The Blue Jays are not where they want to be in the standings. That much has to be acknowledged. While it’s long been understood that the American League East was again going to be a challenging division, the Jays have still been a disappointment, and it’s an open question whether the front office might elect to start selling in advance of this month’s trade deadline. The train has gone off the rails, and while the rails are just right there, within reach, it’s no simple matter for any train to reattach. You know how trains are.

And as long as we’re saying things up front, this is an article about Jays closer Roberto Osuna, and not even very long ago Osuna was in the news because he had to miss a few games, owing to rather severe anxiety. Anxiety is a sinister thing, and a personal thing, and it’s not a villain you conquer with a good night’s sleep. Possibly, it will march alongside Osuna for the rest of his life. Probably, it will linger for at least another few years. It’s just one of the things he’ll have to deal with, like someone else might deal with a wonky knee.

So it hasn’t been all rainbows for Osuna, nor has it been puppy dogs for the baseball team around him. But this much can be said: When Osuna has taken the mound in 2017, he’s been absolutely sensational. Osuna was already a perfectly fine closer. What he is now is something else, something very nearly perfect, at least by human standards. Osuna’s only 22, and he’s pitching at the top of his magnificent game.

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“[Jose Ramirez] is an All-Star baseman. If I were to have told you that four years ago, you’d have been scratching your head, ‘Wait. The guy who is playing second base and is known for his defense? He’s an All-Star third baseman?’”

Those words were spoken by Cleveland Indians team president Chris Antonetti, who went on to say that “development isn’t always a linear process; it’s difficult to predict where guys are going to end up.”

That’s certainly true for Ramirez, who will start at the hot corner for the American League in tonight’s midsummer classic. As Antonetti alluded to, the expectations for the Dominican native were quite different just a handful of years ago. The 2013 Baseball America Prospect Handbook opined that Ramirez has “little power and limited physical projection,” and that he “lacks a high ceiling.”

Feel free to put that scouting report in the shredder, because the 5-foot-9 Ramirez’s ceiling currently resembles that of the Sistine Chapel. The 24-year-old infielder heads into the break with a .332/.388/.601 slash line, and — drum roll, please — an eye-opening 17 home runs. Ramirez has, quite simply, developed into a star.

He isn’t exactly verbose when it comes to talking about his emergence as an offensive force. At least that was the case when I spoke to him — with the assistance of Indians translator extraordinaire Anna Bolton — prior to a recent game. But while Ramirez wasn’t particularly forthcoming, he did share a few a noteworthy nuggets.

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Every year, some combination of fans, players, and members of Major League Baseball come together to select All-Star teams to represent the leagues in an exhibition. Every year, that group mostly gets it right. And every year, either players miss the game due to injury or pitchers pull out after having started on Sunday, and we still end up with a game featuring baseball’s very best players.

This season, both sides are missing arguably their best player: Mike Trout is aiming to return from injury as the second half begins, while Clayton Kershaw is resting after having started a couple days ago against Kansas City. With each side suffering a fairly major blow, let’s see which team is the most talented.

One indicator of talent is the actual quality of play on the field in the first half. One way to measure that play is using WAR. The graph below shows all the position players in both leagues by WAR accumulated so far this season.

As you can see, the American League has the edge at the top, even without Mike Trout. Aaron Judge, Jose Altuve, and Mookie Betts lead the way, and the AL has five of the top seven slots, with only Paul Goldschmidt and Justin Turner from the NL in that mix. Neither Goldschmidt nor Turner are in the starting lineup, however. After the top seven, the National League has 13 of the next 17 spots and overall, which is enough to narrowly edge the AL in first-half WAR by a count of 53.6 to 52.8. A healthy Mike Trout would make things even closer to equal, but it’s already basically a wash.

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Are you nostalgic for 2015? There are a few reasons to be, not the least of which is Fetty Wap’s Billboard dominance. Or, you know, when home runs were more rare. Back when the ball’s seams were probably higher and balls didn’t travel as far. Back when hitting 20 homers by the half was tough to do, and there weren’t 24 players that had done so by the All-Star Game.

What if we could go back?

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This is Matt Swartz’ second piece as part of his July residency at FanGraphs. A former contributor to FanGraphs and the Hardball Times — and current contributor to MLB Trade Rumors — Swartz also works as consultant to a Major League team. You can find him on Twitter here. Read the work of all our residents here.

I first began estimating the average cost per WAR on the free-agent market after the 2009 season, but have not done so since my three–part series at the end of the 2013 season, leaving three extra seasons during which the market for free agents has evolved. In the first piece of my residency, I discussed the labor implications of using this framework. Many of my subsequent pieces in this series will look for which types of players are undervalued or overvalued by the free-agent market.

But first this piece will explain how I actually calculate average value — the reference point for whether players are undervalued or overvalued. It is also the appropriate reference point when considering the opportunity cost of any other number of baseball moves. For example, when a team is considering the value of acquiring a young player who will produce a large volume of team-controlled WAR, the reference point for valuing him is the cost of acquiring that amount of WAR on the free-agent market. This is an important concept for team construction.

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Logically, all of the following is true. We accept that human beings are in charge of calling the strike zone. They try their best to tell the difference between strikes and balls, but you can usually understand if they call a strike on a pitch that missed by an inch. How much is an inch? When’s the last time you tried to do what they do a few hundred times every game? The ball moves incredibly fast, and as an umpire, you never know where it’s going to go, or how it’s going to spin. Anyway, we can be forgiving with an inch. And if we can accept a miss of one inch, it follows that we should accept a miss of two inches. All that is is one more inch, and we already gave them the first inch.

If we can accept a miss of two inches, we can accept a miss of three inches. If three inches, then four inches. If four inches, then five, and if five, then six. On and on it goes, in single-inch increments, and it does all make a certain amount of sense. Humans are great, but humans are flawed, and any human-called strike zone is going to have a gray area.

But, nine inches? Imagine nine inches. You don’t even have to be precisely correct. Your imagination is enough. We know that pitches miss the zone by nine inches. But how does a pitch like that get called a strike? I mean, ever? I don’t want to act like some kind of umpiring authority, because I *haven’t* ever been an ump, and I know sometimes people make mistakes. It’s just — nine inches. Technically, 9.1 inches, in this case. The worst called strike of the 2017 regular season’s first half missed the outer edge of the zone by 9.1 inches. You might’ve seen that Angel Hernandez has been in the news lately.

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Welcome to the third installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can see the links to the honorable mentions and the last 10 guys in the list in the toolbar above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

No need to delay any further; let’s look at the 10 guys who made today’s cut.

If this was just Dave’s Top 50 Franchise Players or something, Russell might not be on this list. I’ve maintained some skepticism over the years about his eventual offensive upside, given his moderate power and low contact rates. His poor start to 2017 isn’t helping the idea that the bat is headed in the right direction. But feedback from friends in the game suggested that his stock within MLB is still pretty high, with multiple reminders that this is a guy who put up +7 WAR at ages 21-22, and he doesn’t need to crush the ball to be an elite player given his defense.

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Justin Bour is going to participate in the Home Run Derby tonight. He’s tied with a bunch of other guys at 16th in baseball with 20 homers. He’ll surpass his previous career high early in the second half.

This is the point at which we normally address a crazy mechanical change a player’s made, allowing him to reach a new level of performance. That crazy change might not exist in Bour’s case, though.

The player himself doesn’t think there’s a big adjustment in his rear-view mirror. “From being in pro ball to now, I’ve only made minor changes to my swing, but for the most part, I’ve always just been myself and tried to get a little better every day,” Bour said before this past weekend’s series against the Giants.

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If I know you, you’ve been around long enough to have seen a number of these. There isn’t much in the way of variation. Over a large enough timescale, the worst called ball will come on a pitch thrown in the vicinity of the middle of the strike zone. There’s no alternative. Those are the clearest, most obvious strikes, so when they’re not strikes, they’re lousy called balls. They all look more or less alike in that regard. So exploration is just about filling in the details. When did this particular bad call happen? Who was the umpire who made the actual call? Which pitcher threw the pitch? Which catcher caught — or didn’t catch — the pitch? What was the situation at the time? Did the call end up mattering much?

I’ve written the same post a whole bunch of times. I’ve done the same research, to end up with the same kind of play. Just about always, the call happens because the catcher sets up somewhere, and then the pitcher badly misses. I usually make some reference to how it’s evidence that framing does matter. Catchers struggle to catch pitches headed for surprising locations. You can “earn” a ball, even when you throw a pitch down the pipe.

This is another play that wasn’t very clean. We’re going back to June 18, in the first inning of a game between the Rangers and the Mariners. Danny Valencia got ahead in the count 1-and-0 against Yu Darvish, because Darvish and catcher Robinson Chirinos failed to properly execute. But this time, there’s a twist. This isn’t the same post as always.

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Can the home-run spike be enjoyed equally across the game?

Some hitters are in better position to take advantage of what might be a juiced ball. Some environments, like Yankee Stadium II and Chase Field, are more favorable to fly balls from the hitter’s perspective. With home-run rates rising per fly ball (HR/FB) across the game, however, it seems at times as though no park is immune to the invasion of the long ball. It seems like we’re running out of pitching-friendly environments.

So that brings me to the curious case of the Padres.

The Padres lead the National League in percentage of runs scored via the home run (46.2%). They Padres would have not been my first guess, but I asked FanGraphs’ own Joe Douglas to research teams’ share of runs off home runs and this is what he found:

Now, the Padres are also last in runs scored (305) — in large part because of their league-worst .295 on-base percentage — so it’s not as though this penchant for the long ball has translated directly to offensive proficiency. But the club ranks second in fly-ball percentage (37%), trailing only the outlier Mets (43%), and is tied for third in GB/FB ratio (1.20). The Padres, despite their home, are hunting fly balls and homers and are having some success.

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