Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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We’ve gotten to see many sides of Nolan Arenado over the past two years. The maker of ridiculous defensive plays. The hitter of a multitude of home runs. The effusive trotter of the base paths. With regard to his plate discipline, however, Arenado hasn’t changed much since he got to the majors. To call him a “free swinger” doesn’t really do him justice: between 2014 and -15, Arenado ranked 10th in overall swing percentage (53.5%) and eighth in swing percentage at pitches outside of the strike zone (38.7%). As a result, he hasn’t walked much since he was called up in 2014 — at just over half the league average the past two years — which, hey, is something you might do too if you had the talent and skill to hit 40-plus home runs in the major leagues. In 2015, he saw the 17th-fewest pitches per plate appearance out of qualified hitters. Arenado hasn’t really waited around, is the point. He’s been aggressive in and out of the zone, and the trade-off has been fewer free passes. The reward was ten first-pitch home runs last season.

Swinging as much as Arenado has in the past two years tends to require other skills to offset/complement that tendency, like above-average contact rates, great power, or speed on the base paths. An illustration: of the ten leaders in overall swing percentage from 2015, five had below-average contact rates:

• Marlon Byrd (100 wRC+)
• Adam Jones (109)
• Avisail Garcia (83)
• Starling Marte (117)
• Ryan Howard (92)

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Trevor Story hit another homer last night, his league-leading eighth home run of the season. That’s eight home runs in just 13 games, totaling 59 plate appearances. He also hit a double, giving him 12 extra base hits on the year; Josh Donaldson is the only other player in the majors in double-digits, and he has 10. At this point, it’s pretty clear that, while still a player with holes in his swing, Trevor Story hits the ball really hard when he does make contact.

Last night’s home run, for instance, was hit at 108 mph. It was the eighth ball he’s hit this year that left the bat with an exit velocity north of 105. For reference, here is the full list of the 13 players that already have eight or more balls hit at 105+.

Most 105+ Exit Velocities

Player	Results	Total Pitches
Carlos Gonzalez	15	215
Domingo Santana	13	230
Mark Trumbo	12	178
Manny Machado	11	175
Carlos Correa	10	189
Gregory Polanco	9	223
Josh Donaldson	9	248
Trevor Story	8	245
Giancarlo Stanton	8	219
J.D. Martinez	8	169
Bryce Harper	8	186
Danny Valencia	8	160
Jonathan Schoop	8	147

SOURCE: BaseballSavant.MLB.com

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The Orioles are 5-0, Ross Stripling almost threw a no-hitter in his Major League debut, and Eugenio Suarez apparently doesn’t make outs anymore, but those were all just footnotes of the first week of the 2016 season. There’s only one big story in MLB right now, and no, that’s not another easy setup for a pun based on Trevor Story’s last name. Okay, maybe it is. They’re so easy!

But despite Trevor’s made-for-headline-writers last name, it’s his performance that keeps him in the news. After finally failing to hit a home run on Saturday, the first time in five big league games that he didn’t go yard, Story launched another one last night, bringing his season total to seven. No one else has more than four. 16 teams have fewer home runs than Trevor Story right now. He has as many long balls as the Mets, Marlins, Pirates, and Angels combined.

So, yeah, welcome to the big leagues, kid. It’s not often that rookie shortstops put on this type of show, and no player of any type has ever hit for this kind of power in their first week in the Major Leagues.

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Trevor Story did something that has never happened in major-league history before: he homered in first three games of his career. People are generally pretty excited about that, and rightly so. Jeff detailed that excitement the other day, and backed it up with a couple of very good points about Story’s plate coverage and adaptability. It may very well be that we are watching the genesis of the next great Rockies shortstop. (Or, if you prefer, the second great Rockies shortstop.) But before we get carried away, I wanted to offer a few counterpoints.

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It took only three games for us to be able to refer to Trevor Story as a rookie sensation. For the most part, this is because Story is currently out-homering most of the teams in major-league baseball. He got Zack Greinke twice on opening day, and that’s remarkable enough, but Story homered again in each of the following two contests, so now here we are, with Story owning four dingers before the overwhelming majority of rookie players are even called up so as to preserve that extra year of control. Hot start. We’re good at noticing hot starts.

After the hot start will come a cooler period. In time, when we have more information, Story will resemble some kind of familiar shortstop, and we’ll have a better idea of how he’s going to work out. In the long run, I mean. The reality is we don’t know that much more now than we did a week ago. This is the hazard of trying to talk about anything so early in a season, and so early in a career. But the word “irresponsibly” is right in that headline. I think we can allow ourselves to have some fun. What’s the downside? So let’s discuss just a few notable observations. Exactly what they mean, I’ll leave to time to settle.

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I can’t tell you whether Trevor Story is going to be a good major-league ballplayer. I can tell you with a high degree of certainty he’s going to be some kind of major-league ballplayer, but as for how he fares, well, that’s more unknown. He has the skills to make All-Star Games, but the same could be said of plenty of non-All-Stars, and this’ll be a big year for Story’s career. He might build upon last year’s gains, and become a part of a core. Alternatively, he wouldn’t be the first young player to stagnate or regress.

Story has become a something on account of his spring, and on account of what’s going on with Jose Reyes. Reyes might never play for the Rockies again, so there’s a vacancy at short, and Story might seize it. Some want for Story to be named the opening-day starter, and there are the usual arguments in favor of waiting at least a couple weeks. No matter — by May or June, it seems like Story is going to be the guy. I can’t tell you if he’s going to be productive. I can tell you only how he’s interesting.

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Any opportunity to talk about Coors Field is a good opportunity, and, hey, wouldn’t you know it, but the Rockies’ home ballpark is undergoing some alterations that’ll have an effect on the gameplay. I’ve only just heard about them, but they’re relatively uncomplicated, and they should be in place in time for the start of the regular season. Baseball’s best argument against the idea that high-scoring baseball is exciting baseball is about to feature some higher fences.

I’m kind of a dork about park effects, and that’s why I find Coors so fascinating in the first place. They’re always trying to figure out if it’s possible to play some sort of normal baseball at altitude, and now we can get into the latest thought, as provided by Nick Groke. The Rockies are working to reduce the number of cheap dingers. It won’t not work. That much we can already say.

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Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?

This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”

That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.

But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.

Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!

Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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