When you think of Adrian Beltre, the first thought that comes to mind might just be his defense. In the early parts of his career, that was his bread and butter. He does, after all, rank 19th all-time in Def, and 10th since the color barrier was broken in 1947. By the time he retires, top 15 in Def is well within his reach.

And yet, Beltre is just as prolific as a hitter! He’s been one of the best players ever on both sides of the ball. Yesterday, he became just the 31st member of the 3,000-hit club. That’s pretty amazing. It’s pretty much an automatic ticket to the Hall of Fame (don’t worry, Rafael Palmeiro will get there some day via some Veteran’s Committee). Beltre also ranks 15th in doubles, 38th in home runs, 21st in total bases and 21st in extra-base hits.

He doesn’t rank quite as high in rate statistics — his .195 ISO ranks 308th out of 3,953 qualified players, for instance. That’s still really, really good, but it doesn’t stand out quite as much. But he has been really good for a really long time. And he’s still playing well. If he’s not at the top of his game, he’s pretty close, and doing a lot better than a lot of other players at the time of their 3,000th hit. Let’s take a look:
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I’m not supposed to embed pictures or videos above the fold. (We have a fold.) So I’m going to get right to it, inserting an early page break so I can show you a clip from last night. Turns out Wednesday was Brandon Morrow’s 33rd birthday! He was asked by the Dodgers to handle the seventh inning of what would turn into a dramatic come-from-behind victory. Morrow set the Twins down 1-2-3. Below, a pitch that he threw to Brian Dozier.

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Clayton Kershaw got hurt yesterday. I guess it’s possible he might’ve gotten hurt the day before or something, but Clayton Kershaw was removed from a start yesterday. His back is the problem, again, and while the symptoms now seem different from what they were a year ago, the initial word is that Kershaw will miss four to six weeks. Even after he returns, there will now be more questions, more uncertainty. And before Kershaw went down, there were already reports linking the Dodgers to Yu Darvish. It would stand to reason that the Dodgers might now have an even higher degree of interest. That’s seemingly good news for the Rangers.

Stop! Reconsider. I should say right here I don’t want to act like a Darvish trade is a foregone conclusion. The Rangers are coming off a sweep of the Rays, and they’re only 2.5 games back of a wild-card spot. You know who could use a guy like Yu Darvish? A team like the Rangers. They might decide to hold. If things stay as they are, they’ll *probably* decide to hold. This could all be much ado about nothing.

And there’s more. The Dodgers have the best record in baseball. They’ve won 33 of their last 39 games, and over that time span, they’ve been 8.5 games better than the next-best baseball team. Kershaw’s played a role in that, obviously. Losing him makes the Dodgers worse, just as adding Darvish would make the Dodgers better. Yet I just don’t see the same need others do. I don’t, say, view a Darvish trade as being crucial. I’m sure it makes me boring, but I don’t see enough of a benefit. The cost is sure to be high.

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Position: Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Research & Development Data Engineer

Location: Los Angeles

Description:
The Los Angeles Dodgers are seeking a Data Engineer for the team’s Baseball Research and Development (R&D) group. We are looking to find someone who thrives in a big data environment. As the scope and quantity of data in baseball continue to rapidly increase, we need a highly-talented individual to manage the computational and informational complexity associated with that growth. The Data Engineer will work closely with our baseball systems and analytics teams to design, build, and maintain a database and computational platform for leading-edge baseball research.

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From a team perspective, one of the big stories of the first half has been the utter dominance of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Sure, most prognosticators thought they would be good, but this good? Their sheer dominance over the last couple months has been nothing short of historic, 1939 Yankees type stuff.

The identity of their lead dogs hasn’t been all that surprising. There’s Clayton Kershaw, the best of the best among starting pitchers — once again healthy and offering elite quality and quantity of contribution. Kenley Jansen is a human zero machine out of the bullpen. Occasionally, hitters even make contact against him. Corey Seager might still be a very young man, but his excellence has come to be expected. And while the immediacy and magnitude of Cody Bellinger’s production might be a bit surprising, he was almost unanimously considered an elite prospect.

We can talk (and have talked, just last week, about Kershaw) about those guys another time. Today, let’s turn toward three supporting players who have made surprisingly large contributions to the larger team effort. Third baseman Justin Turner is one of their core guys, but did you have him down for .377/.477/.583 at the break? Utilityman Chris Taylor is the least likely of the club’s six double-digit homer producers. And it’s Alex Wood, at 10-0 and with 1.67 ERA, who’s making a strong run at the Kershaw/Max Scherzer tandem for Cy Young honors.

How real are their first-half contributions? Let’s drill down into their plate-appearance-frequency and batted-ball-quality data to get a better feel.

In the two tables below, such data is provided for all three players.

The first table lists each players’ K and BB rates, as well as the breakdown of all of their BIP by category type. For this table, color-coding is used to note significant divergence from league average. Red cells indicate values that are over two full standard deviations higher than league average. Orange cells are over one STD above, yellow cells over one-half-STD above, blue cells over one-half STD below, and black cells over one STD below league average. Ran out of colors at that point. Variation of over two full STD below league average will be addressed as necessary in the text below.

The second table includes each player’s Unadjusted Contact Score. This represents, on a scale where 100 equals league average, the actual production level recorded/allowed by each player on balls in play. Basically, it’s their actual performance with the Ks and BBs removed. Their Unadjusted and Adjusted Contact Scores for each BIP category are then listed. Adjusted Contact Score represents the production level that each player “should have” recorded/allowed if every batted ball resulted in league-average production for its exit-speed/launch-angle “bucket.”

Finally, overall Adjusted Contact Score, and for hitters, actual wRC+ and Projected Production, and for pitchers, actual ERA-, FIP-, and “tru” ERA- are listed. Projected Production and “Tru” ERA add back the Ks and BBs to the Adjusted Contact Score data to give a better measure of each player’s true performance level.

Neither Chris Taylor nor Justin Turner was expected to become an offensive force at the major-league level. Each year, I compile my own list of minor-league position-player rankings, based on production and age relative to league and level. It basically serves as a follow list, a starting point from which traditional scouting takes place to tweak the order. Taylor qualified for this list four times, finishing progressively lower each season (Nos. 59, 71, 245, and 307 from 2013 to -16). Turner qualified twice, at No. 212 in 2007 and No. 253 in 2010. I was with the Mariners when we selected Taylor in the fifth round out of Virginia. We thought he was a big leaguer, for sure, but a big bat? Not quite.

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Justin Turner is one of the massively successful swing-change guys, which helps to explain why he didn’t have his offensive breakout until he was 29. Some players know what they’re supposed to do, and they keep trying to do it until they figure it out. Turner knew what he was supposed to do, but he didn’t know the right way to do it. Then he changed his entire batting foundation, and the big-league success followed. Plenty of players now have tried to change their swings. Few have managed what Turner has.

Even with many of the successful swing-changers, there was a problem hidden among the benefits. It was a common problem they shared with other fly-ball hitters. These were hitters geared to punish pitches down in the zone, so there was an area to exploit up top. It wasn’t the same for everyone, of course, but it’s something that could be frequently observed. Turner himself did the bulk of his damage below the thigh. Higher than that, he had some issues, but I guess most hitters have some kind of issue somewhere. Nobody’s perfect.

And yet! Turner’s seemingly gotten one step closer. I’ve held onto this theory that pitchers will ultimately have control over the swing-changers, because they can just throw more high fastballs. But, what if the hitters figured out how to adjust? Justin Turner has figured it out. Justin Turner is doing damage everywhere.

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The overriding theme of the 2017 season to date has been a wave of homers, many of them hit into the stratosphere courtesy of the sport’s new wave of sluggers, like Cody Bellinger, Miguel Sano, and, of course, Aaron Judge. Somewhat under the radar, the game’s three best starting pitchers, Clayton Kershaw, Chris Sale, Max Scherzer and are doing what they always do — namely, dominate.

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Clayton Kershaw is an outlier, and for the more number-oriented among us, outliers can be best appreciated through their statistics. One could investigate Kershaw with the same enthusiasm with which one could investigate Barry Bonds. Maybe more fittingly, he’s like a modern-day Pedro Martinez. His career could be considered an accumulation of incredible fun facts. There’s the one about how his five-year ERA is still holding under 2.00. There’s the one about how Kershaw allowed an identical .521 OPS in three consecutive seasons. (In the fourth season, Kershaw got better.) It’s overwhelming to think about gathering all the best Kershaw fun facts. There are too many. You might already have your own favorite.

Now I have another fact to add to the list. It’s a little bit different — it’s as much about the hitters as it is about Kershaw himself, and it isn’t even necessarily good. What it is is an outlier. It’s another Kershaw stat that stands out from the pack. It requires some digging to get to, but the effort, I think, is worthwhile, because seldom do you ever encounter such statistical separation.

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Over the winter, the Dodgers re-signed Rich Hill. They did so because they knew that, when he was able to pitch, Hill looked like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. And then 2017 went and got underway. Through the earlier part of 2017, Hill looked like one of the more frustrating starting pitchers in the game. The stuff, for the most part, remained there, but Hill didn’t have his same control, and his remarkable curveball was no longer working. I wrote about Hill in the middle of June, at which point his curveball had the lowest run value among all curveballs, out of everyone. It made me wonder where, exactly, Rich Hill was. Could someone who reappeared so suddenly disappear with similar speed?

Since I wrote about Hill and his struggles, he’s gone back to looking like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. In three starts, he’s allowed four runs over 19 innings, with six walks and 26 strikeouts. The easy explanation is that Hill has simply regressed to the mean. That is, his newer mean, the one he began establishing a couple years ago. That explanation would ignore the changes that Hill has folded in. Regression to the mean isn’t an automatic process. Rich Hill has simultaneously simplified and grown more complex.

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

Jorge Mateo, SS/CF, New York AL (Profile)
Level: Double-A Age: 22   Org Rank:  6 Top 100: 91
Line: 4-for-10, 2 3B, HR

Notes
As the dominoes fell following Gleyber Torres‘ injury, Mateo landed in Trenton. He split time between shortstop and center field down at High-A and the Yankees have the option to continue working him at both spots at Double-A with utility prospect Thairo Estrada on the roster. He struggled to do everything on the offensive end but steal bases in Tampa, failing to do damage anywhere but to his pull side. He’s off to a terrific start in Trenton, though, tallying five walks and three triples in just six games.

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