Repeat something often enough and you start to take it for granted. For example, something I’ve taken for granted is that the National League Rookie of the Year race will inevitably come down to Ronald Acuna vs. Juan Soto. I mean no disrespect to, say, Brian Anderson or Walker Buehler or Dereck Rodriguez, but this is where I am, and I know I’m not alone. Soto and Acuna have been absolutely sensational, and they’ve drawn themselves a lot of attention. The Braves have a franchise player on their hands. The Nationals do, too. These are two guys who could one day end up in the Hall of Fame.

Something I’ve realized, though, is my position has been unexamined. I haven’t looked at the competitors in a while. And this was brought to mind by something I read by Ken Rosenthal earlier this morning:

The NL Rookie of the Year race is evolving into a showdown between the Braves’ Ronald Acuña and Nationals’ Juan Soto, but another outfielder — the Cardinals’ Harrison Bader — might receive some third-place votes.

Some possible third-place votes for Harrison Bader. There’s no shame in not winning the Rookie of the Year. In last year’s NL voting, Rhys Hoskins finished fourth. Awards are secondary; on-field performance is what everyone cares about. But I’ve realized Bader deserves more credit than he’s been getting. We all assume the race will come down to Acuna vs. Soto. The race probably will come down to Acuna vs. Soto. But, should it? Bader has a surprisingly convincing case. Forget third-place votes. Bader maybe ought to finish first.

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Every spring training, we all know we shouldn’t read too much into results. And, every spring training, we all read too much into results. It’s not like anyone could blame us — during spring training, that’s the only baseball going on, so, what are we supposed to do? But this past spring training, I fell in love with Lucas Giolito, and it was mostly because of a dominant start he had against the Cubs. His stuff looked sharp and he’d altered his delivery, and it looked to me like Giolito might’ve been poised for a breakthrough season.

Then the actual season began, and Giolito might’ve been the worst starter in the bigs. For one thing, his stuff ticked down. And for another, in March and April, he had 11 strikeouts to go with 21 walks and four hit batters. May brought 19 strikeouts, to go with 16 walks and six hit batters. Giolito approached the end of June with an ERA over 7. He entered August with an ERA over 6. People wondered whether Giolito might’ve been better off getting demoted to Triple-A. It didn’t look like he was making any forward progress in Chicago.

You might’ve checked out. You might’ve focused instead on Michael Kopech. So let me fill you in on a recent development. Over five starts in August, Giolito has thrown 31 innings. He has 10 walks and 32 strikeouts, and he’s thrown close to two-thirds of his pitches for strikes. It hasn’t all been great, but it’s assuredly been better. Giolito might finally be taking a step forward. I’ll walk through some of the points that I find to be encouraging.

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Last week, I wrote about the Dodgers. Not too long before that, I wrote about the Mariners. Both teams were and are still out of the playoff picture, but they’ve gotten to where they are in opposite ways. The Mariners are 74-57, but they have a BaseRuns estimated record of 64-67. The Dodgers are 70-61, but they have a BaseRuns estimated record of 78-53. The Mariners are four games better than the Dodgers in the actual standings. In the alternate standings, the gap is 14 games in the other direction. What on Earth must have happened over these five or so months? The Mariners have been clutch. The Dodgers have not.

We have our own clutch metric, as you know, that’s rooted in win probability. It’s called Clutch, and you can read a little about it here. In the interest of moving this post forward, here is an up-to-the-minute Clutch score landscape for all of MLB:

The Mariners are in first by a mile. The Dodgers are bringing up the rear. They’re not the only clutch and unclutch teams, but they’re the most *extreme* clutch and unclutch teams. The difference here is about 20 wins, based on timing alone. Timing has allowed the Mariners to look pretty strong. Timing has also caused the Dodgers to look surprisingly vulnerable.

Whenever I write about clutch performance, some of the same questions come up. The big one: Is clutch performance real? Now, for those of you who have been around for a while, nothing to follow is going to surprise you. I’ve written about this in the past, and my results today don’t look any different. But I thought this would be a good time to display all the data again. Clutch performances do happen. Obviously, clutch performances do happen, and they can add up over time. But, historically, it all just seems so random. You should never count on a team to be clutch.

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Almost two months ago, I talked about how the Mariners were on a record pace for team Clutch. This is never a fun statistic to explain, since it’s rooted in win probability, which is already complicated enough, but in short, Clutch measures whether a player or team has done better or worse than expected in higher-leverage situations. A player who knocks in the game-winning run will have a high Clutch score for the day. The opposite would be true of the pitcher. The stat is hard to explain in a paragraph, but it still manages to be intuitive, if that makes any sense.

Since that post was written in early July, the Mariners have slumped and fallen well out of playoff position. Nevertheless, they’re still on pace to finish with the highest team Clutch score since 1974, which is as far back as our data goes. If you want to understand how exceptional the Mariners have been, you might consider this plot of all 30 team Clutch scores:

The Mariners are way out in front, with five extra wins even just compared to the next-most clutch team. Clutch performance explains why the Mariners have been able to overachieve their underlying numbers. But, you know, let’s look at that same plot again. Let’s just change what we highlight.

We can use this to talk about the Dodgers, too. Like the Mariners, the Dodgers presently find themselves several games removed from a playoff spot. Unlike the Mariners, the Dodgers were supposed to be good.

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A few weeks ago, when the A’s traded for Mike Fiers, I couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say. It’s not that I thought it was a bad move — it’s that I thought it was a boring move, an unremarkable move. A very modest rotation upgrade that would be hard to dress up for FanGraphs readers over 900 words. I tried — I dug into all the familiar statistics and websites — but nothing jumped out. The Mike Fiers trade, to me, belonged in the same transaction category as the Aaron Loup trade. It was a move that happened that I didn’t need to analyze.

Fiers has started three times for the A’s. The A’s have won all three games, and Fiers has allowed three runs over 18.1 innings. Even more, he’s allowed only one walk, while racking up 21 strikeouts. In a short amount of time, Fiers has made himself remarkable. He’s done enough to draw my attention again. When a player goes on a hot streak, it’s natural to wonder what might be different about him. Sometimes — many times — a hot streak is just a hot streak. Fiers, though, has indeed made a few tweaks. Understanding it’s always impossible to conclude that a given tweak has directly led to greater success, let’s take a look at how Fiers has changed since getting to Oakland.

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The Nationals started to unload yesterday, making moves that, depending on your perspective, were either a few weeks too late, or a week and a half too early. It had been easy for a while to say the Nationals just needed time to come around, and our projections never really lost faith, but at some point a baseball team has to make up ground, and they were unable to get into a groove. There’s plenty to be written about what’s happened to the Nationals, but that might be better left for another day, or for another time when we can have a greater understanding.

The moves the Nationals made on Tuesday mean hardly anything for their future. It was more about just giving up on the present. And as far as the individual deals are concerned, you can see how Matt Adams should have a role on the Cardinals. Likewise, you can see how Daniel Murphy should have a role on the Cubs. And yet it was far easier to see how Daniel Murphy could’ve had a role on the Rockies. The Rockies being one of the teams with a higher waiver priority than the Cubs. Murphy wouldn’t have gotten to the Cubs in the first place had another team from the National League put in a claim, and while Murphy could’ve helped anyone, it sure seems like he could’ve made the biggest difference for Colorado. I don’t really know what they were thinking in allowing him to go by.

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The Mariners lost two of three to the Dodgers over the weekend. It wouldn’t be fair to say the series was an accurate representation of the Mariners’ season, but it works as a convenient caricature. On Friday, the Mariners lost to the Dodgers by ten. On Sunday, the Mariners lost to the Dodgers by eleven. On Saturday, the Mariners beat the Dodgers, by one, in the tenth inning, on a walk-off balk. The Mariners avoided a sweep, and, indeed, the Mariners actually still have a better record than the Dodgers do. Over the three games, though, the Mariners were outscored by a margin of 27-7. Sunday was the Mariners’ worst loss of the year.

It’s hardly new information that the Mariners’ winning percentage and their run differential don’t exactly match up. This has been true for a matter of months, and it partly helps to explain why the AL West is as close as it is. But before we all just collectively get used to something, we should take a step back so we can reexamine precisely what’s been going on. Although the Mariners have slipped out of playoff position, they’re still within striking distance of both the A’s and the Astros. The Mariners are 3.5 back in the wild-card hunt, despite a run differential of -42. The Rays are 7.5 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of +10. The Angels are 8.5 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of +39. The Twins are 11 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of -22. Every year, there are run differential overperformers and underperformers. Yet this is far more extreme than is typical.

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If you’re like me, you’ve been assuming the Dodgers would end up in first in the NL West for a while. Indeed, our playoff odds are still big fans, because it’s hard to overlook the track records of the various players around the Dodgers’ roster. If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d still settle on the Dodgers to be there at the end. Maybe that makes me smart. Maybe that makes me stubborn. Could be a little of both. I don’t like to be put on the spot.

But for however much talent the Dodgers possess, on August 16 we’re looking at the first-place Diamondbacks. The club’s been playing .500 baseball for a month and a half, yet still, they’re looming above the Dodgers and Rockies. When it comes to explaining why the Diamondbacks are where they are, credit has to go to good hitters like Paul Goldschmidt, David Peralta, and apparently Daniel Descalso. Credit also has to go to good pitchers like Patrick Corbin and Zack Greinke. And then there’s the helpful matter of so-called “cluster luck” — the Dodgers have a better run differential than the Diamondbacks do. No team reaches first place because of one reason alone.

Here, however, I’d like to shine some light on the Diamondbacks’ greatest strength. To this point I’d say it’s gone underappreciated, but I’ll show you the evidence in seven plots. The Diamondbacks have had an incredible defense.

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