First, there is the fact of this Monday home run:

That is a very good home run, hit against a very bad pitch. Every hitter deserves credit for every home run, but some home runs come easier than others do. Anyway.

Using Baseball Savant, I’ve created the following plot, showing Manny Machado’s rolling 50-batted-ball averages since 2015. As usual, you can see average exit velocities, and average launch angles.

Machado is at an exit velocity career high. The last time he was particularly close to this, he was hitting the ball with less loft. Home runs come from power and loft.

Machado ranks third in all of baseball in 2017 in average exit velocity. He’s behind only Miguel Sano and Khris Davis. If you prefer, he’s fifth in hard-hit rate, north of 50%. He’s in the upper sixth of all players in average launch angle. If you prefer, he has a very low ground-ball rate, about tied with Chris Davis.

Machado, in April, had the highest walk rate he’s ever had in a single month. He had just two more strikeouts than walks. Compared to last year, his swing rate is down seven points, and his out-of-zone swing rate is down nine points. His plate-discipline numbers look similar to where they were in 2015, except now Machado is swinging through a few more pitches, but giving his batted balls more loft. Machado is trying to kill everything, 118 wRC+ be damned. It’s a 118 wRC+, but it comes with the appearance of upside.

Interpret everything how you will. There’s nothing for us to know for certain yet — there are only some promising signs.

Hyun Soo Kim posted a .382 on-base percentage last season. He was one of just 20 players to post a .380 OBP or better (min. 300 plate appearances). As I’m sure you’re aware, that’s a pretty great mark. As I detailed a little in the positional power rankings for left field, Kim had a rocky start with the Orioles, who generally seemed not to like him very much. But by the end of the season, he was the club’s starting left fielder. He started only 78 of the team’s 162 games in left field, but he did start 40 of their final 64 there. And yet, despite ending the season as the team’s main left fielder and despite recorded a .382 OBP, he’s been buried on the bench to begin the 2017 season.

Let’s go back a second to that .382 OBP. That’s getting hard to pull off these days.

OBP is the heartbeat of an offense. So long as a club is avoiding outs, good things can happen. But it’s been a lot harder to find high-OBP figures over the past 10 years. Two years ago, for example, just eight players produced an OBP of .380 or better. It was the third-lowest total (after 1968 and 1963) since baseball integrated in 1947. Last year, only 20 batters reached that mark, which was tied for the 22nd-lowest total since Integration. The last few years, it has been very tough to find hitters who are really good at not making outs. And when teams find them, they cherish them. Here’s the list of the 20 players who pulled it off last season, and how much they’ve played this season. You’ll see one outlier.

Well, OK: two outliers, I guess. But David Ortiz voluntarily stopped playing games. Kim, on the other hand, hasn’t walked away from the sport. The Orioles simply aren’t playing him. His plate-appearance total is less than half of every other active player except Donaldson, whose total would be higher if he were healthy. They have a lot of other players to whom they’d rather give time, it seems. Joey Rickard was the favorite at this time last season, and remains on the team, despite a career .312 OBP and a negative career DRS and UZR. He’s a candidate to be the next Willie Bloomquist.

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Caleb Joseph is a classic example of a catcher whose value extends well beyond his raw stats. The 30-year-old Baltimore Orioles backstop isn’t much of a hitter, and while his defensive numbers are good — he’s an above-average pitch-framer and has a solid success rate throwing out runners — they’re by no means elite.

More than anything, Joseph is a game-manager and a psychologist. The gear he wears is often referred to as the tools of ignorance, but that might be baseball’s most-misleading slang term. Catchers know the game, and Joseph knows it better than most. The ability to help a pitcher, especially an inexperienced pitcher, navigate from Point A to Point B isn’t something you can quantify. It does make you a huge asset to a major-league baseball team.

I recently approached Joseph to get his perspective on how young pitchers mature. Our conversation didn’t end there. We also delved into the development of young catchers.

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Joseph on the maturation process for pitchers and catchers: “You don’t see many youngsters figure everything out right away. What we’re seeing now is a lot of power arms coming up. The stuff and the action, the power behind the fastball, is all there, and the location is secondary. You do have guys who are 89-92 with incredible command — they rely completely on that — but more times than not, you’re seeing the power.

“You get these young arms who dominated in high school, and they dominated in college, and it was mostly because of their stuff. They could miss in the middle of the plate. Then they got to the minor leagues and a lot of them could dominate at the lower levels there. But when you get to the big leagues, you have to mature in order to succeed. And there are a lot of different aspects to that maturity.

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Last April, I interviewed Baltimore Orioles slugger Mark Trumbo about his hitting approach. As he explained, it’s unapologetically aggressive — and geared toward power. The numbers bear that out. Trumbo hit 47 bombs last year — the most in either league — and he walked just 51 times in 667 plate appearances. For better or for worse, that’s who he is.

Belying Trumbo’s free-swinging ways is the fact that he is studious. He’s put a lot of thought into what works for him, and once the offseason rolls around, he’ll tinker with technology-driven tools. Terms like “exit velocity” and “launch angle” aren’t part of his everyday vernacular, but he knows exactly what they mean. Trumbo’s job is to bash baseballs, which necessitates his need to understand how baseballs are best-bashed.

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Trumbo on launch angles: “I’m not, by any means, hyper-obsessed with some of these pop terms that are being thrown around. Especially launch angle. In practice, my goal is usually timing more than anything. When I am trying to drive the ball, I’m more or less trying to knock the fence down. It’s not to hit the ball as high and far as possible. If that happens in a game, great, but there’s a happy medium between a ground ball and a high fly ball. What’s most productive for me are those line drives that just continue to carry.

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Brad Brach broke out after reaching Baltimore. Fueled by a velocity spike and a healthy dose of confidence, the 31-year-old right-hander has excelled since being acquired by the Orioles from San Diego prior to the 2014 season. In 183 relief outings, Brach has a 2.56 ERA and has allowed just 163 hits over 224.2 innings. Working primarily as a setup man, he’s been credited with 22 wins and three saves.

Brach — an All-Star for the first time last season — was treading water before coming east. A pedestrian fastball was a big reason. The Monmouth University product was barely topping 90 mph when the Padres lost faith and shipped him out in exchange for a low-level prospect. Then came spring training in a new uniform, and sage tutelage from a pair of since-departed pitching gurus.

Brach detailed his career-altering velo jump, and the I’m-coming-after-you mindset that followed, prior to yesterday’s game at Fenway Park.

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Brach on how he turned a corner in 2014: “I made a mechanical adjustment that helped me gain some velocity. I straightened out on the rubber. I kind of throw across my body and, before, I was tilting way too much. I was throwing so far across my body that I was basically having to get over myself to throw to home.

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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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About a month ago, Travis Sawchik and I posted back-to-back articles about Dylan Bundy and how he could make or break the Orioles’ season. I didn’t exactly say that he was the most important player on the roster not named Machado or Britton, but I heavily implied it in a wink-wink nudge-nudge manner. In Bundy, the Orioles have a former prodigy who could realize his potential in 2017.

He took the first step towards that on Wednesday night.

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Brady Anderson was a fascinating – and curious – player, most notably for his outlying 1996 season when he hit 50 home runs, a number he never before or again approached in his career. While the performance came under a cloud of suspicion, there was no evidence tying him PED usage.

He now has a fascinating and curious presence in the Baltimore clubhouse, as documented in an excellent profile by Ken Rosenthal .

Anderson is a controversial figure this spring. He holds an unusual sort of hybrid role with the Orioles. Technically employed as a high-ranking member of the front office, Anderson also has a locker in the clubhouse, wears a jersey, and plays roles in coaching, dealing with agents, and in strength and conditioning

The story is well worth a read, but I took away two main points — namely, that (a) we might see more hybrid-type roles in the future, further blurring lines and testing clubhouse sovereignty, and (b) Anderson is yet another voice challenging conventional coaching practices.

It’s true Anderson’s situation is an unusual one due to his cozy relationship with ownership. He operates with little oversight or constraint. But what has become less unusual is the practice of a front office infiltrating integrating itself in the clubhouse. As front offices have trended in a more analytical direction, they’ve hired more like-minded managers. They’ve hired forward-thinking strength and conditioning staffs. And in Pittsburgh, a quantitative analyst — Mike Fitzgerald — was believed to be the first such employee to be freed of the shackles of an office cubicle in order to travel with a club, complete with his own locker in road clubhouses (although he didn’t wear a jersey). The Pirates viewed Fitzgerald’s role as significant enough that they have hired a former Amherst College shortstop and pitcher, Bob Cook, to fill the role after Fitzgerald departed for Arizona, as MLB.com’s Adam Berry reported.

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Who’s going to have the better season: Bryce Harper or Manny Machado? That’s the question posed to you at the end of this post. Which means this is a poll post. Poll post!

Years ago, the debate used to be about Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and Mike Trout. It’s safe to say Trout is now excluded from the conversation, on account of having become too good. That leaves Harper and Machado to battle, and while they’re not actually in direct competition with one another, what’s the downside here of matching them up? Below, I’ll present the respective cases, before getting to the question. This does not mean I think these are the only great players. Kris Bryant is great. Mookie Betts is great. Corey Seager and several others are great. But Harper vs. Machado is a fun one, and I think we’ll be able to learn from whatever these poll results might be.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Baltimore Orioles 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)

50 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .320/.406/.422 at Double-A in 2016.

Scouting Report
While this series has often extolled the virtues of loud tools, the best aspects of Sisco’s game are ensconced in quiet. This is most important defensively, where Sisco has improved to the point of viability. Balls in the dirt are sputtering off of Sisco’s catching gear with less force, and his receiving has become more still and refined. Scouts now consider Sisco, who didn’t start catching until his senior year of high school in 2013, a viable defensive backstop. Nobody is particularly excited about him back there, but he’s okay right now and should improve into his mid-20s as he continuously makes good use of his above-average athleticism and refines his skills. In fact, scouts consider Sisco athletic enough that, were something to occur that requires him to move out from behind the plate, he might be able to play somewhere other than first base/DH, which is often the value-crushing alternative for unsound defensive catchers.

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