’s shown since being drafted by the Twins in the fourth round of the 2022 MLB Draft (114th overall). In 2023, Morris’s first full professional season, he posted a 3.17 FIP in 84 1/3 innings across two levels of A ball. In 2024, he reached the doorstep of the majors, with a 2.86 FIP across 133 innings spanning High A, Double A, and Triple A. Arsenal and MiLB Outcomes Were it not for Zebby Matthews’s incandescent 2024 season, Morris might have garnered more attention for his sustained excellence last year. Looking at the big picture, he’s part of a remarkable crop of college right-handers the Twins drafted in 2022, four of whom (Morris, Matthews, Cory Lewis, and C.J. Culpepper) have a chance to start at the highest level. There’s more to a Morris and Matthews comparison than the fact that both achieved minor-league excellence. Both are outstanding strike-throwers, and they roughly share a pitching arsenal. Morris lives in the zone. In 2024, his strike rate hovered around 70% (that’s 4-5% above MLB average). Therein lies one of his greatest remaining challenges and conundrums; does living in the zone that much eventually hurt a pitcher? When does leaving the zone (in different counts, with different pitches, using different locations) to induce chases by the batter create more leverage for an extreme strike-thrower? Let’s run down Morris’s 2024 arsenal, as it’s central to his next steps. He throws a four-seam fastball, curveball, slider, changeup, and cutter. As with Zebby Matthews, the Twins essentially split Morris’s cutter into two distinct pitches: a high-vert cutter deployed against left-handed hitters, and a gyro slider for use against right-handed hitters or in two-strike counts. Very loosely, Morris deploys his fastball 35% of the time (94-mph average); his slider/cutter 35% of the time (87 mph), his changeup 17% (88 mph), and his curveball 13% (75 mph). That's a deep arsenal of pitches. He has the ability to throw strikes whenever he wants. No wonder Morris has had consistent success throughout his career, to date. So what’s there to be concerned about? The amount of miss he generates. Morris’s strikeout percentage has fallen with each ascending level of the minor leagues. That's hardly surprising. However, the fall was more stark when he moved from Double-A Wichita to Triple-A St, Paul. Morris struck out 28% of hitters at High-A Cedar Rapids; 25% for Wichita; and just 19% with St. Paul, albeit in a 33 2/3-inning sample. That’s not untenable, but it is more of a tightrope to navigate if he’s to become a solid middle-of-the-rotation starter, instead of a Quadruple-A innings eater. I’d emphasize that these are run-of-the-mill developmental milestones for pitching prospects, as opposed to something unique to Morris. To me, there are three areas of opportunity to explore. Command over control The first area of opportunity is an issue he shares with Matthews. Because he’s an extreme strike-thrower, Morris’s control and command are often conflated. I’d argue there’s an opportunity for Morris to refine the command of his secondary pitches. This isn’t about hitting the zone; it’s about spotting specific pitches in specific portions thereof, and knowing when to leave the strike zone to generate leveraged counts over hitters. Adding a New Pitch Morris’s second area of improvement stems from a tidbit shared with reporters (including Twins Daily’s John Bonnes) at Spring Training. "I’m adding a sinker this year," Morris mentioned. "I need something to go in on righties, to open up the outer half of the plate." New pitch alert! Morris is adding a sinker. Cool. But why? How might it work? Morris’s four-seamer has average velocity and not much in the way of arm-side movement (though it does have some cut), so a pitch with run is going to play well jamming right-handed hitters inside. The Twins are following a template for Morris that the Houston Astros leveraged with Hunter Brown. Brown lowered his ERA by close to three runs after adding a sinker when he was struggling in early 2024. The premise was the same: give the guy something for right-handed hitters to think about inside, to open up the outside portion of the plate for his slider and breaking stuff. Increased Velocity on Secondary Pitches The final area of opportunity for Morris is increasing the consistency of velocity in his secondary offerings (firmness). Essentially, that means getting each within a range that enhances deception based on the velocity or movement characteristics of another pitch, therefore building the efficacy of not just the individual pitch but his arsenal as a whole. Morris should get plenty of run at Triple A in 2025, and that’s a good thing. He has at least seven starting pitchers ahead of him on the depth chart. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from his first two seasons of minor-league baseball, it’s that he’ll achieve the consistency he’s looking for. Twins Daily’s John Bonnes contributed to reporting for this article. View full article

Draft tandem Jeremy Nygaard and JD Cameron team up for a podcast to discuss prospects on their way to the big leagues and the MLB draft, produced by Theo Tollefson. Image courtesy of Thieres Rabelo In episode 68 of Destination: The Show, Jeremy, Jamie, and Theo start by digging into the Twins signing Ty France to a one-year, non guaranteed MLB deal. What does this mean for other players competing for playing time at first base? How would they sum up the Twins offseason heading into spring training? The guys then jump into competing Twins top ten prospects lists. They are consistent through the top three, but things get interesting at pick number four. How did the prospects featured perform in 2024? What are lingering questions for them in 2025? The guys also dig into Connor Prielipp’s role for the Twins in 2025, and talk through the challenge of trying to place recently drafted prospects on organizational lists who don’t have much of a pro-track record to evaluate. 0:00 Intro 1:00 Theo's Plans for the year 2:23 Housekeeping 3:32 Ty France 10:00 Offseason Feelings 12:12 Twins Top 10 -- no argument at 1 (Walker Jenkins) 17:21 Another agreement at 2 (Emmanuel Rodriguez) 23:00 Not a lot of drama at 3 (Luke Keaschall) 31:58 Where the disagreements start: Andrew Morris 37:40 Connor Prielipp 47:20 Kaelan Culpepper 52:05 Marco Raya 57:56 Charlee Soto 1:02:59 Cory Lewis 1:07:09 Brandon Winokur 1:10:25 Kyle DeBarge 1:13:30 Rayne Doncon You can support the show by downloading it from wherever you get your podcasts, including iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoy the content, consider leaving us a five-star rating and review in addition to sharing or retweeting DTS-related content. You can follow us on Twitter @DTS_POD1, @Jeremynygaard, @J_D_Cameron, and @TheodoreTollef1. We’re now on Bluesky @destinationtheshow.bsky.social. You can also find full episodes and clips of our shows on our YouTube page @DestinationTheShow. View full article

Just responding to a couple of trends so far: 1. Often college guys starting in pro ball start slow as it's by far the longest season they've been involved in. I personally think there's some swing changes ahead (or behind) depending on how the offseason went, to get away from the high ground ball rate. 2. RE draft rankings, he was also in the 30s on ESPN and BP, so let's represent the highs and the lows of his rankings. His consensus ranking was 50th. Twins liked what they saw and they've earned enough trust in the draft for that to be good enough for me. 3. For the couple negative folks. You're entitled to your opinions. The goal of these pieces (and any player evaluation) is to start with the question: 'what does this player do well'? From there, we work out to opportunities and areas of growth. Let's give all these guys a full season before drawing meaningful conclusions. Thanks to everyone who has been reading and commenting on these, appreciate the TD prospect community.

I think the outcome you get (production wise) if it all goes well is a Willi Castro type of player. Defensively versatile, enough bat to contribute to the lineup with consistency, some speed etc.

Spring training is around the corner. It’s time to get reacquainted with the Twins' 2024 MLB Draft class ahead of their first full season of professional baseball. Today, that means breaking down the sparkplug of a college infielder the team took with the 33rd overall pick last summer. Image courtesy of Image courtesy of William Parmeter Draft Context, Scouting, and Signing Kyle DeBarge and Sonny Gray will always be connected: The Twins selected DeBarge with the 33rd overall pick in the 2024 draft, a compensatory selection awarded after Gray declined the qualifying offer and signed with the St. Louis Cardinals. DeBarge, a Louisiana-Lafayette standout, signed for $2.4 million (slot value: $2.77 million). A three-year starter at UL-L, he showed steady improvement each season. As a freshman, he posted a .750 OPS with 17 extra-base hits. His sophomore year saw a jump to a .994 OPS, with 22 extra-base hits. He truly broke out as a junior, with a 1.112 OPS and 21 home runs—tripling his previous career high. He had a total of 43 extra-base hits across 62 games. Though just 5-foot-9, DeBarge is an explosive athlete with plus bat-to-ball skills. His swing is noisy and effortful, but it allowed him to generate power in college, particularly on pulled fly balls. However, his tendency to stay tall through his swing may limit his ability to consistently lift the ball at the pro level, unless some big adjustments are made. 2024 Pro Debut: Strengths and Opportunities 2024 Stats (A): 26 games (115 PA) – .235/.322/.343, 1 HR (6 XBH), 12 BB, 28 K, 15 SB DeBarge’s offensive game is built on plus contact skills and an advanced feel for the barrel. Despite a slow pro debut, he showed a mature approach at the plate, posting a 10.4% walk rate and a 78.3% contact rate, with in-zone whiff and chase rates well above average for the level. A dynamic runner, DeBarge aggressively utilized his speed, going 15-for-18 in stolen base attempts for Low-A Fort Myers. Defensively, he has the actions to stick at shortstop, making plenty of plays—including some highlight-reel moments made because of limited range due to his smaller stature. His arm is strong enough to remain at the position, at least in the short term. DeBarge’s early struggles stemmed from excessive ground-ball contact, producing an average launch angle of just 2 degrees. If he can make swing adjustments to generate more loft, he has the potential to be one of the college bats from the 2024 draft class who move quickly through the system in 2025. Expectations for 2025 DeBarge is an exciting player to watch. He belongs to a promising group of college hitters from the Twins’ 2024 draft class—alongside Kaelen Culpepper, Billy Amick, Jaime Ferrer, and Khadim Diaw—whom the organization hopes will advance quickly through the lower minors. A realistic upside for DeBarge is a defensively versatile infielder with enough offensive tools to develop into either a high-end utility player or a lower-impact everyday contributor. He currently projects as a top-15 prospect in the Twins' system, but has the potential to break into the top 10 with a strong 2025 season. View full article

Thanks kindly for saying so. DeBarge is imminent.

Appreciate the kind words and the comments. Thanks for reading.

I'm glad multiple people brought this up. I didn't discuss it in much depth in the article, but in college, the SS opportunity only presented itself in his junior season (he started at 3B). He's always had the arm, but I think that context is helpful. The actions, internal clock will all take some more time at the pro level. I was impressed with what I saw defensively when he debuted, though.

Spring training is around the corner. It’s time to get reacquainted with the Twins' 2024 draft class ahead of their first full season of professional baseball in 2025. First up: the team's first-rounder. Image courtesy of © Brett Rojo-Imagn Images Draft Context, Scouting and Signing Kaelen Culpepper sat in the late first-round range on most industry draft boards throughout the 2024 MLB Draft cycle, and he fits a Twins draft archetype: high-character middle infielders with good athleticism and a track record of college production. Culpepper’s swing is one of beautiful simplicity. He’s upright and quiet. He drifts, rather than kicks into a swing underpinned by good bat speed and rotational acceleration. Despite above-average speed, Culpepper hasn’t been much of a baserunning threat (yet). His arm is plus, and he has good range in the infield. Culpepper should be a lock to stick at shortstop, at least in the medium term, despite starting there for only one of his collegiate seasons. It’s possible he slides over to third base at some point in his career. The Twins were in on Culpepper heavily from the beginning of the year with Kansas State (and well before that, in fact). He finished his junior season with a bang, hitting for the cycle and launching a three-run home run off Hagen Smith at Regionals in the NCAA postseason. The Twins took Culpepper 21st overall (his exact spot on our Consensus Draft Board) and signed him to exactly the slot-prescribed bonus of $3,934,400. 2024 Pro Debut: Strengths and Opportunities 2024 Stats (A and A+): 26 games (112 PA), .242/.330/.394, 3 HR (8 XBH), 11 BB, 15 K, 4 SB Culpepper has a well-rounded skill set at the plate. He doesn’t strike out much (13.4% across two minor-league levels in 2024) and put up strong pitch-by-pitch metrics (82.1% Contact%). He’ll punish mistakes, too, Culpepper didn’t swing and miss at a single pitch in the zone in a nine-game debut at Low-A Fort Myers, which resulted in a .907 OPS and a quick promotion to High-A Cedar Rapids. There are some orange flags in his profile. Despite excellent plate coverage, Culpepper has been exposed a bit by spin, and a 33% chase rate could be problematic as he rises through the ranks of the Twins system. I think there’s a good chance Culpepper can get to solid-average power, to go with an above-average hit tool. While his chase rate is high, the Twins do not shy away from that, and will likely emphasize aggressive swing decisions in key parts of the strike zone to help Culpepper do plenty of damage on contact. Expectations for 2025 I’d expect Culpepper to start 2025 at Cedar Rapids. He had a good start to his pro career, despite slowing down a little at the end of the season. The Twins will be hoping he follows the trail blazed by Luke Keaschall in his first full pro season, in which he made light work of High-A ball on the way to thriving at Double A, before injury cut short his season. In a best-case scenario for Culpepper, a strong 2025 ends in the upper minors and sets the stage for a 2026 debut with the big-league team. View full article

Draft tandem Jeremy Nygaard and JD Cameron team up for a podcast to discuss prospects on their way to the big leagues and the MLB draft, produced by Theo Tollefson. Image courtesy of Thieres Rabelo In episode 67 of Destination: The Show, Jeremy and Jamie work through a busy week of news and notes from the offseason. They start with the Jays signing Max Scherzer, who will provide a boost to the back end of their rotation. How will he perform? Will he end the season in Toronto, or elsewhere? The guys then turn their attention to the Twins who made multiple moves this week after being frozen in carbonite for most of the offseason. Hear their thoughts on the Twins adding Danny Coulombe and Harrison Bader and asking what are the implications for other players on the fringes of the roster. The guys then jump into a round of FrankenProspect. The concept is simple; using the Brewers, Cubs, and Twins farm systems, draft tools to build the best hitter and pitcher possible. They take turns drafting hit, power, defense, arm, and run tools for hitters and fastball, changeup, slider, curveball and control tools for pitchers. Who came out on top? 0:00 Intro 4:00 Housekeeping 5:20 Moves in the MLB 11:00 Twins Sign Coloumbe 16:40 Twins Sign Bader 26:20 Build a Franken-Prospect You can support the show by downloading it from wherever you get your podcasts, including iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoy the content, consider leaving us a five-star rating and review in addition to sharing or retweeting DTS-related content. You can follow us on Twitter @DTS_POD1, @Jeremynygaard, @J_D_Cameron, and @TheodoreTollef1. We’re now on Bluesky @destinationtheshow.bsky.social. You can also find full episodes and clips of our shows on our YouTube page @DestinationTheShow. View full article

"Evaluating catchers is really hard, and I don’t think anyone has gotten it right yet," said Ryan Jeffers, in a recent interview at Twins Daily’s Winter Meltdown. What did he mean? How hard is it to untangle catcher performance? What can we make of what the Twins have asked Jeffers to emphasize in supporting his batterymates? Image courtesy of © John Hefti-Imagn Images We’ll start by digging into how the Twins' approach to positioning behind the plate has changed in the last five years. If you go back to 2021, Ryan Jeffers was 72nd percentile in MLB in framing (stealing strikes for pitchers by subtly bringing the ball back toward the middle of the zone to blur the edges of the strike zone for umpires). Jeffers has since regressed significantly in that metric. In 2023, he fell to the 25th percentile; in 2024, to the 5th percentile. Zoinks! Did Jeffers suddenly lose his ability to frame? Not so fast. There’s a more reasonable explanation. As of 2022, the Twins started asking Jeffers to set up middle-middle, particularly in 0-0 counts. The premise here is setting a clear target for the pitcher within the borders of the strike zone. That might sound counterintuitive. I can hear an annoyed Bert Blyleven on a Twins telecast: "The catcher wanted the pitch down, but he left it middle-middle." But let’s pump the brakes. Why does this ‘targeting’ approach make sense? First, let’s make some distinctions. I’ve led you off the path a bit by presenting framing and targeting as antithetical approaches to catching, they’re not. The Twins still emphasize framing. It’s just more of a challenge when you set up middle-middle. Why? Because your receiving arm is doing more of the heavy lifting. Your body position is removed as part of the disguise for umpires. Let’s dig into why the middle-middle setup may be beneficial, some of the nuances, and the potential pitfalls. The emphasis on a more centralized setup comes from an intertwining of the Twins' pitching and evolving catching philosophies. Get ahead with strike one (that’s the catching part), and be nasty in the strike zone (the pitching part). Leveraged counts are important in baseball. There’s an enormous difference in run expectancy between a 1-0 count and an 0-1 count. If you set up a target down, up, inside, or outside, you’re less likely to get ahead, because your pitcher will be aiming for the edges of the zone. It’s also worth noting that there’s much more complexity to the middle-middle approach than I’ve described so far. Often, a catcher will position their body middle-middle, flash the pitcher's target elsewhere in the strike zone with a glove snap, then bring their mitt back to the center of the plate. To get back to some of the more obvious conclusions. If the middle-middle catcher setup promotes leveraged counts (getting ahead), this should increase strikeouts and decrease walks for pitchers, but conversely, it can increase hard contact (for pitches that hit their target and are left in an undesirable quadrant of the strike zone). At this point, we should dig into miss rate as a relevant stat. There’s a general mythology in baseball (it’s mostly romanticism and nostalgia) that most pitchers' command is better than it really is. Here’s a mind-blowing stat: An average MLB fastball misses its target by 12-13 inches. Wow! Home plate is just 17 inches wide. If you’re wondering about other pitch types, the general range is somewhere from 11-13 inches on average. As stuff and velocity increase, those numbers may also increase, because the mechanical factors that beget high-end spin and speed also tend to exaggerate the magnitude of errors. For me, it added a completely new lens through which to view control and command, but also, how, where, and why a catcher sets up in a particular fashion. If an average miss is roughly 70% the width of home plate (even understanding that some of that miss is vertical, and some horizontal), setting up middle-middle feels more comfortable. Before digging into some numbers for the Twins to contextualize this discussion, I want to plant a seed. Perhaps considering balls and strikes is too simplistic a binary for viewing battery performance. Instead, I’ll offer this modification: strikes, good misses, and bad misses. In this alternate reality of pitch classification, what we think of as ‘balls’ have been further subdivided into two categories; ‘good misses’ that batters cannot make quality contact with, and ‘bad misses’, the type of pitch that ends up earning air miles. Let’s start with some high-level numbers centering on Twins pitching. They ranked first in MLB in Location+ in 2024. That’s a count- and pitch type-adjusted stat that measures how well the pitcher can put the ball in the right place. It’s also worth noting that the Twins were second in MLB in 2024 in pitches thrown over the heart of the plate (27.5%), but 11th in xwOBA for those pitches, which speaks to their ability to be nasty in the zone. Promising, globally, but let’s get a little more specific. Are Twins pitchers throwing more pitches in the middle of the zone since their change in catcher positioning? Simply put: yes. Let’s compare the number and percentage of pitches thrown in the Heart zones (not just in the zone, but well within it, where strikes are certain but damage lurks) in 0-0 counts by the Twins rotation when the setup was more geared toward framing to what they've done since the change. In 2021, Twins starters totaled 647 pitches (6.5% of all first pitches) in the Heart zones in 0-0 counts. In 2024, that number was up to 978 pitches (8.5%). Did this result in more strikes? Of course. In 2021, the Twins rotation accrued 324 called strikes over the heart of the plate in 0-0 counts. Last year, it was up to 444 called strikes. More pitches over the heart of the plate, more called strikes, more pitcher-friendly counts. Seems compelling. Does an increased number of pitches in the Heart zones (particularly in 0-0 counts) result in more contact? Just as predictably, yes. In 2021, pitches thrown by Twins starters in 0-0 counts in the Heart zones resulted in 48 hits, as opposed to 75 hits in 2024, with a more catcher middle-middle setup. (Pablo López was a big part of that problem.) That’s a significant difference. If we can draw a high-level conclusion here, the Twins are walking the tightrope of being more in the zone (and the middle of the zone, especially) early in counts, and living with the tradeoff of significantly more contact by doing so. Before we dig into another layer of data, though, I’ll caveat our discussion thus far as (at best) overly simplistic. The above numbers assume a wholly middle-middle setup in 2024 and the opposite in 2021. That’s obviously not the case, but these data are (at the very least) interesting kernels. We can see how a pitcher performs in different portions of the plate by run value. Those numbers paint a rosy picture for Twins starters. Using Bailey Ober and Joe Ryan (the two starters consistent across both 2021 and 2024), we can see Ryan improved from a zero run value over the heart of the plate in 2021, to +2 runs in 2024. For Ober, it was even more compelling, increasing from +5 runs over the heart of the plate to +9. That’s a 6-run improvement over two pitchers, and I’d posit that the Twins' focus is on scaling improvement (by as many pitchers as possible) as opposed to focusing on catcher performance. Jeffers's framing has regressed to the effect of about 10 lost runs from 2021 to 2024, but we’ve seen 60% of that deficit made up by the improved performances of Ober and Ryan in the strike zone. The challenge that Jeffers alluded to (evaluating catcher performance) is a moving target, because we’re trying to isolate one aspect of a symbiotic relationship, each of the elements of which can’t exist or thrive without the other. Consider the myriad variables we haven’t discussed: how catcher positioning might vary based on pitch type (movement and velocity); the offensive tendencies of the batter; the list is endless. It’s impossible to pick apart the impact of each side of the battery. What we can see, though, is that the Twins and other organizations are getting more value (in the form of leveraged counts) from middle-middle catcher positioning than they're losing; the approach is advantageous to the battery in certain counts and situations. While I don’t feel confident we can be perfectly certain that the setup is leading to better misses from pitchers, I think we can infer that teams are paying attention to the quality of misses from their pitching staffs. View full article

Draft tandem Jeremy Nygaard and JD Cameron team up for a podcast to discuss prospects on their way to the big leagues and the MLB draft, produced by Theo Tollefson. Image courtesy of Thieres Rabelo In episode 66 of Destination: The Show, Jeremy and Jamie work through news and notes from the offseason. They start by digging into rumors that the Twins were interested in trading with the Padres for Dylan Cease, before discussing whether an addition to a strong rotation feels likely. Next they dig into Charlee Soto, fresh off being minted as a new Top 100 prospect by Kiley McDaniel. The guys then dig into the Cubs acquisition of Ryan Pressly, and whether they should pursue another starter, specifically Michael King. The guys then banter over dueling top ten Cubs prospect lists. Who do they have as number one on their list? Who rounds out the back half of the top ten after the top prospects are ranked? Finally, they end with a mailbag question on the kickoff of the college baseball season. 0:00 Intro 2:31 Twins Notes 17:10 Cubs Notes 22:45 Cubs Top 10 26:00 Cubs #2 Prospect 30:35 A Disagreement at #3 41:37 Sharing the rest of our top 10s 1:01:00 Listener Questions You can support the show by downloading it from wherever you get your podcasts, including iTunes and Spotify. If you enjoy the content, consider leaving us a five-star rating and review in addition to sharing or retweeting DTS-related content. You can follow us on Twitter @DTS_POD1, @Jeremynygaard, @J_D_Cameron, and @TheodoreTollef1. We’re now on Bluesky @destinationtheshow.bsky.social. You can also find full episodes and clips of our shows on our YouTube page @DestinationTheShow. View full article