Sunday Notes: Phillies First-Rounder Adam Haseley is Getting Off the Ground

Adam Haseley was drafted eighth overall last year, so his potential goes without saying. That doesn’t mean there aren’t question marks in his profile. When Eric Longenhagen blurbed the 21-year-old University of Virginia product in our Philadelphia Phillies Top Prospects list, he cautioned that “Some scouts have concerns about his bat path.”

I asked the left-handed-hitting Haseley why that might be.

“My interpretation would be that I was wanting be more direct to the ball,” responded Haseley, who put up a .761 OPS last year between short-season and low-A. “Something I’d started doing at UVA was trying to create more launch angle — I wanted to hit balls in the air with true backspin — but coming into pro ball there was more velocity than I’d ever seen in college. I had to adjust to that, and my way of adjusting was to get more direct, which resulted in a flatter angle. Now I’m trying to find that happy medium between the two.”

His quest for middle ground remains a work in progress. Two months into his first full professional season, Haseley has a 48.4 GB% and just three home runs in 217 plate appearances with high-A Clearwater. Compare that to his final collegiate campaign, where as a Cavalier he went deep 14 times in a comparable number of chances.

Longenghagen anticipated the decline — “Haseley hit for an unexpected amount of power as a junior at UVA, but there’s skepticism about that recurring in pro ball’ — and another scouting report lends credence to his claim. Baseball America’s Prospect Handbook pointed to Haseley’s inside-out-swing, and unless you’re JD Martinez that means more liners than bombs.

Haseley acknowledged that his natural swing is more Wade Boggs than pull-side bopper.

“(An inside-out swing) is something I’ve had my whole lifetime,” Haseley told me in our mid-May conversation. “I was kind of brought up handling pitches the other way, so it’s pretty true that I’ll work up the middle and to the left side. You want to see the ball as long as you can, so I like to let it travel.”

Which brings us back to whether the ball travels by air or by ground once it leaves his bat. Haseley feels a better-balanced stride may be the key to propelling more balls in the air.

“One of the reasons I was hitting so many balls in the grass last year is that I wasn’t striding correctly,” the first-rounder theorized. “My weight was kind of moving towards the ball, and then I was kind of clipping the ball, or chopping it. I need to load with my weight back, which will put me in a better position to drive the ball.”

Recent results suggest that has begun happening more often. Over his last 12 games, Haseley is 16 for 48 with four doubles, a triple, and a home run. His seasonal slash line now sits at .281/.327/.394.

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Mike Foltynewicz is coming into his own. The Atlanta Braves right-hander boasts a 2.22 ERA and a 10.4 K-rate, and he’s allowed just 50 hits in 69 innings. His biggest strides have been from the neck up. Foltynewicz feels that reining in his emotions and going one pitch at a time has fueled his breakthrough.

“You can get in trouble when someone gets a base hit and you start thinking about where the pitch was, or about how you could have thrown it better,” the 26-year-old former first-round pick told me last week in Boston. “Sometimes you can even get into a situation where you’re 2-1 on a hitter and you start thinking about who is on deck. What you need to do is focus on getting that next pitch where you want it, because missing by a centimeter can be the difference between a ground ball and a fly ball. I’ve been working on that, and as a result have been doing a lot more pitching than throwing.

“I’ve kind of showed my emotions out there at times,” continued Foltynewicz. “That’s part of my nature. I’m really competitive. Every time I go out there I just want to win so bad, but if you let your emotions get the best of you, things can happen. You can’t let a bad call, or giving up a home run, linger in your head for a couple of at bats. If you do, you might find yourself throwing instead of pitching. I’m learning not to do that.

I opined to the erstwhile Astro — Houston traded “Folty” to Atlanta in the 2015 Evan Gattis deal — that there is often a balance to strike in such matters. Composure is clearly an asset, but at the same time, straying too far from one’s competitive nature can be detrimental.

“You’re absolutely right,” responded the righty. “You can’t be a zombie and you can’t be a chicken with your head cut off. What I’ve done is try to find that middle ground to where if something bad happens I can calm myself down. If I’ve been pitching well, I can get back to pitching well.”

He certainly did that in his last start. On Friday, Foltynewicz fanned 11 and allowed just a pair of singles while hurling a complete-game shutout over the Washington Nationals.

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Travis Sawchik’s illuminating article on Matt Davidson’s improved plate discipline prompted me to peruse my unused-quotes folder in search of an April 2017 conversation with Gary Jones. A member of the Chicago Cubs coaching staff at the time — he now manages Philadelphia’s Triple-A affiliate — Jones was once an OBP machine in the minors. In 899 games down on the farm, he got on base at a .437 clip (and somehow never got a big-league opportunity).

Given his playing-days skill set and quarter century of managing and coaching experience, I asked Jones if plate discipline is largely innate, or if it can be taught with more than a modicum of effectiveness.

“Over the years, I’ve seen guys who have good plate discipline and I’ve seen guys who don’t have good plate discipline,” Jones told me. “Is it something that can be taught? I think it’s something guys can get better at, but I don’t think a .300-on-base guy can turn into a .360-on-base guy.

“The sports psychologists we have now can help guys manage the speed of the game, the speed of their thought process, and get everything to slow down a bit. That’s one way in which guys can get better at it, but overall, a guy is who he is. The guys I’ve been around who have good plate discipline… for the most part they had it when I first saw them. A guy would get drafted and he’d come into the minors and already have it. Either he learned it early on, or he was a guy who had the ability to slow a situation down and not have these anxieties and thoughts racing through his head. Some guys are too high strung that way.”

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Nick Plummer was selected 23rd overall in the 2015 draft out of a Detroit-area high school by the Cardinals. One pick earlier, the Tigers had taken Beau Burrows, a prep pitcher out of Weatherford, Texas. Did Plummer think he might end up going to his hometown team?

“I had talked to Detroit,” Plummer told me. “I’d been in contact with all but one or two teams before the draft. We were watching when the Tigers took Beau, and it was kind of cool because I’d played in showcases with him. I didn’t think I was going to get picked there. And I actually found out that I’d been picked by the Cardinals on the TV. My agent, Sam Samardzija, decided to let me find out by watching.”

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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Evan Longoria is 32 for 78 against CC Sabathia.

Nelson Cruz is 15 for 25 against Kendall Graveman.

Christian Yelich is 14 for 32 against Jacob deGrom.

Brett Gardner is 0 for 16 against Darren O’Day.

Adrian Beltre went 0 for 25 against Darren Oliver.

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Scott Barlow made his MLB debut with the Kansas City Royals on April 30, throwing three quality innings against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. The following day, I asked Boston slugger Mitch Moreland what he saw from the 25-year-old right-hander.

“He’s kind of one of those guys I guess they call spin-rate guys,” said Moreland. “It seemed like his ball kind of got on you a little bit. He had good spin on his breaking ball, too. His changeup was pretty firm. I think he has a chance to be pretty good.”

Moreland was right in regards to spin. The sample is small — just 10-and-two-thirds big-league innings — but Barlow’s four-seam spin rate in his four big-league outings was a an above average 2,325 RPM. In the first two it was a well-above-average 2,778 RPM.

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Will Benson was drafted 14th overall out of a Georgia prep school by the Cleveland Indians in 2016. The 19-year-old is still a work in progress — his batting average is hovering around the Mendoza line — but his raw power is beyond rebuke. Benson, who weighs in at a sculpted 238 pounds, currently stands second in the Midwest League with nine round trippers.

I asked Benson how an African-American kid from Atlanta — particularly one with his build and athleticism — came to choose baseball.

“God blessed me to play this sport,” said Benson. “My parents didn’t want me to play football, which I was all on board with, so the only other sport I played was basketball. I was heavy into basketball. I wanted to play in college and then go to the NBA, but then I started to get pretty good at baseball. I started doing travel baseball instead of AAU basketball and got noticed. That’s kind of how I got to where I am now.”

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NEWSY STUFF

Bruce Kison, who pitched for three teams, most notably the Pittsburgh Pirates, from 1971-1985 passed away yesterday the age of 68. Kison went 115-88, 3.66 in 380 regular-season games, and 5-1, 1.98 in 10 post-season games.

Albert Pujols recorded career hit number 3,023 on Friday, tying him with Lou Brock for 27th most all time. Rod Carew ranks 26th, with 3.053.

The rosters have been announced for the Florida State League All-Star Game, which will be held on June 16 in Tampa. Notables include Nathaniel Lowe (Rays) who leads the circuit with a .374 batting average, and Darick Hall (Phillies) who has a league-best 11 round trippers. The youngest of the all-stars are a pair of 19-year-olds, Cristian Pache (Braves) and Isaac Paredes (Tigers).

Balloting for the 2018 MLB All-Star Game began on Friday — for the fourth consecutive season votes can be cast online only — and will conclude on July 5 at 11:50 p.m. EDT. The 89th Midsummer Classic will take place in Washington D.C. on Tuesday, July 17.

A reminder that the national SABR convention will be held from June 20-24 at the Wyndham Grand in downtown Pittsburgh. The featured speakers include Steve Blass, Joe Block, Dick Bosman, John Candelaria, Dan Fox, and Neal Huntington.

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Like many professional athletes, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Kevin Pillar devotes time and money to charitable causes. Unlike most, his efforts are focused outside of North America.

“My wife has an older friend in Toronto, a Jewish man, and after my grandfather passed away he proposed an idea of starting a charity in his name at Tel Aviv University,” explained Pillar. “Basically, it gives kids a scholarship opportunity to attend school there in the accounting department. That’s something my grandfather did. Every athlete is presented an opportunity like this, and my grandfather was a mentor and a role model in our family, so this seemed fitting. To honor him like this is a cool thing.”

Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University, in support of the Pillar-Lambert Scholarship Fund at Tel Aviv University, will be hosting a golf tournament in King City, Ontario on June 14. The event, according to Pillar, will “hopefully raise a significant amount of money to send multiple kids to school for free.”

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

At The Chicago Tribune, Paul Sullivan wrote about how Danny Farquhar’s recovery is motivating his White Sox teammates.

Over at Tubbs Baseball Blog, John Tuberty wrote about how Dwight Evans overcame a mid-career crisis to evolve into a Hall of Fame-caliber player.

A blown call cost Detroit’s Armando Galarraga a perfect game on June 2, 2010, and Chad Moody wrote about it for SABR’s Game Project.

At Let’s Go Tribe, Merritt Rohlfing explored the possibility that Josh Tomlin may be approaching the end of the line.

ESPN’s David Schoenfield looked at the best draft picks ever and the one that got away for all 30 teams.

Also at ESPN, Jesse Rogers shared how Tommy La Stella is on pace to break Gates Brown’s 1968 record for the highest OBP (.542) for a pinch hitter with a minimum of 40 at-bats in a season.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

Nine players taken by the Detroit Tigers in the 1976 draft went on to play in MLB. Four of them — Jack Morris, Dan Petry, Ozzie Smith, and Alan Trammell — combined for 205.8 WAR.

On this date in 1980, the New York Mets selected Darryl Strawberry, a 18-year-old outfielder from Los Angeles, with the first pick of the June amateur draft. Also taken in the first round that year were Billy Beane, Terry Francona, John Gibbons, and Rick Renteria.

On this date in 1933, the Philadelphia Athletics scored 11 runs in the top of the third inning to take an 11-3 lead over the New York Yankees. The home team subsequently scored 10 in the bottom of the fifth and went on to win 17-11. Jumbo Brown tossed six-and-a-third scoreless innings, punched out 12, and was credited with the W.

Joey Votto leads all players with 809 walks since the beginning of the 2011 season. He’s struck out 773 times over that span.

Brian Anderson is the only rookie to appear in each of his team’s games this year. The Miami Marlins third baseman/outfielder is slashing .282/.357/.380 and leads all rookies in hits (60) and runs scored (30).

Astros shortstop Carlos Correa has handled 200 chances this season and has yet to be charged with an error.

Madison Bumgarner is 15-9 with a 2.53 ERA in 29 career games (28 of them starts) against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Clayton Kershaw is 22-10 with a 1.60 ERA in 43 career games (42 of them starts) against the San Francisco Giants.

Dave Stewart went 168-129 with a 100 adjusted ERA. Pat Dobson went 122-129 with a 100 adjusted ERA.

Rich “El Guapo” Garces went 19-3 out of the Red Sox bullpen from 1999-2001.