Imagine the average Yasiel Puig plate appearance. What does it look like to you? One thing it might look like is Puig flailing at a bunch of low-away sliders. Now, I don’t actually know what’s in your head. I don’t know how you think about Puig. But just in case you think he is extremely vulnerable to breaking stuff, do I have news for you!

I have prepared two plots, showing the entirety of Puig’s major-league career. Here is a rolling-average plot of Puig’s rate of fastballs seen:

Great! He’s gone through some low-fastball phases before. Now he’s higher than ever. I should tell you that, for context, baseball-wide fastball rates are going *down*. So, the average hitter is seeing fewer fastballs than ever before. Puig is seeing more fastballs than ever before. All right, that’s part of it. Time to fold in run values. Here’s the same idea, where I’ve just summed up Puig’s fastball run values above or below average over rolling 30-game stretches.

It shouldn’t surprise you to see how cyclical things are. Underneath, that’s how baseball tends to work — something gets the job done until it doesn’t, at which point adjustments are made, and then more adjustments are made, and on and on. Puig has gone through troughs, followed by peaks, but Puig has been at another low. How low? So far, there are 208 hitters this season who have batted at least 100 times. Puig owns baseball’s highest fastball rate, at 68%. Last year, he was at 60%. And while this has been going on, Puig is sitting on baseball’s third-worst fastball run value, at -8.9 runs. Only Dansby Swanson and Alcides Escobar have been worse. Pitch-type run values, of course, are prone to noise in either direction, but both these factors are fairly convincing together. Puig’s seeing more fastballs because he’s doing less to them.

Here are Puig’s fastball run values by season, expressed as runs above or below average per 100 fastballs:

• 2013: +1.7 runs per 100 fastballs
• 2014: +1.4
• 2015: +1.0
• 2016: -0.5
• 2017: -2.4

So far this season, Puig has been pretty good against both sliders and changeups. It’s almost as if he’s focused too hard on addressing a weakness, such that now he’s just behind faster pitches. It’s something to work on, and with Puig, it’s just another adjustment to attempt. There’s always something, but I guess you could say that’s true for anybody.

It could be misstating things to assert that Puig’s on a high-fastball diet. Pitchers, certainly, are giving him a steady diet of fastballs. Yet relatively few of them are being consumed. So, the headline could probably stand to be fixed. Give me a few seconds to get on that.

Back in the spring, there was a gaggle of starting pitchers under consideration for the final spot in the Yankees rotation. Eventually, the lesser-known starter who wowed management got the chance. Jordan Montgomery has been a top-five rookie starter this year so far and, by all accounts, looks like a major leaguer. Now, the question has shifted. Now, we ask not “Will he pitch in the majors?” but “How good will he be?”

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Part of this job is writing about players who’ve put together interesting performances in small sample sizes. Really, at this point of the season, that describes basically every player. With Andrew Toles, though, it’s even harder: his whole career is a small sample size. And now, depending on the severity of his current knee injury, we might be forced to continue trying to evaluate him as a player based on very little evidence.

In that brief career, however, Toles has been good. Among active players who both (a) have recorded 200-plus plate appearances (Toles has 214) and (b) have yet to turn 25 (which he does in two weeks), Toles ranks 40th out of 99 by Wins Above Replacement — and he’s top 30 in isolated power.

That latter distinction is interesting. Projections, perhaps seeing powerless seasons in the minor leagues and dealing with a missed year in some form or another, don’t see that kind of power. I had to ask the player why they might be missing the point.

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14 months ago, Jeff wrote a post titled “Welcome Back, Alex Wood“. In the piece, Jeff noted that Wood’s arm slot had been dropping each year, corresponding with decreases in effectiveness since he debuted with the Braves and established himself as one of the game’s best young starters. But during Spring Training of 2016, Wood got his arm slot back up to where it was earlier in his career, and his velocity also was higher than it had been in 2015, when the Braves decided he was about to break down and traded him for Hector Olivera.

With better velocity and a return to his previous release point, Jeff suggested that the Dodgers might get the good version of Alex Wood again, and to some extent, that turned out to be right. His strikeout rate jumped from 17% to 26% while also posting the highest GB% (53%) of his career, so while his 3.73 ERA wasn’t amazing, his FIP and xFIP were both back to his Atlanta levels. But Wood also battled elbow problems that put him on the shelf at the end of May, and when he returned at the end of the year, the team used him as a low-leverage reliever. He showed flashes of promise in his 10 early-season starts, but 2016 wasn’t exactly the hoped-for justification of why the team targeted Wood at the 2015 trade deadline when better pitchers — specifically Cole Hamels — were available.

2017 looked like more it might continue that trend, as Hyun-Jin Ryu‘s return to health pushed Wood back to the bullpen to start the year. And even when he was pressed into starting duty a week into the season due to Rich Hill’s blister problem, the results weren’t that encouraging, as he walked five of the 19 batters he faced and couldn’t make it out of the fourth inning. But despite the wildness, there as one big reason for optimism that came out of that start; Wood showed that his spring training velocity bump wasn’t just preparation for a relief role, but that his fastball might really be back to 2013 levels.

While he sat 94-95 in relief in his first appearance of the year, that could have easily been written off as a normal velo bump that starters get when they move to relief work. But when pressed into a starting role, he still managed to sit 93-94, which is what Wood was throwing back when he was a dominating rookie in Atlanta. The command wasn’t there, but stuff wise, this was as good as Wood had looked in years. And after Hill and Ryu’s DL stints gave Wood the chance to rejoin the rotation for more than just a spot start, Wood has finally looked like the guy the Dodgers hoped they were trading for.

Since April 21st, Wood has made four starts, throwing 20 2/3 innings in the process. And while he hasn’t been asked to pitch deep into those games, he’s dominated opposing hitters over that span.

Wood has struck out 30 of the 84 batters since rejoining the rotation, including 11 strikeouts in his start against Pittsburgh last night. He’s walked just one batter in each of those four starts (one of them intentionally), so his 30/4 K/BB ratio shows how well he’s owned the strike zone. But his dominance goes beyond even that level, as 32 of the 50 batters to put the ball in play against him during that span have hit the ball on the ground. You almost never see a pitcher combine a better than 30% strikeout rate with a 60% ground ball rate, but during these last four starts, Wood’s at a 36% strikeout rate and a 64% groundball rate.

That is Dallas Keuchel‘s groundball ways combined with Chris Sale’s control of the strike zone. Those are good things to have, and insanely good things to have simultaneously. And it’s not like the groundballs Wood is giving up have been rockets; he’s allowed just an average exit velocity of 86 mph during these last four starts, and his .216 expected wOBA based on Statcast data is actually lower than the already-absurd .233 wOBA he’s allowed during this stretch.

Of course, this is all super small sample data. We’re talking about four starts, and only 84 batters faced in those four starts. But it’s worth noting that Wood has never really had a four start stretch this good in his big league career. The closest he came was back at the end of 2014, when he ran a 34/5 K/BB ratio across 28 innings while getting grounders on 54% of his batted balls. Even in the best year of his career, when he ran a 2.78 ERA/3.25 FIP/3.19 xFIP, he didn’t quite dominate over four starts like he has since rejoining the Dodgers’ rotation.

The key for Wood this year really does seem to be the effectiveness of his fastball. For reference, here’s the amount of contact on fastballs in the strike zone against Wood, by year.

In the first couple of years, when Wood was really good in Atlanta, his sinker not only got grounders, but it missed enough bats in the zone to help him get ahead in counts as well, and then he could get hitters to chase his curve and change-up out of the zone. Over his first four years, the pitch became more and more hittable, and Wood lost the ability to miss bats, relying on walk-avoidance and grounders to keep him afloat.

This year, though, the fastball is missing bats again, like it was earlier in his career, and that’s putting him in more advantageous counts, which leads to chases on breaking balls out of the zone. Last year, opposing batters swung at just 33% of his curveballs out of the zone, but this year, that’s up to 46%. Wood’s ability to get early strikes with his fastball has put him in a position to bury his off-speed stuff in the ground and still get hitters to chase.

And so, for the first time in a Dodger uniform, Alex Wood looks like the guy Atlanta had at the beginning of his career. He’s mixing a mid-90s fastball with a mid-80s curve and a high-80s change-up, and getting both whiffs and groundballs with all three pitches. He’s never been a guy who has pounded the strike zone, but by getting ahead in counts and getting chases out of the zone, Wood can keep his walks down and his strikeouts up. And even when he’s giving up contact, it’s been of the weak groundball variety.

For right now, the Dodgers are effectively manufacturing injuries in order to keep Wood in the rotation, pushing back a decision to ship someone else to the bullpen in order to keep Wood starting every five days. But with the way he’s throwing right now, Wood might be the team’s second or third best starter (depending on Rich Hill’s ability to stay on the mound), and it’s hard to see him getting bumped back to the bullpen again any time soon. This version of Alex Wood is a high-quality starting pitcher, and the one the Dodgers have been waiting for since they acquired him.

We created computers in our own image, as hard as it is to believe. The hardware that looks so different from us, in this analogy, is our skin, sinew, and skeleton. The software here are the mental processes that control that hardware. Both are equally important, but the software here is the most interesting, maybe. While we can train to get the most of the hardware that is our bodies, and surgery can repair it, it’s our approach, the software, that we can revise on the run.

Here’s another way of putting it. While relievers and starters both lose velocity at similar rates, it’s starters that age more gracefully. That’s because their software is more complex, and they have more ways to alter it. Now let’s take this to Brandon McCarthy, who has graded out as an above-average major league starter so far (2.4 wins per 180 innings pitched). We can identify at least four different versions of McCarthy’s software. Each revision has taught him more, and has given him more weapons.

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Yesterday, we examined pitcher in Los Angeles who’d switched from a pretty ordinary four-seam fastball to a more dynamic two-seamer and found success in the process. JC Ramirez does throw in the high 90s, but his was the story you want to tell.

What we might be seeing with Kenta Maeda is the opposite, or close to it. Because, right now, despite a strikeout minus walk rate that looks familiar, Maeda’s ERA is more than twice his 2016 version. The difference between the two years? Home runs, seven of them already. The fastball might be the key to avoiding those going forward.

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With Andre Ethier, Logan Forsythe, Franklin Gutierrez, Joc Pederson, Rob Segedin all on the DL — and both Chase Utley and Scott Van Slyke struggling to do much of anything — the Dodgers have called up Cody Bellinger to strengthen their lineup. Bellinger is a powerful first-baseman-turned-outfielder who spent the past few weeks mashing .343/.429/.627 at Triple-A at the tender age of 21. Like most first basemen, Bellinger’s power is his biggest asset. He belted 26 homers between Double- and Triple-A last year and has amassed a remarkable 120 extra-base hits since the start of 2015. He’s already hit five out this year, tying him for third among Triple-A hitters.

There’s much more to Bellinger than his homers, however. He’s also a 45 runner who already has seven steals to his name in 2017 and has played all three outfield positions as recently as last year. That same athleticism earned him a 60/70 fielding grade from Eric Longenhagen over the winter. Clay Davenport’s defensive numbers graded him out as a +8 defender across 78 games at first last year.

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Rich Hill is in the midst of a blister problem. It’s been going on since his breakout season last year. Since only three pitchers in 2016 threw more curveballs than Hill, it makes sense to blame the curve. Maybe there’s more at work, but also maybe not. It’s a pretty reasonable hypothesis.

I mean, for one, the pitcher himself believes it. “It’s right there, on the pad of my finger, where it touches the seams on my curveball,” said Hill on Tuesday night. Curious about the condition of his digit, I pushed: could I take a picture of the pad on his middle finger pad? “Nobody’s taking a picture of my finger,” he laughed. I didn’t pursue the matter any further.

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To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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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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