Tom Layne’s major league career is just 157 pitches old. Typically, this is not great news for a 27-year-old. Layne, however, has put together an exemplary 157 pitches to open his time in the big leagues. Following a one-out save Wednesday night, Layne sits with a 1.74 ERA and a 17-to-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio in his first 10.1 major league innings. Even Layne’s two runs allowed only scored after a new Padres pitcher allowed the inherited runners in.

Layne was acquired from the Diamondbacks on May 2nd for “future considerations,” then a career minor league starter coming off a 6.21 Triple-A ERA in his age-26 season — essentially defining the “org guy.” Layne started with the Padres as well at first, rattling off five more Triple-A starts with a 7.77 ERA. Those struggles may have done more for his career than any prior minor league successes — by June, Layne was sent to Double-A San Antonio. He allowed 10 earned runs in his first two starts there, was converted to a reliever, and his quest to the majors began anew.

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As I was flipping channels last night I managed to stumble on the Padres – Dodgers game. Andrew Werner, a 25 year-old rookie making only his third career start, was on the hill for the Padres. It only took me a few pitches to determine I should stick with the game for a little while.

Although the Dodgers would eventually win the game in extra-innings, Werner pitched a great game as his final line can attest to (6 IP, 8Ks, 1BB). And although he posted an equally dominant performance in his previous game against the Atlanta Braves (6 IP, 7Ks, 0BBs), the way he went about shutting down the Dodgers was quite different.

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Yesterday Jeff Sullivan wrote about the San Diego Padres. If you haven’t read Jeff’s post, go read it now. I’ll wait. Okay, so now you know that since June 10, the Padres have a record of 41-30 and have outscored their opponents by 32 runs. But that’s not all. The Padres are 9-1 in their last 10 games, 13-7 in their last 20, and 18-12 in their last 30. They are outplaying everyone in the National League West other than the division-leading Giants.

The Padres also have new owners. The second and third generation of the O’Malley family — who owned the Dodgers from 1950 until 1998 — now own the Padres, along with San Diego businessman Ron Fowler and a group of minority investors. Fowler has been designated as the team’s control person, but Peter O’Malley and his sons and nephews, with their longstanding baseball pedigree, will be key to the Padres’ efforts to re-energize the team and the fan base.

It won’t be easy.

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Overlord Dave and I exchange a lot of emails, and earlier Thursday he sent me an email declaring that everybody’s talking about the Padres. I chuckled heartily to myself, as Dave is one of the funniest people I know. The Padres are about as forgettable a franchise as any in the major professional sports. They could win seven consecutive World Series and still people would only talk about them in order to complain about the camouflage uniforms. But while everybody most certainly is not talking about the Padres right now, more people are talking about the Padres right now than were talking about the Padres some months ago. That’s because the Padres have been playing some outstanding baseball.

By their standards, at least. Maybe “outstanding” is too strong a term, but since June 10 — an endpoint carefully selected to make the Padres look as good as possible — the Padres have gone 41-30 and they’ve outscored the opposition by 23 runs. Overall, they’ve drawn to within a game and a half of the Red Sox, and while the Red Sox clearly aren’t what they were supposed to be, that’s a psychologically significant fun fact. The Padres and the Red Sox aren’t too different. The Padres now might well be better than the Red Sox now. What a game, baseball.

The Padres are nowhere close to a playoff race, because before they caught fire, they played baseball as if they were literally on fire. Yet their stretch of success has people wondering if the playoffs might be in the Padres’ near-term future. Let’s examine how this stretch has happened, and what the Padres’ outlook looks like.

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I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.

In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.

After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
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Trevor Bauer makes his Major League Debut tonight. Carson already wrote about it, and the coverage of his impending promotion has included months of conversation, including a movement to #FreeTrevorBauer. Bauer’s big league debut has been heavily anticipated and is now going to be heavily watched.

However, there’s another guy getting called up from the minors to join the rotation of an NL West team tonight too, and he’s doing it with little to no fanfare. Carson didn’t even mention his start under “other notable games”, and no one has ever used the hashtag #FreeAndrewCashner. So, while the Trevor Bauer Hype Train rolls on, don’t miss out on Andrew Cashner’s first real big league start of 2012, because he very well may be the best pitching prospect to take the mound tonight.

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The minor leagues are a vast landscape of prospects, fillers and veterans. Each year, players from all three of those category impact the major leagues — sometimes for the better, sometimes not. But before they make their September callups or injury replacements, let us familiarize ourselves with some of the standouts.

International League (AAA)
IL Leaderboards

Brad Eldred (.374 OBP, .695 SLG, .465 wOBA, 197 wRC+)

The 31-year-old Eldred was slugging away in the Tigers minor league system (since released and playing in Japan). Like Dan Johnson (173 wRC+) with the White Sox, Eldred would have required multiple injuries before getting consideration at first base. The Tigers have both Miguel Cabrera and Prince Fielder, while the Sox have a trio in Adam Dunn, Paul Konerko and now Kevin Youkilis. That cavalcade of injuries never came — nor an age of enlightenment in which Delmon Young is no longer a DH in Detroit — Eldred never got a steady shot with the Tigers.

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Few players have had the swings of fortune that Anthony Rizzo has experienced.

After being drafted in the sixth round by the Red Sox in 2007, he had an unspectacular but promising debut for an eighteen year-old in rookie ball (.286/.375/.429). Then he found out he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent most of 2008 eating, sleeping, and getting chemotherapy. It took him until 2010 to really bounce back, but that year he hit .263/.334/.481 in Double-A for the Red Sox and suddenly appeared on prospect lists. Then he was traded to the Padres and hit .141 with the big league club in 153 plate appearances. Then he hit 26 home runs in Triple-A. Then he was traded to the Cubs. Then he hit 23 home runs in 284 Triple-A plate appearances.

Now the 22-year-old first baseman has been called up a second time, perhaps to stay. That’s a lot of back-and-forth swings for Rizzo. It should be no surprise, then, that his fortunes hang on his ability to sustain the changes he’s made to his swing.

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If you hadn’t guessed from my first piece on Midwest League prospects, the league is simply loaded with talent. Taking that statement one step further, few would argue it was the best prospect league in all of minor league baseball at present. In this installment, seven more prospects ranging from the relative unknowns to household names (if there is such a thing when it comes to prospects).

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Yesterday, the Padres traded reliever Ernesto Frieri to the Angels, in exchange for Minor Leaguers Alexi Amarista and Donn Roach. Frieri has pitched very well thus far this season, with walk and strikeout rates significantly better than he had in 2011, albeit in a much smaller sample. But will the Angels be getting that pitcher? Petco Park seemingly has a way of elevating mediocre pitchers into above-average, or even elite ones. That has never seemed as prevalent as it has this year, as we have watched Heath Bell struggle to put away the likes of Joaquin Arias and Travis Buck.

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