Pop quiz, hot shots: what does this video…

https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/SociableMistyDragon

… have to do with this one?

https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/HappyBossyBullmastiff

Obviously, they’re both Paul Goldschmidt, and they’re both base hits. They’re actually the first two hits he’s collected all season long against four-seam fastballs thrown at 95 mph or above. By comparison, the Diamondbacks’ five-time All-Star slugger had 21 such hits last year, and an average of 19 from 2015 to -17.

Two hits against high velocity. Two measly, stinkin’ hits. That grim tally — a May 28 single off the Reds’ Tanner Rainey and Wednesday’s double off the Giants’ Reyes Moronta — appears to be be the primary reason why the 30-year-old first baseman has struggled so mightily this year.

I’ve checked in on Goldschmidt twice already this year, first in a dedicated look a couple weeks into the season and then more in passing shortly after A.J. Pollock went down. Almost immediately after the first piece, he went on a brief tear that raised his wRC+ to 145 (.273/.395/.505 line) by the end of April, seemingly providing an object lesson in the dangers of dwelling too long on a single bad month. But then he was utterly dreadful in May (.144/.252/.278, 48 wRC+), his worst calendar month since… well, since last September (.171/.250/.305, 35 wRC+).

New information has come to light in the wake of each piece — or new to me at least. A few days after the Pollock injury, ESPN’s Buster Olney wrote about Goldschmidt in the context of over-30 players struggling with high-velocity fastballs, though he drew the line at 96 mph and considered only batting average. More recently, both Goldschmidt and Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo have fielded questions about any connection between the slugger’s current slump and a bout of inflammation in his right elbow that sidelined him for five games at the beginning of September 2017, the presumed cause of the aforementioned late-season struggle.

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Since it’s always draft-evaluation season, I thought it might make sense to start this post-draft notes column with some names for future draft classes. It’s too early to really rank these guys with any depth since we (and scouts) will be seeing all these players over the next couple months, so they will shuffle themselves a good bit this summer, but we definitely have a sense of who the top tier of talent is in the amateur ranks. These names are all in order of preference within the group in which they are identified.

2019 MLB Draft

For the 2019 class, there is a top tier of five prep standouts, while the college side is very deep in hitters. College pitching is very shallow at this early juncture, however. On the prep side, we have SS C.J. Abrams (Georgia), SS Bobby Witt, Jr. (Texas), LHP Hunter Barco (Florida), 3B Rece Hinds (Florida), and RHP Brennan Malone (North Carolina).

Atop the very deep college hitter class, we have SS Bryson Stott (UNLV), C Adley Rutschman (Oregon State), SS Logan Davidson (Clemson), C Shea Langliers (Baylor), SS Greg Jones (UNC Wilmington), RF Michael Toglia (UCLA), 3B Josh Jung (Texas Tech), RF Michael Busch (North Carolina), RF Matt Wallner (Southern Miss), and SS Braden Shewmake (Texas A&M).

As for that second tier of college bats, we have 3B Drew Mendoza (Florida State), 1B Andrew Vaughn (Cal), SS Will Holland (Auburn), CF Kam Misner (Missouri), 2B Chase Strumpf (UCLA), CF Wil Dalton (Florida), SS Will Wilson (North Carolina State), 1B Spencer Brickhouse (East Carolina), and 2B Nick Quintana (Arizona). All of those college hitters have top-two-round type profiles and the depth of the class means Team USA and the Cape will be deep with bats to watch this summer. There isn’t a clear top college pitcher, and none project for the top 15 picks at this point.

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PITTSBURGH — Dodgers reliever Scott Alexander had just finished his lunch and was walking down the 16th Street Mall in Denver last Friday when he received a text from Dodgers manager Dave Roberts.

“‘Hey, you’re getting your start today,”’ the text read, as Alexander remembers it. “‘One or two innings.’”

Alexander had not regularly started professional baseball games since he was in Rookie ball with the Royals in 2010.

The left-hander had watched with curiosity last month as Rays reliever Sergio Romo started back-to-back games for the Rays, ushering in a new label, “the opener,” and a new game strategy. And on that Friday at Coors Field, the movement spread to the Dodgers and the NL West, as Alexander pitched the first inning of an 11-8 win over the Rockies. The Dodgers employed the strategy again yesterday in Pittsburgh when Daniel Hudson started against the Pirates.

After learning of what the Rays were doing with Romo, Alexander approached Dodgers bullpen coach Mark Prior in the bullpen during a May 28 game at Dodger Stadium. There Alexander “half-jokingly” broached the idea with Prior, saying he would be open to “opening” for the Dodgers.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

Central to the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Josh James, RHP, Houston (Profile)
This marks James’ seventh appearance among the Five proper, and he continues to occupy the top spot on the arbitrarily calculated Scoreboard found at the bottom of this post. Of note regarding James’ season isn’t simply how well he’s performed on the whole but also how little decay his rates have experienced following the right-hander’s promotion to the Pacific Coast League.

As the table below reveals, the differential between his strikeout and walk rates is almost precisely the same at Triple-A as it was in a similar sample at Double-A.

James’ lone appearance from the past week is included in that second line. Facing Milwaukee’s affiliate in Colorado Springs, he produced a 13:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 25 batters over 7.0 innings (box). The most recent reports on his velocity continue to place his fastball in the mid-90s.

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It feels like it’s been a little time since I wrote about the strike zone. As such, it’s time to go back to the well, to a piece I get to write every season. To kick it off, how about a mention of the incredible, improbable Tyler Chatwood? Through a dozen starts, Chatwood is sitting on a sub-4 ERA. And he’s allowed only one unearned run, so, in a way, he’s already paying off. And yet, over 58.1 innings, Chatwood has 53 strikeouts and a genuinely unbelievable 56 walks. He’s running what would stand as one of the very highest walk rates in all of baseball history, and he’s routinely struggled to throw even half of his pitches for strikes. Related to this, the Cubs’ pitching staff has baseball’s highest team walk rate. The White Sox are next. The Indians’ walk rate is the lowest.

The strike zone itself is a funny thing. It is, of course, supposed to change for every hitter, depending on their height or stance, but the zone is fundamental to the game. Everything revolves around the strike zone, and there’s nothing in the rule book that would suggest that one team should get a different zone from another. But we know the team-to-team zones aren’t consistent. We actually sometimes celebrate the pitchers and catchers who can manipulate the zone to their benefit. Teams end up with friendly zones, and teams end up with less friendly zones. The zones can affect strikeouts, the zones can affect walks — the zones can affect records. It’s a part of the game we currently just have to accept.

Accept and acknowledge. Accept and observe! Accept and analyze. With the way the game is played in 2018, it’s a given that all the zones end up being a little bit different. Which teams this year have been happy about their zones? Which teams might have reason to complain? I’ve got a couple tables for you. You can skip all the words if you want. It’s only the numbers that matter.

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Madison Bumgarner made his 2018 season debut on Tuesday night, and while the Giants lost to the D-backs, the return of the 28-year-old staff ace couldn’t have come at a much better time. The team’s rotation has been a mess due to injuries and underperformance, but a surprisingly resilient offense has kept them in the thick of what’s become a four-team NL West race.

Bumgarner, who was limited to 17 starts last year due to his infamous dirt-bike accident, suffered a fractured pinkie on his left (pitching) hand via a line drive off the bat of the Royals’ Whit Merrifield back on March 23. The injury required the insertion of three small pins that were removed four weeks later. He made just two rehab starts before returning to the Giants, so despite his strong performance, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he was pulled after six innings and 82 pitches with the Giants trailing, 2-1. Of the eight hits he allowed, six came in his first three innings, with back-to-back doubles by Ketel Marte and Chris Owings and a single by Kris Negron accounting for both Arizona runs in the second inning. Bumgarner needed a bit of help from his defense to escape a two-on, no-out mess in the third, with Brandon Crawford throwing out David Peralta at the plate and then Evan Longoria and Pablo Sandoval immediately following that with a 5-3 double play. Bumgarner didn’t walk anybody, generated 10 swing-and-misses (seven via his cutter), and all three of his strikeouts came in his final two innings of work.

Alas, Bumgarner pitched on a night when D-backs starter Patrick Corbin and company were just a bit better. The Giants’ 3-2 loss ended a five-game winning streak, but they rebounded on Wednesday for a come-from-behind, walk-off win. At 31-31, they’re just 1.5 games behind the D-backs and Rockies, who are tied for the division lead at 32-29. With the Dodgers struggling out of the gate, Arizona took a commanding lead in April, but its May slide and L.A.’s recent hot streak have helped to turn the NL West back into a race:

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Yesterday was a pretty good day for hitters on the comeback trail. Jason Heyward blasted a walk-off grand slam. Matt Kemp hit another home run. Ian Desmond hit another home run. Jurickson Profar hit another two home runs. And Pablo Sandoval hit his own home run. With the Giants, Sandoval’s been only a part-time player, but over 112 trips to the plate, he’s posted a 115 wRC+. He hasn’t finished as an above-average hitter since 2014.

Let’s take a closer look at Wednesday’s game. Sandoval homered in the bottom of the first. Before that, though, he took the first pitch from Clay Buchholz. In the third inning, he again took the first pitch from Buchholz. In the fifth inning, he again took the first pitch from Buchholz. In the eighth inning, he took the first pitch from Archie Bradley. In the tenth inning, he took the first pitch from Andrew Chafin. Stick with me here, because this is going to get weird. This is bigger than you could imagine.

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The season has gone pretty well for the Yankees thus far. Sure, the team brought in Neil Walker and Brandon Drury in the offseason and they are currently below replacement level; however, those two were acquired as placeholders for Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar, and the two prospects are already succeeding in the big leagues, leaving the performance of the acquisitions moot. Greg Bird got hurt again and Tyler Austin wasn’t great. Giancarlo Stanton has only been good and not great, but Aaron Judge has been great, and Didi Gregorius and Gary Sanchez have been good while Brett Gardner and Aaron Hicks have exceeded expectations. Yankees position players lead the American League in WAR at 13 and are projected to top all of baseball the rest of the way.

On the pitching side, the Yankees have done pretty well, too. Just as they were projected, the bullpen has been the best in baseball, striking out 32% of batters faced. Luis Severino has been one of the best pitchers in baseball with a 2.15 FIP that leads all qualified starters in the American League. After Severino, the rotation hasn’t been good, but with the bullpen, the team’s 9.5 WAR is third in all of baseball.

Fortunately for the Yankees, the team’s good results have translated in the win column up to this point with 40 victories. At this moment, they are projected to win more than 100 games and finish with the best record in baseball. The Yankees may be in an enviable position; however, there are some drawbacks to being an immensely talented, super-rich franchise piling up wins like nobody’s business.

The first drawback is their main rival, the Red Sox. Boston is also an immensely talented, super-rich franchise piling up wins, and only one of these two teams is going to win the division. Despite having the two best records in baseball and the highest playoff odds in the game, the Yankees and Red Sox rank fifth and sixth, respectively, in odds of making the division series. One of the two clubs is going to have to fend for itself in the Wild Card game in what will likely be a 50/50 shot against Shohei Ohtani, James Paxton, or maybe even Justin Verlander. Winning the division is going to affect the Yankees’ odds of winning the World Series by 5%-10%, maybe more.

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