The scouting report on Kenta Maeda never suggested he was overpowering. He was never expected to post extreme strikeout totals, and while his above-average 24% strikeout rate is somewhat surprising, it’s only part of the reason the 28-year-old Japanese rookie has been one of the 20 or 25 best pitchers in baseball this season.

The other part is the part that makes more sense for Maeda and less sense to the rest of us. It’s still difficult to suss out what exactly goes into the skill of generating soft contact, or how much of it is a skill at all, but thus far, Maeda’s been among the best at it. Given how little we’ve seen him work, Maeda’s a relatively mysterious pitcher. Soft contact is a mysterious skill. That’s two mysteries, and playing detective is fun.

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Last year’s brilliant rookie class was exciting for many reasons, one of which was that it brought the arrival of an infusion of talent to the shortstop position in Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Addison Russell. Remarkably, we were assured that even more young shortstops are on the way – an assurance reinforced by Corey Seager’s strong debut last September and his near unanimous presence atop top-100 prospect lists this past winter. But, at the start of the season, it was less-heralded rookie shortstops Aledmys Diaz and Trevor Story catching all the headlines. Where was Corey Seager?

While Story spent the month of April hitting 10 home runs and Diaz spent it batting .423, Seager posted an unremarkable 92 wRC+ through 106 plate appearances. He put up decent enough plate-discipline numbers — a 8.5% walk rate and 14.2 strikeout rate — but a low BABIP (.275) and low ISO (.146) kept him from producing at the level expected of the sport’s top prospect, whether those expectations were fair or not.

Ever since the end of April, however, Seager has been quietly reestablishing his place among the league’s best players. Well, he was going about it quietly, until this weekend. On the off chance anyone had forgotten about Seager or prematurely written him off as over-hyped, he reminded the baseball world Friday night that he’s exceedingly worthy of our time and attention when he did this to Braves pitcher Julio Teheran:

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I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth a reminder. The most important thing to consider before serving up a Julio Urias take is that he is 19 years old. Think about what you were doing as a 19-year-old. Think about what Julio Urias is doing as a 19-year-old. When Stephen Strasburg was 19, his competition was the Mountain West Conference. When Jacob deGrom was 19, he was a shortstop at Stetson University. Julio Urias has already struck out seven major league batters. He’s 19! That’s more strikeouts than literally every other active major league pitcher had when they were 19, aside from Felix Hernandez who may one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

So Julio Urias is 19, and we must always keep that in mind, but he’s now been tasked twice with getting major league hitters out, and he hasn’t done a great job. He can be both unfathomably young and also ineffective at the same time — they aren’t mutually exclusive. The age isn’t an excuse; it just serves as context.

But we can have more context than age and results! How about the process? How’s the stuff? Ultimately, it’s the process that matters; the age will change and results can be wonky. Execute the process enough times and the results will follow. There’s still only so much we can learn from two games, but at the very least it gives us an excuse to analyze Julio Urias, which we’ve all been waiting for, and maybe we’ll see something to help quiet some of the alarm bells currently going off in Dodger Nation. We’ll observe some good, and we’ll observe some bad. We shouldn’t come way with a much different opinion of Urias’ future — two starts shouldn’t have moved the needle anyhow — but we’ll certainly come away with more information.

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When the December three-way trade between the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, and Los Angeles Dodgers was announced, you could sense Dodgers’ fans frustration. “Dodgers, Reds, Sox Complete Three-Way Trade Centered Around Todd Frazier,” is a great headline if you’re a Dodgers fan. Until you realize that Frazier isn’t coming to Tinseltown. Surely this was a mistake. After all, Justin Turner was having knee surgery, and how good is he, really? “We need Frazier!” the people of Los Angeles almost certainly said.

Well, it didn’t work out that way for the boys in blue. And, as it turns out, that’s just fine, as Trayce Thompson has been a revelation this season.

Before we get into why and how he’s been a revelation, I want to share a brief nugget of FanGraphs history with you. At one point, we had been considering a book project, and we crafted a few sample pages for it. On one, we placed blurbs for four players, one of whom happened to be Thompson. Here’s the blurb Carson Cistulli wrote for him (click to embiggen):

So, whenever I see Trayce Thompson’s name, I think of this, and it makes me smile. As I think you’ll agree, that blurb is Vintage Cistulli.

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Happy Julio Urias Day to you and yours!

As you’ve probably heard by now, 19-year-old phenom Julio Urias will make his major-league debut against the Mets. Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen provided an excellent breakdown of Urias from a scouting perspective. Go read that if you haven’t already. Today, I look at Urias through a more statistical lens. Urias looks like an elite prospect from that angle, too.

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Earlier this week, we again utilized granular batted-ball data to determine whether Vince Velasquez could hold onto the championship belt for the best single-game pitching performance of the season. He did so, beating out Max Scherzer‘s 20-strikeout performance. To this point, we’ve also matched the Phils’ righthander against Jaime Garcia‘s one-hitter and Jake Arrieta’s no-hitter.

When one is discussing pitching excellence, it’s only a matter of time before Clayton Kershaw enters the discussion. Today, let’s match up Velasquez’16 K, 0 BB vanquishing of the Padres on April 14 to, well, Kershaw’s entire body of 2016 work.

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The Dodgers announced today that teenage LHP Julio Urias will be called up to make his major-league debut on Friday in New York against the defending National League champion Mets. His statistics in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League this year have been cartoonish. In eight appearances, Urias has thrown 41 innings, allowed 24 hits, 8 walks, and accrued 44 strikeouts. He sports a 1.10 ERA and a 0.78 WHIP — versus the PCL averages of 4.36 and 1.40, respectively. All of it at the age of 19, a full eight years younger than the average Pacific Coast Leaguer.

When he debuts on Friday, Urias will be the youngest player in Major League Baseball and the first pitcher to debut as a teenager since Madison Bumgarner in 2009. Not bad for a kid whom the Dodgers discovered in the Mexican League (and later signed for $450,000) on the back end of a scouting trip that also netted them Yasiel Puig.

Urias’ repertoire and usage thereof is advanced. His fastball is plus and will sit 91-95 while touching 97. However, it can be fairly straight, and even features some natural cut at times, but Urias generally commands it down or below the zone and to both sides of the plate. He generates lots of ground balls when he’s not catching hitters looking on the corners or blowing away the ones who struggle with velocity. The heater is complemented by a plus low-80s curveball and an 82-85 mph changeup that is consistently above average. Urias’ usage of his repertoire is just as (if not more) impressive than his pure stuff. You’ll see him back door and back foot the curveball to right-handed hitters, pitch backwards with it to lefties and rarely leave a secondary pitch hanging in a place where it can be punished.

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Over the last 365 days, Clayton Kershaw has been baseball’s best pitcher. That isn’t a particularly enlightening sentence given that he’s almost certainly been the league’s best pitcher over the last several years, as well. At this point, the question isn’t really if Kershaw is the best pitcher, but rather if he is the best overall player, Mike Trout included. Kershaw has truly been that phenomenal.

To put some numbers behind it, consider: since May 26, 2015, Kershaw has thrown 253.1 regular-season innings (34 starts) and produced a 39 ERA- and 42 FIP-, thanks in part to a 34.8 K% and 3.3 BB%. By our WAR model, that’s equivalent to an 11-WAR season. It’s closer to 12 WAR if you use runs allowed as the primary input instead of FIP.

We all have our own favorite Kershaw fun fact, but here’s one that’s been bubbling to the surface lately. Full disclosure: I’ve been partially responsible for said bubbling.

Some context: since 1961, there have been just a handful of qualified starters to record less than a 40 ERA- in a single season and the only two qualified seasons under 40 FIP- belong to Pedro in 1999 and Kershaw in 2016. Those Pedro years are often considered the modern gold standard of starting-pitcher dominance. He was 60% better than league average for two full seasons.

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The early part of the Major League Baseball season presents an interesting paradox when it comes to interest and attendance. Fans have waited all winter for real live baseball, and Opening Day comes with big crowds and pageantry. After Opening Day, crowds tend to thin out a bit as people come to terms with the long season, and in many places, weather that is still less than hospitable to baseball. Comparing attendance this season to attendance at this time last season shows a still-healthy game with a few teams having made major jumps after successful seasons a year ago.

When looking at per-game attendance so far this season, it should come as no surprise that the usual names remain atop the board, per Baseball Reference.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees were the top four in attendance last season — in that order — and those same four teams continue their grip on the attendance lead this year. The Chicago Cubs have swapped spots with the Los Angeles Angels while the Toronto Blue Jays have taken an edge over the Boston Red Sox. The bottom five teams are the same as the end-of-the-season numbers last year, although in a different order, as Tampa Bay Rays finished the end of the season last while Oakland A’s were ahead of the Chicago White Sox and the Miami Marlins.

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Cuban righty Yadier Alvarez was the $16 million crown jewel of the Dodgers’ 2015/2016 international free-agent class. It was the second-highest bonus ever given to an international amateur and reports on Alvarez prior to last July were so good that I ranked him #1 on my J2 board at the time. Alvarez ventured stateside this spring and has consistently pitched every fifth day, only missing one start to attend the birth of his child. Reports coming out of Camelback Ranch have been superlative. On Monday, I got to see it for myself along with a number of other interesting prospects.

Yadier Alvarez, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 20.2, Height/Weight: 6’3/180
Signed: IFA at age 19 on July 2, 2015 out of Cuba by LA for $16.0 million bonus

Alvarez was electric. After opening his start with a few fringe fastballs, he began to loosen up and was sitting 92-97 before long. He has been up to 100 this spring, which is especially notable given that there were rumors over the offseason that his velocity had been down. Mixed in along with the fastball was an 82-86 mph slider with late, two-plane bite. It flashed plus, but the line between that pitch and his 76-82 mph curveball was sometimes blurry. The curveball is a bit more vertically oriented than the slider and Alvarez decelerates his arm a bit to throw it, but it flashed average and it should solidify there once he becomes more comfortable with its release.

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