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

Thomas Szapucki, LHP, New York NL (Profile)
Level: Low-A  Age: 21   Org Rank: 7   Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 2 H, 2 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
Szapucki missed all of April and May with a shoulder injury. Sunday was his fourth start of the year and he worked more efficiently and missed more bats than he had in his previous three appearances. Szapucki already boasts a plus fastball/curveball combination and he’s a potential No. 3 starter if he can develop a changeup and/or plus command of his breaking ball. Should he fail to, then there’s some concern that Szapucki’s low-3/4 arm slot might be an issue against upper-level right-handed hitters and limit his effectiveness and role. He’s had a back and shoulder issue during his pro career and made many starts on extended rest. Sunday’s came with a full week between starts.

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It’s now been six years since Buster Posey lost most of the season due to a broken leg bone suffered in a home plate collision. Two years later, Major League Baseball adopted Rule 7.13 to deal with collisions at home plate, meaning we are now in the fourth year of the rule designed to prevent serious injuries like the one Posey suffered as well as limit the damaging effects of concussions. There are two parts to the rule, one for catchers and one for runners, and together, collisions at the plate have become pretty non-existent. That’s what makes Monday night’s collision–when Anthony Rizzo barreled down the line into Austin Hedges–notable. It’s now a rarity, but Rizzo’s play was in clear violation of the rule.

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

Dedgar Jimenez, LHP, Boston (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 8 H, 0 BB, 1 R, 7 K

Notes
Jimenez has 60 strikeouts and just 17 walks over 57.1 innings this year. He’s big — 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds — but is a good athlete who repeats his delivery and not only throws a lot of strikes but often throws them exactly where he intends to. His stuff is fringey, his best pitch an average slider which he uses heavily, and he’s surviving purely off of command right now. Without any physical projection, it’s hard to envision him competing at upper levels with this stuff, even if he has plus command.

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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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Hunter Renfroe had a huge game last night. The Padres outfielder hammered a two-run double in the second inning and followed with a two-run homer in the 10th. The latter was a walk-off, giving San Diego a 6-5 win over the Milwaukee Brewers. The blast was his seventh on the season, tying him with Josh Bell and Cody Bellinger for the lead among NL rookies.

Renfroe’s overall numbers aren’t great — his slash line is .217/.273/.406 — but he’s showing signs of breaking out. Over his last six games, the 25-year-old former first-round pick is 6-for-18, and four of those safeties have gone for extra bases. Every bit as notable is the fact that he’s drawn seven free passes. Selectivity has never been a strong suit for the slugger, but given his ability to propel baseballs long distances, a more-discerning eye could very well be his ticket to stardom.

There’s no questioning his raw power. The Mississippi State product left the yard 30 times last year for Triple-A El Paso while capturing Pacific Coast League MVP honors. He added four more dingers after a late-September call-up. Six of the 11 home runs Renfroe has hit in a big-league uniform have traveled over 400 feet.

Renfroe discussed his power-laden gap-to-gap approach, and his views on launch-angle data, prior to the start of the regular season.

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Renfroe on launch-angle data: “I’m obviously aware of it, but the ball is moving. It’s not sitting on a tee, so you can’t stand in the box and think about things like launch angle when the ball is coming at you 98 mph. You hit it, and whatever it does… you know? Hopefully you hit it on the barrel at a good angle, and it makes it over the fence, or at least goes for a double, or even a single.

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This a companion piece to what I wrote earlier today on Trevor Story, in which I wondered if a hitter can become too extreme with regard to a certain approach. In Story’s case, the specific approach is one designed to lift the ball into the air.

This is also a status update on a comment made by Eno Sarris regarding Ryan Schimpf back in early March, after Schimpf had just produced the most fly-ball-oriented season on record. Wrote Sarris:

And maybe that’s the lesson in the end: Ryan Schimpf is so extreme that two things are true. On the one hand, he won’t be as extreme next year, because only one person has ever been as extreme as Schimpf was last year, and that player also didn’t play a full season. But it’s also true to say that Schimpf will probably a hit a ton of fly balls next year, even with regression.

Schimpf was not a qualified hitter last year, recording just 330 plate appearances, but among single seasons of 100 plate appearances or more, no hitter on record had produced a higher fly-ball rate or a more extreme ratio of fly balls to ground ball.

Schimpf is always going to be a fly-ball hitter, because he’s always been a fly-ball hitter. Schimpf routinely posted sub-0.60 GB/FB ratios throughout his lengthy, winding minor-league career. But he’d never produced a ratio like the 0.30 mark he produced last season in a half-season’s worth of work. Surely he was going to regress nearer his minor-league career average this season, nearer normal MLB batted-ball distribution, right?

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Before the start of the year, the Padres’ starting rotation was the butt of so many jokes. They essentially had to build it out through free agency, but not even through the appealing parts of free agency. More like the Jered Weaver parts. Here and there, there was occasional speculation the Padres could go on to have one of the worse rotations in recent memory. At the same time, people held the Cubs in the conversation for having maybe the best rotation around. It was certainly one of the best a season ago. Why would anything change? Cubs good. Padres bad. These statements were inarguable.

We’ve completed just a sixth or so of the season. You should be sticking to many of your preseason thoughts. But let me just show six numbers. Here’s how the Cubs’ rotation has done:

• ERA-: 109
• FIP-: 109
• xFIP-: 94

And here’s how the Padres’ rotation has done:

• ERA-: 106
• FIP-: 106
• xFIP-: 95

The Padres are basically right in the middle in WAR. It’s been a mixed bag of results, but overall it’s been fine, even slightly more effective than the Cubs. It’s a strange place for us to be, and surprising group effectiveness is driven by surprising individuals. Trevor Cahill has earned a front-page post.

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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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Once someone who’s erred has done his time, apologized, and satisfied society institutionally, there’s the matter of going on with life. This is true with every crime, however horrible, and the things Matt Bush did were horrible. He’s served his time — 39 months — and hopes we can forgive him. But that’s almost of secondary concern to him, at this point: life, and living, remains.

And Matt Bush, now perhaps the closer for the Texas Rangers, is doing his best to be a good baseball player because that’s the path in front of him. He believes any success he experiences in that role is due to the help he’s gotten. “Our pitching coaches are great, man, really great,” he suggested multiple times in our talk before a game against the Athletics this week.

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Over the winter, Eric Longenhagen had very nice things to say about Padres outfield prospect Manny Margot. He ranked Margot and 23rd overall in baseball. He also gave four of Margot’s five tools a grade of 60 or higher. Margot’s power was the only tool that didn’t receive a plus grade. Eric assigned Margot’s game power a present grade of 30 (or three to five homers per year) and a future grade of 40 (10-12 homers per year). In sum, he projected Margot to do everything but hit for power.

Nine games into the season, Margot has not adhered to those power grades. He already has three dingers to his name, tying him for eighth in baseball. His .343/.396/.686 batting line works out to a 182 wRC+. The guy who was supposed to do everything but hit for power is hitting for power. Eric said the following in his write-up of Margot, which is starting to look prescient.

It’s possible Margot may learn to elevate the ball more regularly as he matures, and if he does he’ll become a star-level player.

Yes, it’s only nine games. And, yes, punchless hitters sometimes bunch a few homers together by pure chance. Noted bunt machine Mallex Smith hit two in one game, for example, but few noticed because it didn’t happen in the first week of the season. But Margot is doing something very different than what he’s done in the past, and if he keeps doing it, he could be a bonafide star.

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