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

Hoy Jun Park, SS, New York AL (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: HM  Top 100: NR
Line: 1-for-3, HR, 2 BB

Notes
Park is repeating the Carolina League and is exhibiting early indicators of improvement. He’s already hit more home runs than he had all last year (he has three), and he’s cut his strikeout rate in half while maintaining his impressive, career-long 13% walk rate. While unlikely to sustain his current .350/.450/.530 pace, Park’s early success is at least a sign that he could be ready for High-A this year, at which level Jorge Mateo is already splitting time between shortstop and center field and Kyle Holder, who’s old for the level, is hitting .083. Park is a 50 runner with polished defensive actions at shortstop and enough arm to play there. He projects in a utility role.

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If you’re in the Washington D.C. metro area and aren’t otherwise occupied on Monday night, join me and a bunch of local scribes at the Howard Theatre for Pitch Talks DC.

We’ll spend a few hours talking Nationals baseball and baseball in general, and it should be a good time. You can purchase tickets for just $20, or $15 if you use the promo code “NATS”. Going to be tough to find a better deal in town.

Additionally, Kevin has five pairs of tickets he’s going to give away to FanGraphs readers, so if you’d like to attend but don’t have $15 to spare, you can fill out this form and hope to land a pair of complimentary tickets to the show.

I’m excited to see you all there, and look forward to hanging out on Monday night.

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

Yusniel Diaz, OF, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 9  Top 100: NR
Line: 3-for-4, 3B, BB, 2 R, SB

Notes
Baseball Prospectus’ Wilson Karaman was the first to notice that Diaz now has a leg kick instead of his 2016 Sammy Sosa variation. He struggled with contact at times last year and is repeating the Cal League, but he’s hitting .293 so far this season and will play all of this season at age 20. He’s hitting the ball on the ground more often this year and isn’t hitting for power right now.

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Position: Chicago Cubs Baseball Systems Web Developer

Location: Chicago

Description:
This role will primarily focus on the development and maintenance of the Cubs internal baseball information system, including creating web interfaces and web tools for the user interface; building ETL (exact, transform and load) processes; maintaining back-end databases; and troubleshooting data sources issues as needed. The Chicago Cubs are an Equal Opportunity Employer.

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If you sort the wRC+ leaderboard, you find Mike Trout sandwiched in between Eugenio Suarez and Steven Souza Jr. That’s the bad way to spin it. The good way to spin it is that Trout is in sixth with a wRC+ of 210, and that would also easily be the best mark of his career. I don’t have any good reason to write this right now, except that it’s Mike Trout, so, hey, why not? Does Trout have anything going on underneath the surface?

As always, sure. Here’s a home run from last Friday:

As Daren Willman pointed out on Twitter, that’s the most-outside pitch Trout has ever taken deep. This is a plot of his career home runs:

This is the location of that very pitch:

There’s more in here. One thing you might notice is that that’s a first-pitch home run. Trout has gradually been getting more aggressive. He used to swing at the first pitch about 10% of the time. Last year, he jumped to 17%, and so far this year, he’s at 26%. Just in terms of overall swing rate, Trout right now is at 45%, which would be a career high, easily. He has his highest-ever swing rate at would-be strikes, and his chase rate is the highest it’s been since he first came up in 2011. Trout isn’t an aggressive hitter, but he’s looking like a more aggressive hitter, by Mike Trout standards. Something to watch over the coming weeks and months.

Continuing on, that pitch there also would’ve been a ball. Trout swung, and hit it, and hit it hard. This is presumably just a weird statistical fluke, but Trout’s in-zone contact rate is just under 83%, and his out-of-zone contact rate is just over 81%. The two rates are separated by about one percentage point. His career separation is 18 percentage points. Trout’s been hitting a lot of would-be balls. That doesn’t seem good, but, again, 210 wRC+. Nothing to complain about here. Just an observation.

And, at last, that first-pitch homer went to right-center field. Trout’s been less about pulling the ball in 2017. I calculated the difference between pull rate and opposite-field rate. Last season, among qualified hitters, Trout ranked in the 44th percentile. This season, he ranks in the 14th percentile. It’s quite exaggerated when you look at Trout’s ground balls, alone — in terms of pulling grounders, last year, Trout ranked in the 91st percentile. So far this year, he ranks in the 7th percentile. The 7th! Pulled ground balls are basically death. Trout hasn’t been pulling so many of them, and he’s still ultra-dangerous when the ball is batted back. His approach for the first few weeks has focused on using the whole field, and although everything is always cyclical, this is at the very least a helpful reminder that Mike Trout can be successful in countless different ways.

So, early Trout: more aggressive, with more contact out of the zone, and more balls hit the other way. His numbers are fantastic. That last part — that’s the part that doesn’t change.

Statcast! Who doesn’t love playing with Statcast? Baseball Savant makes it all possible, so let’s take a quick look at a 2017 vs. 2016 comparison. I looked at every hitter with at least 30 batted balls in each of the last two seasons. Here’s a plot of all of their changes in average exit velocity and average launch angle. One data point is highlighted.

The point I highlighted belongs to Taylor Motter. There’s a pretty great chance you’ve never even heard of Taylor Motter. He was a quiet acquisition, and he might not even be playing in the majors were it not for health issues with Shawn O’Malley and Jean Segura. But there’s Motter, a utility type with a 179 wRC+. Last season, in exit velocity, he ranked in the 25th percentile, by names like Eduardo Escobar and Chris Stewart. So far this season, he ranks in the 97th percentile. In fact, here’s the whole top 10!

1. Miguel Sano
2. Joey Gallo
3. Miguel Cabrera
4. Nick Castellanos
5. Khris Davis
6. Freddie Freeman
7. Taylor Motter
8. Yandy Diaz
9. Manny Machado
10. Aaron Judge

Very strong, dangerous hitters. Also Yandy Diaz and Taylor Motter. Diaz is interesting, but he’s also hit a bunch of grounders. Motter’s been elevating, and when you look at that plot, his launch angle is up four degrees, and his exit velocity is up nine ticks. Sano has the next-biggest exit-velocity gain, at +6.7. Then it’s Castellanos, at +5.3. No one else has reached +4. Obviously, the samples are small, too small to arrive at certain conclusions, but Motter might’ve seen this as his best shot at building a career. Here he is, and with the Mariners having dropped Leonys Martin yesterday, Motter could stick around, playing all over semi-regularly.

If you watch Taylor Motter go deep, he looks like a home-run hitter. Like, everything about this seems perfectly natural.

Yet here’s the real trick. What’s driving Motter’s early success? Why couldn’t he do this in a brief stint last season? Motter is trying to hit literally everything to left field. He’s trying to make the most of the bat speed he has.

Nobody has a higher pull rate than Motter’s 72%. Only Trevor Plouffe has a lower opposite-field rate than Motter’s 5%. Motter’s been hunting pitches he can elevate and pull, and he’s gotten enough of them to accomplish what he’s accomplished. If you’re curious, since 2002, the highest single-season pull rate for a qualified hitter has been 64%, by 2003 Tony Batista. If you drop the minimum to 250 plate appearances, then the highest pull rate is 66%, by 2002 Greg Vaughn. Pull hitters like Vaughn, Batista, Marcus Thames, and Gary Sheffield don’t really work for me as potential Motter comps.

No, I think there’s an obvious one, here. There’s a decent chance Motter will be exposed over a greater period of time. It might even be a good chance. Motter, after all, struggled just last season. But if he holds to this approach, and if it works for him, you could see him as someone in the Brian Dozier mold. Dozier became a quality everyday player when he started to pull the ball aggressively in the air. Pitchers haven’t been able to solve him yet, after a handful of years. Given a good-enough eye and quick-enough hands, a hitter can survive like this, essentially eliminating half of the field. It’s no way to be *great*, but one can be good. Or even just useful.

Taylor Motter isn’t Brian Dozier, officially. But he’s channeled Dozier in getting to this point, where he’s currently the most-searched player on FanGraphs.com. Sometimes baseball makes me write the weirdest damn sentences.

For the 2017 season, Mitchel Lichtman has made some improvements to the UZR methodology!

– UZR now uses hit timer data (hang time) rather than hit type designations, which is an improvement on the methodology and thus the results.

– The methodology has changed a little that allows UZR to account for some of the noise associated with imperfect data. The net result of this change is that extreme UZR’s, which were likely caused by, to some extent at least, noise in the data, rather than extreme performance, will be slightly ‘dampened.’ We think that these new values, while very close to the old ones in most cases, more accurately reflect the actual performance of the players in question.

These changes in UZR are currently active for 2017, and will also be rolled out for 2012 – 2016 data in the near future.

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

Jorge Alfaro, C, Philadelphia (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 3  Top 100: 32
Line: 3-for-4, HR

Notes
Alfaro’s home run came on a slider on the outer half that he hit the opposite way. It’s about 370 feet to right center at Coca Cola Park and there’s a 16-foot wall you need to clear if you hit one out that way. Alfaro nearly hit the giant Martin Guitar replica on the concourse. He doesn’t walk, but the power is a separator, and he’s now up to .357/.379/.554 this year. Phillies starter Cameron Rupp is hitting .186.

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Jeff Sullivan had a variation of this question for me. I found it intriguing enough to take a quick look. This chart is limited to games where the game was tied entering any half inning.

Obviously, the first two half-innings, the game is scoreless entering those half innings. And we don’t see much separation until we get to the start of the 11th half inning (i.e, top of the 6th). From that point onwards, the chance of home team winning increases in a scoreless game.

Why would this be? Almost certainly selection bias. Those games feature a low run environment, either because pitcher parks are disproportionately represented, or great pitchers are disproportionately represented.

Basically, in a small-ball setting, the chance of winning increases for the home team of a tied game.

But, is that ALL it could be? Could maybe managers and players play differently knowing the game is scoreless? Someone else can take it from here.

I’m an idiot, and looked up where the All-Star Game was last year. The All-Star Game this year is in Miami. So, yes, corrections below.

The story of the first few weeks of this season has almost certainly been the arrival of Eric Thames, who has returned from Korea to look like one of the game’s best power hitters. While Thames won’t keep hitting like Babe Ruth in his prime, unless there’s some hidden exploitable flaw that no one has found yet, he’s probably going to be a pretty decent hitter for the Brewers for the next few months.

And if he does keep hitting even near what the projections think he’ll be going forward, it’s going to be nearly impossible to fill out the first base portion of the National League All-Star ballot. Thames has simply made the most crowded position in baseball even more so.

Just for fun, let’s look at the top 15 hitters by our rest-of-season wOBA projections from the combined ZIPS/Steamer forecasts. I’ll highlight the NL first baseman in this table.

By our forecasts, five of the 13 best hitters in baseball over the remainder of the season play first base in the National League. That doesn’t even account for what has already happened, with Thames and Freeman putting themselves in very strong positions to have All-Star numbers by the break. And even with the DH now being used in every All-Star Game, the reality is that there’s really only room to carry four first baseman on the roster.

And we haven’t even mentioned that, of these five players, there are probably only going to be three spots available, because Wil Myers is very likely to be the Padres best representative, and as their best player, is nearly guaranteed a spot in the game given that the contest is in his home park. If we assume Myers is going to get one spot, that leaves three chances for some combination of Freeman, Thames, Votto, Rizzo, and Goldschmidt. Sorry Brandon Belt, but we’re going to pretend you don’t exist, and I hope you don’t have any All-Star incentives in your contract.

Rizzo is probably the most likely bet to win the fan’s vote as the starter, given the Cubs current popularity and the fact that their fans elected their entire starting infield last year. Freeman seems like something close to a lock, given his start and the likelihood that the Braves won’t have a lot of other compelling options to pick from. So that leaves Thames, Votto, and Goldschmidt probably fighting over one spot.

Yeah. All-Star rosters aren’t a thing that really matter, but I can’t remember a time where some obviously great players were effectively guaranteed of being shut out of the midsummer classic.