The first time I met Dodgers slugger Cody Bellinger, we didn’t have a lot of time, so I just shook his hand and said that I’d seen him enough to think “you swing really hard, every time, don’t you?” He smiled. “Always been this way.” And that part remained true when we reconnected. But he also opened my eyes to the parts of his game that were molded along the way.

The first coach that Bellinger had was his father. Clay Bellinger got some time with the Yankees earlier this century and coached his son early on. But once the son signed with the Dodgers, the father’s advice receded to “little tips and pointers.” His dad’s a firefighter now, in Gilbert, Arizona, and so he’s a little busy with his day job.

And the son had professional coaches. When he first arrived in pro ball, though, the focus was on staying afloat. “When I first signed in [2013] and Rookie ball in ’14, I wanted to learn how to hit first,” Bellinger said before a game against the Giants. “I was so young — I was 17, 18 — I didn’t worry about power at all.” You can see that there was something different about Bellinger back then.

Those professional coaches largely left him alone that first year, but going into High-A Rancho Cucamonga, they saw an opportunity. “Going into Rancho, they told me it was hitter friendly, so they made some adjustments to my swing. Damon Mashore helped me out,” Bellinger remembers. “I created a little bit more of a consistent path to the ball, just to backspin the ball. I never knew how to backspin balls before.”

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Episode 742
Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen is the guest on this edition of the pod. In this episode, recorded on the eve of his trip to the ACC tournament, he discusses a number of top collegiate prospects for the approaching amateur draft — top prospects, for example, like Louisville two-way star Brendan McKay. He also examines a couple former first-rounders — Detroit right-hander Beau Burrows and Pittsburgh shortstop Cole Tucker — who’ve begun to translate their tools into on-field success.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 6 min play time.)

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My first memory of Chris Taylor is of him serving as the third part of the illustrious Nick Franklin – Brad Miller – Taylor line in Seattle. He was the third to come up and the third to stumble. There were some who were of a mind that Franklin and Miller would turn into long-term assets for the Mariners, and that Taylor could be the sort of everyday regular who doesn’t make headlines but steadfastly contributes.

Now, a few years later, none of them play for Seattle. Franklin is struggling for the Brewers, and Miller is on the DL after an unexpected 30-homer campaign in Tampa. Taylor is a Dodger following a midseason trade last year.

He’s amassed 1.4 WAR in 29 games so far this year, and he’s slugging .583. Just as precisely nobody expected.

Some of the old reports on Taylor said that he would be a decent enough hitter, but that he’d make his money with his glove. Nobody ever looked at Taylor and saw a serious power threat, or a player who would prove to offer real value on both sides of the ball like this year. It’s just 29 games, and indeed, just 101 plate appearances. And when you go to his stats page, that .411 BABIP stands out like a sore thumb that just suffered a paper cut and was doused in lemon juice. But there’s so much more than dumb luck going on here.

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I’m sorry to have to tell you that you’re never going to hit in the major leagues. As far as how well you’d do if you got the opportunity — it’s fun to think about the lowest possible limits, but random fans never get the chance. It’s an experiment that will never be run, but the closest we can get to an understanding is by examining American League pitchers. Every last one of them is a professional athlete worth millions of dollars, but they’re not supposed to have to hit. The fact that they do hit sometimes is more or less an accident of scheduling. They practice hitting just about never, and that’s reflected in their results. In this table, there are two lines. One shows how American League pitchers have hit so far in 2017. The other shows how all the regular players have hit so far against Craig Kimbrel.

I kept it a mystery because it’s a popular writer technique. Look, they’re almost indistinguishably bad! Point made! But just for the hell of it, I’ll tell you now, the AL pitcher line is the first one. The Kimbrel line is the second one. The second one is the worse one.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fifth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

On the whole, the Phillies’ offense appears to be taking a big step forward in 2017. Entering play Sunday, their combined wRC+ was 14 points higher than it was the previous year and the highest it’s been since 2011. The team’s batting average, slugging, and on-base percentages are all up, putting them on pace to score 113 more runs than last season.

But they’ve been doing it without much help from Maikel Franco.

After a strong rookie campaign and then slump in his sophomore season, Franco has taken another step back in 2017. His wRC+ has dropped from 129 two years ago to 74 today — the second lowest out of Philadelphia’s regulars and 25th out of 27 qualified third basemen.

The results he’s had don’t reflect the positive steps he’s taken this season, however. He vowed at the end of last year to be more patient at the plate. So far he says he’s done that, which is why his walk rate has crept up and his strikeout rate is going down. He is able to get those better numbers because is he is chasing out of the zone a lot less, dropping his chase percentage 7.2 points from a year ago. According to PITCHf/x, he was swinging at 26.5% out of the zone entering play Sunday. And while his output is down, his average exit velocity is holding steady with last year, which is still up from 2015.

Getting a couple breaks to raise his .222 BABIP average would help, too, but he isn’t worried about that at the moment. “I have to not think about that stuff,” Franco said. “…I have to do everything that I can control.”

But the good has been outweighed by one major problem. If you’ve seen the title of this post, you probably know what that problem is: he’s struggling against the slider.

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When the Tigers signed Alex Avila over the winter, it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster. They paid him $2 million to re-join the organization and serve as the backup catcher to James McCann, and since his dad is the GM of the team, there was an easy narrative for those who wanted to criticize the organization for not doing more to upgrade a team reaching the end of its window to contend.

what a joke. Nepotism all the way. The guy cannot hit. Only way he stays in MLB is daddy ball

— Hard Truth (@zerofilter2021) December 23, 2016

https://twitter.com/Sesso2345/status/812401342664810497

https://twitter.com/MrJonez1/status/812401315343167492

I would imagine that if we polled Roo2481, Sesso2345, and MrJonez1 today, we might find that they have a slightly different view of the Avila acquisition. Because, to this point in the season, he’s basically carried the Tigers’ offense.

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The Brewers’ Jared Hughes is the type of pitcher who’s endangered.

When Hughes was one of the more effective relievers in baseball for the Pirates from 2013 to -15, he relied on one pitch — a sinker — that he threw time after time in the lower part of the strike zone. Over the last year-plus, however, two important trends in the game have conspired against Hughes. For starters, the strike zone shrunk for the first time in the PITCHf/x era last season, according to Jon Rogele’s research. Worse, it shrunk in one particular area, down, where Hughes likes to pitch. Jeff Sullivan found that the zone continued to contract in spring training. The other trend is that more and more hitters have gone in search of fly balls, adjusting their swing planes to become more effective at lifting pitches down in the zone.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather 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.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
Kansas City at New York AL | 19:05 ET
Vargas (48.2 IP, 95 xFIP-) vs. Pineda (47.1 IP, 66 xFIP-)
Michael Pineda continues to possess an arm constructed of electricity or something like electricity. Consider: he’s recorded the seventh-highest fastball velocity among the league’s 94 qualified pitchers and fifth-best swinging-strike rate among that same population. What else he’s done, though, is walk hardly anyone. Does he concede home runs with surprising frequency for a pitcher who otherwise exhibits signs of good command? Yes. That’s how the world is, though. Let’s not belabor it.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Kansas City Radio.

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In something of a surprise move, the Blue Jays summoned top prospect Anthony Alford to the big leagues on Friday. The move is a surprise not because Alford lacks talent, but because he’s played a mere 33 games above A-ball, all of which came this season with the Jays’ Double-A affiliate. Alford has performed exceptionally well this season, slashing .325/.411/.455. But he was overmatched by low-minors pitching as recently as last season, when he struck out 29% of the time and could only muster a .236/.344/.378 batting line at High-A.

Alford cut his strikeout rate by over 12 percentage points (from 29% to 17%) this year while maintaining his robust walk totals and modest power. The result has been substantially better offensive numbers. This is an encouraging development, especially since Alford’s so much more than his offense. He’s a 70 runner per Eric Longenhagen, which makes him a no-doubt center fielder and a threat on the bases.

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