Justin Bour is going to participate in the Home Run Derby tonight. He’s tied with a bunch of other guys at 16th in baseball with 20 homers. He’ll surpass his previous career high early in the second half.

This is the point at which we normally address a crazy mechanical change a player’s made, allowing him to reach a new level of performance. That crazy change might not exist in Bour’s case, though.

The player himself doesn’t think there’s a big adjustment in his rear-view mirror. “From being in pro ball to now, I’ve only made minor changes to my swing, but for the most part, I’ve always just been myself and tried to get a little better every day,” Bour said before this past weekend’s series against the Giants.

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If I know you, you’ve been around long enough to have seen a number of these. There isn’t much in the way of variation. Over a large enough timescale, the worst called ball will come on a pitch thrown in the vicinity of the middle of the strike zone. There’s no alternative. Those are the clearest, most obvious strikes, so when they’re not strikes, they’re lousy called balls. They all look more or less alike in that regard. So exploration is just about filling in the details. When did this particular bad call happen? Who was the umpire who made the actual call? Which pitcher threw the pitch? Which catcher caught — or didn’t catch — the pitch? What was the situation at the time? Did the call end up mattering much?

I’ve written the same post a whole bunch of times. I’ve done the same research, to end up with the same kind of play. Just about always, the call happens because the catcher sets up somewhere, and then the pitcher badly misses. I usually make some reference to how it’s evidence that framing does matter. Catchers struggle to catch pitches headed for surprising locations. You can “earn” a ball, even when you throw a pitch down the pipe.

This is another play that wasn’t very clean. We’re going back to June 18, in the first inning of a game between the Rangers and the Mariners. Danny Valencia got ahead in the count 1-and-0 against Yu Darvish, because Darvish and catcher Robinson Chirinos failed to properly execute. But this time, there’s a twist. This isn’t the same post as always.

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Can the home-run spike be enjoyed equally across the game?

Some hitters are in better position to take advantage of what might be a juiced ball. Some environments, like Yankee Stadium II and Chase Field, are more favorable to fly balls from the hitter’s perspective. With home-run rates rising per fly ball (HR/FB) across the game, however, it seems at times as though no park is immune to the invasion of the long ball. It seems like we’re running out of pitching-friendly environments.

So that brings me to the curious case of the Padres.

The Padres lead the National League in percentage of runs scored via the home run (46.2%). They Padres would have not been my first guess, but I asked FanGraphs’ own Joe Douglas to research teams’ share of runs off home runs and this is what he found:

Now, the Padres are also last in runs scored (305) — in large part because of their league-worst .295 on-base percentage — so it’s not as though this penchant for the long ball has translated directly to offensive proficiency. But the club ranks second in fly-ball percentage (37%), trailing only the outlier Mets (43%), and is tied for third in GB/FB ratio (1.20). The Padres, despite their home, are hunting fly balls and homers and are having some success.

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Over the weekend, the Twins called up speedy center fielder Zach Granite from Triple-A. Granite is a KATOH darling who made my preseason 2017 All-KATOH Team and has been featured regularly on the Fringe Five. Granite’s a stats-over-scouts guy through and through.

I first became aware of Granite around this time last year, when he ranked very highly on KATOH’s midseason top-100 list. At the time, there was little to his profile aside from elite contact and speed. He stole an outrageous 56 bases and played elite defense in center, while also running a strikeout rate in the single-digits. Despite his extreme contact, he only managed to hit a respectable-but-punchless .295/.347/.382.

He’s ramped up his hitting this year. In 59 games at the Triple-A level, he slashed .360/.412/.492, including a .446/.503/.619 tear over his last 36 games. His stolen bases and single-digit strikeout rate remain, but he appears to be driving the ball a bit more than he did in the past. His ISO has spiked to a not-quite-punchless .131, while his BABIP has jumped to .394. Twenty-one extra-base hits in 59 games is respectable, even if that total has been aided by his speed.

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It’s that time of year again: baseball is taking most of the week off to host an exhibition game, and we’re ranking the 50 most valuable trade chips in baseball while they do so. If you aren’t familiar with the series, go read the honorable-mentions post, which includes the introduction and an explanation of what this whole thing is.

As one additional point of explanation, the tables that we’re including below show a few pieces of information: the years remaining before the player is eligible for free agency, whether those years are covered by the arbitration system or a multi-year contract, the guaranteed money owed to the player if a long-term deal is in place, and the ZiPS projections for the player for each year that he’s under control of his current club. The ZiPS forecasts are there to help you get an idea for what one forecasting system thinks of the player’s long-term future, though the players are not ranked solely based on these projections. At the end of the post, we’ll summarize each individual player’s information box with a grid showing all the players ranked in the series so far, and that grid includes the same reference information.

With that said, let’s get right to the guys who made the final 10 spots on the Trade Value list this year.

This last spot was really tough. There are so many players you could put here, with probably 10 to 15 guys having just as strong a case as Lamb for this spot. Even just within third baseman, you could make a case for Justin Turner or Kyle Seager, and then there are all the other good players at other positions who didn’t quite make the cut. If you feel strongly that some other player should be No. 50, I probably don’t disagree with you. Rounding out the list turned into an exercise of picking one of many similarly valuable players.

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After this past offseason’s lack of oomph, the winter between the 2013 and 2014 seasons feels like a different time. In the span of two months, Robinson Cano, Jacoby Ellsbury, Clayton Kershaw, and Masahiro Tanaka signed $150 million-plus contracts. It’s not the last time that’s happened: the 2015-16 offseason featured the same number of deals — to Chris Davis, Zack Greinke, Jason Heyward, and David Price — above the $150 million threshold. But there’s enough distance between that earlier offseason and now that it’s possible to review the performances of the relevant players and reconsider the years ahead for them. And as a competitive Yankees club prepares for the second half of the season, it’s worth wondering what will become of former star center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury.

When Ellsbury first signed his deal, Dave Cameron examined (not for the first time) how well fast outfielders with good defense tend to age and noted that it would be dangerous to lump Ellsbury in with Carl Crawford. This was a fair and calm assessment of Ellsbury’s value. He noted that Ellsbury was projected to be a four-win player in 2014, and that over the life of his seven-year deal, Ellsbury was projected to be worth 17.5 WAR. The first part absolutely came true — Ellsbury tallied 4.1 WAR in 2014, his first with the Yankees. The latter projection, however, isn’t working out quite so well.

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