When Willson Contreras began to shoot up prospects lists last year, it wasn’t because of his defense. The now-24-year-old third baseman-turned-catcher was a fringe prospect who had never cracked a top-100 list until he came out of nowhere to slash .333/.413/.478 in Double-A last season — his fourth year spent behind the dish. Contreras’ breakout at the plate began earning him recognition from scouts, as Baseball America, ESPN, Baseball Prospectus and MLB.com all ranked Contreras as a top-75 prospect coming into this season. Regarding his work behind the dish, however, questions remained.

BP’s Christopher Crawford called Contreras a “work in progress” behind the plate in this year’s preseason scouting report, adding that “receiving is the big focus point right now, as he’s still learning how to frame pitches and call games.” Baseball America made note of Contreras’ “inconsistent receiving and blocking skills that need more development.” Most every scouting report on Contreras echoed a similar sentiment: great athleticism for a catcher, cannon for an arm, but the receiving and blocking needed work. Receiving is far and away the most important defensive skill for a catcher to possess, and so Contreras’ development (or lack thereof) in this area would go a long way toward determining his long-term value, or even future, behind the plate.

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The Cubs have had baseball’s best defense this season. They rank first in Defensive Runs Saved, with 58 runs above average, giving them a 10-run lead over the second-place Houston Astros. They rank first in Ultimate Zone Rating, with 50 runs saved, giving them a 15-run lead over the second-place Toronto Blue Jays. They’re turning a historically high number of balls in play into outs, and while a number of factors influence a team’s BABIP, Chicago’s elite defense is among the most important.

We’ve seen what a truly elite defense can do for a mediocre pitching staff over the past couple years, with the Kansas City Royals. We’re seeing what a truly elite defense can do with a great pitching staff right now, with the Chicago Cubs. But, while the 2013 Royals had the best defense on record during the current 14-year era of advanced defensive metrics, it’s not like that team reached the ceiling of what a defense can be. That team wasn’t built by a mad-scientist general manager whose only goal for the season was to experiment with the upper bounds of defensive performance. It was just a really, really good defense. I’d like to play the role of that mad-scientist general manager for a second, based off this chat question I received on Tuesday:

Apologies to Joe for making you wait. Hopefully you understand that your question was a bit complex for an instantaneous chat-room response. I’d like to think that your excellent question being rewarded with a full article makes up for the delay.

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From 2008-11, Tim Lincecum and Justin Verlander were two of the five best pitchers in the world. The only three pitchers with a higher WAR than those two over that time period were into their 30’s. Verlander was coming off a Cy Young Award victory in 2011; Lincecum already had a pair under his belt from 2008-09. They were both under the age of 28, and were seen as perhaps the two most likely pitchers of that time to go down as all-time greats.

We know what happened with Lincecum. The following year, he lost his fastball. Without the fastball, he struggled to ever adapt. Essentially overnight, he became ineffective, and now five years later, it looks like his career might be over.

Verlander began to lose his fastball in 2013, and by 2014, he, too, was beginning to look ineffective. The strikeouts plummeted, and just two years removed from Lincecum’s swift decline, we began to ask questions wondering if Verlander was hurt or if he could ever be a front-line starter again. All signs pointed to no. As recent as midseason 2015, Verlander looked like one of the least valuable players in the game. It seemed as if we’d lost another one of the greats to the dreaded fastball decline.

Except, something’s happened. Over the last calendar year, here are the five most valuable starting pitchers in baseball, according to our measure of WAR:
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Just six months ago, Raisel Iglesias was everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016. The 26-year-old Cuban, signed for seven years and $27 million by the Cincinnati Reds in 2014, was coming off an impressive rookie campaign in which he struck out more than a quarter of all batters faced as a starter while exhibiting above-average command and a knack for getting ground balls, and he only got better as the year went on. Iglesias, alongside Anthony DeSclafani and John Lamb, was perhaps the most enticing pick of a trio of young Reds starters who have all provided us a painful reminder of the fickle and painful nature of choosing pitching as a profession.

DeSclafani spent the first two months of the season on the disabled list with a strained oblique. Lamb’s experienced decline across the board. And Iglesias hasn’t made a start since April, and last week earned his first career save.

Iglesias’ status update informs us of two important developments. The first being: everyone’s favorite starting pitcher breakout candidate for 2016 has been a reliever for the last two months. That’s disappointing, because fans want their exciting young starting pitchers to be start. The bullpen is rightly viewed as a downgrade. The fact that Iglesias earned a save, though, at least suggests that he’s been effective out of the bullpen, and effective might be an understatement. In 28 relief innings this season, Iglesias has allowed just two earned runs — good for a Britton-like 0.64 ERA — while striking out nearly 30% of the batters he’s faced.

The Reds made the switch in an effort to keep Iglesias healthy by limiting his workload, and also to provide stability to a bullpen that’s still among the worst the expansion era has ever seen. Thus far, Iglesias has thrived. He’s thrived, and beyond that, he’s expressed satisfaction with his new role. In early July, Iglesias told Cincinnati reporters through a translator that he “thinks [he doesn’t] want to go back and be a starter again” and that he wants to “start thinking about continuing [his] career as a closer.” Now, that time is here, and so the Reds have an interesting decision to make.
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“Does Zach Britton have a shot at the Cy Young this year?”

It’s a question I didn’t take seriously at first. It’s only happened once in the last 20 years, and Eric Gagne’s 2003 season is perhaps the greatest season in the history of the modern closer. It comes complete with major league records — 55 consecutive single-season saves and 63 consecutive saves spanning multiple seasons — that helped justify the voter’s decision. There existed both the utter dominance and the storyline. But the Cy Young Award is now almost universally a starter’s award, and it’s been fair to wonder all this time whether Gagne could be the last reliever to win it, but it also might be time to start wondering whether this is the year it should happen again.

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Exit velocity! We love it! Sorry for shouting. But we do! We love to sort the leaderboards, and we love to write articles using the information gleaned from those leaderboards. This is one right here! Beat writers love to tweet the exit velocity when a player they cover dongs a dinger, and even the folks who don’t always love the application of exit velocity in the public sphere agree that its tracking can only mean positive things for the future of our understanding of the game. Exit velocity: it’s for the people. Can you believe just a few years ago we didn’t have this stuff?

We have it now, and for as little as we have grasped about the subject, it’s intuitive that the higher the average exit velocity, the better. Hard-hit balls can go for home runs, and home runs are the best. In first place on this year’s average exit velocity leaderboard is Nelson Cruz. Good hitter. In second place is Giancarlo Stanton. Good hitter. Third place? Mark Trumbo. I’m on a word count, so I’ll stop here. You get the point. Good hitters having good seasons are hitting the ball hard, and that should surprise no one.

There’s a flip side to that leaderboard. Some bad hitters are having bad seasons and hitting the ball not-hard. The guy with the lowest average exit velocity and more than 200 balls in play is Billy Hamilton, who’s averaged just 83.3 miles per hour on his batted balls. Hamilton’s having a fine season, overall — he’s projected to finish the year right around +3.0 WAR thanks again to his elite defense and baserunning — but we’re now nearly 1,500 plate appearances into Hamilton’s career, and it’s beginning to look like the bat might wind up being more Alcides Escobar than the league-average production we all dreamed on when Hamilton broke into the league.

But that’s not going to stop me from writing about Hamilton. Because even though we might like to see what happens were he to hit the ball harder, there’s a lesson to be learned from when he hits it softly. Kudos to you if you already see where this is going.

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By now, we’re used to seeing once-starters transition to the bullpen and have successful careers. We’re used to the mold. It’s a hard-throwing righty who’s got a fastball and a slider but just can’t master a consistent changeup. He gets moved to the bullpen, he ditches the changeup entirely, he ramps the velocity up a few ticks, and the fastball/slider combo dominates in one-inning bursts. It’s become a rather common career arc. And it’s almost the precise opposite of Jeff Samardzija’s career arc.

After playing football for four years at the University of Notre Dame, Samardzija cracked the big leagues two years after being selected in the fifth round of the 2006 MLB draft, and after four years pitching out of the Chicago Cubs’ bullpen, made the rare reliever-to-starter conversion. Not only that, but he actually reduced his arsenal when he became a starter. Usually, it’s the other way around. So much about Samardzija’s career seems backwards.

From an ESPN article from 2012:

Samardzija was tough against the Atlanta Braves on Monday as he got some much needed distance from a terrible June. Last month he added a curveball into the mix and might have leaned on it a bit too much.

“These last few starts we have been feeling things out, seeing what works and what doesn’t,” said Samardzija, whose next outing will be Saturday at New York. “But I was kind of fed up with walking guys and stuff so I really wanted to get into the zone, and I knew I could get into the zone with my slider.”

Starters-turned-relievers have no qualms with abandoning their problem pitches, because they don’t have to worry about giving batters multiple looks in order to turn over a lineup several times. Every batter a reliever faces, he’s only going to face once, so he trusts his best stuff and lets the hitter have it. Starters do have to worry about multiple looks, and so theoretically, the wider the arsenal, the better, as long as the pitches are effective. Jeff Samardzija used to throw a curveball, but once he transitioned into his starter role, he began to struggle. He identified the curve as being no longer effective, so he ditched it. From August 8, 2012 to July 23, 2016, Jeff Samardzija threw zero curveballs.

In the second inning of Samardzija’s July 24 start in New York against the Yankees, Starlin Castro saw something he couldn’t have possibly expected:

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Let’s peer into the future for a moment. The time: roughly one year from now. I’m hosting my weekly Tuesday chat, and a reader wants to know: who is the most underrated player in baseball? It’s a common question. It’s a question without an answer, but an answer everyone wants to know. Ben Zobrist’s time with the belt has come and gone. It’s no longer Jose Quintana — not after winning last year’s Cy Young Award. Another one of my go-to answers for this question is Mike Trout, and I might still believe that, but I know it’s not what the reader’s looking for. No, they want the star-not-perceived-as-a-star. The guy flying under the radar as one of baseball’s best at his position without the national recognition. They want what Zobrist was in his heyday. What they want is Devon Travis.

But they’re not going to get Travis as the answer to that question a year from now, because what I’m here to do now, in the present, is exactly what they don’t want you to do in any movie that involves time travel, like that one with Ashton Kutcher or any one of the dozen Final Destination films. I’m here to do something in the present that changes the future. I’m here to prevent Devon Travis from becoming the most underrated player in baseball, because he deserves to be recognized as one of the best second baseman in baseball already.

Travis checks all the boxes of a player doomed to be underrated. The first key of being overlooked as a major leaguer is to be overlooked as a minor leaguer. Check. Travis lasted until the 13th round of the 2012 draft, selected as the 424th pick between Phildrick Llewellyn and Alan Sharkey largely because teams were wary of his 5-foot-9 stature. By 2014, he’d worked his way up to cracking Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list, but even then came in at just 84th, and shortly thereafter was traded from Detroit to Toronto for Anthony Gose, whose own stock was rapidly plummeting.

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