The Dodgers announced they’ve promoted top pitching prospect Josiah Gray. He’ll make his major league debut during tonight’s game with the rival Giants.
Selected by the Reds in the second round of the 2018 draft out of Division II Le Moyne College, Gray was traded to Los Angeles a few months later as part of the deal that sent Yasiel Puig to Cincinnati. The following season, he emerged as one of the game’s better pitching prospects. He dominated across three minor league levels in 2019, demonstrating a three-pitch mix and surprisingly advanced command for a player who didn’t convert to pitching full-time until his final season at Le Moyne.
Entering the year, Gray appeared on the top 100 prospect lists of each of Baseball America, Eric Longenhagen of FanGraphs and Keith Law of the Athletic. Longenhagen was the most bullish of that trio, slotting the 23-year-old as the #29 prospect leaguewide. In his scouting report, Longenhagen raved about Gray’s repertoire and strong fastball command, noting that he projects to be a “mid-rotation stalwart” at his peak. BA and Law echoed those sentiments, pointing to Gray’s continued development of his secondary pitches and strong understanding of pitching as reasons for optimism he’ll continue to improve.
Gray has reached Triple-A Oklahoma City for the first time this year, but a shoulder injury sidelined him for two months. He’s only made four appearances because of that, but Gray’s shown no difficulty adapting to the minors’ highest level. He’s allowed just five runs across 15 2/3 innings, striking out 22 while issuing a pair of walks.
Adding rotation help before the July 30 trade deadline figures to be a priority for the Dodgers. Los Angeles trails the Giants by one game in a tightly-contested NL West. Gray pitching well right out of the gate would go a long way towards stabilizing the starting staff, although that’ll likely be a target area for president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and his front office regardless of Gray’s early performance.
Even if Gray is in the majors for good, he won’t reach free agency until the conclusion of the 2027 season. He’s not slated for arbitration eligibility until the 2024-25 offseason. Future optional assignments could push back that service time projection.
Hope he does well in his debut
Same here. The game needs more dominant pitching.
Right. 5000 more strikeouts than hits this year. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Yeah sure, so the league batting average can be below the Mendoza Line.
Maybe it wasn’t in the plans to bring him up mid-season (and against the 1st place Giants) given that he’s only put in about 15 innings in the minors since 2019. But duty calls, next man up, and best of success to him.
Yaz going deep tmrw
Muncy will go deep twice “tmrw”.
GIANT KILLAH
@Infinite Muncy definitely loves playing against the Giants lol. He’s the new Paul Goldschmidt (Goldy always kills us).
He’s more dangerous than Goldschmidt and Arenado combined!
SF pitchers need to give him the Bonds BB treatment. The days of drilling guys to move their feet and/or back them off are over.
@44McCovey Seriously. I wrote that before he smashed another one last night lol. What’s that, 9 in 10 games or something?
Mad Max has 8 home runs in 30 ABs.
I just heard him and his wife are expecting anytime; maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll miss a few games? As with Gausman, wish him well with the new baby.
Instead, they just put one in his back and one in Turners knee. Gray gave up some bombs, but he also struck out 7 in his debut. Good win for a banged up Dodgers team.
All unintentional. S**t happens.
When Wood loses it, he really loses it.
He had a similar situation a few starts back when his breaking ball completely abandoned him.
What did I tell you.. Yaz likes taking the youngins deep
Gray getting roughed up.
How’d that work out for ya?
@Baseball 1600 Giants seem to do poorly against pitchers they haven’t seen (especially ones with good stuff). Hope you’re right though. Posey back and Craw on the IL…
just four games in?
Giants hit at least 2hr off him
And Muncy will hit 2 off of Wood by himself……….
You know it! Muncy’s about to have two kids, to go with the first one we play today.
I love being right
Yeah, good call! Y’all spoke too soon.
Good call
Another good pitching prospect for the Dodgers. I’ll go ahead and admit I’m jealous.
Dodgers have been one of the best all-around organizations in baseball for a while now.
As a Reds fan, this pains me. We didn’t realize he’d be THIS higly touted at the time of that trade, but man, Id sure prefer having Josiah over a season of underperforming Puig and the ghosts of Alex Wood and Matt Kemp. At least Kyle Farmer has been a serviceable addition from that trade but that’s pretty much it.
You also gave up Jeter Downs in the trade.
Gray is really the only one that got away. Over the 19 and 20 trade seasons the Reds parted with some decent prospects, and time will tell, but Gray is the only one that seems poised to be a good MLB player.
The Dodgers also sent cash in that deal, and were saddled with nearly $30M of Homer Bailey’s beached whale contract. Fans would rightly prefer to see their teams acquire players over money, but you can’t set aside how much of it came the Reds’ way in this trade. It was a lot, for which the Dodgers got Gray and Downs. The Dodgers aren’t in a good position to make a similar trade this year.
The Reds took on more salary than they gave up in that trade.
Because they took on active players. The Bailey contract was dead money, and the Dodgers sent cash besides.
Whom do we think gets the boot off the 40 man roster?
Lux? Not sure though.
Brutal!
It was Alan Burns.
Lux to the 60 day?
I’m not sure that would hurt the team the way he’s been (not) hitting
Please let it be Vesia/Uceta
Uceta is already gone
It might not be Alexander today but his time is coming soon with no more options left.
Angels should have sent a Van up the 405 freeway by now and scraped him up for peanuts
I’d Bet Scott is mixed in a trade of some sorts in next 2 weeks. There’s actually some nice surprising arms we might want to keep around longer than we initially thought at the back end (who also have options)
I would love to see the Dodgers trade Alexander
Vesia? Why? He had control issues but that was a new thing. He has a career BB9 of 2.39. He put it back together in AAA, even running of a streak of 15 strikeouts in a row, and earned a promotion to the bigs, where he’s given up one hit and no walks. His last walk was June 17. Don’t give up yet. Uceta is a disaster, the only question is whether to give up on him. He’s one of tHe only guys on the 40 who can eat innings for the team, but that is changing with Gray, the trade deadlie, and the OKC Dodgers putting White in the rotation, where Hess given up 1 run in 15 innings over 4 starts, throwing as many as 6 innings. He has a 1.42 ERA in OKC and hasn’t pitched awful in MLB. With that, I would say to go any length to keep Vesia, and DFA Uceta / Sherafy / Reed. Get what u can for Uceta and try to keep Teed and Sherafy if possible.
A low BB rate in the minors doesn’t mean a whole lot. Those leagues are full of undisciplined free-swingers. It’s a totally different story in the majors where OBP rates of .350 and more are now commonplace. Really you are just pointing out how the bullpen after having to move Gonsolin and Price into the rotation is now mainly a bunch of odds and ends, many of them castoffs from other teams. If the answer is Mitch White, we’re really in trouble. Even in the minors he has control issues.
I’m not saying the answer is Mitch White, I’m saying he makes Uceta expendable. They definitely need an SP.
If minor league walk rate doesn’t matter, then let’s look at it compared to the rest of the league. In 2021, Vesia has pitched 9 innings in triple-A west, and has walked three. His 3.00 BB9 ranks 103 out of 313 pitchers who have appeared in a game as a pitcher. That’s top third, though many pitchers before, after, and including him have small sample sizes. But he hasn’t walked a batter in over a month.
In 2019, Vesia pitched 16.1 innings in the southern league (AA), walking 1. His 0.55 BB9 ranked 15th of 302 pitchers, again, minimum 1 appearance, and Vesia is in the top 0.5% in a larger sample size. In A+ ball, Vesia threw 18.2 innings and walked 1 batter, for an 0.48 BB9, which ranked 49th of 415. In A ball, he threw 31.2 innings and walked 17 for a career worst 4.83 BB9, 345th out of 483, but rebounded to post the aforementioned numbers.
In 2018, Vesia threw 24.2 innings in the New York Penn
League, and walked 4 batters. His 1.46 BB9 ranked 53rd out of 392. In the GCL, he pitched 8.2 innings, walking 3 batters. His 3.12 BB9 ranked 242 out of 514.
Overall, Vesia has mostly been throwing the ball in the zone throughout his career, and to a level better than league average, despite a high-movement fastball. He has struggled at times but there is no reason he can’t throw strikes, and when he is throwing them he looks like a high leverage reliever, The last thing to do is DFA him. DO go out and get a Kyle Gibson / other strong starter.
Time will tell on Vesia but until that information comes in I aways think about whether I’d like to see a pitcher on the mound in a close postseason game. With Vesia the answer for now is no, same as it would be for any 3-5 pitchers they have in the bullpen.
I also don’t think Vesia should be on the mound in the postseason this year. In the future he definitely has the stuff to do it. Floro would have helped a bunch though, wish we could’ve kept him.
Rooting for JG! Imagine getting called up to pitch for the first time in the THICK of a season and a game against rivals clamoring for 1st place? Hopefully the nerves don’t get the best of him. Good luck out there.
The Dodgers filthy rich farm system. Never seems to dry up.
Then you have franchises like my favorite team: dry as a bone system or slim pickings.
That was true a couple of years go, but not anymore. After Gray the Dodgers have no pitching prospects in the top 100, and after Ruiz, only one top 100 position player prospect. That well is running dry.
They’re still roughly in the top 10 but MLB ready prospects are thin now.
Bleacher Report ranks them at #11, and it’s tough to build it up higher when drafting at low positions every year, and when the team hasn’t got a lot of trading material to leverage in the way they did to get Gray. That doesn’t mean they have no keepers in the minors but that overall the farm is depleted. For sure it is far from filthy rich. I’ve been saying for a couple of years that they are going to hit a tough patch with key players entering arbitration and free agency and nobody standing in the wings to replace them, and with no obvious surplus to trade. Feels like that time has come, maybe a little sooner than it might have done due to the injuries.
Who are you worried about? Seager & Chris Taylor are known. I’d be shocked if both walked this offseason
Otherwise Bellinger has 3 years till FA, Buehler 4, Muncy 3, Turner 2, Smith 5. What, now you’re worried about AJ Pollock? The farm is “depleted” because more than half the of the 40 man last year was from the farm. The FO has also shown in the past the ability to bring a “bottom of the top 10” farm up to top 5 or better. If you’re going to cite pitching, they’ve shown repeatedly the willingness to spend big on elite pitching. No reason to expect that to change
BA btw hasn’t had the farm below 9th since 2016. Athletic had them 10th coming into the year. By most accounts I’ve seen, they have multiple prospects excelling in AA and below. Unless you expect their pipeline to become the Phillies, i don’t see the cause for alarm. They’re 10th with a solid base. Sign the draft class top guys and let the system rebound like it did in 2019
Sheesh, here we go again. Yes, Seager and Taylor. Both if they return will be at much higher cost, especially Seager. Add Kershaw too. The others aside from Turner are all entering their arbitration years, so they will also become significantly more costly over the next few seasons. The Dodgers are already paying the CBT. At some point they will have to draw a line. Where that line is we don’t know and maybe they don’t yet either, but we can’t simply assume that no line will ever exist and whatever it costs they will spend it. To repeat my point about the farm again, it simply is not “filthy rich” anymore. It is in need of some restocking, and the tactic they used to get prospects such as Gray is going to be much tougher to pull off now because of both the cost (they sent a lot of money to the Reds and took a huge obligation off their hands) and the lack of contracts they can move. They have nobody like Puig or Wood to send off in trade.
By the time the others reach FA the Dodgers farm will be rich again. They busted their draft in 2017-18 and called everyone up in 2020, so it’s awful at the top. The bottom is flowing with talent.
Time will tell, but every team drafts, so it’s a question of whether the Dodgers have managed to draft better with their lower picks, which is possible but unlikely. Just putting out the reminder that some of players in the system when the Dodgers were one of the top farm systems came through trading and leveraging cash, including Gray, who they kept, and Downs, who was part of the flip for Betts. I’m not seeing anybody expendable on the roster right now and the needs this year are immediate so any trade they make in the next ten days has to be for majors talent not prospects, so this deadline is going to be more about depleting the farm than building it up.
The only guys at the top of the system other than Gray, Ruiz, and Vargas are players like Raley and Reks, both of which struggle with mlb-caliber breaking balls, which is keeping them in AAA, where they can’t solve that weakness, someone like Peters and Santana who strikeout a lot and are easy to bait, some Neuses and Whites who aren’t good enough to make a good team like LA, some older struggling prospects such as Omar Estevez, but mostly veterans and non-prospects. Some, like closer Kevin Quakenbush, starters Aaron Wilkerson and Austin Biden’s-Dirx, infielder Matt Davidson and OF Steven Souza Jr. are doing good, but most aren’t really. AA ball has some interesting players, including several future relief aces, some decent starting pitchers such as Micheal Grove, Andre Jackson and Ryan Pepiot, and swing men such as Gus Varland, John Rooney, etc. On the hitting side there are three true outcome hitters likeMicheal Busch and to a lesser extent Ryan Noda (lower strikeout and walk rates), Donovan Caseys and Jaren Kendalls, who have power and speed and no hit tool, and Clayton Daniel and Hunter Fedducia who don’t strikeout but don’t do much else.
Ryan Pepiot looks like a keeper too. He seems to be the next in line for a call up in the starter ranks.
Desperate times go with desperate measures.
The Dodgers are actually 2 games behind the Giants.
The article was actually written yesterday.
They just updated it today.
What Arthur said but additionally it is hard to tell what was added
Yaz just hit one off Gray.
Dodgers just walked off………
Would love to trade Bryant and maybe a reliever or two for Josiah Gray!