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

Sean Newcomb, LHP, Atlanta (Profile)
Level: Triple-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 11  Top 100: HM
Line: 7 IP, 11 K, 1 H, 2 BB

Notes
Walks have again been an issue for Newcomb so far this year, but he was dominant on Sunday, missing bats in and above the zone with his fastball and then working his curveball and changeup (the latter more frequently later in the game) down for either more whiffs or weak contact. He lulled Brock Holt to sleep in an early plate appearance by tripling up on his curveball, then sneaked a fastball past him for a called third strike. Newcomb finished the day with the sequence below.

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Yes, ThamesGraphs is still in full force. I’ll write about someone else eventually.

You know the Thames story by now. You probably also know that a lot of it has been written against the Cincinnati Reds. The Brewers have played seven games against the Reds already, and in those seven games, Thames has launched 8 of his 11 home runs. He’s slugging 1.400 against them, and it’s easy to dismiss his early success as just mashing bad pitching. After all, the Reds just set the all-time record for home runs allowed last year, and their current staff is missing Anthony Desclafani, their best starting pitcher. We have the Reds projected as the worst rotation in baseball.

So since this comes up so often, I figure we might as well show what he’s doing against everyone else. Here’s Eric Thames‘ 2017 batting line if you eliminate the seven games against Cincinnati.

If Thames had been benched for all of the games against the Reds, he’d still rank 9th in MLB in wRC+. And, of course, that’s without taking away any results from anyone else because we deemed part of their competition too weak to include in the calculations.

Yes, Thames destroyed the Reds. He also destroyed the Cubs, Rockies, Cardinals, and Blue Jays. The 8 of 11 home runs is a nice headline stat, but the reality is that Thames has hit against good and bad pitching this year, and his numbers haven’t been that heavily inflated by facing weak pitching early. Facing the Reds a bunch has helped, but he’s doing work against everyone.

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

Marcus Wilson, CF, Arizona (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: HM  Top 100: NR
Line: 2-for-4, 2B, 2 BB

Notes
The latest iteration of Wilson’s swing includes a slow, dangling, leg kick (2016 version here, new version below), and it seems to be working. He’s hitting .362/.470/.696 so far. Wilson is a patient hitter with plus speed and he projects in center field, but his first three pro seasons were marred with swing-and-miss issues. He has a career 24% strikeout rate but is at 16% so far this year. This is Wilson’s first spring in full-season ball but, even after three years in rookie/short-season leagues, he’s still just 20. He’s hit some balls 400-plus feet this spring and still has some and has some physical projection remaining. The Midwest League will have a chance to solve him, and I don’t expect him to keep up this pace (Wilson already has more home runs this year than ’14-’16 combined), but the mechanical change suggests that not all of this is a small-sample mirage.

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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.