Full disclosure: as you might be aware, I authored a book on the Pirates — Big Data Baseball — which was published in 2015. As a result, it’s possible that I write this piece with some bias.

Still, I wouldn’t have entered into that book project if I thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were run by fools, engaged in uninteresting practices, and set for a catastrophic 2014 season. To work on the project, I had to believe the Pirates were a team likely to enjoy more success.

I pitched the book following the 2013 campaign, after the Pirates’ first winning season since 1992. I felt it was a compelling narrative: the Pirates ended the longest consecutive streak of losing seasons in North American pro sports history by residing on the cutting edge of analytics and innovating new practices (like having a quant embedded in the clubhouse) while also remaining attentive to the human element. It was a story of creativity, collaboration, and peak Andrew McCutchen.

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At some point, there was going to be a correction. Pitchers have been taught forever to work off their fastballs. If not for the fastballs, after all, to what would the other pitches be compared? The fastball has always been the primary pitch, and yet it was something of an unexamined position. How many fastballs are too many fastballs? How few fastballs are too few fastballs? Do you actually need to throw fastballs the majority of the time?

This is the age of information, so this is the age of experimentation. Just the other day, Trevor Bauer was critical of Avisail Garcia’s expectation of a fastball. Tom Verducci wrote up a whole feature earlier in the year about the Yankees’ fastball avoidance. One thing we know is that the fastball rate is going down.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Willson Contreras’ Twitter behavior and the Yankees-Red Sox sign-stealing scandal, then answer listener emails about “up the line” vs. “down the line,” how rebuilding works, whether teams can count on the current home-run rate continuing, Deion Sanders’ career taking place today, the heat of the hot corner, the Hall of Fame candidacies of Joe Mauer and Justin Verlander, OBP vs. out rate, banning in-season trades, and more.

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Episode 764
Ashley MacLennan is a writer/editor for Bless You Boys, the proprietor of 90 Feet From Home, and the author — under the pseudonym Sierra Dean — of weird, beautiful novels. She was also FanGraphs’ writer-in-residence for the month of August.

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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 7 min play time.)

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Daulton Varsho is a Cheesehead at heart. He hails from Chili, Wisconsin, attended high school in nearby Marshfield, and played collegiately at UW-Milwaukee. Summer ball also found him close to home. The 21-year-old catcher strapped on his gear for the Eau Claire Express, in the wood-bat Northwoods League.

He’s currently hanging his hat in the Pacific Northwest. Selected in the second round of this year’s draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Varsho is beginning his career with the short-season Hillsboro (Oregon) Hops. The environs have been to his liking. With the Northwest League playoffs set to begin, Varsho’s left-handed stroke has produced a .311/.368/.534 slash line.

His rooting interests have largely been geographic, but there is a notable — and perfectly plausible — exception. Varsho is a Packers fan, and he went to Badgers games growing up, but he didn’t root for the Brewers. His baseball allegiances were with the Philadelphia Phillies, with whom his father — former big-league outfielder Gary Varsho — was the bench coach during his childhood.

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Even just a couple months ago, Justin Verlander was a name. He was a name with a contract and diminished results, and his desirability on the market was low. Teams were interested in him, for sure — teams would always be interested in someone with Verlander’s background. Yet his performance wasn’t matching up with his cost, and so it didn’t seem like a trade would be likely. The Tigers didn’t want to give their legend away, yet contenders didn’t want to pay for someone whose best days were long gone.

Ultimately, Verlander did get traded. The Tigers, admittedly, paid him down, but the Astros picked up the bulk of the money, and they even gave up three legitimate prospects. The Astros paid for Verlander as if Verlander were an ace again. And for the past several weeks, Verlander has resembled an ace. He made his debut for Houston on Tuesday, and he allowed one run over six innings. Verlander’s gotten back to looking like one of the best in the world. So, what changed? What convinced the Astros to pay what they did? Outside of their own pitching issues, I mean. Verlander, it won’t surprise you, has made a couple tweaks.

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Manny Machado turned 25 on July 6. If he checked his stat line after that day’s game, he probably wouldn’t have liked what he saw. A little over halfway through the season, Machado had come to bat 350 times and hit 16 homers, which is pretty good. He was also slashing .215/.283/.418, though, equivalent to just an 80 wRC+.

That didn’t seem right. After all, the young infielder entered the season with a 119 career wRC+ — and had actually produced an even better 130 mark between 2015 and -16. At Machado’s age, hitters tend to improve, not collapse.

Machado’s performance gave the impression that something might be wrong, that something might need to be fixed. Whether that impression was correct at the time, it’s moot now: over the past two months, all he’s done is hit.

Here are a few relevant hitting stats for Machado from earlier this season compared to 2015 and 2016, when he was one of the better hitters in baseball.

While Machado began the season striking out a bit more often than in recent seasons, his walk rate was fine. And while his power took a dip, it still compared favorably to the league average. There’s nothing here that would reduce Machado from one of the top-20 hitters in baseball to one of the 30 worst.

Here, though, are some other relevant stats from those same time periods.

The batting results from that period through July 6 line are poor — but almost entirely a product of a lower batting average on balls in play. Now, that lower BABIP could reveal some decline in Machado’s game. An injury or change in approach. And if the drop in BABIP were paired with other observable differences, it might warrant further consideration.

And there were some differences. For example, while most of Machado’s batted-ball profile — including pull percentage, infield flies, ground-ball rate — remained largely unchanged, he was swinging outside of the zone a little more and making a little less contact. His swinging-strike rate had increased from 8.3% in 2015 and 2016 to 11.5% in the early going this year. The combination of some extra strikeouts and reduced power certainly affected Machado’s production. Again, though, their effect was pretty minor compared to the massive drop in BABIP drop.

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With September call-up season upon us, the Phillies have summoned top prospect J.P. Crawford from the minor leagues. He made his debut last night, starting at third base and notching his first career hit. Prior to his call up, Crawford hit .243/.351/.405 in Triple-A this year, including a powerful .284/.385/.517 since July 8th.

Crawford is an extremely talented player who can provide value in more ways than one. His minor-league batting lines don’t necessarily jump off the page, but in the context of his age and defensive value, they’re rather impressive. That’s why he’s been appearing near the tops of prospect lists — including KATOH’s — for years. Baseball America ranked him among the top-14 prospects each of the last three seasons, while Baseball Prospectus ranked him No. 4 each of the last two. Eric Longenhagen ranked him No. 9 in the preseason and No. 34 in his summer list.

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