Among the comments Kiley McDaniel and I received from people in baseball regarding the updated draft board we published last week is that Oklahoma quarterback and center fielder Kyler Murray should have probably been on it. Evaluators see him as a crude but gifted speedster with good pop for his size who possesses more projection than most because of his athleticism. Murray is performing this year (.290/.390/.520 at publication) on the baseball field despite little prior in-game experience.

While I’ll consider his merits as an athlete more fully in a moment, it seems important to briefly recount Murray’s somewhat circuitous path to the present. A superstar high-school quarterback, Murray was expected to replace Johnny Manziel at Texas A&M as soon as he reached campus. At the same time, though, he was also a first-round shortstop prospect. He removed himself from MLB draft consideration by refusing to do some of the mandatory paperwork and testing for eligibility. He went to A&M, split QB reps there with Kyle Allen as a freshman, then transferred to Oklahoma, where sat out a year due to NCAA transfer rules. In 2017, he held a clipboard behind Heisman winner Baker Mayfield.

All the while, Murray barely played baseball (although he did spend last summer on the Cape). Now, he’s Oklahoma’s starting center fielder and also locked in another quarterback competition as a redshirt sophomore, juggling both sports at the same time.

Discussions about Murray invariably lead to which of those sport he should play professionally — and, as part of that, which path might be more lucrative for him. Because Murray is available for the MLB draft this June but not for the NFL’s own draft until next year, baseball has the opportunity to present its case first.

The size of his signing bonus obviously isn’t the only factor Murray is likely to consider. The prospect of a full year as a starter at a big football school — with the possibility of making a run at a Heisman — is probably appealing to him. The reality of football’s health risks — which, for a 5-foot-11 quarterback, might be even riskier — are also likely present.

That said, we can at least try to see if a clearly superior financial path lies ahead for Murray as he comes to a fork in the road this June. To do this, we have to know some things about each sport’s draft and then get some idea of where Murray might be drafted and how he would be compensated in each case.

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I guess you could say that the Angels are sputtering. After sprinting out to an astonishing 13-3 record, the club has lost five out of six, getting swept by the Red Sox and then losing two of three to the Giants. It was a fairly unremarkable weekend for the most interesting player in baseball. Shohei Ohtani was in the lineup twice, and he even batted cleanup. Though he recorded three singles, he didn’t drive in any runs, nor did he score any himself. He struck out two times on Sunday.

Meanwhile, context be damned, it was a tremendous weekend for the best player in baseball. In the eighth inning on Friday, Mike Trout homered. In the third inning on Saturday, Mike Trout homered. And in the eighth inning on Sunday, Mike Trout homered. Trout leads baseball with nine home runs. Over the weekend, he homered to left field, to center, and to right.

There exists a recurring joke(?) that baseball statistics start to matter the day that Trout assumes the lead in WAR. Barring a DL stint, it always feels like an inevitability. As of this Monday morning, Trout leads all players in WAR according to FanGraphs. And Trout also leads all players in WAR according to Baseball Reference. Here we are, and, you know, we haven’t checked in with Trout in a while. He seems to…be…better?

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Sometime late in the afternoon of March 11, word broke on Twitter that the Phillies were “moving close” to a deal with then-free agent Jake Arrieta. In the hours that followed, several national and local writers confirmed that the two sides had reached a verbal agreement on a complex multi-year contract, though all involved cautioned that no deal was official yet.

And indeed it wasn’t. Before any major- or minor-league transaction can become officially official—before, indeed, a player can appear on a team’s roster or begin receiving paychecks from said team for their services—team, league, and (mostly in the case of free agent signings) agency officials have to work together to confirm each and every minute detail of the transaction in baseball’s system of record: the Electronic Baseball Information System (eBIS).

The gap between when verbal agreement is reached and when a deal is finalized in eBIS is most familiar to us as the interstitial period that comes between word of a big deal breaking in public and the team making that deal official. But the same process applies to thousands of transactions every year, big and small, and when we speak of a deal becoming Official—or, for that matter, a player being placed on waivers or reassigned to the minor leagues or drafted—what we really mean is that that transaction has been recorded and approved in eBIS.

It’s possible that the details of how this system works are only interesting to me, A Known Process Nerd. But on the off chance that might also be interesting to you, I spent some time talking about how the system works with Morgan Sword, the league’s Senior Vice President for League Economics & Operations, and Ned Rice, one of three Assistant General Managers for the Phillies, and the man mostly responsible for that team’s eBIS interactions (you may also recognize him as one of the men who greeted Arrieta’s plane on the tarmac in Florida on the evening of March 13th—the two men have known each other since their time in Baltimore).

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In my weekly chats or in the comments section of certain posts, readers often ask a question like, “Does Pitcher X have ace potential?” or some variant of it. While it makes sense that people would be curious about such a thing, the answer is (by definition) almost always “No.” Because there are so few aces in the majors, the probability that any prospect would develop into one is necessarily low.

When I’m at games — and especially when I’m at spring-training games — I’ll occasionally run into someone like Corey Kluber, though. And while I realize nobody’s wondering if Kluber has a chance of succeeding in the majors, there’s some value in writing up guys like this as an exercise, to illustrate what an ace looks like on paper. So that’s what I’ve done here. (Note, as well: context is important when reading the following, as it’s the product of an abbreviated spring look.)

Kluber was 90-92 in my viewing, with enough movement on his fastball to merit a half-grade bump. That’s about 1.5 ticks slower than his average fastball velocity from last year, but this is typical of early-spring Kluber. I put a 55 on his fastball while observing im and imagine it’s plus during the season when he’s throwing harder.

He mixed in a cutter, slider, changeup, and a curveball. The cutter was 86-88 with tight, late movement. It was consistently plus, flashing plus-plus, and Kluber put it where he wanted to when he wanted to. It’s likely that the slider and curveball are the same pitch and that Kluber can just manipulate the shape and depth of the pitch, but the ball acts differently enough when Kluber does this that he functionally has both, even if the catcher puts down the same sign for both. When his breaking ball behaved more like a curveball, it was a 50, a deep, but blunt, 80-82 mph curveball. The slider was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and Kluber threw a few 80-grade sliders in the outing, while most were 70s in the 83-85 mph range. These had more horizontal movement and, like everything else Kluber does, located with precision. I saw a few changeups that I thought were average.

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On February 15, 2018, top prospect Ronald Acuña Jr. wore his hat in a way different than baseball players wear hats. Mass hysteria immediately followed. The teenagers looted. Bill Haley’s obstreperous pleas for 24-hour rebellion blasted. The unmistakable Mary Jane wafted through the air. Supporters of decorum openly wept. There was fire and dancing in the shadows of crumbling architecture.

Actually, no. None of that happened. Rather, Acuña Jr. let his locks show during spring-training camp. Nobody seemed to care at the time.

Yet, as Mark Bowman of MLB.com noted earlier this week, Atlanta was concerned. Wrote Bowman: “the Braves want Acuña to wear his hat straight and maintain a professional appearance while in uniform.

It was a shame, since it overshadowed former Brave wunderkind and Acuña spring-training mentor Andruw Jones seemingly inventing a fun new term.

From Jones:

The main thing he needs to remember is keep your head straight and respect [your surroundings]. Be humble, but a humble-cocky.

The cap story was controversial. Some noted the racial hypocrisy. Some theorized it was a ploy by Atlanta to later claim the very talented but very young Acuña should hang his hat in a home in Triple-A Gwinnett for the beginning of the 2018 season, in order to acquire an extra year of team control. Manager Brian Snitker said this afternoon talk of Acuña’s hat was “blown out of proportion.” Well, yeah. Acuña readjusting himself following a catch during Friday afternoon’s game against the Yankees should not have been as dramatic as it was.

https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/NaturalMenacingJunco

Acuña hasn’t worn his hat any differently than his teammates in either of his televised spring-training starts, and photos from last year’s Futures Game show he probably never wore it at any disapproving angle during any game in his nascent career.

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“This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my life.”

– Billy Hamilton on the following proposal

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — There has always been some debate about where to bat Billy Hamilton in the lineup.

He has the world-class speed that managers traditionally prize out of a leadoff hitter. Hamilton, for example, was the fastest man in the game by some measures in 2016 and has trailed only Byron Buxton (30.2 feet/second) in Statcast’s “sprint speed” each of the last two seasons.

The problem, of course, is the rate at which he gets (or doesn’t get) on base. Hamilton recorded a .299 OBP last season, 11th worst amongst qualified hitters. His career mark is almost precisely the same (.298). In the modern era of lineup construction, avoiding outs is regarded as a greater asset for leadoff hitters than speed alone.

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A conversation I had with Rob Whalen on Wednesday took an unexpected, and coincidental, turn. The 24-year-old right-hander brought up the first of the two starts he made for the Seattle Mariners, a game in which he was out-pitched by Boston’s Brian Johnson. A few years earlier, the Red Sox left-hander had taken a leave of absence from baseball to get treated for anxiety and depression.

It turns out that Whalen did the same thing last July — and he should have done it sooner. His mental health had been slowly crumbling, and it finally reached the point where he could no longer function normally — either on or off the field. When Whalen finally walked away from Seattle’s Triple-A affiliate, he did so knowing that he was in serious need of help.

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Rob Whalen on his battle with depression: “Mentally, I was in a tough place. A lot of it was personal stuff, and it wasn’t one thing. It was how I’d felt for a few years, even when I was having success. The way I’d describe it would be a perfect storm of not feeling very confident in who I was as a man. I was kind of losing my identity as a person. Baseball is our job — it’s what we do — and I kind of lost that, as well.

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