There’s a difference between watching the game at home and watching at the park, that much is obvious. Personally, I’m more analytical at home, where I have the tools to identify pitch type and location with some precision, for example. At the field, I can only tell velocity and maybe spot the curveballs, so I get an adult soda, a good companion, and I talk and wait.

What am I waiting for? “People go to the game to see us put the ball in play, throw the ball away, and fall down,” Giants starter Jeff Samardzija told me the other day. “They want to see people doing things,” said Indians slugger Jay Bruce. I couldn’t disagree. The problem, if this is true, is that baseball is trending in the opposite direction. There are fewer balls in play now than at any other point in the history of the sport. There’s less of people doing things, to use Bruce’s words.

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While writing about Miguel Sano last week, I connected two thoughts that had laid dormant next to each other for a while.

Those thoughts, as follows:

1. It’s easier to lift and drive balls that appear in certain parts of the zone; and
2. How pitchers approach batters in terms of location is part of an endless loop of adjustments that makes judging a batter’s true talent difficult.

That confluence of ideas led to an innocuous enough question: could we adjust exit velocity for pitch location?

The answer is yes, of course we can. The next question, however, was much more interesting: what the heck does this measure?

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If you’ve watched the Reds recently, you’ve probably noticed that they can score some runs. They’re among the top five or six in the National League no matter which offensive metric you choose for your sorting, and it’s based around a core that may only lose Zack Cozart next year. For this team, then, the future is dependent on pitching — and finding an ace among the many different arms they’ve acquired over the years. Is it possible they have that ace in Luis Castillo?

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We’re at a point in the season when you can reasonably split the data into two halves. In terms of reliability for batted-ball metrics, 50 balls in play is a good sample, and the majority of regular position players have produced that many since the first of July, more or less. If you look at exit velocity in two halves, Miguel Sano’s name jumps off the list. In a bad way. But why?

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Joey Votto hasn’t made a West Coast swing recently so we don’t have original words to annotate here, but he did say some interesting things to Zach Buchanan at The Cincinnati Enquirer this week, interesting particularly because he said that “This has been documented, so this is not anecdotal here,” and that sort of statement is like catnip around here. Let’s provide the documentation.

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Yonder Alonso is now a Mariner, and for a player that just added a ton of fly balls to his repertoire (and the power that comes with it), hopefully that change of scenery will be a salve. Because Alonso has lost those fly balls momentarily. He thinks he knows why.

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The man with a 96 mph fastball and devastating changeup looks more himself these days. Danny Salazar is back up with the Indians, dealing, and was even name-checked by his General Manager as a deadline acquisition that should make their rotation hum this postseason. It could just be two good starts, but his pitching mix is radically changed. And though that change looks drastic, the driver of change might actually be more subtle.

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