Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen.

Mike Soroka, RHP, Atlanta (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: 9  Top 100: 93
Line: 5 IP, 2 H, 0 BB, 2 H, 7 K

Notes
Soroka is the most polished strike-thrower of Atlanta’s young arms and has mature competitive poise. Much was made of his aggressive assignment to Double-A, but this was a promising start.

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After two starts and one week of baseball, Sean Manaea has the seventh-worst ERA among qualified pitchers at 7.15. That’s a pretty useless sentence for about five different reasons, but I’m going to rely on it briefly because it’s April and being a baseball writer is very difficult in April. In early April, we’re on the hunt for indicators. Other than health and velocity, it’s hard to find anything that happens in week one that will meaningfully shift your opinion, but we’re all keeping our eyes open for signs of things to come. The data points from April matter, it’s just too early to know if they’re representative of anything.

Typically, if a promising young pitcher like Manaea recorded two starts during which he allowed 10 runs over 11.1 innings, we would either brush it aside as a product of growing pains or consider it as a possible indication that something is wrong. In general, it’s not good to give up a lot of runs, even if we’re all in agreement that pitchers don’t have complete control over how many runs they allow.

But what’s so interesting about Manaea is that, in addition to what appear to be a couple of rough starts in the outcome department, he’s excelling in two of the pitching statistics that become reliable most quickly. Any reasonably astute fan can take a look at Manaea’s strikeout rate (28.6%), walk rate (8.2 %), home-run rate (0.79 HR/9), and BABIP (.259) to determine that his opponents have stacked all their success into just a couple of weird innings. But while those indicators look good enough to chalk this up to sequencing, there are actually two deeper measures that are quite interesting.

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Last spring, in Dodgers camp, a remarkable thing happened without any of us noticing. It’s not uncommon, of course, for a young prospect to seek out a veteran starting pitcher for conversation. That sort of thing happens all the time. But when Jharel Cotton was soaking in knowledge from Scott Kazmir that day, something unique was happening. Baseball’s top changeup was hanging out with baseball’s second-best changeup. A baton was being passed.

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Last year’s playoffs were seen as a win not only for the Cubs and their fans, but also for proponents of the relief ace. On a national stage, Terry Francona used Andrew Miller early and often to put out fires almost regardless of inning. He’d been doing it ever since Cleveland acquired Miller in the summer, of course, but here was a manager deploying the strategy on the game’s largest stage.

Not every team can be blessed with having both Miller and Cody Allen on their roster, though, nor can every team have both Dellin Betances and Aroldis Chapman. Most teams are lucky enough to have a good closer, and most of those teams employ the traditional strategy of waiting until the ninth inning to use their best reliever. Much has been made of the strategic merit of that, but it’s a system that helps players know their roles on the team, and that has value, too. But if a team isn’t blessed with a Miller-type player, then they need a sturdy bridge to arrive at that closer. Even Cleveland and New York need help from guys without well-known names.

We’ve been fixated on the idea of the relief ace. The idea is so tantalizing and so intoxicating. Not only is it awesome to see Miller jump in and melt faces whenever Tito desires, but it’s a bit of a high for sabermetric types to see something for which they’ve argued so strenuously actually getting implemented in games. And this isn’t to say that the relief ace is a bad idea! It’s an exceedingly good idea, if the usage of the pitcher is properly managed. But the relief ace, and the closer, don’t matter a ton if the rest of the guys in the bullpen aren’t effective.

Take the Giants’ opener on Sunday, for instance. Madison Bumgarner went seven innings. Bruce Bochy needed just two innings from his bullpen to hold a one-run lead. A lot of teams have a setup man to serve as an opening act for the closer, and indeed, the Giants were supposed to have Will Smith out there. He’s out for the year with Tommy John surgery, though. So the duty fell to Derek Law, who promptly coughed up the lead, and the Diamondbacks walked it off against Mark Melancon in the ninth.

San Francisco’s bullpen, outside of  Melancon, looks almost entirely the same as it did last year. They appeared in the bottom half of our bullpen power rankings for a reason. There just isn’t enough firepower there, even if they likely aren’t as disastrously bad as they were down the stretch last year, from a true talent perspective. They may have replaced Santiago Casilla with Melancon, but the relief corps isn’t strong enough to compensate when a starter only goes five.

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As the season approached, I found myself intrigued by the Oakland starting rotation. That being said, among the starters, I was least interested in Kendall Graveman. Andrew Triggs? I’m all over that. Jharel Cotton? You better believe it. Kendall Graveman? Ehh. He didn’t do much for me. That was my mistake.

This is today’s second Graveman post on FanGraphs. I wrote the first one a few hours ago, wherein I discussed that Graveman seems to be experiencing a velocity spike, on the heels of a 2016 velocity spike. That fascinates the hell out of me, but something still felt incomplete. So here I’d like to revisit what Graveman has going on, because I’ve found a fun point of comparison. Why care about Kendall Graveman’s velocity? Because you could say his sinker has leveled up.

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There was a post I intended to write sometime last month. The post was going to be about Kendall Graveman, and his future, and it was going to be based around the fact that Graveman went and had his best spring training to date. What’s more, there were some unconfirmed reports floating around that Graveman was occasionally pushing his sinker up into the high 90s. Ultimately, I sat on the idea, because Graveman didn’t throw any spring-training pitches in front of instrumentation that spits out useful data. He had a good March, and that was all.

On account of Sonny Gray’s injury, Graveman just got the nod to start for the A’s against the Angels on Monday’s opening day. Here is the Graveman post I was thinking about. It took one inning for me to know what I was going to do.

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Have you seen what Yonder Alonso is doing this spring? You might not recognize it. If he qualified, his .421/.560/.789 line would the third-best in baseball. While it’s easy to dismiss a spring fling from an established player, this player spent the offseason thinking differently. Now he’s moving differently at the plate, too.

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Brett Lawrie isn’t quite ready to sign with a club, according to a report by Jim Bowden from Wednesday afternoon. Lawrie is still working through a soft-tissue, lower-body issue. Teams like the Blue Jays, Mets, Rays and Royals reportedly have some level of interest in Lawrie after he was released by the White Sox.

What kind of role Lawrie can expect to land is unclear. And what we can expect from a player who was once one of the more exciting prospects in the game — who was once selected 15th overall in an ESPN franchise player draft in 2012 — a player whom Bowden himself once predicted would become a batting champion, is uncertain.

After he burst on to the scene with a .293/.373/.580 slash line in a 43-game span as a rookie, Lawrie averaged two wins per season from 2012 to -14. But in what was supposed to represent the beginning of his prime years in 2015 and 2016 — i.e. his age-25 and -26 seasons — Lawrie’s performance continued to decline. Most notably, what was once a strength, his bat-to-ball skills, began to erode.

Perhaps we can pinpoint the beginning of the issue. It’s difficult to have a tougher day than Lawrie endured on April 7, 2015, for the A’s against the Rangers. Over the course of four plate appearances, all of which ended in a strikeout, Lawrie saw 12 pitches: eight sliders, three curveballs, and just one fastball. For posterity, the following footage documents those 11 breaking pitches.

His first at-bat versus Colby Lewis:

His second at-bat versus Lewis:

In the seventh, against Keone Kela:

And in the ninth, to end the game, against Neftali Feliz:

That was not the look of a player who appeared comfortable. Lawrie takes for called strikes almost all the breaking pitches in the zone. He swings, on the other hand, at all the pitches that fall out of it. He also appears to be anxious or over-hyped before triggering his swing. He’s a high-energy player. Perhaps, too high-energy.

It was just one game. But it was a most unusual performance. And it was that second game of his 2015 season that perhaps created a template for other teams to follow, which explains why Lawrie’s ability to make contact – once one of his strongest skills – has eroded as teams have attacked him with more breaking stuff each of the last two years.

Teams have increased their curveball and slider usage against Lawrie. Only 6.8% of pitches Lawrie faced in 2014 were curveballs. Last season, that rate had nearly doubled, to a career-high 11.3%. In 2014, 16.8% of pitches Lawrie saw were sliders. That jumped to a career-high 22.4% in 2015, and 19.2% last season.

Correspondingly, Lawrie’s swinging-strike rate has jumped, from 8.8% in 2014 to 11.9% in 2015 and to a career-high 13.2% last season. His contact rate with pitches in the zone has declined each year from a career-best 90.5% in 2012 with the Blue Jays, to a pedestrian 80.9% mark last season.

The book appears to be out on Lawrie, as seen in this Brooks Baseball chart:

What’s troubling about Lawrie’s career trend is that often, when we think of a hitter losing contact ability, we think — or hope, for his sake — that there ought to be a corresponding improvement in power. This is especially true for a player in his 20s. But not only has Lawrie seen his ability to make contact erode, his isolated slugging has declined from its 2014 level.

I asked Sean Dolinar for help in researching hitters who have had two-year contract trends like Lawrie, combined with loss of power. Among the sample that includes all qualified hitters since 1950, Lawrie has the ninth-greatest increase in strikeout rate.

Of the top-12 players here, Jones produced four total wins over the next four seasons, the final four of his career. Morneau remains unsigned this spring. Napoli’s struggles continued into 2015, though he enjoyed a 34-homer season last year on a one-year deal with Cleveland. McGwire’s final season was in 2001. Kubel last played in the majors in 2014.

Of course, all of them were all over 30.

Some good news for Lawrie: Clark rebounded to post five consecutive seasons of wRC+ 129 or better.

As for the 30-and-under crowd, Langerhans never again received more than 139 plate appearances in a season. Weis was a reserve middle infielder who finished with a 61 wRC+ for his career. Kemp received just 59 more plate appearances in the majors. Johnson is one modest success story: he went on to post four seasons of wRC+s 108 over his career.

Two other significant success stories that suffered similar contact collapses include Dave Henderson, who rebounded at age 29 and posted three 125 wRC+ seasons through age 32, and Mike Stanley, who improved in his age-30 season and produced seven straight seasons of 117 wRC+ or better. But they did not suffer isolated slugging losses.

Lawrie’s No. 1 PECOTA comp is Ryne Sandberg who, after a eight- and six-win seasons early in his career, went through an age 26-27 lull, before entering a five-year peak.

So there’s some hope mixed in with some concern.

In examining Baseball Reference’s top similarity scores for batters comparable to Lawrie through age 26, there are some troubling comps, like that of the most similar hitter, Gene Freese, who enjoyed only one more season (1961) with a starting job in the majors. Another, Russ Davis, produced a 92 wRC+ for his career and 0.0 WAR over over 612 career games.

Logan Forsythe and Justin Turner are two interesting names, appearing as the No. 5 and No. 6 most similar batters to Lawrie, though Turner needed to reinvent his swing to become a star. And perhaps Lawrie needs to make a significant swing adjustment to cut down on his pre-swing movement. The most encouraging name on the list of most similar batters through age 26 is Edwin Encarnacion, who posted a .790 OPS and 102 OPS+ with the Reds from 2005 to -09 and who has since recorded a .850 OPS, 124 OPS+, earning three All-Star invites in the process.

Beyond the bat, Lawrie offers defensive versatility: he’s been an above-average defender for his career (32 defensive runs saved) at third base and plays an acceptable second base. But it’s the bat that will make or break his career. History shows of those players who have endured a similar erosion of contact skills without a gain in power many never recover, though some do. There are even some stars in the group. While Lawrie’s collapse is a bit unusual, there are likely multiple career trajectories he could follow dependent upon health, adjustments and opportunity.

I’d like to believe this guy still exists:

But that walkoff homer from his rookie year is beginning to seem like a long time ago. While there’s evidence of similar players turning around their careers, Lawrie must show the league he has the ability to punch back.

Throughout much of the offseason in this space, we’ve been taking a look at hitter contact quality, using 2016 granular exit-speed and launch-angle data as our guide. We’re down to the last two installments, in which some non-qualifying hitters from both leagues will be reviewed.

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In baseball, luck is a tricky concept. In some cases, it’s used to describe an event that’s within the normal distribution of outcomes but far from the mean. In other cases, what we call luck might actually be the first signs of an outlying skill for which we simply lack a sufficiently large sample to identify.

We’ve developed a new understanding on one kind of luck in recent years — namely, the sort that occurs with a batted ball. With Statcast data, we can look at the shape and size of a ball in play and try to decide what the batter “deserved” from that sort of ball in play. Then we compare it to actual outcomes. The difference between the observed and expected outcome is luck.

What if you want to look at a luck on a specific pitch type, though? How would you do it? You could look at the results on the pitch and basically use the Statcast-type process from the other side of the ball. What sorts of balls in play did that pitch produce, and what sort of results should those balls in play have produced? The problem with that approach is that you’re slicing a pitcher’s repertoire into small samples when you start talking about balls in play off a specific pitch. Even David Price, for example — who led the majors in innings last year — allowed fewer than 300 balls in play on his most frequently thrown pitch, the fastball. Secondary pitches are, almost by definition, thrown much less often. Variance isn’t the exception in such cases, but the rule.

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