In the interest of showing some accountability, I’d like to remind you of something. Before the season started, the Marlins projected to be worst in baseball at catcher. They projected to be worst in baseball at first base, and they also projected to be worst in baseball at second and third base, and they projected to be second-worst in baseball at shortstop. They were, basically, projected to be Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Fernandez, and 23 members of the community in good standing. At this writing, the Marlins are third in baseball in position-player WAR, and they’re tied in third in wRC+. It’s not quite like if the Astros were good, but it isn’t dissimilar.

A fifth of the way through the season, feelings about the Marlins are complicated and conflicting. On the one hand, they’re an easy, appealing team to root for, with a lot of young, energetic, lesser-known talent. They’re a feel-good story and an obvious bandwagon candidate. On the other hand, it can be tricky to separate a team from its ownership, and for certain reasons it might work to baseball’s greater benefit to have the Marlins fall flat on their faces every year. You want to root for the Marlins, but you don’t want to side with Jeffrey Loria. It’s a good and bad thing when sports make you think.

But as long as we’re thinking about the Marlins, let’s address all that hitting. Just a year ago, the Marlins were an offensive catastrophe, and a catastrophe offensively. They were supposed to be bad again in 2014. They’ve been anything but, to this point, so one has to wonder: what does this mean? Just how wrong have we been?

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Understand, immediately: Mike Trout is currently first in the American League in WAR. In the majors, he’s sandwiched between two Rockies, one surprisingly healthy and one surprisingly awesome, and Trout’s current season pace puts him at 13 WAR, which would eclipse what he’s already done, and what he’s already done has been basically impossibly good. That Mike Trout doesn’t lead the majors in WAR isn’t a reflection of Trout; it’s a reflection of, hey, sample sizes, and also, don’t forget about Troy Tulowitzki, who is also amazing.

But let’s talk about something, just because it’s interesting. Trout is so good, so almost perfect, that we’re at heightened awareness when something might not be right. At the moment, he’s running an extraordinary 161 wRC+, which is an almost exact match for his career mark. But behind that summary number is another number that doesn’t look like the numbers that’ve come before it. What I’m referring to inspired an article in the LA Times.

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As promised a while ago, our Playoff Odds page is, in time, going to feature the old Cool Standings functionality, where you’d be able to click on a team and track its past odds day by day. That way you’d be able to monitor winning and losing streaks, as well as, somewhat indirectly, the impact of injuries and acquisitions. I suspect that it’s going to become one of FanGraphs’ more popular tools.

As promised a while ago, the Cool Standings functionality is coming in time, and that time remains in the future. It’s a priority, but it’s not a top priority, and the result is posts like these, periodic check-ins on how the odds have changed since the start of the season. On April 4, when I did this the first time, the Mariners’ odds were up about eight percentage points, and the Angels’ odds were down about ten. What does the picture look like today, on May 5? Let’s dive right in.

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Hey there, people who were six once, and welcome to the second part of the year’s first edition of The Worst Of The Best. Here is a link to Thursday’s first part, and here is a link to the complete series archive. If you were to explore that archive and go back to 2013, you’d find several apologies for how the second parts tend not to feature very much event diversity. This is the part about wild swings, and by my methodology, the overwhelming majority of the wild swings come on two-strike swings at stuff in the dirt. Here’s an excerpt from a post from the middle of last August:

With the wildest swings, almost invariably we end up with five swings at two-strike breaking balls in the dirt. That’s just the way it is, and of course all those swings are ill-advised, but part of the fun is supposed to be the surprise, and here we don’t really get many surprises. I don’t know what to do about that and it’s too late in 2013 to just up and change the methodology. […] I am sorry. I’ll have to figure some stuff out before 2014.

I never got around to figuring any stuff out. So you’re going to see the same stupid predictable crap as always. I’ll have to figure some stuff out before 2015.

Below, the wildest swings of the season, up through the end of April. Featured in some detail is a top-five list. Provided with less detail is a next-five list, and there are also two bonus inclusions. It’s all based on PITCHf/x data, so I can only work with what I’m given, and I don’t count checked swings or swing attempts on hit-and-runs. I only want to highlight hitters who decided to swing on their own, and who didn’t think better of it in the middle. These are swings at pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone. I repeat this every time but I’m sure you got the message ages ago. Let’s load some .gifs and laugh at some millionaires.

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The Padres are a team that always just kind of blends in. They do little to call attention to themselves, and they seldom excel in any particular category. Right now, they’re a few games under .500, close to the race without being actively involved in the race, and they appear set for another season best described as inoffensive.

Per usual, the Padres are a team without star players. At the moment, they’re featuring baseball’s worst team offense. They have a middle-of-the-pack rotation, and they have a fine if slightly overachieving bullpen. The team defense, as a group, has been right around the league average. In a lot of ways, this Padres team is unremarkable. In still more ways, this Padres team is worse than that.

But there’s one area where the Padres have been better than anyone else. One area where the Padres might continue to be at least among the league leaders. It’s an area that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but is gaining traction every month. The Padres have gotten to pitch to the best strike zone in the majors.

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of the year’s first edition of The Worst Of The Best. If you don’t know what this series is all about, here’s a link to the complete 2013 archive. As an alternative to reading through the archive, you might elect to not read through the archive. The idea, it turns out, is very easy to understand, and I explain it in plain English every time, and there’s never any carryover from one edition to the next. Some people have been asking if this series would return. Quite obviously, now, the answer is yes, but this’ll be running every month instead of ~every week. The public explanation is that, week to week, there isn’t enough diversity. The private explanation is that this is a lot of work. Thankfully, you guys are only privy to the public explanation. I don’t need to get stuck with a lazy rep.

Here, we’re going to look at the wildest pitches thrown in April, and thrown in March, too, since March only had a couple days of games. We’re going to look at the wildest pitches thrown so far. It’s based on PITCHf/x, so excluded are any and all pitches that didn’t generate PITCHf/x data (remember that there were two games in Australia). Sometimes that means I leave something out, but I’d rather make the occasional omission than watch every pitch of every game. The MLB Fan Cave sounds like a nightmare. I’ve defined the wildest pitches as the pitches ending up the furthest from the center of the strike zone. It works as a proxy and you’ll take what I give you. In detail, we’ll run through the top five. I’ll also present to you, quickly, the next five. Here now are five wild pitches, that were not among the five wildest pitches.

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Pitch-pattern data can be interesting when you’re trying to spot trends or adjustments for scouting reports. Changes in pitch patterns can sometimes be revealing. Just the other day, we looked at Miguel Cabrera, and beginning in last year’s playoffs, pitchers started to challenge him with more fastballs over the plate. That trend continued into this April, as opposing teams picked up on the fact Cabrera wasn’t 100% after offseason surgery. With Cabrera not swinging like himself, pitchers often tried to blow him away. Now Cabrera’s getting back to normal, so pitchers, one figures, should soon return to their normal. Not that it’ll do them much good.

Pitch-pattern data can also be interesting and revealing when it doesn’t change. Wilin Rosario doesn’t see many fastballs, or strikes, or fastballs for strikes. What’s revealed is how people think of Wilin Rosario and his eye. The way Rosario gets pitched is perfectly justifiable, and this is an example of baseball finding its equilibrium. Yet there’s something curious I’ve noticed about Anthony Rendon. His name has come up when I’ve been researching other things.

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A common question in our chats has asked how much longer the Reds can put up with Billy Hamilton and his lousy numbers out of the leadoff slot. Hamilton was known to be a question mark coming into the year, and he got off to a putrid beginning, and all the speed in the world can’t do you any good if you can never even get down to first. Some entertained the idea of Hamilton becoming a full-time pinch-runner, figuring that was the way for him to maximize value. The questions have been coming in less frequently lately. Hamilton, since April 15, has hit .340.

That isn’t intended as evidence that Billy Hamilton is a good hitter. Before he started hitting .340, Hamilton was hitting .140, and that data’s every bit as valid. What’s becoming more clear, though, is that Hamilton’s a real player, and not just an assortment of exaggerations. Before a player arrives in the majors, it’s tempting to view them as caricatures of their strengths and weaknesses. Then big-league performance pulls everything back closer to the ordinary. Billy Hamilton played a game Tuesday that said as much as words could: he’s probably not the worst hitter in baseball. And while he’s gifted on the bases, he’s far from un-throw-out-able.

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You remember what the concerns with Austin Jackson used to be. There weren’t many questions about his defense, there weren’t many questions about his athleticism, there weren’t many questions about his ability to hit the ball hard. There were, simply, questions about his ability to hit the ball. A fine rookie season gave way to a mediocre sophomore campaign, in which Jackson posted the fourth-highest strikeout rate for a 24-year-old ever. Before 2012, Jackson worked hard to modify his swing and, most visibly, eliminate his high leg kick. He chopped a fifth off of his strikeouts, and his lifted his wRC+ by almost 50 points. Austin Jackson had been fixed, and he turned into a legitimate everyday player.

So fans knew what to credit for Jackson’s turnaround. Mechanical changes always make good sense after the fact, if a player’s been successful. Jackson had a rougher go of it in 2013, but he did keep his strikeouts down. Yet Jackson was awful in the playoffs, and he’s off to a scorching start in 2014, and he’s looked both very familiar and very different. Funny thing about those mechanical changes.

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