I wanna say he was injured early in the season, and that along with not being near Rule 5 eligibility may be why he hasn’t been called up.
Got to root for Jordan Lyles and the Rangers vs Mike F#cking Fiers and the A's tonight. At least its a Ranger home game where they have managed a .500 record. Go (cough) Rangers!
While all other regular-season records shouldn't count, if the Rangers are the worst hitting team ever....it needs to be recorded on a plaque made from petrified crap displayed in front of the barn that they are calling a stadium.
Apparently Collin Barber was also added to the 60 player pool. I think he is the highest ceiling position player prospect in Houston’s system.
According to Fangraphs Eric Longenhagen, there will be no Arizona Fall League this year, but there may be an actual competitive Instructional League where teams play each other for 6 weeks. So aside from the guys getting time at the alternate site and in the big leagues, only ~30 prospects will play competitive ball this year (not counting guys in independent or informal leagues). This would be my hopeful instructional league roster: C: Lee, Perry, CJ Stubbs IF: Matijevic, Kessinger, Pena, Nova, J Perez, L Santana OF: Barber, Barefoot, McKenna, De La Cruz SP: H Brown, Henley, Solis, Rivera, Solomon, Ivey, Macuare, Gusto RP: T Brown, Jairo Lopez, DeJuneas, N Hernandez
@Snake Diggit any info on Cuban infield prospect Narbe Cruz who signed with the Astros? I’ve heard 60 arm, 60 power, 6’3 185 lbs. sounds intriguing
Not a ton of info out there. Only hit 1 HR in his last season in Cuba so I doubt he’s got 60 power, especially considering that as a middle infield prospect he only signed for $218k. Of course there’s a wildcard aspect to all Cuban teenagers, and $218k isn’t nothing, so he will be worth tracking.
If that is real, then he must either have low grades on his hit, speed, and glove tools, or Houston got a steal. SS prospects with big arms and power get big money unless they can’t hit or field.
Joe we are saying the same thing. The owners did not want to live up to their agreement, they really did not want to play because they did not want to pay the players.
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/keeping-up-with-the-al-wests-prospects/ That writer is more down on Javier than I am. I don’t think anybody expected him to strike out 10+ hitters per 9 like he was in the minors, and 8.44k/9 is plenty good. And the fact that he’s limited runs so well despite a bloated HR rate is a good sign to me. I am really excited about him and can’t wait to see what he does over a full/normal season next year. They are higher on Luis Garcia. The article didn’t mention the other rookie arms who have impressed in the bullpen (Taylor, Paredes, Scrubb, Perez). And they didn’t highlight the young bats who have pretty much busted this year (Toro, Straw, Stubbs, Jones). I am especially disappointed in Toro, as his projections were pretty good. I was really hoping he or Jones would emerge this season as a capable everyday bat to soften the blow of potentially losing Springer, Brantley, and Gurriel. But none of those guys have enough PA to write-off yet; hopefully they will give Toro an extended audition next year where he can get 200+ PA to determine if he’s a keeper or not.
With Javier, his first inning (against what should always be the best hitters) are absurd. 26 PA, 10 K's and 2 baserunners. When you add that to his 3 innings of relief work you get 38 PA, 16 K's and 4 baserunners. I'm not writing off him as potentially being a starter by any means, but he could be the type of guy where the question of decent starter versus dominant reliever comes into play. He's a flyball pitcher, and he seems to particularly vulnerable to fatigue, a drop in velocity effects his spin and so you start to get a lot of teed up pitches. His HR/flyball ratio is high, but it's not absurdly high and I think that bad luck is offset by an extremely low BABIP to this point to the point that both his SIERA and xFIP are also poor. I'm sure the Astros will give him an extended look in the rotation next season to see if he can take the next steps (as they obviously should), but if I'm being honest what I see right now is a guy whose most dangerous weapon (an oddly deceptive fastball) tends to become less deceptive as the game goes on. On a positive note, he will almost certainly be in the pen during this postseason, and he looks like he could be an absolutely dominant weapon there.
This year, without being able to stretch out as a starter..... Javier has given up 27 hits in 45 innings. Javier has a WHIP of .95 He has 42 K/44 innings He has a 2.75 K/BB split Almost all of his problems are long ball related. Javier has given up 16 runs this season and 12 of them were on home runs. He has an era of of .85 with homers taken out of the equation and an overall era of 3.22 He has a WAR of 1.2 in only 44 innings. If you go look at his game logs, he has been a starter in 8 games and has only given up more than 3 runs once during that time (when A's bombed him for 5 runs)..... He certainly has things to work on, he needs to refine his control more to cut down on home runs, and this season he has had issues going deep in games, which hasn't been such a problem in the past. He also could use some work on his change up. If anything I think that this season has been a positive for Javier........ his FIP is very high, but he is clearly hard to make consistent contact off of.
On Javier, he's striking out over 11 batters/9 in 1st 2 innings. I completely expected him to strike out more than 10K/9...though I expected him to have walk more as he would try to get more batters to chase. Like Nook said, he wasn't stretched out this season before Dusty had him averaging 5 1/3 innings per game (that is above average for MLB starters). While I think Javier will fit in nicely as a MoR or BoR starter, his chance at being an actual ace once stretched out is not 0.
Javier is odd in that he has that high HR/FB rate but his major strength since coming up has been oriented towards contact management more so than swing/miss stuff. His slider particularly has been poor at generating whiffs but it has been exceptionally difficult to square up by hitters. It's also interesting that he has been as successful as he's been with basically two pitches.
Javier is a very rare pitcher, because he is one of those pitchers that the combo of his pitchers are better than the value of each of his pitches. All of his pitches play really well off of one another, and it makes it hard to differentiate them until late in the box. Some guys are guessing right, and there have been a few that have read them well out of his hand.... however he causes a lot of weak contact. He has primarily been a two pitch pitcher with the Astros, but that isn't what he was last year and that isn't what they anticipate him to be going forward. This year he has thrown some change ups and almost no curve balls. Last year he was throwing the change up one or twice an inning and had mixed in a lot more curve balls. The curve ball makes the slider a lot more nasty because they are hard to differentiate. Here are some numbers to consider...... so this year Javier has thrown his slider and curve ball a combined 230 times this season..... he has give up 5 total hits and 4 of those have been singles.... FWIW his curve ball has even more movement than his slider, it is just harder for him to get mastery of. His curve has almost a spin rate of 3,000 the last I checked. If anything, his struggle has been that his change up has been terrible, so he isn't throwing it much. Last year at some points he only had a 2-3 MPH difference between his fastball and change up as he would take something off his fastball some innings and then come out the next inning throwing 4-5 mph harder. Right now he is too fastball dependent and that is part of the home run issue. He really last year used his slider and curve to set up his fastball and this year hasn't had the confidence to mix it up more. He also was working on a cut fast ball last year that I thought could be pretty nasty. Javier is a crafty guy, that isn't a junk ball pitcher like some try to label him, but he is someone that really has a strong feel for pitching.... he just needs better control of his pitches and confidence. If you told me when he was called up that he would be throwing his fastball 66% of the time and his slider nearly 30%, I would have said he would get crushed.
Fall league officially cancelled. BA shared some details on instructs in Arizona, schedule is set and teams will play varying numbers of games from like 15 to 40. Giants fielding 2 instructs teams. No details on the Florida instructs. Hopefully Houston gets closer to 40 games than 15, and hopefully they publish stats.