It’s always dangerous to assume everyone else is the same as you are. Just because you don’t give a shit about poems doesn’t mean other people don’t give a shit about poems. You want to be careful not to assume too much of your own preferences and experiences. That being said, I’m pretty comfortable with one assumption — I’ve barely paid attention to the Padres, and I feel like most people have barely paid attention to the Padres. That’s not to say no one has paid attention to the Padres, but those who have are probably few and far between. You know how it goes. Apparently Austin Hedges is leading all Triple-A hitters in slugging percentage by like a million points. I learned this Tuesday morning. Austin Hedges? Whatever.

About a certain Padres player, then. Apologies to those of you for whom this isn’t new news, but something has quietly been taking place. Remember when the Padres picked up Melvin Upton Jr.? They did it in the Craig Kimbrel trade, and they took him on as a salary dump. The Braves just wanted to be rid of him, and right away, the Padres put Upton on the DL. He did come back and play, eventually. He played well. And he hasn’t…stopped…playing well. Away from the spotlight, away from the pressure, Upton has rediscovered his talent. It sure looks to me like Melvin Upton Jr. is back.

The Braves signed Upton after the 2012 season. In the table below, you’ll see three lines of numbers. You see the three years of Upton leading up to free agency. You see his two catastrophic years with the Braves. And you see his past year as a Padre.

I’ll be damned. Recent Upton isn’t the exact same as earlier Upton, but the profile is awfully close. Strikeout-prone power hitter with athletic, all-around skills. Upton, back then, looked like a borderline star. For the past year or so, he’s played like a borderline star. You can never forget about a dip like the dip he had, and it’s not like Upton would forgive himself for that or anything, but the player Upton looks like now is the player the Braves wanted to sign. He didn’t hit the ground running, but Upton is working to salvage the contract he agreed to. He lived through a professional nightmare, and he didn’t let it destroy him.

Over the weekend, Upton mashed a walk-off dinger against the impossible Andrew Miller. In the past year, Upton has clocked in with a 36% hard-hit rate, matching Jay Bruce and Andrew McCutchen. The Braves got burned. You do have to wonder how much another team would trust Upton, at this point. But he’s made himself appealing again, at least to some extent, and his contract extends through next year, when he’ll earn around $17 million. What’s crazy now is it’s not too hard to imagine Upton actually being worth that salary. All he’d have to be is something like an average outfielder, and lately he’s been clearing that bar. Clearing it easily! Melvin Upton Jr. could be a legitimate trade target. The Padres might not have to eat too much money. They got a bad break with the Jon Jay injury, but this career reversal is working out.

Upton’s back. If he’s not all the way back, he’s seemingly most of the way back. That’s astonishing in and of itself, and you could write a book about all this. Hell of a story, Melvin Upton Jr.’s. Another time, we can celebrate how Upton has found himself. For now, it’s July, and Upton is a talented veteran on a go-nowhere team. Front offices are going to call about Upton. Front offices are going to want Upton. Upton, once again, ought to be wanted. What a game this is.

Javier Baez is a home-run hitter, and on Tuesday against the Reds, he hit a home run. This is a video of said home run, linked because it is not yet embeddable. I would encourage you to watch the home run, because why not?, but if you’re not in the mood, check out the catcher’s pitch signal:

The count was 1-and-2, and Javier Baez is also a strikeout hitter, so the signal was for a pitch in the dirt. If not for a pitch in the dirt, then it was at least for a pitch well below the zone. Nothing unusual for the circumstance. Here’s the pitch that Baez ultimately hit:

Yeah, so, whoopsadoodle. What was supposed to be thrown was a pitch below the knee. What was actually thrown was a pitch over the middle and at the belt, with Baez already in swing mode and probably guessing offspeed. Baez strikes out and hits home runs. Featured here, he got his home run.

Like many hitters, Baez crushes pitches in the zone. Like many hitters, Baez doesn’t so much crush pitches out of the zone. This, of course, is exactly why hitters go up there looking for a good pitch to hit, in theory. The strike zone is roughly the same as the hitting zone. That’s why it’s the strike zone. According to Baseball Savant, when Baez has hit a batted ball, he’s slugged .817 against would-be strikes, and .397 against would-be balls. Remember, this is when Baez has made contact. He makes more effective contact in the zone. There’s nothing weird about this.

Yet I present Baez in this case as the opposite of Michael Saunders. I wrote about Saunders a few weeks ago, and in there, I pointed out Saunders’ high rate of batted balls against pitches in the zone. In other words, when Saunders has turned pitches around, he’s mostly been turning around strikes, helping him maximize his contact quality. Every leaderboard that has a top has a bottom. Let’s look at the bottom, in terms of batted balls against strikes over all batted balls. I’m using a minimum of 100 batted balls, so you know.

I’m a complete sucker for lists with big gaps. Can’t get enough of them! As you see here, the difference between second-lowest and third-lowest is…well, as seen here, it’s nothing. It’s a tie. There’s not much separating many of these players, and then there’s Baez, in last place by more than six percentage points. Out of Baez’s batted balls, just 47% have come against pitches in the zone. Then there’s the next-closest player, at 54%. That’s laughable, if baseball statistics are ever laughable. Maybe they aren’t? That’s a different post.

I doubt that you just learned anything new about Javier Baez. I mean, you just learned a new fact, but you probably already knew he’s aggressive. Discipline is his problem, as you can see from his contact rates and O-Swing%. But, you know, after Tuesday, Baez is sitting on a 104 wRC+. That puts him right there with names like Todd Frazier and Jason Kipnis. Baez is kind of succeeding like this, and what it really indicates is Baez’s upside if he could ever figure out how to lay off pitchers’ pitches. Over-aggressive hitters usually don’t do that, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. Yet, remember when we all wanted to fall in love with Javier Baez? This is why it’s easy to love him, and this is also why it’s difficult. There’s a special player in there, almost half the time.

The Royals line-up has been crushed by injuries this year, with Alex Gordon and Lorenzo Cain both spending chunks of time on the DL, and Mike Moustakas lost for the season due to a torn ACL. Today, the injury bug is apparently moving over to the pitching side of things too.

Wade Davis is going on the disabled list with a right forearm strain. Brooks Pounders is being called up.

— Rustin Dodd (@rustindodd) July 5, 2016

On a superficial level, Davis has seemed fine this year, running a 1.23 ERA and converting 19 of 21 save opportunities. But this news probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, because there have been some lingering red flags for a while now.

Davis struck out just seven of the 40 batters he faced in June, a remarkably low total for a guy who has been one of the most dominant relievers in baseball for the last few years. Interestingly, though, the other traditional red flag associated with pitcher injuries — velocity decline — has actually not been an issue for Davis. In fact, his velo has been trending up all season.

Of course, the upwards trend is mostly him getting back to where he threw the last few years, as his velocity was down a lot in April and May, so velocity decline was an issue earlier. It’s a bit odd that his strikeouts are disappearing at the same time his velocity is coming back, but given the existence of both issues within the first four months, the fact that he’s headed to the DL makes plenty of sense.

For the Royals, this is a pretty big loss, as Davis has been the anchor of their bullpen, which is really the only thing keeping them in contention at this point. The team has had the worst starting rotation in the AL this season, and their offense isn’t anything special. Without Davis, the team will likely have to shift Kelvin Herrera into the closer role, weakening the team’s middle relief significantly, and they might have a tough time winning as many close games as they have become accustomed to.

Given that the All-Star break is coming up, it is possible that the Royals are just using this timing to give Davis a bit of an extended break — this keeps him from going to San Diego, after all — and perhaps the issue won’t be a long-term concern. But forearm tightness is often a precursor to Tommy John surgery, and if the Royals lose Davis for an extended period, it will be a big blow to their chances to get back to the postseason.

Over the weekend, the Cubs called up third baseman Jeimer Candelario to replace the injured Chris Coghlan on the roster. Candelario enjoyed a breakout season last year, when he hit .277/.339/.431 as a 21-year-old between High-A and Double-A. He carried some of that success over to 2016 by hitting .249/.359/.428 between Double-A and Triple-A this year. This included a beastly .333/.452/.600 in his 25 game pit stop at Triple-A.

Candelario’s offensive game is largely centered around doubles and walks. He laced 24 doubles in 81 minor-league games this year and walked in an impressive 14% of his trips to the plate. On the downside, he didn’t make a tremendous amount of contact in the high minors, which suggests he may struggle against big-league pitching. His 19% strikeout rate from this year is fine, but you’d like to see a little more bat-to-ball ability from someone with merely OK power numbers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cuban National Team is touring the independent Can-Am League right now and their roster includes two of the three best prospects left in Cuba. Below are my brief thoughts on those two prospects as a supplement to this week’s July 2 content, as both of them would fall under the J2 bonus guidelines were they to leave Cuba.

Luis Moiran Robert, OF, 6’2, 180, R/R

Robert (the second syllable is pronounced the way it is in Stephen Colbert and not the way it is in Keary Colbert) body comps to Alex Gordon. He has plus bat speed, advanced pitch recognition and generates contact to all fields. He walked three times on Wednesday and also showed the ability to make adjustments in the middle of at-bats. Reports from international scouts on his bat control were better than what I saw and his weight is distributed a little too heavily on his front foot for my taste, but Robert is only 19 and clearly has prodigious physical skill and a good approach so I’m not too concerned about the lack of results on this Can-Am tour. He’s hitting .255/.263/.291 on this trip and looks a little disintereste,d but he hit .305/.384/.413 last year in Serie Nacional at age 18 and is already hitting third in the lineup for the National Team.

I didn’t get a good time on Robert from home to first because of all the walks, but eyeballed him as an above-average runner on a few steal attempts. I’m not sure that Robert will retain the wheels for CF as he fills out but he should at least be a defensive asset in a corner and I think he’ll hit enough to play there.

Early this spring, scouts lost track of Robert and thought he might have left the island.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we’re almost to July, and teams that need pitching help have decided not to wait any longer. According to reports, two small trades for pitching help are being completed this afternoon.

Heard the Padres and Marlins are nearing a deal for Fernando Rodney for a good A-ball prospect

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) June 30, 2016

Sources: #Dodgers getting Bud Norris from #Braves.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 30, 2016

Neither Fernando Rodney nor Bud Norris are the kinds of guys that are going to single handedly carry you to the playoffs, but both also have their value in providing useful depth, and both are having excellent starts to the 2016 season. Rodney’s strikeout rate has spiked back up this year, allowing him to be an effective pitcher even with his command problems, and will likely slide into the Marlins bullpen, allowing them to ride A.J. Ramos, David Phelps, and Kyle Barraclough a bit less in the second half. Though, if Keith Law is correct that the Marlins gave up a “good prospect” to get a half season of Rodney’s inconsistency, that seems like a steep price to pay. But we’ll have to wait and see what price they paid.

For the Dodgers, this was very likely a reaction to the news that Clayton Kershaw is heading to the DL, weakening the team’s rotation even further. Norris has been pretty good of late, and as Jeff Sullivan recently noted, that’s coincided with him getting rid of his garbage change-up and replacing it with an effective cutter. If that swap continues to pay dividends, he could be a nice back-end starter for the team in the second half.

That said, Norris also has a pretty long history of underperforming his peripheral numbers, with +11 WAR in his career if you go by the FIP-based WAR, but only +6 WAR if you go by RA9. With over 1,000 big league innings, it’s pretty likely that a good chunk of that difference is due to Norris’ own weaknesses and not just bad luck, so we shouldn’t expect him to be as good as his FIP suggests. But even with some BABIP issues, a guy with average walk and strikeout rates and some groundballs can be useful, and Norris is good enough against RHPs that he could be an effective situational reliever in the playoffs, if the Dodgers manage to get there.

Like with the Rodney deal, we don’t know what the acquisition cost was, but the Dodgers certainly needed to add an arm with Kershaw going down for at least a few weeks. Norris isn’t an ace, but he can help the team survive for a little while, and if this new cutter proves effective, maybe even do more than that.

On rare occasion, I’ll interview a player and end up not writing about him — at least not right away — despite fully intending to. This happened with Brock Stewart, who will be making his major-league debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers later tonight.

Stewart was more of a project than a prospect when I talked to him last summer. A sixth-round pick in 2014 out of Illinois State University, the converted infielder was having his ups and downs pitching for Rancho Cucamonga in the High-A California League. But his potential was apparent. Not long after we spoke, it was speculated that Stewart would be part of the three-team, multi-player deal that sent Mat Latos to L.A.

After a sophomore season at Illinois State that saw him hit .330/.402/.496, Stewart thought he’d go on to be drafted as a position player. That changed late in his junior year. The Normal, Illinois, native was scuffling at the plate, and opening eyes in occasional appearances out of the bullpen. One of his coaches suggested that he focus more on pitching, and his father, a pro scout for the Padres (and now the Rays), agreed. Jeff Stewart told his son “a lot of scouts, myself included, think your arm is your best tool.”

The youngster was a little surprised — “I always thought I was going to be playing in the infield for a big-league team someday” — but he heeded the advice. As he put it, “You have to go with the flow, and for me, that flow was toward the mound.” Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of January, the author published unassailable evidence to the effect that — owing to certain traits he shares with SEC alumnus and current major leaguer Josh Donaldson — that Washington infield prospect Max Schrock is a strong future candidate for an MVP award.

Not unlike life itself, the author’s argument bore trace elements of the absurd. One finds, for example, that Schrock passed his junior year at the University of South Carolina as a 5-foot-8 left fielder — not a classic profile for which scouts are clamoring. Perhaps not coincidentally, Schrock wasn’t selected until the 13th round of the 2015 draft. The $500,000 bonus he eventually extracted from the Nationals compensated him more along the lines of a fourth-rounder. Despite that — and despite success in his first exposure to affiliated ball — he entered the 2016 campaign absent from all notable top-prospect lists.

The purpose of this post is to announce how Schrock, following a strong half-season at Low-A Hagerstown — for which he was rewarded with a place in the Sally League All-Star game (winning that contest’s MVP award) — has been promoted to High-A Potomac, for which club he debuted last night, batting second and playing second base (box). By those measures which suggest future success — most notably, contact and power and the capacity to provide defensive value — Schrock’s tenure in Hagerstown was encouraging. One notes, for example, that Schrock recorded the lowest strikeout rate among all qualified batters across all Low-A while also recording an isolated-power figure about 10 points higher than the SAL average. Schrock’s last month, in particular, was impressive — and rendered below in table form.

On the most recent edition of FanGraphs Audio, managing editor Dave Cameron made comments to the effect that contributors to this site aren’t clairvoyant — nor is it the present author’s intention to contradict that sentiment. What one finds in Max Schrock, however, and his receipt someday of baseball highest single-season honor, isn’t so much a prediction as an account of the inevitable. Future Max Schrock has already been recognized as an MVP. We’re human anachronisms, all of us, for not knowing it yet.

As you might remember from last year, Matt Carpenter turned himself into a different kind of hitter. He’d already been wonderfully productive, but last year, he seemingly made the decision to exchange some contact for power. So while Carpenter soared to a career-high ISO, with a career-low rate of grounders, he also notched a career-high strikeout rate, with a career-low rate of contact. It wasn’t necessarily good, and it wasn’t necessarily bad; it was interesting. Carpenter managed a 139 wRC+. Two years earlier, as more of a contact guy, he managed a 146 wRC+.

Now look at this year’s leaderboards. As I write this, David Ortiz owns the highest wRC+ among qualified hitters in the game. Carpenter, however, is right there in second, ahead of Jose Altuve and Mike Trout. And upon investigation, this has gotten silly. Carpenter has hit for more power than a year ago. He’s still putting most of his batted balls in the air. Yet Carpenter has re-gained much of his lost contact. His strikeout rate is down about six percentage points, and his walks are higher than ever. So to summarize: Carpenter traded some contact for power, but then he boosted the power and the contact, and, I don’t know, but here we are. You might think his numbers look very familiar. This is because Carpenter now resembles a left-handed prime Jose Bautista.

Bautista became Bautista in 2010. So that’s why I selected that window of time. And while Bautista, of course, has done this over several seasons, while Carpenter has done this over about half of one, look at the similarities. LOOK AT THEM. Same walks. Same strikeouts. Same power. Same batted-ball tendencies. Same pull-side preference, with limited strength the other way. One column I didn’t include: Bautista’s one weakness has been infield flies. Usually goes hand-in-hand with that sort of uppercut approach. Carpenter has two infield flies on the season. That helps to explain the wRC+ difference. I’m not saying that’ll sustain, but it’s worth a mention.

Carpenter bats lefty, and Bautista bats righty, and that’s an important difference, but it’s also maybe the only difference that really matters. Matt Carpenter just looks like Jose Bautista from the other side. Carpenter was never really supposed to develop this sort of power, but the man stands 6’3, as compared to Bautista at 6’0. It’s not like it’s come out of nowhere. This ability has been contained within, and now it’s gotten out. It’s gotten out while Carpenter has still been able to keep the strikeouts in check.

Matt Carpenter was never a Baseball America top-100 prospect. He was never a BA top-10 Cardinals prospect. Nevertheless, he developed into an elite contact hitter, and now it looks like he’s developing into an elite power hitter. This is by no means a shot at BA. Rather, it’s a reminder that prospecting is difficult work. Sometimes an underrated prospect becomes a great player. Sometimes an underrated prospect becomes two great players.

It’s not something I’ve ever officially written down, but I’ve tried to observe a personal policy of not bothering to write about Bud Norris. Do I really need to explain? I assume you get it. The level of interest you’ve had in reading about Bud Norris — that’s more or less been my level of interest in writing about Bud Norris. And I certainly didn’t think I’d be writing about him this year, not given his employer, and not given how he started.

But don’t go away! For one thing, Norris is generating some attention on the trade market. And, yeah, I know, it’s a lousy trade market, for starting pitchers in particular. That fuels some of this. Yet Norris, also, deserves whatever amount of respect that confers. Quietly, Norris has gotten up to something. For the month of June, he’s tied for fourth among qualified pitchers in WAR. He’s right behind Jose Fernandez and Clayton Kershaw, and even with Jacob deGrom, Corey Kluber, Max Scherzer, and Zachary Davies. Norris has become a ground-baller, which is new. Bud Norris is making something of himself — again? — and there’s even what feels like an easy explanation.

Cutter!

Following, I’ve plotted all of Norris’ pitches, grouped by velocity and spin axis. There are two plots which you’ll see: Norris’ pitches through the end of May, and Norris’ pitches since the start of June.

See the group that increases in number around the middle? That’s a cutter. And the group that all but disappears more toward the middle right — changeup. Norris has gotten comfortable with a cutter, and he’s abandoned his changeup, and this makes sense for a pitcher who’s long struggled against opposite-handed hitters. He’s been searching for a solution, and maybe borrowing from Brooks Baseball is a cleaner way to show this. Norris’ changeup and cutter frequencies against lefties, by month:

Lots of cutters, recently, and the changeup is dead. Pitchers want a useful changeup to show when they have the platoon disadvantage, but cutters can work, too, and it’s not like the changeup was ever much of a weapon before. Norris has embraced this in his return from the bullpen, and here’s an idea of what the cutter looks like:

More important than a hand-selected video of one pitch are bigger-picture results. Against lefties this year, Norris has thrown his cutter for a strike 72% of the time. It has yet to be hit for a fly ball. It’s generated 22% whiffs, and lefties have batted .105 against the new wrinkle, slugging .158. I can make this more dramatic. Check out Norris’ seasonal lefty splits. This is stupid.

Obviously, the samples are pathetically small, but the samples are also substantially different. Before embracing the cutter, Norris was a complete disaster against left-handed bats. He could barely get them out, and they were hitting him for excellent contact. In June, however, those fortunes have reversed, as Norris has found a way to pitch well in what had been difficult situations. Norris has thrown strikes to lefties. He’s made them miss. Even the contact quality has improved. All right, Bud Norris!

Who knows what the future holds? Maybe opponents just need to adjust to this, and then he’ll go back to being the pretty boring Bud Norris. Yet pitchers change ability levels pretty quickly from time to time, and all of a sudden, Norris looks like he can pitch to righties and lefties. That makes him a usable starter on a bad team, which makes him a modestly appealing trade candidate. There’s actually a reason for a team to want Bud Norris.

I’m not saying it’s the best idea in the world. I’m just saying, hey, look at that. He’s done something. It’s a pretty cool something.