Yesterday, I published a post comparing and contrasting the virtues of a pair of NL left fielders, Kyle Schwarber and Aaron Altherr. They are pretty different kinds of players, but to this point, their career numbers are very similar, and I thought it was an interesting question to consider which of the two you’d rather have going forward.

At the end of the post, I included a series of three polls, asking you to select a range for your view of the future expected performance for both players, as well as asking you to pick which one you’d rather have going forward. The results of those polls should something very close to a down-the-middle split.

When it came down to pick a side, Schwarber won 54/46, so there’s a slight edge to the bat-first, longer track record guy, but it certainly wasn’t any kind of blowout. And when you look at the expected performance buckets, it seems that Schwarber’s slight edge comes down to perceived upside.

A plurality of voters picked the +2 to +3 WAR bucket for both players, with 49% of Altherr’s votes going in that category, compared to 48% of Schwarber’s. There was a pretty large block of you guys that agreed that these guys are both above-average players, but not quite reaching star levels.

The +3 to +4 WAR bucket was the second most common choice for both players, and here, Schwarber pulled ahead slightly, 34% to 30%. Then it was +1 to +2 WAR, with Altherr getting 14% of his votes in that bin versus 9% for Schwarber. +4 to +5 WAR went 6% to 4% for Schwarber, and then +5 or better went 3% to 2% for Schwarber.

So overall, 43% of voters saw Schwarber as a +3 WAR or better player, the legitimate star that he’s been hyped up to be since being taken #4 overall. Only 37% of voters saw Altherr at that same level, and those who weren’t willing to put him in that category didn’t shift to the +2 to +3 WAR category, but instead, saw him as a role player, a fringe starter, effectively not buying into his 2017 performance as a significant indicator of change.

Essentially, the votes indicate that, while similar, you guys see a slightly higher upside with Schwarber. I’m guessing some of those higher-upside votes came from the idea that a new team could use him at first base, and his defensive limitations in left field would go away if Anthony Rizzo wasn’t standing in his way of the position he’s likely best suited for. If you think Schwarber could play a reasonable 1B and hit at a 130 or 140 wRC+ level, then yeah, that +4 to +5 WAR level is definitely reachable.

Altherr’s path to stardom in left field is easier; he just has to hit at a 120 to 130 wRC+ level, and his athleticism should carry the rest of the skillset. But while it was close, it appears that a few more of you buy into Schwarber hitting at a higher level, or changing positions, than see Altherr hitting at that level.

You probably don’t need much of an introduction to Kyle Schwarber. His story has been told numerous times, and he gained legendary status through his late-season return from ACL surgery, hitting .412 in the World Series to help the Cubs end their 108-year World Series drought. Schwarber is probably one of the most well known young players in baseball.

Depending on how frequently you read FanGraphs, you may be aware of Aaron Altherr. Jeff wrote about him in March when he was having a strong spring, trying to earn more time than his slotted 4th outfielder job on the Phillies would give him, and I wrote about his breakout performance last week. But while Altherr has gotten some notice for his strong performance the last few weeks, he’s still a relatively obscure young outfielder.

But despite their significantly different levels of recognition, they may be more similar than their reputations would suggest. So today, I wanted to do something of a thought experiment, and gauge how our readership sees the pair, as of May 16th, 2017.

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Back in March, Jeff wrote a post entitled “Could Aaron Altherr Be Part of the Core?” Let’s start by just lifting a few paragraphs from that piece.

Aaron Altherr has had a good spring. As should always go without saying, it’s a lot easier to have a good spring than to have a good summer. Worse players have posted better numbers, and we can seldom learn that much from these six weeks of semi-baseball. What I like here is that Altherr has put himself back on my own radar. Although he doesn’t have a clear path yet to regular playing time in Philadelphia, he could conceivably force his way. Not that long ago, he already did.

Altherr’s breakout year was 2015. Then, as a 24-year-old, he trimmed his strikeouts in the upper minors, and he graduated all the way to the majors, where he posted a 125 wRC+. That’s an above-average offensive line for a debut player with quick legs and above-average defense. Altherr was going to play, and play often, until in the following spring, he busted his wrist. He missed that starting opportunity, and when he got back, he wasn’t the same.

The Phillies did give him a chance. Altherr played frequently down the stretch, but his wRC+ was half what it had been. The power went away, and this is where you have to think the wrist injury took a devastating toll. Out of 309 players who batted at least 150 times in both 2015 and 2016, Altherr saw the third-largest year-to-year increase in ground-ball rate. The swing consistency wasn’t there. The swing stability wasn’t there. Wrist injuries aren’t always a valid excuse, but you can see how they could be in particular cases.

Jeff used Altherr’s big spring — he hit .303/.395/.591 in the Grapefruit League — to wonder how heavily Altherr’s miserable 2016 performance should factor into our evaluations. ZIPS and Steamer certainly weren’t very high on him, projecting an 83 wRC+ that suggested the Phillies were right to move him to a fourth outfielder role. A 26-year-old with that kind of offense is not a guy you need to make room for, even on a rebuilding team.

But ZIPS and Steamer didn’t know that Altherr might have been playing hurt last year, and as Jeff noted, his 2016 batted ball profile bears little resemblance to the one he put up in 2015 as rookie. If the wrist was a lingering problem, perhaps a healthy version of Altherr shouldn’t have such a pessimistic forecast based mostly on his total lack of power last year, especially after he showed some legitimate thump in Spring Training.

So that’s the back story. In Spring Training, Jeff found Altherr interesting, and thought maybe there was more power there than the projections thought. Fast forward five weeks, and Alther has made Jeff look like a genius.

After launching a pair of home runs yesterday, Altherr now has 15 extra base hits, five more than he had all of last season. Among players with 80+ plate appearances, he ranks fifth in the majors in ISO, and his 202 wRC+ ties him with Freddie Freeman for sixth best in baseball. Or, if you want a fun comparison, here’s his slash line compared with some other guy who we’ve been writing about occasionally around here.

Thames has played everyday, so he has 54 more plate appearances than Altherr does, plus he has the KBO dominance, so don’t take this comparison to mean that Altherr should now be viewed as an elite hitter. But in a little under a month’s worth of playing time, Altherr has effectively matched the production of one of the biggest stories in baseball this year.

So, yeah, Aaron Altherr is interesting, and he’s currently looking a lot more like the 2015 version that made a splash in Philadelphia rather than the guy who played himself out of a job last year. As Jeff noted, his groundball rate spiked last year, but that has corrected itself in 2017, as his GB% is back to 42%, down from the 51% mark he put up last year. And his average launch angle over the last three years (11.6, then 5.6, and now 10.0) mostly confirms Jeff’s suggestion that his swing was off last year.

And speaking of swings, Altherr hasn’t gone all Yonder Alonso on his approach, but he is something of a minor “swing-change” guy. Here’s Pete Mackinin on his changes, in a piece written by David Laurila in March.

A guy who jumps out to me is Aaron Altherr. He’s adjusted his setup and his swing path. He’s gone from a long swing to a shorter swing, and he’s getting good results because of it. [Hitting coach] Matt Stairs changed him. You have to give Aaron credit, too. A lot of guys aren’t really receptive to making a change from how they’ve swung the bat their whole life. He was willing to do it, so I tip my hat to Aaron.

“The key is to go directly to the ball from your launch position. Instead of A to B to C, what you’re looking for is A to C. [Altherr] has his bat on his shoulder now. He had been starting with his hands up high, and it looked uncomfortable. I always felt his swing looked a little too long. He made the correction.

Jeff noticed the hand position change in his post, so there is some mechanical explanation for Altherr hitting the crap out of the ball this year after slapping it around last year. And while anyone running a 202 wRC+ has almost certainly gotten at least a little lucky, Altherr is definitely making better contact than he did last year; his average exit velocity is up from 88 to 91 mph, and more importantly, from 93 to 98 mph on balls in the air. His airball exit velocity puts him in the same area as Ryan Braun, Manny Machado, Cody Bellinger, Yasmany Tomas, Justin Upton, and Matt Holliday.

So, while he’s not a true talent .392 ISO guy, it seems pretty likely that there’s legitimate power here. And as Jeff noted back in March, if he has legitimate power, then he’s a good player, because everything else is already in place. Altherr already showed a decent idea of the strike zone, but he’s also running a career low 22% O-Swing% this year, and his overall swing rates show a relatively patient hitter who isn’t afraid to work counts. His contact rates have hovered around 75%, a little bit below league average, but his in-zone contact rates have been either around or above league average, and this year, is up at 87%.

His swing-and-miss problem is almost entirely related to chasing pitches out of the zone, which is something that he’s doing less this year than he has previously. If you have to have a contact problem, it’s much better to have low contact rates on pitches that you can choose to take than on pitches you have to swing at. Altherr isn’t Joey Gallo or Byron Buxton, where he’s swinging through pitches in the zone, and that he can hit for real power while making above average contact on pitches in the zone is certainly encouraging.

So we have a hitter who will draw some walks, makes enough contact, and has some power. That’s a nice offensive base to build from, and he’s not exactly slow either. Toss in that he looks like he could have some real defensive value in left field, with the ability to cover center occasionally if need be, and the package starts to look pretty similar to the skillset that made Mitch Haniger a popular guy on FanGraphs over the winter.

Like Haniger, Altherr is a little older, and as a guy who might profile as a good-not-great hitter in a corner outfield spot, he probably won’t become an accepted star. But an above-average hitter who can also play defense is a very nice piece, and there’s George Springer upside to this skillset. Springer, of course, has been producing in the big leagues for four years now, and Altherr isn’t even on three good months as a Major Leaguer yet, so there’s a lot of risk here. As the league adjusts, he might not adjust back, and he very well may join a very long list of guys who were good for 100 at-bats and then got exposed.

But as a good athlete who shows some control of the strike zone, all Altherr really needed was enough power to scare pitchers into not pounding the zone in order to be a big league regular. It’s not easy to fake the kind of power Altherr is showing right now, and while there’s inevitable regression coming, he looks like he might have enough power to let everything else play.

While the Phillies pitching staff got most of the hype last year, their organization has done a pretty nifty job of turning a cast of fringe prospects into the start of a pretty interesting core group of hitters. Between Cesar Hernandez, Odubel Herrera, and now Altherr, the team could now have three solid young players who add value on both sides of the ball. There’s still holes to be filled, but right now, Altherr looks like he’s taking one of the corner outfield jobs and running away with it.

Last week, Sam Miller wrote an excellent piece for ESPN on the rise of the height-challenged slugger.

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How does one define stardom in baseball? How does one identify a star? Well, firstly, it probably doesn’t require knowing a guy’s WAR. It’s more intuitive than that. You can feel your lips curling into a grin when a certain player does something exceptional. When that happens again and again, that’s when you know: there’s something special about that one guy. He can do it all, and he does it more often than everyone else. What’s a star? A star is someone capable of evoking an almost childlike sense of joy and wonder.

Yoenis Cespedes has sentimental value for Mets fans beyond his capacity to do just that. It was Cespedes who strode in and muscled the Mets to the World Series a couple years ago. He may not serve as a daily one-man wrecking crew with the sort of frequency that he did during the 2015 stretch drive, but he’s still pretty damn good, and pretty damn watchable to boot. He’s a near-ideal mixture of talent and swagger, a man with monstrous power and a magnetic presence off the field. It was that monstrous power, and the Phillies, which helped him launch three home runs last night.

Homer #1

Look, I don’t know whether we’ll ever be able to say for sure if Clay Buchholz is (was?) good. His career has been a roller coaster without safety harnesses. There have been years where he’s looked brilliant, and there have been years where he’s looked disastrous. Both varieties of seasons are prone to being curtailed by injuries. And, speaking of which, Buchholz did wind up leaving last night’s game with the dreaded “right forearm tightness,” so he may not have been at his best when Cespedes did this to him.

Now, yes, the Phillies do indeed play in a bandbox. But hitting a ball out to dead center is impressive no matter where you’re playing, and Cespedes cleared the wall with room to spare. It’s easy to do that when you’re built like Cespedes and you’ve just been thrown a big-league meatball, but you’ve still got to actually hit the thing. Cespedes, true to form, did in fact hit the thing. Thus began a game that would see the Mets score 14 runs and hit seven bombs in total. It seems Mets hitters really do trust the process.

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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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It feels like things with the Phillies should be a little more settled than they are. That could just be my own impatience, but even on the pitching side, we have to see if Aaron Nola and Vince Velasquez can stay healthy. And as for the young position players, Odubel Herrera might be the lone sure thing, and he’s bizarre. Maikel Franco still needs to prove that he’s valuable. J.P. Crawford needs to step up his own game. There’s been progress, but the actual core here is still being built.

Thinking about that led me to think about Aaron Altherr. Wednesday’s spring-training highlights also led me to think about Aaron Altherr.

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My most recent Sunday Notes column contained a snippet from Pete Mackanin, those quotes coming from a longer conversation I had with the Philadelphia skipper on Saturday. Much of it is being shared here.

We sat down primarily to talk about this spring’s notable performers. Among them are a pair of veteran non-roster invitees trying to win a roster spot on a youthful club. Offseason signee Daniel Nava is slashing .361/.465/.444, while Brock Stassi, 27 years old and in the system since 2011, is slashing .320/.370/.680 with five home runs.

Outside of asking specifically about Nava and young third baseman Maikel Franco, I mostly let Mackanin lead the conversation. He brought up several of his players, with time constraints limiting his opportunity to cover even more.

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Mackanin on the pitchers: “Our starters have been pitching well. Jerad Eickhoff is right where he should be. Aaron Nola has increased his velocity, and I’m thrilled about that. He’s touched 93, and even 94 once, which we’d never seen. If he can retain that throughout the season, that’s going to be a plus for him. Plus, he’s learned a changeup and he’s thrown that very effectively, as has Eickhoff. They’ve added that to their repertoire, which can only enhance their performance. We haven’t seen Clay Buchholz enough yet, and I think he’s a little sick again today.

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TAMPA, Fla. – Most pitchers try to avoid having Tommy John surgery at all. Sean Burnett wanted it a second time.

The former Pirates first-round pick went to see Dr. James Andrews again after he dealt with elbow pain early in 2013, nearly 10 years after the first surgery on his left elbow. Said Burnett to Ryan Lawrence of PhillyVoice:

“They went in to fix the flexor tendon and Dr. Andrews said it was the ligament. It wasn’t torn, but it was completely stretched out and looked pretty beat up. It was 10-years old (from the first surgery). He wasn’t going fix it, hoping that the surgery for the flexor issue would do something, but the first day I threw after four months I knew it was still a problem.”

Burnett knew his left UCL wasn’t right so he did something you hear few, if any, pitchers attempting to accomplish: he tried to tear it. He went back to the Legacy Golf Club room at which he was staying while rehabbing in Tempe, Arizona, stacked pillows up against his bed’s headboard, and started throwing baseballs with as much violence and velocity as he could into them. I asked Burnett about this bizarre strategy earlier this week.

“I needed to pop it until he would fix it, so I tried to pop it in the hotel room each night,” Burnett said. “It didn’t work but maybe it sped up the process a little bit.”

Did he disturb any neighbors?

“I don’t throw hard enough,” Burnett said. “I had enough pillows up there.”

In May of 2013, Burnett “finally” felt his ligament “pop” in an outing against Seattle.

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Mark Appel is one of the great unknowns this spring. He remains something of an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, and now shrouded in post-surgery mystery.

I will begin with a brief history of a player who has seen his prospect luster diminished as dramatically as few pitchers in recent memory.

Recall that the former Stanford University ace was drafted twice in the first round. In 2012, under the new restrictions on amateur signing bonuses, the Pirates weren’t willing to forfeit a future draft pick for exceeding their pool limit. Appel’s signing demands were not met, and he returned to Stanford.

He returned for his senior year, which seemed like a risky decision given that injury or poor performance could diminish his stock. But Appel won the bet on himself as he was drafted No. 1 overall in 2013, by Houston, one spot ahead of Kris Bryant. While Appel over Bryant looks like Bowie-over-Jordan-like decision at the moment, Appel had an impressive resume coming out of school, including a mid-90s fastball and wipeout slider that helped him set the program’s strikeout record with this very pitch against UCLA nearly four years ago:

But few have fallen further than Appel in the last four years.

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