On this date a year ago, the Dodgers traded pitcher Zach Lee for non-pitcher Chris Taylor. Since then, Lee has been claimed off waivers, and he’s thrown eight big-league innings, with eight walks. Taylor, meanwhile, didn’t impress in the majors in 2016, but he made some offseason changes and currently ranks third among Dodgers position players in 2017 WAR, behind only Justin Turner and Corey Seager. Cody Bellinger has been very good, yes? He’s at 1.8 WAR, with a 144 wRC+. Taylor’s at 1.9 WAR, with a 140 wRC+. He’s appeared at second base, shortstop, third base, left field, and center field.

I’m not here to give Taylor an exhaustive look. I’m not going to do any video breakdowns. This is pure statistics. Let’s begin with a table featuring one statistic. For every hitter who’s batted at least 150 times this season, I calculated the difference between their in-zone swing rates and their out-of-zone swing rates. There have been more than 250 such hitters. A leaderboard:

That’s Chris Taylor in first place. That’s Chris Taylor in first place in a table that also has Joey Votto in it. Taylor, to this point, has been making many of the right swing decisions, being aggressive within the zone while laying off garbage outside of it. That’s not everything about being a good hitter, but you couldn’t ask for a better foundation. Taylor has made himself difficult to pitch to.

Now to expand. This is going to be another somewhat experimental table, a form of analysis I’ve done a few times before. I just finished writing an article for ESPN, in which I performed this same analysis for Cody Bellinger. I identified, for hitters, four core traits — discipline, contact, exit velocity, and launch angle. I gathered data for every hitter going back to 2015, when Statcast was introduced, and I looked for the closest comps to 2017 Chris Taylor. There were no extremely close comps. But among the comps that were there, one comp was far stronger, far closer than the others. The name and the stats:

For the new Chris Taylor, at the plate, easily the closest comp has been recent George Springer. They’re close up there in all four categories, and while Springer has shown the slightly better peak strength, Taylor has made more consistent contact. So, when you wonder how Taylor’s wRC+ might regress, you might decide to be strongly anchored to Springer’s 130. Perhaps that’s still too high, I don’t know, but Taylor has been showing legitimate offensive skills, and his defensive versatility is an obvious plus. Pitchers will have time to try to figure this out, but Taylor hasn’t given an inch.

Without question, Bellinger has come in handy for the Dodgers at just the right time. But Taylor, too, has been crucial to the Dodgers’ early success, and this is just another testament to the organization’s depth. Taylor always seemed like someone who could play a little bit. Now he’s resembling a critical component of the Astros’ organizational core.

Update: And, to pile on, earlier today, the Padres designated Zach Lee for assignment.

So, I already had a post published today that talks about the struggling Rich Hill. Here it is! That includes just about everything I have to say. There’s one fact, though, that I wish I’d slid in, but it eluded my notice. I only stumbled upon it while talking about Hill this morning on Effectively Wild. Let’s stop beating around the bush.

Rich Hill is all about the curveball, right? Throws it all the time. Or, at least, throws it close enough to half of the time. Between 2015 and 2016, when Hill re-emerged, he had baseball’s third-highest curveball rate. No one didn’t know about that, and, of course, the curveball rated well, in terms of being an effective pitch. You are probably aware of our pitch-type run values. Between those two seasons, Hill had baseball’s fifth-most valuable curveball, by raw value. Focusing on all the pitchers who threw at least 100 innings, and then converting that curveball value to a rate stat, Hill ranked in third place. Nothing here is surprising. Hill threw the curveball a lot because the curveball was good. It’s a big part of what allowed him to occasionally resemble an ace.

Turn now to 2017. Hill has thrown 37% curveballs. That’s down, but it’s still very high. Hill has still been throwing plenty of curves. And yet, let’s look at the pitch-type run values again. Here are baseball’s least-valuable curves to this point:

Rich Hill: last place. Last place, even, by a couple of runs. The run values are by no means perfect measurements, but they do generally point you in the right directions — good pitches tend to get good values, and bad pitches tend to get bad ones. Rich Hill’s curveball has been horribly unsuccessful, the very most unsuccessful, after starring as a nearly unparalleled weapon. Hill won’t be right until his curveball is right. Said curveball has too often been wrong.

This doesn’t so much change the analysis. It’s still a problem of location, which is still a problem of either injury or mechanics. That’s what the Dodgers have to figure out, and these numbers don’t really help to shed light on what’s going on. The Dodgers already knew that something was awry. But still, this manages to tell a heck of a story. Rich Hill’s world-beating breaking ball has completely abandoned him. You could say that life has really thrown Rich Hill a curveball. Do not say that, though. It’s stupid.

From the case of Rich Hill, I’m not sure one could learn any lessons. For one thing, he still has more time to pitch, so his final chapters are unwritten. But even if Hill is already underwater, so what? No one needs to be told that there are risks inherent in committing to a free agent 37-year-old. And it’s not like anyone else is following the Rich Hill career path. His case is unique. What matters for him might not apply to anyone else. Everything about what he is is atypical, and so we stand to learn about Hill and Hill only.

It is fair to say, though, there are things to be learned. The Dodgers are probably anxious to learn them, because they’re counting on Hill, and he’s not pulling his weight. Now, no one thought Hill would throw 200 innings. I don’t think anyone expected 140. But here’s Hill now, at 35 innings after eight starts, eight starts in which he’s run up a 5+ ERA. Hill’s strikeouts have fallen and his walks have exploded, and Thursday in Cleveland saw him cough up seven runs. Rich Hill isn’t right, and although the Dodgers aren’t so worried about his June, they’d like to know if he’ll be fine by October. Something right now is borked up.

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Long-time UCLA baseball coach Gary Adams was nearing the end of his coaching tenure when he made his way to The Ball Yard in 2003 to talk hitting philosophy. The Ball Yard is a spartan hitting facility, containing two batting cages, located in a nondescript building in a business park in Chatsworth, Calif. There, Doug Latta and Craig Wallenbrock, a former major-league scout, worked as private hitting instructors. There was a UCLA connection: Bruins star Chase Utley was a client of Wallenbrock, and other UCLA players had worked at the facility.

Whatever you want to call the effort in the majors to hit balls less often on the ground, much of the grassroots movement — many of the alternatives to traditional and professional hitting philosophy — began at places like The Ball Yard, the hitting equivalent to garage start-ups.

At some point, Adams and Latta engaged in a separate conversation as they walked to exit the facility. After Adams listened to their philosophies on the swing, after hearing Latta’s antipathy for a ground-ball-oriented approach, Adams asked Latta a hypothetical question: what kind of swing would he have recommended Dave Roberts to adopt? Robert was a former UCLA standout under Adams, one who became a useful major-league player, mostly known for his speed. He is, of course, now the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Roberts slashed .266/.342/.366 over parts of 10 major-league seasons.

Even many proponents of the #NoGroundballs club would look at Roberts as an exception, a player who should put the ball on the ground to ensure that his speed is a factor as often as possible. As a layman of hitting mechanics, that concept makes sense to this author.

“I think that’s what Dave did. He made it to the big leagues,” Latta said of hitting ground balls. “But I think Dave Roberts could have had an outstanding career. He had incredible makeup. He’s a phenomenal manager because of his makeup and the way he approached the game. Good outfielder. But what happens if he suddenly hits like a Justin Turner? (Turner is a Latta client.) He could have been one of the great lead-off men of his generation.”

Had he worked with Roberts, Latta would have recommended dramatic swing changes. Perhaps today’s Roberts comp is Billy Hamilton: a player with incredible speed but whose swing and whose ability to hit have limited his overall value and the utility of his speed. Hamilton is a player who has probably been coached to hit the ball on the ground since he began playing baseball. With changes to his approach and swing, Latta thinks, the offensively challenged Hamilton could get to some untapped potential. (Hamilton has a 60 wRC+ for the season and 70 for his career.)

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

Gleyber Torres, INF, New York AL (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 1   Top 100: 7
Line: 3-for-3, HR, BB

Notes
Even with Ruben Tejada’s recent trade to Baltimore, Torres’s reps are likely to come mostly at second and third base, as Tyler Wade remains entrenched at shortstop in Scranton. I saw him play both positions last week and lots of second base in the Fall League, and he looked like a fish out of water at both spots, especially around the second-base bag. He has the physical tools to play anywhere on the infield and will likely improve with reps, but he’s not ready for the majors right now.

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Around the end of last September, Clayton Kershaw began an experiment. A few times a game, seemingly at random, Kershaw would drop down and deliver a pitch from more of a sidearm slot. He took the experiment with him into the playoffs, and although that seems like it would’ve been ballsy, one of the explanations given was that Kershaw used to pitch from that slot in high school, so it wasn’t completely unfamiliar. It was clear immediately that the experiment was interesting. It was less clear whether it was particularly successful. Kershaw had a total of 25 pitches tracked from his lower slot, and I wrote about them in March.

One of the things about Kershaw is he doesn’t say much. So he didn’t offer much analysis of his own little quirk. We couldn’t be sure, therefore, whether Kershaw would resume dropping his arm in 2017. He didn’t throw any pitches like that in his first start. He didn’t throw any pitches like that in his second start. He didn’t throw any pitches like that in his first eight starts. It certainly looked like the experiment was dead. So it goes. If nothing else, at least he was still Clayton Kershaw.

Then start number nine came along. It’s back. For 21 pitches in the last four games, it’s been back. And Kershaw has added a new twist to his new twist.

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Previously
Changeups: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveballs: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Cutters and Splitters: MLB Starters.
Four-Seamers: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Sinkers: MLB Starters.
Sliders: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Two-Seamers: MLB Starters.

Over the last few weeks in this space, I have been painstakingly grading the individual pitches of every 2016 ERA-qualifying starter. Unfortunately, Clayton Kershaw didn’t pitch enough innings to be included. He is special enough to deserve his own article, however.

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Yasmani Grandal and I will be forever connected.

Despite his paltry traditional offensive numbers a year ago — including a .229 batting average, 49 runs scored, and 72 runs batted in — I placed Grandal seventh on my NL MVP ballot. I was the only writer to cast a vote for Grandal. I wrote about why I did this back in January when I was still new on the job here at FanGraphs. In summary, I gave a lot of value to Grandal’s framing, batting eye, and power from each side of the plate.

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Strategy in the game of baseball has always evolved. As it pertains to pitcher usage, that evolution has been particularly swift over the last few decades. The four-man rotations of the 1950s and ’60s morphed into five-man groups in the ’70s and early ’80s. The 200-inning season has become increasingly rare in more recent seasons. Bullpens have become more specialized and diverse. In part due to the frequency of injury among pitchers in today’s game, teams and individual players have become more curious about prevention and efficiency.

My best guess, and I am hardly alone in this thinking this, is that the future of pitching-staff organization will eventually look much different. The structure will perhaps begin with tandem starters as part of four- or three-man rotations, or the rotations will be extended to six-man rotations. Perhaps there will be a battle of ideas and practices.

While 25-man rosters limit creativity, the new 10-day DL has allowed teams to experiment, and the Dodgers — as was forecast before the season by many — have best taken advantage of the truncated disabled list. The Dodgers entered the season with the greatest number of quality rotation options in the game, and that depth came with plenty of talented but risky options like Rich Hill, Scott Kazmir, and Brandon McCarthy. The Dodgers were the first natural test case and Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci procured an interesting quote from a Dodgers official while reporting on the club’s pitching strategy in 2017:

“There’s no team that has the kind of depth we do,” said one club source. “This team is built to win 95 games on the strength of depth carrying us over six months. We should get to 95 wins. But the year comes down to this: Clayton, Richie and Julio being healthy and ready to go to start playoff games. That’s it. So if it means they throw 170 innings instead of 200, that’s fine. They’ll actually be better for it.”

The disabled list has always been loosely governed. It’s always been used as a roster-manipulation tool in addition to a place to earnestly store injured players. And the 10-day DL certainly hasn’t ended that. As Eno Sarris noted last week, days spent on DL this year are up about 50% compared to the 2011-15 five-year average.

Wrote Sarris:

The positive spin on this situation is that maybe, once the dust settles, we’ll see some reduction in days lost. Players can take a 10-day breather in a situation where they would have previously attempted to return too early. Maybe a little bit of preventative rest will reduce the amount of catastrophic injury. Trips up, days down might be the slogan.

But that’s a maybe. In the meantime, we’re left a very real explosion of unavailable players. And a few teams that are perhaps superior at manipulating that rule change and new situation, whether due to resources or superior preparation.

And perhaps thanks to resources, and superior preparation, the Dodgers are leading the way in a practice that is surely to be copy catted — if it works. And it is working: the Dodgers lead baseball in fewest runs allowed per nine innings by starting pitchers (3.59 runs). They’re one of three teams with starting rotations allowing fewer than four runs per nine innings. Sure, having Clayton Kershaw helps. But the Dodgers ranked fifth last season in the majors in runs per game from starters (3.94), they allowed 3.67 in 2015, second in MLB, and 2014 (3.81), when the Dodgers ranked 10th and the game was still in a modern dead-ball era.

To date this season, the Dodgers have never pitched more effectively in the Andrew Friedman Era, and Kershaw is just getting his slider back.

And while a number of factors could be at work, this is also the first year of the 10-day DL, and the Dodgers are leading MLB in something else: the number of starts made by starters on more than four days of rest. Consider the leaders in “Long Days Rest”, tracked by Baseball Reference:

In 2014, the Dodgers ranked 11th in starts made on four days rest or more (85). The league average was 83. In 2015, Dodgers starters made 83 such starts. The league average that season was 84. Last season, the Dodgers jumped to second (103), and the league average jumped to 87. This season, they’re on pace to shatter that mark, with 130 such starts, while the league average will grow to near 90. In 1990, the league average was 55. In 1970, it was 45.

And the Dodgers aren’t just giving their starters more rest between starts; they’re also limiting them to 87 pitchers per start, tied for the third fewest in the majors.

The Dodgers represent an interesting experiment this year: never in the history of game will a staff have been as well rested throughout a season — or, presumably, entering the postseason.

While the Rich Hills and Kenta Maedas and Alex Woods are receiving more rest and trips to the DL, Kershaw is also receiving more time between starts. He’s already made six starts on more than four days rest, according to Baseball Reference. The most such starts he’s made in a season was 17 in 2011.

The Dodgers are creating a de facto six-man rotation. If this experiment works, if the team plans for it and has the depth for it, perhaps it will become a new model going forward.

In theory, a four- or three-man tandem rotation makes a lot of sense. Starting pitchers are less effective each time they work through a stating lineup, and a team can more often create platoon advantages by flipping to an opposite-handed tandem starter. (And in the NL, for as long as DH doesn’t exist, pitchers will less often bat.) But in speaking with executives, coaches, and players on the subject, the problems with the idea include how it would stretch a staff, the limited roster spots available, and when the plan blows up on a given day. If a pitcher fails to log his innings, it really stresses a roster.

So while the piggyback rotation is ideal in theory — and could perhaps become a reality with a combination of expended rosters and a 10-day DL — perhaps it’s the six-man rotation, or some sort of 10-day DL-enabled variety, that will eventually win the day.

If a fresh Dodgers rotation rolls through October, it will be a model to be copied.

When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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