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

Enyel De Los Santos, RHP, San Diego (Profile)
Level: Double-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 24   Top 100: NR
Line: 7 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 8 K

Notes
The good-bodied De Los Santos, acquired from Seattle for Joaquin Benoit in November of 2015, missed bats with all three of his pitches last night, garnering swings and misses on his 92-95 mph fastball both within the strike zone and above it and with his fading changeup. De Los Santos also has a solid-average curveball that he can bend into the zone for cheap, early-count strikes the third time through the lineup, but he’s becoming more adept at burying it in the dirt when he’s ahead. He generally lives in the strike zone and is a good bet to start; the only knock I’ve heard from scouts is that the stuff plays down due to poor extension, which might explain the modest strikeout rate despite good reports on the stuff.

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Matt Stairs loves to teach hitting, and he has plenty of teaching to do. The 49-year-old former slugger is in his first season as Philadelphia’s hitting coach, and given the youthfulness of the Phillies lineup, he’s got his hands full. Raw talent dots the roster, but that’s essentially what it is. Finished products are in short supply.

Stairs isn’t heavy-handed with his approach — he wants his hitters to be themselves — but at the same time, he knows what does and doesn’t work. With 19 big-league seasons as a player under his belt, he understands the nuts and bolts of the craft as well as anyone. So while he’s being entrusted to mold and shape young Phillies, he’s not doing so in a cookie-cutter way. For Stairs, it’s all about doing what you do, but in a more efficient, and more productive, manner.

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Stairs on exit velocity and launch angle: “I think it’s mostly just different terminology now. Hitters have always thought about exit velocity, just not in those words. Our thought process was hitting the ball hard and getting the proper angle to the baseball.

“You’re not creating exit velocity by swinging harder. It’s about making solid contact. It’s about being short to the baseball with a quick, compact swing. We have guys like Tommy Joseph, and Cameron Rupp — their swings are so short that, at times, when the ball comes off their bat, it accelerates. You create bat speed and exit velocity by using your top hand and driving your bat through the zone.

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

Yordan Alvarez, DH/1B, Houston (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 19   Org Rank: HM   Top 100: NR
Line: 2-for-5, 2 HR

Notes
Alvarez is hitting a preposterous .413/.500/.693 as a 19-year-old in full-season ball. Even once you acknowledge that better hitters at lower levels are going to have especially high BABIPs because they’re hitting balls harder than the baseline player at that level, Alvarez’s current .553 mark is unsustainable. Nevertheless, reports on the ease of his power and picturesque swing are very strong. There’s some swing-and-miss risk here but also a potential middle-of-the-order bat.

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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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These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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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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