NEWSLETTER
Great news for all ye lovers of minor league baseball and prospect play: the Triple-A season has been extended! Remember how the Triple-A season was supposed to start earlier than the other minor league seasons this year, but then was bumped back at the last minute for COVID-related reasons? Well, the league announced the addition of 10 games to the back-end of the schedule, which will take the Triple-A season into October this year (that’s wild). The Iowa Cubs now wrap on October 3, and you can see the details for the announcement here. The 10 games are part of a special postseason tournament situation.
The added games are assuredly an extremely welcome development for both the Triple-A teams that need the added revenue, as well as MLB organizations that won’t mind the extra game action for prospects. It’s all the more plausible now that breakout Double-A prospects could have a chance to get a taste of Triple-A before the season ends, especially since the Tennessee Smokies schedule ends on September 19.
Elsewhere around the Cubs farm …
⇒ Rough news for outfield prospect Cole Roederer, who has been out for a while, and now we know why: he reportedly had an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery. His season is over, and he’s expected to be back in time for 2022. Tough to lose most of the developmental year, especially after 2020. Still only 21, it’s not as if Roederer can’t more or less stay on track by reaching Double-A at some point next year, but he’ll have played barely 160 pro games by the time he starts his fourth full season in the system. Hopefully the rehab goes well, and he’s ready to roll next year.
⇒ With a shortened draft (now 20 rounds instead of 40) and a smaller farm system (just four teams above rookie ball, and 180 total players in the system), I think it made a lot of sense that the Cubs took particularly big swings on Day Three of the draft. Take a bunch of prep players who you have high on your board, even if it’s going to be tough to sign them. Inevitably, SOME of them will decide by August that they want to go pro, and you’re also likely to sign some undrafted free agents in this environment, too. I’m not so sure how much you miss out on – in the aggregate – by taking the swings. You can see in Bryan’s great write-up yesterday that there were clearly a lot of big chances taken by the Cubs on Day Three. I was pleased when considering all the factors.
⇒ THAT SAID, you certainly would’ve expected the most-likely-to-land swings to come in the early rounds of Day Three, since the Cubs would’ve known approximately how much bonus pool space they would have to work with after day two, and also could have had time to put out the feelers to know if they were going to be able to sign the guys they took in rounds 11 and 12. But it turns out that those picks – Gage Ziehl, a Miami commit; Teo Banks, a Tulane commit – very quickly announced after the draft that they were still fully committed to going to college. In normal years, you almost never don’t sign your 11th/12th rounders, and it would seem doubly odd when there are just 20 rounds to see the Cubs whiff on both of those picks.
⇒ So the question is: are one or both of these guys just preserving leverage, since they know they are in the catbird seat to try to get as much of the Cubs’ leftover bonus pool as possible? Or were they super firm on going to college from the jump, and the Cubs simply never should’ve picked them? I tend to think it is still very possible that the Cubs sign at least one of these two, whose advisors rightly know that there’s no value at this moment in saying they’re possibly going to sign. The Cubs can offer up to $125,000 without it counting against the pool, and maybe these guys already know that’s not enough to sway them. So they say they are firmly committed to college, and then it’s up to the Cubs to wrap up their first ten rounds and still have a lot available to put on top of the 125K. Let’s just see how the bonus pool signings play out, because I find that we get surprised by some of the over-slots every year. (The Cubs went way under slot with a lot of their picks after the 4th round, so it’s easy to point to the savings, but some of the savings there might be going to third round prep Drew Gray, for one example, and even 4th rounder Christian Franklin might require solidly over-slot.)
⇒ Reliever Ben Leeper has now been at Triple-A Iowa for a month and a week … still waiting for him to give up his first hit there. The 2020 undrafted free agent signing is striking out almost half the hitters he faces, and is quite obviously on the radar for 2022, if not later this year. The only reason you wouldn’t necessarily want to call him up this year is to manage his development/pitch-stress in a non-competitive year, and also because once he’s up, then he requires a 40-man roster spot for the entire offseason. The flip-side, though, is that when a guy just keeps forcing the issue with his performance, sometimes it’s worth dealing with everything else so that you can show the rest of the system: hey, when you succeed here, you come up, period. It’s also possible that getting Leeper some big league experience this year – exposing him to big league hitters and their adjustments and talent – could serve his development better in the offseason.
⇒ Loved the big night from Ed Howard – two singles and a homer – and while the adjustment process continues, he’s been on a really good stretch lately. Until 15 days ago, Howard was hitting just .158/.229/.224 with a 41.0% K rate and a 33 wRC+. We knew it was going to be a really tough adjustment for him given the competition and his last playing regularly as a junior in high school, but it was really quite rough. Well, although the season numbers are still quite bad, look how much they’ve jumped thanks to 15 good days: .220/.264/.314, 62 wRC+, 34.4% K rate. That’s what you need to see. Improvement as he gets exposure. (And everyone who sees him still says the glove is more or less already big-league-ready, which is nuts when you think about the fact that he’s a 19-year-old with mostly only high school experience.)
⇒ And finally … THE GOOD BOY IS BACK:
He’s back.
The good boy returns to the dugout on Sunday, July 18; will officially be added to the 2021 roster. Welcome home, Slider! pic.twitter.com/B5FuMLeJ2U
— Myrtle Beach Pelicans (@Pelicanbaseball) July 14, 2021
