I was recently talking to J.D. Martinez about launch angle and exit velocity and the like. Besides helping me to update my language, he also told me he didn’t really track his performance by those measures. Same thing for some other metrics I mentioned. It’s clear Martinez has some substantive thoughts on hitting, though. It would be strange if he didn’t use any of the data available to him. So I asked him… what do you track? What numbers do you look at?

“I track my swings and misses in the zone,” he said. “I can deal with swing and miss out of the zone. If I’m swinging and missing in the zone, I don’t like that. That tells me something is wrong. It tells me that something is not right with my swing, I’m fouling balls off. If the ball’s in the strike zone, I should be able to hit it. There are certain situations, take a pitch, that’s fine. But when I swing and it’s a strike — especially on a fastball and I’m not hitting it — that’s not good.”

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We’ve written about a possible sea change in baseball over the last few years here, using phrases like “point of contact” and “attack angle” to better articulate the emergence of a Fly-Ball Revolution, itself another relatively new expression. Add those phrases to all the ones we’ve been compelled to learn for the benefit of Statcast alone — terms like “launch angle,” “exit velocity,” “spin rate,” etc. — and it’s obvious that our baseball dictionaries are getting an update on the fly.

Simply because we’re using a new lexicon, however, doesn’t mean we’re using it correctly — or, at the very least, that some of our assumptions couldn’t benefit from an update, as well.

With that in mind, I decided to examine some of the most notable and commonly used terms in this new language of hitting. With the help of the players themselves, perhaps we can better see what lies beneath each of them and attempt to reach something closer to a common understanding.

Fly-Ball Revolution

“I wish you wouldn’t call it the ‘fly-ball revolution,'” Daniel Murphy told me earlier in the year. “Coaches then think we’re talking about hitting the ball straight into the air. Call it the ‘high-line-drive revolution.'”

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Daulton Varsho is a Cheesehead at heart. He hails from Chili, Wisconsin, attended high school in nearby Marshfield, and played collegiately at UW-Milwaukee. Summer ball also found him close to home. The 21-year-old catcher strapped on his gear for the Eau Claire Express, in the wood-bat Northwoods League.

He’s currently hanging his hat in the Pacific Northwest. Selected in the second round of this year’s draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Varsho is beginning his career with the short-season Hillsboro (Oregon) Hops. The environs have been to his liking. With the Northwest League playoffs set to begin, Varsho’s left-handed stroke has produced a .311/.368/.534 slash line.

His rooting interests have largely been geographic, but there is a notable — and perfectly plausible — exception. Varsho is a Packers fan, and he went to Badgers games growing up, but he didn’t root for the Brewers. His baseball allegiances were with the Philadelphia Phillies, with whom his father — former big-league outfielder Gary Varsho — was the bench coach during his childhood.

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Yesterday, the Diamondbacks throttled the best team in baseball, winning by 13 runs. Last Thursday, they beat the same team by seven runs. Wednesday, they beat them by two; Tuesday, they beat them by one. Before that series, the Diamondbacks swept the Giants, and took three of four from the Mets. Between the last two series against the Dodgers, the Diamondbacks swept the Rockies, and they did so on the road. In all, the Diamondbacks have won 11 in a row, and 13 of 14. A playoff position that was once in some doubt has now been effectively sealed.

It’s certainly true that the Diamondbacks aren’t this good. No team is this good, because no team has ever been this good, because no team could ever be this good. Every team looks perfect when it’s riding a winning streak, and winning streaks end. Heck, from June 28 until the start of this run, the Diamondbacks went 17-29. That’s bad! But that’s why you always need to look at the bigger picture. The Diamondbacks have baseball’s fifth-best winning percentage. They have baseball’s sixth-best BaseRuns estimated winning percentage. This team is good, and better than it was expected to be. Let’s think about that for a few minutes.

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There have been 23 perfect games in major-league history but only 18 four-homer games.

While we’d expect to see the quantity of the latter increase during a home-run spike like the one baseball is currently experiencing, the four-homer game remains one of the rarest individual, single-game achievements of which a player is capable. Perhaps the only rarer deeds are the 20-strikeout game (accomplished five times) and unassisted triple play (recorded 15 times in major-league history).

J.D. Martinez, as you’re probably aware, became the 18th player to produce a four-homer game this Monday. He became just the third one to reach the mark against four different pitchers.

Only six players have hit four homers in a game since the start of the 21st century. Mike Cameron (May 2, 2002), Shawn Green (May 23, 2002), Carlos Delgado (Sept. 25, 2003), Josh Hamilton (May 8, 2012), and Scooter Gennett (June 6 of this year) represent the other five. While Gennett is the unlikeliest player in the modern era to accomplish the feat, Martinez is also an unlikely candidate — if you account for the unusual path he’s taken to stardom.

More immediately, the four-homer game renders even more puzzling the lack of interest in Martinez’s services at the deadline — and, perhaps, helps his case en route to the free-agent market, hinting that this is a hitter who’s still improving.

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In the age of the shift, it takes a lot for a particular defensive alignment to merit real attention.

But over the weekend, the Diamondbacks managed to do just that, utilizing what appears to be the most dramatic shift in recent history — notable even more so because the park at which they did it, Coors Field, features one of the game’s largest outfields.

We’ve seen about every variety of infield shift over the last four years, but we’ve never witnessed anything quite like what the Diamondbacks employed against DJ LeMahieu.

That gets your attention. That is bold.

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Things are going well for Arizona starter Zack Godley. He’s among the top 25 of all pitchers this year no matter how you measure value, his team comfortably occupies the first Wild Card spot, and he’s outperforming expectations. Some of those expectations might have been muted because, at first glance, he looks like a run-of-the-mill sinker/breaking-ball pitcher without a sufficiently good changeup to battle lefties. But then you look at the results on his change and you’re tempted to tinker, to suggest he should throw it more. Dig a little deeper, though, and things aren’t as clear.

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

Victor Robles, CF, Washington (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1  Top 100: 8
Line: 3-for-5, 2B, HR, SB

Notes
Robles is slashing .320/.375/.505 since his promotion to Double-A and has tallied a career-high 51 extra-base hits already this year. Many of those are doubles hooked down the left-field line that Robles turns into extra bases because of his plus-plus speed. Though he still has occasional lapses out there right now, that speed is likely to make Robles a very good defensive center fielder at maturity as he runs down balls in the gaps that many center fielders cannot. Scouts anticipate Robles will hit around .300 with some pop — though probably not quite as much as he’s shown this year — while playing good defense in center field. As a point of reference, Lorenzo Cain, a good defensive center fielder, has slashed .295/.360/.440 this season with strikeout and walk rates within 1% of Robles’ career marks. Cain has generated 3.3 WAR in 119 games this year. That appears to be a very reasonable outcome for Robles, who is one of baseball’s best prospects.

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Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the National League West. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Arizona Diamondbacks (Preseason List)

1. Anthony Banda, LHP
2. Jazz Chisholm, SS
3. Jon Duplantier, RHP
4. Pavin Smith, 1B
5. Marcus Wilson, OF
6. Taylor Clarke, RHP
7. Socrates Brito, OF
8. Domingo Leyba. INF
9. Kristian Robinson, OF
10. Drew Ellis, 1B/3B

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

Michel Baez, RHP, San Diego (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: NR (signed before SD rankings)  Top 100: NR
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 1 BB, 0 R, 9 K

Notes
I could probably reserve a place for Baez in this space every fifth day and not be let down. His fastball velocity has backed up a bit since extended (when he was routinely in the upper-90s) but is still sitting mid-90s with huge extension. Baez’s secondaries are also progressing, especially his running changeup, and he’ll flash a plus breaking ball and change a few times during the course of a start now. He’s come a long way since spring training when he was just a tall guy who threw hard.

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