“[Jose Ramirez] is an All-Star baseman. If I were to have told you that four years ago, you’d have been scratching your head, ‘Wait. The guy who is playing second base and is known for his defense? He’s an All-Star third baseman?’”

Those words were spoken by Cleveland Indians team president Chris Antonetti, who went on to say that “development isn’t always a linear process; it’s difficult to predict where guys are going to end up.”

That’s certainly true for Ramirez, who will start at the hot corner for the American League in tonight’s midsummer classic. As Antonetti alluded to, the expectations for the Dominican native were quite different just a handful of years ago. The 2013 Baseball America Prospect Handbook opined that Ramirez has “little power and limited physical projection,” and that he “lacks a high ceiling.”

Feel free to put that scouting report in the shredder, because the 5-foot-9 Ramirez’s ceiling currently resembles that of the Sistine Chapel. The 24-year-old infielder heads into the break with a .332/.388/.601 slash line, and — drum roll, please — an eye-opening 17 home runs. Ramirez has, quite simply, developed into a star.

He isn’t exactly verbose when it comes to talking about his emergence as an offensive force. At least that was the case when I spoke to him — with the assistance of Indians translator extraordinaire Anna Bolton — prior to a recent game. But while Ramirez wasn’t particularly forthcoming, he did share a few a noteworthy nuggets.

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Logically, all of the following is true. We accept that human beings are in charge of calling the strike zone. They try their best to tell the difference between strikes and balls, but you can usually understand if they call a strike on a pitch that missed by an inch. How much is an inch? When’s the last time you tried to do what they do a few hundred times every game? The ball moves incredibly fast, and as an umpire, you never know where it’s going to go, or how it’s going to spin. Anyway, we can be forgiving with an inch. And if we can accept a miss of one inch, it follows that we should accept a miss of two inches. All that is is one more inch, and we already gave them the first inch.

If we can accept a miss of two inches, we can accept a miss of three inches. If three inches, then four inches. If four inches, then five, and if five, then six. On and on it goes, in single-inch increments, and it does all make a certain amount of sense. Humans are great, but humans are flawed, and any human-called strike zone is going to have a gray area.

But, nine inches? Imagine nine inches. You don’t even have to be precisely correct. Your imagination is enough. We know that pitches miss the zone by nine inches. But how does a pitch like that get called a strike? I mean, ever? I don’t want to act like some kind of umpiring authority, because I *haven’t* ever been an ump, and I know sometimes people make mistakes. It’s just — nine inches. Technically, 9.1 inches, in this case. The worst called strike of the 2017 regular season’s first half missed the outer edge of the zone by 9.1 inches. You might’ve seen that Angel Hernandez has been in the news lately.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Adbert Alzolay, RHP, Chicago NL (Profile)
Level: Hi-A Age: 22   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 5.2 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 2 R, 7 K

Notes
His delivery is a bit rough (though it’s more efficient than it used to be), but Alzolay has good stuff, sitting in the mid-90s and topping out at 97 with arm-side run. He’ll flash an average changeup and can vary his breaking ball’s shape, at times exhibiting 12-6 movement and showing two-plane wipe at others. He has a chance for a plus-plus fastball an two solid-average secondaries, perhaps a tick above, to go with fringe command.

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On Opening Day, Edwin Encarnacion made his presence immediately felt with his new team. With Cleveland down a run, one out in the eighth, and Matt Bush on the mound, Encarnacion homered to tie the game in Arlington. It was his second hit — in just his fourth plate appearance — for his new team. By WPA, it was the biggest play of the game to that point (it would end the day as the second-biggest). By the time he came up for his fifth plate appearance, Cleveland had pulled ahead by three runs, and they would go away winners. Unfortunately, Encarnacion wouldn’t hit another homer for 13 games. In the 12 games between those homers, he would hit just .182/.308/.205 (48 wRC+) in a 53-PA stretch that had some Cleveland fans feeling a whole lot of buyer’s remorse.

Fortunately, Encarnacion hasn’t maintained that horrid performance all season. In fact, as the calendar has flipped to June, he’s been on fire. His 228 wRC+ for the month is tops in the majors, and his 132 wRC+ for the season is now 32nd among qualified hitters. In case you hadn’t noticed that he was heating up, he punctuated the hot streak yesterday with two homers off of Twins starter Kyle Gibson, accounting for the only three runs Cleveland would require to secure both the win and also four-game road sweep of the Twins. He then tacked on an RBI single and a sac fly just for fun, which made him responsible for driving in all five Cleveland runs on the day. Not bad. And the home runs were pretty, to boot, both landing in Target Field’s second deck.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Breiling Eusebio, LHP, Colorado (Profile)
Level: Short Season  Age: 20   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 5 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K

Notes
It’s been a strong 2017 affiliate debut for Eusebio, who looked quite good throughout extended spring training, his fastball often sitting 90-94 with some tail. His low-70s curveball improved as we inched closer to the summer and it, too, was missing bats as June arrived and is currently average, flashing above. Eusebio has trouble timing his delivery, which can negatively impact his command, but he’s deceptive, throws hard for a lefty starting-pitching prospect, and has breaking-ball feel. Very much a prospect.

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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Yordan Alvarez, DH/1B, Houston (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: HM   Top 100: NR
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR

Notes
Alvarez is hitting a preposterous .413/.500/.693 as a 19-year-old in full-season ball. Even once you acknowledge that better hitters at lower levels are going to have especially high BABIPs because they’re hitting balls harder than the baseline player at that level, Alvarez’s current .553 mark is unsustainable. Nevertheless, reports on the ease of his power and picturesque swing are very strong. There’s some swing-and-miss risk here but also a potential middle-of-the-order bat.

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This past Tuesday night against Oakland — just as there have been at other times this season — Trevor Bauer showed glimpses of the bat-missing strikeout artist he can be, the top-of-the rotation potential he’s possessed since departing UCLA with Tim Lincecum-like Pac-12 numbers and starter-kit stuff.

Bauer set a career high with 14 strikeouts against the A’s on Tuesday, and he has a career-high strikeout percentage (29.2%) and strikeout-walk rate differential (22.1 points) this season — nearly doubling his career rate (12.4-point K-BB%) by that measure.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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In your mind, you might have an idea of the relative strengths of the Indians’ Jose Ramirez. He’s what many might term a “good little player” — and that’s not a comment on his 5-foot-8 stature. It’s about the fact that he can run a little, hit for a little power, make a little contact, and play a few positions. Useful, but maybe not a star.

Then you might look at his stats from last year and find yourself surprised that he was nearly a five-win player. Then you might look at his stats from this year and find yourself surprised that he’s now a power-hitter. For the player himself, it required a little recalibration of his own approach. And that’s forced a recalibration on us — and on pitchers, as well.

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