Yesterday, Yonder Alonso hit a home run. Used to be, that would be notable because Yonder Alonso home runs didn’t happen very often. This year, that home run was notable because it was ninth of the year, matching his career high for home runs in a season. Alonso matched his career-best home run total on May 7th, in his 29th game of the 2017 season.

You can only do something like that if you haven’t hit many home runs previously, and there are few regular corner players who have hit fewer home runs and kept their jobs than Alonso. From 2012 through 2016, when Alonso racked up over 2,200 plate appearances, he managed to launch all of 34 home runs, one fewer than Andrelton Simmons hit during that same time period. James Loney hit seven more home runs than Alonso did during that stretch, and Loney was the probably the most Alonso-like first baseman in baseball; James Loney also just got released from his minor league contract over the weekend, if you’re curious about league-wide interest in low-power first baseman on the wrong side of 30.

But low-power first baseman apparently doesn’t describe Alonso anymore, as he’s currently tied (with Bryce Harper, among others) for ninth on the 2017 home run leaderboard. His .356 ISO ranks even better, putting him fifth overall, one spot ahead of Harper. Yeah, it’s early, but Alonso is showing every characteristic of a guy who revamped his approach and might have salvaged his career.

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Obviously you should use “who” rather than “what” when dealing with human beings — and I’m not suggesting that Andrew Triggs is some sort of robot — but when we try to understand pitchers, we often classify them in different buckets. And those buckets are things. So the question is, in which bucket does Triggs belong? How should we sum him up?

Let’s try three different labels and see if any of them make sense, beginning with…

A Slider/Cutter Guyer
It’s right there on his player page. Brooks Baseball has it the same. Andrew Triggs throws a slider or a cutter more than half the time.

That would make you suspicious, maybe, of his hot start. His pitching-independent numbers are fine, but there isn’t really a great road map for this type of pitcher. It didn’t quite work for Shane Greene as a starter, for one. For another, there isn’t a single qualified starter this year who throws only a cutter and slider as his secondary pitches.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Oakland Athletics 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)
AL West (HOU, LAA, SEA, TEX)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Has recorded .295 career batting average.

Scouting Report
Barreto was signed by Toronto for $1.45 million back in 2012 and then traded to Oakland — along with Kendall Graveman, Brett Lawrie, and Sean Nolin — in exchange for Josh Donaldson. Bay Area sports talk radio still discusses the deal with frequency and bile, and largely considers Barreto the last hope for salvaging it, though Graveman and his sinker appear to be breaking out this year.

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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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