The A’s occupy one of the AL’s two wild-card slots, and the other day they picked up Mike Fiers. They’re about to use him out of the rotation. I tried — I promise — to come up with some kind of Mike Fiers article, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t think it would be interesting. The A’s added a below-average starter, but, into the rotation he goes. That might be the real story here, how the A’s have gotten where they are despite a patchwork rotation that no one expected. The A’s have given Brett Anderson nine turns. They’ve given Edwin Jackson — literally Edwin Jackson — eight turns. Fiers probably will help, if only for the fact that he can reliably pitch. The group he’s joining appears paper-thin.

Which isn’t to suggest that I don’t think much of Sean Manaea. Manaea, at least, has been a familiar constant. But there’s a surprise in here, too, a guy without whom the A’s would be struggling. Contact rate measures bat-to-ball contact per swing attempt. The lower the contact rate, the better a pitcher is at generating whiffs. I looked at every starter this year with at least 50 innings. The guy with the lowest contact rate allowed is Chris Sale. In second is Patrick Corbin. In third is Max Scherzer. In fourth is Trevor Cahill. The A’s signed Cahill for $1.5 million in the middle of March, seemingly as a response to losing Jharel Cotton. Cahill’s started 13 times, and he’s ended up an absolute bargain.

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Episode 827
Meg Rowley, managing editor of The Hardball Times, discusses not only (a) the rules of the game but also (b) how much fretting is appropriate over those rules — both for commissioner Rob Manfred and for private citizens at their homes. Also: how the Maginot Line — that is, a line of fortifications built by France on its border with Germany between World Wars — might or might not help us answer that question.

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 51 min play time.)

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This contributor is not a supporter of baseball’s Wild Card game format.

While efforts to make a division title more meaningful are sensible and logical and while the addition of another team to the playoff field keeps more teams involved and fan bases invested during the regular season, the issue for me and many others is its one-game format. While a single play-in contest artificially creates drama and is a fun made-for-TV, web-streaming event, the notion that a team can compile a 100 wins over a season-long marathon only to fall in a single game borders on the absurd.

While the postseason is in many ways a different game from the regular season, one defined by small samples, the Wild Card raises legitimate questions about fairness (a point recently addressed by Craig Edwards) and the purpose of October baseball.

Had the Yankees lost in the AL Wild Card game last year, I suspect we would have heard much more said about revamping the system. Well, we might hear about it this next offseason. After being swept by the Red Sox over the weekend, the Yankees are almost assuredly headed to the Wild Card game again despite being projected to win 100 games. The Red Sox are on pace to win 108.

The Red Sox opened play Monday with a 91.4% chance of winning the divisions, with the Yankees at 8.6%. Entering the weekend? Those figures were at 76.6% and 23.4%, respectively. It was a devastating weekend for New York. While the Yankees could still conceivably win the division, it’s unlikely. The Yankees, the No. 3 team in baseball and the American League in run differential and 19 runs better than the No. 4 team (the Indians), are likely destined for a play-in game.

While not all fans of the sport will feel much sympathy for a club situated in baseball’s largest market, with the most flags currently flying forever, winning 100 games only to end up in a winner-take-all game doesn’t exactly seem to be in line with the most meritocratic of practices.

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Language is rich with words and terms that recognize the contributions of historical figures. This can be a good thing, but also a bad one, depending on what’s being commemorated. You’d rather go down in history as the namesake of a popular sweater (like James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan) or a certain type of legal protection (Ernesto Miranda) than for those traits by which Nicholas Chauvin or Ned Ludd are best remembered. In baseball, former utility infielder Mario Mendoza belongs to the latter category. Thanks to some creative but cruel teammates on the 1979 Mariners, Mendoza’s name has become synonymous with hitting futility. To fall below the Mendoza Line is to record a batting average below .200.

For a hitter both to qualify and to finish below the Mendoza Line actually represents a notable feat of ineptitude. One must not only fight the influence of the Regression Gods attempting to pull the hitter into the respectable company of the .200s, but also to play sufficiently well otherwise not to lose his job. It’s something Mario Mendoza himself never actually even achieved, coming closest in the black-magical 1979 season, but falling short due to manager Darrell Johnson’s mercy: Mendoza was frequently pinch-hit for in his third time up, was pinch-hit-for five times in his second plate appearance, and lost significant playing time to Larry Milbourne late in the season.

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The 2018 season is looking like another one in which the Giants’ even-year magic has deserted them. Amid a barrage of bad news about Brandon Belt, Johnny Cueto, and Pablo Sandoval — not to mention unsettling signs regarding Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey — they were inactive at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline and now look ill-suited to leapfrog nearly half the league in order to get to October. After a crushing 3-1 loss to the Astros on Monday night via Marwin Gonzalez’s three-run homer off Will Smith with two out in the ninth inning, they’re 57-57, six games out of first place in the NL West and six back in the Wild Card hunt. Their playoff odds (2.8%) suggest they’re fated to play out the string.

Mind you, coming off a 64-98 season, the Giants never appeared to be a juggernaut. Offseason trades for Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen did fill a couple of obvious holes, albeit with players whose best years are probably behind them, but the team’s preseason odds (23.9%) still suggested more than a puncher’s chance at relevance. Yet the Giants haven’t been in first place in the NL West since March 31, and have spent just five days in second since I last checked in on them on June 7, two days after Bumgarner made his belated season debut. Then as now, they were a .500-ish team — 30-30 before Bum’s return, and 27-27 since — but as time has run off the clock, the hits have kept coming. Not the good kind, either.

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Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow is a very smart man. There’s not much dispute about that – he has an MBA (from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management) and degrees in economics and engineering. He’s developed a reputation for being well-prepared.

So after the club acquired Roberto Osuna for Ken Giles at the deadline, columnist Lance Zierlein was well justified when he wrote that “[t]here is no way the Astros haven’t done their homework on Osuna.” And while the organization’s public-relations department appears to have confused the word willfully with willingly (otherwise, this statement regarding Osuna would have a markedly different meaning), even Luhnow himself noted that his own office’s due diligence on Osuna was “unprecedented.” There’s no reason to doubt him.

That said, there are certain outcomes for which no amount of preparation can ultimately account — and that’s relevant to Osuna’s future with the Astros, because, while the right-hander has been punished by Major League Baseball, his criminal case in Canada remains pending. And the outcome of that case could have real consequences on Osuna’s career.

Osuna, for his part, doesn’t want to talk about it, “declin[ing] to provide specifics about the incident” according to ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez. There are multiple reasons why Osuna would refuse to address the charge. To avoid conflicts with an ongoing case, for example. Or to avoid revisiting an episode about which he’s ashamed.

Finally, it could be part of a legal strategy. As Gonzalez notes in his piece, Osuna’s attorney, Domenic Basile, “has entered a not guilty plea on Osuna’s behalf and is reportedly seeking a peace bond that would essentially drop the charges in exchange for good behavior.”

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Rick Porcello has a plus curveball. That wasn’t always the case. He could really snap one off in his amateur days, but then something strange happened. Shortly after signing with the Detroit Tigers, who drafted him 27th overall in 2007 out of a New Jersey high school, Porcello found that the pitch had gone missing.

When I talked to the 29-year-old Red Sox right-hander recently, the plan was to include him in my ongoing Player’s View: Learning and Developing a Pitch series. As it turns out, the story behind his hook merits a longer look than can be folded into three or four paragraphs. A tale of disappearance and recovery is not only compelling, it takes time to tell.

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Rick Porcello: “When I was a teenager I had a really good curveball. It was something that came naturally to me. Then, when I got into pro ball, I didn’t have a good one in my first start, and I didn’t have a good one in my second start. It turned into this thing where it wasn’t there all year. I completely lost it. But I did have a really good sinker and a really good changeup, so I was fortunate enough to make the big-league team the next year.

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

These daily notes are going to be different/sporadic this week, as I’ll be in Southern California for the Area Code Games in Long Beach and then PG All American in San Diego over the weekend. In today’s edition, I’ve got notes on some of the players I saw in Arizona over the weekend, and a reflection on a few specific aspects of our process as it relates to pitcher injuries.

First, a look at Dodgers lefty Julio Urias, who is rehabbing from surgery to repair a tear of his left shoulder’s anterior caspule. Urias threw 1.2 innings against the White Sox’ AZL team on Saturday in his second rehab appearance of the summer. He allowed just one hit and struck out four. His fastball sat 88-91 and topped out at 92, well below the velocity band he has displayed throughout his career, which was typically in the 92-95 range. A scout who was in attendance at Urias’s first rehab outing earlier in the week told me they also had Urias topping out at 92, which conflicts with what was reported just after that outing. Urias’s fastball command was much better in this brief look than it was in his often frustrating big-league appearances, and it has flat, bat-missing plane up in the zone. Overall. though, it’s a 45 fastball right now.

Urias’s secondaries were a bit less crisp than pre-surgery. I saw one slider and several curveballs (flashed plus, mostly average) which were also thrown with less velocity (71-74 mph) than Urias exhibited before injury (75-80). The pitch has good depth and tight snap when it’s down, perhaps not playing within the strike zone quite as well. Urias threw a few average changeups (including a first pitch cambio that Luis Robert foul-tipped) in the 80-83 mph range, but he lacked feel for keeping the pitch down and hung several of them in the top of the strike zone or above it.

Obviously, Urias is returning from a serious shoulder injury, and it’s possible his stuff will tick up with continued work. The Dodgers expect him to contribute to the bullpen in September and he need only wield a competent breaking ball remain left-handed for the next eight weeks to do that. Long term, it’s hard to say what’s going to happen here. Urias was once 6 fastball, 6 breaking ball, above-average changeup, plus command projection. Right now he’s a bunch of 45s and 50s.

Some Thoughts on Process

Before I start discussing some process-oriented stuff on our end, I want to give newer readers a crash course on how we assign FV grades to players and what they mean. A more detailed explanation can be found here.

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Every so often it’s fun to review the preseason FanGraphs staff predictions. We predict standings, but we also predict awards, and, clicking and scrolling down to the National League Rookie of the Year predictions, you can see a lot of love for Ronald Acuna Jr. And, you know, he’s a 20-year-old with a 119 wRC+. Very good! Acuna Jr. ran away with the predictions. There were three votes apiece for Lewis Brinson, Victor Robles, and Scott Kingery. And then there were single votes for J.P. Crawford, Ryan McMahon, Alex Reyes, and Nick Senzel. There were zero votes for Juan Soto. In fairness, there were also zero votes for, say, Brian Anderson and Harrison Bader, but this is a Soto article, so that’s where I’m going to focus.

I wouldn’t consider this a case of staff stupidity. Late last October, Soto turned 19 years old. Injuries limited him in 2017 to just 32 games, all in the very low minors. He came into the season as the FanGraphs No. 50 overall prospect. He was ranked No. 56 by Baseball America. When Soto reached the majors, he did it at nearly record speed. His ascent was as much about major-league injuries as it was about his own performance. Soto wasn’t supposed to arrive as quickly as he has.

There are 240 players who have batted at least 250 times this season. The leader among them in wRC+ is Mike Trout, at 190. In second place, we find Mookie Betts. After Betts, there’s Jose Ramirez. After Ramirez, there’s J.D. Martinez. And after Martinez, there’s Juan Soto. There’s 19-year-old Juan Soto, with a wRC+ of 161. This is a season that hasn’t at all gone the Nationals’ way, but even with that being said, the sudden emergence of Soto has changed the organization’s longer-term outlook. And the shorter-term outlook, too.

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