Last season, second basemen produced their best collective season ever in major-league history. There are a few different theories about what might have happened. With the increased use of the shift, it’s possible that teams were willing to deploy worse defenders at second in exchange for more offensive production. It’s also possible it was just a random blip of very good seasons by quite a few second basemen. Those are the most likely explanations, at least.

We’re now roughly halfway through the 2017 campaign, and the production from second basemen so far has been good — one of the better seasons of all time, if things hold up — but it also represents a big step back from what we saw last year.

How big a step back? Well, consider: last year, 11 second basemen recorded four-win seasons.

In contrast, here’s the list of players who are projected to hit 4.0 WAR by the end of the current season.

Even if you include the players who are “on pace” to hit four wins — if not forecast by the projections to do so — then the only additions are Josh Harrison (2.3 WAR as of Sunday) and Jed Lowrie (2.1 WAR).

It’s not just overall value that’s taken a step back, either. If you look at the first table from this post, you’ll see that nine second baseman recorded at least a 120 wRC+ last season. Matt Carpenter — who split time evenly between second, third, and first — would make a 10th. Nor does that include the 122 wRC+ or 3.7 WAR produced by Neil Walker, as he fell roughly 50 plate appearances short of qualifying for the batting title.

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The Marlins are sellers this year. Adeiny Hechavarria is already gone. Kyle Barraclough, David Phelps, and A.J. Ramos are among the bullpen pieces that might be appealing. Marcell Ozuna is having a great year and has two more years of control after this one, so he would be a desirable piece. If the team opted to, they could get a haul for Christian Yelich, too. And if the team is truly selling for the future and wants to reduce future salaries either for a future owner or because that’s just what the Marlins do, then trading Giancarlo Stanton has to be an option, as well.

It’s not entirely clear how much value Stanton has in trade. He’s obviously been a very good player to this point in his career and has recorded a 130 wRC+ so far this year. The projections see him doing roughly that the rest of the way, as well, coming close to a four-win season. He’s also only making $14.5 million in 2017, which makes him quite valuable in the near term. Detracting from that value in the longer term is the $295 million owed to Stanton over the next 10 years, part of a deal that will pay him through his age-37 season. He also has a no-trade clause. Adding to the complexity is an opt-out clause Stanton possesses in his contract after the 2020 campaign. He’ll be finishing his age-30 season at that point and will be owed $219 million over the next seven seasons.

Given the size of his deal, the return for Stanton might not be great. For that reason and because he’s a good player now and because he’s likely to remain a good player for the next few years, it’s fair to question why the Marlins would bother moving him. It’s probably too easy just to say “Because that’s what the Marlins do.” But, well, that is what the Marlins do. That opt-out might end up being difficult to turn down, and the current owner, Jeffrey Loria, likely has no interest in paying a 30-plus-year-old slugger $30 million a year. There are also rumors that the Marlins will be sold at some point soon. Before teams are sold, we often see large contracts moved in order to make the team more attractive in terms of future commitments.

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Over at Baseball Savant, another Statcast leaderboard has been rolled out. This one relates to speed. They are calling it Sprint Speed, and the definition is as follows:

Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard.

While Sprint Speed has been used for a while, we didn’t have leaderboards until now. Mike Petriello over at MLB.com has a full article on the rollout which I would recommend. Among the highlights: Sprint Speed correlates well from year to year; it doesn’t require a large sample to become reflective of true talent (Petriello compares speed to fastball velocity); and it might be useful when attempting to identify injuries that could be slowing players down.

So, we know that the metric can tell us who is fast and who is not. That’s helpful. I wondered if it might also be able tell us anything about any other statistics.

Before trying to predict the future or look at past years, I thought it might be useful to compare speed to the stats we have and see how they compare. While the leaderboard over at Statcast features nearly 350 names (every player who’s produced 10 or more max-speed data points), those sample sizes might be a bit too small when looking at other statistics. As a result, I narrowed the sample for this study down to the 166 players who were qualified at the end of Monday’s games.

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Earlier this week, Travis Sawchik took note of some steps that Colorado Rockies pitchers have taken this year to better succeed in the context of the team’s challenging home park. Jeff Sullivan added to the conversation the next day, observing that the Rockies have been fantastic on the road this season. To continue the investigation of Colorado’s strong campaign, I’ve attempted here to understand what factors have contributed to the Rockies’ road record — which stands at 25-13 entering today, the second-best mark in the majors. My conclusion? A good bullpen, the club’s first decent defense in quite some time, and some luck.

The Rockies have one of the best records in the majors this year. Examining merely the raw numbers, one might conclude that the club’s offense, which ranks fourth in runs per game, is largely to thank for that. That would be a bad conclusion to reach, however. For the Rockies, in their stadium, fourth is actually quite bad. After adjusting for park, the team’s offensive is 15% worse than league average, fifth worst in the majors. One might argue that the park adjustment penalizes hitters too much for Coors Field. Perhaps that’s the case. Even so, the Rockies have recorded a below-average offensive mark away from Coors, as well. Their offense, by most measures, just hasn’t been that great.

There are also suggestions that the club is perhaps getting a bit lucky. While the Rockies have compiled a 47-27 record overall, Pythagorean win percentage (which estimates a club’s record based on runs scored and allowed) has them at 43-31, while BaseRuns (which strips out sequencing) has them at 40-34. That could go a long way in explaining the Rockies road record: just chalk it up to luck and be done.

We can’t actually do that, though, because most of that luck has come at home for the Rockies. In 36 home games, Colorado has outscored their opponents by just 19 runs; on the road, that margin is 46 runs. At least in terms of runs scored and prevented, the Rockies have earned their road success.

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It’s now been six years since Buster Posey lost most of the season due to a broken leg bone suffered in a home plate collision. Two years later, Major League Baseball adopted Rule 7.13 to deal with collisions at home plate, meaning we are now in the fourth year of the rule designed to prevent serious injuries like the one Posey suffered as well as limit the damaging effects of concussions. There are two parts to the rule, one for catchers and one for runners, and together, collisions at the plate have become pretty non-existent. That’s what makes Monday night’s collision–when Anthony Rizzo barreled down the line into Austin Hedges–notable. It’s now a rarity, but Rizzo’s play was in clear violation of the rule.

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Some say it’s all been done before. That’s perhaps mostly true, but as something only mostly true, all of it has not actually been done before. This is especially true if you are willing to include qualifiers. Take this example: Before last weekend, no player had ever completed a cycle with a walk-off homer when the team was trailing at the time of the blast, per Baseball-Reference’s Play Index. Nolan Arenado has now eliminated that previous distinction.

Cycles are fairly rare, occurring 255 times, per Baseball-Reference, roughly once every 700 games, and this decade has been in line with that average. Since the beginning of last season, there have been 99 walkoff wins that ended in a homer, about one in 35 games. Of those 99 walkoffs, just 19 were come from behind homers, and only 13 came in the ninth, roughly one in 266 games. Put those two together, and we have about a one in 750,000 chance of both happening in a game. Given we’ve had about one quarter of that many games played over the last 100 years, it seems reasonable we’ve waited this long.

There have been a few other similar games over the years if you relax some of the requirements. There were only nine games in the Baseball-Reference Play Index where a player hit for the cycle and had the game winning hit in a walkoff. Many might have seen that the last player to hit a walkoff homer to complete a cycle was Carlos Gonzalez in 2010. He hit his shot to break a 5-5 tie against the Cubs. Hopefully the seven year difference between occurrences adds to the perceived rarity as opposed to making it seem commonplace. Read the rest of this entry »

Living in a world where Mike Trout doesn’t suit up nightly leads to some difficult questions about who might be the best player in his absence. Given their similar ages and trajectories, Bryce Harper is a decent choice. That said, we could consider a host of names, including Jose Altuve, Kris Bryant, Mookie Betts, Josh Donaldson, Clayton Kershaw, Manny Machado, Corey Seager… you get the idea. There are a lot of really good baseball players out there who aren’t Mike Trout and all have good cases for second-best player.

If we focus just on offense, the field changes a little bit. Bryant is probably still up there. Harper and Donaldson, too. Joey Votto has a pretty good case, Anthony Rizzo is still very good, and Aaron Judge is certainly a force this season. But if you combine track record, current performance, and expected future performance, Paul Goldschmidt might top them all.

In terms of hitting, patience, and power, Goldschmidt is the complete package. He’s got a career batting average over .300, on-base percentage over .400, and slugging percentage over .500. The only other active players to meet those standards are Mike Trout and Joey Votto. And while those numbers are subject to Goldschmidt’s inevitable decline, players who retire with .300/.400/.500 slash lines tend to end up in the Hall of Fame. Chipper Jones and Frank Thomas are two the most recent examples. And Goldschmidt might be having his best year with the bat. His .323/.448/.596 receives the benefit of his home park, but the 164 wRC+ plays anywhere.

Hitting isn’t the only aspect of Goldschmidt’s offensive profile, either. He’s an excellent runner, both stealing and taking the extra base on batted balls. The list of players with more steals than Paul Goldschmidt since the start of the 2015 season is a short one. They are (in order of total stolen bases): Billy Hamilton, Dee Gordon, Jonathan Villar, Jose Altuve, Starling Marte, Jarrod Dyson, and Rajai Davis. When you take into account runs generated from stolen bases and losses from caught stealing, the list of players better than Goldschmidt over the last two-plus seasons is even shorter: Hamilton, Gordon, and Dyson.

It’s not just on steals where he generates runs. He’s also in the top 10 since 2015 in Ultimate Base Runs (UBR), which measures extra bases taken. So far this season, his percentages of going first to third on a single (50%), first to home on a double (57%), and second to home on a single (63%) are all well above the respective league averages of 28%, 40%, and 60%. He’s done it without making an out.

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We’re still 100 games away from the end of the season, but we’re getting closer to that time when teams have to decide whether they’re in or out of contention for the playoffs. Some clubs might have to make the tough choice of moving themselves out of contention despite having a reasonable playoff shot. In the American League, nearly every team is still in the race. That might change over the course of the next month, of course, but the field certainly looks like it will still be crowded come July.

There are five playoff spots up for grabs in the AL, and while a lot can and will happen the rest of the way, there are four teams to which our playoff odds give roughly an 80% or better chance of making the playoffs: the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. The Astros look well on their way to potentially 100 wins, while the Indians, Red Sox and Yankees appear to be moving toward close to 90 wins, a figure that generally amounts to a spot in the postseason. Those four teams total 359% of the 500% total odds available. After that, seven teams have something close to a 10%.

After the first four teams, no club has a better than a 50% chance at the playoffs. The team at the top, Toronto, is currently in last place in its division. Here are the playoff odds since the beginning of the season for the rest of the teams in the American League — with the exception, that is, of the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, who have been near zero all season long.

Does that look like an incomprehensible mess? Well, welcome to the AL Wild Card race. If it helps at all, the list of teams at the bottom of the chart is in order in terms of their current playoff odds. There are seven teams with close to a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, with a couple more in Kansas City and Oakland that possess an outside chance of getting back into the mix. If you picked the top team currently by the odds, Toronto, taking the field is probably a better bet.

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Currently 5.5 games out of first place in the AL Central, it’s still unclear whether the Royals will go for it one last time with a number of the same pieces from their championship season, or if they’ll perform a massive sell-off of multiple potential free agents. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Jason Vargas are among those who could be moved. Perhaps Kelvin Herrera, just another season from free agency, could be gone as well. Mike Moustakas might not get the notoriety of some of his teammates, but whether the Royals go all-in or sell, it’s Moustakas who should play the most important role.

Just a few seasons ago, Moustakas was a part of a disappointing group of formerly heralded prospects on the Royals’ major-league club. In 2014, as the Royals shocked just about everyone with their run to the World Series, Moustakas finished the season with a line of .212/.271/.361, good for just a 75 wRC+. Even with solid defense, the result was a barely replacement-level season. Moustakas had a problem: he was a fly-ball hitter in a spacious park. In the 2014 postseason, Moustakas hit four homers in his first six games, but was mostly quiet the rest of the way.

That power from the 2014 postseason didn’t really carry over to 2015, but once the summer hit — around the same time baseballs began flying out of the park at a much greater rate — Moustakas surged. Due to a knee injury, he recorded only 113 plate appearances the next season, but the power showed up in limited time — and it has continued in a big way this season. The graph below shows Moustakas’ 15-game rolling ISO, allowing us to see where Moustakas took off.

In the first half of 2015, Moustakas had become a ground-ball hitter, and the 35% fly-ball rate he recorded over that period would have been the lowest of his career if it had continued. He was pairing those grounders with a very low 11% strikeout rate, .315 BABIP, and very little power. The result was a 115 wRC+ over the first half, not too bad for a guy with a career 82 wRC+ in nearly 2,000 plate appearances. As for the change in approach, maybe it was because he was slotted at the No. 2 spot in the lineup and felt he had a role to play. He hadn’t ever been a guy to run up a decent BABIP on account of all the fly balls, so it’s unclear whether this strategy of grounders was going to work long term. We’ve never had to find out.

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There are a handful of reasons why Edinson Volquez’s no-hitter didn’t get a ton of attention. It happened on a weekend day in one of baseball’s least engaged markets (Miami). The pitcher involved was a journeyman in the midst of another just okay season. And as for making history and grabbing headlines, this particular Saturday wasn’t ideal, as one the greatest players of all time, Albert Pujols, was busy hitting a grand slam to record his 600th homer. So, yes, there were a lot of factors working against extensive coverage of this particular no-hitter. But it’s also possible that the no-hitter itself has lost a little bit of its cachet.

Some have lamented that Pujols’s 600th homer didn’t net the attention it should have garnered, given the rarity of such an event. It has actually been a while since a modern player — whether Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, or Jim Thome — hit their 600th home runs, and we might not see another player get there for quite some time. The home-run barrage of the 90s and early 2000s might have dampened the enthusiasm for career accomplishments like a 500th or 600th homer. As for a no-hitter, it’s more of a single-game oddity and, in terms of rarity, comes nowhere close to a big career home-run threshold. But Scooter Gennett’s four-homer game received a lot of attention, and that’s a single-game exploit, as well. (Although, in fairness, it’s probably closer to a perfect game in terms of frequency.) Whatever the case, it appears as though interest in the no-hitter has decreased and it’s quite possible that the volume of them over the last half-decade is the reason why.

From 2012 to -15, there were 20 no-hitters, an average of five per year and the greatest number over any four-year stretch in the last century. Here are the number of no-hitters by season over the past 50 years.

The past decade has produced four of the top 10 individual seasons for no hitters out of the last 50 years, and every single year of the past decade has seen at least three no-nos. In looking at things another way, let’s go back even further, and look at the period of time it took to get to the 20 no-hitters that we saw from 2012 to -15.

We get sort of close to the present rate in 1968 — a season literally known as the Year of the Pitcher — but otherwise the present is unrivaled by this standard. Perhaps that’s why most of us didn’t even notice we were going through the longest no-hitter drought in more than a decade when it was two seasons between Randy Johnson and Anibal Sanchez no-nos between 2004 and 2006. To find another drought longer, you have to go back to 1988 to 1990, when Randy Johnson ended a drought begun by Tom Browning.

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