Page 2 - Erick Pena News Today

Happy International Signings Week!

The Royals play Santa for a Day.

But the Royals made a move before it, so don’t say they’ve never given you anything.

The Los Angeles Dodgers have not missed the postseason since 2012 and have won three National League pennants and a World Series in that time frame. Conversely, the Seattle Mariners are fighting to avoid missing the playoffs for the 20th consecutive season. What about some of the other franchises yearning for October baseball?  Lets take a look at some of the longest playoff droughts in MLB and when they might end. These timelines were devised through an assessment of current MLB rosters and ...

70 How much contact does Bobby Witt Jr. need to make to be a star? Even with a raucous 2021 spring performance on his ledger, there are reasonable concerns among pro scouts who saw him about how often he’s going to swing and miss. None of this is new. Witt swung and missed a lot during his showcase summer but his subsequent fall and spring were strong enough to make him the second overall pick of the 2019 draft class, and he’s the type of talent who’d be a threat to go first in most draft...

Lesky’s Notes: The Royals are passing every test so far Share this story Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports I was skeptical of the Royals being contenders this season before things got started and even during spring training when they were playing so well. I thought they’d be competitive. I thought they’d at least not be completely out of it by the start of May, which would be a nice change after the last couple full seasons. And I thought they had a chance to outlast some teams because of their...

April 9, 2021 Join me and Kevin Goldstein this afternoon at 1:00 PM PT/4:00 PM ET for another Prospect Film Session live on the FanGraphs homepage, or our Twitch channel. We’ll be discussing my looks at the unique co-op scrimmages going on in Arizona and the prospects therein, including Jarred Kelenic, Erick Pena, Davis Wendzel, Nick Loftin, the prospects I wrote about here, and more. Players who participated in spring training but didn’t make the big league team and weren’t placed on t...

Under-the-radar Royals prospects Share this story Anderson Paulino MLB Pipeline recently released their Top 30 prospect rankings, and this week, they placed the Royals tenth among major league teams, the highest organizational ranking of the known prospect sites. You can read about those prospects at MLB Pipeline, and I’ll release a list here as well, but I thought I’d drop a few names that aren’t on the Pipeline that are intriguing if not as highly ranked yet. The minor league season wil...

It’s common for our readers to want to know which of the players who aren’t on this year’s Top 100 might grace next year’s. Who has a chance to really break out? This is the piece for those readers, our “Picks to Click,” the gut-feel guys we think can be on the 2022 Top 100. This is the fourth year we’ve conducted this exercise at FanGraphs, and there are some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings....

Lesky’s Notes: Finally some action Share this story Peter Aiken-USA TODAY Sports Last week I talked about being a little surprised that the Francisco Lindor trade didn’t open things up more, but it looks like things are starting to really take shape. Of course, that makes sense with pitchers and catchers reporting in less than a month. George Springer is a Blue Jay. Michael Brantley was thought to be as well until he wasn’t. And the Twins have signed another lefty starter in JA Happ who t...