I’d like to believe that Jacob deGrom started out as hair. Just hair. Over time, that hair grew into much more than just hair, eventually sprouting a full human figure and developing world-class athletic ability. The hair would go on to play middle infield in college before transitioning into a pitcher and getting drafted by the New York Mets. The hair would then have Tommy John Surgery and never crack a top-1oo prospect list, but nevertheless the hair would reach the majors by age 25. And the hair would dominate.

On Monday night, deGrom made the 21st start of his rookie season, this one against the Miami Marlins. Here’s how he started:
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I’m going to be honest, I feel a bit dirty writing this post. We’re now on year five of Craig Kimbrel being impossibly good. For four years he’s clearly been the best reliever in baseball and, frankly, it’s one of the better stretches of relief pitching we’ve seen in recent history. Yet, this is the first post on FanGraphs this year where he is the subject, and it’s about him making a mistake. Which, really, just reinforces how good Craig Kimbrel is. He’s so good that when he makes a mistake, it becomes news. On Wednesday, Kimbrel made a new kind of mistake.
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Victor Martinez has been the best hitter in baseball this season.

Granted, that’s just an opinion that I’ve presented as fact, but he has a strong case. The strongest part of his case is that, at the time of this writing, he leads the MLB in both wOBA (.412) and wRC+ (167). There aren’t any better hitting metrics than those two, but in case you want more evidence, he’s also second in batting average (.337), first in on-base percentage (.407), second in slugging percentage (.575), 10th in isolated slugging percentage (.238) and second in total batting value behind only Mike Trout, thanks to a disparity of plate appearances. Victor Martinez has the same total batting value as Giancarlo Stanton and he’s come up to the plate 56 fewer times. That’s how good he’s been. He’s been so good, some have tossed his name around in the MVP discussion, despite serving primarily as a designated hitter. A DH has never won the MVP award.

But he has been much more than just a great hitter. He has been a downright fascinating hitter. One thing that really jumps out when looking at his numbers are his walks and strikeouts. He has the lowest strikeout rate in the MLB, at 6.5%. He also has a 10.7% walk rate. No other player in baseball has walked more than they’ve struck out this year. Victor has 22 more walks than strikeouts (not including his league-leading 25 intentional walks). His strikeouts and walks, as well as his still-elite bat speed, are things I touched upon when I wrote about Martinez for this site back in May. But that’s in the past. The contents of that post were remarkable because of the circumstances, e.g. his age, injuries and past as a catcher. The content that follows in this post is remarkable because of its place in history.
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We can’t ever be sure exactly who a player is. Some guys are easier to project than others. Some guys have many years of data and consistent results. Guys like Hunter Pence or Ben Zobrist. Other guys have minimal data and inconsistent results. Danny Salazar is a guy like that.

Nevertheless, a large portion of what we do is try to figure out exactly who players are. We can’t have a definitive answer as to what a player’s true talent level is, but we do have data. We do have video, and we do have people inside the game with whom to converse. Let’s combine these three things and try to figure out what to make of Danny Salazar.

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When I recently wrote about Adam Dunn for this site, the circumstances were a bit different. That was about Adam Dunn pitching. This is about Adam Dunn becoming a member of the Oakland Athletics via trade, because that is exactly what happened on Sunday. As you know, Dunn was traded to the A’s in exchange for minor leaguer Nolan Sanburn. Just like Adam Dunn pitching, Adam Dunn playing for the A’s just seemed like something that eventually had to happen. The A’s were one of the first teams to really value the OBP/power guys. Adam Dunn is the posterchild of the high-OBP, high-power mold.

And so now, here we have it. Adam Dunn is a member of the Oakland Athletics. It’s no secret why they traded for him. It was no surprise when they traded for him. The trade was completed on August 31, the last day a player could be acquired and still be eligible for a team’s playoff roster. The A’s got Dunn for the playoffs. The A’s got Dunn to hit homers in the playoffs. We’re not in the playoffs yet, but here’s what Adam Dunn did in his first at-bat with Oakland:
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We’ve reached the point in the regular season where, moving forward, a lot of our posts will be focused on the playoff race and teams within the playoff race. This is simply a natural shift of attention that occurs as the season progresses. Everything throughout the regular season builds up to the playoff race and now we’re here, so everything that happens which directly affects the playoff race becomes all the more noteworthy.

That doesn’t mean much for the New York Mets. They’re playing without their best and most exciting player, are currently eight games below .500, just two games out of last place and all but mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, with a a 0.1% chance to make the wild card.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Looking beyond this season, the Mets have a lot to be excited about, thanks to some combination of Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Jon Niese, Rafael Montero and Dillon Gee making up one of most promising young pitching staffs in baseball. Looking towards the rest of this season, there is less to be excited about, as neither Harvey or Syndergaard will pitch in the majors this year. But deGrom is still enjoying an unexpected breakout year and Wheeler is living up to the hype of being really, really good.

And there’s something else about Zack Wheeler that will make the rest of his starts this season a little more interesting.
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Two facts, with which you as a FanGraphs reader are likely familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays are among the most sabermetrically-inclined organizations in major league baseball.

• Sabermetrically-inclined folk generally are against the decision to sacrifice bunt.

One more fact, with which you are less likely to be familiar:

• The Tampa Bay Rays have attempted 58 non-pitcher sacrifice bunts this season, by far the highest mark in the major leagues. No other team has even 50.

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On Monday, our very own Jeff Sullivan wrote about the return of the Koji Uehara curveball. You see, Uehara doesn’t really throw a curveball. He only threw three last season. He’s thrown two this season. This fascinated me. Pitchers have set repertoires and, for the most part, they typically don’t deviate from them. What I wanted to do was put together a list of some of baseball’s most rare pitches. I set to the leaderboards to find starting pitchers with an unusually low percentage of curveballs, sliders, splitters or changeups, but the results didn’t really please me. Turns out not many guys are like Uehara, throwing a certain pitch just a couple of times. Either they’ve thrown a pitch 25-30 times already this season or they don’t throw it at all.

That is, unless we’re talking about the eephus.

What follows, mostly, are not pure “eephi” in the true sense of the word, as there haven’t been too many true eephus pitches since perhaps El Duque’s in the early 2000’s. But when we think eephus, we think really slow, high-arcing pitches. What I’ve done, thanks to the help of BaseballSavant, is identify all curveballs throw less than 60mph this season. “Slow curves” are generally those under 70. When the speed starts with a 5, that’s when you’re really getting unique.

This season, there have been 31 curveballs thrown less than 60mph, but there’s some caveats here. Not all eephi are made the same. For example, the pitch thrown by Hector Santiago listed at 46mph is clearly some sort of PITCHf/x glitch, as it was actually a 93mph fastball that got smoked to right field. Down to 30.

Then there’s pitches like this:

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My Sunday afternoon was spent covering the Cleveland Indians and the Baltimore Orioles game at Progressive Field. In the fifth inning, something caught my eye from the press box:

Quite the double play turned by the #Orioles to kill a potential rally with two on in the fifth. Nice snag by Gausman, quick turn by Hardy.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_ABJ) August 17, 2014

Double plays happen all the time. This one was a bit unique in that it was started by the pitcher, but it still appeared to be a pretty standard double play. Most exciting double plays are the result of a glove flip, a diving stop or a barehanded catch-and-throw. Here’s what this one looked like:

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Let us, for a moment, imagine a wacky, nonsensical alternate reality MLB. In this alternate reality MLB, players do not agree upon a salary before the season begins. Rather, they are compensated for their yearly production. Let’s say that production is measured by WAR. The generally accepted market value of a win is approximately $6 million/WAR.

During Shin-Soo Choo’s prime in Cleveland from 2008-10, he was a 5-win player. Last year, for Cincinnati, he was a 5-win player. At Choo’s best, and his most recent prior to signing a big free agent contract this offseason, he would have earned $30M per season for his production. That’s a high number! That’s a lot of production.

In this year’s wacky, nonsensical alternate reality MLB, Choo would still be waiting to earn his first dollar. By the end of the season, he’d be lucky to scrape together a few million. As of about a week ago, he would have actually owed the Texas Rangers organization a million or two.
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