The Mets’ quick slide from a National League championship in 2015 to 90 losses this season had to claim a victim. Manager Terry Collins appears to be one of them: according to reports, he’s unlikely to return next year. Now, pitching coach Dan Warthen is a candidate to join him on the chopping block in New York.

It makes sense to some degree. The Mets’ fate over the past few years has been tied closely to the quality of the pitching staff. Once a clear strength of the club, that staff represented a weakness for this year’s team. But much of that weakness was a product of injury, and injuries hit every team at a seemingly random pace. Is Warthen a scapegoat here, or is he somehow directly responsible for the current situation?

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You have to look past the raw runs-allowed numbers. If you do, though, you’ll quickly realize that a large part of the Rockies’ success this year has been their bullpen. Second in the National League in Wins Above Replacement, second in the entire league in Win Probability Added, third in Shutdowns, third from the bottom in Meltdowns, and first overall in Clutch: this is a strong unit. Talk to a some of Colorado’s relievers about what they’ve discovered this year and a trend emerges. There’s a bit of a secret, maybe, to building a good bullpen when you’re up a mile high.

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Jon Lester pitches tonight against the Cardinals in St. Louis, and how he performs in that start may have some impact on his postseason rotation spot. The 33-year-old lefty is in the middle of his worst season by most metrics, and he’s had an ERA over 5.00 in the second half, so it’s only gotten worse. There are plenty of reasons to be worried about the pitches the Cubs starter is throwing right now. Even more worrisome might be the pitches he’s not throwing anymore, though.

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I was recently talking to J.D. Martinez about launch angle and exit velocity and the like. Besides helping me to update my language, he also told me he didn’t really track his performance by those measures. Same thing for some other metrics I mentioned. It’s clear Martinez has some substantive thoughts on hitting, though. It would be strange if he didn’t use any of the data available to him. So I asked him… what do you track? What numbers do you look at?

“I track my swings and misses in the zone,” he said. “I can deal with swing and miss out of the zone. If I’m swinging and missing in the zone, I don’t like that. That tells me something is wrong. It tells me that something is not right with my swing, I’m fouling balls off. If the ball’s in the strike zone, I should be able to hit it. There are certain situations, take a pitch, that’s fine. But when I swing and it’s a strike — especially on a fastball and I’m not hitting it — that’s not good.”

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We’ve written about a possible sea change in baseball over the last few years here, using phrases like “point of contact” and “attack angle” to better articulate the emergence of a Fly-Ball Revolution, itself another relatively new expression. Add those phrases to all the ones we’ve been compelled to learn for the benefit of Statcast alone — terms like “launch angle,” “exit velocity,” “spin rate,” etc. — and it’s obvious that our baseball dictionaries are getting an update on the fly.

Simply because we’re using a new lexicon, however, doesn’t mean we’re using it correctly — or, at the very least, that some of our assumptions couldn’t benefit from an update, as well.

With that in mind, I decided to examine some of the most notable and commonly used terms in this new language of hitting. With the help of the players themselves, perhaps we can better see what lies beneath each of them and attempt to reach something closer to a common understanding.

Fly-Ball Revolution

“I wish you wouldn’t call it the ‘fly-ball revolution,'” Daniel Murphy told me earlier in the year. “Coaches then think we’re talking about hitting the ball straight into the air. Call it the ‘high-line-drive revolution.'”

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There’s dizzying loop hidden within the effort to build better baseball players. Because every player possesses a different body, it makes sense not to be prescriptive with mechanics. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions in baseball.

But there are still some underlying truths. All things being equal, power is good. Velocity is good. And so on. If coaching is tailored too closely to a perceived type, it might prevent the player from developing the sort of power or velocity to transcend that type. It’s possible that this is what happened to Andrelton Simmons for a few years.

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Rarely do the graphs line up as nicely as they do for Twins shortstop Jorge Polanco, who changed his season — and maybe his baseball future — on a dime. Over a span of 310 plate appearances leading up to the end of July, he’d recorded a slash line of .213/.265/.305, a mark roughly 50% worse than average after adjusting for park and league. In the 170 plate appearances since then, however, he’s produced a .347/.409/.626 mark, 70% better than league average. There’s been some batted-ball fortune maybe, but that hardly accounts for the enormity of the improvement in the numbers.

While the change in outcome has been significant, the change in process has been relatively simple. Polanco has basically followed three steps to rethink his approach, allowing the former top prospect to regain his standing with the team.

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Eugenio Suarez can hit the sinker. He’s been able to do it his whole life. And, generally speaking, that means he shouldn’t be able to hit the four-seamer. Or, at least not hit it as well, I mean. That’s typically how it goes, one or the other. It has to do with swing paths and approaches, mostly.

But Suarez has pulled off a rare feat this year. He’s been hitting the four-seamer, too. And he’s improved his success against that pitch by improving something other than his swing.

With an .878 lifetime OPS against sinkers, Suarez ranks in the top quartile among the more than 600 players who’ve seen 500-plus sinkers in the PITCHf/x era. His .797 OPS against four-seamers makes him only average against that pitch, though.

Again, that’s not uncommon. Peruse the top-40 hitters against both the four-seamer and the sinker, and only seven names appear on both lists. You might have heard of Kris Bryant, Miguel Cabrera, Matt Kemp, Paul Goldschmidt, Aaron Judge, Mike Trout, and Joey Votto. They’re pretty good.

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