Just a couple of weeks ago, the Cardinals were just behind the Brewers in the National League Central. Just over a week ago, the Cardinals pulled just barely ahead of the Brewers. Today, after taking three of four against Milwaukee, including yesterday’s 9-1 crushing, the Cardinals are five games up on the Brewers, who are actually now in third next to the Pirates. Over the last week the Brewers’ rotation has not exactly made its defenders look good.

While one could go on about the Brewers’ fall, the Cardinals are the main story. They have never really been out of it. At the beginning of the season, St. Louis was a solid favorite to win their division. Two months ago, when they were four games behind the Brewers, the Cardinals’ chances of winning the division were roughly the same as the Brewers. Today, they are overwhelming favorites.

The 2014 Cardinals are not clearly dominant in either pitching or hitting. In particular, on the offensive side they have not hit nearly as well as the 2013 team. Yet they again are poised to win the division. In many ways, the regression was predictable. But does that mean the Cardinals made mistakes when preparing for 2014?

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Nothing groundbreaking here. The primary trend discussed has been discussed at length in other places, with far superior analysis. Here is one example! During the PITCHf/x era, through last season, umpires were granting more and more low strikes. Now we have most of a new season’s worth of data, and, guess what? Trend’s still alive. Trend’s still thriving. There’s never been a better time to be alive as a low strike, provided low strikes appreciate the company of others. We will, henceforth, focus on what I’ve elected to refer to as the zone of interest, because it is our present zone of interest:

The black box is an approximation of the average rule-book strike zone. The red zone of interest is somewhat arbitrary, but it more than gets the job done. Sometimes you don’t need to call on superior analytical techniques. Which is good for me, because I don’t know them. Data’s on the way! Thank you, Baseball Savant.

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Nobody could ever accuse Kevin Towers of being anything less than bold. Few teams have been as interesting as the Arizona Diamondbacks over the last few years. Setting aside the quality of his moves, the sheer volume and often puzzling circumstances surrounding them garnered Arizona more headlines than such a middling team typically deserves.

His moves cut against the grain of prizing young, cheap talent and instead focused on a loose set of criteria, most of which was derived from the ability to play above one’s tools. It didn’t make the team better but it sure spilled a lot of ink. The problem is a simple one: a general manager’s job is to win and make money for the club, not generate think-pieces and schadenfreude. The Diamondbacks didn’t win and now Towers is out as the general manager, with the search for his replacement beginning in earnest (the list of candidates is as long as your arm.)

The Diamondbacks team  Towers inherited wasn’t a world beater, though it did claim the 2011 National League West crown. One could convincingly argue that the franchise is actually in worse shape now compared to Towers’ first day on the job. What exactly has the outgoing general manager left the next person to fill his chair? More than you might think.

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Talking to a player like Sam Fuld — one with an analytical mind and questions about the game — can be all sorts of fun. Like this week, he suggested that teams might switch corner outfielders in the middle of a game for defensive reasons.

“If you have extremely varied skill levels in the outfield in the corners, between right and left field, like an elite right fielder defensively and a slugger in left,” Fuld said, “I think we’re going to see those guys flip flop within an inning depending on who’s coming up.”

This isn’t something that would make sense on most teams. Most left and right fielders are too close in talent to move around just because a right-handed pull hitter is at the plate. Even with a recent high-profile defensive whiff, it wouldn’t make sense to move Jayson Werth to left and Bryce Harper to right when lefty pull hitters are at the plate. The small defensive upgrade would be negated by the unfamiliarity with the other outfield corner.

“It would only occur when you have one really good and one really bad defensive corner outfielder,” Fuld agreed, adding: “If you get a right-handed pull hitter, you might want that elite defender in left.”

Let’s look at the defensive numbers of teammate corner outfielders over the past two years and see who might be a candidate for this switch. The following teammates had more than a 15-run discrepancy in defensive prowess (measured by Ultimate Zone Rating per 150 games):

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Jeff Passan is one of the most aggressive advocates for FanGraphs in the mainstream media, regularly citing data and concepts from our leaderboards and helping to educate the masses about different ways of viewing baseball. He’s certainly not an old-school guy who wants to be left alone with his pitcher wins and RBIs, and he’s more than happy to embrace new ideas supported by data. But he still has some problems with WAR, and specifically, the defensive component that can allow lesser hitters to be listed as among the most valuable players in the game alongside some of baseball’s greatest sluggers. To get an entire sense of his argument, read the whole piece, but here’s a selection that sums up his argument:

Defense does have its place in WAR. Just not in its present incarnation, not until we know more. Not until we can account for positioning on the field. Not until we can find out the exact speed a ball leaves a bat and how quickly the fielder gets a jump and the angle on the ball and the efficiency with which he reaches it. Not until we understand more about fielding, which will allow us to understand how to properly mete out value on a defensive play, which may take years, yes, but look how long it took us to get to this point, where we know more about hitting and pitching than anyone ever thought possible.

The hackneyed Luddites who bleat “WAR, what is it good for, absolutely nothing” should not see this as a sympathetic view. On the contrary, WAR is an incredible idea, an effort to democratize arguments over who was best. Bringing any form of objectivity to such singularly subjective statements is extremely challenging and worthwhile work.

Which is why this at very least warrants more of a conversation among those who are in charge of it. They’ve changed WAR formulas before. They’ll change them again. And when they do, hopefully the reach of defensive metrics will be minimized.

I don’t agree with everything Passan wrote in the piece, but his criticisms of the metric aren’t entirely off base. It is easier to evaluate run scoring than run prevention. WAR is flawed and an imperfect model. Some of the assumptions in the construction of the model may be entirely incorrect, and as we get more information, we may very well find that some of the conclusions that WAR suggested were incorrect, and maybe not by a small amount. Just as the statistical community is quick to highlight the problems with pitcher wins and RBIs, it is fair for Passan to highlight the problems with WAR, especially if the purpose of that discussion is to help improve the model.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Kansas City at Detroit | 16:08 ET
Jeremy Guthrie (179.2 IP, 113 xFIP-, 1.2 WAR) faces Justin Verlander (178.0 IP, 111 xFIP-, 2.6 WAR). The Royals and Tigers are currently projected, by the methodology employed by this site, to record 89.4 and 89.1 total wins, respectively, this season — figures which the discerning reader will recognize as “largely indistinct” from each other. That the two clubs are both members of the AL Central and are both attempting to vanquish the other and are actually playing each other tonight — this is a recipe for drama. Or, in the parlance of those New Englanders who employ the intrusive R: a recipe for drammer.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Detroit Radio.

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We can’t ever be sure exactly who a player is. Some guys are easier to project than others. Some guys have many years of data and consistent results. Guys like Hunter Pence or Ben Zobrist. Other guys have minimal data and inconsistent results. Danny Salazar is a guy like that.

Nevertheless, a large portion of what we do is try to figure out exactly who players are. We can’t have a definitive answer as to what a player’s true talent level is, but we do have data. We do have video, and we do have people inside the game with whom to converse. Let’s combine these three things and try to figure out what to make of Danny Salazar.

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Matt Kemp has had a terrible season.

He’s been worth only 0.9 WAR — close enough within the margin of error to refer to him as a “replacement-level player” — and he’s being paid $21 million to do it. He was so awful in center field that the Dodgers removed him from the spot in late May despite not having a reasonable alternative. No, really, they first turned to Andre Ethier, then to Scott Van Slyke, then to Yasiel Puig — then pushed Kemp to left field before eventually finding him a home in right field. His reaction to the move was so poor that he didn’t start for five consecutive games, around which he had an 0-18 streak. His agent, former pitcher Dave Stewart, couldn’t stop talking about how much he’d like to see a trade. That didn’t happen, obviously, in part because no one would reasonably want any part of his large contract.

Matt Kemp has had a great season.

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Ben and Sam banter about Ben’s encounter with Roger Angell, then discuss Comeback Player of the Year candidates for 2015.

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