It was a dramatic one Sunday in Kansas City. The Royals played the Rangers in a late-season matchup of wild-card hopefuls, and the game was scoreless going into the bottom of the tenth when the Royals loaded the bases with none out. Then, after Mike Moustakas hit, there was one out. Then, after George Kottaras hit, there were two out. Up came Justin Maxwell, and the count ran full, and on what would be either a decisive pitch or a foul, Maxwell swung and lifted the ball out for a walk-off grand slam. A single would’ve done, or an error would’ve done, or a walk would’ve done, but a grand slam is emphatic, and the Royals celebrated like the Royals seldom have over the past however many years.

However, with a week left in the season, the Royals still don’t have much of a shot of advancing. They trail the Indians by three and a half games, the Rays by four. The Rangers are two games in front of them, and the Indians play a soft schedule. Our own playoff odds give the Royals a 1-in-71 shot, so while they’re happily playing meaningful baseball in late September, it’s unlikely there’ll be meaningful baseball in early October. Featuring the Royals, anyway. And that’s too bad for a team that might be one of baseball’s best.

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Typical  Billy Hamilton story outline: Ordinary introductory paragraph noting Hamilton’s speed when running the bases. Reference to Hamilton’s record-breaking stolen-base numbers in the minor leagues. Note regarding Hamilton’s immediate base-stealing success in the majors. Cautionary remark pertaining to Hamilton’s limited offensive potential at the plate. Renewed appreciation of footspeed. Statement that Hamilton could be one-of-a-kind, at least for his generation. Explanation that — while base-running scores tend to be close to zero — Hamilton looks like an actual valuable weapon. Insert joke that Hamilton is so fast he’s already finished reading this article.

Run-of-the-mill paragraph pointing out how slow Jose Molina is. Note that Molina is perhaps the game’s slowest runner. Obligatory reference to Molina’s high-quality pitch-framing. Joke that Molina slows the game down in more ways than one. Acknowledgment that no one expects catchers to be able to run; decent speed is just gravy. Acknowledgment of Molina’s relatively advanced age. Note that this is not intended as a criticism. Statement that this is just a fact, to which Molina would certainly admit without shame.

Predictable musing about how Hamilton and Molina might compare.

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Hey guys, and welcome to a post to which you don’t need to be welcomed. This isn’t property or a residence — no one resides here. This is a post, weighing literally nothing, figuratively little, with no doors and no walls. I’m not inside of it, allowing you in. I’m not even greeting you, as you’re reading this — my words are, but my words are old, having been written in advance of this post being published. So, hey guys, and here’s a post. Did you know that these introductions have become the trickiest part of composing this series? Maybe you can tell. Neat thing about wild swings and wild pitches is that they provide a jumping-off point. You can look for things to write about in the video or the numbers. A completely open introduction? The hell am I supposed to say? I don’t have many strong opinions about things, and this isn’t the place to talk about potential Breaking Bad spoilers. Although that gives me an idea, so check back next week. I’m just kidding, I’m not going to do what I thought of, so you’ll never know what I thought of. Thank goodness, this paragraph is finished.

This is the part where we talk about wild swings and share many laughs because the swings were ugly and irresponsible. Our window of observation this time around goes from September 6 through September 19, and as always, I’ve elected to exclude checked swings and the nearly-always-hypothetical wild swings on hit-and-runs. Authors of excluded checked swings for this edition: Marc Krauss, Brian Bogusevic, Junior Lake, and whoever Chris Rusin is. I’ll warn you that one of the wild swings below was attempted by a pitcher. But to compensate for that, this post also features among the neatest of chance quirks, so, keep your eyes peeled for what I will make a point of bringing to your attention. Get ready for fun! Or get ready to browse the series archive. Now get ready for fun!

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to the first part of this edition of this. Here’s a link to all of the previous editions. Understand that part of me feels guilty right now. This is my full-time job — my full-time job is serving as a content creator on the Internet. It’s a pretty good job, the sort of thing a lot of people out there are currently fighting for. But there are a lot of content creators on the Internet, full-time and part-time and unpaid. The only way to remain relevant on the Internet as a creator is to keep creating. So, there’s a lot of content, and a lot of it seems like it could be interesting, and a lot of that turns out to actually be interesting. So there’s a lot to consume — too much to consume, infinite content to consume — and it’s easy to get lost. Hours can disappear and you can snap out of it and realize you’re reading an article about Super Dave Osborne. The Internet is dangerous, because information is appealing, and it’s easy to click. If you can control yourself, kudos; if you have trouble, I apologize for contributing to the Internet’s volume. Many of you are reading this instead of doing what you’re supposed to be doing, and you might not even realize it, and that makes me feel bad. Not bad enough to stop doing my job, because Greek yogurt isn’t going to buy itself, but know that I know your struggle. This weekend let’s all go to the woods.

Uh so here come some wild pitches, covering the window from September 6 through September 19. Once again, this covers two weeks instead of one, because last Friday I was out of town and FanGraphs stays where my computer is. Don’t know what happens next week. Could cover a week. Could cover the second half. Could cover the whole season. There are surprises in store. Meanwhile, this week, few surprises, except for all of the surprises to come. You know the deal: top five pitches furthest from the center of the PITCHf/x strike zone. Pitches just missing: Ivan Nova to Mike Carp on September 15, Madison Bumgarner to A.J. Pollock on September 8, and Stephen Fife to Angel Pagan on September 14. Those pitchers are fortunate to have escaped mocking commentary. They did not, however, escape mention. Now for some mocking commentary.

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Full, immediate disclosure: it’s actually a tie. When you think unhittability, you might think batting average against, or slugging percentage against, or something. Me, I prefer contact rate, because it’s elegant and simple. Contact rate measures how often batters hit the baseball when they attempt a swing. Most simply, that’s the whole point of a swing. A pitcher who gets a lot of missed swings can rightly be said to be unhittable. Other metrics might penalize for wildness, or just take other matters into account. For pure unhittability, I like looking at the rate of contact, and among National League starters, the lowest rate of contact allowed partly belongs to Francisco Liriano, at a hair above 71%.

Liriano’s tied with somebody else, and it’s not Matt Harvey or Clayton Kershaw. I’m going to be writing about that somebody else, because Liriano’s a lot more familiar. Liriano’s long been hard to hit, and he’s had a breakthrough season for the Pirates after coming over on the cheap. Don’t get me wrong, Liriano’s been surprising, but the guy with whom he’s tied has been a bigger surprise after also joining his current team on the cheap. I’m not sure even the Padres knew what they were getting when they dealt for Tyson Ross.

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I’ll admit that I don’t know a lot about the other sports, so I can’t speak to situations more messed up than what we’ve got in baseball. But in baseball — little details aside — we’ve got the A’s, and we’ve got the Marlins.

The A’s consistently try really hard to win, despite the odds being stacked against them. Oakland has a brilliant front office, and they play in a ballpark plagued by sewage leaks in the clubhouse and in the dugout. The Marlins are crooks. Money-hungry crooks. They play in a brand-new ballpark they didn’t pay for — a ballpark they’ve made no effort to fill after a disappointing debut season. The Marlins did what the Marlins do: They got some people excited, then they undid the goodwill and more.

Some baseball teams have reputations. The Yankees are the big spenders. The Dodgers are the other big spenders. The Twins are lovable throwbacks. The Braves are slightly less-lovable throwbacks. The Royals are run by people who shouldn’t be running the Royals. And so on. The Marlins’ reputation is that they’re run by criminals who deceive with every word. Two offseasons ago, it looked like they were trying hard to turn the page, to create a new identity. Two offseasons ago, the Marlins tried to spend to build a powerhouse. But their identity is still their identity. You know how it went. The Marlins are as the Marlins have been.

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When writing about statistics, there’s always the matter of finding the right balance between brevity and significance. Oftentimes, you’ll want to use filters, for purposes of proper analysis, and these filters show up as written qualifiers. Too many qualifiers, though, will turn off an audience, because audiences want numbers to be pretty easily consumable. It can already be difficult to try to sell numbers to readers; there’s a responsibility on the writer’s part to keep readability in mind.

You run into this all the time in baseball analysis, because there are virtually infinite ways to whittle a sample smaller and smaller. Every split is a qualifier. But some are just necessary, and there’s no other way around it. Like, with pitchers, you just have to separate starters and relievers. Starters need to be compared only to starters, and relievers need to be compared only to relievers, because they’re entirely different jobs. You’ve got marathon runners and hurdlers. What they have in common is that they throw baseballs, but they throw baseballs in different ways, and they use their bodies in different ways, and they prepare in different ways, and so they should be treated as distinct player pools. You don’t compare Aroldis Chapman to Yu Darvish. You compare Chapman to Craig Kimbrel, and Darvish to Max Scherzer. Not separating pitchers is at best irresponsible.

Some of the focus in this post will be on starting pitchers. Much of the focus in this post will be on Yordano Ventura.

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There are a lot of different ways in which a dinger can be exceptional. It can be the fastest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the slowest pitch hit for a dinger all season. It can be the longest or the fastest dinger all season. There exist plenty of exceptional dingers, and not too long ago, Miguel Cabrera hit one, against Phil Hughes. Hughes threw a pitch to Cabrera that PITCHf/x measured at almost two feet inside from the center of home plate. No matter — Cabrera hit it out, and what’s more is that it didn’t even look like it was a problem for him. The homer wowed everyone who watched, but according to Jim Leyland, that was something Cabrera could top:

What’s really stunning, [Leyland] said, is when Cabrera takes that same pitch — a pitch, by the way, that jams most right-handed hitters and results in either a foul or a weak grounder — and pounds it to the opposite field for a home run. Ponder the physics of that for a second.

According to Leyland, Cabrera has gone the other way for a homer off that inside pitch off the plate. Maybe Leyland was referring to what Cabrera has done with the team in batting practice. He hasn’t actually done what Leyland claims, at least not in a game, at least not in the PITCHf/x era. Mostly because that would be impossible. We don’t need to exaggerate Miguel Cabrera’s plate coverage; Cabrera’s true plate coverage is already an exaggeration.

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The Rangers are sliding again. Perhaps you’ve noticed. The last time they won was September 8, and even that was just their second win in seven games. Since then they have zero wins in seven games, losing on Monday to the Rays, who are direct wild-card competition. To make matters worse, the Rangers haven’t even had a single lead in this seven-game cold streak. Or maybe that doesn’t make matters worse. Maybe it’d be worse to have blown leads. Maybe the sequences don’t matter, provided the end result is still a loss. Who cares how you get there? Losing is losing, and mid-September is the wrong time to be losing.

Used to be, the Rangers felt like postseason shoo-ins. Now they’re clinging to a half-game lead for a wild-card slot, their division hopes entirely dashed. There are four teams on the Rangers’ heels, the Indians tied in the win column. Our playoff odds report puts the Rangers’ chances of getting beyond the regular season at 47%. It is now, basically, a coin flip, where it used to be a flip of a very biased coin. Though hope is far from lost, the Rangers need to get to work, because now they can’t back into the playoffs — they’ve already done the backing up. The Rangers need to score and not let the other guys score.

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