The numbers are almost laughable. In a season when over 100 players have hit 20 home runs, Clayton Kershaw has put up a line for the ages. Through Tuesday: a 1.65 ERA, 1.67 FIP, a nearly unthinkable 168:10 strikeout-to-walk ratio. The only blemish is his low innings total, resulting from the back injury that cost him a substantial part of the summer. With no one seeming to run and hide with the NL Cy Young Award, it’s only natural to ask whether Kershaw might still be a worthy recipient of the hardware.

Last week, I used granular batted-ball data to measure the contact-management performance of all ERA-qualifying NL starters. This group did not include Kershaw. In that article I referred to my hypothetical Cy Young ballot, if it were limited to only qualifiers; that ballot would have been headed by two above-average contact managers with very strong K/BB profiles, Max Scherzer and Kyle Hendricks. Today, we add Kershaw to that mix, comparing him to those two pitchers, again utilizing exit-speed/launch-angle data in our analysis.

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In a good way, Francisco Liriano is making life more complicated for the Blue Jays. Not that a team should take anything for granted, but as the Jays look ahead to the playoffs, it’s hard to know exactly which starters could and should serve as their starters. The Jays already had some depth when Liriano arrived as something of a salary dump, but a funny thing has happened — Liriano has found himself after leaving Pittsburgh. He’s slashed his walk rate, he’s upped his strike rate, and his ERA with Toronto is 2.92. Liriano looks good again, and he looked terrific Wednesday night.

Ultimately, for the Blue Jays, Wednesday was disappointing. They suffered through a blown save and a loss, and they still haven’t locked up an actual playoff spot. There’s work to be done, and because of the ninth-inning collapse, moments from Liriano’s start earlier have been forgotten. They simply can’t matter that much if the end result was a loss to a rival. I want to bring something to your attention, though. In the fifth inning, Liriano came through with a crucial strikeout of Chris Davis. In that showdown, Liriano took a hell of a chance, and the gamble paid off.

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According to recent reports, the Marlins are on the verge of signing third baseman Martin Prado to a contract that would keep him from hitting the free agent market this winter; the extension will cost them roughly $40 million over three years, keeping Prado in Miami for his age 33-35 seasons.

According to even more recent reports, the Cubs are on the verge of signing President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein to a contract that would keep him from hitting the free agent market this winter; the extension will cost them roughly $50 million over five years, keeping Epstein in Chicago for his age 43-47 seasons.

Between the two of them, the Epstein news is certainly more significant. The architect of the best team in baseball, Epstein is now the highest paid executive in the sport, and this represents about a 250% raise over the contract he got when he got to Chicago, which paid him $18 million over five years. The Prado deal is more of a run-of-the-mill contract extension for a nice player, but it barely rated as news in the baseball landscape. But given the differing lengths of the contracts, Prado is actually making more per season, and the two deals are roughly comparable in value.

In other words, MLB just told us that one of the best executives in the game is worth about the same as the decline years of a solid non-star, a guy who should be expected to be something like a league average player during the contract he just signed. I’m sure the Marlins and Cubs weren’t trying to create this kind of juxtaposition, but thanks to the timing of these two deals, we can say that the market is currently valuing coveted front office members in a similar way to an average player.

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Trea Turner is squaring up a lot of baseballs. He’s also flying around the bases. The 23-year-old Washington Nationals rookie has a dozen home runs, seven triples, and 29 stolen bases in just 68 games. His slash line is a sexy .340/.362/.560. In a nutshell, he’s been very, very good.

He’s also thoughtful when the subject turns to hitting. The North Carolina State product likes to keep thing simple, but at same time, he has a nuanced feel for his craft. Launch angle is a familiar term, and he understands that what works for Daniel Murphy isn’t necessarily going to work for him. He isn’t going to tailor his swing for pull-side home runs. Nor is he going to take advantage of his plus-plus wheels by slapping and burning like a young Juan Pierre. Turner is going to be himself, and based on early returns, that’s an All-Star-caliber player.

Turner — currently manning center field after reaching Washington as a second baseman — talked about his hitting philosophy when the Nationals visited Pittsburgh over the weekend.

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Turner on his approach: “For me, it’s really situational. It depends on different things. Am I leading off the inning? Are there are runners in scoring position? Does the pitcher on the mound have good command or bad command? Am I going good or going bad? There are a lot of questions I ask myself. Based on the answers to those questions, I’ll have an approach. You have to play it by ear.

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If the New York Mets finish the 2016 season as world champions, they’ll have done it with a drastically different approach than the one with which they began the year. See, the Mets are something like a bat-first team now. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, and now Steven Matz won’t pitch again until 2017, and while they’ve still got Noah Syndergaard and a suddenly impressive bullpen, it’s the offense that’s really carried their second-half resurgence. Since the All-Star break, the Mets have baseball’s seventh-best wRC+, among non-pitchers. Over the last month, they’ve had baseball’s third-best offense by that same measure.

And so, barring some unforeseen heroics from the likes of Robert Gsellman and Seth Lugo, it seems that the World Series aspirations in New York that began with the starting rotation now fall heavily on the starting lineup. If the Mets want to win this thing, they might have to slug their way there, the way Daniel Murphy nearly did for them last postseason. The Mets probably don’t love the fact that they opted not to go the extra year on Murphy in free agency and saw him not only go to a division rival in Washington, but go on to build off last postseason’s success and become potentially the best hitter in the National League. But even though the super-charged Murphy will now play for the Nationals in the postseason, the Mets suddenly have a super-charged middle infielder of their own in Asdrubal Cabrera.

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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.

Attempting to represent numerically the probable appeal of baseball games, already an absurd enterprise, becomes even more absurd at the end of the season. It stands to reason that a spectator would prefer, all things being equal, to watch a game that offers postseason implcations to one that doesn’t offer them. After that, though, there are questions of preference that are likely too subtle to account for and then express in a single number.

Like, for example, what’s more compelling: a game that features two clubs, each with a very low (but still extant) probability of reaching the playoffs, or a game that features one club that’s been eliminated already against another that possesses exactly a 50% chance of reaching the postseason — and therefore resides at the crossroads of great uncertainty? Or, here’s another question: is a game featuring two clubs that have been eliminated entirely meaningless? Or, another one: is the “average” watchability of a game in April (when hope is ubiquitous) the same as one September (when most clubs have already become resigned to merely seeing the season out, like a marriage that exists only for the kids)?

While there’s probably something worthwhile to say about any of those questions, this post is designed only to address only the last one — which is to say, the matter of an April game versus a September one. By the typical methodology for calculating NERD team scores, all those same scores are adjusted to produce a leaguewide average of 5.0 exactly. For most of the year, the effects of that calculation are largely invisible. But as postseason odds begin to represent a larger portion of the team NERD score (which they do, slowly, as the season progresses), most clubs also begin to feature postseason odds either of zero or one. At that point, a plurality of teams are playing games of little consequence. This becomes “average.”

The result is that clubs all cluster together at around 5.0. Here’s an example of how today’s NERD scores would look calculated by the typical methodology:

Basically, every club is a 5. Detroit and San Francisco and two or three other clubs receive a bonus for their still living postseason aspirations. But that’s it. All the other teams have either clinched and been eliminated. As a a result, this is “normal.” And because a majority of the clubs have nothing for which they’re a playing, they all receive basically an average score of 5.

For today, however, I’ve also employed an alternative methodology. One that doesn’t take for granted this average of 5.0. One that, as a result, implies that certain games in September are a bit hopeless — especially as compared to April, when every club features basically the same generic odds of reaching the World Series. For this method, what I did was merely to take each club’s chances of reaching the postseason and find the absolute value of that figured substracted from 50%. Then I’ve subtracted that figure from 50% and multiplied the result by 20. By this method, a club with a 50% chance of making the playoffs reaceives a 10.

Here’s how it works, with the Tigers as an example. The Tigers currently possess a 0.0% probability of winning the division and 29.0% probability of reaching the wild-card game, so a 29.0% chance overall. Here’s the calculation that follows:

• |0.50 – 0.29| = 0.21
• 0.50 – 0.21 = 0.29
• 0.29 * 20 = 5.8

By this method, Detroit receives a NERD score of 5.8, rounded to 6.

Here’s that same thing applied to all today’s games:

In this case, there are mostly 0s where there were 5s before — because the average team’s postseason future is already settled. The top game by this methodology is the one between two still-contending teams in Baltimore and Toronto. The readers preferred broadcast is Baltimore television.

Don’t ask Justin Verlander if his new harder slider is a cutter, apparently. “Verlander is steadfast on this — he’s not throwing a cutter. It’s a slider,” is how Chris McCosky characterized the ace’s opinion on the changing pitch.

The difference between a cutter and a slider is difficult to really nail down — and is most easily represented as existing on a spectrum. First, there’s the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly offset grip but still a fastball release. That pitch usually goes about a mile or two slower than the four-seam with only a couple inches of drop beyond the four-seam. Mariano Rivera threw that thing better than anyone, but Adam Ottavino modeled it for us.

Then there’s the baby slider, a cutter grip thrown with a little more supination before release, and those go 4-plus mph slower and have a few inches more drop. Those are the pitches you see from Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Jon Lester, James Shields, and Adam Wainwright. Most of those pitchers refer to that pitch as a cutter, but most of those pitches also drop more than the overall average for the cutter.

To make matters worse, there’s a brand of slider thrown by the Mets which might fit between the “baby slider” cutter and the slider-slider. We’ve dubbed that pitch the Warthen Slider. And it might be the answer to why Verlander is throwing a harder slider that looks like a cutter, but one to which he still refers as a slider. And it might be part of the answer to why tonight’s starter Daniel Norris has seen such an improvement in his walk rate.

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Yesterday, with the help of a much smarter friend, I dug a little bit into the home-run surge that we’ve all observed. There was room for some more examination, though, so this is to be considered a brief follow-up. Toward the end of that post, I engaged in some speculation. Based on evidence below, I believe I was wrong!

To re-cover some territory real quick, we do have this fact, established in the original post: Home runs are being bunched unusually tightly. The distribution of home-run rates around the game is closer to being even than ever before in at least the game’s modern version. That’s interesting! More and more hitters are getting into the dinger spirit, such that the landscape isn’t so dominated by a handful of elites. That now being given, let’s move on.

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Ben and Sam banter about Rich Hill, Clayton Kershaw, and Shohei Otani, then answer listener emails about Mike Trout, playoff formats, inflated homer totals, their introductions to baseball, and more.

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