Five Compelling Numbers For Five NL Central Prospects
"The physical look of a man among boys"
This week we continued our rollout of updated Top 10 prospect lists with the NL Central. You can find updated reports and rankings for the Cubs, Reds, Brewers, Pirates and Cardinals all live on the site now with writer chats for each org as well.
Many of you seemed to like last week’s newsletter where I dug into some fun numbers for five players on each team in the NL East, so I’m going to replicate that again this week and for each division moving forward.
Before I get into that, some thoughts on this week’s mass exodus from Twitter and my plans moving forward with social media.
There’s been no shortage of post-election commentary1 in the last few days, with much of it focused on how we should be using social media, love and hate relationships with Twitter and the fact that more and more people seem to be moving to the latest hyped Twitter clone, Bluesky.
The degradation of Twitter isn’t new. It’s been happening for years. It’s been happening since long before Elon bought the site. It was one of the main reasons I started this newsletter back in January of this year.
I’m still on Twitter. I also created a Bluesky account this week. I don’t expect I’ll focus much time or energy on either platform, however, and instead put more of my attention into actually producing work I’m proud of for Baseball America and in this newsletter.
There was a time when being on social media was fun and exciting and informative for all things baseball. I’ve grown increasingly disillusioned with the project over the last few years. There’s a lot of hope that Bluesky will be some grand Twitter replacement—and that might well be the case—but to me it feels like more of the same but with different branding and a feed that hasn’t (yet) succumbed to a mind-rotting algorithm.
I’ll continue sharing links to my work and those of my colleagues at BA on both sites for now, but this newsletter will remain the best place to keep up with what I’m doing if you care about that. If you’ve got strong thoughts on this stuff, let me know. I’d be curious to hear where you guys are all at.
Now, on to the fun stuff.
Eric Bitonti, 3B/1B, Brewers — .437
Bitonti has some outlier traits and hits the ball exceptionally hard for someone who played his 2024 season at age 18. Ben Badler gave him a 70-grade future power in his updated report this week and even before he was drafted scouts were projecting double-plus raw power for him.
While there are some things he’ll still need to clean up to fully maximize that power in games—the swing can get overly steep, the outer third of the plate can be exposed, he struck out at a 27.9% clip in rookie ball and Low-A—he produced an insane .437 xwOBAcon2 this year. That was the best of any hitter in the NL Central by a decent margin: Cardinals catcher Jimmy Crooks was second at .403 and Cubs third baseman Cam Smith (who we’ll talk about shortly) was third at .397.
Among 1,081 players with at least 300 plate appearances in the minors this year Bitonti’s xwOBAcon was good for 12th-best. And of the players ahead of Bitonti, all but one (Deyvison De Los Santos) were more than 23 years old this season.
Sal Stewart, 3B/2B, Reds — 126
Dylan White has created a blended offensive metric called Hit+ that folds in various batted ball metrics like contact rate, 90th percentile EV, chase rate, barrel rate and xwOBAcon in an attempt to give us a single all-encompassing offensive number where 100 is average. Stewart’s 126 Hit+ metric was the second-best of the division, behind only Mike Boeve (135 Hit+) who is two years older.
He’s an extremely well rounded hitter who just put up a .279/.391/.454 line with High-A Dayton, with eight home runs, 23 doubles, a 14.8% walk rate and 16.9% strikeout rate. He’s been above-average in terms of contact, exit velocity and swing decisions (although only marginally so in this last category) and I’m hopeful he’ll start to add more in-game power as he ages. He’ll need to given a light defensive profile, but there’s a great hitting pure-hitting foundation here.
Thomas Harrington, RHP, Pirates — 72.7%
Harrington’s 72.7% strike rate with his four-seam fastball was the best rate of any NL Central pitcher among samples with 200+ pitches. That’s above both fastball variants of Reds RHP Rhett Lowder (72.6% four-seam, 72.5% two-seam) and other high-quality strike-throwers like Michael McGreevy (69.7% two-seam) and Brandon Birdsell (68.2% four-seam).
He’s now thrown back-to-back pro seasons with more than 100 innings each year and owns a career 6.1% walk rate. In 2024 specifically, Harrington pitched in Double-A and Triple-A and walked just 4.1% of batters he faced. That mark was good for fifth-best among all minor leaguers with at least 100 innings. We gave him a 70 for his control grade. In last year’s prospect handbook we handed out just three 70s in this category for pitchers. He’s now one of the best command pitchers in the minors.
Cam Smith, 3B, Cubs — 10.7%
Smith made a huge leap in his contact and approach during the 2023 Cape Cod League summer and hasn’t looked back since. He cut his strikeout rate from 28.7% to 14.9% in his second year with FSU, got drafted 14th overall and then performed as perhaps the most impressive draftee in his pro debut:
.313/.396/.609, 7 HR, 4 3B, 5 2B, 11.2 BB%, 17.9 K%
One scout I talked to about Smith before the draft mentioned that he had concerns about the way Smith was hitting with his new approach, specifically citing a “manufactured, opposite-field oriented approach” without a lot of looseness. Smith had an all-fields results his pro debut with a well-distributed batted ball profile:
Pull% — 31.3%
Center% — 37.5%
Oppo% — 31.3%
I’m not sure this is a bad thing, but I did notice his AirPull% was just 10.7%, which was the lowest mark of any NL Central hitter we have data for behind middle infielders like JJ Wetherholt (13.8%), Nick Yorke (14.9%) and Sammy Stafura (18.8%).
My point here is I think even with Smith homering seven times in 32 games, he might have some room to improve his in-game power by getting the ball in the air a bit more often to his pull side. Saying that is easier than doing it, however, and perhaps by attempting it he’d slide back into the high strikeout hitter he was as a freshman at FSU. He’s a fascinating hitter.
Quinn Mathews, LHP, Cardinals — 25.4%
Much of the talk surrounding Mathews’ excellent 2024 season revolved around his increased fastball velocity. For good reason. It was a large part of what helped him strike out 35.4% of the batters he faced across four different levels and win our Minor League Pitcher of the Year award.
Still, it’s nice to know his calling card changeup is just as dominant (or more so) than ever. Back before the 2023 draft when Mathews threw a low-90s fastball we gave him a plus changeup—the only tool on his scouting report that was better than average. Geoff Pontes, who does our Cardinals list, as bumped that pitch up to a 65 in his update today.
Mathews used the pitch to generate a 25.4% swinging strike rate this year. That rate was good for fourth-best among all 89 pitches we have data for in the division, and if you just look at 200+ pitches, it was tops. Our internal Stuff+ metric has it as the best changeup of the group as well. He used it about 20% of the time against righthanded hitters this season and they managed a whopping .117/.117/.267 line against it.
Much of my time this week was spent writing reports on Guardians prospects. I’m tackling that handbook chapter this year for the first time. Previously that was the responsibility of Teddy Cahill, who left BA earlier this year to get into law. I have big shoes to fill.
It’s been a fun system to dive into with plenty of hitters and international prospects to report and write on—something the Braves haven’t supplied much of in the last few seasons.
I wrote a short piece on a minor Braves-A’s trade where the two orgs flipped glove-first shortstop Nick Allen for minor league flamethrower and reliever Jared Johnson.
We’ve also continued our weekly podcast cadence on both fronts. Ben Badler and I broke down NL Central organizations and talked a lot about Roki Sasaki on Episode 103 of the Future Projection Podcast. Peter Flaherty and I continued our draft review series with the AL West—spoiler alert, we continue to like Nick Kurtz quite a bit.
Thanks for reading and hope you have a great weekend.
This link to Sam Harris’s piece had one of the most compelling reasons to get off Twitter I’ve seen so far. “And perhaps a note to journalists, and scientists, and writers, and people with actual reputations to protect and lives to live: none of this gets any better until you all decide to leave X. You know it's a cesspool. You know it's harming our society. Most of you know it's harming your lives, personally. By merely being there, and making it seem like everyone has to be there because everyone is there, you are helping to build the tool that is making fact-based conversation impossible. Our society is being riven by lies. And social media, and X in particular, is largely responsible for this.” My FOMO, the sunk cost fallacy and an obligation to be there for work has prevented me from hitting the delete account button for now.
xwOBAcon stands for “expected weighted on-base average on contact” and looks exclusively at how productive a hitter is on his balls in play based on launch angles and exit velocities.