You sure wouldn’t think there would be anything wrong with the Diamondbacks. They currently have the best record in the National League by multiple games, and even after a loss on Wednesday, there’s an eight-game gap between them and the Dodgers with almost a quarter of the season already gone. They survived the absence of Steven Souza Jr. They’re actively surviving the absence of Jake Lamb. They’ll try to continue to survive the absence of Taijuan Walker. No team ever stays totally healthy.

And one of the big early stories has been the breakthrough by Patrick Corbin. After eight starts, Corbin owns a 2.12 ERA, with an easy career-high rate of strikeouts. The biggest change for Corbin has been an increased reliance on his best pitch — his slider. He’s now throwing the pitch at multiple speeds, sort of going the way of Rich Hill or Lance McCullers. Corbin is setting himself up for an offseason payday. And on the surface, he’s cruising, having allowed just two runs over his last two starts.

Yet something underneath is incredibly worrisome. Something fundamental to the very idea of pitching. Corbin has suddenly lost his zip. No one would do that on purpose.

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Earlier today, Jeff Sullivan examined the most changed hitters — change for better and for worse — in the game.

In this post, I want to revisit one of the hitters most famously averse to change — for better and for worse — in Eric Hosmer.

From speculating on what sort of contract he might receive to analyzing the contract he actually did receive to evaluating his swing mechanics, this author and others at FanGraphs considered Hosmer at some length during the offseason. He was one of the key figures of public interest in what seemed like the longest winter ever.

It only seems appropriate that we revisit Hosmer this spring — particularly after I approached him in Arizona during exhibition season and asked him about whether he was thinking about making changes.

That conversation didn’t start well.

“What are you trying to ask me? About launch angle?” exclaimed Hosmer as I (indeed) attempted to use that precise term, which can have a negative connotation in clubhouses. The conversation proceeded rather amicably, though, and Hosmer even disclosed he had spent some time exploring the “Air Ball Revolution” and how he could possibly benefit from coming aboard.

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It feels like the Rangers have been playing out the string since somewhere around the fourth inning of Opening Day, even before injuries knocked Elvis Andrus, Adrian Beltre, Delino DeShields Jr., and Rougned Odor out of the lineup. But just because they’re already nine games below .500 (15-24) and no threat to contend for a playoff spot doesn’t mean they don’t mandate some attention. Beltre, who’s back in the lineup, is an all-time great, Joey Gallo is a fascinating player, Bartolo Colon is the eighth wonder of the world, and if you don’t want to see what Jurickson Profar can do with regular playing time after so many setbacks, you must be some kind of monster. Right now, though, the Ranger to watch is Nomar Mazara.

The 23-year-old Mazara has been on some kind of tear lately. Over his past nine games, he’s hit seven homers, including two against the Tigers on Wednesday. In the seventh inning, he tied the game with a solo homer off Daniel Stumpf, and in the 10th inning, he won it with a walk-off shot off of Warwick Saupold. Get outta here:

That second shot, a scorcher down the right-field line, had an exit velocity of 117.1 mph. Coming into Wednesday, there had been just five homers of 117.0 or more, two by Giancarlo Stanton and one apiece by Marcell Ozuna, Hanley Ramirez, and Kyle Schwarber. Hours after Mazara joined the club, so did Aaron Judge — the owner of seven such shots last year, including a season-high 121.1-mph homer on June 10 — via a laser into Yankee Stadium’s Monument Park. Anyway, it’s a cool group to be part of.

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The Toronto Blue Jays managed the singular feat Tuesday of being no-hit and having that no-hitter register as only the second-worst news of the day. Whenever that happens, you know you’re having a very bad day.

Per ESPN:

All-Star closer Roberto Osuna of the Toronto Blue Jays was charged with assault Tuesday and put on administrative leave by Major League Baseball, preventing him from playing for at least a week.

Osuna assaulted a woman, according to Toronto police.

Now, obviously there’s a lot to unpack here, and we don’t have all of the facts. In fact, at this point all we know is that Osuna was arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend, then released. Multiple sources have confirmed that the incident in question was indeed one of domestic violence. But the Blue Jays had what might be considered an interesting response to the allegations.

“We are taking the matter extremely seriously, as the type of conduct associated with this incident is not reflective of our values as an organisation,” the team said.

Osuna has been placed on administrative leave per Article II of the Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy in the CBA, a move the team says it “fully supports.”

Let’s start with the Blue Jays’ statement. As a lawyer, among the first things one learns is that words matter, and what struck me about that statement is what was missing from it. Nowhere in that statement is there any qualification, like the words “allegedly” or “if true.”

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The other day, I wrote about Corey Dickerson, and how, since he’s joined the Pirates, he’s all but stopped striking out. I went through and tried to identify changes he’s made. This has become a fairly routine writing process, looking at changes in the numbers and then going to the video. I realize I write more about players who are becoming good, or who are becoming bad, than I do about players who are still good, or who are still bad. Players who stay the same are old news. I’m biased to look for players doing something different, and in that regard I’m not alone.

Players who change are interesting. Players who don’t change are interesting, too, but those players are just out there, acknowledged and understood. When players start making adjustments, or when opponents start making adjustments to them, it’s like you’ve got a mystery box, and you just want to know what’s in it. What is the new player going to be? Has he become truly better, or truly worse? Players become moving targets, and if nothing else, we can stand to learn from whatever happens.

I guess I don’t need to justify this. I think many of us are in the same boat. We want to know who’s changing, and how. I’ve run some math. This post will have a big table in it.

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In the annals of modern baseball history, we’ve seen some pretty bad teams win division titles, with the 1973 Mets and 2005 Padres claiming flags with just 82 wins apiece. If there was a silver lining to the 1994 strike, it’s that it spared us the possibility of a sub-.500 team making the playoffs, as the 52-62 Rangers were the best of the AL Worst, er, West. Which brings us to today’s AL Central. With the Indians (17-18) having lost four in a row and eight out of 11, the division lacks a single team playing .500 ball. Cleveland nonetheless leads the pack, and the division as a whole has a collective 68-102 record and a .400 winning percentage, the worst in the majors.

To be fair, the AL Central did project to be the majors’ worst. Via our preseason Playoff Odds page, here are the aggregated projected standings for the six divisions:

And here’s how the divisions sat as of Wednesday morning:

The AL Central has become MLB’s black hole, sucking losses into its gravitational field. Currently, it’s the only division collectively below .500 (the NL Central has rallied over the past few days), and there’s now a 103-point difference in winning percentage separating them from the worst of the other five divisions. Coincidentally, their collective run differential is 103 runs worse than any other division’s as well.

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Many of us have jobs. All of us have lives. And one thing that’s true about any job, or about any life, is that sometimes you wake up in the morning and you just don’t have it. Maybe you’re groggy, maybe you’re irritable, maybe you’ve got brain fog, maybe you have a headache. For whatever reason, there are simply bad days, and they can happen at random. They can come right after normal days, and they can come right after great ones. It’s all part of the experience of existence. You learn not to let the bad days define you.

Many of us have jobs, and all of us have lives, but few of us are performers. The average employee, when necessary, can hide herself or put forth a reduced effort. You can make yourself scarce, or even call in sick. If you’re just having a regular weekend day in the dumps, you can choose to stay in, to not engage with the world. Everyone has the right to bad days, and most people have the flexibility to more or less live their bad days in private. Other people don’t have to know when you’re off.

Performers, entertainers, have no such luxury. The responsibility is to perform for an audience, an audience that will quickly realize if something’s not right. The pressure to do well is ever-present, because, one way or another, you’re going to have to do something, and the people will judge you if what you do isn’t good. The stakes can be frightening, even paralyzing, because there’s no option to hide when you’re a performer. A performer like Dylan Bundy.

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Among all the transaction/acquisition vehicles available to teams — trades, waiver claims, free agency, etc. — the most unlikely to benefit a major-league roster in a forthcoming season is the minor-league free-agent signing.

Esteemed FanGraphs managing editor Carson Cistulli found that only 1% of minor-league free agents go on to produce at least 0.5 WAR or greater in the following season. They are scratch-off lottery tickets that are almost always misses. So when one hits, it’s worth examining.

Now, it seems one has!

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When the Royals traded away Wade Davis in a one-for-one swap for Jorge Soler in December of 2016, the trade looked like a win-win. The Cubs needed a closer and had an extra young, cheap outfielder. The Royals had Kelvin Herrera presumably ready to step in at closer but needed some offense to make one last run with their core.

For the Cubs, the deal worked out as expected. In 2017, Davis had a very good year for a very good club. For the Royals, however, the trade went less well. Herrera struggled — and, even though Scott Alexander and Mike Minor exceeded expectations, the team probably missed Davis to some extent. Soler, meanwhile, played poorly, ultimately passing much of the season at Triple-A. The Royals ended up finishing just five games out of the Wild Card. If they had gone 11-8 against the Twins instead of 8-11, they might have had one last chance at October.

Soler is now off to a great start in 2018, and the Royals control him at a low cost for the next four seasons, although there is a reasonable argument to be made that winning the trade is impossible at this juncture. The Davis trade diminished the the Royals’ chances of winning a division title, prevented the club from receiving a compensatory draft pick, and led the team to trade away Esteury Ruiz, Matt Strahm, Travis Wood, and cash for Ryan Buchter, Trevor Cahill, and Brandon Maurer. Cahill didn’t work out with the Royals, Maurer is off the 40-man roster, Buchter was sent to the A’s with Brandon Moss for Jesse Hahn — currently on the 60-day disabled list — and Heath Fillmyer. That’s the road the Royals traveled down last year, it did not work, and now they are terrible and likely several years away from contending.

Concluding that the Davis-Soler trade is already a loss for Kansas City requires some hindsight analysis. Davis was hurt in 2016, and his performance in 2017 was far from a guarantee. There is an alternate, even reasonable, scenario where Herrera pitches well in 2017, Soler provides solid production in an outfield corner, and the money saved on Davis’s salary that went to (which went to Moss and Wood) produces two more contributors to a potentially contending team. Davis didn’t get hurt, Herrera wasn’t great, Wood didn’t pitch well, and Soler and Moss combined for -1.4 WAR on the season. The plan didn’t work out, but it was at least defensible in terms of competing in 2017 with the added benefit of acquiring a future asset in Soler.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All the numbered prospects here also appear on THE BOARD, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. Click here to visit THE BOARD.

55 FV Prospects

Buehler roared back from Tommy John in 2016 and sat 96-99 with a plus curveball and slider/cutter in his first outing back from surgery. That was harder than he ever threw at Vanderbilt. He threw only five affiliated innings, but the Dodgers immediately began internal conversations about how to get him to the big leagues in 2017. They did, and after a late-summer move to the bullpen, Buehler got a nine-inning September espresso.

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