Last year, Miguel Cabrera won the American League Triple Crown and the American League Most Valuable Player Award. You might’ve heard about that. This year, Miguel Cabrera has been even better. His wRC+ is up dozens of points. His WAR is almost even despite it still being the beginning of August. Offensively, Cabrera’s been having one of the very greatest seasons ever, helping to make up for Prince Fielder’s extended slump. Cabrera’s been the kind of good we take for granted — we eventually take all kinds of good for granted — but in those fleeting moments of clarity and appreciation, Cabrera knocks us on our asses. It’s absurd, basically, what Miguel Cabrera has done, and can do.

The in-contention Indians were dealt a difficult blow when Corey Kluber landed on the disabled list with a finger injury. Kluber’s a good pitcher, see, and in-contention teams need good pitchers, and the Indians had to turn to prospect Danny Salazar on Wednesday night. Wednesday, Salazar made his second big-league appearance and start, facing the Tigers for the first time. Meaning he was facing Miguel Cabrera for the first time. Interesting things happened.

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In the beginning, there was Jose Molina. For real though, he’s really old. Molina hung around, and then baseball was invented, and then people figured out how to measure catcher pitch-framing, and then, initially, Molina really shined. Molina’s numbers blew everyone else’s out of the water, and so Molina became something of a cult favorite, and so on and so forth. You know how this story has gone. You know how Molina has become sort of popular, and you know how Molina is playing a lot for a contending team. Molina’s still really great at framing. It’s probably what he’s most great at.

Over time, I myself started to champion Jonathan Lucroy. Not because I thought Lucroy was better than Molina, but because I thought the two were roughly equivalent, and Lucroy didn’t get enough attention or respect. It seems to me Lucroy is one of baseball’s more underrated all-around players, and even still this year, Lucroy has been helping the Brewers’ pitching staff suck just a little less than it might otherwise. Lucroy’s still good, of course. Molina’s still good, of course. One doesn’t simply forget how to frame. But I was surprised when I took a peek at the 2013 pitch-framing leaderboards.

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So much of what we do is try to separate the signal from the noise. That is, a lot of what we do is investigate whether what we’re looking at, statistically, is real. We’re always chasing evaluations of a player’s true talent because we want to know what that player’s going to do. We want to know how his team is going to do because we think we want to know the future. As a group, we’re not horrible, but we’re not very good. There are biases that we have, there are things we don’t know and there’s the matter of players being humans and humans being all change-y. So often, we end up having to throw up our hands and say, “Welp.” Firm conclusions are hard to come by because firm conclusions are almost impossible to reach.

The greatest problem and the greatest solution is sample size. The rule of thumb is the smaller the sample of data, the greater the error bars around the actual signal. It follows, then, that the greater the sample of data, the smaller the error, assuming the players aren’t changing too much. If you observe one characteristic in one year, then that’s meaningful. If you observe it in three or four or five years, then that’s a lot more meaningful.  You’ve got signal that drowns out the noise. Which  brings us to Mark Buehrle and the Blue Jays.

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Monday night in Washington, the Braves beat Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals by a 3-2 score. The beginning of the Nationals’ MLB.com game recap reads so casually you almost skip right over the astonishing part and miss the absurdity. Quote:

WASHINGTON — The Nationals entered Monday night with nine chances remaining to cut directly into the Braves’ 12 1/2-game lead in the National League East. They wasted the first of those chances in the opener of a three-game series, as Justin Upton’s go-ahead solo home run in the eighth inning lifted Atlanta to a 3-2 victory.

Braves in first, check. Nationals with chances left, check. Nationals with a blown chance, check. Twelve and a half games. Wait. Now thirteen and a half games. Because the Braves won. The number is inserted as if the gap isn’t completely ridiculous. The number is inserted as if Nationals fans ought to be holding out hope.

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As good as Jose Fernandez is, there still exists a critical angle. Fernandez, of course, pitches for the Marlins, and the Marlins get a lot of things wrong. The Internet usually doesn’t let those things go by unacknowledged, and the Marlins, this year, placed Fernandez on their opening-day roster. Fernandez was coming straight from Single-A, and had the Marlins waited even just a couple weeks, they could’ve preserved an extra year of team control. Instead, Fernandez is due to become a free agent in five years, instead of six. Viewed objectively, viewed just on paper, that decision is needlessly wasteful. The Marlins had no plans to contend. Fernandez didn’t need to be up that quick.

But there’s no sense in letting that dominate the conversation, because let’s revisit the beginning of that paragraph: “As good as Jose Fernandez is.” Fernandez just, and I mean just turned 21, and he’s outstanding. It’s fine to talk about contracts and service time, and those details are important, but that’s not nearly as interesting as on-field performance. Though Matt Harvey’s drawn more of the headlines, Fernandez has more quietly exceeded most reasonable expectations, and in the interest of better appreciating what he’s done, I thought we could take a few minutes to dig in. Let’s go beyond “Jose Fernandez is great.” What are some of his defining characteristics?

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For a while, Biogenesis didn’t exist. Then for a while, Biogenesis did exist, but we didn’t know anything about it. Then we started to know a lot about it, and in particular a lot about its distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, but it didn’t seem like baseball would be able to hand out much in the way of discipline. Then it seemed like baseball would be able to deliver suspensions, but not until 2014, after appeals were dealt with. Now baseball has handed out suspensions and all but one will go un-fought. This Monday is the big day: on this Monday, players tied to Biogenesis have been given official discipline.

Naturally, people are going to have questions. What does a 50-game suspension mean? What are the rest of the consequences out of all this? It’s too soon to really have an FAQ, because this early no Qs have been FA’d, so consider this FAQ more anticipatory. Let’s focus on the suspended Nelson Cruz, and the suspended Jhonny Peralta.

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Hi again, you same people that I greeted earlier, and welcome to the second part of this edition of The Worst Of The Best. Right here you can check out a whole section archive, featuring posts in this series all the way back to the first one, if you like these posts and don’t really care about the timeliness. You’ll notice that this post is going up pretty late in the day, especially for a Friday. Optimally, it would go up much much earlier. But the delay isn’t my fault — it’s actually, honestly, the fault of two old people from San Diego I’d never met before. And one other old person from San Diego I have. You don’t need to know the story, because it’s perilously uninteresting, and hardly FanGraphs-appropriate. Just take my word for it that this post is late because of the California elderly. Take my word for it and forgive me.

Before, we looked at the five wildest pitches since the All-Star break, covering two weeks. Now we’re going to look at the five wildest swings, as has always followed. Next time we’ll get back to doing these on a weekly basis but for now just accept that I had to spend last Friday thinking instead about an incredibly boring trade deadline. The wildest swings are those swings at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, and for this post I excluded a check-swing strike by Yan Gomes, and another by Brett Pill. What’s left are five full swings, each of them humiliating. Are you ready to see them? You’re ready to see them. This requires like literally zero preparation on your part. In that regard, aren’t you lucky.

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Hello good friends, and welcome to the first part of whichever edition of this this is. Right here, check out an archive of this whole series! The big story in baseball right now, apparently, is Alex Rodriguez, and what’s about to happen to him. That’s why there are reportedly about 150 media members on hand for his Friday rehab appearance in Trenton. Because A-Rod is finally going to open up and be honest, with the media, and every single one of those media members is going to emerge with a fresh and original take on an enjoyable and novel subject. I can’t wait to read it all! But if you’d like a break from A-Rod, who I guess must be the only thing happening, take a few minutes to watch some really terrible pitches, down below. Or do like anything else, maybe even away from an electronic screen. “It’s bad for your eyes,” I was often advised 20 years ago, before anyone understood science.

Here, we’ve got the five wildest pitches since the All-Star break. That covers two weeks, instead of the customary one week, but this series was interrupted in July due to trade coverage, and the possibility of more trade coverage. Starting now we should get back to normal, so look for these to resume every Friday. You know the deal by now. PITCHf/x, pitches far away from the center of the strike zone, and so on and so forth. Screenshots, .gifs, angry people with slow processors who didn’t know better when they clicked. Three pitches that just missed this list: David Purcey to Elliot Johnson on July 26, Hiroki Kuroda to Clayton Kershaw on July 31, and Will Harris to Jeff Francoeur on July 19. “Did Francoeur swing at the pitch?” you ask, jokingly. No, he didn’t, that would be absurd. You exaggerate how bad he is. Now let’s look at some stuff and make jokes and observations.

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Sometimes, to get a batting champion, you have to pay a steep price. Right now, Miguel Cabrera is blowing away the competition in the American League, to such an extent that it’s hardly a competition at all. The Tigers, of course, couldn’t be more thrilled that he’s on their side, but when they got him, they had to have some doubts. And sometimes, to get a batting champion, you can make a move that people hardly notice. The leader in the National League right now is Chris Johnson, batting .342. Johnson didn’t even begin the year as an everyday player.

Johnson went from the Diamondbacks to the Braves as part of a much larger deal. The key, everybody understood, was Atlanta’s acquisition of potential superstar Justin Upton. This was the conclusion of the Justin Upton sweepstakes. To this point, Upton has been worth 1.6 WAR. A big part of Arizona’s return was the solid and underrated Martin Prado. To this point, Prado has been worth 0.4 WAR. Johnson went to Atlanta and people didn’t notice. To this point, he has been worth 1.9 WAR. He was worth more than a third of that in July.

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