Last season, the Orioles unexpectedly won the AL East. I say “unexpectedly” for two reasons. One, because almost nobody called for it during the preseason. And two, because Baltimore experienced injuries to and underperformance by some of their best players to such a degree that, had any of us known about it beforehand, it would have caused us all to project them falling backwards into last season, let alone last place. At the end of the year, their top-five players by WAR were Adam Jones, Steve Pearce, Nelson Cruz, J.J. Hardy, and Nick Markakis — a list within which Chris Davis, Matt Wieters, and Manny Machado (i.e. much of the team’s hypothetical core) are conspicuous by their absence.

This season things are different. This season, the list basically goes like this: Manny Machado, Manny Machado where you mispronounce his name for some reason, Manny Macahdo where I mistype his name for some reason, and then two more Manny Machados where you and I summon the humanity to get the man’s name right. Essentially this season, the second-place Orioles are Manny Machado and a bunch of .500-ish players or worse. That’s how good Manny Machado has been in 2015.

You may have read Dave Cameron’s recent trade-value series. If not read it. READ IT. On it, Machado ranked eighth, which is a very high ranking. However, if you look at the projected WAR by ZIPS over the next five seasons listed for each player in the articles and then re-ranked the players on that basis, you’ll get a top two of Mike Trout (double duh) and then Manny Machado himself. Machado, whose name my computer badly and inexplicably wants to change to “man mated,” has the second-highest projected WAR over the next five seasons. He’s that good now. He projects to be better soon. He hasn’t always been that good, though.

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The All Star Game is the holy line of demarcation between the first and second half of the season. Dip your toe ever so gently across it and you’ve entered the second half of the season. Beware, friend! This is the time when we know who is good and who isn’t, who should sell at the upcoming trade deadline and who should buy. It’s all cut and dried, like beef jerky. Just look at the standings and, like listening to Donald Trump, all the secrets of the world will be revealed! By now, we know a lot about the season, much more than we did in March. Except, actually no, no really we don’t.

Last season’s standings featured the Orioles, Tigers, A’s, Nationals, Brewers (yes, seriously, the Brewers), and Dodgers in first place at the All Star break. During the second half of the season, the teams with the best records in those divisions were the Orioles, Royals, Angels, Nationals, Pirates, and Dodgers. There are certainly some similarities between those lists, but they’re clearly not the same either. The A’s and Brewers completely fell apart while the Royals and Angels got hot. Things aren’t always as they seem after one half season of baseball.

As FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan wrote here last week, pre-season projections are, on the whole, a better indicator of how the second half of the season will go than the games played in the first half. Even this late in the season, good projections can help us look past the noise in the data that comes from one half season of baseball. This is an important point because it’s so easy to look at the standings and start to cross teams off the list of prospective playoff contenders. Instead, we’re going to cast a larger net by looking at some projections for the rest of the season, and explore how they jive with what we’ve seen so far.

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The market for starting pitching this offseason should be robust. I find starting articles with sentences that use words like “market” and “robust” is a great way to weed out readers. So, if you’re still with me, welcome to an article about Jordan Zimmermann!

The Zimmermann I’m referring to, by the way, is the Zimmermann that pitches, not the Zimmerman who hits. The Nationals are lousy with Zimmermen(n) so it’s easy to get confused. This particular Zimmermann, the subject of this here article, will be a free agent next season. After his big 2014 season, the Nationals talked to Zimmermann’s people (when you’re about to be a big money free agent you get you own people) about a contract extension to stay in DC beyond 2015 when his contract expired, but those talks didn’t get anywhere and then last off-season the Nats signed Max Scherzer. They did that because who doesn’t love a SuperRotation, but also as a replacement ace, as the club believed Zimmermann and to a lesser extent Doug Fister weren’t likely to stay in Washington after 2015. I don’t know what figures were discussed between Zimmermann’s people and the Nationals but it’s fair to say by not signing, Zimmermann passed on a lot of money.

Now, one half season into that decision and a half season from free agency, I wanted to take a look at Zimmermann to see how his decision is panning out.

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The funny thing about being a phenom is you don’t really have to be phenomenal. Last season Mookie Betts was both exceptional and therefore the exception to that when he put up a 130 wRC+ in 52 games for the Boston Red Sox. He stole bases, he hit home runs, and he played center field after a life spent in the middle infield. He was your basic run-of-the-mill young star. But even young stars often struggle eventually, so this season figured to be somewhat of a learning process for the 22-year-old center fielder.

Betts didn’t disappoint at being disappointing. After a solid opening week that featured him almost single-handedly beating the expected best team in baseball, the Washington Nationals, in the home opener, Betts faltered. On June 10 — exactly one month ago for those of you without calendars — he was hitting .237/.298/.368. An 0-for-3 the next day made the numbers look worse. In this run environment that could play with exceptional defense, but for Betts that type of production was a disappointment. There was reason to believe he wasn’t playing quite that badly based on batted-ball velocity and a mid-.250s BABIP, and hey, fast forward* one month and Betts has brought his OPS up 131 points to .789.

*That’s a thing old people used to have to do when watching movies on videotape.**
**Videotape is what they used to have back before DVDs.***
***DVDs were what they used to… Actually, you know what? Forget it. I’m old.

During that time he’s put up a 189 wRC+ which, as Mike Petriello notes, puts him in the company of Bryce Harper, Mike Trout, and Manny Machado. Here are 10 ways Mookie Betts has turned his season around.

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On Friday, Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports wrote an article titled “Red Sox need to dump Sandoval, Ramirez, like, now.” He states, in essence, that the Red Sox need to dump Pablo Sandoval and Hanley Ramirez, like, now. He states that they’re bad fits for Boston and that the Red Sox should have known that and the only way forward for Boston is to send both elsewhere and pay whatever it costs to do so. Suppose the Red Sox did trade Sandoval and Ramirez. Suppose they followed Rosenthal’s plan and got rid of both. What would happen then? Would Boston be better off? Let’s find out!

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Everyone makes mistakes. Some marry people they shouldn’t. Some cheat on their taxes. Some refuse to eat their dinner and find out later I won’t give them dessert and then throw a holy fit that prevents me from starting my article on how Francisco Cervelli is the Pittsburgh Pirates MVP until very late. But I will persevere. Welcome to an article about how Francisco Cervelli is the Pittsburgh Pirates MVP!

In fact, this brief reflection on mistakes is relevant, as the Yankees seem to have made one when they dealt Cervelli to Pittsburgh last November for reliever Justin Wilson. It’s not that Wilson is lousy so much as Cervelli has been fantastic. But let’s consider only mistakes for the moment. The Yankees gave Brian McCann $85 million over five seasons to be their starting catcher before the 2014 season because he was (a) available on the free-agent market and (b) one of the few major-league catchers who’s both a good hitter and good defender. McCann’s defensive reputation was as strong as his hitting, and in addition, he consistently scored high in catcher-framing statistics according both to Baseball Prospectus and StatCorner throughout his career. If anyone is worth $17 million for five seasons in his early and mid-30s that sounds like a good candidate.

But then last season happened. McCann had one of the worst offensive seasons of his career, recording a 92 wRC+, although his pitch-framing skills helped keep him a valuable player. In 2014, he stole 68 strikes and added 10.2 runs via his framing alone, according to Baseball Prospectus. StatCorner says the number is 11.4. Either way that’s a win and a bit more. This season he’s back to hitting again (119 wRC+) but his pitch-framing numbers have taken a nosedive. Perhaps it’s not surprising that McCann would step back a bit in pitch-framing skill as he enters his age-31 season.

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The thing about Max Scherzer is he’s really good. We knew that. You knew that. This Sunday the Milwaukee Brewers learned about it firsthand when Scherzer threw a complete game one-hit shutout against them. Well, okay, they probably knew it already thanks to scouting reports and whatnot. On the off chance the Brewers don’t use scouting reports or whatnot — and considering their record this is possible — they know it now. Scherzer is really good.

The lone Brewer hit was a broken-bat muscle job over the outstretched glove of second baseman Anthony Rendon. A few innings later Scherzer issued a walk. It was okay. His 16 strikeouts and nine shutout innings overshadowed it. Great as he was, the start was an outlier, of course. Nobody strikes out 16 guys against one walk and one hit every time out. But Max Scherzer is, as we know, quite good, and this start was emblematic of his season.

Against the Brewers, Scherzer threw all four of his pitches for strikes more than 60 percent of the time. He got swings and misses on each of them, including 12 on his fastball, nine on his slider, four on a curveball he threw only 16 times (according to MLB Gameday’s data, at least), and two on his changeup. When a pitcher can throw as hard as Scherzer and throw three other good pitches, well gosh. That’s about the definition of an ace.

Most importantly, that kind of pitch mix allows him to get both right-handers and left-handers out. Against right-handers Scherzer, throws fastballs and sliders with the occasional changeup when he gets ahead in the count. Against left-handers he abandons the slider and becomes a fastball, changeup, curveball pitcher. He also throws a cut fastball (rarely) against lefties but never against righties. Sunday, Scherzer struck out 12 right-handed batters. Those came on six sliders, three curveballs, and three fastballs. He also struck out four left-handed batters on two fastballs and two changeups. It’s a varied enough repertoire of pitches that he effectively becomes two different pitchers against different-sided batters, Pat Venditte style, though with much better pitches than Venditte throws.

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Pitching is an enigmatic thing. There are so many aspects to it that it can be difficult to get them straight in one’s head. A thing we all know about it, though, is the faster you throw the better you are. This is what makes Nathan Eovaldi so fascinating and yet so curious. Eovaldi has the fastest average fastball velocity of any starting pitcher in baseball at 95.8 mph. He started against the Nationals on Wednesday and hit 99 mph with his fastball in the third inning. Dude throws hard. And yet, outside of that, he’s not really anything special as a pitcher. In total value Eovaldi is Wade Miley. Miley has an impressive beard, but to paraphrase a great person, an impressive beard does not an impressive season make. The most valuable pitcher in baseball so far is Corey Kluber at 3.0 WAR. Kluber’s average fastball is 93.5 mph, 2.3 mph slower than Eovaldi’s. So clearly fastball velocity isn’t everything.

But why not? The quicker a pitch, the shorter the batter’s reaction time, and we’re talking about removing hundredths of a second. A 95 mph fastball will reach home plate in 0.4 seconds so removing those small fractions of a second you’d think would be problematic for the hitter. And they are problematic. The thing is, they’re not the whole story.

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The A’s and Red Sox are both last-place teams so perhaps you weren’t riveted to your screen Friday night when the two met for the first of a three-game set in Boston. If not, you missed the major-league debut of a 29-year-old relief pitcher. Your life is undoubtedly sadder now. But have no fear because you’ve stumbled upon this here article which will fill you in on said 29-year-old relief pitcher. Settle in for some fun!

We’re not in the habit here at FanGraphs (or, really, anywhere else) of cataloguing the debuts of old relievers, but this one is odd enough to be special. Pat Venditte threw his first major-league pitch Friday night left-handed. It was to Brock Holt the first batter he faced. Then, after Holt grounded out to first base, he threw the first pitch to Hanley Ramirez, the second batter he faced, right-handed. That’s because Pat Venditte is a switch pitcher.

We can start off with this:

That’s the last switch-pitcher, Greg Harris. So, you know, this stuff isn’t easy. Unlike Harris, Venditte has been switch-pitching his whole life so he can actually throw it to the catcher with both arms! But actually, he’s even better than that.

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David Ortiz is hitting — that is, to the extent he has stood in the batters box with a bat and hit a pitched ball and run towards first base. He is hitting, that is, in that he is and has been a hitter in the technical sense of the term. He is not hitting in that he is not hitting. That is to say, he is not hitting in the David Ortiz sense, the sense where he crushes line drives and smacks majestic home runs. David Ortiz, it should be noted, is 39 years old. The implication is that David Ortiz is, like all of us, getting older — and also like all of us, but only relevant to him, his baseball skills are eroding. When a baseball player reaches Ortiz’s age, the end is coming fast; it’s just a question of when. Based on the way Ortiz’s first two months have gone, maybe that when is now.

It was only last season Ortiz hit .263/.355/.517. That’s a wRC+ of 135. Quite good! Ortiz spent this May hitting .214/.287/.337, however, and it’s not as thought he was much better in April either. His combined slash line this season is .224/.308/.379. With his age and skill set, that’s bound to engender talks of his retirement. Baseball death, often like real death I suppose, can arrive quickly. But Ortiz has had tough starts to seasons in the past and gone on to excellence. Some have postulated that, instead of age, the problem is mechanical issues with Ortiz’s swing that are the true culprit. It is possible Ortiz’s bad start is entirely age related and this is who he is now, i.e. someone whose time has gone. It’s also possible that his lousy production is entirely the fault of faulty swing mechanics. It’s also possible that it’s some combination of both.

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