When was your last sitcom-style spit-take?
I’m not sure I’ve ever done the full expulsion. It’s more like gagging on the liquid as I try to keep it in, which is what happened last night when Tony Gonsolin tried to throw a fastball higher-than-high against Reds SS Elly De La Cruz, who simply smoked a 112 mph line drive into right center on a pitch about ten inches above the strike zone. I’ve seen him do stuff like that before, but the reason it surprised me here was the previous pitch. Gonsolin features one of the game’s best splitters, and he made Elly look bad on it in this at bat. De La Cruz had every right to be flummoxed by the ultra-high heater, but it didn’t bother him at all. Even way up out of the strike zone, it was the only real pitch to hit he saw all night from a Dodgers staff that wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.
I remember that nobody threw strikes to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. when he first came up, but this felt different than that somehow, probably because Elly is so locked in right now that he just laughs off the pitches that aren’t in his zone. It’s tough to say Gonsolin looked scared because he’s a grown man making a lot of money to play a game, but he kinda looked scared of the Reds’ new cleanup hitter, which leads me to my next thought.
I know I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but how can it be that a Triple-A player jumps right into the cleanup spot if he was somehow unprepared to play major league baseball just last week? It’s maddening. I was listening to a popular fantasy baseball podcast last week when an analyst said he expected Elly to spend all season in Triple-A. Might get a September look. We have been trained to see gifted hitters dominating Triple-A and just say “meh, they probably won’t play him,” and we’re going to have to rewire that under the new collective bargaining agreement. I’ll give that podcaster credit: it did feel like the Reds would rather not do this, “this” meaning contend in 2023 and promote their best players to give them their best chance. It took them two full months to realize they have a shot, or maybe just that they no longer have the option of dragging their feet and playing Kevin Newman atop the lineup every day.
And while we’re all delighted to finally see Elly De La Cruz and Andrew Abbott at the highest level, Kevin Newman went 0-for-5 as the starting first baseman. Tyler Stephenson played DH while Luke Maile caught, and Christian Encarnacion-Strand went 3-for-4 in Triple-A with his 15th home run of the season. If you’ve been reading this space on the regular, you can probably tell that part of me would love to root for the Reds in the NL Central, but the part of me that tracks their roster management song and dance believes they don’t deserve to win. The day C E-S gets promoted, he’ll probably bat cleanup, and Elly will bat third. And we’re all just supposed to fit that into our brains and be excited that they’re not completely tanking to artificially suppress the income of their young employees.
Elsewhere in slow-motion roster management, the Royals seem to have finally decided Bobby Witt Jr. and his .271 on base percentage do not fit the profile of a lead-off hitter. Only took them 200-plus games. Nick Pratto got the chance on Monday. Maikel Garcia led off Tuesday. I think the offense could look better in a hurry with Witt off the top. It’s all relative, of course, but if anyone cared to try it, this team could go RLRLRLRLS and look pretty interesting one-through-nine:
SS Garcia (R)
DH Pratto (L)
C Perez (R)
1B Vinnie P (L)
3B Witt (R)
RF Melendez (L)
RF Olivares (R)
2B Massey (L)
CF Waters (S)
One nice thing about this group is it offers flexibility. Pratto can fake outfield and plays a great first base. Witt and Garcia are both good shortstops. Garcia could play third or second. Melendez could catch, though he hasn’t done that since April 30.
One awful thing about this group is the pitching staff they play behind. These kids are going to lose a lot of games, and I think that’s hard to navigate when it comes to player development. Success is contagious and empowering. Failure can be the same, I suppose, but too much failure, and the contagion outweighs the motivation. I suspect it’ll have no impact on a player like Sal Perez, but the rest of this team knows only losing, and it’s hard to see their path back to victory. LHP Noah Cameron is having a good age-23 season and has pitched well since his promotion to Double-A. Luinder Avila is doing fine at 21 in High-A but has a long way to go, command-wise. Alec Marsh has a 1.52 WHIP in Double-A. Asa Lacy hasn’t pitched this year.
LHP Frank Mozzicato was the developmental highlight of this season before he collided with a teammate during batting practice. He’ll miss about a month with an undisclosed injury but was carrying a 2.14 ERA through 46.1 innings up to that point.
RHP Ben Kudrna offers nice upside but has a 1.51 WHIP in Low-A as a 20-year-old. He’s been excellent over his last six starts (1.16 ERA), but even then he has a 1.32 WHIP thanks to 13 walks. Some of that should be chalked up to passive hitters overwhelmed by his stuff, so I’m hoping the team pushes him to High-A for this season’s second half to see how he fares against better bats. They need help in a hurry. Pushing kids beyond their capacity isn’t going to do the trick, but their timelines are misaligned right now on the hitting and pitching sides, and it’s not for lack of prospect capital invested. If they can get anything at all out of Lacy, that’s a win at this point, even if he’s just a Carlos Hernandez shaped relief piece. Their famous all-pitching draft to kick off the rebuild has netted them two rotation pieces in Brady Singer and Daniel Lynch. They’ve never been good at the same time, and they were both fine in their last time out, so maybe that’s a start.
Brewers RHP Jacob Misiorowksi was promoted to High-A this week after 11 total starts in Low-A. I think it’s fair if a bit optimistic to expect another ten or so in High-A with a late-season look at Double-A, if his health holds up all year. They’ve been careful with his innings. He’s gone more than four just once, and that was a five-inning no-hitter on May 25.
Athletics RHP Mason Miller has begun a throwing program. Feels a bit deGromian in that he’s going to deal with this elbow injury by waiting a little bit and then throwing, but hey, the human body is a mysterious mechanism. Maybe it’ll work.
I’ve been checking in on Rangers 1B Abimelec Ortiz every day for a couple weeks now, and he just keeps hitting. He’s up to five home runs in ten High-A games, posting a 203 wRC+ at the level after a 173 in Low-A. He’s not especially young for it at 21, and Hickory is a hitter-friendly setting, to put it mildly, but it’s impossible to ignore outcomes like these. A six-foot, corner-only bat, Ortiz is unlikely to generate much dynasty hype anytime soon, so you can probably monitor him from afar in shallow leagues, but I’ll be trying to find some room for him this weekend in a league that rosters about 200 minor leaguers.
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