We keep learning more about baseball. Every year, we learn things we didn’t know. Every year, we have new data to back up things we might’ve already suspected. The level of knowledge is ever-increasing. You’d think that might make baseball analysis easier. The more you know, the more you should be able to say, right? It’s true, now we can say more — and we can say more with data. But if anything, all this knowledge is making everything more complicated. The more we learn about the game, the more we learn about the gray areas. The more we learn about the gray areas, the more we have to hedge against making strong, conclusive statements.

So it’s more complicated to do player analysis, and it’s more complicated to do transaction analysis. At least, it’s more difficult to assign the winner and the loser of a transaction. There are generally too many different things at play. I think it’s notable, then, when strong conclusions are still reached. It’s notable to me when the analytical community comes down strongly on one side of something, because situations are grayer than ever. It must mean something when a firm consensus is reached despite all the complexities.

With decreasing frequency do writers come out strongly against a given transaction. So it’s worth reflecting on the trade that sent Doug Fister from the Tigers to the Nationals. That one didn’t make any sense. That was a pretty clear steal, on the Nationals’ part. Everybody agreed the Tigers didn’t get enough. I know, because I was one of them. The deal looked terribly lopsided at the time, which is something we don’t get to experience so much anymore.

And you know what? It probably was lopsided. The Tigers probably didn’t get enough. The trade legitimately sent waves through the industry. But you have to look at where we are now. Regardless of whether this could’ve been predicted: Robbie Ray looks like he might be emerging. Ray’s talent is coming to the surface.

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Monday, against the Twins, Billy Hamilton stole four bases. In so doing, he reached 40 steals on the year before anyone else reached 30. Probably even more impressive: Hamilton now has more steals than exactly half the teams in baseball. He has more than the White Sox and Dodgers combined. Over the course of the past month, Hamilton has stolen 20 bases, and second and third place on the leaderboard combined have stolen 19 bases. Over that same month, Hamilton has more stolen bases than he has hits.

It’s funny now to reflect on some of the things I wrote in 2014. Early on, when Hamilton started to hit, I decided he wasn’t a caricature. When it all ended, I asked why Hamilton hadn’t been a base-stealing dynamo. Now Hamilton is a base-stealing dynamo. And he’s a terrible hitter. He can’t hit, but he does run, and when he’s on the other side of things, he can play a mean center field. Which means, in a way, Billy Hamilton now is something of a caricature. He’s an exaggeration of a player type, which is exactly how he was advertised.

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A few years ago, early in the World Series, Pablo Sandoval teed off against the Tigers, going deep three times. What people tend to remember most is Sandoval tomahawking an 0-and-2 Justin Verlander fastball, up and out of the zone. Sandoval, of course, has always been perhaps the best bad-ball hitter in the game, but it was still something to get on top of that kind of pitch, in that kind of place, in that kind of situation. A relevant still:

That’s a high pitch, that Sandoval drilled with little problem. The form looks good. I mean, it was a dinger — the form had to look good. Some people took to saying that Sandoval homered off a pitch at his eyes. Something of an exaggeration, sure, but it’s the language of baseball, and it’s not like pitches get a whole lot higher.

On Monday, against Toronto, Pablo Sandoval hit a pitch that was actually at his eyes. It wasn’t the World Series, and it wasn’t a home run. It wasn’t even a base hit. It was just a groundball, like any other groundball. Except for that one thing, where the pitch was more than five feet off of the earth. People still remember Sandoval going upstairs to punish Verlander. The pitch Sandoval put in play against R.A. Dickey was higher than the Verlander pitch by 21 inches. 21 inches is the height of the world’s smallest man. Between Monday’s pitch and the Verlander pitch, you could fit a whole man.

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It’s been a good stretch for Nolan Arenado. In the past seven games, he’s hit eight home runs. Going back seven games is an arbitrary endpoint, so, in the five games preceding, Arenado hit either a double or a triple. After a May 23 doubleheader, Arenado was batting .257; since then, he’s batted .333, and far more importantly, he’s slugged .811. Now, the Rockies themselves haven’t necessarily felt it. They’ve played .500 baseball over the course of Arenado’s hot stretch, and it’s not a team that’s about to compete. But the Rockies are no strangers to playing ordinary baseball while getting extraordinary performances. This time we just get to look beyond Troy Tulowitzki.

I’m not all that interested in trying to analyze Arenado while he’s on fire. There’s only so much to be said about a short-term awesome performance, and in a case like this, I think it’s best to just take a step back and try to consider the bigger picture. Arenado is starting to get a little more attention. God knows he deserves it. He’s not a mediocre player in the middle of doing well; he’s a good player in the middle of being amazing. Have we seen a player like Nolan Arenado before? What kind of asset is he, to the Rockies? In the interest of honesty, I went into this with an idea already in mind. It was just a matter of collecting evidence. I don’t think the initial bias invalidates the conclusion.

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It was almost cute when it started — there were the Astros, playing really competitive baseball, a year or two ahead of schedule. They stormed out of the gate and people everywhere wrote about the possibility of the Astros making the playoffs without really believing it would happen. And to this point the Astros still haven’t clinched a berth in the playoffs, but with every passing day, they’ve been taken a little more seriously. They’ll be in first place at the halfway mark, leaving only another half left to go, and the prospect promotion is well underway. It’s not so cute these days. It’s like the Astros have skipped a step.

Look over what they’ve accomplished and you can understand why the Astros are a legitimate threat to make a playoff run. Hitting-wise, they’ve collectively been above-average. The rotation might not have a classic ace, but it’s been above-average as a group. The bullpen, too, has been above-average, and the team’s been good about running the bases, and on top of all that, the Astros have avoided ugly black holes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a problem spot, which is a feature of a winning club. But what might you call the Astros’ strength? Some might suggest hitting for power, which, yeah, they’re good at that. But they’re even better at dealing with groundballs.

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Think you could be a general manager? I think, in the beginning, a lot of people think they could do the job. Then, later on, they come to learn of the complexity, and fewer remain so confident. Being a general manager is incredibly difficult, support staff be damned. But I’ve got a hot tip for you — every front office out there has the same strategy. I don’t know if it could be any simpler. The strategy of all 30 teams in major-league baseball:

• get good players

It’s that easy. There’s no disagreement over the strategy. The separator tends to be player evaluation. Which players are good? Which players will remain good? Which players will be the most good? The teams that have the most good players tend to be the strongest teams. You might not know why you bothered to read these paragraphs.

When it comes to team-building, so much of the emphasis is on accumulating as many good players as possible. And that’s good, that’s important, because that’s the biggest key to winning games. But there’s another side of this, one that tends to get ignored. It’s important to have good players, but it’s also important to not have *bad* players. That might seem like saying the same thing. They’re related, but they aren’t identical.

For example, let’s consider two hypothetical mini-teams. Team A has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is 0. Team B also has three players. Two of those players are both +4. The third player is -1. Of Team A and Team B, you could say each has a pair of good players. But Team B also has that bad player, relative to Team A’s 0. So by this simple math, Team A comes out at +8, and Team B comes out at +7. The good players are critical, but a bad player still made a difference.

Reality isn’t quite that clean, in that teams are much bigger and we don’t have perfect measures of performance, but we do have Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. So for the sake of this example, let’s trust those 2015 WAR figures. It’s pretty easy to navigate over to FanGraphs and figure out which teams have generated the most and the least total WAR. It’s tougher to break that down. How much of that WAR is coming from good players, and how much negative WAR is coming from bad players? It’s the latter I’m going to focus on here — enough attention is already paid to the good-player side of the equation.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

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Among the many complains of Mets fans at the moment is that the defense hasn’t been doing enough to support a pitching staff that carries the burden of trying to do everything. It stands to reason, if you’re going to be built first and foremost around run prevention, you’d want to do as much as you can to, say, prevent runs. It’s not a total surprise the Mets have had some defensive issues; they’ve had Wilmer Flores at shortstop, after all, and Michael Cuddyer in an outfield corner. More of a shock is what’s been taking place in the outfield middle. Juan Lagares has been playing defense like a normal and mortal person.

Which a team can’t afford, when said player has Juan Lagares’ bat. The Mets wouldn’t have signed Lagares to a five-year contract if they didn’t believe in him. They were clearly comfortable with the idea of a starting center fielder who does most of his helping on defense. But Lagares, right now, would be evidence to the contrary of the idea that defense doesn’t slump. How much of this seems like a real thing, and how much seems like just a few bad breaks?

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The Mets have lost seven games in a row. It’s never a good time to lose seven games in a row, but a particularly bad time is when the rival Nationals decide to win five games in a row. So it is that the Mets have ceded control of the National League East, falling perilously close to the surprisingly competent Braves. Now, if you just fast-forwarded from the start of the season to now, these standings wouldn’t be a surprise. The Nationals were supposed to run away with the division. The Mets were supposed to be okay, and the Phillies were supposed to suck. Outside of the Marlins, it seems mostly normal. But sequences of events matter, and the way the year has gone for the Mets makes this current situation feel desperate. A season feels like it’s slipping out of their grasp.

There’s an awful lot of pressure on Sandy Alderson to make a move. Alderson feels it, and he’s been in communication with other front offices. Here’s one move, that just showed up literally as I was writing the above paragraph:

Source says #Mets calling up Matz. Two different club officials declined comment when asked. Team again could be pondering six-man rotation.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) June 25, 2015

This has been coming. Fans knew Steven Matz was on the way. But, consider the first tweet response to that:

Young Ideas ?@DickYoungsGhost 23m23 minutes ago

@Ken_Rosenthal Unless Matz can bat .400 and play all other positions, still doesn’t help the @Mets.

During the losing streak, the Mets have scored nine runs in seven games. They’ve had a bottom-five NL offense for the year, and a bottom-five NL offense the last month or so. Pressure isn’t on to make any move — pressure is on to make an offensively-minded move. It’s understandable, given how the Mets have looked. But it might very well be prudent for Alderson to keep on taking the boring approach.

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Used to be, people would argue about whether Stephen Strasburg was really an ace. There was no right or wrong answer, since there is no consensus definition of an ace starting pitcher, but aside from that, where Strasburg was concerned, there was disagreement. Some people thought he was amazing; some people thought he was a letdown. Some people could squint and see both. That all concerns past Stephen Strasburg. There was no disagreement over 2015 Stephen Strasburg. That version sucked, and by some measures he was one of the very worst pitchers in baseball. It wasn’t like him, and after a start in late May, Strasburg hit the DL. He didn’t feel great. He also needed to work on his mechanics. The DL stint was a chance to work on both.

And a few days ago, Strasburg came off the DL and threw 94 pitches against the Braves. Many of them were pretty good pitches, and while this was a Braves lineup without Freddie Freeman in the middle of it, I’d still say it wasn’t easy for Strasburg to throw his five shutout innings. That was still a major-league opponent, so the outing was positive from start to finish. What sorts of things was Strasburg up to? We can make this easy, with just a few pictures. In some ways, Strasburg was his classic self. In some ways, he was completely different.

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