Is Paul Goldschmidt underrated? Probably, yes. Is Paul Goldschmidt the most underrated player in all of baseball? Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s a tricky question, with no possible answer. I mean, on the one hand, Goldschmidt is the National League vote leader at first base for the All-Star Game, and his lead is something like a million votes. People know who Paul Goldschmidt is, and they think he’s great. But there’s also the feel test, and while everyone’s results will be different, it feels to me like Goldschmidt doesn’t get enough credit. Not that he cares — championships aren’t won upon public opinion — but more time should be spent considering his exploits. All those things we’ve said this year about Bryce Harper? Goldschmidt hasn’t really been any worse.

Some of it is the player himself — Goldschmidt isn’t one to linger in the spotlight. And some of it is the team — there’s no such thing as a forgettable MLB franchise, but relatively speaking, the Diamondbacks aren’t the Yankees. It’s easy enough to understand maybe overlooking Goldschmidt, or perhaps taking him a little for granted, yet he really is something else. He really is, right now, an MVP contender. Let’s seize this opportunity to focus on Goldschmidt and take the Paul Goldschmidt dinger test. What is the Paul Goldschmidt dinger test? It’s what’s starting right now. Geez.

For no particular reason, I selected eight different Goldschmidt swings from this year. You’ll see slow-motion video, pausing with Goldschmidt halfway through swinging. Your task, then, is very simple: vote in the poll. The vote: whether you think Paul Goldschmidt hit a home run. Answers will be provided at the bottom of the post, but don’t skip ahead until you’re finished. What’s the point of skipping ahead? You aren’t being graded on this.

Good luck to everyone!

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Last night I was out getting a drink with our own Matthew Kory. His favorite team is the Red Sox. My favorite team is the Mariners. The bar we went to was showing the Mariners game, and while the Mariners were actually winning, that did nothing to stem the tide of jokes at our own expense. They’re two very different teams in two very similar situations — they came in with a lot of hype and promise, some people labeling them World Series contenders, and to this point they’ve more or less sucked. I don’t know which team has been the bigger disappointment. There’s still time yet, but while that means things could get better, that means, also, things could get worse.

The conversation turned to looking ahead. It was just last week I wrote about the meaning of the standings through a couple months, relative to the meaning of the projections. The numbers suggested that the Sox and Mariners would be pretty good. They continue to suggest that, and, my brain knows it should believe that. But it can be difficult to fully accept, when you’re watching a team playing different from the expectations. It feels like a bad team is just a bad team. It feels like a good team has something special going on. There are feelings you’re supposed to feel, and feelings you actually feel. Actual feelings, you could say, are greatly prone to recency bias.

The conversation has led to this post. It’s another post with an assortment of polls, asking for your participation. The idea: do you see something, in the teams you follow, the projections don’t? Do you see reason to doubt the projected records? The polls will ask about five teams: the Red Sox, Mariners, Royals, Cardinals, and Nationals.

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Ben and Sam banter about Billy Hamilton and discuss the New York Times report about the Cardinals’ involvement in the hacking of the Astros’ internal system.

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The New York Times dropped a bombshell of a story Tuesday morning, reporting that the FBI is investigating whether front-office officials from the St. Louis Cardinals may have illegally hacked into the Houston Astros’ proprietary computer network. According to the Times, government officials believe that unnamed Cardinals employees may have accessed the Astros’ computers in order to retrieve the team’s internal trade discussions, proprietary statistics and scouting reports. The FBI has apparently traced the source of the hacking to a house shared by some Cardinals employees.

While some are understandably comparing Tuesday’s news to the NFL’s recent “SpyGate” scandal – in which the New England Patriots were accused of impermissibly videotaping the New York Jets coaches’ hand signals during a 2007 game – if true, the Cardinals’ alleged hacking would, of course, be much more serious. Beyond just league-imposed penalties, the hacking allegations carry the possibility of criminal prosecution, not just for the Cardinals employees involved in the breach, but potentially for the organization as a whole.

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The 2014 version of Anthony Rizzo would be great enough for just about any team out there: lots of walks, power, and contact. If you were trying to build him into the model of a superstar, the only knock against him would be that he basically didn’t run, but he’s promptly taken care of that this season. Through the first two months of 2015, he’s also shown another remarkable improvement: he’s cut his strikeout rate by a third while slightly increasing his power output. Take a look at his ISO and K% since he was called up in 2011:

Rizzo’s 2015 is the equivalent of making a Ferrari go a little faster while using less gas; it’s rare we see that sort of development. Recently, strikeouts have become something of a necessary evil with power hitting, so Rizzo’s current strikeout level is a bit of an exception to that relationship. Over the past 15 years, qualified hitters around his ISO (.250) and K% (12.4) make for some pretty great company: Rafael Palmeiro (2003), Albert Pujols (2002), and Bernie Williams (2000) are just a few of the names that come up.

The early 2000’s was a different era for strikeouts, however, so if we just look at the past five years, we see only four qualified hitters who have posted ISOs higher than .250 with strikeout rates below 13%: Adrian Beltre (2011), Edwin Encarnacion (2013), and Pujols twice (2009 & 2010). Quickly, let’s take a look at where Rizzo fits into that ISO vs. K% connection among qualified hitters in the past five years (2009-2014), with those other four players mapped. Rizzo is the red dot, the other four players the blue dots:

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Carlos Gonzalez is showing the worst power he’s shown since he was a rookie. He’s healthy, maybe, but he’s not producing, not yet. He’s still only 29, and there are signs of life — mostly centered around the velocity on the balls leaving his bat. Maybe he’s not done.

Batted Ball velocity is probably close to stabilization. Jeff Zimmerman found that the correlation between April and May’s batted ball velocities was already reasonably high (r^2 of .34, stabilization point is around .5) at the very least. So, in small samples like these, it does look meaningful to look at CarGo’s speedometer.

It’s healthy. By Baseball Savant, he has the fifth-highest maximum exit velocity this year. His average exit velocity is 58th of 273, or in he top fifth. On fly balls and line drives, he’s up to 45th.

If it seems like these aren’t elite numbers, maybe they aren’t. But Gonzalez hasn’t been an elite slugger, maybe? He’s 21st in isolated slugging since 2011, and 11th in home runs per fly ball. That’s fairly elite. But the bar was lowered in 2014, when he would have been 28th in ISO and 24th in HR/FB, had he qualified. That sort of bar seems reachable with his current velocity.

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Believe it or not, the Minnesota Twins kind of look like a playoff contender. Their 34-29 record is tied for 4th best in the American, and puts them just 2.5 games behind the Royals in the AL Central. They also hold a slim lead over the Rangers and the Tigers in the Wild Card chase. The Twins have recorded one of the better records in baseball over the season’s first two and a half months. This is a fact. They have those wins in the bank. But it’s not at all clear they have the talent on their roster to keep winning going forward. Several Twins have outperformed their projections to date, and it remains to be seen if first-half contributors, like Brian Dozier and Mike Pelfrey, will be able to keep up the pace down the stretch.

But the Twins will have some additional help in the form of Byron Buxton — their new centerfielder. The Twins summoned the 21-year-old from Double-A Chattanooga before Sunday night’s game. Buxton’s gone one for seven in the big leagues so far, but that one was a stand-up triple. Typical Buxton. Prior to his call up, he had twice as many three-baggers as any other player in Double-A.

Prospect evaluators have been drooling over Buxton’s tools since he was in high school. The Twins selected the Georgia native second overall in the 2012 amateur draft, and his name immediately started showing up at the tops of prospect lists. Here at FanGraphs, we’ve ranked him 16th, 1st and 2nd the last three pre-seasons. Other outlets have given him similar praise, with some — MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus — ranking him as the top prospect in baseball this year, ahead of Kris Bryant.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Toronto at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Copeland (10.0 IP, 92 xFIP-) vs. Harvey (79.2 IP, 81 xFIP-)
Recent research by the author in advance of an August trip to Montreal reveals that a U.S. citizen is permitted to remain in Canada as a tourist without a visa for up to 180 days, or roughly six months. Six months, one notes, is also almost the precise length of the major-league baseball season. In theory, then, one could take up residence in Toronto for the duration of the Blue Jays’ entire season and then return to the States upon the completion of same. Why anyone would engage in such behavior isn’t immediately clear. That it’s permitted legally, however — provided the traveler possesses no criminal record — is manifestly true. Moreover, one having relocated to Toronto this past April would have had the opportunity, thus far, to observe more closely the top park-adjusted offense in the majors.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: New York NL Television.

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