When asked recently about his post-retirement plans, the fabulous Ichiro Suzuki provided a response as memorable as his career: “I think I’ll just die,” he told Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald. It’s possible that he might just play forever. So it’s premature to call this remarkable at-bat in Seattle on April 19th his last in Seattle, as many did when it occurred.

But it does remind us of another great response Ichiro provided — one that gave life to the idea that he would be a great Home Run Derby entrant. “If I’m allowed to hit .220, I could probably hit 40 [homers],” he told Bob Nightengale back in 2007. “But nobody wants that.”

Ben Lindbergh once looked at the hypothetical shift in Ichiro’s outcomes if the player had attempted to hit for power, but now that we have even better batted-ball data, we can maybe take a look and see if he could have even been that 40-homer hitter at all.

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Statcast! Who doesn’t love playing with Statcast? Baseball Savant makes it all possible, so let’s take a quick look at a 2017 vs. 2016 comparison. I looked at every hitter with at least 30 batted balls in each of the last two seasons. Here’s a plot of all of their changes in average exit velocity and average launch angle. One data point is highlighted.

The point I highlighted belongs to Taylor Motter. There’s a pretty great chance you’ve never even heard of Taylor Motter. He was a quiet acquisition, and he might not even be playing in the majors were it not for health issues with Shawn O’Malley and Jean Segura. But there’s Motter, a utility type with a 179 wRC+. Last season, in exit velocity, he ranked in the 25th percentile, by names like Eduardo Escobar and Chris Stewart. So far this season, he ranks in the 97th percentile. In fact, here’s the whole top 10!

1. Miguel Sano
2. Joey Gallo
3. Miguel Cabrera
4. Nick Castellanos
5. Khris Davis
6. Freddie Freeman
7. Taylor Motter
8. Yandy Diaz
9. Manny Machado
10. Aaron Judge

Very strong, dangerous hitters. Also Yandy Diaz and Taylor Motter. Diaz is interesting, but he’s also hit a bunch of grounders. Motter’s been elevating, and when you look at that plot, his launch angle is up four degrees, and his exit velocity is up nine ticks. Sano has the next-biggest exit-velocity gain, at +6.7. Then it’s Castellanos, at +5.3. No one else has reached +4. Obviously, the samples are small, too small to arrive at certain conclusions, but Motter might’ve seen this as his best shot at building a career. Here he is, and with the Mariners having dropped Leonys Martin yesterday, Motter could stick around, playing all over semi-regularly.

If you watch Taylor Motter go deep, he looks like a home-run hitter. Like, everything about this seems perfectly natural.

Yet here’s the real trick. What’s driving Motter’s early success? Why couldn’t he do this in a brief stint last season? Motter is trying to hit literally everything to left field. He’s trying to make the most of the bat speed he has.

Nobody has a higher pull rate than Motter’s 72%. Only Trevor Plouffe has a lower opposite-field rate than Motter’s 5%. Motter’s been hunting pitches he can elevate and pull, and he’s gotten enough of them to accomplish what he’s accomplished. If you’re curious, since 2002, the highest single-season pull rate for a qualified hitter has been 64%, by 2003 Tony Batista. If you drop the minimum to 250 plate appearances, then the highest pull rate is 66%, by 2002 Greg Vaughn. Pull hitters like Vaughn, Batista, Marcus Thames, and Gary Sheffield don’t really work for me as potential Motter comps.

No, I think there’s an obvious one, here. There’s a decent chance Motter will be exposed over a greater period of time. It might even be a good chance. Motter, after all, struggled just last season. But if he holds to this approach, and if it works for him, you could see him as someone in the Brian Dozier mold. Dozier became a quality everyday player when he started to pull the ball aggressively in the air. Pitchers haven’t been able to solve him yet, after a handful of years. Given a good-enough eye and quick-enough hands, a hitter can survive like this, essentially eliminating half of the field. It’s no way to be *great*, but one can be good. Or even just useful.

Taylor Motter isn’t Brian Dozier, officially. But he’s channeled Dozier in getting to this point, where he’s currently the most-searched player on FanGraphs.com. Sometimes baseball makes me write the weirdest damn sentences.

So far, Mitch Haniger has been one of the best hitters in baseball. He’s not alone — Freddie Freeman has also been one of the best hitters in baseball. Eric Thames and Francisco Lindor and Khris Davis have been some of the best hitters in baseball. By definition, we’re talking in pluralities, but Haniger is one of a small group, and I would like to write about him. This is what that is. Yesterday, Haniger batted five times against the Marlins. What did he do? Here’s the first plate appearance.

(That’s a walk.)

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For the Mariners, pitching-wise, 2017 has already been a mixed bag. Drew Smyly showed some extra arm strength in the WBC, but then almost immediately afterward, he experienced arm discomfort that sent him to the disabled list. Yovani Gallardo has shown better stuff, but not better results. Hisashi Iwakuma has shown far worse stuff, and far worse results. Felix Hernandez, though, has gotten himself back to throwing consistent strikes. And then there’s James Paxton. Many have focused on whether Felix would be able to bounce back, but it’s Paxton who’s been the best and most exciting starter for a while.

Last Saturday, against the Rangers, Paxton spun eight frames of shutout baseball, getting all the way up to 114 pitches. Some shutout efforts come as the result of exceptional defense or exceptional fortune, but Paxton threw strike after strike, whiffing nine of 26 opponents. He looked every bit like a rotation ace, and although it can take some time before that label is truly earned, Paxton is making a charge for it. In the early going, he’s made three starts. He’s allowed a run in none of them.

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There’s no shortage of disappointing teams in the early going. The playoff-hopeful Cardinals are 3-6. The playoff-hopeful Rangers are 3-5. The playoff-hopeful Giants are 4-6. Scoot all the way to the bottom of the standings, though, and two teams stand out. The Blue Jays are a terrible 1-7, and Dave just wrote about the decision they could shortly be facing. And the Mariners are a hardly-better 2-8, already multiple games behind every team in the division. Based on the calendar, it remains too early for anyone to panic. Yet no one should doubt that a challenging start can result in significant damage.

It’s not too hard to put a semi-positive spin on things. While the Mariners have wound up losers in eight games, they’ve had a lead at some point in seven. Last night, they lost a game they led 5-0. Over the weekend, they lost a game they led 8-1. Games like that are fluky. A week ago, they lost a game they led in the bottom of the 13th, because they had to use a pitcher who was replacing another pitcher whose wife was having a baby. Tough losses always feel like unfortunate losses. But, they are losses, and they all count just the same. It feels like we just reached the end of spring training, but life comes at you fast.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Seattle Mariners farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)
NL West (HOU, LAA)

55 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .395/.535/.731 with 20 home runs as junior at Mercer.

Scouting Report
Lewis crashed the national party on the Cape in 2015, distinguishing himself as the most talented prospect and youngest regular on an Orleans roster teeming with talent. (Half of the Firebirds roster were honest-to-god prospects.) His junior year at Mercer included 20 home runs, a Golden Spikes award, and questions about the quality of pitching he faced in the Southern Conference.

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Mike Trout is the best baseball player, so he’s automatically interesting. Felix Hernandez is probably not one of the best baseball players, but he has been recently enough that he remains interesting. On Saturday, Felix pitched and Trout hit, and as we all learned in school, Interesting * Interesting = Interesting^2. That’s extremely interesting! In this post, we’ll review the game’s first at-bat between the two. It was the kind of at-bat that leaves you thinking and talking about it days later, which, well, yeah, that’s what we’re doing here.

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There are certain unstoppable forces in this world. Some of them are acts of nature, like hurricanes and tornadoes. There’s also death, taxes, and reality television — inevitable, all of them. In baseball, there’s the bat of Mike Trout and the glove of Francisco Lindor. There’s the fastball of Noah Syndergaard and the cutter of Kenley Jansen. In the baseball present, these are facts of life, threatened only by the natural corrective measures of health and the passage of time.

While these unimpeachable laws pervade the game, there are times when events fail to obey the natural order of things. Times when Jansen’s cutter doesn’t cut or when Lindor makes an error. Or, for example, when the third out of an inning — a frequent occurrence on any given day in a season — appears unlikely to ever arrive.

Two clubs, the Washington Nationals and Seattle Mariners, suffered from this particular sort of chaos this weekend. The Nationals are good. Unfortunately, the pitcher who started for them on Saturday isn’t — or isn’t any longer. The Mariners are also pretty good. Unfortunately, with one of their best pitchers on the mound on Sunday, they failed to produce a third out in the last, most important inning of their game in Anaheim.

Jeremy Guthrie, by all reasonable measures, has had a good career. His outing on Saturday marked his 14th individual year in which he’d made an appearance in the majors. He’s thrown more than 1700 innings and made more than $43 million by playing a game. He won a World Series with the Royals. Guthrie has a reputation of being a standout human being, as well. At age 38, Guthrie has already lived a full and exciting life. His WAR, or his FIP, or his win total, mean little in the face of all of that.

He turned 38 on Saturday. On that same day, he allowed 10 runs in less than an inning — the game’s first innings — of what may very well have been his final start.

The Phillies aren’t a great offensive team. “Great” is a relative term, though. Major-league hitters are all great relative to the human population — and Guthrie, for his past, spent last year putting up a 6.57 ERA against Triple-A batters. So the fact that he even got a start at the highest level this year is an accomplishment. But the Phillies probably represented an easier task for him than, say, the Cubs or the Dodgers. Again, though: big-league hitters can knock around balls over the heart of the plate, and the Phillies did just that. Enny Romero, who follow Guthrie, would offer up some meatballs of his own before the damage was finally done.

Guthrie’s advanced age (for a ballplayer, that is) and the resulting deterioration of his stuff played a role here, but luck did as well. The ball that Cesar Hernandez hit for a leadoff double, for instance, only goes for a hit about 55% of the time. Had that been an out, perhaps the inning proceeds much differently. It didn’t, though, and the resulting offensive explosion was torrential. Even the two outs that Guthrie induced, fly balls from Maikel Franco and Freddy Galvis, were sac flies that brought runs home.

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In honor of Opening Day 2017, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at the five craziest Opening Day games (or home openers), as defined by swings in win expectancy. So we did, in this video we just posted at our Facebook page! Happy baseball!

Thanks to Sean Dolinar for his research assistance.

By now, the most prolific pitchers of the spring have put in the equivalent of three major-league starts, some close to four with how short the average start has become. And as much as we talk about the inconsistent talent level in the spring, these starters have mostly faced major-league-quality hitters because the first four to five innings of spring baseball is a decent approximation of regular-season ball. It’s not entirely irresponsible to make certain observations about a pitcher two weeks into the season, so we might as well do it now, too. So let’s talk about Taijuan Walker. Again.

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