Jake Thomas is flying under the radar with a sky-high OBP. Playing on a Lansing Lugnuts team that features some of the top prospects in the Toronto Blue Jays system, the 23-year-old outfielder has logged 17 hits, and drawn 27 walks, in 84 plate appearances. His slash line is an eye-popping .315/.536/.407.

On-base percentage was his MO in college — Thomas slashed .322/.453/.470 at SUNY Binghamton — but MLB clubs weren’t exactly clamoring to procure his services. He went undrafted in 2014, and when he joined the Blue Jays organization a year later, it was as a 27th-round senior sign. When he reported to rookie ball, he did so with a degree in finance and the odds against him.

The uphill battle continued last summer. Despite having put up a .393 OBP in the Gulf Coast League, Thomas began his first full professional season in extended spring training. He was subsequently promoted to Low-A Lansing, in June, but his first go-round with the Lugnuts was pedestrian at best. As Courtney Barnett sang on Saturday Night Live, the left-handed hitter “made a mess of what should be a small success.” He slashed just .244/.326/.315.

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Over the last few seasons, the Diamondbacks haven’t been a team worthy of positive attention. Ever since Mike Hazen took the reins back in October, however, we’ve been keeping tabs on them. It started when Dave correctly noted that there wasn’t a clear direction for the D-backs to pick heading into the 2017 season. We’ve seen why through the first six weeks of the 2017 campaign: this season has presented the D-backs an opportunity. With the Giants’ rapid fade and the Mets’ injury troubles, the National League Wild Card is suddenly wide open, and teams like Arizona (and Colorado) have an opportunity to step into the void. As such, it’s time to start paying attention to the D-backs.

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Last night, Zack Greinke took a no-hitter into the 8th inning. Gregory Polanco ended the no-hit bid and the shutout with one swing, but Greinke’s 8/1/1/1/11 line was still his best outing of the year. And that’s saying something, because in the first five weeks of 2017, Greinke has been as good as he was in his prime.

Back in spring training, the narrative was primarily about his velocity. He was sitting in the high-80s in Arizona, and while I noted that he’d done this before, he continued this somewhat worrying trend on Opening Day, when he lasted just five innings against the Giants, running a 5.22 FIP/5.28 xFIP in his first start of the season.

But since Opening Day, Greinke has made seven starts, and with just one exception, they’ve ranged from really good to staggeringly excellent. His line during those seven starts: 46 2/3 IP, 40 H, 6 HR, 7 BB, 54 K. That’s a 2.70 ERA/2.83 FIP/2.65 xFIP, and in this run environment, that translates to a 60 ERA-/68 FIP-/65 xFIP-. Even including his Opening Day clunker, he’s at 62 ERA-/74 FIP-/71 xFIP-. Over a full season, those marks would each be the third-best of his career in their respective category. Right now, Zack Greinke is pitching like Peak Zack Greinke.

And, remarkably, he’s doing this without his fastball. His dominance of late isn’t because his velocity has returned; he’s actually throwing just as not-hard as he was when there was so much concern over him in March.

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Ringer staff writer and FanGraphs podcaster Ben Lindbergh exhibited some excellent reporting earlier this week, obtaining MLB’s study on the properties of its baseballs. It was a valiant attempt to learn whether the ball itself is responsible for the game’s curious home-run surge. Last year, Lindbergh and Rob Arthur went as far as dissecting some balls to study, wondering if juiced balls were the “new steroids.”

This year, the home-run rate on fly balls is 12.8%. Last year, it was the same. Both marks are the highest on record and certainly grab our attention.

Lindbergh has been on the case of the juiced ball for a while. In light of that fact, it’s somewhat unsatisfying that the report he obtained doesn’t support the juiced-ball theory. While this conclusion naturally depends upon the assumption that MLB’s study was conducted in good faith, Dr. Alan Nathan — friend of FanGraphs and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois — was asked by MLB to review the research as an independent source. Lindbergh spoked with Nathan.

“Quite frankly, I was disappointed at that result, because I was hoping I’d find something,” Nathan, who was compensated by MLB for the time he spent studying the BRC report, tells me by phone. However, he says, “I saw nothing in the data that was presented that suggests that the ball has been altered at all.”

Wrote Lindbergh in conclusion:

If the spread of dingers has less to do with COR or seam height than with a wave of Yonder Alonso–like breakouts by hitters who’ve tailored their swings to lift low pitches, then pitchers could exploit those uppercuts by raising their own sights … The historic performance we’ve seen since mid-2015 still supports at least a little skepticism about the true roots of baseball’s home run revolution; without witnessing the tests, we can’t consider these findings definitive. But the “juiced ball” hypothesis does seem much less likely than I thought it did two days ago. “It has every look of being suspicious,” Nathan says about the timing of baseball’s big-fly bailout. “But as I said, there’s nothing I could find that suggests anything amiss.”

Everyone interested in the home-run surge has a theory about its causes.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*All 200 names!

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Beau Burrows, RHP, Detroit (Profile)
Burrows is unusual among the players typically included here. He’s a former first-round selection, for one. And for two, he’s considered one of the top prospects in his organization. These aren’t the sort of qualities shared by residents of this column like Sherman Johnson or Max Schrock. Indeed, including a player here who possesses those qualities would appear to contradict the very mission of this weekly effort.

And yet, Burrows has appeared within zero of the relevant top-100 lists as a professional — was, in fact, omitted from John Sickels’ list of 200 prospects published before the season. A bit of context reveals why that might be. As Eric Longenhagen noted in December, Burrows was “seen as a bit of an overdraft” when he was selected out of a Texas high school in 2015. Moreover, the organization to which he belongs, the Detroit Tigers, has routinely featured fewer high-end prospects than almost every other system. Nor does this year represent an exception to that rule: Detroit placed 25th in Baseball America’s preseason organizational talent rankings, the club’s best ranking since 2012. Being regarded as one of the Tigers’ best prospects, in other words, isn’t equivalent to a similar honor for those minor leaguers employed by Atlanta or the Yankees.

Whatever the reasons for his omission, he’s pitched well this season. After appearing among the Next Five last week, Burrows recorded a 7:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 24 batters over 7.0 innings in a start versus St. Louis’s High-A Florida State League affiliate (box).

Here’s video from last year of the three main pitches in his repertoire, a fastball (usually in the mid-90s), a curve, and then probably a changeup:

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This started as a post about Eugenio Suarez. Suarez has gotten off to a big offensive start, and that’s drawn a certain amount of attention, yet more behind the scenes, he’s also taken a step forward in the field. The other day a baseball person said he’s gotten about as good at third base as Nolan Arenado. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but even just the idea was enough to push me to Suarez’s player page. And, sure enough, by the numbers we have — DRS and UZR — Suarez is playing like a better third baseman.

I checked to see where Suarez might rank among the most-improved defenders, league-wide. I know it’s early, but I still wanted to see. Suarez ranks super high. Yet near the top of the list, there’s also Jose Peraza. And there’s also Joey Votto. You don’t have to scroll far to find Scott Schebler. Forget about Suarez. I mean, forget about Suarez, individually. What Suarez is doing is interesting, and he’ll get his own post one of these days, but I’m more intrigued by the Reds as a whole defensive unit. It’s played like the league’s best defensive unit.

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The Rockies were this offseason’s popular dark horse. Not everybody agreed on that, naturally, but if they did, then the Rockies wouldn’t have been a very good dark-horse candidate. A team has to be rated low in order to be underrated, and there was plenty of chatter the Rockies could surprise and push for the wild card. The FanGraphs community determined the preseason projections were too low on the club, so coming in, there was a certain amount of hype. There was faith! Faith in the Colorado Rockies.

Among the things that have happened: Ian Desmond got hurt. Tom Murphy got hurt. Tony Wolters got hurt. Jon Gray got hurt. David Dahl got hurt. And Chad Bettis got sick. Over the course of the last few months, the Rockies roster has been beaten and battered. And it’s also managed to win 22 of 35 games. At this writing, it’s the Rockies who are on top of the NL West, and it’s the Rockies who have so substantially boosted their own chances of making the playoffs. For the first time in so many years, the Rockies could be delivering on their promise. There are two major reasons why they are where they are.

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After getting swept by the New York Yankees and losing two out of three to the Colorado Rockies, the Chicago Cubs are now sitting on a .500 record. By run differential or BaseRuns expected performance, tools that strip out sequencing, the answer is the same; the Cubs have played pretty much like a .500 team. The offense has been a little worse than average, the pitching a little better than average, but overall, the team has played roughly like an 81 win team so far.

Of course, this isn’t what recent Cubs teams have played like.

In 2015 and 2016, Cubs starters topped all of Major League Baseball with 36.3 WAR, just ahead of the Nationals, Mets, and Dodgers. The starters’ 3.50 FIP, without even considering the impact of defense or the potential of inducing weak contact, has been the best in the majors. The Cubs have returned almost all of last year’s staff intact, with Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks present for each of the past two seasons and John Lackey around last year.

The question we are trying to answer here is what is responsible for the downturn in results. We are just 34 games into the season, so we could chalk it up to luck. We could try to determine if the talent level has changed in any way, which might cause us to lower our expectations, and we could point to some outside factors that aren’t luck, but aren’t necessarily the responsibility of the pitchers, like defense. To frame our understanding of what is going on, it probably helps to create some expectations of what we would expect to see from a Cubs rotation this season. While Brett Anderson has made six starts, he’s only pitched 12% of the Cubs starter innings, and little was expected of him, so we will focus on the four returnees. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s day off and Ron Fowler’s comments about Jered Weaver, then answer listener emails about baseball’s arbitrary rules, David Ross’s unexpected cultural cachet, the definition of a “slugfest,” Manny Machado’s relationship with the Red Sox, the softening of the tone of sabermetric writing over the past two decades, “Three True Outcomes” percentage and overreactions to changes in the game, pitch-clock countdowns, poor performance during hitting streaks, limiting Mike Trout to one swing per plate appearance, how to root for an independent or minor league team, loaning hitters to the KBO, and more.

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