The Phillies’ 2011 season ended with Ryan Howard crumpled in a heap between the batter’s box and first base. What was suspected then was confirmed later: Howard had suffered a rupture of his Achilles. Howard’s five-year, $125-million extension was to begin in 2012.

It just about goes without saying that Howard’s contract with the Phillies has been a disaster. It’s important to understand that most analysts predicted that the deal would be a problem for the organization. It’s just as important to understand that the deal has gone far worse than anyone could’ve thought. The most-wrong person here is Ruben Amaro, but in a way the skeptical analysts were also wrong, for not projecting a bad-enough outcome. That’s not entirely fair, but the point is that even the biggest cynics didn’t think what has happened with Howard would happen.

And here’s what’s happening: it’s 2014, and Howard’s deal has two more years left. According to Jon Heyman, the Phillies are trying hard to deal Howard away, expressing a willingness to eat a lot of the money. So far, of course, there have been no takers. Meanwhile, Ryne Sandberg is starting to sit Howard, trying to find room for Darin Ruf. Ruf, in Triple-A, has hit one home run. Contained within that piece is a note that the Phillies have internally discussed just dropping Howard from the roster, paying him, and moving on. His contract is a little more than halfway over. Said Amaro at the time of the extension agreement: “There’s always risk when you’re doing guaranteed deals, but based on what he’s done, I think it’s a good risk.”

The contract, for the Phillies, has been catastrophic. It hasn’t singlehandedly prevented them from competing, but no reasonable contract can do that to a team, and it’s certainly made the situation more difficult. Probably, it’s not the worst contract in the history of baseball, in terms of the difference between dollars paid and dollars worth. The one bit of good news is that Howard inked a five-year deal, whereas, say, Albert Pujols is under contract through 2021. So, at some point in the somewhat near future, Howard will be off the Phillies’ books. But Howard is well on his way to an ugly feat. One that seems almost inconceivable, but one that captures the reality of all that’s gone down.

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* Update: kind of. Though Morales will surely take opportunities from Hart, they may coexist on the active roster. It’s complicated, but it shouldn’t change too much about the analysis.

There was never any question that the Mariners liked Kendrys Morales. They traded for him in the first place, and he hit. They offered him a three-year contract. They kept in touch with him during the offseason. If the Mariners had had their druthers, they would’ve locked Morales up to return as the team’s DH. But Morales, see, didn’t really want to go back to Seattle:

“He knew it was going to be tough to look for another offer, or another job, but in his heart he just didn’t really want to come back here and be in the same spot … he was taking his chances to see if something was better.”

When a player is a free agent, he gets to decide where he ends up. When a player belongs to a team, however, he can’t control where he gets traded, barring a full or partial no-trade clause. The Mariners couldn’t sign Morales, so he waited and waited and signed with the Twins. The Twins fell quickly out of the race, and now they’ve traded Morales to the Mariners, for Stephen Pryor and salary relief. The Mariners got Morales the only way they knew how to, and now he’ll serve as the rusty DH, in replacement of a rusty DH.

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I learned of the Jeff Samardzija trade at an Independence Day house party. That’s how long ago that deal took place, and most people have moved on. They’ve turned their attention to potential trades. We analyzed the Oakland-Chicago deal rather thoroughly, first with Mike Petriello, then with Tony Blengino. It seems like there shouldn’t be a whole lot left to say — the A’s paid steeply to try to win a World Series; the Cubs bolstered a position-player stockpile that’s not so easy to bolster. Classic, fascinating midseason blockbuster.

And I agree there’s not a lot left to say. But I do have one thought I want to throw on top of the others. It concerns a potential side benefit for the A’s — a side benefit they might not have even considered to be a benefit at the time. This is about the nature of how the deadline works, and how this particular deadline could be shaping up.

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There’s absolutely no denying that pitch-framing is a thing. Different people call it different things, but it’s real and it matters and it’s going to continue to matter until or unless everyone’s the same or there’s an automated strike zone. Pitch-framing is normally associated with catchers, because it’s the catchers who’re doing the framing. Borderline pitchers are in large part up to them, and given that we have pretty good data, a lot of people ask us here at FanGraphs when we’ll incorporate pitch-framing into catcher WAR. It’s something we’d like to do, but it’s also something that’s a lot more complicated than you might think.

Framing data affects pitchers. Those are the next people to be considered when the subject comes up. Catchers receive pitches, but catchers receive pitches thrown by pitchers, and good or bad framing value already shows up in the data. It just doesn’t show up next to the catchers’ names, being instead woven into the pitching statistics. So if we’re going to give catchers WAR credit for framing, we have to figure out a way to strip the same amount of credit from pitchers. Framing affects, among other things, walks and strikeouts, and right now those are pitcher-only.

So when people talk about framing, they talk primarily about catchers. Sometimes, they’ll talk about pitchers, often talking about specific batteries. Barely ever do people talk about the hitters. You know, the other people dealing with balls and strikes. The victims, as it were, in the case of good receiving. Or the non-victims, in the other case.

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I remember… some of the details about the clearest time regression to the mean was ever explained to me. It wasn’t explained to me personally; it was a blog post somewhere, or maybe a print-published article, and it simply showed league-leading batting averages, and then the batting averages for the same players the next season. If you’re familiar with the concept of regression, of course you know that, the next season, the batting averages were pretty much all down. It couldn’t have been more simple, and it couldn’t have been more helpful, and regression is so common a term now within baseball analysis that we all get to feel like part-time mathematicians. Especially around here, most people are smart enough to factor regression into almost everything.

It applies between seasons, and it applies within seasons. It’s a little like gravity — it’s always a factor, whether you like it or not, and it’s built into good player projections. It’s built into good standings projections. If a player has been really good for a time, odds are, going forward, he’s going to be less good. If a team has been really good for a time, odds are, the same thing. Regression is among the more powerful forces, but there is some evidence of teams being able to fight it off. Let’s talk about midseason trades.

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Not too long ago, I observed that Allen Craig was getting pitched differently. He was getting pitched differently because he was hitting differently, in that he hasn’t been hitting for pull power. So pitchers have fed him more fastballs, and more fastballs inside, daring him to turn on something. Before that, I observed that Robinson Cano was also missing his pull power, although he compensated better than Craig has. And somewhere along the line, I wrote something similar about Evan Longoria, so I guess I realize I’m interested in certain batted-ball tendencies. And that realization made me want to look at the bigger picture.

Some hitters are lethal when they’re able to pull the ball. Other guys are quite good at going the other way. Brian Dozier is a total pull hitter, who can’t do crap the other way. Ryan Howard, meanwhile, can’t do crap to his pull side, preferring the opposite field. Individual tendencies are individual tendencies, but things get interesting when you see those tendencies change. Changes can be indicative of changes to swing or ability.

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We’re constantly on the lookout for the adjustments pitchers make. We love being able to spot where the game of baseball is changing, and you never know when a pitcher’s next tweak might vault him into another performance level. Felix Hernandez became Felix Hernandez when he picked up a reliable change. Dallas Keuchel became someone worth knowing when he developed a dependable slider. Mariano Rivera didn’t even have a cutter when he was coming up in the minors, and so on and so forth. It’s easier to spot changing pitchers than changing hitters, and when one thing about a pitcher changes, sometimes you can end up with a whole different profile.

Now, often, when we’re looking for changes, we’re comparing against previous years. And that makes some sense — depending on the adjustment, they’re frequently rolled out and tested in spring training. But it’s also possible to spot some midseason adjustments, with perhaps the simplest adjustment being a change to the pitch mix. Let’s take a look at that for 2014, inspired by something I’ve noticed about Chris Young. I’ve had a note to write about this for a week or two. I guess now I’ve waited long enough.

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The Red Sox, like the Rays, aren’t quite sure whether it’s time to sell. Both of them are tied for fourth, or last, in the AL East, at 7.5 games back. But then they’ve won a combined nine games in a row, and our projections have them as the best teams in the division. Still, their playoff odds are low enough that this might be too little, too late. If the Red Sox elect to sell, they have a handful of veteran role players that could find temporary homes with contenders. But no matter what the Sox choose, it appears they’ll be keeping Jon Lester. The free-agent-to-be doesn’t seem to be available on the market.

The idea is that the Sox would like to extend him. Lester has said before that he’d be willing to take something of a hometown discount, even if that urge is diminished with every passing day. Obviously, the two sides have yet to reach an agreement, despite a midseason re-opening of talks, and obviously, the Red Sox’s reported offer around spring training was too low, but there’s still a pretty good chance of a long-term marriage, here. Both Lester and the Sox ultimately want the same thing. They just need to agree on what Jon Lester is.

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Just the other day, we went through the first half of the season’s strike-iest called balls, which were more or less called balls on pitches taken right down the middle. Those are always interesting to observe and analyze, but that idea also has a natural follow-up, which is what we’ll review here. Below, the first half of the season’s ball-iest called strikes, which are called strikes on pitches absolutely not taken right down the middle. Umpire mistakes are always frustrating for about half of the observers, and on the larger scale umpire mistakes are frustrating for everybody, but the purpose of these posts isn’t to lead you to your individual boiling points; rather, this is just about identifying and reflecting on curiosities. What you see below is weird! Never a bad time to look at weird.

I’m changing things up just a little bit. Instead of calculating distance from the center of the strike zone, I’ve calculated distance from the nearest point of the strike zone. I’ve also gone with Brooks Baseball’s corrected PITCHf/x pitch locations, instead of the raw PITCHf/x pitch locations, because I am taking this way too seriously. The top five? Four left-handed batters, as you’d expect. But one righty. One most unfortunate righty. Here now are the ball-iest called strikes of 2014.

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