A friend of mine who dropped out of a chemistry PhD program would describe the experience as getting to know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. There’s a lesson in there about the nature of limits, but there’s also the comparison between general knowledge and specialization. I feel like my writing has taken me on something of a PhD course, where I used to write about simpler things, and now I have to keep digging deeper and deeper to find new deposits worth mining. One of my current fascinations is the interplay between pitcher and batter, the strategy of sequencing, and I just wrote about that for Fox. In that piece, I talk about players who’ve been pitched differently in 2014, relative to 2013.

As a natural follow-up, I figured I’d look at players who’ve been pitched differently within 2014, say, splitting the first and the second halves. I did all the research and I generated all my numbers, but when I evaluated them, I decided I’d focus on one player in particular. You’re already aware that Matt Kemp is experiencing a major resurgence at the plate. Mike Petriello wrote about him earlier this very month. And how have pitchers responded to Kemp’s incredible rebound? Relative to the season’s first half, no player in baseball has had a bigger drop in his rate of fastballs seen in the vicinity of the strike zone.

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This article originally ran in February, and is now being re-posted on account of Derek Jeter.

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Run a Google search for “Derek Jeter” and “defense” and you get almost 700,000 results. Run a Google search for “Chipper Jones” and you get fewer than 450,000 results. I suppose now you can bump each of those up by one. The matter of Jeter’s defense is a tired, tired topic, and it was a tired, tired topic years ago. Personally, I try to avoid tired topics. But in this instance, I think there’s something; something not enough attention has been paid to on account of the raging argument elsewhere. People have argued about only part of the story.

You all should be familiar with the position of the advanced defensive metrics like DRS and UZR. It’s because of those metrics that an argument exists in the first place. Jeter loyalists have continued to insist he was at least a solid defensive shortstop in the past. UZR has disagreed, and DRS has more extremely disagreed, as they’ve both evaluated Jeter as subpar for the position. On the occasion of Jeter’s retirement announcement, there were people who couldn’t help but make fun of his defensive ability, and he’s been the butt of such jokes for much of his career. Jeter’s often been described as an awful defensive shortstop, or as something along those lines. While there’s been some basis for this, though, one of the key words in that description is “shortstop.”

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One of the beauties of baseball as an analytical pursuit is that there’s a record kept of pretty much everything. What we’ve all been familiar with from our young ages are the records of results, or statistics, like dingers or ERA. What we’ve only more recently gained access to, though, are records of processes, the factors that to some extent determine or respond to the results. Considering the processes opens up a whole new layer of potential analysis, as you can see not just what happened, but why it happened, and what has or hasn’t been done about it.

Myself, I like to look at how players get pitched. I’m still getting used to the fact that I can look at this at all, and I think it’s fascinating to basically see evidence of the scouting reports. It’s readily evident that, say, pitchers don’t want to throw Josh Hamilton fastballs in the zone, because they don’t need to. It’s readily evident, as well, that pitchers are perfectly happy to be aggressive with Ben Revere, because, why not? Certain guys get pitched in certain ways, and there’s a broad spread between the extremes. And more often than not, scouting reports and approaches will hold consistent from year to year. Weaknesses tend to stay weaknesses, and strengths tend to stay strengths.

So given the consistency of this kind of data, it’s interesting to look at the cases where the numbers change. If the changes are big enough, it stands to reason the changes aren’t accidental. This all builds to the question: who’s been pitched the most differently in 2014, relative to 2013? This isn’t something we could’ve easily played with in 2004. In 2014, the information’s out there for anyone.

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Maybe, when you were younger, you observed a pitcher triple in the wild. These days they’re mostly found in captivity, and they spend a lot of time sleeping and they don’t like to breed.

Looking over the history of baseball, two trends emerge, related to one another. Pitcher triples are going away. Relative to a century ago, a pitcher triple now is almost ten times less likely. It’s half as likely as it was in the 70s and 80s. Pitchers, overall, are getting worse at hitting, relative to the rest of the league, because pitchers are more specialized than ever. They’re also taking fewer chances on the basepaths, as measured by the ratio of doubles to triples. Some of that last bit could additionally be explained by recent emphasis on defense and differently-aligned ballparks, but it’s clear that pitchers are getting worse, and they’re getting more conservative. So it’s not like anyone should expect a pitcher-triple rebound.

Let’s bring this back to current events. Through last season, the lowest pitcher-triple total in a year was three, first achieved in 1991, and achieved again in 2010. Last year, there were ten pitcher triples, the highest total since 2005. And this year? As of Friday, September 19, there had been zero pitcher triples. As of dinner time on the west coast on Saturday, September 20, there had been zero pitcher triples. There have since been three pitcher triples. All of the year’s pitcher triples have come in the last five days, off the bats of Andrew Cashner, Jake Arrieta, and Clayton Kershaw. Arrieta and Kershaw both delivered on Wednesday. Let us reflect, as humans do.

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People love a breakout, so they’re always on the hunt. You’ll see a bunch of potential breakouts get written up in the first half, as season sample sizes start to grow. Among those potential breakouts, you will find the actual breakouts. But you’ll also find the noisy duds, because it turns out half of a season has a limit on how meaningful it can be. In the first half of this season, Lonnie Chisenhall posted a 163 wRC+. In the second half of this season, he’s posted just about the same wRC+, except without the 1 in it. Chisenhall’s gotten much much worse. Early on, J.D. Martinez was another potential breakout. As I write this his wRC+ is sandwiched between Giancarlo Stanton‘s and Paul Goldschmidt’s. Martinez, to a large extent, has kept things up, and he’s produced like one of the top hitters in baseball.

Because one half of one season can be noisy, two halves of one season can be noisy, particularly when a guy hasn’t been a full-time player from the start. Martinez hasn’t totally established his new baseline yet, but it’s not like this came without warning — Dan Farnsworth was all over it in December. I think we can see J.D. Martinez is better. So the question is: How much better is he?

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Teams are behaving more and more alike. There’s less separation between front offices by the month, and talent is fairly equally distributed, and people everywhere believe many of the same things. There are, of course, better situations and worse situations, but when it comes to team strategies, generally speaking everyone agrees: play the best baseball. Pitch the best pitches, swing the best swings. The Dodgers have a better on-field product than the Rockies, but they try to go about their business similarly. Neither really has a signature philosophy you can observe in the numbers.

Such philosophies are few and far between. People believe one of them is the Diamondbacks and pitching inside, but in reality the Diamondbacks pitch inside as a staff an average amount, and they’ve hit a roughly average amount of batters. They’ve just had a tendency to talk. The Diamondbacks don’t have a team philosophy of brushing hitters back. You don’t see a lot of philosophies that stand out, because successful ones will be copied, and unsuccessful ones will be abandoned. But some do still exist. You’ve presumably heard about each, but I feel like they should be put together in one place. I can think of three standout examples. Do let me know if I’m missing any others.

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When your job is to write about everybody, you’re allowed to have a favorite team. Still, you need to be objective, and it’s bad form to write about that team too often. So a workaround is writers will identify favorite players and favorite themes. A favorite FanGraphs player and theme is Mike Trout. You might’ve noticed. But I personally have my own assortment of favorites, and among them is the super-weird Vance Worley. I love any opportunity to write about him, and wouldn’t you know it? Worley’s back, and he’s thriving like he did when he was a rookie. Worley isn’t a guy who used to be fascinating. Worley is a guy who’s back to being fascinating.

And you’ll remember the Pittsburgh Pirates got him pretty much for free. There’s an argument to be made that Worley’s been the best starter on the team, and while he’s not the most talented starter on the team, the numbers are compelling. Worley’s certainly been good enough to have fit with the Minnesota Twins, which dealt him in March. Vance Worley now is doing what he used to do, only now he’s doing things even better. And now he’s in a perfect situation for success.

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When the Yankees traded for Michael Pineda, they didn’t know he’d need surgery on his shoulder labrum. Had they known that, they certainly wouldn’t have agreed to the move. See, that’s because labral tears are big deals, the sorts of things that can end careers before they really get started. Anyhow, Pineda underwent the operation, and on the other end, the Yankees weren’t sure what they’d be left with. They didn’t know what a post-op Michael Pineda might turn into. If 2014’s any indication, he’s turned into Michael Pineda, only even more aggressive than before. He’s turned into the kind of guy the Yankees are thrilled to have on their payroll.

This easily could’ve been a disaster of a season. In the very early going, Pineda had that humiliating incident with the pine tar. Shortly thereafter, he dealt with an injury that knocked him out for months. Between April 23 and August 3, Pineda didn’t pitch in an official game, and it seemed like the whole year could be a wash. But Pineda was able to move back to the Yankees quickly from there, and a dominant outing Monday night only underscored the fact that Pineda’s re-established himself as a building block for the present and for the future.

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We’ve got a lot of weeks ahead of debating Felix Hernandez vs. Corey Kluber, as the Cy Young race seems like it ought to be a dead heat. Several different elements come into play, and to be perfectly honest it’s basically impossible to separate the two from one another, but something that’ll get talked about is Felix’s ERA advantage. While Kluber has outstanding peripherals, people also care about actual runs, and Kluber’s allowed a dozen more runs than Felix has. Some of this is probably because of defense. Some of this is probably because of ballpark environment. But you also have to consider this:

Felix Hernandez 2014 splits

Bases empty: .259 wOBA allowed
Runner(s) on: .215
Scoring position: .208

In run-scoring opportunities, Felix this year has stepped up his game. With the bases empty, that wOBA allowed ranks tied for 22nd. With runners on, that wOBA allowed ranks first, and by a whole 17 points. As you could guess, this sort of thing needs to be regressed, and it won’t surprise you to learn that Felix’s BABIP is also lower in run-scoring situations. But this goes beyond just a BABIP thing. Felix probably deserves some credit for this, because that doesn’t all seem like a fluke.

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