Step one for Mike Bolsinger was throwing a unique curve.

Only eight players in 2014 had a smaller velocity difference between their fastball and curve, and his curve is two ticks faster than the average curve, which led me to highlight him in my JABO piece on what makes great curveballs. That piece helped alert the Dodgers’ front office to his viability as a starter. They acquired him and then turned to him when depth became an issue. That gave him an opportunity.

Step two for Mike Bolsinger was adding a third pitch, of course.

Most interesting about this new pitch for Bolsinger might be that it’s not very different from the other two pitches he throws. He threw a cutter and a curve and now he’s throwing a … slider. Everything breaks towards his glove, and everything averages between 80 and 88 mph. Watch him pitch, and you’ll think he’s throwing the same pitch over and over again. Actually, he might be.

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The year of the prospect debut continues. Now that the Super Two deadline has come and gone, prospects are getting called up left and right. This past Sunday, we were treated to two debut events simultaneously, when both Byron Buxton and Francisco Lindor joined their respective major league clubs. I covered Buxton yesterday, so today, I’ll take a look at Lindor, who ranked 14th on Kiley McDaniel’s preseason top-200 list. In case you were wondering, a Kyle Schwarber piece is also in the works.

Unlike Buxton’s call up, which came sooner than many had anticipated, Lindor’s wasn’t much of a surprise. The 21-year-old was hitting .281/.348/.399 in Triple-A this year, after spending the final third of last season at the same level. Throw in that he’s a plus defensive shortstop by all accounts, and it’s probably safe to say that Lindor was the best player left in the minors before his promotion — a distinction that seems to change hands on a weekly basis.

Offensively, Lindor’s calling card is his ability to make contact. The switch-hitter struck out in just 15% of his minor-league plate appearances this year, which matches up with his 14% clip from his prior three-and-a-half years as a pro. Lindor made contact on 89% of his swings in the strike zone in Triple-A — the 29th-highest rate of 126 qualified Triple-A hitters. This bodes well for Lindor’s immediate future, as players with this skill set tend to have relatively smooth transitions to the majors.

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In the aftermath of yesterday’s shocking news that the FBI is investigating the St. Louis Cardinals for allegedly illegally accessing the Houston Astros’ computer network without authorization, many fans have begun to speculate as to what sort of penalty the Cardinals might face from Major League Baseball. MLB has already suggested that some form of punishment is forthcoming, issuing the following statement yesterday in response to the New York Times’ initial report:

Major League Baseball has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros’ baseball operations database. Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly.

In particular, as others have noted, MLB’s reference to the incident as an “illegal breach” – as opposed to an “alleged” illegal breach – is especially noteworthy. MLB isn’t denying that employees of one of its teams may have illegally accessed the Astros’ computer network, nor is the league holding off judgment on the veracity of the reports until the federal investigation is complete. Instead, the league office is explicitly acknowledging that an illegal breach has occurred.

So the Cardinals are almost certainly facing some form of MLB-imposed punishment on top of any potential criminal charges the government may pursue. The question now is just what type of punishment MLB and Commissioner Manfred will seek to impose.

Given the unprecedented nature of the incident, initial speculation has ranged anywhere from a steep fine or the loss of draft picks to a potential postseason ban for the Cardinals. However, while Commissioner Manfred certainly has broad authority to govern the sport under his “best interests of baseball” powers, his authority – as NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has learned in recent years – is not absolute. Instead, MLB’s league constitution and collective bargaining agreement both impose some real constraints on the commissioner’s ability to punish the Cardinals. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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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With two down in the ninth inning Monday night, Alex Rodriguez came up for the New York Yankees with a chance to be the hero. It didn’t work out that way, and the Yankees lost, but there was reason for hope. More reason, perhaps, than there would’ve been with nearly any other Yankee hitter. That’s saying something, considering where Rodriguez has been, considering where his relationship with the team has been and considering the team is pretty good.

Technically, a great story shouldn’t require anything more than interesting characters and a captivating plot. That’s not the way it’s used in conversation, though. The connotation is that a great story revolves around a character you want to root for, and the character earns a deserved payoff. For the average person, a great story should be uplifting. I’m not sure Alex Rodriguez is capable of broadly stirring such sentiment. His personal tale will forever be tainted, and that’s an obstacle for many even if you’re not among them. But the story Rodriguez is presently authoring is almost great. With just about everyone prepared to give up on him, a seemingly cleaned-up Rodriguez is soaring, allowing observers to ever so fleetingly forget about that other stuff.

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