The Mets are seven games under .500 three-plus years into the tenure of the current front office, so maybe it was inevitable that someone got fired. And with 252 runs scored, the offense is middle of the pack (ninth in the National League by runs per game). Hitting coach Dave Hudgens made an easy target for someone in the Mets’ organization. But was it the right move?

That’s a hard question to answer. But by focusing on the peripherals of the team, and perhaps even the career of Lucas Duda, who played all but a hundred or so of his plate appearances under the tutelage of Hudgens, maybe we can try to evaluate the move.

In some ways, focusing on results understates the problem. Yes, the Mets are middle of the pack in runs, but their underlying numbers are worse. Their weighted runs created — calculated by weighting each offensive event according to its impact on the game in the past — is 11% worse than league average and near the bottom of the National League. They walk more than any team in the big leagues, but with that walk rate has come a high strikeout rate (sixth-worst)… and none of the power that usually comes with taking pitches. The Mets have the second-worst slugging numbers in the National League.

Of course, the hitting coach can only work on the process, he can’t hit the ball. Research suggests that the major axis between hitting coaches is between those that preach patience and those that preach aggressiveness.

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The Rays may be in a new position when it comes to this year’s trade deadline. Since their playoff odds have dropped more than any other team’s since the beginning of the season and are now close to 5%, it’s at least hard to see them as buyers. Then again, they haven’t made a ton of in-season acquisitions in their more competitive past, and their team is built for 2015 as much as it was built for this year — it’s likely that their transition from buyers to sellers may come without many big moves.

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You’re a pitcher? You need a change-up.

That automatic response seems reasonable enough given the state of modern pitching analysis. You’ve probably heard it plenty of times about pitchers like Justin Masterson or Chris Archer. After all, the change breaks away from opposite-handed hitters and helps pitchers neutralize platoon threats.

But you know what? There’s another pitch that breaks away from opposite-handed hitters: the two-seamer or the sinker, whatever you want to call it. And yet lefties love sinkers from righties. So why do two pitches with similar movement have such different results?

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Sometimes, you can just do everything right and the results aren’t coming,” Tigers outfielder Austin Jackson said before a late-May game against the Athletics. And if you look at what Jackson is doing at the plate, he’s right.

Big changes in parts of his process all seem positive, but the results aren’t quite there yet. Could good times be around the corner?

The most stark change Jackson is demonstrating comes when we look at the numbers that evaluate his swing decisions. At FanGraphs, we track how often a player reaches at pitches outside the zone (O-Swing%) and inside the zone (Z-Swing%). Jackson has incrementally improved this skill with every year in the bigs, but this year he has taken a large step forward. His contact rate has enjoyed it:

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“You should go look at the research again and see what the charts say,” Chris Young, the Seattle Mariners pitcher, emphatically told me one afternoon this season. We were talking about high fastballs and he didn’t agree with something I’d said.

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Trevor Plouffe had a good June 2012 — he hit .327/.391/.735 with 11 home runs — and announced himself to the baseball world in his third season. Unfortunately for him, though, those were good results after a process that didn’t fit him best. It was the slump that came after (.226/.279/.381 with eight home runs) that taught the Minnesota Twins third baseman the tools he needed to become a better player.

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The Giants are fourth in the National League in runs, and they’ve got a new Big Bat in the middle of the lineup. Michael Morse didn’t have a great season last year, and he came to the Giants to rehabilitate his value on a one-year pillow contract. Now things are going well for team and player, and there’s something to his approach — his mentality about aggressiveness, his openness to adjustments, and his enjoyment of the game — that makes it all work. Especially with a wrist that’s finally healthy.

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