On Tuesday evening, Orioles’ first baseman Chris Davis launched a 445-foot home run to center field off Tampa Bay’s James Shields to place himself in elite company. It marked his sixth-consecutive game in which he hit at least one home run, making him the 19th player in Major League history to accomplish that feat.

In the American League, the last player to hit a home run in at least six-consecutive games was Kevin Mench in April 2006, but some of the other names include Lou Gehrig, Roger Maris, Jim Thome, and Reggie Jackson (the only other Baltimore Orioles player). The longest stretch of consecutive games with at least one home run is eight games, which is held by three players — Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly, and Dale Long.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. True-Talent Leaderboards: September
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

True-Talent Leaderboards: September
Regarding What Is a True-Talent Leaderboard
A true-talent leaderboard, in this case, is the sort of board that features league leaders over the past month in regressed and defense-independent batting and pitching.

Regarding True-Talent Leaderboard, Its Use
A true-talent leaderboard, such as the ones that follows, is useful insofar as it allows one to see which players have excelled of late by those metrics which both (a) most directly inform run creation/prevention and (b) become reliable rather quickly.

A True-Talent Leaderboard, To What It’s Similar
It would be entirely fair to say that a true-talent leaderboard is similar to — even, perhaps, the exact same thing as — the SCOUT leaderboards the author has published in these Notes periodically (like, for this year’s minor-league leaders, for example, or for assorted summer college leagues). Click here to learn more about it.

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A few weeks ago, I advocated for a wild card play-in game strategy that involved beginning the game with a reliever and relying heavily on a team’s bullpen to get them through. In that scenario, we used the Atlanta Braves as the example of how it could work. Well, we’re not yet to the wild card play-in game, but with Texas and Oakland going head to head for the AL West title in a few hours, we’re presented with another situation where skipping the starter makes a lot of sense – specifically, the Oakland A’s should try to maximize their chances of winning Game 162, and they can do so by diminishing A.J. Griffin’s role in today’s game.

Make no mistake, Griffin has pitched really well for the A’s since they called him up from Sacramento in late June. While his ERA is heavily dependent on an unsustainably low BABIP, his FIP and xFIP are both above average as well, as his 3.76 K/BB ratio is the kind of thing that usually leads to success. This isn’t a knock on A.J. Griffin – the A’s can simply maximize their chances of winning by minimizing the amount of batters he faces.

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Ben and Sam discuss the Mariners’ decision to bring in (and lower) Safeco Field’s fences, then talk about what the seasons of Tsuyoshi Nishioka and Norichika Aoki say about the difficulty of projecting the performance of Japanese imports.

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Episode 253
FanGraphs author and proprietor of Mariners SB Nation blog Lookout Landing Jeff Sullivan fights baseball with his words.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 54 min. play time.)

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Monday night, the Athletics played a critical game against the Rangers, which is not what this is about. The starter and the winning pitcher for the Athletics was Jarrod Parker, which is more what this is about. Parker allowed three runs in six innings, with two walks and six whiffs. One notes that, through his first 13 starts of the season, Parker had 39 walks and 61 strikeouts. One notes that, over his final 16 starts of the season, Parker had 24 walks and 79 strikeouts. And a higher ERA. But anyway.

Early on in the Oakland/Texas action, I got people on Twitter asking me to whip up a .gif. It seemed Jarrod Parker had thrown a particularly unhittable pitch to Josh Hamilton to close out the top of the first inning, and people wanted to be able to watch that pitch over and over in a low-quality repeating image. I didn’t immediately make a .gif, because I was otherwise occupied, but I made the .gif just a little while ago. And then I .giffed the last pitch Parker threw to Hamilton in the top of the third inning, too. They are presented below for your viewing pleasure, or for your viewing torture, if you are Josh Hamilton.

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In September, we reported a number of stories related to the business of baseball.  There have been some recent developments, so we now provide this update.

Getting Home From Late-Night Nationals’ Postseason Games

We reported in mid-September about the difficulties facing Nationals fans when weekday games run very late due to the midnight closing time of the Washington Metro (the subway operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority). The issue had been brewing all season, and with the Nationals headed to the postseason — when games traditionally start later to accommodate the national TV broadcasts — concerns were raised about how to ensure that Nationals fans could reliably get home from weekday postseason games.  The Metro will stay open an hour later, but only if the person or company requesting the additional hour pre-pays a deposit of nearly $30,000.  The Nationals seemed poised to make that deposit, until Major League Baseball expressed concerns about “setting a precedent.”

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