The baseball season is currently about seven-eighths complete. Typically, around this time, the MVP races in both leagues start to become somewhat clear, with two or three players distinguishing themselves from the crowd. In the American League, that’s more or less the case. Jose Altuve, Aaron Judge, and Mike Trout possess the highest WAR marks among batters by some distance. Boston’s Chris Sale, meanwhile, will almost certainly provoke philosophical debates about a pitcher’s worthiness for the distinction of MVP.

In the National League, however, the picture is much less clear. One could make a convincing argument for Paul Goldschmidt. On the other hand, Giancarlo Stanton might hit over 60 home runs. Anthony Rendon is the current NL WAR leader. Corey Seager is the best position player on the team with the best record. Joey Votto is having a great season even for Joey Votto (and even for a last-place team). Kris Bryant has approximated the offensive numbers from his MVP-winning season last year. And, finally, Nolan Arenado is generally regarded as the best player on a Rockies club that’s likely bound for a play-in game.

This post actually does concern a member of the Rockies. It isn’t Arenado, though. While Arenado is probably the club’s best player, that’s not necessarily the same thing as having authored the club’s best season. Charlie Blackmon earns that distinction, and he’s a deserving MVP candidate.

A brief examination of Blackmon’s stat line reveals some gaudy numbers. He’s got 34 homers, the third-highest total in the NL. His .338 batting average leads the league, as does his total of 128 runs scored. His .404 on-base percentage ranks seventh in the NL; his .617 slugging percentage trails only Stanton’s .644 mark.

Of course, those numbers are all a product of Coors Field to some degree. As a member of the Rockies, Blackmon plays half his games in a ballpark that inflates offensive lines, which naturally invites suspicion regarding the legitimacy of Blackmon’s hitting exploits.

Fortunately, we can account for that. His 147 wRC+ — a mark that adjusts both for league and park — ranks sixth in the NL and indicates that Blackmon has been one of the National League’s best hitters even after acknowledging the influence of Coors.

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A brief examination of the Cleveland Indians’ roster reveals a number of good players having a number of good seasons. That’s generally the type of thing you’d expect from a team that currently possesses one of the best records in baseball.

Much of Cleveland’s overall success has been the result of a strong second half. By wins above replacement, Corey Kluber has been the club’s most important contributor since the All-Star break. Among non-pitchers, Francisco Lindor has a very narrow lead over one of his teammates in the WAR column. And the identity of that teammate might not be completely obvious. It isn’t last year’s breakout star Jose Ramirez, for example. It’s not big offseason acquisition Edwin Encarnacion, either. No. In a virtual tie with Lindor for second-half WAR is veteran Carlos Santana. The first baseman has arguably been the best player on baseball’s best team in the second half. The 31-year-old soon-to-be free agent has inarguably been one of baseball’s best hitters since the All-Star break.

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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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Towards the end of last week, Maury Brown published the local television ratings for the league’s non-Canadian teams at Forbes. For the sport, the news is generally positive. Even as those in some quarters continue to perpetuate the narrative that “baseball is dying,” the data suggest otherwise.

This isn’t to say that Major League Baseball is without its flaws, of course. Greater attention ought to be paid to some areas, particularly to the matter of local youth outreach and accessibility to the sport, in general. As a business, however, baseball is booming. In terms of general popularity, attendance and television ratings suggest that MLB is a major force. An examination of the numbers reveals a series of encouraging trends. For example, we find that (a) many viewers prefer baseball to other available options and (b) winning clubs attract larger audiences than losing ones and (c) a successful Yankees club helps ratings.

Let’s take a look at some of these trends using the data from Brown’s piece, both overall and among teams. Before we begin, a note about ratings versus attendance numbers. Historically, the former respond to recent success more quickly than the latter. Team’s get a big boost after a strong season, with raised expectations for the next year. It takes some planning and expense for fans to actually attend games, though. To watch them on television, meanwhile, requires just a cable subscription and some free time. So expect these figures to be more reactive to success than similar numbers for attendance.

The chart below shows the change in winning percentage for MLB teams from 2016 to 2017 as well as the percentage change in local television ratings.

Eight of the 12 teams to have recorded at least a 20-point improvement in win percentage from last season have seen also experienced a more or less corresponding improvement in television ratings from. Of the four teams not to have benefited from a ratings bump, only the Diamondbacks have actually been good — although the Rays and Angels are each contending for a playoff spot.

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If the postseason started today, five teams in the top half of major-league payrolls at the beginning of the year would qualify for the playoffs: the Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees, and Washington Nationals*. That means that five teams in the bottom half of Opening Day payrolls would make the playoffs as well — in this case, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, Colorado Rockies, Houston Astros, and Minnesota Twins.

*Numbers current as of yesterday.

Presenting the standings in this way might give one the impression that we remain in an age of great baseball parity. An age in which the Kansas City Royals can win the World Series, Cleveland can get there, too, and teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates can sustain multiple years of playoff contention.

That isn’t quite the case, however.

Of the clubs that feature top-six payrolls this season, three have playoff chances of at least 96% (Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs). A fourth, the Yankees, aren’t too far behind. If the Twins can’t hold on to a playoff spot and are overtaken by anyone but the Rays, the only team in the bottom 12 of payrolls this season to make the playoffs will be the Arizona Diamondbacks, and even their spot isn’t a guarantee. Money buys players, and those players rack up wins for their ball clubs. Last season, at around this time, I took a look at the relationship between payroll and wins, and noted that the relationship was one of the strongest we had seen in a while. This is what it looked like at the end of last season.

Last season saw one of the strongest relationships between payroll and wins to exist in several decades. Here’s how the relationship has developed since 1990, with help from data courtesy Brian MacPherson. 

In the early 90s, Major League Baseball was coming off an era of collusion and lack of expansion. That, combined with a new influx of talent from outside the United States, meant that simply paying for major-league talent wasn’t the only solution to winning major-league games. (To track back further, read Dave Studeman’s piece in Hardball Times on the subject.)

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Last week, I took a look at Statcast data from 2016 and 2017 and attempted to find contact-management skills among pitchers. The basic conclusion of that study? Pitchers might well have skills to manage contact once the ball hits the bat; if they do, however, neither xwOBA nor Statcast classifications seem to reveal it. Quality of contact didn’t hold up from year to year — i.e. last year’s results on contact aren’t likely to inform much of this year’s results on contact.

In the comments section, however, one reader wondered if in-season results might create a different result. That’s what I’d like to examine in this post. Here we go.

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Marcus Stroman is one of the very best pitchers in baseball. Since the beginning of last season, his 6.7 WAR is 13th in the league, right behind Jon Lester, Stephen Strasburg, and Jose Quintana — and just ahead of Jacob deGrom, Madison Bumgarner, and Zack Greinke. If you’re a believer in ERA, you probably didn’t think much of his 4.37 mark last year but are much more impressed by this season’s 2.99 figure. His FIP has remained steady, right around 3.70.

Despite a listed height of 5-foot-8, Stroman has recorded one of the league’s higher average fastball velocities. While there’s typically a relationship between velocity and strikeouts, that’s never been integral to Stroman’s success. His game is about inducing ground balls. It works well for him, but it does also leave room for some to regard him as something less than an ace.

As far as the ground-balling goes, Stroman’s elite. His 60.1% ground-ball rate topped all pitchers last season. He’s actually improved upon that figure this year, recording a 62.6% rate so far. The right-hander’s 61.2% ground-ball rate in 2016 and 2017 is the second-highest over a two-year period (min. 300 innings pitched) this decade behind Dallas Keuchel’s 62.6% mark in 2014 and 2015. Tim Hudson is the only other pitcher to exceed 60% grounders over a two-year period since 2010.

Inducing a lot of ground balls is a good thing, largely because ground balls can’t become homers. Stroman’s 0.87 HR/9 over the last two years is indicative of that; it places second among qualified starters only to Michael Fulmer’s 0.80 mark. Even after dropping the inning requirement to 250, Stroman sits behind only Fulmer, Clayton Kershaw and Kyle Hendricks. Stroman’s ability to limit homers helps make him one of the league’s better pitchers, even without an abundance of swings and misses.

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While there are certain events (like strikeouts, walks, and home runs) over which a pitcher exerts more or less direct control, it seems pretty clear at this point that there are some pitchers who are better at managing contact than others. It’s also also seems clear that, if a pitcher can’t manage contact at all, he’s unlikely to reach or stay in the big leagues for any length of time.

Consider: since the conclusion of World War II, about 750 pitchers have recorded at least 1,000 innings; of those 750 or so, all but nine of them have conceded a batting average on balls in play (BABIP) of .310 or less. Even that group of nine is pretty concentrated, the middle two-thirds separated by .029 BABIP. The difference between the guy ranked 125 out of 751 and the guy ranked 625 out of 751 is just three hits out of 100 balls in play. Those three hits can add up over a long period of time, of course, but it still represents a rather small difference even between players with lengthy careers. For that reason, attempting to discern batted-ball skills among pitchers with just a few seasons of data is difficult. Thanks to the emergence of Statcast, however, we have some better tools than just plain BABIP to evaluate a pitcher’s ability to manage contact. Let’s take a look at what the more granular batted-ball data reveals.

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The Astros’ best player this year has been Jose Altuve, and it isn’t particularly close. The second baseman is one of the leading candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player award. After Altuve, the best players on the team are probably George Springer and Carlos Correa, though Springer spent some time on the disabled list recently and Correa remains there now. After that group, there’s Marwin Gonzalez, who’s hitting out of his mind, and a collection of other adequate players on the position-player side.

As a team, the Astros have an MLB-leading 127 wRC+, miles ahead of the second-place Dodgers, who sit 16 points back. With Altuve, Correa, and Springer leading the way, the Astros offense has been great all year. A slow start moved Alex Bregman from the all-important second spot in the lineup down to the eighth spot for much of the season. Over the past two months, however — in somewhat quiet fashion– he’s become one of Houston’s most important players.

It’s possible that Bregman’s profile doesn’t lend itself to stardom the same way some of his teammates’ profiles do. His relative lack of notoriety, however, might just be a result of the way he entered the majors.

Consider the following players:

Player A was taken with the second-overall pick in the draft out of college and, less than a year later, was destroying Double-A pitching. He was a top-20 prospect and, by midseason, had become the top prospect in the game according to Keith Law. At that point, he was promoted to Triple-A, where spent the rest of the season performing extremely well. He entered the following season as baseball’s top prospect and subsequently won Rookie of the Year.

Player B was taken with the second-overall pick in the draft out of college and, less than a year later, was destroying Double-A pitching. He entered the season as a top-20-ish prospect (No. 42 was on the low end) and, by midseason, had become the top prospect in the game according to Keith Law. At that point, he was promoted to Triple-A and crushed it, but only stayed there briefly before getting promoted to the big leagues and holding his own. He then lost his prospect eligibility, any Rookie of the Year buzz, and got off to a slow start.

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The defining characteristic of that period in baseball now known as the PED Era isn’t particularly hard to identify: it was power. Home-run totals increased across the game. The long-standing single-season home-run record was broken multiple times in a few years. And, of course, drug testing ultimately revealed that many players were using steroids and other PEDs specifically to aid their physical strength.

Attempting to find a similarly distinctive trend for the decade-plus since testing began isn’t as easy. For a while, the rise of the strikeout seemed to be a candidate. A combination of increased velocity, better relievers, and a bigger strike zone has caused strikeout rates to increase dramatically in recent seasons.

Over the last couple years, though, we’ve also seen another big rise in homers — a product, it seems, both of a fly-ball revolution and potentially juiced ball. We’ve also witnessed the aforementioned growth of the strike zone begin to stagnate, perhaps even to reverse.

The combination of the strikeouts with the homers over the last few years has led to its own sort of trend: an emergence of hitters who record a lot of strikeouts, walks, and homers — each of the three true outcomes, in other words — without actually hitting the ball in play all that often.

The players responsible for this development are the sort who swing and miss frequently while refusing to offer at pitches on which they’re unable to do damage. To get a sense of who I mean, here’s a list of the top-10 players this season by percentage of plays ending in one of the three true outcomes.

That’s a pretty representative collection of the sort of hitter I’m talking about. Not only are these guys refusing to hit balls in play, they’re being rewarded for it: all but two have recorded distinctly above-average batting lines.

And this group of 10 is representative of a larger trend across the league. Consider how TTO% has changed in the 20-plus years since the strike.

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