Cincinnati Reds MiLB Notebook: TJ Hopkins, rosters, and early impressions

The Louisville Bats game was postponed on Wednesday – five hours before scheduled first pitch. There’s a line or two of storms rolling through the midwest that is bringing plenty of nasty weather. That means there’s a doubleheader scheduled for Thursday, which is also going to be opening day for both the Chattanooga Lookouts and the Dayton Dragons. Daytona’s going to have to wait until Friday before they get on the field. With no games to write about for the next 30 hours or so, it felt like a good time to bust out a notebook to discuss some things from the last few days.

TJ Hopkins is the early exit velo leader

With the Triple-A levels now giving us Hawkeye/Statcast data in 2023 we’ve got plenty of information to look at. We are only through four games played for Triple-A Louisville. If we look at the data from those four games, even including the data from the opponents in those games, TJ Hopkins has three of the top four exit velos*.

Doug, why is there an asterisk on that? Well, that’s because the dataset includes foul balls. Here’s what the top four looks like:

1. TJ Hopkins – 111.8 MPH (double)
2. TJ Hopkins – 110.7 MPH (foul ball)
3. Tyler Naquin – 109.6 MPH (lineout)
4. TJ Hopkins – 108.2 MPH (home run)

Hopkins also has a 4th batted ball over 100 MPH – a ground out at 102.9 MPH. Suffice to say, he’s been hitting the ball quite hard so far this season. He’s not the only Bat doing so, though. Brian Rey has only played in two games so far, but he’s had four batted balls over 104 MPH so far (all between 104.1 and 105.2). Rey also had a ground out at 99.1 MPH.

On the pitching side it’s Tayron Guerrero standing out for his velocity. He’s thrown six fastballs this season and they rank 1-6 on the chart within Bats games. The slowest one came in at 98.3. The rest of them checked in at 99.1-99.9 MPH.

When it comes to some of the spin rate darlings, it’s Jared Solomon spinning 3000+ RPM sliders. Casey Legumina‘s coming close, as he was dropping in 2800-2900 RPM sliders in his only outing of the season so far.

How about some baserunning? Raise your hand if you had Alex McGarry as the player on top of the sprint speed leaderboard for Louisville. Weird, I don’t see any hands raised. The sample size is small, and it’s likely going to change as the season goes along and we get more than four games worth of data, but for now it’s McGarry atop of things. Not that his times are slow – they’ve actually been quite fast – he’s topped out at 29.4 feet per second (players that average 30.0 feet per second on “competitive” runs are considered elite speed guys).

Where are the Top Prospects starting?

Yesterday we got the opening day rosters for the non-Louisville teams that start up their seasons on Thursday and Friday. Four players in the Top 25 are not going to be on the  field this week as the season opens up. Elly De La Cruz, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and Chase Petty will all begin their season on the injured list. Ricardo Cabrera will likely remain in extended spring training until the Arizona Complex League season begins later this summer. Below is a list of where everyone is assigned.