The Oakland A’s lost by four runs on Thursday. Granted, it was a two-run game in the bottom of the eighth. But, still. Four runs. The A’s currently have the worst record in the American League. They’ve lost by at least four runs 11 times. The Royals easily have the best record in the AL. Kansas City has lost by at least four runs 15 times. Four runs is an arbitrary cutoff, but this helps to demonstrate something you’ve probably already heard: The A’s are badly underperforming, and in the weirdest way. By the standings, in the AL, no team has been worse. By other metrics, in the AL, arguably nobody has better.

For a more rich and representative 2015 A’s experience, consider Wednesday. Sure enough, the A’s lost to the New York Yankees — but they lost by one. The game ended with the tying run in scoring position. The Oakland bullpen coughed up four runs; the Oakland defense coughed up the other one. It’s not that the Yankees didn’t do enough to win. It’s that the A’s did, too. Yet they came up short. The market is just waiting for Billy Beane to sell.

It isn’t new that the A’s are underperforming the numbers. It’s already been written about here, there and everywhere. Just in April, the team went 9-14 while outscoring its opponents. Lately, the team has been more successful, despite its recent setbacks. But while you’re probably tired of hearing about Oakland’s misfortune, you might not be aware of the magnitude of what’s happened. This isn’t the kind of thing that happens to someone every year.

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Let’s go ahead and get this out of our systems: Wednesday night, some Cardinals got ejected for complaining in a game the team won. Some people might call that the very most Cardinals thing. Those same people are just people who don’t like the Cardinals, but, whatever, everyone’s entitled to his or her own feelings, and we should get this out of the way before proceeding. All right, it’s out of the way! So let’s unpack a picture:

What you see is a play in progress. It’s a bases-clearing double, that put the Cubs ahead. As the Cubs were in the process of rounding the bases, and as the Cardinals were in the process of retrieving the baseball from the outfield, Yadier Molina argued with home-plate umpire Pat Hoberg. We see Molina with his back turned to the plate, even though there might soon be a play right there. (There wasn’t.) Arguments are common; arguments during plays are less common. Molina was shortly ejected. The same went for his manager. The game had been leading up to this moment.

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There is no good known method for rating all the front offices. Every team has a front office, consisting of a general manager and a bunch of other guys, and fans talk about those front offices, but critical evaluation is hard. One could, I suppose, just think about wins and losses, but that seems an over-simplification. So this is the second part of a project, a project that depended upon your participation. Just the other day, I posted polls for every team in baseball, and I asked for front-office ratings. It’s crowdsourced evaluation, and while there’s a difference between crowd evaluation and the actual truth, I’m no less interested in perception of the front offices. Presented below is how people think. Who isn’t interested in how people think?

How good is a front office? It’s a very simple question, that’s also an extremely complicated question. I tried to untangle the front office from ownership. I tried to untangle the front office from the player-development people. The question is, basically: if a front office were given average resources, how many championships would it win over a million season repetitions? More than average, fewer than average, or exactly average? That’s not a possible thing to know, but that doesn’t mean the community didn’t have opinions. Some of them were very strong.

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Carter Capps allowed a three-run single on Tuesday. That’s both pretty bad and pretty weird. Three-run singles might be a post topic of their own, but the most interesting thing didn’t have anything to do with the play result. Before Xander Bogaerts ever swung the bat, Capps threw a fastball, and I’ll excerpt conveniently from an MLB.com entry by Ian Browne:

Bogaerts hung in on a pitch that had a perceived velocity of 105.55 mph, the highest number of any pitch in the Major Leagues this season, according to Statcast™. The pitch looked that fast to Bogaerts, thanks to an extension of 9.5 feet by Capps.

This sounds complicated, but it’s simple to understand. Not a whole lot of time passed between Capps releasing the ball and the ball arriving around home plate. That’s all perceived velocity is — a kind of measure of flight time. According to Statcast, this year, no pitch has had a smaller flight time than the one Bogaerts drilled for a hit. That’s remarkable, on Bogaerts’ part, and that’s remarkable, on Capps’ part. Capps’ part, we’re becoming more familiar with.

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Over the past several years — going back to 2010 — there have been seven bunt doubles in Major League Baseball. Had I written this story a day ago, I would’ve said there have been six. On Tuesday in Kansas City, Alcides Escobar put down a bunt for a double in the eighth inning of a game against Tampa Bay. Escobar didn’t end up scoring — and the game story was entirely about the ninth-inning hero — but this isn’t a page about game recaps. The Royals won, but I’m more interested in the hit.

What does a bunt double look like? I’ve written about these a couple times before, but I do that because they’re so curious. Just off the top of your head, a bunt double doesn’t seem like it ought to be possible. Infielders always have bunts surrounded. How does one end up with a bunt double instead of a bunt single and an error? Using what video is available, let’s break down what’s probably an incomplete list of the ways. I’m sure there are other ways, but this is what recently has happened.

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A little over a month ago, I asked which player would get a major-league hit first: Jon Lester, or Kyle Schwarber. Lester had just set an all-time record for the longest hitless streak to begin a career. But, it’s not like the Cubs were about to remove Lester from their rotation. Schwarber, meanwhile, was a hell of a hitting prospect, but he was in the minors, so that was a hurdle. By nearly a 3-to-1 margin, the audience voted for Lester. By nearly a 3-to-1 margin, the audience was wrong. Schwarber was briefly promoted, and he registered a hit. Then he registered another seven. Lester continued making outs.

Until Monday! Monday, Lester recorded his first-ever knock, off John Lackey in the second inning of a game in which Lester, for a time, had more hits than his opponent. For Lester, it was career at-bat number 72, and career plate appearance number 79. The hitless-streak record still belongs to Lester, and there’s nothing about that to be done, but now he’s officially no longer an o’fer. And while Lester himself would’ve preferred a win to a single, just because he won’t dwell on it doesn’t mean we can’t. Here’s to dwelling.

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FanGraphs used to run something called the organizational rankings. Sometimes it was funny. Arguably the main reason we stopped was because it seemed just entirely too difficult to objectively grade a team’s front office. That was an important grade for the rankings, and if you couldn’t trust a component grade, there wasn’t much sense in trusting the overall grade. The intent was always good; the outcome was always iffy.

I’ve been thinking a little bit about front offices lately. Monday, I thought about the Mariners’ misfortune in Robinson Cano developing some sort of energy-sapping stomach ailment. And not long back, I was thinking about the Angels, and Jerry Dipoto, and how the Angels might not be in a perfect position, but also how Arte Moreno forced Dipoto’s hand with some major transactions. What I keep coming back to is the idea that front offices are almost impossible to evaluate, in any meaningful way. Everything they do, they do for a reason, but there’s an enormous element of luck, and there are other sometimes hidden factors we might not know a lot about. Sometimes a decision really came from ownership. Sometimes a success or failure was more about player development. It’s almost hopeless out here. For these purposes, there’s little the analyst can do but react.

But then, I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing. Not necessarily because the people always know the answers, but because it can be really interesting just to see how different people think. Who pays more attention than you? Who thinks more critically than you? Why wouldn’t I want to tap into this audience, to see what it believes?

In this post, many polls. I want to know what you think about the front office of the team you follow most closely. I know this is an impossible task, but I want you to think about the front office independent of ownership, and independent of player development. Think about the methods, or about what you perceive to be the methods. Think about how the front office might work with an average payroll. And think about the front office right now. What’s really being asked: relative to the other front offices, how much would you believe in your team’s front office, if it were given an ordinary roster and an ordinary budget? Would it build something successful, or would it end up as a mess?

No part of me believes we’ll get real answers out of this. But it’s not like you’re being graded on how you vote. I’m interested, mostly, in how the 30 front offices are perceived. That’ll be made possible with your feedback. We’ve tried to grade the front offices before. Consider this your turn. And unlike when you’re picking a president, this time your vote could actually count for something. FanGraphs is for the people!

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Last winter was the winter of Cole Hamels trade conversation. As it became more clear the Phillies were going to hold on for the time being, it became necessary to try to forecast the midseason trade market. Hamels was obviously going to be out there. And then people wondered about Johnny Cueto. On the one hand, it made sense, with Cueto due to become a free agent, and the Reds seemingly not very good. But the Reds also wanted to win — everyone wants to win — and in the middle of May, the Reds were caught in that in-between position, with as many wins as losses. That’s not a good place to find yourself, when you’re on the verge of having to rebuild. Since then, though, the Reds have lost 60% of their games, so they’ve at least gotten clarity. These Reds ought to sell. While nobody likes losing, at least losing has made the Reds’ decision easier.

Where the Reds know what they ought to do, though, the situation has grown increasingly complicated in Detroit. Many have been predicting the Tigers’ coming demise for a while, and though that might be overstated, it’s not an organization on the upswing. It’s more of a win-now ballclub, but it’s a win-now ballclub with about as many losses as wins, and a few days ago Miguel Cabrera went and hurt himself. For the next six weeks — roughly half of the remainder — Miguel Cabrera will be replaced by not Miguel Cabrera, and that’s a huge void for a team that’s been struggling for a month and a half. The Tigers, I’m sure, would love to know how to proceed. Unfortunately, nothing about this is simple. The Tigers are navigating a ridge while they’re fully exposed.

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Carlos Carrasco’s Wednesday night ended with a smile, but few others were smiling, as Joey Butler broke up a would-be no-hitter in the ninth with two outs and two strikes. Throw in the fact that Butler’s liner just barely sailed over Jason Kipnis and you could argue Carrasco came as close as you can come to a no-hitter without pulling it off. Still, it was rather obviously the performance of a lifetime — Carrasco struck out Rays hitters 13 times, and he missed a full 30 bats. The line-drive hit came on pitch no. 124; Carrasco’s previous season high was 114.

A performance like Carrasco’s is interesting on its own. Yet in this case, it’s even more interesting in context. Carrasco dominated the Rays on July 1, just missing a no-hitter. Carrasco got knocked around by a very similar Rays lineup on June 19, getting pulled with a 10-hitter. The Rays, in other words, got to go up against Carlos Carrasco twice in two weeks, and the first time around, they got the better of him. But it turned out that didn’t give them an advantage. In the second game against the same team, Carrasco simply pitched like someone else.

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Welcome to one of those posts that’s basically just a bunch of words around one table. The function of the words is to try to explain what the table is saying, but if you don’t need that interpretation, you can just look at the numbers and be on your merry way. Look at the time you can save. It’s like you made your day longer!

I wrote this post once already, when the season was roughly a quarter over. Now the season’s roughly two quarters over, so I thought it could be useful to issue an update on the data. The question being answered, to some extent: which teams have most benefited from favorable strike zones? Which teams have been hurt, meanwhile, by unfavorable strike zones? It might seem like a complicated thing to dig into, but it’s really quite easy, and you could do it yourself in a matter of minutes using numbers we have on our leaderboards.

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