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We live in interesting times, and despite Major League Baseball’s supposed problems — a lagging pace of play, an excess of strikeouts and homers coupled with a shortage of balls in play, a glut of teams in rebuilding mode, service-time manipulations, and so on — we’ve generally been blessed in recent years with down-to-the-wire suspense when it comes to races for playoff spots. Thanks in part to the expanded Wild Card format (which has its critics and, admittedly, its flaws), only once since 2003 has the full playoff picture been determined before the season’s final day. Unfortunately, it was last year that broke the streak.

Amid the drama of the 2011 races, which saw the Rays and Cardinals snatch spots away from the collapsing Red Sox and Braves, respectively, on the season’s final day, I coined the phrase “Team Entropy” — taking a page from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that all systems tend toward disorder — to describe the phenomenon of rooting for scenarios that produced end-of-season chaos. I’ve returned to the concept on an annual basis since then, tracking the possibilities for end-of-season, multi-team pileups that would require MLB to deviate from its previously scheduled programming.

The idea is that, if you’re a die-hard fan of a team trying to secure (or avoid blowing) a playoff spot, flag-waving for your squad of choice generally takes precedence, but if you’ve embraced the modern day’s maximalist menu of options that allow one not just to watch scoreboards but also to view multiple games on multiple gadgets, you want MORE BASEBALL in the form of final-weekend division and Wild Card races. You want extra innings and tiebreaker scenarios topped with mustard and sauerkraut. You want TVs, laptops, tablets, and phones stacked like a Nam June Paik installation so you can monitor all the action at once, and you want the MLB schedule-makers to contemplate entering the Federal Witness Protection Program instead of untangling once far-fetched scenarios. Welcome to Team Entropy, friends.

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Blue Jays infielder Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who became the consensus No. 1 prospect in baseball once Ronald Acuña graduated, has recorded one of the top batting lines at Triple-A since his promotion to that level at the end of July. White Sox outfielder Eloy Jiménez, generally considered one of the game’s top five prospects, has actually been slightly more productive than Vlad Jr. during his own 200-plus plate appearances in the International League. Mets prospect Peter Alonso, meanwhile — who lacks the transcendent talent of the aforementioned players but also rates as a top-100 prospect — leads the minor leagues in homers and plays a position from which the Mets have gotten sub-replacement level production. All three have demonstrated some level of mastery over minor-league competition. None of them are likely to appear in the majors this year.

If the circumstances were different, one could understand. If the Jays or White Sox or Mets were in the midst of a playoff race and were adding veteran talent to complement their rosters, that would be one thing. That’s not the case, though. All three clubs possess sub-.500 records. All three have endured depressed attendance figures (down 24.7% in Toronto, 5.7% in Chicago, 7.4% in New York). All three are looking towards next year.

Despite this emphasis on the future and development, executives have found excuses not to recall any of aforementioned players, ranging from a lack of available playing time to defense (always defense) to checklists to which the public isn’t privy. If the formula holds, not only will Guerrero, Jiménez, and Alonso fail to appear in the majors this year, they also won’t break camp with their respective clubs at the beginning of next season. Instead, their teams will head north from spring training without them and then, a few weeks later in April, summon them to the big club — as soon as they’ve acquired what amounts to another year of control.

What’s happening with this particular group of young players isn’t uncommon, of course. We’ve been here before — with Evan Longoria in 2008, with David Price and Matt Wieters in 2009, with Mike Trout and Bryce Harper (2012), with George Springer (2014), with Kris Bryant and Maikel Franco (2015), and with Gleyber Torres (who at least was returning from a season-ending injury) and Acuña this year.

From a cutthroat, competitive standpoint, it makes sense. Acting in their own self-interest under the rules of the collective bargaining agreement, teams want to retain their best young players for longer while paying them as little as possible. The executives’ euphemisms are all the more tiresome, however, because fans have become conditioned to accept (or even defend) them, taking the sides of billionaires (the owners) against millionaires (if, in this case, they got a handsome signing bonus). The teams’ actions may not be illegal (though colleague Sheryl Ring offered a legal argument on their behalf concerning their postponed entry into the union). We’ve become hyperconscious of it in the wake of Bryant’s delayed arrival and subsequent grievance, which three years later remains unresolved.

The problem is, the subject of teams manipulating the service time of young players is diverting attention away from the games themselves and becoming it’s own story. It’s a bad look for the sport, particularly in a year where nearly one-third of the teams are noncompetitive by design, where leaguewide attendance is down 4.6% relative to 2017 and slated to finish below 30,000 per game for the first time since 2003.

Instead of any collective effort to address the problem, however, the sport has recently produced a novel kind of service-time manipulation — in this case, involving former consensus No. 1 prospect Byron Buxton.

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Shohei Ohtani is coming back. Not Ohtani the hitter, who has thrived in his capacity as a designated hitter and pinch-hitter since his return on July 3 from a Grade 2 sprain of his ulnar collateral ligament. No, it’s Ohtani the pitcher, the one who we were afraid we might not see again this year — and maybe not even next year — will start Sunday night’s game against the Astros, announced Angels manager Mike Scioscia on Thursday. It will be the first time the 24-year-old two-way phenom taken the ball in that capacity since June 6.

If you’re not awaiting this start — and the return of this incredible athlete’s filthy stuff — with bated breath, consult your doctor.

Ohtani left his June 6 start — his ninth of the season — against the Royals after just four innings due to a recurrence of a blister. While getting the blister drained, he complained of soreness in his elbow, and a subsequent MRI revealed the sprain. With the Angels optimistic that he could avoid Tommy John surgery, he underwent both platelet-rich plasma and stem-cell injections and was placed on the disabled list. He was cleared to begin taking swings again three days later, returned to action without even going on a rehab assignment, and, despite some ups and downs, has more or less equaled the impact of his early-season work, if not exactly replicating its shape:

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Update: Less than an hour after this was published, the Mets announced that Wright would join the team for this weekend’s series in San Francisco “to continue his rehab under the watch of our training staff” and adding that he “will remain on the DL [disabled list].” Via the New York Post, “Sources said the Mets most likely would not activate Wright on the current road trip but would be more likely to do so Friday [September 7], when they return home.”

In the latest demonstration of their 80-grade ability to transform good news into bad, the Mets have turned David Wright’s promising rehab assignment into another illustration of the club’s parsimony and clumsy relationship both with players and fans. Even while promoting the 35-year-old third baseman and team captain from their High-A affiliate to their Triple-A one on Tuesday, the team — which has gone 48-73 since April 13, just half a game better than the NL-worst Padres — indicated that it’s unlikely to promote Wright to the major leagues this year, even for a September cameo, because of the insurance implications.

A seven-time All-Star, two-time Gold Glove winner and career .296/.376/.491 hitter, Wright hasn’t played in the majors since May 27, 2016 and has played just 75 big-league games since the start of 2015 due to chronic spinal stenosis (a narrowing of his spinal column) and problems with his right (throwing) shoulder. He has undergone three surgeries since his last MLB appearance, one to alleviate a herniated disc in his neck (June 2016), one to repair his right rotator cuff (September 2017), and one to alleviate pressure on a nerve in his back (October 2017). In August 2017, before the shoulder and back surgeries, he attempted a rehab stint, but it lasted just three games before he was shut down again.

In the wake of that operating table double whammy, Wright wasn’t cleared to resume baseball activity until June, and had to re-learn the mechanics of throwing. His pregame exercises to prepare his neck, back, and shoulder start at 1:30 pm for a night game, and he deals with pain on a daily basis. As The Athletic’s Marc Carig described it in his recent profile of Wright:

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As a Baby Bomber, Greg Bird is considered part of the young foundation of the Yankees’ lineup, alongside Aaron Judge, Gleyber Torres, Gary Sanchez, and now Miguel Andujar. In the wake of his tantalizing 46-game, 11-homer late-2015 debut, the Yankees have waited out his seemingly endless string of injuries, yet despite a clean bill of health, he’s been curiously unproductive — the majors’ worst regular in August, in fact. The 25-year-old slugger’s hold on the starting first base job might be summed up with this clip from Tuesday night’s game:

“It’s not what you want,” as Bird’s former manager Joe Girardi would say, but that dropped throw aside — it did not figure in the scoring of the Yankees’ 5-4 win over the White Sox — defense hasn’t been Bird’s primary problem. At a time when the Yankees have been without Judge, Sanchez, and Didi Gregorius due to injuries, Bird is in an 0-for-21 slide since homering in his first plate appearance against the Blue Jays on August 19, and hitting .114/.186/.228 with two homers in 86 plate appearances in August. His 10 wRC+ for the month is the lowest of 177 qualified hitters in that span. And that’s after I suggested it was fair to quibble with including him on the first-base list in my Replacement Level Killers series just prior to the July 31 deadline. Overall, he’s hitting .196/.284/.384 (80 wRC+) this year, and through 640 PA over his three-season major-league career, he’s at .213/.302/.435 for a 97 wRC+. That’s not going to cut it.

Bird’s short career has been one of extremes:

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While Kendrys Morales’s consecutive-game home-run streak — which ended at seven games on Monday night — and the Blue Jays’ season-high five-game winning streak provided some distraction, this past weekend brought news that most people following the team probably already intuited, namely that Troy Tulowitzki will not play this year. The 33-year-old shortstop had undergone surgery to remove bone spurs in both heels in early April, and while there were initially hopes that he could return in late May or June, and optimism that he could still return this season as late as a month ago, he’s never gotten to the point of going on a rehab assignment. In fact, he hasn’t played a competitive game since July 28, 2017, when he sprained his right ankle running the bases. While he’s vowed to return, it’s difficult to be optimistic about his future.

Though he’s earned All-Star honors five times, won two Gold Gloves, and at one point appeared to be laying the foundation for a Hall of Fame-caliber career, Tulowitzki has always had problems remaining on the field. Since debuting with a 25-game cup of coffee in 2006, he’s played more than 131 games in a season only in 2007 (155 games), 2009 (151 games), and 2011 (143 games). He’s played 100 games in back-to-back seasons just once since 2010-11, and averaged just 115 games per year for 2007-17. In the words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, it’s always something.

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Baseballs have continued to fly out of the park in 2018, if not at a record pace — the current per-team, per-game rate of 1.15 is the fourth-highest of all time, after 2017 (1.26), 2000 (1.17), and 2016 (1.16) — then nearly so. Nonetheless, over the past week-and-change, the game has produced something previously unseen amid this recent surge: a player challenging the major-league record of homers in eight consecutive games, a feat last completed by Ken Griffey Jr. in 1993. Blue Jays designated hitter and occasional first baseman Kendrys Morales has homered in seven straight, something unseen in 12 years. Tonight in Baltimore, he’ll have a chance to put himself in the record books.

Here’s Morales’s entry from Sunday, a towering two-run blast off the Phillies’ Vince Velasquez:

Alas, the homer, Morales’s 21st of the season, wasn’t enough to help the Blue Jays continue their season-high five-game winning streak, which has been fueled by the 35-year-old switch-hitting slugger’s power burst.

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It’s been a forgettable season for the Giants as a team (63-66 at this writing), and earlier this week, we got a clue as to why — at least with regards to Buster Posey. The 31-year-old catcher has been hobbled by a right hip injury, and season-ending surgery to repair his labrum and clean out bone spurs is reportedly “imminent,” according to executive vice president of baseball operations Brian Sabean. While there’s no concern that Posey will do additional damage by continuing to play, the goal is to give him enough time to recover from the surgery before the beginning of next season.

“Recovery time is what it is, it’s six-plus months,” Sabean told KNBR on Thursday night, “and if you hit the mark well enough you should be able to perform in spring training and hopefully start the season on time.”

With MLB announcing this week that Opening Day for the 2019 season would be on March 28 — just over seven months away — Sabean’s timeline leaves relatively little margin for setbacks. Cactus League action will have just gotten underway by the time he hits the six-month mark.

Via the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Shea, Posey began experience soreness in the hip in late May and the problem has lingered, bothering him both while catching and while hitting. Via MLB.com’s Joe Trezza, he’s known about the looming likelihood of surgery since before the All-Star break. Selected to the NL All-Star team for the sixth time in his 10-year career, he opted to miss the game, receive a cortisone shot, and rest. Some break.

“You know me pretty well,” Posey told a Chronicle reporter regarding the hip, “and I don’t want to make any excuses for anything. It’s been something I’ve kind of pushed through and played through.”

The injury is the primary culprit in The Case of Buster’s Missing Power, as Posey has been unable to fully utilize his lower half in the service of driving the ball. He’s gone 44 consecutive games without a home run, tied for the second-longest streak of his career; he went 47 games during the second half of 2016 and 44 games from last August 9 until April 4 of this season. Posey’s current numbers (.284/.357/.382, five homers, 106 wRC+) all represent career lows, excluding his incomplete 2009 and 2011 seasons (a cup of coffee in the former, a gruesome collision — you know the one — in the latter). Since the All-Star break, Posey is hitting just .271/.327/.302 for a 78 wRC+ in 104 plate appearances, with three doubles representing the entirety of his extra-base hits total in that span. For an elite hitter with a career line of .306/.374/.465 (132 wRC+), that’s way out of character.

On the one hand, it would seem to be good news that the cause of Posey’s sagging production has been diagnosed and is treatable. On the other, one has to wonder how much impact such a surgery will have on a catcher heading into his age-32 season. While several position players have undergone hip surgeries in the past decade — a partial list would include Ike Davis, Carlos Delgado, Jacoby Ellsbury, Alex Gordon, Mike Lowell, Logan Morrison, Alex Rodriguez, Corey Seager, Steven Souza, and Chase Utley — it would appear that relatively few catchers have done so.

Via the subscription-based Baseball Injury Consultants site, run by my former Baseball Prospectus colleague Corey Dawkins (who set up BP’s injury database which, lamentably, is no longer being updated), I found only four major-league catchers who underwent what was described as a hip labrum surgery: Todd Hundley (2004), Matt Treanor (2008), Rob Johnson (2009), and Devin Mesoraco (2016). Treanor and Johnson were light-hitting backups, and Hundley, an NL All-Star in 1996-97, had become one by that point; in fact, he never played professionally after the surgery.

That leaves Mesoraco as the closest comp, but not necessarily an apt one. A former first-round pick and touted prospect — he made the top 25 on the lists of Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, and MLB Pipeline in 2012 — Mesoraco didn’t hit much from 2011 to -13 (.225/.282/.359, 69 wRC+) but broke out in 2014 to bat .273/.359/.534 with 25 homers and a 147 wRC+, a performance that earned him an All-Star berth. He was limited to just 39 games (including a mere 18 starts behind the plate) in 2015-16, undergoing left hip surgery in the former year and both left shoulder and right hip surgeries in the latter year. Since that nightmarish stretch, he’s hit just .214/.307/.384 (86 wRC+), and earlier this year was traded from the Reds to the Mets in exchange for Matt Harvey. Given so many major injuries, it’s fair to wonder how much of Mesoraco was left on operating tables, but I don’t think his plight offers much insight into Posey’s future, either as a catcher or as a hitter.

It’s a future the Giants are heavily invested in, with salaries of $21.4 million per year from 2019-21 and then a $22 million option and $3 million buyout for 2022, Posey’s age-35 season. That the Giants have made a habit of playing Posey at first base regularly — 13 times this year and an average of 28 a year since 2010 (excluding 2011) — probably works in his favor in the long run. He’s caught 885 games in his career, never more than 123 in a season. By comparison, the top 10 catchers in JAWS — a group that I believe will one day include Posey — averaged 1,265 games caught through age 31. Reprising the upper end of a table that I created for a recent piece about Yadier Molina (1,302 games caught through age 31, if you’re asking):

Given that the next three guys in the JAWS rankings are a pre-war catcher (Gabby Hartnett), a guy who died in a plane crash at age 32 (Thurman Munson), and a guy who spent substantial time at first base (Gene Tenace), I figured cutting the table short would suffice. Posey currently ranks 16th in JAWS among catchers (40.7 career WAR/37.1 peak WAR/38.9 JAWS). He’s already surpassed the peak standard (34.5, seventh all-time) but is short of those for career WAR (53.5) and JAWS (44.0). Via Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, Posey was forecast to wind up sixth on that table above, with a line of 60.7/37.9/49.3.

I don’t know what moving Posey to first base would do to the projections, but the concept has relatively little appeal for the Giants, both because he’s an excellent defender and because the team also has a very good first baseman in Brandon Belt. On the first note, Baseball Prospectus, whose Fielding Runs Above Average metric includes pitch-framing, rates Posey as 156 runs above average for his career; that’s fifth since 1949, though the framing element of that overall figure only goes back to 1988. Posey is 4.4 runs above average this year. As for Belt, signed through 2021 with an annual salary of $16 million, he’s an above-average first baseman (5.9 UZR/150) as well as hitter (127 career wRC+, 120 this year). While he’s played 78 career games in the outfield, mostly in left, his UZR/150 there is -5.9. He might improve with more reps there, but such a chain of events clearly isn’t one the Giants are eager to pursue.

The Giants have deferred questions about the ramifications of Posey’s surgery until after it’s done, but as I noted in my post-mortem a couple of weeks back, it’s already clear that while he may remain the face of the franchise, the team can no longer afford to treat him as the centerpiece of the lineup given his health and what now amounts to two years of good-not-great production out of the last three (he had a 115 wRC+ in 2016, 128 last year). Nonetheless, here’s hoping that he comes back strong enough to regain some of the offensive stature he’s lost and to continue his Cooperstown-bound career behind the plate.