Yadier Molina inspires considerable debate. Debate about his importance to the the St. Louis Cardinals. Debate about his value in terms of wins, more generally. Debate about his place among the best players both of past and present.

Buster Olney himself stirred up considerable debate last week when he asserted that Molina was “the best catcher of his generation” and asked fans to vote whether they believed the Cardinals’ catcher would make the Hall of Fame. While the precise magnitude of his impact will continue to be a matter of some dispute, there’s less disagreement that Molina is both (a) a good player right now and also (b) important to the current edition of the Cardinals, even at 35 years old. Unfortunately for the Cardinals, they’re about to lose Molina for at least a month after the catcher suffered a painful injury over the weekend.

Before hitting the disabled list, Molina paced all MLB catchers with 256.1 innings behind the plate this season — or nearly 20 more innings than second-place Yasmani Grandal. The Cardinals’ Gold Glover had started 29 of the team’s first 31 games. Since the beginning of the 2015 season, Molina has started 435 games at catcher and recorded 3,750 innings in that capacity, roughly 50 games and 400 innings ahead of any other backstop. Now, Molina heads to the DL for first time since 2014 — and only for the fifth time in his 15 big-league seasons.

Most of Molina’s injuries over the years have been more of the freak variety rather a product of physical deterioration. He tore thumb ligaments in 2014 while diving into third base. He fractured his had in 2005 and his wrist in 2007. He did miss a couple weeks with a sprained right knee that had been bothering him during the 2013 season, but that’s the closest thing to a chronic problem.

This injury, what has been called a “pelvic injury with traumatic hematoma,” is most definitely a freak sort, although it’s among the risks to which catchers subject themselves daily.

Here’s how it happened:

Out of respect for readers, I haven’t reproduced Molina’s entire pained reaction. Basically what happened, though, is Jordan Hicks threw the ball at 101.5 mph according to the Statcast Gamefeed. Kris Bryant deflected the pitch just enough to divert it away from Molina’s glove. The ball ricocheted into an extremely sensitive area of the male anatomy. Molina immediately fell over, was tended to, and, shortly thereafter, underwent surgery.

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When Matt Harvey burst onto the scene in 2012 — yes, it has been six years — there was every reason to believe he was destined to lead the long-maligned Mets back to the promised land. Over a 10-start camero, he struck out 28.6% of the batters he faced, good for nearly eleven strikeouts per nine innings. And while he walked more than 10% of his opponents, the future seemed limitless: Eno Sarris wrote before the 2013 season that “Yu Darvish might be his floor.”

Then Harvey went out and blew the doors off Queens in 2013.

However good you remember Harvey being in 2013, he was probably better. His ERA? It was 2.27. His FIP? Even lower than that. He cut his walk rate down to 4.5% while preserving his strikeouts (27.7%). He recorded an average velocity of 95.8 mph with his fastball, which was an incredible 30 runs above average. But his slider, and curveball, and changeup were all plus pitches, too, which is what has to happen to be 50% better than league average.

In the 2013 campaign, Harvey accrued 6.5 WAR in just 178.1 innings. To understand that in context, consider that, last year, Clayton Kershaw threw 175 innings and accrued 4.6 WAR. The mighty Noah Syndergaard was worse in 2016 than Harvey was in 2013. Harvey was, in 2013, the best pitcher in baseball.

Then Harvey tore his UCL and needed Tommy John surgery, forcing him to miss all of 2014. Still, Derek Ambrosino wrote before the 2014 season that “there isn’t a great reason to worry that he won’t regain form as soon as he regains health” — and, a year later, before his return, Eno called him a “top-15 pitcher” even with the uncertainty of the surgery.

Matt Harvey circa 2015 wasn’t the same pitcher he was in 2013, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. After the All-Star break that year, Harvey posted a 25.7% K rate, a 3.6% walk rate, a 48.6% ground-ball rate, a 2.28 FIP, and a 7.18 K/BB. In other words, post-TJ Matt Harvey in 2015 looked an awful lot like prime Cliff Lee.

Then the postseason happened, and the World Series happened.

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The Dodgers have not gotten off to the start they would have liked this season. Failing to win even half their games, they’ve seen the Diamondbacks parlay a strong first month into a place atop the NL West standings. The combination of those two developments has allowed the D-backs to turn the Dodgers’ projected 14-game divisional edge at the beginning of the season into a complete tossup.

Injury has played a part in LA’s struggles. The club, of course, recently learned that star shortstop Corey Seager would miss the entire season with Tommy John surgery. In addition to Seager, Logan Forsythe, Yasiel Puig, and Justin Turner have all missed time, as well. Despite all that, however, Dodgers position players rank third among NL teams in WAR. The Dodgers’ depth in the lineup has thus far passed the test.

For much of the the season’s first month, the club’s rotational depth hasn’t been tested in the same way. It’s about to be, however. And a good season out of prospect Walker Buehler — once a luxury in the organizational depth chart — could be necessary for the team to overtake the Diamondbacks in the division.

Before the season started, the Dodgers opted to get under the competitive balance tax to save money. In doing so, they absorbed the contract of the thus-far resurgent Matt Kemp, sending Scott Kazmir and Brandon McCarthy to Atlanta. Kazmir, since released by the Braves, was purely a salary dump, but McCarthy represented some depth for a Dodgers’ rotation that already had quite a few arms. Walker Buehler was foremost among that depth, but after pitching around 100 innings last year in his return from Tommy John surgery, he might have to blow past that mark this year to keep the Dodgers in the race.

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One of the great questions about Kris Bryant early in his career — actually, one of the only questions — was if he would make enough contact to become an impact player.

He struck out in 30.6% of his plate appearances as a rookie in 2015 and had K’d in at least a quarter of his plate appearances in stops at High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A as arguably the game’s top prospect.

There was no doubt about his power. Bryant crushed ball after ball out of Cactus League stadiums in the spring of 2015, creating a stir about just how the Cubs could justify keeping him off their Opening Day roster. The home run played a large part in his Rookie of the Year and MVP campaigns in 2015 and 2016.

But early this season, accelerating what was a gradual trend, Bryant has made a remarkable change, having recorded a better-than-average strikeout rate. Is it possible that Kris Bryant is now contact hitter?

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The Mets may have dodged a bullet, or they may have experienced their most Mets-like moment of the 2018 season — with that franchise, you can never be sure. On Wednesday night at Citi Field against the Braves, after he was seen wincing during a third-inning swing of the bat and again following a fourth-inning pitch, Jacob deGrom departed with what was soon characterized as a hyperextended right elbow. The good news, revealed in manager Mickey Callaway’s Thursday morning press conference, is that a postgame MRI revealed no structural damage to the elbow. No torn ligaments, in other words. Whew.

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Nonetheless, almost immediately, confusion reigned in Queens. The New York Daily News‘ Kristie Ackert initially reported that, via Mets sources, deGrom “is expected to miss at least four starts with the hyperextended elbow.” But shortly afterwards, multiple reporters tweeted that deGrom had been cleared to make his next start on Monday. Hardly the finest hour for a team that’s attempting to change its reputation for turning injury management into a punchline.

As Ackert later explained, “I was told by sources there was a much bleaker outlook on deGrom earlier this morning. I reported what I was told, my bad. The #mets are cautiously optimistic he will make his next start and so is deGrom.” SNY’s Andy Martino bolstered that account by saying that sources told him that the team would prepare deGrom but “haven’t made any decision to scratch him yet.”

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. 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.

50 FV Prospects

Acquired from Houston as part of the return for Justin Verlander, Perez has advanced command of a four-pitch mix that enabled him to reach Double-A at age 19. He’ll likely have a plus fastball and changeup at peak, while his breaking balls are still works in progress but promising.

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You could almost be convinced that hitting is easy. Or, at least, you could almost be convinced that getting better at hitting is easy. What can a hitter do to improve in this day and age? Aim up. Try to hit the ball in the air. Elevate and celebrate, and everything. So much contemporary analysis is built around identifying a player or players who are hitting more fly balls than they used to. And, without question, for some players, this has been the key. For some players, aiming up has unlocked potential that could never get out. Especially in the era of aggressive infield shifts, a ball in the air is more valuable than a ball on the ground.

But the important equation isn’t so simple. We went through the opposite of this 10 or 15 years ago. There was a time when we all fell in love with ground-ball pitchers, because, after all, grounders can’t be homers. But there are processes that lead to someone getting grounders, and there are processes that lead to someone getting flies, and fly-ball pitchers have their own upsides. Moving to the present, with hitters, it’s not about whether a fly is better than a grounder. It’s about the swing. What specific kind of swing can allow a hitter to become his best self, overall?

The answer isn’t the same for everyone. The answer could never be the same for everyone. Some hitters, for sure, have gotten better by steepening their swing paths. Kyle Schwarber and Joc Pederson are two hitters attempting the opposite.

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Wednesday night, in a game against the A’s, the Mariners started James Paxton and received one of the most dominant starts in the franchise’s whole entire history. A couple innings after Paxton was removed, the Mariners lost, and the conversation deteriorated into an argument over bringing in the closer in a non-save situation. Thursday has brought the additional news that Ichiro Suzuki is transitioning into a non-roster advisory role, so it would be easy for Paxton’s start to get lost in the shuffle. It wasn’t the most important story of the game, and the game is no longer the most important story of the day.

But I won’t turn down many opportunities to write about James Paxton. I have the freedom to write what I want. And Paxton wasn’t only good against the A’s. He wasn’t only overwhelming. He was almost genuinely unhittable, collecting 16 strikeouts over the span of seven innings. Paxton issued one single walk, and he allowed a handful of hits. Nobody scored. Of Paxton’s 105 pitches, an incredible 80 of them were strikes. I know that, through the lens of ERA, this year’s Paxton has been modestly disappointing. That ERA misleads, and Wednesday provided a reminder that Paxton is almost as good as it gets. And as he went about setting down the A’s one by one, Paxton followed a pretty simple game plan. It’s one that could hint at even more to come.

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Scott Barlow made his big-league debut on Monday. Pitching for the Kansas City Royals against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, the 25-year-old right-hander went three effective innings in a 10-6 loss. With family watching from the stands, he allowed just one run while working the sixth, seventh, and eighth frames. Needless to say, it was a night the former Los Angeles Dodgers farmhand — a 2011 sixth-round pick out of a Santa Clarita, California high school — won’t soon forget.

Barlow, who signed a free-agent deal with the Royals over the winter, took us through his once-in-a-lifetime experience the following afternoon.

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Scott Barlow: “Around the fifth inning, [bullpen coach] Vance Wilson told me, ‘Make sure you’re staying loose,’ so I started stretching and kind of getting my energy going. This is my first time ever at Fenway, so I was also soaking up the scenery a little bit. Tim Hill started warming up, and they called down to have me warm up with him.

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Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Alex Rodriguez: at some point soon, Albert Pujols will join this exclusive company, the list of players who have attained both the 3,000-hit and 600-home-run milestones. With a home run and a double off Dylan Bundy on Wednesday night, the 38-year-old slugger is at 2,998 hits after collecting just four in his previous seven games. His mid-April hot streak, such as it was, is a memory.

Baseball’s major milestones and records are supposed to be opportunities to celebrate careers, the totality of a player’s accomplishments, the road he took along the way, and the connection to history. But as they tip their caps, too often they remind us that the man we’re cheering is far from the player he once was. In Pujols’ case, the difference is particularly striking, as it’s almost impossible to fathom the gap between “the best player of this young millennium” and “the worst regular in the majors,” or how a single player might hold both titles at the same time. Any honest reckoning with his career, however, will take us to this uncomfortable place.

The Pujols who earned the first of those titles is the one we’ll be celebrating when hit number 3,000 drops. That guy — a powerful but bad-bodied 13th-round 1999 pick out of Maple Woods Community College who rocketed three levels in his lone minor league season and was in the majors by 2001 — is the stuff of legend. Pujols’ All-Star and unanimous NL Rookie of the Year-winning debut (.329/.403/.610, 37 HR, 130 RBI) began an amazing 11-year run during which he hit a combined .328/.420/.617 while averaging 40 homers, 121 RBIs and 7.4 WAR, made nine All-Star teams, won three MVP awards and a batting title, with 19 top-three slash-stat finishes. In 2006, -08 and, -09, he led the league in slugging percentage, wRC+,and WAR. His 81.4 WAR for that span was 27.1 more than the next-highest total, Bonds’ 54.3, and his 167 wRC+ trailed only Bonds’ 208, over more than double the plate appearances. On a rate-stat or prorated basis, Bonds did have more value during the period the two players overlapped, but beyond the video-game stats he put up from 2001 to -04, he didn’t have much value outside the batter’s box, producing just 7.1 WAR from 2005 to -07, his age-40 to -42 seasons.

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