Yesterday afternoon, Dave told me he was going to write about the National League MVP. Specifically, he said he was going to write about how there’s just no real good way to pick a winner, because all the best players are almost equally good. Here is the post. It went live in the morning. It’s all sensible, and it does a good job of laying out the landscape.

I said to Dave it would be possible to compare this year’s crop of the best players to how the crops have looked throughout baseball history. I added that I could look into it if he won’t. His response, and I quote: “I won’t.” So now here I am! I’m running through some quick analyses, going back to the start of the integration era in 1947. I’ve prepared plots to examine all of Major League Baseball, and I’ve prepared plots specific to the American and National Leagues. Off we go.

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The baseball season is long. How long is the baseball season? For the last little while, I’ve been following the Brewers and thinking about them as the underdog in the wild-card race. Yet the team they’re pursuing — the Rockies — is also an underdog in the wild-card race. It’s all about how you narrow your field of vision. If you’re concerned only with the right now, the Brewers as a wild-card team would be a surprise. If you step back and consider all of 2017, the Rockies as a wild-card team are no less surprising. Their success shouldn’t be taken for granted, or assumed simply because they’ve been successful from the beginning.

The NL wild-card teams are likely to be the Diamondbacks and the Rockies. That’s how it’s looked for a while. But, if you remember, the NL wild-card teams were supposed to be the Mets and the Giants. Maybe the Cardinals. If the division winners are what we thought, the wild-card situation is more surprising, or even refreshing. We’ve got no shortage of underdogs, and some of them required that the Mets and Giants move out of the way. The Mets this year have been a letdown. The Giants have been even worse.

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There was, I’m sure, a certain amount of message-sending last night, when the Twins went into Cleveland and knocked off the Indians. The Twins right now are trying to make a statement, ensuring that opponents take them seriously. More important than any of that, though, the win moved the Twins to the verge of sealing up a playoff spot. All they need now is one more win, or one more Angels loss. Say what you will about the odds, but the Twins would love to just make things official. You could see that in Brian Dozier’s expression, as he rounded the bases following his lead-changing, eighth-inning, three-run homer. The Twins were likely to make the playoffs with or without the home run, yet Dozier was elated by the prospect of moving one step closer.

There’s nothing so unusual about Brian Dozier going deep. He’s one of the better power hitters in his division. But I’d like to show you a screenshot of his homer in flight.

Brian Dozier’s right-handed. He homered the other way.

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James Shields is the oldest part of a young and rebuilding White Sox ballclub. For that reason, he’s easy to overlook. Even fans of the team itself would presumably rather focus on, say, Yoan Moncada or Lucas Giolito or Reynaldo Lopez. Those guys, and others — they could be around the next time the White Sox make the playoffs. Shields, almost certainly not. He might not even still be in the game.

So this isn’t a tale with widespread implications. This isn’t a story that’s going to change how you think about the broader baseball landscape. All this is is a story of a pitcher who’s come back from the brink of professional extinction. James Shields will turn 36 a few days before Christmas, yet over the last couple months, he’s changed the way that he pitches. Shields still has something left to give after all; all he had to do was alter everything, at a time when it would’ve been easy to wave the white flag.

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Last night, in a game that meant little, the Astros clobbered the Rangers. It made sense, because the Astros are a very good baseball team, and the Rangers are not. Maybe the most interesting thing happened early on, before the clobbering part was underway. One at-bat before Carlos Gomez took inexplicable offense to nothing, Joey Gallo stepped in, and he looked at the following defense.

We’ve seen our share of aggressive shifting. We’ve seen infields stack the left side, and the right side. We saw what the Diamondbacks did to DJ LeMahieu. Still, that Astros shift for Gallo is something else. Depending on how you word your definitions, either the Astros had four infielders on the right side, or they had two infielders on the right side, with a five-man outfield. The positioning sort of blurs the traditional lines. But, these days, tradition doesn’t matter for much. Defenses are just trying to get as many outs as possible. For Gallo, this defense just might have been perfect.

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As I write this, six teams have already reached 90 wins. Another three teams still could. Four teams have won at least 60% of their games, which is the highest total for the league in more than a decade, and that doesn’t include the Yankees, who have baseball’s second-highest run differential. It also doesn’t include the Cubs, who last year were one of the better teams in recent memory, and who this year picked up Jose Quintana, among a few others. The Dodgers, who are great, added Yu Darvish. The Astros, who are great, added Justin Verlander. The Nationals, who are great, added Sean Doolittle, Ryan Madson, and Brandon Kintzler. And so on. The top of the league is always good, by definition, but this year the best teams seem particularly strong. Particularly talented, and particularly deep. This year has marked a step away from what had been a trend toward greater parity. Now the parity is simply among the elite.

The great teams are going to the playoffs. That’s what’s supposed to happen. The Twins, also, look like they’re going to the playoffs. It’s not yet locked up, but it’s just about there, with the Twins looking ahead to a date in New York. Playoff entry, of course, is everything, because each of the final 10 teams gets a chance to win it all. It’s inarguably true that the 2017 Twins could win the World Series in a month. The question is, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a question I’m actually posing to you, but not before I go over each side.

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Compelling articles frequently begin with an anecdote. Let me therefore begin with one of my own. Aaron Judge annoyed me on Monday. See, Judge hit a home run, and after the ball left the yard, I started working on this post about the details of his full rookie season. Heck of a rookie season! Just as I was really getting into it, though, I had to stop and re-work a few things, because then Judge hit another home run. New data. New tables. New images. Here’s one of them.

At first, on Monday, Judge hit his 49th home run, tying Mark McGwire’s record for a rookie. You can tell it’s a remarkable record, too, because of the gap between McGwire and the next guy on the list. Well, the record is split no longer. Judge and McGwire shared the spotlight for a handful of innings, but the record now belongs to Judge and Judge only. Judge is the first rookie to ever reach the 50-homer plateau. Although, perhaps plateau is an incorrect word, because Judge could continue to climb ever higher in this season’s final week.

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I realize that I can be a little too often drawn to bests and worsts. It happens because I’m lazy, but it also happens because those make for easy subjects to sell. I don’t need to convince you that the best of something is interesting. Same goes for the opposite. I’m just the messenger, providing exceptional fun facts. Baseball creates the fun facts. I just go and find them.

I have another fun fact to share with you. I have another potential historical worst. Several weeks ago, the Marlins were worth watching, because they were making an improbable surge into the wild-card race. The surge ended as abruptly as it started, and now the Marlins are just playing out the string. There are still players of significance, sure. Fans are still watching to see if Giancarlo Stanton will go yard. But let me give you a statistic to keep your eye on. Want a reason to pay attention to the Marlins’ final stretch? They could badly use some pitcher-hits. Otherwise they’re going to set a new low.

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Now that we’re close to the end of the season, you’re going to see a lot of talk about the bests in certain categories. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best pitcher. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best rookie. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best player (sort of). And there are further awards that are supposed to go to the best hitters. It’s seldom easy to identify a given season’s best whatever, but at least you can limit yourself to one year of data. That makes things simple, relatively speaking.

It’s half as simple, or twice as complicated, if you double the number of years. But that’s something you have to do if you want to measure improvement. And this is something I’d like to spend a few minutes on — who, among major league baseball players, is the most improved hitter? There’s no great reason to focus on this, I guess, but there’s no great reason to focus on anything. Major improvement is good. Makes for a compelling story. Why not find the most improved hitter? All we need to do is agree on a method.

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