Matt Kemp is in a funk. I’m not talking about the kind of funk endorsed by Sly Stone or Parliament. Kemp’s funk is more like the time a friend of mine left a chicken salad sandwich in my car over a hot weekend and it fermented into a noxious cloud of nauseating death-barfiness. Or funk metal.

I’m nearly certain the Dodgers didn’t originally expect to ever have Kemp on the roster in 2018. LA acquired him from Atlanta in exchange for Charlie Culberson, Adrian Gonzalez, Scott Kazmir, Brandon McCarthy, and cash — and if the the deal were to have occurred in 2012, with those names, it would have been a blockbuster. In the winter of 2017, however, Kemp wasn’t so much a player as a tax loophole, the maguffin in a trade that was primarily about teams aligning their year-to-year payrolls in such a way as to avoid luxury tax.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the luxury tax: Kemp became interesting. For once, one of those articles about a player looking amazing in spring training actually bore real fruit. Kemp showed up to spring training in excellent shape, having lost a non-trivial 40 pounds and gained a renewed interest in playing defense.

The homecoming to Los Angeles, after a lot of hurt feelings years ago, turned out to be a positive one. When Kemp slugged .561 in spring training while also exhibiting improved defense and a real effort to be a mentor to the younger players, he gave the Dodgers enough justification to keep him on the team as a role player.

Los Angeles struggled early. Kemp, however, did not. With one of the club’s top batting marks and the promise of better defense — or at least decidedly less-atrocious defense — fulfilled, Kemp received more at-bats. Unlike in previous seasons with Atlanta and San Diego, Kemp’s playing time in this case was earned on the merits of his play and not his reputation or salary. He started in the All-Star Game.

Since the All-Star Game, though, things have not gone well for Kemp. Standing at .310/.352/.522 when baseball took its midsummer respite, Kemp’s OPS has bled about 100 points in just a month, and he’s stalled at 1.1 WAR for the 2018 season. Neither ZiPS or Steamer are optimistic about a turnaround, projecting him to finish at 1.3 and 1.2 WAR, respetively, the primary difference between the two being playing time.

Before Wednesday’s 2-for-4 performance, Kemp last had a multi-hit game on July 23rd and now has hits in four of his last 19 games. Overall, he’s 5-for-58 from that date with only a lone double. The result? A .086/.191/.103 line.

So, what happened to Kemp’s 2018?

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If you’re like me, you’ve been assuming the Dodgers would end up in first in the NL West for a while. Indeed, our playoff odds are still big fans, because it’s hard to overlook the track records of the various players around the Dodgers’ roster. If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d still settle on the Dodgers to be there at the end. Maybe that makes me smart. Maybe that makes me stubborn. Could be a little of both. I don’t like to be put on the spot.

But for however much talent the Dodgers possess, on August 16 we’re looking at the first-place Diamondbacks. The club’s been playing .500 baseball for a month and a half, yet still, they’re looming above the Dodgers and Rockies. When it comes to explaining why the Diamondbacks are where they are, credit has to go to good hitters like Paul Goldschmidt, David Peralta, and apparently Daniel Descalso. Credit also has to go to good pitchers like Patrick Corbin and Zack Greinke. And then there’s the helpful matter of so-called “cluster luck” — the Dodgers have a better run differential than the Diamondbacks do. No team reaches first place because of one reason alone.

Here, however, I’d like to shine some light on the Diamondbacks’ greatest strength. To this point I’d say it’s gone underappreciated, but I’ll show you the evidence in seven plots. The Diamondbacks have had an incredible defense.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Bryse Wilson, RHP, Atlanta Braves
Level: Triple-A   Age: 20   Org Rank: 12   FV: 45+
Line: 8 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 13 K

Notes
Bryse Wilson touched 97 several times last night and sat 93-95 late in the outing. He pounded the zone with his fastball (72 of 98 pitches were for strikes) and blew it past several hitters up above the strike zone. His slider (mostly 83-85, though he lollipops some slower ones into the zone for first-pitch strikes) flashes plus but is mostly average and is only capable of missing bats when it’s out of the zone. Wilson’s changeup is fringey and firm, without much bat-missing movement, but the velocity separation off of the fastball is enough to keep hitters from squaring it up, and it’s going to be an effective pitch. The entire package (Wilson’s physicality and stuff) looks very similar to Michael Fulmer and Wilson’s delivery is much more graceful and fluid than it was when he was in high school, when scouts thought it would impact his ability to command the fastball and possibly move him to the bullpen.

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Lance Parrish embraces the opportunity to help young players chase their dreams, and he’s doing so in the organization where he made six of his eight All-Star appearances. The 62-year-old former catcher manages the West Michigan Whitecaps, the Low-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers. Parrish broke into the big leagues with Detroit — the Motown home of Aretha Franklin — and went on to play for 19 seasons.

Parrish joined the coaching ranks shortly after hanging up his shinguards, and he became a minor-league manager soon thereafter. As fate would have it, he later found himself on the outside looking in, wondering if he’d ever get back in the game. He was skeptical that would happen, but then the Tigers came calling. He couldn’t be happier.

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Lance Parrish: “When it was getting toward the end of my playing career, Sparky Anderson told me that if I had the desire to stay in the game, his recommendation was to go right into it as soon as my playing days were over. I think he was trying to give me a heads up that it’s not that easy to stay out for any length of time and then get back in whenever you feel like you want to get back in. He said, ‘If I were you, I’d jump right into it and see if it’s something you want to do.’ I took his advice.

“At first, I kind of moonlighted as a minor-league catching instructor with the Kansas City Royals, when Bob Boone was their manager. That was in 1996. Then I went to the Dodgers. In 1997 and 1998 I coached in San Antonio, Texas, in Double-A. My first year there, Ron Roenicke was managing and we won the Texas League. That got me off on the right foot, and I learned a lot from watching Ron manage. Ron is very astute when it comes to details. I learned about managerial style, how to relate to players, structure — he’s a very structured guy — things to work on throughout the course of a baseball season.

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No one likes to lose, baseball players perhaps least of all. We’ve all heard ballplayers talk about the necessity of putting losses behind them, but I bet some disappointments stick in the backs of their minds. I sometimes wake up at 3am feeling badly about things I did in middle school; I imagine giving up seven runs in two innings could have a similar effect to when I was nasty to Charissa in French 2 because Laura was mean to me, and I wasn’t sure how feelings worked quite yet. Ghosts haunt their haunts at the oddest times.

But losing is also part of baseball, like spit and dust and strikeouts. Twelve teams have losing records this year. Baseball’s losingest team by win percentage, the Orioles, have as many wins (36) as the Red Sox (the winningest team) have losses. That’s a lot of losing! That’s losing days in a row. That’s losing weeks at a time. That’s the sort of losing you have to get used to if you’re going to carry on living. Which got me thinking about the best ways to lose. Losing stinks, sure, and baseball players hate doing it, but how can you lose and grin and bear it and avoid revisiting it at 3am on a Tuesday night? There are a great many ways to lose, but I believe I have arrived at the best five.

Beaten by God
Giancarlo Stanton hits a 453-foot walk-off homer.
The Mariners’ mistake was asking Ryan Cook to face God. There are whole books in the Bible dedicated to the various ways in which the Ryan Cooks of the world don’t prevail when forced to square off against the divine. And sure, Ryan Cook was angry when Giancarlo Stanton thwacked a dinger to end the game.

Here Cook is, being angry. Aw buddy! You messed up good.

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Prior to the season, they installed a humidor in Arizona, much like they did several years ago in Colorado. The underlying ideas were similar: rein in the offense, which was increasingly out of control. Chase Field was never as hitter-friendly as Coors, and nothing will be as hitter-friendly as old Coors until there’s a big-league team in Mexico City, but there’s value in trying to make the game more neutral. The perception was that play in Chase was too lopsided. Those in control wanted to balance things out.

I wrote about the possible consequences of the humidor in February. Even better than that, Alan Nathan wrote about the possible consequences of the humidor the previous April. The potential existed for a dramatic effect. While part of the stated goal was to just make the baseballs more grippy — thereby benefiting the pitchers — the humidor would also decrease each baseball’s coefficient of restitution. Put another way, in theory, the ball wouldn’t come off the bat quite so fast. Now that we’re three-quarters of the way into the season, it’s possible to take a look at how things have actually gone. If you’re in a rush, let me give you the conclusion right here: Chase has turned into what was expected. It does seem to have become more neutral, indeed. Not in so much of a rush? Below, I’ll present the basic evidence.

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They set records for the highest win total and run differential of the post-1960 expansion era, and featured future Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera in full flower among what would become known as the homegrown “Core Four,” as well as a memorably diverse lineup and bench sprinkled with some sage veterans. Despite a brief scare in the AL Championship Series, they steamrolled their way to the 24th championship in franchise history and the first of three straight. The 1998 Yankees — who went 114-48, outscored the opposition by 309 runs, and won 11 out of 13 postseason games, culminating in a sweep of the Padres in the World Series — were the best team upon which I’ve ever laid eyes, and they’ll probably remain the yardstick by which I measure all others, just as the 1927 Yankees were for my grandfather’s generation. If not for the time I spent watching and attending their games, it’s quite likely I’d never have taken the career detour that led to full-time writing about baseball.

As the Yankees celebrate the 20th anniversary of that team this Saturday in the Bronx, I’ll be there for personal reasons as much as professional ones.

I’ll spare you the long version of the personal journey, as I’ve previously documented my experience growing up as a third-generation Dodgers fan and then gradually taking to the Yankees after moving to New York City. The short version is that my arrival in NYC in February 1995, at the tender age of 25, more or less coincided with the Yankees’ return to prominence after having failed to crack the postseason since 1982. I had never before lived in a city that had its own major-league team (let alone two), and my passion for baseball was only beginning to awaken from its college-era dormancy. It was fueled primarily by reading the New York Times sports page and watching ESPN and network broadcasts.

I had rooted for the Mariners in their thrilling 1995 Division Series with the Yankees, but somewhere in the next year, between my first trip to the House That Ruth Built (August 18, 1996), David Cone‘s seven no-hit innings in his return from an arm aneurysm (September 2), and Jim Leyritz’s homer off Mark Wohlers in the epic Game Four of the World Series (October 23) — all of it blanketed by the preternatural placidity of manager Joe Torre, whose ability to withstand the bluster of owner George Steinbrenner and the noise of the New York media I found nothing short of miraculous — I found myself pulling for the Yankees.

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This is Nate Freiman’s second post as part of his August residency. Nate is a former MLB first baseman. He also played for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and spent time in the Atlantic and Mexican Leagues. He can be found on Twitter @natefreiman. His wife Amanda routinely beats him at golf. To read work by earlier residents, click here.

Being a tall hitter came with its drawbacks. Long arms, lots of moving parts. Eight-hour bus rides starting at 11pm. Getting pitched inside. (In fairness, I saw thousands of pitches and only suffered two broken hand bones.)

And yes, the low strikes. My entire career, anytime I’d get a low strike called there would be someone from the dugout yelling, “He’s six-eight!” Hopefully, by that time, it wasn’t news to the umpire. My hitting coach in A-ball told me to wear my pants Hunter Pence style. Above the knees. He figured the umpire would see the bottom of the zone better. I figured that would get me ejected.

So I can honestly say I sympathize with Aaron Judge. Travis Sawchik has done great work on Judge’s relationship with the bottom of the zone. It makes sense that a guy that big is a strike zone anomaly, but do other guys have the same problem? I used Statcast data to investigate.

The MLB pitch data features anywhere between 50 and 90 columns of information for every single pitch thrown. One of them is “sz_bot,” or strike-zone bottom. I used this number to adjust the strike zone for each hitter. The problem is, sz_bot varies. Of the hitters who have seen at least 500 pitches in 2018, the top of the zone measurement (sz_top) has an average range of 2.8 feet, while the bottom of the zone (sz_bot) varied an average of 3.4 feet.

Most of this is due to random outliers. One of the columns for David Freese, for example, suggests his strike zone on one pitch extended up 11 feet. To address this, I took the median strike-zone top and bottom for each hitter instead of the average.

Once determining the approximate strike-zone boundaries for each hitter, I isolated somewhat arbitrary window at the top and bottom of the zone. The window at the top of the zone is simply every pitch that is coded as being at least half the diameter of the baseball above sz_top. The bottom window is every pitch located between half a ball below sz_bot and one foot below sz_bot. The batters receiving strike calls on these pitches are, in theory, those who are the greatest victims of low strike calls.

Not surprisingly, Judge is way ahead. In fact, there’s a statistically significant difference between him and Peralta, who’s still ahead of everyone else in baseball. These guys also happen to have an average height of 75.4 inches, or a little over 6-foot-3.

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