The Orioles and Red Sox have provided some of the season’s juiciest narrative thus far. Everyone (well, almost everyone) loves a good bit of drama, even when it’s remarkably dumb drama. And even though our postseason odds favor Boston by a considerable margin in the AL East, Baltimore has made a habit in recent years of outperforming their projections. The two teams are going to be going for the jugular against each other for the rest of the season, and it’s going to make for some great baseball.

They may find themselves directly competing off the field, as well. Both teams have dire needs on the left side of the infield. The Red Sox haven’t had a strong third-base presence in some time, and the Orioles are hurting badly at shortstop with J.J. Hardy firmly in his decline phase and contributing just a 38 wRC+ thus far. Boston’s third-base woes are particularly bad this year, given that the cast of characters who have taken the position this year have combined for -0.5 WAR. These two problems don’t initially seem to be all that related. The teams will theoretically be scouring two different trade markets, no?

Maybe, maybe not. The simplest solution for Baltimore would be to just go get a shortstop like Zack Cozart, who’s hitting well and playing for a Reds team that probably isn’t as talented as they’ve looked thus far. However, Cozart is currently the only truly attractive shortstop option on a still-evolving trade market and there are other teams who will likely prefer Cozart over someone like Freddy Galvis. The Orioles also don’t have very much prospect capital with which to work, and could easily be outbid. Therefore a more elegant solution presents itself: moving Manny Machado to short and pursuing someone to play third. Machado is one of the best all-around defenders in the game, and is a natural shortstop. He could do it in a heartbeat.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather 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.

How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.

Most Highly Rated Game
New York AL at Kansas City | 20:15 ET
Pineda (41.1 IP, 58 xFIP-) vs. Vargas (44.2 IP, 90 xFIP-)
Yankees right-hander Michael Pineda has produced strikeout and walk rates of 30.3% and 3.6%, respectively, this year. The 26.7-point difference between those two figures represents the second-best mark — behind only Chris Sale (32.9) — among baseball’s 99 qualified pitchers. He’s elite in that regard, is the idea.

Of some interest, as well: Kansas City starter Jason Vargas has recorded the league’s second-highest WAR figure — largely, that, by allowing the fewest home runs per fly ball among major-league qualifiers. The Yankees, meanwhile, have produced the highest park-adjusted home-run rate in the American League. “Will or won’t Vargas allow a home run?” one wonders. The suspense is terrible.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Kansas City Radio.

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Last September, Corey Dickerson admitted he’d gotten into his own head during his first season with the Tampa Bay Rays. Things hadn’t gone too well. Trying to impress in a new league after putting up an .879 OPS with the Colorado Rockies, the lefty slugger scuffled early, then proceeded to tinker and obsess. He ultimately swatted 24 long balls, but the blasts were accompanied by a .245/.293/.469 slash line and a 24.5% strikeout rate.

This year has been a different story. No longer overanalyzing every unsuccessful at-bat, Dickerson is slashing a lusty .333/.382/.595, with 12 doubles, two triples, and eight home runs, over his first 39 games. He’s doing so despite having played more than half of those contests as a designated hitter, a position at which batters produce slightly worse numbers than when playing the field.

Dickerson discussed his resurgence — including his “let it go” attitude and his weapon of choice — when the Rays played at Fenway Park over the weekend.

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Dickerson on rebounding from a subpar 2016 season: “I’ve kind of let it go. I’ve gone back to being me instead of trying to do other things. I’m also finally 100% healthy, which I wasn’t last year. That’s not an excuse — everybody battles through stuff — but now I can do everything I want.

“In 2015, I was hurt — I only had 200 at-bats all season — and coming off that, I kind of acted like I didn’t have any. I started off 2016 in a slump. I’d never really been a slump in my career, so I started to chase my tail. I struggled. Finally, at the end of the year, I started to let it go. I was like, ‘OK, if I get out, what’s the biggest deal? I’m going to hit .242 instead of .245?’

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Episode 740
The prolific Travis Sawchik is a former beat reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and author of the book Big Data Baseball. He’s also the guest on this edition of the program, during which he discusses both (a) Eric Thames and the transformative power of boredom and also (b) the Hardball Dynasty league in which he participates with notable beat writers, whose names he reveals here!

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

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 1 hr 15 min play time.)

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The reigning American League champion Cleveland Indians haven’t been quite as dominant so far in 2017 as last year. Lackluster production from their outfielders has been a big culprit. Michael Brantley is seemingly healthy and productive once again, but there’s been a void beyond him. Abraham Almonte, Brandon Guyer, and Austin Jackson have been varying degrees of unremarkable in limited playing time and have all found their way to the 10-day DL. Minor-league journeyman Daniel Robertson has been playing right field this week, while Lonnie Chisenhall has started 18 games in center this season.

The Indians were desperate for outfield help, and luckily they had an impact player waiting in the wings in the form of top prospect Bradley Zimmer. Zimmer has mashed Triple-A pitching this year to the tune of .294/.371/.532 and has stolen nine bases. Zimmer is a 6-foot-5 power hitter who also happens to be a speedy center fielder, which means Chisenhall can return to a corner where he belongs. Zimmer has also posted double-digit walk rates at most levels of the minors, which gives him yet another way to provide value. Very few prospects can get on base, hit for power, and play good defense at a premium position, making Zimmer a rare bird. On the downside, however, Zimmer has some serious contact issues that threaten to eat away at his offensive value. He struck out at a high-but-acceptable 30% clip this year, but was up over 37% in his first crack at Triple-A last year, when he hit .242 without any power.

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The Rangers are currently riding a six-game winning streak. That’s the longest active streak around! Now, to be fair, three of those wins came against the Padres, who are bad, and the other three came against the A’s, who are more bad than good. And even with the winning streak they’ve pulled off, the Rangers still have one more loss than they have wins. They’re under .500 and eight games out of first. Suffice to say, the Rangers haven’t come sprinting out of the gate.

But it would be easy to look at the Rangers and feel a little disappointed. What if we were to spin things in the other direction? It’s true that, yes, overall, the Rangers have failed to impress. Yet at the same time, it’s impressive that they’re even 19-20, given how things have gone. Rangers fans are probably already acutely aware of what I’m going to discuss, but, it’s time to talk about the top of the Rangers’ roster.

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Previously
Changeups: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveballs: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Cutters and Splitters: MLB Starters.
Four-Seamers: AL Starters / NL Starters.

Our series evaluating the individual pitch offerings of 2016 ERA qualifiers grinds on. Actually hoped to be finished by now, but I’ve been writing a little bit more over at ESPN Insider (shameless plug), slowing down my progress here. We’re going to double up today, and tackle both AL and NL two-seam fastballs.

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One of the more fascinating rollouts from Baseball Savant this season has been xwOBA, a metric that utilizes launch angle and exit velocity to assign a hit value (single, double, triple, home run, or out) to every batted ball and then translates the results to “expected” wOBA. Why does it matter? By stripping out the influence of luck and defense, it gets closer to something like a “deserved” hitting number.

Here’s what the glossary at MLB.com says about the metric:

xwOBA is more indicative of a player’s skill than regular wOBA, as xwOBA removes defense from the equation. Hitters, and likewise pitchers, are able to influence exit velocity and launch angle but have no control over what happens to a batted ball once it is put into play.

For instance, Tigers first baseman Miguel Cabrera produced a .399 wOBA in 2016. But based on the quality of his contact, his xwOBA was .459.

For the most part, those claims make sense. But that’s not to say xwOBA can’t be beaten. To understand how, let’s look a little bit at how wOBA compares to xwOBA. Let’s begin by looking at all players from last season who recorded at least 400 at bats and compared their wOBAs to their xwOBAs. The scatter plot looks like this.

There’s a pretty strong relationship there. Of the 183 players represented above, 150 had a disparity between wOBA and xwOBA under 30 points. That seems pretty conclusive.

So what are we to do with this data? We could look at the outliers on either end, presume that they were either unlucky or lucky when it came to batted balls, and then move on with the analysis. However, before we do that, we might want to look at other reasons for the potential disparity. To that end, I did an eye test of sorts. I took all players with at least 400 at bats in both 2015 and 2016 and looked at their xwOBA minus wOBA in both seasons. If a player had a negative number, he might be considered to have had some good luck. If the numbers were positive, he might have had some bad luck.

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