Alan Zinter has a challenging job. The 48-year-old former first baseman is San Diego’s hitting coach, and the position players on the Padres roster are, with few exceptions, young and inexperienced. There is a plenty of raw talent, but there are also plenty of learning curves. Works-in-progress abound.

Zinter embraces the challenge, in large part because he enjoys teaching. By all accounts, he is very good at it. Prior to joining the Padres a little over a year ago, he served as assistant hitting coach in Houston, and before that he was Cleveland’s minor-league hitting coordinator. He began his coaching career in the Diamondbacks system.

He’s anything but old-fashioned in his understanding of the craft. Zinter is well-versed in launch angles and exit velocities, and as a result, he’s not interested in seeing his hitters — not even the speedy ones — slap balls on the ground and run. He wants them driving through the baseball with a swing plane that opens up a window and results in gap shots. From his perspective, it all starts from the launch position.

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Zinter on teaching proper swing mechanics: “With technology being what it is today, with the slo-mo cameras — the ability to slow down the swing — we can actually see what a good swing looks like. A lot of times, what’s taught is ‘chop wood, swing down on the ball, knob to the ball’ — things like that, which make for a shorter compact swing. But some guys who feel they’re doing that end up swinging improperly.

“A lot of hitters, when they try to swing down, lead with their hands. They’re too steep into the zone. Other hitters, for whatever reason, think the same thing and do it properly.

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As if being a 27-year old rookie weren’t hard enough, Ryan Schimpf went at things in an unprecedented way last season. While the fighter — schimpf literally means “to curse and fight” in German — probably established himself as a useful major leaguer with a couple of important tools, regression will come for a player with such an extreme batted-ball mix.

Since we started recording these things, no batter has ever had a qualified season during which he hit fewer than four grounders for every 10 fly balls. Schimpf hit three for every 10 in his debut last year. Even if you relax the entry to 300 plate appearances, the San Diego second baseman is an outlier — only one person has ever recorded a higher fly-ball rate.

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Baseball announced a handful of rule modifications today. For the most part, they’re concerning pace-of-play adjustments — there’s the modification about the new, automatic intentional walk, and there’s a line in there about a two-minute guideline for determinations on replay reviews. There’s nothing in there that should cause too much of a stir. We were given plenty of warning about the intentional walks. Yet one bullet point stands out from the others:

• An addition to Rule 5.07 stipulates that a pitcher may not take a second step toward home plate with either foot or otherwise reset his pivot foot in his delivery of the pitch. If there is at least one runner on base, such an action will be called a balk under Rule 6.02(a). If the bases are unoccupied, then it will be considered an illegal pitch under Rule 6.02(b).

With that, baseball has moved to clarify and formalize its position on Carter Capps‘ delivery.

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Last week, we ran an interview with Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia on the subject of swing paths and launch angles. If you read the piece, you’ll recall that the Rockies outfielders share a similar philosophy, but come to it in different ways. One is studious in his pursuit of the science, while the other is satisfied to be aware of the launch-angle concept.

San Diego Padres teammates Carlos Asuaje and Wil Myers are much like their Colorado contemporaries. Both want to elevate the baseball, but one puts a lot of thought into the why, while the other tries to keep things as simple as possible.

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Carlos Asuaje: “It’s easy to overanalyze things, and try to focus on something that’s pretty tough to control. The angle of where the ball is going off your bat is a good example of that. But you want to hit the ball in the air. That’s the reality of it. It’s the way to get hits nowadays. There’s enough technology and science to back that up.

“It’s something I definitely focus on. Being a smaller guy doesn’t change the fact that it’s true. If you hit ground balls, you’re going to be out, especially at the major-league level. Guys don’t boot balls, they don’t throw poorly, and you’re not going to outrun the baseball. You have to play the odds, and the odds are that if you hit the ball in the air, you have a better chance to be successful.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the Padres’ bullpen. More specifically, it was a post about how the Padres could dismantle their bullpen around the trade deadline. I tucked something in near the bottom, but I don’t know how many of you read that post, so here I want it to stand alone. Sorry for repeating myself, if you knew I was repeating myself.

First, to establish what we’re doing: Andrew Miller’s slider is one of the best pitches in baseball, yes? Miller is one of the best pitchers in baseball, and he just threw his slider more than half of the time. Miller’s secondary pitch, in 2016, was his primary pitch. Whenever one player does something extraordinary, people wonder who’s going to be next. So, who else, if anyone, throws something like the Andrew Miller slider? There is one name that stands out.

A few years ago, I introduced pitch comps. It’s just a simple method of comparing individual pitches based on velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. Long story short, I looked at all 2016 lefties who threw at least 25 sliders. I ran the math, and just one other slider earns a comp score below 1.0. Granted, that threshold is arbitrary, but it’s what we’re working with. By a good margin, the slider most similar to Andrew Miller’s belongs to Brad Hand.

Miller has a little more zip, and an inch and a half more sink (on average), but the pitches are siblings, if not quite twins. Here, you can see the pitches in action, courtesy of a perfect Tampa Bay camera angle. Thank you, Tampa Bay! Here’s Miller:

And here’s Hand:

Miller threw his slider 61% of the time. It was a strike 72% of the time, and 48% of all swing attempts missed. Hand threw his slider 31% of the time. It was a strike 61% of the time, and 53% of all swing attempts missed. But it’s worth noting that Hand threw 44% sliders over the season’s final month. His command of it improved. And why wouldn’t it have? The pitch was relatively new. Hand hardly threw sliders until 2015’s second half.

Brad Hand’s slider is not as good as Andrew Miller’s slider. Not yet. But it is a very good pitch, and a very similar pitch, and considering how new it was to Hand last season, who’s to say it couldn’t get better? There are different ways for players to succeed. Andrew Miller blazed his own trail. Brad Hand could now be following in his footsteps.

Major League Baseball would never root for its own players to be injured, but sometimes the timing of certain injuries can be convenient. We spent a chunk of 2015 talking about whether Carter Capps‘ throwing motion should be allowed. Parallels were drawn to Jordan Walden, who has his own unorthodox delivery. Nothing was approaching the level of a crisis, but Capps was drawing a lot of attention, and he was dominating all the while. Then he got hurt, and he didn’t pitch in 2016. Walden also didn’t pitch in 2016. Baseball didn’t have to deal with anything, here, because nothing was happening. The deliveries were out of sight and out of mind.

Walden is still working his way back. There’s a chance he might never return to the majors. But, Capps? Capps has recovered from his elbow surgery. He’s been throwing in Padres camp, and based on early looks, he has made a mechanical change. Yet it still seems to be against the rules. Once more, this could turn into an issue.

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My sense is that people used to talk about Austin Hedges more. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but I can’t imagine I’m about to be fact-checked. Hedges has long been considered a quality catcher prospect, far more for his defense than for the potency of his swing. By receiving, by game-calling, by throwing, Hedges was among the prospect elite. At the plate, he drew a few too many comparisons to players like Drew Butera. And so the reputation was cemented — Hedges could field, and do nothing else.

It’s difficult for any player to change a reputation. Prospect reputations, however, probably shouldn’t be all that sticky. Hedges, at this point, is in line to be the starting catcher for the Padres, and last season, he did the damnedest thing. It would appear that Austin Hedges just learned how to hit.

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The bad news is that we have the Padres projected for baseball’s worst record. The good news is that’s not really surprising to the Padres, and Keith Law recently ranked their farm system at No. 3. They tried the whole go-for-it thing, and it blew up, so they reversed course. To this point, it’s gone well, and probably better than was expected. You can look at the Padres and see how they could eventually return to being competitive.

What that doesn’t mean is that the rebuild is complete. The Padres will have more selling to do, and as I look at their roster, I see a team poised to do one of the things the Brewers have done. Milwaukee has done well to sell off parts of its bullpen, bringing real prospect value back in exchange for Jeremy Jeffress, Will Smith, and Tyler Thornburg. They’re all effective pitchers, but they don’t mean much to a could-be cellar-dweller. You might know the Padres for having a suspect pitching staff, but the bullpen should be of considerable interest. And if events go well enough, then come July, the Padres might end up in charge of the late-inning reliever market.

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Look, over the horizon. You can just barely make it out with the naked eye. Can you see? It’s baseball, just coming ’round the bend. Sunday marks the end of football, and then we’ll have pitchers and catchers reporting to Florida and Arizona. We even get a treat in the form of the World Baseball Classic this year. Real, competitive baseball, and then Opening Day. It’s so close that you can taste the sunflower seeds and Big League Chew.

That doesn’t mean that everyone has a job yet, though. There are still some fairly notable players on the free-agent market. Not all of them are that great, but there are always a few February stragglers. So, like any self-respecting baseball fans, we’re going to arbitrarily put the best of them (based on MLB Trade Rumors’ list of remaining free agents) into a lineup, and then we’re going to see how they stack up against the Padres, using our Depth Chart projections. Why the Padres? Because we’ve currently got them projected for 66 wins, fewest in the league as of today. I’m not going to put together a whole 25-man roster out of these guys, because I value my sanity and, to a slightly lesser degree, yours as well. At least, though, we’re going to find out how a lineup of misfit toys looks against that of the San Diego Dads. Why the hell not? Buckle up.

First, I’ve identified the top free agent at each position. Below that, I’ve included a table featuring a head-to-head comparison between the top free agent and Padres likely starter at each position.

Catcher: Matt Wieters

Wieters is the clear option here, which isn’t saying much. The former future “Mauer with power” has seen his career degrade and his bat erode. Baseball Prospectus’ framing metric wasn’t fond of his work last year, or the year before that either, so his 1.9 WAR projection is probably a bit generous. That being said, it’s him and a bunch of aging career backups, so Matt Wieters it is. He’s projected for an 89 wRC+, though, so let’s not get too excited just yet.

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I think we can all agree that baseball is amazing. If we weren’t all on the same page, it stands to reason we wouldn’t all be here. I think we can also all agree that baseball is stupid. Sometimes it is extremely stupid. Other times, it is more forgivably stupid. But it is very stupid. Following in the true spirit of baseball, let’s take a quiz! There are nine questions, and for each, you select one answer from five options.

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