This is a series of scouting thoughts on high-school prospects eligible for the 2017 MLB Draft based on observations from summer showcases. Today’s positional group is corner infielders. Links to other positional groups appear below.

Previous editions: Catchers / Middle Infielders / Center Fielders / Left-Handed Pitchers.

The position du jour is corner infielders. This is a weird group. I shuffled the names around quite a bit before publication and am still not sure that I’m okay with what I have because beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder when it comes to all of these prospects. Without further adieu…

Adisyn Coffey, 3B, Delta HS (IN)

Height: 6’2, Weight: 170, Commitment: Arizona State

Coffey had the coolest looking bat at Area Codes and put on quite a display with it, making hard, airborne contact in several at-bats. He has above-average bat speed and great feel for generating lift because of a cute little backside collapse that creates some uppercut in the swing without overdoing it and eating away at his ability to make contact. Coffey loads his hands quite high and it can take a good bit of time for his barrel to find the baseball in the hitting zone, but he moves the bat around pretty well, I like his chances to hit and, eventually, hit with some power.

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A few weeks ago, I approached Tampa Bay (and former San Francisco) infielder Matt Duffy in the visiting clubhouse at Fenway Park. I wanted to talk to him about the mental side of the game. He was getting dressed, so we agreed to meet in the dugout in five minutes. At that very moment, Brian Kenny began talking about the idea of clutch on MLB Network, which was showing on the TV a few steps from where were standing.

Duffy kept his eyes and ears on the MLB Network discussion as he pulled on his uniform and cleats. With that in mind, I began our subsequent conversation with that very subject. From there, we segued into his mindset as a hitter, which is heavily influenced by Harvey Dorfman’s The Mental Keys of Hitting.

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Duffy on clutch hitting and heart rate: “I think there is something to [the idea of clutch]. When you look at the RBI leaders every year — the guys who do well with runners in scoring position — for the most part it’s the same guys. To me, that’s not an accident. I think a lot of people think RBIs are purely a result of the opportunities you have. That does play into it, but I also think that, in certain situations, if I can keep my heart rate at a more efficient level than the pitcher does, more times than not I’ll succeed. I don’t want my heart rate to be so low to where I’m not awake, but I also don’t want it to be so high that I’m jumping at everything in the box.

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We’ve all seen those swings so terrible that a batter can’t help but smile. Swings like this one from Brandon Phillips last year.

Phillips, of course, isn’t the only victim of this sort of thing. He’s been a league-average major-league hitter for a decade, which is a substantial accomplishment. But even accomplished hitters can look bad, can get it very wrong.

Were Phillips batting not for a last-place club but one contending for the postseason, we might gnash our teeth. Couldn’t he see that was a slider? What was he thinking? What was he looking at?

The answer to that last question, turns out, is way more complicated than it seems. Phillips clearly should have laid off a breaking ball that failed to reach the plate. He clearly has done that — otherwise, he wouldn’t have had a major-league career. So what happened? What did he see? Or not see? Ask hitters and experts that question, and the answers are vague, conflicting, and sometimes just strange.

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All things considered, Julio Urias is having an extraordinary rookie year. In his age-19 season, Urias has struck out a quarter of all the batters he’s faced in 72 innings. He’s got a 3.50 ERA and a 3.25 FIP, and the list of starting pitchers, age 20 or younger, with better adjusted ERAs and FIPs over the last 50 years runs just six deep. ZiPS already sees Urias as being the near-equal of Cy Young candidate Masahiro Tanaka, and Steamer thinks even more highly of the Dodgers’ young phenom. Already, Urias has put himself on the map as one of baseball’s best young pitchers. And already, Urias is coming after one of teammate Clayton Kershaw’s crowns.

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Baseball has a thing for archetypes. Leadoff hitters are supposed to be fast. Right fielders have good arms. Closers need either to be Mariano Rivera or slightly bizarre. These archetypes exist, in theory, because they are consistent with what you need from certain players. The rise of the analytics movement in baseball has fought against some of the ill-conceived archetypes, like the bat-handling No. 2 hitter, but many of these ideas remain because they align with success.

One straightforward example is that center fielders should be fast. Technically speaking, you just want a center fielder who can prevent hits over a large section of the field. There’s more than one way to possess that ability, obviously, but speed certainly helps, even if you could imaging a successful center fielder who didn’t run particularly well. Yet, in general, it’s a baseball archetype that seems to have stood the test of time.

This article is not going to challenge that belief. It is better to have a fast center fielder. But what this article is going to do is study and celebrate a particularly unusual data point relating to center fielders and speed. Marcell Ozuna is just weeks away from becoming the first center fielder since 2005 and just the 22nd ever to go an entire season without a stolen base.

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In the eighth inning of Monday night’s game at Yankee Stadium, Yasiel Puig was asked to pinch-hit against a left-handed relief pitcher named James Pazos. With two outs, nobody on and the Dodgers already winning 6-2, the stakes weren’t terribly high. However, with Puig’s recent return from purgatory Triple-A, it was a good opportunity to give the right-hander an at-bat off the bench over the left-handed Joc Pederson. The result was the first pinch-hit home run of Puig’s career. However, beyond the actual outcome of this one at-bat, Puig’s pinch-hit performance served as a reminder of exactly how important he can be for the Dodgers in September and October.

The latest whispers and rumors indicate that, leading up to the August 31 waiver trade deadline, the Dodgers and Brewers were tantalizingly close to completing a deal that would have sent Puig to Milwaukee and Ryan Braun to Los Angeles. Reportedly, it’s a trade scenario that may be revisited this offseason. For now, however, Puig remains a Dodger. Whatever discord does or doesn’t exist between the player and team ought to be put on the back burner for now because the Dodgers have a role that needs to be filled and Puig is the one here to fill it.

There are a lot of different directions in which the Dodgers could go as they construct their postseason roster, but one of them includes taking the five pure outfielders currently with the team. Did you ever watch Sesame Street either growing up or with your own kids? You know that “One of these things is not like the other” song? Go ahead and sing it in your head while taking a look at the Dodgers five outfielders: Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, Josh Reddick, Andrew Toles, and Yasiel Puig. (Yeah, that song will be in your head all day. Sorry.)

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The Chicago Cubs are the unquestioned best team in baseball at the moment. There is no aspect of the game where the team struggles. They hit, hit for power, field and run the bases at a high level, pitch well as starters, and pitch well as relievers. When we ask questions and delve into the numbers, we do not ask if they are good. Instead, we ask how good are they, how this happened, and who is responsible. On the hitting side of things, numbers are easier to come by and believe in. On the run-prevention side, however, assigning value between pitching, defense, and luck can be difficult.

Back in June, August Fagerstrom noted that the Cubs’ opponent BABIP, then at .250, was basically the lowest of the past 55 years when adjusted for league average. Back in June, we had not yet completed half the season. Now in September, with the season nearly complete, the Cubs BABIP has risen… all the way to .251, increasing just one measly point. The Cubs are preventing balls in play at a record level.

On balls in play there are three principal groups of actors: pitchers, hitters, and defenders. While an individual hitter might have a decent amount of control over whether a batted ball becomes a hit or an out, pitchers face so many different hitters over the course of a season that, for any one pitcher and any one team, the control by the pitcher and defense on batted balls is likely very influential. So how do we break this down?

First, let’s back up a step, and note something else the Cubs have been doing at a historic level. Generally speaking, a team’s FIP is going to be fairly close to a team’s ERA. Since World War II, there have been 1,716 team seasons, and all but 108 (6.3%) have produced an ERA and FIP within a half-run of each other; two-thirds of teams, within a quarter-run. The Cubs are one of the biggest outliers we have ever seen.

So we see the Cubs up there, and wonder what could be causing this. Do the Cubs have a secret sauce? Is it the pitching? Is it the defense? Is this luck?

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Last week, we ran a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award (links to all of which are available here). Today, we continue with the National League MVP Award.

Note that, as with last week’s posts, these are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Not every award race has an obvious front-runner. Like, take the American League Cy Young Award. That’s as tight a race as you can imagine, so any number of candidates can emerge. For any one of them, you can go in asking, why should this guy be the winner? I think the National League MVP Award is different. The way I see it, the conversation begins with Kris Bryant. He’s out in front, so you have to wonder, why shouldn’t this guy be the winner? Perfectly legitimate question. Trying to answer it just leads you right back to the start.

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It’s no secret that power is up in baseball. While guys like Brian Dozier are hitting their 40th home run and Tyler Naquin are putting up Barry Bonds-type numbers against breaking and offspeed pitches, investigations into the potential of a juiced ball have persisted throughout the analytical community. We can’t say for sure why power is up, but it is. The league’s .167 isolated slugging percentage is the highest the peak of the steroid era in 2000, and the second-highest in the history of the game, and the 14-point increase in ISO from 2015-16 is the 10th-largest single-season in increase since the modern era began in 1921.

Such a sudden and drastic increase can make it difficult to contextualize player changes on the fly. When I wrote about Eric Hosmer’s season two weeks ago, this line from a comment by user “isavage” stuck with me:

It doesn’t seem like Hosmer’s performance has fluctuated too greatly, it’s more that his offense didn’t get better when the league’s offense got better.

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Last September, we ran an interview with Cody Allen that was titled A Cleveland Closer’s Weird Year. At the time, his BABIP was .366 (it was .342 at season’s end). Despite his balls-in-play issue, opposing batters hit just .219 against him (with a .305 SLG). He finished with 34 saves, a 2.99 ERA and a 1.82 FIP.

The 27-year-old right-hander is having another weird year. His ground-ball rate is up almost 10 points and his infield-fly rate has plummeted from 15.4% to 4.1%. Counterintuitively, his BABIP has plummeted to .248. On the season, Allen has 27 saves, a 2.70 ERA and a 3.24 FIP. Opposing batters are hitting .184 against him, with a .333 SLG and a much higher HR/FB rate (14.3% versus 3.1% a year ago).

Allen’s repertoire hasn’t changed, and his pitch ratios and velocity are essentially the same. His strikeout rate remains high. All in all, he’s the same pitcher he was a year ago, so why are some of the numbers so markedly different? Allen did his best to explain — and expounded on a variety of other pitching subjects — this past weekend.

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Allen on his numbers: “As a reliever, your numbers can change quite a bit, because your innings aren’t that high. One or two blowups can really inflate some of them. I had one against Chicago where I gave up five and got only one out. My ERA went way up in one game. As for explaining my numbers the past two years — the ones you’re asking about — I’m not sure if there are any simple answers.”

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