Five Compelling Numbers For Five NL East Prospects
"One of the best hitting catchers in the minors"
Last week was a busy one for the country and also fortunately a busy week over at Baseball America if you, like me, are exhausted with politics.
One of the many great things about baseball is that there’s truly no offseason.
We started rolling out our updated Top 10 prospect lists for the league and started with the National League East. We’re rolling out one team each business day from here on out until all 30 orgs are down. As of this writing, we’ve got the Braves, Marlins, Mets, Phillies and Nationals up and live on the site, with corresponding chats each day the rankings drop.
I write the Braves handbook chapter each year so that list and chat was done by yours truly, and I’m also going to pinch hit for Savannah McCann on our Nationals chat that starts today at 2 p.m. ET if that’s something you are interested in.
Today in the newsletter I wanted to look into five fun numbers for five prospects on these updated NL East Top 10s. Let’s get into it:
Travis Sykora, RHP, Nationals — 28.1%
This year Sykora managed a 28.1% swinging strike rate on his changeup. Among all 21 pitchers ranked on these NL East top 10s, that swinging strike rate is the best mark of any pitch that was thrown at least 15 times. Sykora had an excellent 2024 season—his first as a professional—posting a 2.33 ERA over 20 starts and 86 innings with Low-A Fredericksburg with a 39.2% strikeout rate and 8.2% walk rate.
His 31% K-BB% was good for the best mark among all pitchers age 20 or younger with at least 50 innings this season. I had some skepticism about Sykora coming out of the draft because he was an extremely young hard thrower and there’s no shortage of busts that come from that flamethrowing prep righthander demographic. He’s been a better pitcher with more advanced secondaries than I would have expected already, and he’s now one of the most interesting pitching prospects in the game.
Justin Crawford, OF, Phillies — 60.9%
Crawford was an impressive performer this year between High-A Jersey Shore and Double-A Reading. He slashed .313/.360/.444 with nine home runs, 25 doubles and 42 stolen bases. However, he did so while also posting a 60.9% groundball rate—the sixth-highest groundball rate among qualified minor league hitters.
Josh Norris, who writes our Phillies prospects, initially brought this up when he was finalizing the list and talking it over with our staff and made the point that there are few everyday regulars who have produced a groundball rate this high in their minor league careers. Here are the following groundball rates for Crawford at each stint of his pro career so far:
2022 FCL: 56.7%
2022 Low-A: 80.0%
2023 Low-A: 68.5%
2023 High-A: 74.5%
2024 High-A: 60.6%
2024: Double-A: 61.3%
Crawford has surprising pop for a player of his profile, but so far he’s not been able to fully take advantage of that because he hits some many of his balls on the ground and to the opposite field. I’m not sure he needs to be an elevate and celebrate sort of hitter to be productive, but I am skeptical that his extreme groundball tendencies and aggressive approach in the box—he had a 55.3% swing rate and 35.7% chase rate—will lead to success in the majors. I’m hoping he’ll improve on one or both of these areas in 2025.
Agustin Ramirez, C, Marlins — 107.9 mph
Among each of the hitters ranked on our NL East Top 10s, Ramirez led the pack with a 107.9 mph 90th-percentile exit velocity—ahead of players like Dylan Crews (106.2 mph), Gabriel Rincones Jr. (107.1 mph), Drake Baldwin (105.9 mph) and Ryan Clifford (105.5 mph).
He homered 25 times and doubled 26 times this season between Double-A and Triple-A and Austin Yamada, who wrote our Marlins list, called him “one of the best hitting catchers in the minors” and slapped a 55 on his hit and power tools. Those are loud tools generally, but especially for a player who has a chance to stick at behind the plate with some improvement.
I tend to be further behind on the international prospects than the draftees since I’m just more familiar with the player pool, and I admit I have been sleeping a bit too much on Ramirez. Consider me wide awake.
Nolan McLean, RHP, Mets — 130
We’ve got internal stuff+ metrics are Baseball America and McLean’s 130 stuff+ score on his slider was the best mark of any individual pitch among NL East arms with data. That big slider grade helped him rank second (along with Christian Scott, Thomas White and AJ Smith-Shawver) among NL East arms with a normalized overall stuff+ mark of 113—behind only Phillies righthander Moises Chace (119).
McLean had a tremendous ability to spin the baseball going back to his amateur days and in 2024 he threw the slider at 85.1 mph on average with more than 2,900 rpm spin on average and nearly 14 inches of glove-side movement on average. Despite the power, spin and shape of the pitch he managed just a 13.1% swinging strike rate with the slider in 2024. That’s a lower rate than I would have expected given the pitch data, and would rank towards the bottom of NL East sliders.
Halfway through the season McLean dropped hitting (finally) and began to focus on pitching full-time. I’m fairly bullish on the arm talent here and think he can make some real strides now that he’s focused on pitching exclusively.
Owen Murphy, RHP, Braves — 19.6
Murphy was excellent in his first seven starts before going down with injury this season. He threw 41 innings with High-A Rome, posted a 1.54 ERA and struck out 38.7% of batters faced while walking just 7.7%. His 31% K-BB% tied Sykora’s for the best mark among 20-and-younger pitchers though he did so with about half the workload.
Murphy is a unique profile because he averages just 90-92 mph with his fastball and tops out at 94. That’s below-average velocity from a righthander, but it also might be one of the better fastballs in Atlanta’s system. If you wanted to argue it was the best fastball in the system I wouldn’t fight you on it. That’s because the pitch averaged 19.6 inches of induced vertical break—more riding life than any other top-10 NL East pitcher.
He generated a 14.6% swinging strike rate with the fastball, which was the third-best mark of this group of pitchers behind only Moises Chace (17.1%) and Travis Sykora (16.0%)—both of whom average 94-95 mph with their fastballs. Murphy has the slowest fastball on average of this group of players but it’s close to ideal in terms of shape that allows him to miss bats. He throws from a lower-than-average release height, he has a flat vertical approach angle (-4.31), he has a ton of spin (2505 rpm) and he also lands the pitch for strikes more than 70% of the time.
It’s Joe Ryan-esque.
In addition to the Braves top 10 list dropping on the site this week I have a few new podcast episodes. The first, with Ben Badler, was episode 102 of the Future Projection Podcast where we talked about the issue of age falsification in the international market and then dove into NL East Organization overviews. The second, with Peter Flaherty, as a draft podcast where we reviewed the 2024 draft classes of the AL Central.
A few other pieces I’ll point you to this week:
Peter Flaherty writes about 10 impact freshmen in college baseball for the 2025 season.
Dylan White has a few pieces digging into minor league data. The first is a Hit+ leaderboard by age and the second is a Stuff+ leaderboard by age.
Ben Badler has more context and detail about MLB’s increased investigations into age fraud among Latin American prospects.
JJ Cooper looks into the best rule 5 draft picks of the century.
Thanks for reading everyone. Hope you have a great weekend.