Over the past 365 days, Paul Goldschmidt has been the best hitter in baseball, posting a .331/.458/.610 line that is good for an absurd 184 wRC+. Do you know who the second best hitter has been over the past year? It’s not Bryce Harper: He’s third, at 167. And Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera are tied for fifth, each putting up a 161 wRC+ during that span. So who’s the mystery man who has put his name among this elite group of hitters?

Dodgers infielder Justin Turner. Yes, the same Justin Turner who began the year as LA’s second-string utility guy, as he wasn’t even the team’s top infield reserve. Despite a very strong 2014 season of part-time work, the Dodgers glut of infield talent put Turner behind not only the starting trio of Howie Kendrick, Jimmy Rollins and Juan Uribe, but also saw him slide in behind Alex Guerrero for playing time at third base. Turner didn’t get his first start of 2015 until April 22, the Dodgers 14th game of the year.

But just as he did a year ago — when he’s been placed in the line-up — Turner has done nothing but hit. In fact, while his 157 wRC+ a year ago looked like a total fluke — given that he’d put up marks of 96, 98 and 99 the the three years prior — he’s actually hitting even better this season, cutting his strikeout rate while also hitting the ball in the air more frequently and with more authority, leading to a 169 wRC+ in the first few months of 2015.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Turner’s breakout, of course. He didn’t have his first above-average hitting season as a big leaguer until last year — when he was 29 — and even dating back to the beginning of 2014, Turner has only hit 503 times, less than most players get in a full season. Most of Turner’s track record suggests that he’s not really a great hitter, but a guy with good contact skills and some power who is on the hot streak to end all hot streaks. It’s also somewhat telling that the Dodgers watched him destroy opposing pitchers last year, but still weren’t interested in expanding his role for 2015, then also went out and spent $63 million to sign infielder Hector Olivera this spring.

But while there are plenty of reasons to not believe in Turner’s breakout, it’s not like this career arc is entirely without precedent. For some historical context, here are five recent hitters who were, like Turner, essentially useless at the big league level through age-28, then turned into quality big leaguers later in their career.

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A little over a month ago, I wandered into the depths of the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, looking to see who had the most increased movement on their breaking pitches through the first month of the season compared to last year. As you might imagine, increased movement doesn’t always mean increased success, and so many of the names that turned up were interesting but inconclusive: seeing names like Rick Porcello and Ross Detwiler leading best-of lists tells us that the article was a fun exercise, if not a totally meaningful one.

However, there were a couple of interesting names when it came to right-handed pitchers with increased horizontal movement on their sliders. First, there was Sonny Gray, who is now the proud owner of a top-three slider by run value this year. Then, coming in a close third after Seth Maness, was Drew Storen. Unlike Gray and Maness, Storen has been around for a while, so the prospect of him tinkering with pitches (especially after four mostly successful years), drew some attention.

That attention was, and is, warranted: Storen’s slider (PITCHf/x calls it a slider; some say it’s a cutter. For ease, we’ll go with slider) now has over two inches of greater horizontal movement than last season, and at least one inch more than his previous career-high. Take a look at the horizontal movement change of his slider over his career, courtesy of Brooks Baseball:

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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
Houston at Los Angeles AL | 15:35 ET
McCullers (40.1 IP, 81 xFIP-) vs. Shoemaker (72.2 IP, 100 xFIP-)
The haphazardly constructed algorithm used by the author to measure watchability indicates that today’s Astros-Angels game is of some interest in no small part due to the Houston ball club’s unusual combination of youth and strength. The Astros feature simultaneously the lowest average batter age and also the highest park-adjusted home-run rate among all major-league teams — greater than two standard deviations from the mean in each case. Of shortstop Carlos Correa, one might reasonably say that he possesses youth and strength. Of George Springer, one might say the same thing. With regard to Evan Gattis, meanwhile, one is inclined to make a different sort of observation — namely, that he resembles a 19th century longshoreman. A longshoreman not just with a troubled past, but also a troubled present.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Radio.

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ATT Park, from behind home plate, at game time for a night game.

Justin Upton has hit the ground running in San Diego. His power stats have not suffered as much as you might expect, at least, as his isolated slugging (.194) and home runs per fly ball (16.7%) are right in line with career norms (.201 and 15.1%, respectively). When I asked him about hitting in San Diego, he shrugged it off. He also said something interesting about San Francisco’s park.

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This is a weird home run, that Yoenis Cespedes hit off Trevor Bauer Monday night:

It’s weird for a few reasons. The pitch was down. Cespedes hit it to the other side of center field. It was a low rocket, and the majority of these low-rocket dingers tend to hug the lines. Pretty good demonstration of Cespedes’ strength, or bat speed, if you think of those as different things. Things that are weird make me curious. Alas, I found a recent home run that was even weirder. It happened just this past weekend.

I hear you guys. You’re sick of reading about the Red Sox. You’re sick of reading about Hanley Ramirez. It’s totally understandable, but let me assure you — this isn’t being written because it’s about Hanley Ramirez on the Red Sox. That’s a coincidence. This would’ve been written about, I don’t know, Shin-Soo Choo on the Rangers, if that had been what’d happened. But there was a weird home run, and Hanley Ramirez hit it, and, dammit, it’s going to get words.

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Ben and Sam banter about prosecuting the Cardinals and the Royals’ All-Star tally, then talk about the Diamondbacks’ perplexing Bronson Arroyo trade.

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For the last few years, Rick Hahn and Kenny Williams have been steadily rebuilding the White Sox base of talent, and along the way, they’ve acquired a few cornerstone players that are the envy of every other franchise in baseball. Chris Sale continues to get better by the year, and is probably the best pitcher in the American League at this point. Jose Abreu was a monster from the minute he arrived in the big leagues. Jose Quintana went from minor league free agent to rotation stalwart. The team’s struggles allowed them to be in a position to draft Carlos Rodon, who got to the big leagues less than a year after being drafted, and they just selected Carson Fulmer, another polished college pitcher who Kiley McDaniel believes could get to the big leagues very quickly as well. There are the makings of a very good team here.

Unfortunately for the White Sox, having a few star players just isn’t enough, and even with Sale dominating every fifth day, the 2015 season has been a disaster on the south side of Chicago. After pulling within two games of .500 after an early-June sweep of the Astros, the team has now lost nine of their last 11 games, including a 13-2 drubbing at the hand of the Twins yesterday. As they enter play today, they stand at 30-39, the second worst record in the American League, and even that overstates their performance to date; by BaseRuns, their expected record is 24-45.

Six weeks ago, I noted that the White Sox faced a “looming decision”, as the team’s poor start would test their conviction that this really was a roster built to contend in the short-term; since then, the White Sox have played roughly .500 ball by getting some clutch hits and stranding runners, but they haven’t really done anything to show that this is a team capable of running down the legitimate contenders in the American League this year. At this point, it’s pretty clear that the White Sox should probably be sellers in July.

But the more I look at the White Sox roster, the more I think that they probably shouldn’t just stop at moving Jeff Samardzija before he hits free agency. It might really be time for the White Sox to blow up their roster.

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Joc Pederson and Kris Bryant are ahead of the pack when it comes to the National League Rookie of the year race, but perhaps lost among many other intriguing promotions, Maikel Franco is having himself a solid rookie season in Philadelphia. Franco has been up just over a month and received 150 plate appearances, but he has already hit nine home runs after two more cleared the fences against the Yankees last night. The 22-year-old does come with some questions, particularly with regard to his plate discipline, but his power is clearly major league-ready. His line on the season is an impressive .312/.353/.574 with a 154 wRC+ that outpaces Bryant thus far, and he provides some hope for the future in a dismal season for the Phillies.

Franco signed out of the Dominican Republic for $100,000 in 2010 without a lot of bulk, but he has beefed up considerably since that time and made a power bat his ticket to the majors. He was noticed as a prospect in 2013 when the 20-year-old Franco tore up High-A and Double-A pitching, hitting 31 home runs with an on-base percentage above .350 despite taking very few walks. Baseball America put Franco at No. 17 on its prospect list entering 2014. Franco was young for the level and struggled with the transition to Triple-A hitting just .209/.267/.318 the first three months of the season before posting excellent numbers in July and August and earning a promotion to Philadelphia in September. Read the rest of this entry »