The Rays are big fans of Corey Dickerson. You don’t have to just take my word for it. Consider that the Rays exchanged a valuable trade commodity to get him. And since Dickerson has joined the roster, the Rays have at times gushed over his swing and his approach. They love his natural aggressiveness, and they love the way the ball comes off of the bat. Dickerson is skilled, for a purely offensive player, and if anything the Rays would like more hitters like him.

Dickerson is a great individual indicator of the Rays’ move toward a more aggressive lineup. As they say, Dickerson goes up there prepared to take a swing. Okay, now, think about aggressive hitters. Think about aggressive power hitters, and how they succeed, and how they fail. Dickerson has seen new opponents in a new league, but what they’re doing might in one sense not be surprising at all. Provided you forget about Dickerson’s background.

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Originally I wanted to sit here and write about the Reds’ godawful bullpen. But then the research started bumming me out, so I turned my focus to the opposite of the Reds’ godawful bullpen, which is Andrew Miller. I find Miller to be much more pleasing, so here comes stuff about him.

You might remember that, before the year, Miller sustained a fracture in his non-throwing wrist. So there was concern that he’d have to be sidelined for a while, which would deal a blow to the Yankees’ biggest strength, but Miller opted to play through the discomfort. He’s so far allowed an OPS of .273. He has an xFIP- a little over 0, an ERA- of exactly 0, and an FIP- somehow under 0. No less deliciously, Miller is presently the only pitcher in baseball who’s gotten a higher rate of swings at pitches out of the zone than at pitches inside of the zone. Andrew Miller basically turns hitters into pitchers, except he turns them into pitchers who have to be hitters. To make matters worse for them, they’re effectively pitcher-hitters at the highest-leverage spots. Andrew Miller is good.

There are so many ways to demonstrate how Andrew Miller is good. That paragraph demonstrates it. Everything after this demonstrates it. I decided to pull up Miller’s log of plate appearances on the year, and sort them by leverage. I looked to see how Miller has done in the toughest of the tough situations. Miller so far has 33 batters faced. Here are the 10 most important showdowns.

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I don’t know what the scariest thing is about the Cubs. It might be that they have baseball’s best record, and a historically excellent run differential. Or maybe it’s that they have baseball’s best record, and a historically excellent run differential, while Jason Heyward has been a worse hitter than Alexei Ramirez (who has been a bad hitter). Heyward hasn’t gotten going yet, not even a little bit, and the Cubs have barely noticed. You might feel like the Cubs are overhyped. I get it. And, you’re wrong.

Let’s preface this with something. We’re about to talk about Heyward’s offensive struggles. Heyward has a career 116 wRC+, and he’s 26 years old, so he’s probably not broken. Not beyond repair. His career wRC+ in the first month is 96 — he’s genuinely something of a slow starter. There’s every reason to expect that Heyward is going to settle into a groove at some point. Typically, given enough time, good players find their level. This doesn’t mean Heyward hasn’t had a bad start, though. He knows it. The coaches know it. And to this point, Heyward has shown a somewhat unusual plan of attack. Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, I don’t know.

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Ben and Sam banter about their book release, Dylan Bundy, and juiced baseballs, then revisit the Pedro Martinez-Clayton Kershaw comparison.

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Adam Conley is surprising some with his sophomore effort, just by seemingly repeating what he did in his debut last year. His velocity, ERA, WHIP — even his swinging-strike and ground-ball rates — are all about the same as they were in 2015. But he’s different! In important ways.

Late last year, in the midst of a decent debut with the Marlins that saw him hitting 94 mph on the radar gun and shutting out the Mets on their way to the World Series, the lefty starter saw a picture of himself and froze. “I really didn’t like what I saw,” Conley told me a few days before he no-hit the Brewers for seven-plus innings this year. “It didn’t look like what I thought I looked like.”

Maybe the image was something like this one from his start against the Nationals late last season. “I could see in the picture that my front side was gone completely and my foot wasn’t down,” Conley says. “My foot is floating through the air and I’m trying to throw the ball.”

But once he saw that thing, he was convinced. He had to get back to the things he’d heard growing up, when he took the drive to Pete Wilkinson’s camp to work on his pitching mechanics. He had to get away from results-oriented development — “throughout the minor leagues, they would talk about results a lot,” he said — and get back to making sure his process was good.

The effort was two-pronged. He had to make sure he was getting his power from the right places, and he had to make sure his pitches worked together. The results brought him back to where he was, in a more sustainable way, with differences that appear once you look under the hood. And as he describes it all, you start to hear all of the things that we’ve been hearing recently as the new numbers have caught up to the pitching coaches.

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Over the weekend, Ken Rosenthal reported that the possibility of Ryan Braun being traded “was becoming more realistic”, as Braun is off to a fantastic start to the 2016 season, and he’s starting to put some distance between himself and the BioGenesis scandal that cost him half the 2013 season and a good chunk of his reputation. Since the suspension, Braun hasn’t played up to his previously established levels of performance, and when combined with his contract and the baggage surrounding how he handled his failed test, he was mostly an immovable object.

But with Braun hitting .372/.443/.605 — yeah, that is heavily inflated by a .409 BABIP, but his early season strikeout rate is back in line with Peak Braun levels, and he can still hit the ball a long way — and only four guaranteed years left on his deal after this season, dealing Braun is starting to look like something that could happen. It’s almost a certainty that the Brewers will take on some of his remaining contract in any deal in order to get better talent in return, with the question of how much of the remaining ~$90 million they’ll keep on their books being settled depending on how well he keeps hitting and what other sluggers hit the market this summer.

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Dee Gordon‘s recent suspension has renewed the conversation about how to deter and punish PED users. The issue is complicated for a number of reasons. One specific reason — which I discussed this past Friday — concerns the possible benefit to owners of PED suspensions. Teams who employ aging players with large contracts actually benefit when those players are penalized by suspensions without pay. The longer the suspension, the greater the benefit. The principal examples of this at work involve the Yankees (with Alex Rodriguez and his PED suspension) and the Angels (and their frustrations concerning Josh Hamilton’s lack of suspension for substance abuse).

The noteworthy aspect regarding Gordon’s case, of course, is that he had just received a five-year, $50 million extension this winter. Naturally, the Marlins’ decision to offer Gordon an extension was based, in no small part, on his excellent 2015 season. But was Gordon’s success in 2015 based at all on the positive effects of PEDs? And when he returns to the club in the second half, will he be able to match that success without the aid of PEDs? Did Gordon essentially “dupe” the Marlins into $50 million?

The issue has little to do with moral integrity, but is instead purely financial. The possibility exists for a player to use PEDs, sign a big contract, then get suspended and see his performance decline while the owner remains on the hook for the contract. Players object to this sort of scenario because they see money going to players who are cheating instead of those who play clean. Owners, who have had little problem benefiting from players’ performances even if they are cheating, naturally object to the prospect of owing guaranteed money to players who are unable to provide production at a level commensurate with their contract.

While there is certainly a possibility of PED users benefiting from a large extension or free-agent contract, the questions is, has it actually happened? For this post, I attempted to identify situations in which an owner had been “duped” in this manner during the previous dozen years of PED suspensions.

Major League Baseball began suspending players in 2005, but the suspensions at that time were only for 10- days, hardly an indication that MLB was really ready for meaningful enforcement. Beginning in 2006, the penalty was increased to 50 games, and then in 2014, the current 80-game penalty for first-time offense was instituted. While MLB also suspends for amphetamines, the penalties are less stringent, and the stigma is not anywhere near the same. For the purposes of this post, those cases have been omitted. That leaves us with 31 players and 35 suspensions of at least 50 game since 2006.

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Jose Iglesias is a shortstop capable of doing some pretty terrific things on a baseball field. I say that now because there’s going to be plenty of .gifs in this post that paint Iglesias in a not-so-positive light, and it can be a weird feeling to make a player look bad based solely upon which clips you’ve hand-chosen to show, so here, look at all the incredible things Jose Iglesias is capable of doing on defense. There. Those are the kinds of plays that earn you a reputation.

And Iglesias has certainly earned a reputation. He had earned the reputation before he ever stepped on a big league field. He was named the best defensive infielder in the Red Sox system by Baseball America from 2009 to 2012. In 2010, he was named the best defensive shortstop in the entire Eastern League, and received those same honors in the International League each of the next two seasons. From that same publication’s scouting report of him in 2010, as the No. 1 prospect in Boston’s farm system a year before his MLB debut:

Iglesias is an exceptional defender who could challenge for a Gold Glove in the big leagues right now. He plays low to the ground, using his quick feet, lightning-fast hands and strong arm to make all the plays. His instincts and body control also stand out, and he made just seven errors in 57 games at short last season. He’s fearless in the field, almost to the point of overconfidence, but he makes more web gems than mistakes.

The reputation was what it was, and it’s since carried over to the big-league level. And yet, in about two full season’s worth of major-league playing time at shortstop (1,991 innings), Iglesias has but three Defensive Runs Saved to his name. Baseball Prospectus’ Fielding Runs Above Average actually has him below average, crediting him with -0.8 runs saved over the course of his still-short career. Ultimate Zone Rating is the only defensive metric with anything more than an average assessment of Iglesias’ defense, and even that pegs him as a +13 defender over two seasons, which is certainly good, but still comes up short of the perennial Gold Glove types around whom Iglesias’ name is mentioned.

Understandably, folks have been skeptical of these assessments. It’s something our very own Neil Weinberg addressed last fall. As a community, our understanding of how to properly evaluate defense has always lagged behind other facets of the game, but the good news is, it’s getting better every day! It’s still far from perfect, but between the arrival of Statcast and advancements made by Baseball Info Solutions and Inside Edge, we’ve got more pieces to the puzzle than ever before. And they’re already helping explain some of our outliers, guys whose performance by the metrics have never aligned with the scouting reports or eye tests. Like Dexter Fowler, who we discovered was playing more shallow than any center fielder in baseball, and that it was killing his defensive metrics. The Cubs realized this, and have repositioned him. Let’s see if we can’t use some of these same advancements to better figure out the Jose Iglesias mystery.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman 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
Philadelphia at St. Louis | 20:15 ET
Nola (33.0 IP, 67 xFIP-) vs. Wacha (29.1 IP, 93 xFIP-)
Despite their 15-11 record, the most likely outcome for the 2016 iteration of the Phillies remains the very dim one intimated by this site’s preseason projections. The club’s BaseRuns record — which metric strips out sequencing — is the fifth-worst in the majors. The team’s hitters, meanwhile, have produced the second-worst collective WAR. They possess a 0.1% probability of qualifying for the postseason. What oughtn’t be ignored, however, is the starting rotation. As a group, they’ve recorded the league’s highest strikeout rate and fifth-best collective WAR. Entirely central to that effort has been right-hander Aaron Nola. Despite having produced an average fastball velocity of just 90.0 mph, Nola has nevertheless parlayed impressive command and largely unhittable curveball into one of the league’s best pitching lines.

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