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

Durin O’Linger, RHP, Boston
Level: Short Season Age: 23   Org Rank: NR   Top 100: NR
Line: 4 IP, 3 H, 2 BB, 1 R, 6 K

Notes
O’Linger isn’t exactly a prospect — his fastball sits in the 86-88 range and he’ll flash an average changeup — but of note due to his recent, historic postseason run at Davidson during which the senior threw 502 pitches over six appearances in a 16-day span. Rest was not a priority for O’Linger, who was so sure he had no future in pro baseball that he was set to attend the University of Florida’s pharmacy school in the fall. The 23-year-old is pitching with house money in the New York-Penn League right now.

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The Effectively Wild podcast gets a good number of emails every day, and a recent one was sent along by Aidan Jackson-Evans. He was asking about a trend that he noticed, and wrote about several days ago. I’d like to point you to his post, at High Heat Stats. You should read it, because this thing is quickly just building off that. I wouldn’t have noticed this trend if not for the email, and he’s already done a lot of the work.

I’ll get to the heart of the matter. At FanGraphs, we have splits going back to 2002. That’s not very long, but it’s long enough for research purposes. In this plot, you simply see league wOBA by leadoff hitters, and overall league wOBA. Nothing complicated, at least if we’re all to the point where we no longer think of wOBA as being complicated.

Last year, leadoff hitters were better than average. The same was true the year before that, and the year before that. And so on. Nothing earth-shattering. This year, the numbers have been exactly equal. Here’s where things get cooler. In here, leadoff-hitter wOBAs, split by whether it’s the first plate appearance of the game, or a subsequent plate appearance.

Allow me to translate that! Between 2002 – 2015, leadoff hitters averaged a .323 wOBA in their first plate appearances. Over all the rest of their plate appearances, they averaged a .325 wOBA. Essentially the same. Nothing weird. But since the start of last season, leadoff hitters have averaged a .343 wOBA in their first plate appearances. Over all the rest of their plate appearances, they’ve averaged a .323 wOBA. Leadoff hitters, in other words, have started performing a lot better in the top and bottom of the first inning. This is what Jackson-Evans found.

So what’s going on? As with everything in baseball, the answer is presumably complex. Yet, using data from Baseball Savant, I bet I can simplify. Firstly, let’s look at the rate of pitches thrown within the Gameday strike zone. Here you see two rates: the league overall rate, and the rate for first plate appearances.

The first batter of the game sees more strikes. But this might not seem very dramatic. It’s not! This is dramatic. Here’s the same as above, but showing fastball rates instead:

Over the past decade, over all plate appearances, hitters have seen an average of about 57% fastballs. However, leadoff hitters in the first inning have seen an average of about 73% fastballs. The margin so far this season is 72% to 55%. It’s particularly extreme if you look at the first pitch of the first plate appearance, where pitchers routinely throw fastballs more than nine-tenths of the time. Pitchers have historically been aggressive to start off, trying to get into the flow of things. If the results are any indication, leadoff hitters have started to ambush more often. That is, instead of letting pitchers get away with free strikes, those leadoff hitters in the first inning are going up more prepared to take a swing or two. It’s as if the hitters are getting ready before the pitchers are.

It’s weird to see it happen so suddenly, but this is where we are after thousands upon thousands of plate appearances. It’ll be interesting to see if pitchers try to adjust by folding in more secondary stuff at the beginning. It’s the obvious apparent correction, but it might not make them feel very comfortable. Maybe they want or need to settle in with a few early fastballs. It’s something for all of us to try to monitor, I suppose. Kudos to Jackson-Evans for identifying this curiosity.

The Tampa Bay Rays are 40-38. Now, that isn’t fantastically good. The Rays are not fantastically good. But that record is good enough to sit just 2.5 games back in the American League East. That record is also good enough to sit just one single game back in the AL wild-card hunt. The Rays right now are playing through the absence of Kevin Kiermaier, but they’re very much competitive, and very much capable of winning another 45 or so times. So the Rays are interested in getting better today.

Enter Adeiny Hechavarria! Rumors started to swirl before the weekend that the Marlins wanted to ship Hechavarria to somebody else. It will not surprise you that the motivating factor here was shedding the salary. The Rays are picking up the salary, and also the player.

Deal is done: Hechavarria to Rays for two minor-leaguers, outfielder Braxton Lee and RHP Ethan Clark.

— clarkspencer (@clarkspencer) June 26, 2017

Braxton Lee is a talented baseball player, and I have nothing against him. Nor do I have anything against Ethan Clark, another talented baseball player. But the people who are supposed to know these things don’t think either one of those players will develop into an impact big-leaguer. We’ll see. Both these teams understand this is mostly a salary dump. The Marlins could get a lucky break, but for now, Hechavarria is the guy to talk about.

Let’s do that. He’s 28, and coming off a strained oblique. Although he’s been around for years, his career WAR is 1.7. If you know anything about Hechavarria, and you’re also a FanGraphs reader, you know the numbers have seldom liked him. But! Something did turn around for him a few seasons back. The Marlins always talked up Hechavarria’s raw defensive talent. In 2015, that talent turned into results. The performance kept up into 2016. Since the start of the 2015 season, 37 shortstops have played the position for at least 1,000 innings. Hechavarria’s been the seventh-best defender by DRS, and the fifth-best defender by UZR. He’s become a plus glove, and that’s the major reason why the Rays had interest here in the first place.

Yet Hechavarria has a career wRC+ of 70. To make matters worse, between his last two full seasons, he dropped from 87 to 56. His WAR, therefore, dropped from 3.1 to 0.4. One of those is good! One of those is not good. You could easily interpret him as a declining asset.

Here’s where Hechavarria gets kind of interesting. I mean, the defensive stuff is already interesting, but here’s what makes him more interesting still. Even in 2015, Hechavarria didn’t qualify as a good hitter. Then, by his results, his numbers tanked. But Baseball Savant also now hosts an expected wOBA statistic, based on Statcast inputs. In 2015, Hechavarria topped his expected wOBA by 26 points, which was one of the bigger gaps in the majors. Then, in 2016, Hechavarria undershot his expected wOBA by 30 points, which was one of the bigger gaps in the majors in the other direction. According to Statcast, 2016 Hechavarria was better. According to hard-hit rate, 2016 Hechavarria was better. It’s his actual numbers that went in the toilet. That’s neat, even if we don’t know quite what to do with it.

It seems like Hechavarria’s results are misleading. It seems like he went from overachieving to underachieving, and the Rays might figure the bat has just enough life. We don’t know expected wOBA well enough to say for sure, but it’s something to take a chance on. And if Hechavarria can hit enough, the Rays know he’ll be their best defensive shortstop in a while. Certainly better than Matt Duffy, who’s still recovering from an operation. This’ll be good for the infield.

And, ideally, good for the team. Hechavarria will have to be better than an offensive black hole. There’s reason to believe that’s well within his reach.

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

Jacob Scavuzzo, OF, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Level: Double-A  Age: 23   Org Rank: HM   Top 100: NR
Line: 3-for-5, 3 HR
Notes
Scavuzzo has above-average raw power, but he often expands the zone; has a stubborn, pull-only approach to contact; and has long levers. That’s a potent swing-and-miss cocktail, but hitters with Scavuzzo’s body type sometimes put it together a bit later than their peers. He’s 23.

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

Pedro Gonzalez, CF, Colorado (Profile)
Level: Short Season  Age: 19   Org Rank: 7   Top 100: NR
Line: 4-for-5, 2B, BB, SB, CS
Notes
Gonzalez spent much of extended spring training in the Dominican Republic. Colorado doesn’t have an AZL team, so Gonzalez went directly from the DR to Grand Junction, his second year at that affiliate. Because of this, it has been hard for clubs, even those who place a heavier priority on complex-level scouting, to get eyes on Gonzalez. He remains physically projectable at a lean, broad-shoulder 6-foot-5, 190, and he’s a plus runner under way.

His defensive instincts draw mixed reviews, but he has the speed to stay there and try to polish his routes over time. If he fills out, slows down, and has to move to a corner it probably means he’s grown into enough power to profile there, at which point it will become imperative that he quell his desire to chase breaking balls off the plate.

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The Rockies presently sit atop the NL West, and they own the best record in the National League. Before the season started, the FanGraphs community identified the Rockies as the team the projections were most underrating, but then, on the other hand, the Rockies also fell victim to a number of early-season health problems. It’s been an outstanding two and a half months, in other words, and the Rockies’ playoff odds have soared to nearly 90%.

Plenty has already gone right, and these being the Rockies, they’ll forever be a source of certain intrigue. There’s no separating the Rockies from the reality that they play in baseball’s weirdest environment, and Travis just wrote on Monday about the Rockies learning to pitch with confidence at Coors Field. The adaptability of the pitching staff has been a major story early on, with so many young successes. But I’d like to quickly highlight something else. It’s something very simple! Here are the Rockies’ year-to-year franchise winning percentages at home:

The present Rockies are at .618, which would stand as their best mark since 2010. Now here’s the same plot, but for road games instead:

The present Rockies are at .658, which would very easily be their highest mark ever. Only once before have the Rockies won even half of their road games — 2009, when they went 41-40. They’re already 25-13. The Rockies have yet to play half of their games, and the samples get even smaller when you split them in two, so I don’t want to jump the gun or anything. But, quietly, a huge development here has been the Rockies playing well outside of Colorado. That’s been a problem of theirs forever.

Over the previous decade, the Rockies won 54% of their home games, ranking them 15th in baseball. Nice and average. Over the same span of time, the Rockies won a hair under 40% of their road games, ranking them 29th in baseball. No other team had a bigger such difference in rank, and no other team had a bigger such difference in winning percentage. The Rockies deal with twin phenomena, which are almost impossible to separate: they get a home-field advantage, and they also get a road-field disadvantage. Theories have abounded. I probably don’t need to go over them all.

Simply, the Rockies have been able to win at home. They’ve needed to do something about the other half of their games. There’s evidence, now, that something has organizationally clicked. It’s also too early to declare that — the Rockies have faced a softer road schedule. Their home opponents have an average winning percentage of .511, while their road opponents have an average winning percentage of .462. That’s a thing. That’s a partial explanation. But it’s not a *complete* explanation. The Rockies are showing a reduced home/road split, and it’s happening by the road numbers getting better, instead of the home numbers getting worse.

I don’t know when we’ll be able to say anything for sure. Park factors always take a while to stabilize, and the Rockies’ schedule will even out. It’s not like the Rockies are suddenly better when they aren’t at Coors Field. That wouldn’t make any sense. But right now, they’re running a hell of a reverse split. They’re literally the last team you’d expect to be doing that. If we’re going to talk about why the Rockies are where they are, this has to be a part of the conversation. It’s something out of the Rockies’ wildest dreams.

On this date a year ago, the Dodgers traded pitcher Zach Lee for non-pitcher Chris Taylor. Since then, Lee has been claimed off waivers, and he’s thrown eight big-league innings, with eight walks. Taylor, meanwhile, didn’t impress in the majors in 2016, but he made some offseason changes and currently ranks third among Dodgers position players in 2017 WAR, behind only Justin Turner and Corey Seager. Cody Bellinger has been very good, yes? He’s at 1.8 WAR, with a 144 wRC+. Taylor’s at 1.9 WAR, with a 140 wRC+. He’s appeared at second base, shortstop, third base, left field, and center field.

I’m not here to give Taylor an exhaustive look. I’m not going to do any video breakdowns. This is pure statistics. Let’s begin with a table featuring one statistic. For every hitter who’s batted at least 150 times this season, I calculated the difference between their in-zone swing rates and their out-of-zone swing rates. There have been more than 250 such hitters. A leaderboard:

That’s Chris Taylor in first place. That’s Chris Taylor in first place in a table that also has Joey Votto in it. Taylor, to this point, has been making many of the right swing decisions, being aggressive within the zone while laying off garbage outside of it. That’s not everything about being a good hitter, but you couldn’t ask for a better foundation. Taylor has made himself difficult to pitch to.

Now to expand. This is going to be another somewhat experimental table, a form of analysis I’ve done a few times before. I just finished writing an article for ESPN, in which I performed this same analysis for Cody Bellinger. I identified, for hitters, four core traits — discipline, contact, exit velocity, and launch angle. I gathered data for every hitter going back to 2015, when Statcast was introduced, and I looked for the closest comps to 2017 Chris Taylor. There were no extremely close comps. But among the comps that were there, one comp was far stronger, far closer than the others. The name and the stats:

For the new Chris Taylor, at the plate, easily the closest comp has been recent George Springer. They’re close up there in all four categories, and while Springer has shown the slightly better peak strength, Taylor has made more consistent contact. So, when you wonder how Taylor’s wRC+ might regress, you might decide to be strongly anchored to Springer’s 130. Perhaps that’s still too high, I don’t know, but Taylor has been showing legitimate offensive skills, and his defensive versatility is an obvious plus. Pitchers will have time to try to figure this out, but Taylor hasn’t given an inch.

Without question, Bellinger has come in handy for the Dodgers at just the right time. But Taylor, too, has been crucial to the Dodgers’ early success, and this is just another testament to the organization’s depth. Taylor always seemed like someone who could play a little bit. Now he’s resembling a critical component of the Astros’ organizational core.

Update: And, to pile on, earlier today, the Padres designated Zach Lee for assignment.

A lot of things have gone right for the Yankees this year. This is not one of those things.

Yankees announce Gleyber Torres needs Tommy John surgery on his left elbow

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) June 19, 2017

The Yankees top prospect was running a 144 wRC+ as a 20-year-old in Triple-A, and was being groomed to replace Chase Headley as the team’s third baseman (who has an 86 wRc+) in the not-too-distant future. He also would have provided depth at the middle infield spots, and given the team another dynamic young player for the stretch run.

The UCL isn’t as important for hitters as it is for pitchers, but even while this injury is to his non-throwing arm, this will still knock Torres out for the remainder of the 2017 season. The Yankees press release notes that he’s expected to be ready for the start of spring training next year.

With Torres out of the picture, the Yankees are probably going to have to turn to the trade market now if they want to upgrade over Headley for the second half. Which is particularly interesting, because the Red Sox might also be looking for a third baseman over the next six weeks, and with J.J. Hardy on the shelf, it’s possible the Orioles could look for a 3B, with Manny Machado shifting over to shortstop. That would leave three A.L. East teams potentially trying to outbid each other for the same crop of mediocre veteran options.

Regardless of what the Yankees do at third base, this is bad news for Torres, who was on the verge of being a big leaguer. Hopefully he recovers in full and this doesn’t have a detrimental effect on his career, which still looks quite promising.

Today, ESPN published something pretty remarkable; an in-depth look at what it is like for Latinos in the Major Leagues. They are calling this project the Béisbol Experience.

They interviewed over 50 players for the story, breaking down their comments into various categories, giving us a better look at who these people are as people. Given the language barriers that often exist between these players and many of their fans, this is a look into areas those of us who don’t speak Spanish often don’t see and regularly don’t understand.

A few of my favorite quotes from the series.

“I went almost two years without seeing my family. Sometimes I talked to [them] and they cried. You have to fight twice as hard — fight to succeed for you, for your family and fight mentally because you miss your family and you want them close. Sometimes it takes you out of the game.” — ADEINY HECHAVARRÍA

“I went down to a gas station to buy a phone card for calling my family. I didn’t know how to say ‘phone card.’ The lady asked me, ‘How can I help you?’ and I didn’t know what to say. It was so hard. I went to the gas station alone because I didn’t want anyone laughing at me. I waited until no one was left but myself and the cashier.” — JEURYS FAMILIA

“I remember once we were in the elevator at the All-Star Game and a woman was talking to Vladimir Guerrero in English. She said, ‘Hey, you don’t speak much English,’ and Vlad said to her, ‘I speak English with my bat.'” — ALBERT PUJOLS

“Respect [your opponents] so that they respect you. But passion should not be confused with a lack of respect.” — MIGUEL MONTERO

Really, the entire thing is worth your time. Go read it.