Admit it, you’ve wondered. Not you, the former Division I baseball player or the major leaguer who’s maybe reading this. I mean you, the former pony-league baseball kid who maybe got a cup of coffee with the varsity in a nondescript high school league: you’ve wondered if, given a full season’s chance — say, 600 plate appearances — you could get a single major league hit.

Maybe you haven’t. I certainly have. And so has MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes.

It’s easy to argue that he wouldn’t. Just making contact requires sufficient bat speed to catch up to the incoming pitch speed, and the difference between a layperson’s bat speed and a professional one is stark. I’ve linked this image recently, but this time it’s for the stats on the left. Take a look at how much faster Hunter Pence can swing a bat than I can.

Pence nearly doubles my bat speed and gets to the ball three times quicker. Maybe we mere fans just couldn’t connect with the hard stuff. And that’s on the fastball. What happens when a pitcher starts throwing the bendy stuff?

Hayes wondered the same. “I was recently at a batting cage and spent about half an hour, got the speed up to 70 mph, and after enough of them I was more or less getting around, though mostly fouling pitches off, with occasional solid contact,” he wrote in an email. “BUT: no breaking balls and no pitches out of the zone. I just think any major leaguer would be able to just terrify me with a first pitch fastball and then get me to chase garbage out of the zone and that would happen for literally an entire season.”

But isn’t this a question of numbers in the end? Over 600 plate appearances, more than 2000 pitches… couldn’t you swing as hard as possible middle-in and eventually get one measly hit?

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I was in the Dodgers clubhouse before a game last week at PNC Park when the Sports Illustrated cover was released featuring Justin Turner immersed in Gatorade, the orange liquid nearly a match for the hue of his iconic mane and facial hair.

The amiable Turner was of particular interest that day due to his cover-boy status. He accommodated round after round of media interviews before his locker in the road clubhouse. The Dodgers have perhaps the largest traveling media contingent in the National League.

I waited not for not an interview but an introduction. As someone who has promoted the Air Ball Revolution, I wanted to express my appreciation for his work and to note our mutual acquaintance, private hitting instructor Doug Latta, who helped Turner rebuild his swing and philosophy. In passing, I asked Turner not about the photo (which is tremendous), but about a passage from the accompanying article by Stephanie Apstein.

[Justin Turner] persuaded a fringe major leaguer with a career .598 OPS to spend last offseason overhauling his mechanics; Chris Taylor, now a starting outfielder, has been L.A.’s best second-half hitter, with an OPS of 1.105. Since Turner assigned right fielder Puig five pushups for every grounder he hit in spring training, Puig has pounded the ball harder than in any season since his first. Turner cues up the curveball machine and challenges 22-year-old rookie first baseman Cody Bellinger to fly ball competitions, with the winner taking home $10 per session. “I’m down a little bit,” Bellinger admits. It’s worth the lighter wallet, though: His .800 slugging percentage on curves is second in baseball. The team as a whole has cut its ground ball rate by 8%, the biggest drop in the league.

I’ve previously explored the idea of how air-ball advocates like Daniel Murphy might influence teammates in positive way, how they might be adding value simply by communicating ideas.

Turner is another.

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There’s so much to like about Yasiel Puig, and the season he’s having in 2017. He has a career-high rate of walks, and a career-low rate of strikeouts. He has a career-high isolated power, and he also has a career-high 12 stolen bases. He’s remained, for the most part, totally healthy, even on a team that makes liberal use of the disabled list, and Puig’s even got easy career-best marks in both defensive runs saved and UZR. In so many different ways, Puig’s game is looking more polished. Yet his WAR is simply a hair over 2.

There’s only one thing that has held back that number. I mean, all right, sure, Puig could stand to have a higher BABIP. He’d look better if he gathered some missing singles. But there’s just one area where Puig doesn’t look good. If you know how WAR is calculated, you’re probably one step ahead, but I should issue some quick background context. Some numbers around these parts have changed.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the AL wild card race, whether the Dodgers are doing anything wrong by using the 10-day DL liberally, then answer listener emails about packaging Pujols with Trout, Gio Gonzalez’s league-leading (but also not league-leading) WAR, the pitfalls of Statcast for pitchers, Steven Souza and home-run imbalance by handedness, an especially silly save, how many major leaguers are being missed, baseball’s hidden superheroes, and more.

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The Arizona Fall League just announced its rosters for the 2017 season. These are subject to change for any number of reasons, and a combination of promotions, injuries, and trades will likely impact who arrives and who doesn’t between now and October 10th, when the Fall League’s seven-week season gets underway.

For the uninitiated, the Arizona Fall League is a developmental league featuring six teams, each of which are assigned players from five parent MLB clubs. This league has been a fleeting but well-lit stage for many of MLB’s top talents, including Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, Gerrit Cole and dozens others. The league is heavily scouted and players sent here often debut in the majors the following season. With that as introduction, below are my thoughts on the prominent/interesting prospects headed to the desert in October.

Glendale Desert Dogs
(CLE, CHW, LAD, PHI, PIT)

Glendale’s pitching staff has a few notable names, led by Pirates RHP Mitch Keller, who’ll pick up the summer innings he dropped in June due to a back strain. Keller has one of the best fastball/curveball combinations in the minors, but the changeup might be his developmental focus here in Arizona. Also on Glendale’s staff is hard-throwing Pirates LHP Taylor Hearn who came to Pittsburgh from Washington as part of last year’s package for Mark Melancon. He hasn’t thrown since July 13th, when he struck out a career-high 10 hitters in 4.2 innings for High-A Bradenton. He was put on the disabled list with an oblique strain two days later. Hearn has had several injuries throughout his career. He suffered from a strained UCL in high school and had a screw put in his elbow as a college freshman after suffering two humeral fractures. When healthy, Hearn sits 94-97 and throws a hard slider. Phillies lefty Elniery Garcia, whose velocity spiked into the mid-90s late last year and who was (coincidentally!?!) busted for Boldenone in April, missed 80 games this year. His fastball has been in the 89-93 range lately.

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The Royals last scored in the bottom of the second inning of their game against the Rockies last Thursday. Brandon Moss hit a home run, and the Royals went ahead 2-0. Since then, the Royals have played the better part of five games, and after the Moss dinger, the Royals as a team have been outscored 35-0. They lost the Rockies game, and of course they lost the subsequent four. The Royals offense has managed 43 straight scoreless innings. Is that bad? Jeffrey Flanagan and Bill Chastain have the facts.

The Royals, who lost their fifth straight, now have been shut out in 43 straight innings, the longest such streak in Major League Baseball since the mound was lowered after 1968. The previous mark was 42 by both the 1983 Phillies and the 1985 Astros. The ’79 Phillies were blanked in 39 innings. The all-time mark is 48 by the 1968 Cubs and the 1906 A’s.

We’re dealing with an active, modern-day baseball record. This is a developing era of offensive rejuvenation, powered by the league-wide resurgence of the home run. Within that context, the Royals haven’t scored in a long-ass time. It’s not even that the record is now 43. It’s that the record will be at least 43. The Royals play again tonight. You wouldn’t think they’d be blanked in a game started by Alex Cobb, but they’ve just been blanked in games started by Ryan Merritt and Austin Pruitt. Sometimes it’s not up to the pitcher.

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Byron Buxton’s torrid August has been the primary reason the Twins have vaulted back into the Wild Card race this month, as the team’s center fielder is again showing why he was previously considered the best prospect in baseball. But while it’s very easy to draw a straight line between Buxton’s performance and the team’s 17-10 record in August, he isn’t doing this alone; there’s another guy on the roster whose performance has changed even more dramatically. And that guy is Matt Belisle.

After having a nice run with the Rockies in his early-30s, Belisle became the quintessential journeyman reliever the last few years, signing one year deals with the Cardinals, Nationals, and now the Twins. Those one year deals paid him between $1.25M and $3.5M per year, and despite running a 1.76 ERA with Washington last year, the Twins got him for just $2 million this past winter. As a pitch-to-contact 37-year-old, there just wasn’t much interest in Belisle despite last year’s shiny ERA.

And for the first three months of the year, the league looked prescient. When June came to a close, Belisle had a 6.53 ERA/5.17 FIP/5.53 xFIP. He was pitching himself out of baseball, as if the Twins released him, he might not get another chance, given his age and lack of ability to put batters away. An aging command guy with a 12% walk rate isn’t something many teams want.

But then, at the beginning of July, Belisle started doing something weird, for him; he started striking everyone out.

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Chicago White Sox right-hander Mike Pelfrey is a survivor of Tommy John surgery, but only in the technical sense of having returned to a major-league mound after having undergone the procedure. Prior to going under the knife, the 6-foot-7 right-hander was a solid, midrotation starter for the New York Mets. Since surgery, however, he’s been a shell of his old self. Pitching for the Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, and now the White Sox, Pelfrey is 18-47 with a 4.99 ERA over his last four-plus seasons.

Age-wise, he isn’t over the hill. The former first-round pick is still just 33 years old. And while his arm feels strong, it also feels… different. Pelfrey can’t quite put a finger on it, but ever since his ulnar collateral ligament — and subsequently an ulnar nerve — were repaired, something has been amiss. A dozen years — and countless pitches — into his big-league career, he has limited control over where the ball is going to go once it leaves his hand.

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Mike Pelfrey on his post-surgery command issues: “There’s been a little more adversity than I would like. Early in my career I was more of a power-sinker guy — I was about 75% fastballs — and my command was a lot better. In 2012, I ended up getting hurt. My elbow blew out after three starts, and I had Tommy John surgery. I’ve never been the same since. My command hasn’t quite been the same. Read the rest of this entry »