Jackie Bradley Jr. has been doing amazing things. To be absolutely clear, they’ve all been doing amazing things. Every last one of them. That 91 mile-per-hour sinker outside? Amazing. That opposite-field roller past the shortstop? Amazing. The reason we bother to pay attention in the first place is because everything that happens out there is amazing, performed by amazing players. Yet Bradley has been particularly amazing. Here’s an amazing thing from yesterday:

Bradley is riding a long hitting streak, and while we don’t really care too much about hitting streaks, on their own, they’re tightly correlated to good offense. That’s what we do care about. This year, Bradley ranks eighth in baseball in wRC+, between Manny Machado and Nick Castellanos. Of course, some things still look a little weird — Aledmys Diaz, for example, ranks second. So looking over the past calendar year, Bradley ranks 15th. That covers 401 trips to the plate, and he’s sandwiched between Machado and Nelson Cruz. Regardless of whether this is for real, Bradley is now definitely a hitter. And in this season, he seems to have taken one more step.

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Harrison Bader is raking in his first full season of pro ball. The 21-year-old St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect ranks second in the Double-A Texas League with a .351 batting average. Batting leadoff for Springfield, Bader boasts a .401 OBP and his slugging percentage is a sporty .554.

Last year, he hit the ground running after being drafted in the third round out of the University of Florida. Splitting his debut campaign between the New York-Penn and Midwest Leagues, the Bronxville, New York native put up an .891 OPS. This year he’s been even better, which he partly attributes to being a sponge.

Bader talked about his approach to the game, including his insatiable thirst for knowledge, earlier this week.

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Bader on how he identifies as a hitter: “I don’t see myself as a power guy. Not by any means. I think that’s evident from where I’m batting in the lineup at this level. I’m a leadoff hitter, so I’m expected to get on base as often as possible. I’m expected to work a lot of counts, have a high level of plate discipline and a good understanding of the strike zone. I also need to know my hitting zone, where I can do damage.

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The introduction of granular ball-in-play data has changed baseball analysis in numerous ways. While traditional methods of evaluation remain invaluable, they can now be supplemented by hard data that can explain what our eyes are telling us, just as our eyes can at times help explain the numbers.

Park factors have been a part of baseball analysis for at least a generation now. Some versions are calculated very simply, others are much more complex. Most would agree that a single year is way too little data upon which to generate meaningful park factors; rolling three- or four-year metrics are often utilized.

Well, I would submit that there is a lot we can learn from park factors generated over very short periods of time, provided that granular exit speed and angle data is integrated. Today, let’s look at some fairly crude context-adjusted park factors based on data from opening day through May 11 of this season.

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It’s May 19th, and the Phillies are in first second place in the National League East. Yes, the Phillies. The team that generated a 1,000 “tanking is ruining the sport” articles this winter has, six weeks into the season, the third-best record in the National League. As Jeff Sullivan noted this morning, their remarkably excellent bullpen has been one of the primary drivers of the early success, with David Hernandez and Hector Neris surprisingly emerging as dominant forces in the middle innings, and Jeanmar Gomez driving another nail into the coffin of the necessity of a “proven closer”. And yet, despite being in second place at this point, if you look at our current playoff odds, you wouldn’t actually know that the Phillies are off to a great start.

See that flat line across the bottom? That’s the Phillies. Their 24-17 start hasn’t moved the needle, at all, on our forecasts expectations for their chances of reaching the postseason. Okay, that’s not exactly true; they’ve gone from a 0.1% chance of winning one of the two Wild Card spots in our preseason forecast all the way up to a 0.3% chance of getting to the play-in game now. But their odds of hanging on to the NL East? Still close enough zero to round down when displaying one decimal point.

This is, to some, puzzling. A question in my chat yesterday brought up the point that our system is far more bearish on the Phillies hot start leading to postseason success than others; Baseball Prospectus gives them a 2.3% chance of winning the division and a 7.6% chance of getting a Wild Card spot, for 10% overall odds of reaching the playoffs. FiveThirtyEight is even more bullish than that, putting them at 4% to win the NL East and 13% to reach the postseason. So why is our system so stubborn relative to others attempting to look into the same crystal ball in order to see what the final standings will look like in October?

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If you were looking to rank early-season National League storylines, the Pirates playing at an 87-win pace probably wouldn’t be near the top of the list. As a narrative, it doesn’t compete with the scorching-hot Cubs, the surprising Phillies, a team that can’t win home games in Atlanta, and plenty of exciting individual players. Our preseason projections had the Pirates finishing the year with 83 wins, so it’s not all that interesting to point out that they’re playing slightly ahead of that pace. And that’s before acknowledging that most people thought the model was a little light on the National League’s eternal Wild Card.

So, you might be asking, why would the author call attention to the Pirates performance to date if it’s essentially what a reasonable person would have expected from them seven short weeks ago?

While the Pirates are winning baseball games at roughly the expected rate, they are not doing so in the manner we expected. Observe:

The Pirates average run differential in 2016 is similar to the expectation (+0.05 vs +0.11), but they are essentially scoring and allowing a full run more per game. Of course, we’re only 39 games into the season, so this isn’t to say that the projections were wrong and we should disregard them, but rather that the Pirates have looked different than we expected for the first quarter of the year.

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Thanks to the wealth of new Statcast data that’s entered the public sphere over the last two seasons — including information on batted-ball exit velocity, direction, and location, as well as this year’s rollout of previously unavailable launch-angle data — the metrics we currently use to evaluate hitters are not the same metrics we’ll be using to evaluate hitters, say, 10 years from now. We’ll need several years of complete Statcast data, at least, before people much smarter than myself can start devising these metrics with any sort of confidence, but that won’t stop us from playing make believe until we have them.

The more I thought about the idea behind this post, which was originally intended to be trivial in nature — just looking at some of the season’s more unique singles — the more I realized there was to it. That’s not to say this is any sort of groundbreaking work — there are no major findings in what’s to follow, and in fact there aren’t any findings at all. But a simple base hit recently reminded me of how close we are to the next leap of better understanding the game. In the time it takes to get through this post, we’re just going to watch some clips, and think about those clips and what they may mean, and dream on the future. Nothing wrong with any of that.

I was watching a baseball game the other night and a player hit a baseball with a bat. That’s gonna happen. The player was Yan Gomes, and he hit the baseball like this:

Now, that type of hit is called a single. It’s been called a single for more than 100 years, and it’s still called a single now. It’s a single according to batting average, it’s a single according to total bases, it’s a single according to OPS, it’s a single according to wOBA and wRC+, it’s a single according to WAR. A single. No more, no less.

Y’know what else is a single? This is a single:

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Introduction and #31-32
#30 – #21
#20 – #11

Roughly four years ago now, the present author facilitated a crowdsourcing project designed to place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams. The results weren’t intended to represent the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather to provide a clue as to which broadcast teams are likely to appeal most (or least) to the readers of this site.

The results of that original exercise have been useful as a complement to the dumb NERD scores published by the author in these pages. Four years later, however, they’ve become much less useful. In the meantime, a number of the broadcast teams cited in that original effort have changed personnel. It’s possible that the tastes of this site’s readers have changed, also.

About a month ago, the present author began the process of reproducing that original crowdsourcing effort, facilitating a ballots for this site’s readers. This post represents the final installment of the corresponding results for the television side of things.

Below are the 10th- through 1st-ranked television broadcast teams, per the FanGraphs readership.

But first, three notes:

• Teams are ranked in ascending order of Overall rating. Overall ratings are not merely averages of Charisma and Analysis.
• The author has attempted to choose reader comments that are either (a) illustrative of the team’s place in the rankings or (b) conspicuously amusing.
• A complete table of ratings cast will appear in these pages Friday.

10. San Diego Padres
Main Broadcasters: Dick Enberg/Don Orsillo and Mark Grant
Ratings (Charisma/Analysis/Overall): 3.8, 3.1, 3.5

Three Reader Comments
• “Enberg is the best broadcaster no one talks about.”
• “Mark Grant… is funny and brings the knowledge and humor of a journeyman player.”
• “I want everyone to understand just how good Don Orsillo is at calling a game. Very. Very good, is the amount of good he is.”

Notes
A number of respondents cite similarities between Enberg in San Diego and Vin Scully up the coast in Los Angeles — not necessarily for the length of their tenure or prominence in the game (by which criteria Scully is unparalleled) but for their affability and comfort with the leisurely pace at which a baseball game is played. Grant, for his part, has the bearing of a “typical ex-player,” but does seem to offer a measure of playfulness and good humor to which readers respond well. As for Orsillo, he was largely adored by Boston fans.

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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
Washington at New York NL | 19:10 ET
Strasburg (55.0 IP, 73 xFIP-) vs. Harvey (45.2 IP, 95 xFIP-)
What one finds here is a game with considerable promise. Two elite pitcher with easy plus velocity. Two strong clubs, each of which currently possess greater than a 45% chance of winning the division. “Garden-variety excellence,” one might be inclined to call it. Unless, that is, the garden has been started by the author. In which case, the garden is much less impressive. Because the tomato seedlings haven’t even sprouted their true leaves yet. Even though it’s been, like, three weeks. Because he used these peat pots from Agway instead of a plastic starter tray. Even though the gardening book was pretty explicit about don’t use peat pots.

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The Phillies won again on Wednesday. So this is already off to a silly start, but anyhow, here’s more or less how they did it.

When you allow two runs, you don’t have to do much at the plate to win, and though the Phillies never do much at the plate, they did enough against Tom Koehler to make a winner out of Jeremy Hellickson. Hellickson gave way to David Hernandez, who turned in a scoreless inning. Hernandez gave way to Hector Neris, who turned in a scoreless inning. And Neris gave way to Jeanmar Gomez, who turned in the final scoreless inning necessary. Sometimes good teams are said to have bullpen formulas. This is the Phillies’ formula, and it’s helped propel them into a wild-card spot. The Phillies are in a wild-card spot. You know who’s in a wild-card spot? The Phillies.

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