Yesterday, Ender Inciarte hit a home run. Two games before that, he hit a home run. The game before that, he hit two home runs. Four. That’s four home runs. Last season, Ender Inciarte hit three home runs.

Inciarte owns plenty of firsts now for SunTrust Park. I don’t care about that as much as I care about another first. Last season, there were 146 so-called “qualified” position players. The cutoff there is 502 plate appearances. I know that seems like a silly number, but, what do I care, I didn’t make it up. Looking at that group of position players for 2016, and for 2017, Inciarte has become the first of them to achieve a higher home-run total this year. I know it’s a lot easier for Ender Inciarte to top three than it is for Mark Trumbo to top 47, but maybe Trumbo shouldn’t have set so high a bar for himself.

When something like this happens, the automatic follow-up question is, “why?” Why the power surge? I don’t want to make too much of it yet. Four homers. But look at the Sunday homer. Or look at this earlier homer:

Check out the confident bat-drops! Since when does Inciarte know enough about hitting home runs to develop such a confident bat-drop?

Two times, Ender Inciarte has looked like a power hitter, so at the very least, this is something to keep your eye on moving forward. Inciarte doesn’t have a history of hitting for power. He’s got 17 career dingers to his name, to go with a .099 ISO. In this year’s tiny sample, Inciarte hasn’t cut down on his grounders. He has pulled the ball more, and he has swung more often, with less contact. The samples are so small I’m almost embarrassed to even be analyzing them, but let’s face it — if I didn’t look at the numbers, you were just going to click through and look at the same numbers. I’m saving you time. Maybe Ender Inciarte is up to something? Maybe he’s not, and he’s just made an unusual amount of great contact lately. But it’s easy to let your imagination get the best of you, given that Inciarte already runs and fields so damned well. Baseball’s so weird Inciarte might as well go deep 40 times.

Time will tell how much Inciarte will accomplish at the plate. Already, he’s accomplished one thing, thanks to having accomplished four things: He’s become the first qualified hitter from 2016 to reach a higher home-run total in 2017. Your turn, Jose Iglesias.

The present author, in his ongoing pursuit of total obscurity, has passed much of the night composing another installment of his top-college posts which appear intermittently at FanGraphs.com. That, in itself, is almost certainly of little interest to the reader.

Perhaps of greater interest, though, is the video embedded here. While attempting to gather intelligence on probably talented and certainly draft-eligible Arizona center fielder Jared Oliva, I accidentally encountered footage of a strange baseball play/absurdist happening from this past Sunday in Pullman, Washington.

So far as I can tell, the principal characters in this avant-garde production are Arizona’s Cal Stevenson (batting) and Washington State first baseman James Rudkin. With one out and two on in the top of the ninth, Stevenson elects to perform a safety squeeze. He fulfills his duties admirably, laying down a deft bunt to the right side of the infield. Rudkin, recognizing the challenges that lay ahead of him, senses the need for improvisation. Rather than fielding the ball and throwing it to his catcher in the conventional manner, he instead uses his glove to forcefully roll the ball in the direction of home plate. The result? An improbable second out of the inning.

Rudkin’s play ultimately didn’t make a difference: Washington State lost by a score of 5-6. Is this the point, though? A brief examination of things suggests that, no, this isn’t the point. The mental acuity exhibited by a member of our own, typically helpless species: this appears to be the point. Or, if not that, then it’s certainly closer to the point.

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

Foster Griffin, LHP, Kansas City (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: HM  Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 BB, 0 ER, 6 K

Notes
I saw Griffin sit 86-89 last year and get torched by a good Lynchburg lineup. He’s allowed one run and K’d 14 over 11 innings so far this year.

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

Nick Neidert, RHP, Seattle (Profile)
Level: Hi-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 3  Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 8 K

Notes
Neidert is very advanced and will throw his breaking ball and changeup, both of which are already of big-league quality, in any count. He was 87-91 with his fastball in his final spring-training tune-up start and I wondered how his fastball would play in the Cal League but, at least last night, it didn’t matter. He was part of a combined one hit shutout of Stockton with righties Matt Walker and Lukas Schiradli, both of whom missed bats in the Midwest League last year, slamming the door over the final three innings.

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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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This is when we’re supposed to hunt for potential trends, right? We can look at the home runs. We can look at the strikeouts. We can look at the walks. We can look at the strike zone. We’re always trying to see where baseball might be going. What’s another potential trend? Baseball has slowed down! Again.

In 2014, the average game lasted about 188 minutes. In 2015, the average game lasted about 181 minutes. The improvement was modest, but still cause for celebration, as the league wanted to increase the pace of play. Unfortunately for them, things slid back some of the way last year, when the average game length bumped up to 185 minutes. And in the early going this year? We’re at an average of 191 minutes. All the gains of 2015 have been erased, and then some, and this isn’t because there has been, say, an unusual number of extra-inning contests. Last year’s average game had 76 plate appearances. This year, the average is…76 plate appearances.

So, what’s going on? Oh, right. Players love doing nothing.

I don’t know if it’s the hitters or the pitchers or what, but the time between pitches has shot up by nearly a second and a half. Pace was already trending up heading into 2015, when baseball passed a few new pace-related rules. Remember the one about staying in the batter’s box? Right, all that. There were short-term gains, but the players have slipped into old habits due to a lack of enforcement. I guess it’s not even old habits. By this measure, the old habits have gotten worse and more exaggerated. An extra second here and there is nothing, but it all adds up, given that hundreds of pitches are thrown for every nine innings.

This isn’t a judgment post. Some people mind that baseball has gotten slower. Some people don’t mind at all. My opinion is my opinion alone, and I would never assume everyone else feels the same way I do. How you feel is how you feel, but the facts right now point to baseball once again slowing down. And if that trend keeps up, I’d think that pitch clocks are an inevitability. Rob Manfred, see, has his opinions, too, but his opinions turn into actions. I just get to sit here and write about them.

The backstory: Over the course of the PITCHf/x era, the major-league strike zone kept getting bigger and bigger. Last year, for the first time, the zone basically stabilized. The commissioner floated the idea of raising the zone’s lower boundary. The union disapproved. In theory, this year’s zone should look familiar. It should look like last year’s zone.

And, you know, it does look like last year’s zone, in that the strike zone never changes that much. Even the dramatic changes are actually subtle changes. But here are two league heat maps, showing called-strike probabilities. One of these reflects the 2016 season, and the other reflects 2017 so far.

Changes! Somewhat substantial changes. Some of them actually a little too substantial. One is reminded that the tracking systems have changed this year, and that affects more than just velocity readings. All the data from before 2017 came from PITCHf/x. Now we’ve got Trackman data instead. They might report slightly different pitch locations, which could explain the heat maps above. So as a proxy, how about something else? How about something as simple as…strike rate?

Two years ago, 64% of all pitches were strikes. So far this year, that’s down to 63%, and while a change of one percentage point isn’t going to render the game unrecognizable, you can see the clear trend leading up into 2015. Strikes were on the rise. Now they’ve gone in the other direction, and this year’s early (EARLY!) rate is right in between where the league was in 2010 and 2011. It doesn’t necessarily directly reflect a change to the strike zone, but it’s suggestive. Walks happen to be up, and Dave wrote about that earlier Monday.

For reasons unbeknownst to me, Baseball-Reference reports numbers that are even more striking. According to them, over the past three years, strike rate has slipped from 64.3% to 63.8% to 62.7%. Swing rate is also a little down. The zone could be smaller. The pitchers could just be throwing more pitches out of the zone. Could easily be both. You can’t expect any actual exhaustive research a week into the regular season.

Here’s where we are: Walks are up, and unsurprisingly, related to that, strikes are down. We’re not used to seeing strike rate going down! This is absolutely something to watch, because even as early as it is, there have still been plenty of games. Something could be happening. Recent trends could be turning around.

Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen.

Daulton Jefferies, RHP, Oakland (Profile)
Level: High-A   Age: 21   Org Rank: 6
Line: 4 IP, 2 H, 0 BB, 2 K

Notes
Jefferies dealt with a shoulder injury last year at Cal and was 91-93 with a good changeup and fringey mid-80s slider in the AZL after he signed. This spring he was 92-95 with command, the same potential impact changeup, and an average curveball with more two-plane tilt than the slider had last year.

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Position: Tampa Bay Rays Baseball Operations Data Engineer

Location: St. Petersburg, Fla.

Description:
The Tampa Bay Rays are a professional baseball team looking for a Data Engineer to join our Baseball Operations team. This position will be responsible for ensuring that our database meets the highest standards of accuracy and integrity. This includes designing and implementing data import procedures, performing quality assurance checks, and finding and fixing data errors. This person will work closely with our Baseball Research & Development and Baseball Systems groups. All offers contingent on satisfactory background check.

Responsibilities:

• Strong experience with SQL (particularly Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)).
• Detail oriented.
• Knowledge of basic probability and statistics.
• Strong communication skills.
• Minimum two years of experience in similar role.
• Willing to relocate to the St. Petersburg, Fla., area.
• Willing to work some nights and weekends during baseball season.

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Position: Boston Red Sox Baseball Data Architect

Location: Boston
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