The 2018 Marlins have had precious little about which to cheer so far, and the forecast calls for more of the same. The performance of 25-year-old lefty Jarlin Garcia has been an exception, however. In the first two starts of his big-league career, Jarlin the Marlin* threw a hidden no-hitter — no hits allowed over a span of 27 outs, stretched across multiple games — via six hitless innings against the Mets on April 11 followed by 4.1 hitless innings against the Yankees on Tuesday night. Garcia was hardly perfect, scattering eight walks across those two starts, but joining Bartolo Colon and Shohei Ohtani in an exclusive club — the other pitchers to throw hidden no-hitters so far in 2018 — is close to perfection itself.

*His name is actually pronounced HAR-leen, which puts him behind teammate Starlin Castro in that pecking order.

Prior to his seven no-hit innings against the Astros on Sunday, Colon had gone the last 2.2 innings of his three-inning relief stint on April 10 without allowing a hit. Ohtani’s last 4.2 innings of his April 1 outing against the A’s were hitless, as were his first 6.1 in the rematch a week later. He and Garcia thus share the season high of 33 outs without a hit recorded.

Like any reputable speakeasy, you won’t find the Hidden No-Hitter Club on Google Maps, but the club itself isn’t that exclusive (a point which I’ll address momentarily). But first, consider Garcia. Unlike Colon and Ohtani, with whom you can’t help but be familiar if you’re reading this, he’s hardly a household name. The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Dominican-born southpaw isn’t a rookie, having spent all but the first couple weeks of last season in the Marlins’ bullpen, from which he made 68 appearances to the tune of a 4.73 ERA and 4.23 FIP. He jumped to the majors from Double-A Jacksonville, where over the course of 2016 and early -17 he totaled all of 80.1 innings, mostly as a starter; he missed 10 weeks in mid-2016 due to a triceps strain, and entered last season with mixed reviews as to whether he was even one of the top 10 prospects in one of the game’s worst farm systems.

As a reliever, Garcia held his own through the end of August (2.91 ERA, 3.74 FIP), then allowed nine runs while retiring just three hitters in his first two September appearances. In all, he struck out a modest 18.7% of hitters while relying upon a combination of a four-seam fastball that averaged 94.7 mph, a slider that produced a 14.5% whiff rate and a .194 AVG/.242 SLG when put in play, and a changeup that produced a 21.7% whiff rate and .129 AVG/.258 SLG when put in play (data via Brooks Baseball).

With nothing to lose but another 100 or so games, the Marlins decided to return Garcia to the rotation for 2018, and while the results have been superficially encouraging, neither his .096 BABIP nor his 2.6-point K-BB% mark (16.9% K, 14.3% BB) are sustainable. But until he’s just another guy getting knocked around in a Marlins’ uniform, his performance is at least worth celebrating. In terms of predecessors, I’ve struggled to find a parallel for his hitless first start, which ended after 77 pitches because manager Don Mattingly and pitching coach Juan Nieves saw signs he was laboring.

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With the event itself still over a month and a half away, it’s still too early to say with any type of certainty which clubs will select which players in June’s draft. That said, we’ve become familiar enough with industry consensus and player buzz in recent weeks to take a stab at projecting the first 10 picks.

As mentioned yesterday in our updated draft rankings, signability is everything in a hard-capped draft, and most prospects haven’t even met with their advisors yet to set a number, though there have been indications in many cases.

The depth of the class is found in high-school talent in the 20-50 overall range. With the top of the draft unsettled — and with a couple teams featuring lots of extra picks and pool money (draft order) — there will likely be a pick or two among the top 15 signed for well below slot to set up some overslot bonuses at later picks. With the specific dope on every pick getting spottier around the 10th pick, we cut things off there, but there’s plenty of buzz on that 20-50 range as clubs line up contingency options should the board blow up for their first pick.

1. Detroit Tigers – Casey Mize, RHP, Auburn

All of our intel suggests that Mize will be the pick here, provided he doesn’t get hurt and his medical comes back fine. It’s not a 100% slam dunk, but that scenario seems well over 50% likely. In the event things go sideways with Mize, Wisconsin prep CF Jarred Kelenic is the second option and would be signable for a lower bonus, but the weather and competition he’s facing this spring has made him tougher to scout than some other similarly ranked prospects. Wichita State 3B Alec Bohm is another player who has been mentioned here, but he seems like a longshot at this point.

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As I was researching a Mookie Betts article yesterday, I kept coming across various suggestions that Betts was thriving because of a more swing-happy mindset. Maybe that’s true on some level, but Betts isn’t actually swinging more. He continues to run one of the lowest swing rates in either league. The key for Betts has been pulling the ball in the air. He’s hunted pitches to drive, and he’s driven them as he wanted. There are few better pull hitters in the game.

That being said, while Betts hasn’t turned into anything particularly aggressive, he has given a little push to his in-zone swing rate. He’s cut down on his out-of-zone swing rate. There’s no benefit from swinging at would-be balls. And as for the rest of the Red Sox around him — this has become a different-feeling lineup. The Red Sox, as a team, have changed their approach, bringing to an end a long era of patience.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Shohei Ohtani’s blister, the Braves signing Jose Bautista as a third baseman, and Oakland’s well-attended free-admission game, then talk to two authors of new books about what happens in baseball players’ brains: Zach Schonbrun, author of The Performance Cortex: How Neuroscience is Redefining Athletic Genius (11:58), and former MLB pitcher (and current Giants mental skills coach) Bob Tewksbury, author of Ninety Percent Mental: An All-Star Player Turned Mental Skills Coach Reveals the Hidden Game of Baseball (41:04).

Audio intro: Violent Femmes, "Blister in the Sun"
Audio interstitial 1: The Action, "Brain"
Audio interstitial 2: Beulah, "Don’t Forget to Breathe"
Audio outro: Superchunk, "Lost My Brain"

Link to The Performance Cortex excerpt
Link to Bob Tewksbury’s website

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It’s not entirely clear anything was wrong with Mookie Betts in 2017. Yes, he finished with a wRC+ of just 108, after the previous season’s 137, but those numbers can occasionally mislead. Consider the Statcast-based expected wOBA, available to query at Baseball Savant. Betts, in 2015, had an expected wOBA of .335. In 2016, it was .336. In 2017, it was .341. I wouldn’t necessarily call that conclusive, but it’s evidence that Betts was just hurt by a little bit of bad luck. He remained a perfectly good hitter all the while.

In 2018, Betts has an expected wOBA of .602. He leads all qualified hitters in wRC+. Tuesday night, in a game started by Shohei Ohtani, Betts went deep three times. Betts won’t keep this up, because no one could keep this up, but it’s worth it to look under the hood. Betts’ scorching start has been a consequence of his hitting to his strengths.

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In an offseason characterized by inactivity and a wariness to trust anybody over 30, the Giants made waves by trading for both Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen, adding them to a lineup that last year already ranked as the NL’s oldest and least potent, even after park adjustment. So far, the gambit hasn’t paid off. On the heels of a forgettable 64-98 season, the team scoring a major-league-worst 2.88 runs per game has gone 6-10, scoring exactly one run in six of those games and being shut out three times. On Tuesday night, they were a measly Brandon Belt check swing against the shift away from being no-hit by the Diamondbacks’ Patrick Corbin. Though both Longoria and McCutchen have had their moments, neither has come anywhere close to living up to their billing.

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Like many, I was introduced to sabermetrics by the venerable Bill James. My first exposure to advanced metrics was in the 1986 edition of his Baseball Abstract I delightfully found at a yard sale as a young girl, and I spent years calculating the secondary averages of every hitter I could find. Secondary average later became the basis for the projection system I built as a teenager (wherein I did all of the math by hand). I kept refining and tinkering with it for years before abandoning it in law school. It had its successes — it spat out a Ryan Howard comp for a 20-year-old Chris Davis. It also had its weaknesses, too; it was convinced, for example, that Chris Duncan was going to be a star.

But my favorite part of James’s Abstracts was the “Ken Phelps All-Star Team.” Ken Phelps was a talented hitter who nevertheless toiled for years in the minors, not exhausting his rookie eligibility until age 28. As Jeff Bower characterized it for Baseball Prospectus, the Phelps All-Star team represented “an assemblage of players with skills that made them useful, but who were generally not given a fair opportunity to prove their worth in the majors or had been given unwarranted labels they couldn’t shake.” Basically, the idea behind the exercise was to identify minor leaguers who, like Phelps himself, were not considered prospects and had earned a Quad-A label, and yet might be competent (or more) big leaguers if given the opportunity.

In honor of the beginning of the major-league season, I present to you my 2018 Ken Phelps All-Star Team.

Now, let me start with a couple of disclaimers. First, these players are not supposed to be prospects. So this isn’t like Carson’s Fringe Five series. And many of the labels these guys have earned may very well be accurate. I’m not expecting my fictional team to go and win 100 games. Instead, I’m looking for guys who, for whatever reason, have mastered the highest levels of the minors but are organizational depth at best, or forgotten entirely at worst, yet have skills which might (might!) make them useful on a big-league team.

Now, scouting and analytics are better than ever before, so that means that the idea behind this team has to change a bit. Major-league equivalencies have become mainstream, and that means that we have to do more than simple projected big-league performance. However, the essence remains.

I’m also going to tweak James’s criteria slightly. To qualify for my team, a player cannot have had more than 550 plate appearances or 50 innings pitched in the major leagues. He also must not have appeared on any FanGraphs organizational top prospect lists or the Fringe Five in the past two years (2017-18), and must be no younger than 25.

And with that said, here we go.

The Outfield

Left field: Jabari Blash

You know the book on Blash, 28, by now. He strikes out a ton, walks a ton, and hits for a ton of power. He hit 20 homers in just 291 plate appearances at Triple-A last year (a .332 ISO), and already has a .515 ISO and 209 wRC+ at Triple-A this year. But Blash, now will never see a big-league starting job so long as he’s striking out at a 30% clip at Triple-A (31% this year). In 2017, his only extended run (195 PA), he struck out at a 33.8% rate and yet still managed an 88 wRC+ due to his high walk rate. Blash will be an adventure in left field, and he might hit .190 over a full season, but I bet he hits 30 homers in the middle of our lineup. We’ll take him.

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