For the last few years, as the season comes to a close, I’ve basically written a version of the same article, advocating for the extreme use of relief pitchers in the Wild Card games. I think the first one I wrote was back in 2012, when I titled the piece “Play-In Game Strategy: Skip the Starter”. And while teams have started to move more towards aggressive reliever usage, teams haven’t really adopted the full-on bullpen game as a planned outing as of yet.

I think this year, that changes.

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As you know by now, the world lost Jose Fernandez on Sunday. Here at FanGraphs, we wanted to offer those affiliated with us an opportunity to remember Fernandez in their own way. We have collected those remembrances, and would like to share them with you, as we all mourn Fernandez’s passing together.

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The lens that I watch baseball through has shifted many times. Growing up, the game was a thing I aspired to, a dream for my future. Somewhere along that path, the internet became a thing, and somehow, I ended up seeing baseball as a thing to write about, as I found community with other fans while I lived thousands of miles from where I grew up. Most recently, the way I see the game has begun to evolve again, as I have a son headed towards his second birthday, and I wonder what our relationship to baseball will be. Frequently, now, I think about how I’m going to introduce him to baseball, and what parts of the game might draw him in.

Yesterday, the idea of showing my son how fun baseball can be got a bit more daunting, as the game lost its seminal ambassador for the sport as an opportunity to experience unbridled enjoyment. Yesterday, my son lost the opportunity to watch Jose Fernandez. Not just to watch Jose Fernandez pitch, but more importantly, to watch Jose Fernandez love the game of baseball.

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On Monday night, Ken Rosenthal wrote something of a plea to his fellow BBWAA members; stop looking for reasons to give the MVP award to anyone besides Mike Trout.

My fear is that in 20 years people are going to say, “Trout led the majors in combined OPS-plus from 2012 to ’16 and won only one MVP in those five seasons? What the heck were the writers thinking?”

Shame on us if, instead of celebrating Mike Trout, we keep looking for the next best thing.

It’s a good piece, and given Rosenthal’s standing in the baseball writing community, it could have some influence on the 30 voters who have AL MVP ballots this year. And if you’ve read FanGraphs for the last few years, you probably know that most of us writing here agree with his stance; the idea that Trout is somehow less valuable because his teammates stink is not an argument that I give much credence to.

But I also have been doing this long enough to realize that a good number of people are entrenched on this issue, believing that production on a losing team is not valuable; we’ve all heard some version of “The Angels could have finished in last without him” trope. The (unfortunate) reality is that this idea isn’t going away any time soon, and it’s likely that a bunch of AL MVP voters will continue with the tradition of voting for the best player on a playoff team.

So here’s what I would like to add to Ken’s plea to our BBWAA brethren; if you’re going to argue that Trout cannot be more valuable than one of Mookie Betts, Josh Donaldson, or Manny Machado, because his teammates didn’t let him turn his production into value, then extend that belief throughout your ballot. Own the idea of value being exclusively created by team wins and playoff appearances, and apply it to every place on the ballot, not just the top spot.

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On August 19th, the Mets lost 8-1 to the Giants, dropping to 60-62 on the season. The loss, coupled with a depleted roster — that was just about to get more depleted, as they would place Steven Matz back on the disabled list three days later — pushed their playoff odds to a season-low 6.6%. Here’s what has happened over the last month, in graph form.

That is simply a remarkable image; the visualization of a team saving a nearly-lost season in very short order. Since that loss to the Giants, the Mets have gone 20-7, and have now taken the lead for the top spot in the NL Wild Card race. The defending NL Champs are now very likely to be back in the postseason, 30 days after they were just about to write their own eulogy. Let’s take a look at how they got here.

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Yesterday, following a league investigation into claims that the Padres withheld pertinent medical information from other teams with whom they were discussing trades, MLB suspended Padres GM A.J. Preller for 30 days. The Padres admit that they screwed up and vow to change their “medical administration and record keeping,” but in their statement about the suspension, claim to have done so unintentionally.

Obviously, as outsiders without knowledge of what the league found in their investigation, we can’t make any definitive claims about what is true and what isn’t, but the idea that the Padres accidentally kept two sets of medical records — one for their internal use and one to be fed into the centralized league database — is absurd. You don’t unintentionally create more work for your medical staff without knowing exactly why you’re doing so, and it’s not like everyone in the Padres organization hasn’t previously worked with other organizations; they all knew the standard protocol for reporting health information in trade discussions, and they knew this wasn’t how everyone else does things. The idea that this was an accident, and that no one in the organization realized what the team was doing, is laughably unbelievable absent a compelling explanation, which the Padres did not provide.

As best as we can tell, the Padres lied (by omitting pertinent information) to other teams about the health of their players in order to try and complete trades and secure returns that they might not be able to otherwise if the full scale of medical information was disclosed. And it worked. They made the Andrew Cashner deal with the Marlins by also including Colin Rea, a young starter the Marlins thought they were getting to bolster their rotation; when it turned out that Rea got to Miami and admitted that his elbow hurt and had been hurting for some time, the Marlins went nuts and the Padres had to agree to rework the deal, taking Rea back and sending one of the prospects they got in the deal back to Miami.

Unlike the Rodney/Rea deal, the Red Sox didn’t force the Padres to rework the Drew Pomeranz/Anderson Espinoza swap, but it is fair to wonder if they would have surrendered their top pitching prospect had they known that Pomeranz had been taking anti-inflammatory medications at the time of the deal. We’ll never know, of course, but it’s at least reasonable to think that the Padres believed there was some benefit to their trade discussions by withholding that information from the Red Sox, or else they wouldn’t have bothered to omit that information in the first place.

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Last week, we ran a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award (links to all of which are available here). Today, we continue with the National League MVP Award.

Note that, as with last week’s posts, these are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Let’s travel back to spring training, shall we? At that point, we projected the Dodgers to win 93 games and take the NL West crown, but we also thought Clayton Kershaw was going to stay healthy and pitch a full season. We thought the rotation behind him would consist of Alex Wood, Brett Anderson, and Scott Kazmir, with Brandon McCarthy and Hyun-Jin Ryu coming back in May or June to provide depth. We thought Andre Ethier and Yasiel Puig would man the corner-outfield spots, with Carl Crawford and Scott Van Slyke serving as the reserves. We thought Chris Hatcher and Yimi Garcia would be effective setup guys to get the ball to Kenley Jansen.

Almost nothing has gone the way the Dodgers expected. Their rotation was decimated by injuries, their outfield by injury and underperformance. The bullpen has been a tilt-o-wheel of guys coming up from the minors to throw some innings before heading back to the PCL. They spent the second half of the year without the best pitcher alive, and set the record for most players placed on the disabled list in a single season. And yet, here they are, two weeks from the end of the season, with a projected final record of 92-70. How on earth did they get here?

Well, it’s easy to credit the team with building admirable depth, since that has been the focus of their roster construction. Guys like Justin Turner and Joc Pederson deserve recognition for holding the offense together. Julio Urias has been terrific as a part-time starter. But, in reality, there’s one big reason the Dodgers are likely to win the NL West despite a historic rash of injuries, and that reason is Corey Seager.

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