Washington left-hander Gio Gonzalez pitched into the seventh inning on Sunday in San Diego. His 120th pitch of the late afternoon was ripped into right field by Manuel Margot for a single. It was his last pitch of the outing, as Nationals manager Dusty Baker strode to the mound, gestured to the bullpen, and took the ball from Gonzalez.

Twenty years ago, this wouldn’t have been a noteworthy event. The sequence would seem rather innocuous, in fact. But we live in an age marked by an unprecedented number of pitching injuries, an age in which teams and players are more often turning to science to better understand performance and injury prevention. We live in an era when pitch counts routinely accompany the game data in the corner of a telecast. No team of which I’m aware has figured out how to significantly reduce pitching injuries, but there is a general sense that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

And this is where Baker stands out from the crowd.

While pitch counts are crude metrics, only 10 teams have allowed a starting pitcher to exceed 120 pitches this season; only two teams have allowed it to occur on multiple occasions.

Baker and the Nationals have accomplished it four times.

Baker is lapping the field.

The Nationals under Baker also rank second in average pitch count per start (100.5 pitches), one of only two teams averaging more than 100 pitches per start. They also rank second in number of 100-plus pitch outings (76). The Nationals are trailing only the Red Sox (101.1, 81) in each category, according to the Baseball Prospectus data.

It’s not curious just that Baker is leaning on his starters to an unusual degree relative to the league in 2017, but that he’s doing so at a time when the Nationals have a 14-game lead in the NL East and a 100% chance of reaching the NLDS according to FanGraphs playoff projections entering Monday. This would seem like the time to give players more rest when possible.

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When Danny Duffy first arrived in the big leagues, he was electric. As a guy, he’s naturally laid back — perhaps a product of having grown up in southern California — but he used to throw really hard. Unfortunately, the velocity didn’t necessarily translate to success. Duffy lacked real command of his repertoire. As the left-hander put it to me recently, he “had no idea where the ball was going.” He threw mostly just four-seam fastballs and a curve.

Duffy has evolved pretty considerably since his rookie season in 2011. It’s not that he’s just a command guy now — he still throws hard — but a lot has changed over the last few years. With more than a month left in the season, Duffy has already recorded the highest WAR figure (2.9) of his career.

What happened? What allowed him to refine his command, to establish a more ideal pitch mix? Duffy recently helped answer those questions, relating all the “aha” moments that led to a completely different, and much more successful, arsenal — an arsenal I address pitch by pitch in what follows.

The Fastball
This year is the closest Duffy has ever come to throwing more sinkers than four-seamers. There’s always a ground-ball benefit — “I started getting more ground balls, more weak contact,” said Duffy, who is currently enjoying the highest ground-ball rate of his career — but this change was more about command than outcomes on balls in play.

When Duffy first came up, the refrain was that he’d go as far as his command would take him. “I thought I had to be so fine when I was younger, because I struggled with the strike zone so much,” Duffy remembered. “Then I figured out that it was all about repetition. You can’t expedite it; experience will give it to you.”

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A couple of weeks into his big-league career, Rhys Hoskins is running a 159 wRC+. Steamer thought he was the Phillies’ best hitter before he even made his major-league debut, and thus far, he hasn’t done anything to make that forecast look crazy.

But, of course, we’re talking about 47 plate appearances. Any results over a 47 PA sample approach worthlessness. If we go back to the first couple of weeks of the season and look at the early leaderboards, when everyone had a comparable number of trips to the plate, we see guys like Chase Headley, David Freese, and Robbie Grossman hanging out near the top of the list. Forty-seven PAs into his 2017, Taylor Motter had a 153 wRC+; he’s run a 45 wRC+ over 188 PAs since.

It’s best to not react too strongly to any two-week stretch, no matter how good or poor it is. Our opinion of Rhys Hoskins now shouldn’t be dramatically different than it was before he was called up. But as he does some things in the majors that he also did in the minors, it’s hard not to notice some emerging characteristics that could make him a really good big-league hitter.

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In one of multiple stories he shared in the initial installment of this series, Lars Anderson noted how unique the umpires are — compared to their U.S. counterparts — in Japan’s Shikoku Island League. Here, in Part 6, the former big leaguer expounds on that subject, then proceeds to address the shoe-soaking humidity and drum-beating, alcohol-fueled festivals.

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Lars Anderson: “Former college basketball rager/legendary coach Bob Knight was with us in spirit in a recent game against our foes, the Kagawa Olive Guyners. Fighting Dogs favorite, Sir Chuckie Okada, strode to the plate in a tied game. It was the top of the eighth inning with a runner on first and none out — an obvious bunt situation. But let’s be real… even if it was the first inning, it’d still be an obvious bunt situation here.
  
“Anyway, Chuckie squared to bunt and the pitcher misfired with a high-and-tight fastball, striking Chuckie in his left hand. He yelped and shook his hand, indicating he had been hit. The other team’s bench wasn’t buying it. They cried, ‘Foul ball-u!”

“The umpire wanted proof so he asked Chuckie to take off his batting glove in order to see if his hand had in fact been hit. Chuckie removed his glove, revealing his reddened, quivering pinky finger. It was enough evidence for the man in blue, and he pointed Chuckie to first base.

“The Olive Garden’s bench erupted with indignant rage and their manager, a Japanese version of Earl Weaver (both in shape and style), came storming onto the field in protest.

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We’ve seen a lot of premium free agents negotiate opt-outs into their contracts in recent years. Teams like the fact that they can use opt-outs to decrease the total amount they have to guarantee the player in order to sign him, and players like the flexibility of hitting the market again if they play well and increase their value. But by and large, most of these end up not getting used, as free agents are almost always older players by design, and older players usually don’t get better as they age.

Johnny Cueto has an opt-out for this winter that he almost certainly won’t use, as his poor 2017 season — and now an extended DL stint — would force him to take a pay cut this winter. Masahiro Tanaka probably won’t use his opt-out this winter either, since he’s developed a home run problem this year. Wei-Yin Chen definitely isn’t opting out. Neither is Ian Kennedy. Looking ahead to the future, it’s hard to imagine either Jason Heyward or David Price walking away from the remainder of their guaranteed years at this point.

A year ago, Justin Upton fit into that category. In the first year of his six year, $132 million contract, he hit .246/.310/.465, posting a career-low (as an everyday player) +1.4 WAR. He joined a host of other albatross contracts in Detroit, and all the money owed to aging, unproductive players was part of the reason the Tigers decided to start rebuilding this year, moving veterans for younger, cheaper talents when they could.

But this year, Upton has gone right back to being the Justin Upton the Tigers hoped they were signing. He’s currently at .282/.366/.546 and +4.1 WAR; his 140 wRC+ would be the second-best of his career, behind just the 141 mark he put up in 2011. He won’t match the +6.3 WAR he put up that year, but if he finishes strong over the next six weeks, he’ll crack +5 WAR for just the second time in his career. Regardless of how he finishes, this will likely go down as one of Upton’s best seasons.

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For some time, it seemed like the battle between analytics and scouts had died out.

The divide first surfaced in the public consciousness following the publication of Moneyball 14 years ago. Michael Lewis recounts in his book how some in the A’s front office contemplated a future in which scouts were redundant and no longer necessary — at least not in such numbers. It was an extreme view.

In the meantime, however, a sort of peace appeared to have been brokered. It was generally accepted that the best clubs, the model organizations — like the St. Louis Cardinals for much of the 2000s — successfully integrated both camps.

And then in 2015 something happened: Statcast was installed in every major-league stadium.

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This is Ashley MacLennan’s third piece as part of her August residency at FanGraphs. Ashley is a staff writer for Bless You Boys, the SB Nation blog dedicated to the Detroit Tigers, and runs her own site at 90 Feet From Home. She can also be found on Twitter. She’ll be contributing regularly here over the next month. Read the work of all our residents here.

Umpires are a necessary part of any baseball game. They’re nearly as integral to the sport as the ball itself. But just as the ball has been the object of considerable interest over the last couple years, so too has the role of the umpire become a topic for re-examination.

Baseball is currently in a state of flux, commissioner Rob Manfred having dedicated himself broadly to the “improvement” of the game. His intent? To make it more efficient, streamlined, and watchable in order to compete in an increasingly demanding media landscape. His ambiguous mandate has led to a number of proposals (some of which have become reality): the elimination of pitches for intentional walks, the possibility of flat bases at first, and the ever-popular prospect of robot umpires. Regarding that last point, there would appear to be some interest from the players, as well. Just recently, for example, Ben Zobrist of the Chicago Cubs was so infuriated by a call that he publicly stated his approval of replacing umpires with electronic zone readers.

Before we get carried away, though, a few things need to be noted, the first (and most important) being that Rob Manfred himself has said he has no intention of getting rid of human umpires any time soon. At the quarterly owners’ meeting he said, “It would be a pretty fundamental change in the game, to take away a function that has been performed by our umpiring staff, really with phenomenal accuracy. The fact of the matter is they get them right well over 90% of the time.”

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It’s almost always a cliche when a player says he’s out there to help his team win. When Whit Merrifield utters the phrase, the meaning is more nuanced. The 28-year-old Kansas City Royals outfielder attributes much of his late-bloomer success to an approach that didn’t seem plausible when he was a prospect.

After six-plus seasons in the minors, Merrifield is flowering in the big leagues because… he’s in the big leagues.

“Honestly, it’s just being up here and playing to win,” Merrifield told me when I asked about his breakout campaign. “Every day there’s a motivation to come to the field. There’s an excitement that you don’t really have in the minor leagues. Down there, you’re not playing to win every game so much as you’re playing to move up. Here, it’s a different attitude, and I’m at my best when I don’t focus on my numbers.”

His numbers have been a pleasant surprise. Playing in his first full MLB season — he split last year between Kansas City and Triple-A Omaha — Merrifield is slashing (despite his current 0 for 19 skid) a solid .281/.319/.461. Not only that, he’s left the yard 14 times, and his career home-run high on the farm was 11.

“I’m just in a little groove this year,” Merrifield responded when asked about his uptick in the power department. “I’ve always been more of a gap-to-gap, doubles hitter, but I can drive the ball. When I catch it right and get it a little more elevated, it will go out.”

The University of South Carolina product went into the 2015 offseason with a revitalized work ethic that arguably has as much to do with his success as his team-first attitude. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 759
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the husk of a guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 3 min play time.)

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