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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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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Did you know that the A’s lead the American League in home runs? Here’s one of them:

Here’s another one of them:

Those are two mammoth home runs. More, those are two mammoth home runs hit by the same guy — one Chad Pinder. Pinder is a 25-year-old infielder who’s topped out as Baseball America’s No. 7 Oakland prospect. In Pinder’s best professional season to date, he went deep 15 times. He’s gone deep four times over his last six big-league starts.

Pinder clearly has pretty good power. Keep that in the back of your mind. There are nearly 1,700 players with at least 50 batted balls in each of the last two seasons, including both the minors and the majors. Here are the 10 players with the biggest drops in ground-ball rate:

Whole bunch of minor leaguers. One Alex Avila out in front, about whom Dave just wrote. Avila has dropped his grounder rate by a stunning 30 percentage points, and that’s insane, but it’s also insane that Pinder is in ninth, having dropped his own grounder rate by 21 points. Pinder’s year-to-year track record:

• 2013: 41% grounders
• 2014: 46%
• 2015: 48%
• 2016: 42%
• 2017: 21%

One of those stands out from the others, and although it’s still early, and although things can still shift, what’s remarkable is remarkable. Suddenly, Pinder looks like he’s become an extreme fly-ball hitter. There’s power there to back it up. You know how Yonder Alonso has dramatically changed his own batting profile? His grounder rate is down by 19 points. Pinder has slightly bested that.

And oh, hey, Statcast. Out of everyone in the majors with at least 30 batted balls this season, Pinder ranks second — second! — in average exit velocity. He ranks fifth in average air-ball exit velocity. He ranks seventh in rate of batted balls hit at least 95 miles per hour. Pinder has hit nine so-called “Barrels”, which ties him with, say, Carlos Correa and Anthony Rizzo, and Pinder hasn’t played very much. He’s basically insisting that he gets noticed.

So, consider him noticed. How far this goes, I can’t tell you. Dramatic early-season shifts don’t always reflect legitimate changes in true talent. Yet Pinder is off to a promising start, and just to the eye, his swing is quite pleasing. The A’s could have something here. The A’s could have something terrific.

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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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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A few years back, I was sure that throwing too many breaking balls was bad for pitchers’ arm health. I wasn’t alone — there was some decent research backing up that hypothesis. As the methods for examining the question have become more refined, however, and further work has been conducted on the matter, it looks like we’ve found that it’s not so much breaking balls as velocity that most directly affects arm health.

Perhaps teams have been on the same journey, because curveball usage — and breaking-ball usage, in general — is up to heights we haven’t seen before.

Breaking-ball usage has increased. That said, the uptick has been slow and gradual. Perhaps too slow and gradual. Maybe we should be pushing it.

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Martin Cervenka is looking to join a select group of his countrymen. Currently the lone product of the Czech Republic in professional baseball, the 24-year-old native of Prague is hoping to follow John Stedronsky (1879), Frank Rooney (1914), and Carl Linhart (1952) as the only Czech-born players to see big-league action.

Cervenka has been climbing the ladder slowly, but surely. Signed by Cleveland when he was 16, he began playing stateside two years later — the Indians wanted him to finish high school first — and he’s currently strapping on his catcher’s gear in Lynchburg. He’s also swinging a much-improved bat. In 32 games with the high-A Hillcats, Cervenka is slashing .280/.328/.407.

Competition-wise, it’s a long way from Prague to pro ball.

“Back home, it’s a bunch of clubs playing on weekends only,” explained Cervenka, who estimated there are “five or six” baseball diamonds in Prague. “There are 10 teams in the top league, and something like 14 teams in the second league. In total, they play about 55 games a year. There are some really good players, though. We have one of the top four or five (national) teams in Europe.”

Outside of Czech baseball’s small inner circle, even the best players are largely anonymous. Despite his unique standing, Cervenka is basically John Doe. Read the rest of this entry »

PITTSBURGH – Daniel Murphy spends much of his offseason in his hometown of Jacksonville, Florida, where he hits in the batting cages of his alma mater, Jacksonville University. He works out there alongside his brother, who is also an alumnus of the program and who is also a local high-school coach. At the university, with his brother’s high-school team, Murphy will often talk about the craft of hitting with amateur players.

Murphy is, of course, one of a number of hitters who has changed his swing, improved his launch angle, and enjoyed significant success and improvement. He was an early adopter along with the usual names mentioned like Josh Donaldson and J.D. Martinez. But as Murphy talks to players at the grassroots level about swing concepts, he notices there are often curious looks when he discusses the idea of hitting fly-balls.

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