Yency Almonte is scheduled to take the mound for the Hartford Yard Goats this weekend. It will be the 22-year-old right-hander’s first appearance since May 3, when shoulder discomfort cut short his fifth start of the season.

Prior to being shelved, Almonte excelled. The No. 13 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system has a 1.37 ERA, and Eastern League opponents have hit .189 against his power mix. He was almost untouchable when I saw him live. On April 20, Almonte allowed just four baserunners, and fanned 10, over seven scoreless innings against Harrisburg.

When I caught up to him a few weeks later, the first thing I asked about was the velocity escalation I’d witnessed. Almonte had sat 91-92 in the early innings. By game’s end, he was consistently 95-96.

“I like to spot up and not overdo it early,” explained Almonte. “I know that once the game goes on, and I start getting warm — I start getting hot — I start getting it up there. This year, I’ve been anywhere from 91 to 99.”

Reigning in a tendency to overthrow has been a focus. According to Yard Goats pitching coach Dave Burba, the youngster has been guilty of trying to light up radar guns.

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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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The Rockies were this offseason’s popular dark horse. Not everybody agreed on that, naturally, but if they did, then the Rockies wouldn’t have been a very good dark-horse candidate. A team has to be rated low in order to be underrated, and there was plenty of chatter the Rockies could surprise and push for the wild card. The FanGraphs community determined the preseason projections were too low on the club, so coming in, there was a certain amount of hype. There was faith! Faith in the Colorado Rockies.

Among the things that have happened: Ian Desmond got hurt. Tom Murphy got hurt. Tony Wolters got hurt. Jon Gray got hurt. David Dahl got hurt. And Chad Bettis got sick. Over the course of the last few months, the Rockies roster has been beaten and battered. And it’s also managed to win 22 of 35 games. At this writing, it’s the Rockies who are on top of the NL West, and it’s the Rockies who have so substantially boosted their own chances of making the playoffs. For the first time in so many years, the Rockies could be delivering on their promise. There are two major reasons why they are where they are.

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Ryan McMahon is rebounding well. On the heels of a lackluster 2016 campaign, the Colorado Rockies prospect is slashing a loud .359/.413/.630 in his second go-round with the Hartford Yard Goats. And not only are balls screaming off his bat, he’s essentially halved his strikeout rate. McMahon has fanned just 17 times in 103 plate appearances.

Last year’s Double-A efforts — a .724 OPS and 161 Ks — were an introduction to adversity for the 2013 second-round pick. He came into the year with a history of raking, but he did anything but rake in his initial opportunity with the then-yard-less Goats.

Hand path was part of the problem.

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Trevor Story was one of the great surprises of 2016. He continues to be of interest early in 2017.

Story has always been a fly-ball hitter, which is an attractive trait for a player who calls Coors Field home. In his eight minor-league stops, Story hit more fly balls than ground balls six times. As a rookie last season, he posted a 0.62 GB/FB ratio and a 47.1 FB%.

This season?

Story has gone full Schimpf on us. He ranks second only to Schimpf in GB/FB ratio and second in GB/FB ratio (minimum 100 plate appearances) since batted-ball ratios have been recorded.

Story was already an extreme fly-ball hitter. Now he’s even more extreme — nearly the most extreme on record.

Story’s proclivity for fly balls doesn’t appear to be the result of fluky, early-season sample size. Consider: his average launch angle is 32 degrees, nearly double his 2016 average (16.7 degrees). A number of batted-ball metrics are near stabilization points. In the majors, Story ranks second only to Schimpf (33.1 degrees) in average launch angle. I haven’t seen any reports on Story’s apparent swing alterations or changes to philosophy early this season, but it appears as though he’s up to something.

We’ve written quite a bit about the uppercut philosophy this spring, and more and more MLB hitters appear to be buying in. The league’s average launch angle has inched up from 10.0 degrees in 2015, to 10.6 degrees in 2016, to 10.9 in 2017.

The question is, when does a hitter become too extreme in approach?

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A tough thing about analyzing pitching is that it’s a moving target. You can get a decent sense of what a pitcher is like right now, and then he can completely change his approach over the next month and become a different pitcher. There’s evidence of this in the data: a pitcher’s exit velocity becomes stable relatively quickly, but then that stat’s predictability doesn’t actually improve as the sample increases. In other words, you can see what the pitcher’s got now, but what about tomorrow? Ask us then.

This is all relevant to Tyler Chatwood. You might have thought you had an idea of who he was as a pitcher — great sinker, uses his four-seamer for whiffs, and doesn’t have great secondary stuff, so it’s all about the ground balls. That’s who he was! It isn’t who he is right now, though. I had to ask him about who he is right now when I had the chance.

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Take a look at Charlie Blackmon’s defensive charts and you’ll notice that he has a good side, one where he’s made a higher percentage of catches than the other. On the one hand, that seems strange: humans are largely symmetrical creatures. On the other, maybe it makes perfect sense: most people have dominant hands and eyes and move better in certain directions.

Nowhere is the latter point more painfully clear to me, personally, than on the basketball court. As much as I practice going to my left, I usually do something very silly when I attempt the feat in a game. If I get to the left and actually get to the hoop, my mechanics fall apart when I get there, and I end up doing a strange thing with my right hand that leads to cuss words more often than points.

So when I saw this map for Blackmon, I figured it was all about that first step. See those hits over his left shoulder that are colored blue? Those are relatively high-percentage catches that have fallen into play against him. Must not be stepping well in that direction, I figured.

But when I asked the outfielder about those hits and his first step, he laughed. First, he thanked me for highlighting his shortcomings. Then he said something surprising — “I prefer the ball to my left,” he said. “There’s something I don’t like about running towards a ball to my right.”

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I got asked the question in my chat this week. Dave also got asked it in his. What do you do to solve Byron Buxton’s problems at the plate? This is essentially the question. People want to know. The answer, to me, is you let him play. It seems that we get these questions each April about a phenom struggling in his first taste of a full major league season. So while I’m writing this piece with Buxton in mind and as the lead example, it is also sort of universal.
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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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In 2015, Chris Rusin made 22 starts for the Colorado Rockies in what was a lost season for the ballclub. They finished in last place for the third time in four seasons, and their attendance dropped to its lowest mark in eight seasons. The club possessed a promising cache of prospects. Regardless, one couldn’t be blamed for feeling pessimistic about the Rockies’ future.

Fast forward to today, and Rusin is still with the team. Instead of working in a starting capacity, though, he’s been moved to the bullpen. And rather than occupying a large role in Colorado’s rotation, he’s not even a sure thing to serve as the club’s sixth or seventh starter.

This isn’t a product of Rusin’s failings, however. He was actually pretty good last year, recording an 83 xFIP- and 76 ERA- in 84 innings of starting and relief work. Rather, the change in Rusin’s role is emblematic of a new development in the organizaion — namely, that the Rockies suddenly have a great deal of pitching depth, both in the rotation and the bullpen.

Let’s start with the most recent starting pitcher to make his major-league debut for the Rockies, Antonio Senzatela. After showing well in 2015 in his first trip through the California League, Senzatela had a very trying 2016 season. First, he missed time due to a shoulder injury. Then, his mother died from cancer back home in his native Venezuela. At the time, the Rockies used his shoulder injury as cover to let him go home and spend time with his family, which isn’t only an understandable but commendable move by the organization. But for those tasked with determining how Senzatela would stack up as a prospect heading into this season, it certainly created uncertainty, as any season-ending shoulder injury normally would. He’s still not very projectable, but he might have snuck on to the back end of Rockies’ team lists had people known why he really missed the latter portion of the season.

Fast forward to 2017, and Senzatela’s major-league debut was certainly promising. Despite hitting Keon Broxton in the face (Broxton fortunately seems to have come away from the HBP unharmed), he was otherwise brilliant on the day, striking out six batters through five scoreless innings. The result was a Game Score of 66 — and a Game Score v2 of 66 — which is pretty good for a Rockies pitcher making his major-league debut. Take a look:

Now, some of this is damning with faint praise. The Rockies haven’t had a ton of good starting pitchers, and even fewer who turned in good debuts. But it’s better than the alternative, which would have been getting rocked. Senzatela’s outing is tied for third in terms of Game Score, and by itself in sixth place according to Game Score V 2.0. Not too shabby.

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