Two weeks ago, Eno Sarris wrote about how Alex Cobb’s split-change has gone missing. The Tampa Bay Rays righty had a very good one before undergoing Tommy John surgery in May of 2015, but the arduous road back extracted a heavy toll. The changeup is a feel pitch, and — cue up some Righteous Brothers blue-eyed soul — Cobb lost that loving feeling.

Fortunately for the 29-year-old hurler, it’s not gone, gone, gone. As a matter of fact, his relationship with his signature offering is already being rekindled. Cobb threw his split-change just 10 times in the game about which Eno wrote. In ensuing outings that number has climbed to 13, and most recently to 23.

I haven’t spoken to Cobb since he last pitched, but I did talk to him after he faced Boston on April 16. That was the game where he threw 13 split-changes, along with 36 curveballs and 44 fastballs. He wasn’t particularly pleased with his performance, but he was thinking positive thoughts. Rather than feeling forlorn, he was looking forward to an inevitable reunion with a pitch he holds dear to his heart.

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Cobb on why his changeup went missing: “If I had that answer, it would be here. But I do have ideas. Going into Tommy John surgery, you hear that the overall feel of pitches comes back slowly, and the changeup is usually the last one to come back.

“It has nothing to do with [flexor-group muscles, as Eno theorized]. I feel completely normal. When people say ‘feel on a pitch’ — especially a changeup — it’s usually a mechanical thing. Feel isn’t what the ball feels like. It’s not a literal term. It’s the way your body feels, in rhythm, over the rubber. We’re talking about inches, even fractions of inches, of changes that impact the flight of the ball.

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Once someone who’s erred has done his time, apologized, and satisfied society institutionally, there’s the matter of going on with life. This is true with every crime, however horrible, and the things Matt Bush did were horrible. He’s served his time — 39 months — and hopes we can forgive him. But that’s almost of secondary concern to him, at this point: life, and living, remains.

And Matt Bush, now perhaps the closer for the Texas Rangers, is doing his best to be a good baseball player because that’s the path in front of him. He believes any success he experiences in that role is due to the help he’s gotten. “Our pitching coaches are great, man, really great,” he suggested multiple times in our talk before a game against the Athletics this week.

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Steven Souza, Jr. is showing signs he might be ready to break out. Fourteen games are far too few to make any determinations, but the numbers are promising. The Tampa Bay Rays slugger is slashing .320/.424/.520, and six of his 16 safeties have gone for extra bases. Every bit as notable is the fact that he’s drawn nine free passes, and fanned just 13 times, in 59 plate appearances.

Power has never been a problem for the 27-year-old Souza. Making consistent contact has. Coming into the season, he was a .234/.309/.404 hitter with a propensity for being punched out. All of a sudden, he’s the one doing the punching.

When I asked Souza why he’s gotten off to such a good start, he offered a fairly generic answer.

“I really don’t know,” Souza told me on Saturday. “Right now I’m just running into some balls, finding some holes, finding the barrel. I don’t get too caught up in the analytics stuff. I’m a guy who can’t overthink things, so I just try to keep it simple. Right now the ball is falling for me.”

For a baseball reporter, “I just try to keep it simple” is a commonly heard phrase. It’s an honest answer, but at the same time, a more concrete reason is often lurking behind the facade. Souza is hitting the ball harder than ever before — at least in terms of big-league success — and simplicity is rarely a new concept for a professional athlete.

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Logan Morrison is older and wiser, and he’s off to a strong start this season with the Tampa Bay Rays. Over 46 plate appearances (including this morning’s game), the 29-year-old first baseman is slashing a healthy .302/.348/.535, with three round trippers. Thanks in part to a grand salami and a .350 batting average with runners on base, he’s tied for the team lead in RBI, with 10.

He’s still colorful. Morrison has long been good with a quip, and while his hitting approach has matured, his personality remains engagingly offbeat. That’s good new for scribes and fans alike — everyone loves a snappy quote — and LoMo supplied several when I spoke to him over the weekend.

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Morrison on his career thus far: “I’d say I’ve had some ups and downs. There have been some speed bumps along the road, but I’m still here. They’re trying to get me out, but I’m still here.

“I was 22 years old when I got called up. I didn’t know [crap] about anything I was doing. I thought I did. I thought I had it all figured out, and I actually did pretty well that first half-season. I carried it over into the next year, too, but then I got hurt and got off the tracks a little bit. Then I got hurt again. I had to have another surgery on the same leg.

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Alex Cobb once had a power changeup so nasty we gave it a nickname. The Thing even had progeny: Cobb taught the grip to Jake Odorizzi, and Thing Two is now the latter pitcher’s best secondary pitch.

Likely the product of what appears to be an organization-wide focus on the changeup, Thing One was an impressive pitch. Unfortunately, it’s gone. At least for now. For the moment, it doesn’t resemble what it used to be, and Cobb is using it less and less often with each start. The weird part is, Cobb might still be okay, anyway.

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The Tampa Bay Rays had 12 bunt hits in 2016, with Kevin Kiermaier’s four leading the way. Expect Mallex Smith to surpass both of those numbers this season — not just the individual mark, but the team total, as well. The 23-year-old speedster already has one in the books, and if all goes to plan, more are on the way.

Mallex Smith is a bunt machine in the making. That’s not a pejorative. The kill-the-bunt crowd isn’t off base, but their primary target is the out-surrendering sacrifice. Smith’s aim is to reach safely, and to then wreak havoc once he’s on. There’s no questioning his ability to do the latter. Smith led the minors with 88 steals in 2014 (as MLB.com’s Jim Callis sagely predicted he would), and he’s a perfect three-for-three since donning a Tampa Bay uniform.

Acquired over the offseason — he went from Atlanta to Seattle to Tampa on January 11 — Smith isn’t conventional in a modern-day sense. Launch angles and exit velocity are in vogue, and the 5-foot-9 outfielder is all about electricity. He fashions himself a jackrabbit, which is exactly how his first-base coach sees him.

“Mallex is a very dynamic athlete who can do things you don’t see a lot on a baseball field these days,” opined Rocco Baldelli, who as a player was dubbed The Woonsocket Rocket. “There just aren’t a lot of players that fit that sort of speedy, athletic profile in 2017. He really endears himself to that role. He knows what he is as a player.”

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While pitcher wins and losses have been abandoned by many as a means to assess a pitcher’s effectively, the traditional measurement of performance from a bygone era is still attached to every pitcher in the game. And even though pitchers have limited control over the ability to win and lose games, Chris Archer’s 19 losses last season do tell a story. They tell a tale of frustration, of an uneven campaign, and of poor luck on balls in play (and out of play) even as his underlying skills and fielding-independent numbers were suggestive of a pitcher who deserved a better fate.

Despite Archer’s 27.4% strikeout rate and the 19.5-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%), the Rays still managed to lose 23 of the 33 games Archer started.

But his Opening Day start against the Yankees suggested that Archer might be poised not only to bounce back by traditional measurements, but that he might be ready to leap to a new level of underlying performance thanks to an improved pitch.

After working as a top-of-the rotation arm mostly via a fastball-slider combo, Archer might have a new important variable for opponents to consider: an improved changeup.

Archer threw 13 changeups in the season opener versus the Yankees, and many of them were of the fading-, diving-, bat-missing, lefty-neutralizing variety.

An Archer change against Jacoby Ellsbury…

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Here’s an excerpted note from the top of a FanGraphs player page you’ve presumably never visited:

RotoWire News: Pruitt has made the Opening Day roster for Tampa Bay, Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reports. (3/30/2017)

Here’s Topkin, writing a little about Pruitt. Here’s Bill Chastain, also writing a little about Pruitt. I should tell you that the specific Pruitt here is Austin Pruitt, who is a 27-year-old right-handed pitcher. A quote from the team:

“We’ve got unique situations where guys can provide lengthier innings,” [manager Kevin] Cash said. “I think looking at it, Austin will be used as a multi-inning [guy]. But those multi-inning roles could come in a 2-1 ballgame. We wouldn’t hesitate to do that with him.”

Pruitt has been a starter, in the minors. He’s about to be a reliever. A particular kind of reliever, a kind of reliever that might be becoming increasingly prevalent. I like Austin Pruitt a lot, and so, allow me to try to sell you on him.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Tampa Bay Rays farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

60 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .270/.370/.430 as a 20-year-old at Double-A.

Scouting Report
The barrel-chested Adames might ordinarily project to move off shortstop given his build, but it seems to me that Tampa has a rather liberal organizational philosophy about what constitutes a viable defensive shortstop and Adames isn’t going to be any more offensive there than aging Asdrubal Cabrera and Yunel Escobar have been in recent years.

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The Rays just traded for Peter Bourjos, a soon-to-be 30-year-old worth zero WAR over the past two seasons. The Rays are giving up basically nothing, because just a couple months ago, Bourjos signed a minor-league contract with a go-nowhere team. You don’t want to read a blog post about Peter Bourjos. I don’t want to write a blog post about Peter Bourjos. But he’s one part of a bigger-picture collection — the Rays are assembling another fantastic outfield.

Another fantastic defensive outfield, I should say. Heaven knows if Bourjos is going to actually hit. As you know, it all begins with Kevin Kiermaier, who might be the best defensive outfielder in the world. And the Rays are no strangers to having good defense out there; they were fifth by both DRS and UZR last season, and they were first by both measures the season before. Kiermaier is good enough to carry a group by himself. This year, though, he won’t have to do that.

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