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

Jacob Nix, RHP, San Diego (Profile)
Level: Hi-A Age: 21   Org Rank: 7   Top 100: HM
Line: 9 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 0 BB, 11 K

Notes
A groin strain sidelined Nix until late May. Since returning, his fastball has been in the mid-90s, touching 97, and his curveball flashes plus. He has an inning-eater’s build (I have a Jon Lieber comp on the body) and throws lots of strikes. He’s rather firmly an overall top-100 prospect.

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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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Maybe the Astros are the best team in baseball, and maybe they’re not. There are lots of good teams, and the differences are all fairly slim. At least, we can say the Astros have the best record out of anyone in baseball, and they deserve to stand where they’re standing. They’re easily clear of the rest of their own division, and while they’ve experienced a handful of significant or semi-significant injuries, they’ve chugged right along. The Astros were supposed to be good. So far, the Astros have been great. Projections can miss in one of two directions.

One of the things we knew was that the Astros were going to hit. During the winter, they were lauded for their offensive depth, and the Astros have an easy MLB lead in wRC+. But now I have a fun fact for you. It’s even more telling than that one. The Astros, as a team, lead baseball in home runs. They also have baseball’s lowest team strikeout rate. In the 19 full seasons since baseball moved to a 30-team landscape, no offense has led in both categories. The Astros are trying to be the first, which is downright impressive.

Read that again. Home runs? Sure. Everyone hits home runs. Marwin Gonzalez hits home runs. The Astros might as well be leading. But, strikeouts? Yeah. It’s not that there was zero warning. Reality is just following what could’ve reasonably been expected.

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No team’s batters have ever seen fewer four-seam fastballs than the Houston Astros this year. Few teams’ pitchers, meanwhile, have thrown fewer four-seam fastballs than the Houston Astros this year. This all has something to do with changes in baseball, yes, and also with the personnel on this current team. But there’s also a wrinkle to the thing that tells us a little more about why these trends are happening, and why the Astros are at the forefront in both cases.

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There are two types of stories you might be growing tired of reading. This guy figured out how to hit home runs. Well, there are home runs everywhere. And, this guy figured out how to get more strikeouts. Well, there are also strikeouts everywhere. Home runs. Strikeouts. Home runs. Strikeouts. It can feel sometimes like the game is nothing but home runs and strikeouts. It’s not, but it is more than it’s ever been. I’m sure many of you are craving diversity.

But Brad Peacock is leading all starting pitchers in strikeout rate. Not Chris Sale. Not Max Scherzer or Clayton Kershaw or Corey Kluber. Brad Peacock. Yeah, I had to lower the innings minimum, because Peacock hasn’t been starting the whole time, but when he was a reliever earlier on, he got a whole bunch of strikeouts, too. Let me show you a table, including 2016 and 2017 contact rates allowed:

Peacock has a long history of pretty average contact rates. Relatedly, he was essentially a replacement-level pitcher. Now a third of all swing attempts are missing. This can’t not be discussed. Strikeouts might be everywhere, sure, but this is the first time Peacock has managed to find them.

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With Josh Reddick sidelined by a concussion, the Astros summoned 23-year-old center fielder Derek Fisher to the big leagues yesterday. The early returns are good: in his debut, Fisher went 2-for-3 with a homer and two walks.

Fisher had more than earned this opportunity, slashing .335/.401/.608 at Triple-A this year. A power-speed threat, Fisher eclipsed 20 homers and 20 steals in both 2015 and 2016, and Eric Longenhagen gave him raw power and speed grades of 60 and 70, respectively. Fisher had a bit of a strikeout problem in the past, but has managed to slice his strikeout rate from 27% last year to 19% this year without sacrificing any of his power.

KATOH loves Fisher, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise given his excellent performance this year. I have him projected for 8.1 WAR over his first six seasons by stats-only KATOH and 6.3 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates Eric Longenhagen’s relatively modest 45 FV grade. Those projections make him the 18th- and 48th-best prospect in baseball, respectively.

To put some faces to Fisher’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps for the toolsy center fielder. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Fisher’s Double-A and Triple-A performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

Please note that the Mahalanobis analysis is separate from KATOH. KATOH relies on macro-level trends, rather than comps. The fates of a few statistically similar players shouldn’t be used to draw sweeping conclusions about a prospect’s future. For this reason, I recommend using a player’s KATOH forecast to assess his future potential. The comps give us some interesting names that sometimes feel spot-on, but they’re mostly just there for fun.

It’s not immediately clear how, or how often, Houston will work Fisher into their lineup once Reddick is healthy. But Houston would perhaps benefit from shifting some of Nori Aoki’s at-bats to Fisher, giving them an outfield of Fisher, Reddick and George Springer. Regardless, Fisher’s rare combination of power, speed, and contact ability makes his future look incredibly bright. And he made it clear with his 2017 performance that he has nothing left to prove in the minor leagues.

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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I think every article about this year’s Astros is supposed to begin in the same way, so, who am I to defy convention? Let’s just embed this and move on:

We don’t need to review the feature. We don’t need to review the things it got right and the things it got wrong. It’s unlikely to be remembered for more than the headline, because that’s the way the reading public works, and here we are, three years later, and the Astros have baseball’s best record. The best record by a decent margin, at that, and the Astros also happen to have our second-highest odds of winning the World Series. No team has improved its World Series odds more since the start of the year. I just got an email an hour ago from some gambling business that currently has the Astros as its World Series favorites. This could become a reality. Chances are, it won’t, yet the Astros’ odds have never looked better. The Astros are good. That doesn’t sound as weird as it used to, but the process is complete. Winning is all that’s left.

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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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