By now, most baseball fans have probably heard about Kenley Jansen’s intentional balk. If you haven’t, let me catch you up to speed.

The rarity occurred on Friday night. It was the top of the ninth inning. The Dodgers held a 5-3 lead over the Cubs, and Jansen was on the mound to close out the victory. The inning started nicely, as Jansen struck out Carlos Gonzalez, but the Cubs did not go down cleanly. Thanks to an error from first baseman Matt Beaty, Jason Heyward reached second base. David Bote then struck out, leaving Victor Caratini as the only roadblock between Jansen and his 20th save.

The oddity commenced when Jansen yelled, “I’m going to balk,” following the strikeout of Bote. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the season, the San Francisco Giants were expected to be bad, and the Milwaukee Brewers were expected to compete for a playoff spot. So far this year, the Giants are 30-39 with a -82 run differential, last in the NL West. The Brewers are 40-31 and first in the NL Central. Both teams have been more or less what we thought they were. With that in mind, you probably didn’t have much reason to watch Friday night’s Brewers-Giants clash. If you did watch it, however, you caught a singularly bizarre series of plays that highlighted the absurdity and joy of baseball.

In the bottom of the seventh with one runner aboard, the Brewers called on Alex Claudio to keep the Giants off the board. Down 3-2, Milwaukee couldn’t afford to let the Giants pad their lead any further, and the lineup set up perfectly for Claudio, a side-arming lefty with extreme career platoon splits. With Kevin Pillar standing on first, the Giants had four lefties in a row due up, and Claudio is on the Brewers more or less solely to get lefties out.

With Alex Claudio on the mound, there’s a certain minimum amount of weirdness involved in every pitch. His pre-pitch routine is hypnotizing — a few torso-and-arm shakes, an uncontrollable toe tap, and finally a corkscrewing, impossibly angled sidearm release. He looks like a kid impatiently sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room, right up until he explodes into a tremendously athletic delivery. Here, watch him throw an 84-mph sinker past Steven Duggar for the first out:

As much fun as it is to watch Claudio pitch, it would be hard to call this inning fun if he did his job and set down the three lefties in order. The Duggar at-bat made it look like that was a possibility. Even if 84-mph sinkers that strike out major league batters are fun, there’s a limit to how much fun an inning can be to watch if nothing happens. Fortunately, things were about to get weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Gallo is a unique hitter having an outstanding season. Though temporarily sidelined with an oblique injury, he’s slashing .276/.421/.653, with 17 home runs in 214 plate appearances and a 170 wRC+. And when he’s not bopping, he’s usually fanning or walking. The 25-year-old Texas Rangers slugger has the second-highest walk rate, and the second-highest strikeout rate, among qualified major league batters. The antithesis of a singles hitter, Gallo is all about Three True Outcomes.

Gallo sat down for an in-depth discussion of the art and science of hitting earlier this week.

———

David Laurila: Straightforward question to start: What is your hitting approach?

Joey Gallo: “I feel that I have a pretty in-depth thought process at the plate. I always have an approach. I think a lot of people assume I just go up there kind of ‘beer-league-softball,’ and try to crush everything I see. But I have a plan of what I want to do against a certain guy; the pitches I want to look for; who is behind the plate, umpire-wise; who is calling the pitches, catcher-wise; what the environment is; what the situation is. There’s a lot that goes into hitting. It’s not just me trying to put the ball into the seats.”

Laurila: Nuance aside, are you generally hunting fastballs middle, and adjusting from there?

Gallo: “I don’t want to give away exactly what I’m thinking at the plate. Obviously, you’re taught to look fastball and adjust to off-speed, but there are situations where you change that approach and look for different stuff. It changes at-bat to at-bat. Sometimes you’re looking off-speed. Sometimes you’re looking for a certain location. You’re not always just looking fastball, because the guys are so good in this league that you can’t always have exactly the same approach.”

Laurila: Have you made changes this year with either your approach or your mechanics?

Gallo: “I’m trying to stay through the ball a lot more now. That’s something we’ve worked on: I try to stay as short and compact as I can. One thing we talked about when Luis Ortiz was hired [as hitting coach] was that I don’t need to generate any more power. All I have to do is touch the ball; all I have to do is put the barrel to the ball. So we worked on simplifying my swing, throughout the offseason and in spring training. I had too much movement for a big guy. Now I’m just thinking about getting my foot down and putting the barrel to the ball.”

Laurila: Is there any compromise with the shortening up? All hitters have their timing mechanisms. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Brendan has previously written at Baseball Prospectus, The Athletic, and Lookout Landing. He’ll be contributing to FanGraphs a few times a week, and we’re excited to welcome him.

Edwin Jackson is not pitching well. He’s running an 11.90 ERA, with a FIP north of eight and a DRA above 12. Toronto, deep into their rebuild, has no long-term attachment to Jackson, who at 35 years old was never going to be more than a placeholder. Despite everything, Jackson is still scheduled to start today against the Orioles. When asked why, Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo quipped “we don’t have anybody else.”

Obviously, that’s not the nicest thing a manager has ever said about his player. It’s more resemblant of Leo Durocher lamenting that his “center fielder can’t catch a f–king ball” than the polished schtick contemporary skippers feed to the local media. It does, however, convey how ineffectively Jackson has pitched in Toronto this year.

The famously nomadic right-hander is on his 14th big-league team. Rachael McDaniel covered some of the more romantic parts of that journey after his first start, a perfectly cromulent five-inning, three-run outing. Since then though, the wheels have fallen off:

Clearly, his opponents have been strong; few pitchers would get through that gauntlet without fluffing up their ERA at least a little bit. One of those starts was in Coors. But even accounting for a small sample size and tough competition, Jackson’s numbers are ghastly. If anything, the stats at the top of the page undersell just how freely hitters are teeing off. Collectively, they’re batting a Bondsian .383/.442/.787. Opponents are hitting .394 on balls in play, which is amazing because they’re not exactly limiting their hard contact to singles and doubles. Among pitchers who have thrown more than 15 innings, Jackson’s 3.66 HR/9 ratio is the second worst in the league.

What makes his collapse so spectacular is not the raw numbers, but the baseline it stems from. Jackson pitched just fine last season: his 3.33 ERA looks a bit rosy relative to his peripherals, but a 4.65 FIP across 92 innings isn’t nothing, particularly for a guy Oakland signed off the scrap heap.

At a glance, not much looks different this year. He’s still averaging a little more than 93 mph on his fastball, as he has for the last two seasons. He’s neither added nor subtracted a pitch, and his mix looks just about the same as it did in 2018. He’s still generating the same number of groundballs as ever.

But baseball is a hard game and there’s a very fine line between adequacy and the abyss. While there could be an infinite number of factors plaguing Jackson this season, two small ones stand out.

The first is velocity. While Jackson is throwing his heater just as hard as in years past, he’s actually lost some juice on his secondary pitches:

These aren’t seismic changes in velocity, the kind of drops that would suggest he’s pitching through an injury. But every tick on the radar gun is crucial; all else being equal, less velocity means less sharpness. It’s easier now for hitters to foul off a tough slider, lay off an average changeup, and thwack a bad curve than it was last season. Not surprisingly, batters are swinging and missing at his primary secondaries less often and hitting them harder when they do connect:

It’s not clear whether Jackson has lost arm strength or if he’s doing any of this consciously. Perhaps he’s trying to take something off the ball, or is otherwise experimenting with grips. Regardless, what he’s done thus far hasn’t worked.

The second issue concerns Jackson’s fastballs, which are getting battered as well. His cutter, a late-career addition and his go-to pitch last year, has been hit even harder than the slider or change. Even worse, the sinker that he’s relied on for so long is increasingly a tough pitch to succeed with in the modern game. Batters throughout the league are better at driving balls low in the strike zone than ever before, and this year Jackson’s sinker has both mediocre velocity and less sink than normal. Not surprisingly, batters are torching it: He’s thrown 50 of them, and hitters are hitting .556 with three homers.

Both of those factors are exacerbated by a few things beyond Jackson’s control. He’s no longer pitching in Oakland’s spacious Coliseum, with one of the game’s finest defenses at his back. Four of his five starts this year have been in launching pads, and the Jays are still working out the kinks in the field. Moreover, the rabbit ball seems particularly unkind to guys like Jackson, dinger-prone hurlers without an out-pitch to miss bats with.

You’d have to search hard to find a silver lining in all of this. Watch Jackson’s outings, and there’s no hint that he’s about to turn a corner. Statcast only provides further indignities, revealing that he’s in the very bottom percentiles in both average exit velocity and the percentage of balls that opponents hit hard.

Still, there’s something morbidly compelling about watching someone at the very end of his career. A veteran like Jackson has wowed us before: He’s pitched in All-Star games and the World Series, thrown a no-hitter, and toiled seemingly everywhere. Watching such a durable player fade away is a reminder of our own waning skills.

There’s more to it than that though. One of the decade’s most gut-wrenching moments was watching Ramon Ortiz, a baseball lifer if there ever was one, openly sob after injuring his elbow, seemingly certain that he was leaving a major league mound for the last time. Ortiz was easy to empathize with because his reaction gave such visceral proof to what we all suspect: that big league baseball is not an easy thing to let go of. Knowing that, it’s captivating to watch players claw for their place in the game. As fans, we want the players to care. When Jackson slaps his glove in frustration, or looks bewildered as yet another homer sails into the seats, it’s clear he does.

So long as that last point holds true, there’s no glory in rooting for carnage today; I certainly hope that this isn’t the end of Jackson’s line. If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope, his career demonstrates the folly in declaring that someone is washed up. Jackson sure seemed cooked two years into his tenure with the Cubs — all the way back in 2014 — but a move to the bullpen sparked a return to form. Just last year, he appeared lost to minor league obscurity before reviving his career in Oakland. A start against the Orioles could be just the tonic he needs to get back on track.

But whether Jackson has one start left or 100, everyone’s time is fleeting. Enjoy baseball’s vagabond while you still can.

It’s not a secret that baseball at every level is being changed by the information gleaned from advanced tech like TrackMan, StatCast, and about a dozen other platforms. There are examples of changes in swing plane, pitch grips, sequencing, and location from every team in the big leagues derived purely from this data. It’s also generally known that this progressive approach has reached into the minor leagues for many teams and is also spreading to amateur baseball. Because the pitching end of this march began early (PITCHf/x came about nearly a decade before we heard the term exit velo), progressive hitting knowledge has lagged years behind pitching, and now the fact that colleges haven’t fully embraced it is affecting the draft and what kind of talent gets to campus.

Eric and I have spoken with numerous scouts in recent weeks about a topic that came up innocently in our draft prep but that, when we dug deeper, appears to be indicative of a larger trend in the game. There are an unusual amount of high school position player prospects who are signable in the $250,000 to $500,000 bonus range. One crosschecker said his region normally has at most one prospect per year of this sort, and this year there are at least seven. Every other regional or national scout we’ve asked has confirmed that they’ve noticed the same thing, but none had a ready-made explanation for why it is happening. We put together a hypothesis, and got universal agreement that we were onto something.

Colleges Coach Hitters for College
Many, if not most, top collegiate hitting prospects need a substantive swing change right after they’re drafted to match what’s going on in pro ball. Last year South Alabama’s Travis Swaggerty (reduce effort/movement) and Wichita State’s Alec Bohm (extend arms/increase loft), our fourth and fifth prospects in the draft, most needed to modernize their swings. This year our 12th and 26th prospects, Texas Tech’s Josh Jung (more pull/lift/loft) and Missouri’s Kameron Misner (eliminate toe tap/improve timing), are the two prospects in greatest need of a swing change. It’s not every player, and some prospects I haven’t mentioned need less obvious adjustments, but this is also choosing from a group of the most elite tools and performances in the country.

You may ask why collegiate hitting coaches aren’t addressing these issues. A more fully actualized and pro version of these hitters would surely help their college team in the short term, right? Not necessarily. BABIPs are much higher in college because of the lower skill level, particularly on defense. It’s common for some top programs (especially on the west coast) to have middle-of-the-order batters bunt early in games, and since those bunts result in errors much more often in college, it’s a better strategic play than it is in the majors. An opposite field, line drive, and grounders approach also results in more hits than it would in pro ball while a groundball, at any level of baseball, is more likely to result in a hit than a fly ball. Read the rest of this entry »

ESPN’s Jeff Passan was first with the full details about Eastern Florida State College RHP Carter Stewart’s (our 56th-ranked prospect for next month’s 2019 draft) shocking signing with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Japan’s Pacific League. Stewart will receive $7 million over the next six years, enabling him to qualify for MLB free agency at age 25 (through the new tiered posting process) when the deal ends, provided he plays in the Pacific League in parts of all six years.

There are a number of impactful outcomes from this deal, so I’ll take them one at a time:

1. This is surely more money than Stewart could’ve gotten through the draft and MLB path over the next six years.

Passan and J.J. Cooper took a stab at projecting Stewart’s earnings over the next six seasons in America, and I’ve come to the same conclusion. Charitably projecting roughly $2 million in a draft bonus, something like $20,000 to $30,000 in total minor league salaries (depending on how quickly he gets to the big leagues), and something between $750,000 and $1.8 million in the big leagues (again, depending on when he gets there and if he stays). The rosiest versions of those numbers doesn’t even get Stewart to $4 million, which is still about $1 million less than the slot value ($4.98 million) at the pick where he didn’t sign with the Braves last year, roughly what he could’ve expected without the dispute over his wrist.

2. This sets up an alternative path for draft prospects to gain negotiating leverage, likely starting with next month’s draft.

Going overseas for six years and then coming back to a free agent payday is only a move that an elite prospect that’s solely focused on baseball and somewhat culturally open-minded would approach, so this won’t be a negotiating tactic for the whole draft. For prep or first-year junior college prospects projected for the top two rounds, however, this could be a real bargaining tactic, even if it’s never fully explored by the player. Read the rest of this entry »

Near the end of 2017, reports surfaced of a massive deal that would see Disney buy more than $50 billion in FOX assets, including 22 regional sports networks that broadcast the games of about half of the 30 major league baseball franchises. After a bidding war between Comcast and Disney saw the latter win out, moves needed to be made to satisfy antitrust concerns. Given Disney’s already powerful place in the market with its ESPN family of channels, one of those moves included the sale of those regional sports networks. The first domino fell in March when the Yankees agreed to buy back the YES Network at a total valuation of around $3.5 billion dollars. Now, the remaining dominoes appear to have fallen, with the Wall Street Journal first reporting that Sinclair Broadcasting Group has agreed to buy the remaining 21 networks, valued at $10.6 billion.

The networks included in the deal are as follows:

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night in Arizona, CC Sabathia claimed a little slice of baseball history. With his strikeout of the Diamondbacks’ John Ryan Murphy, the 38-year-old Yankee became just the 17th pitcher to reach 3,000 for his career, the first since John Smoltz on April 22, 2008, and just the third southpaw ever, after Steve Carlton and Randy Johnson. It’s a milestone worthy of celebration, a testament to longevity, dominance, and tenacity. It’s also inextricably a product of this high-strikeout era, a point worth considering when placing Sabathia’s accomplishment in context.

But first, to savor the moment. Sabathia, who entered the night three strikeouts short of 3,000, collected all three in the second inning, first freezing David Peralta looking at a sinker, then whiffing Christian Walker on a high cutter. After yielding a solo homer to Wilmer Flores and an infield single to Nick Ahmed — the latter on an 0-2 changeup well outside the strike zone — he induced Murphy (who caught Sabathia’s 2,500th strikeout in 2015) to chase an 84.2 mph changeup:

Alas, while Diamondbacks starter Zack Greinke — himself a potential 3,000 strikeout club member, more on which below — held the banged-up Yankee lineup to a single run over 7.2 innings, Flores also added a fourth-inning RBI double off Sabathia. The big lefty departed on the short end of a 2-1 score, and the Yankees ultimately lost, 3-1, putting a mild damper on the celebration.

Of the major traditional milestones among pitchers and hitters, 3,000 strikeouts is the least common. Thirty-two players have notched at least 3,000 hits, and 27 have swatted 500 home runs. On the pitching side, 24 pitchers have collected 300 wins. Nearly all of the players who have reached any of those round numbers have been elected to the Hall of Fame, with the exceptions generally related to performance-enhancing drugs and other bad behavior. Among the members of the 3,000 strikeout club who have preceded Sabathia, only Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling remain outside, for reasons besides on-field performance. This could very well be the big man’s ticket to Cooperstown. Read the rest of this entry »

The summer of 1962 was one of political turmoil. Within the United States, the civil rights movement continued to fight for an end to racial segregation, and outside the United States, the globe-consuming tension of the Cold War continued to intensify. The Vietnam War continued to escalate, with Robert F. Kennedy declaring in February that the United States would not leave Vietnam until Communism was defeated. The Space Race proceeded apace, with both Americans and Russians being launched into orbit. And the brewing conflict between President Kennedy’s administration and the still-new Castro regime in Cuba was reaching a fever pitch. In February, President Kennedy extended the embargo on trade with Cuba to include almost all exports; in March, the participants in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year were put on trial by the Cuban government, and in May were sentenced to 30 years of imprisonment. Both the United States and the USSR continued to test new kinds of nuclear warheads. The Cuban Missile Crisis loomed on the horizon; by midsummer, it was already clear that the pressure was about ready to boil over.

It was perhaps inevitable, then, that this conflict found its way into the relatively uneventful world of American professional baseball, where the most interesting thing going on was the Mets’ 120-loss inaugural season. Baseball in the United States, after all, is embedded in the national mythology, from the legends surrounding the sport’s invention to its status as America’s Pastime. The cultural significance of baseball was not lost to either side of the Cold War Conflict. New York Mirror columnist Dan Parker wrote that he was sure the world would be a better place “[i]f more ambassadors used sports instead of double talk as their medium of expression,” and that he’d “like to see the new envoy to Moscow introduce himself in the Kremlin by fetching Uncle Joe Stalin a resounding whack on the noggin with one of Joe Dimaggio’s castoff bats.”

Soviet paper of record Izvestia, meanwhile, in an attempt to undermine baseball’s status as a pillar of American values, claimed baseball was actually a descendant of the old Russian game lapta. In Cuba, where baseball had been the country’s most popular sport for almost a century, the game had developed yet another ideological purpose as a nationalist symbol, with the excellence of Cuban baseball demonstrating the values and victory of the revolution. 

In August of 1962, the ideological tensions existing in baseball manifested themselves in the form of one unlikely person: a 17-year-old boy in a 16-foot boat.

***

On August 5th, 1962, the Associated Press ran a curious news item. The headline read “Cuban Baseball Player Branded as Traitor,” and opened with this paragraph:

A Cuban baseball player who signed a U.S. major league contract but kept it a secret so he could disqualify his nation’s entry in the Central American Games has been denounced as a traitor, Havana Radio said yesterday.

The story identified the player as one Manuel Enrique Ameroso Hernandez. There was no other information about him, no age or identifying characteristics. All that was known was what he had done, and what he had planned to do: He had signed a contract with a major league team, which made him a professional baseball player, and had intended to identify himself as such and claim political asylum in Jamaica, where the Central American Games were being held. The Cuban team, then, having had a professional play for their team, would be disqualified from the competition.

Given baseball’s cultural importance to Cuba and the revolution, this would have been a stunning act of sabotage if it had been successfully carried out. But Hernandez’s reserved, apathetic demeanor leading up to the competition drew suspicion, and he eventually admitted his plan to his teammates. His actions were condemned in the strongest possible terms. Teammates were quoted as saying that they “would prefer death a thousand times before selling ourselves for the bloody dollars of the Yankee monopolies,” and the team issued a statement condemning “the traitorous and miserable attitude of Ameroso Hernandez for having signed as a professional and keeping this secret for the ruinous and cowardly object [of giving] our enemies the opportunity to disqualify our invincible team.” There was no clarification of what was to happen to Hernandez, nor of which major league team he had signed with in the first place.

In the coming days, as the story spread in the American media, more information came out about Hernandez. There was, first, the fact of his talent: Raul Castro had only recently sung Hernandez’s praises on the national stage as Cuban baseball’s finest player, and assessed his annual value at $60,000. (The highest salary in the major leagues in 1962 was $90,000, earned by both Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.) This revelation was followed by one that made the former all the more surprising: Hernandez was only 17 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

Through their first 701 plate appearances of the 2019 season, the Seattle Mariners hit 38 home runs and posted a wRC+ of 145. Both marks were the best in the game by a fair margin, though you probably knew or could have guessed that already, because Jay Jaffe wrote about the team’s strong offensive start on this site last week. What you might not know is that if you ask Seattle’s hitters about the source of their success, they’ll tell you — after getting through the usual platitudes of “just playing as a team” and “taking it one game at a time” — that this year’s daily hitters’ meetings, led by first-year hitting coach Tim Laker, have been good. Really good.

“Those hitter meetings,” says fellow first-year Mariner Tom Murphy, “have been fantastic. It’s been one of the things that’s stood out to me this year. From the analytic staff to the hitting staff to the players speaking out about what they’re seeing, it’s been a triple-headed effort. Not only are we getting the statistics on what guys are throwing, their locations and pitch tunnels and stuff, we’re also getting real-world advice from players and hitting coaches together. That communication has been spot-on, and I really think it’s contributed to our success.”

Laker, 49, came up as a coach in the Diamondbacks’ system after spending parts of 11 seasons as a big-league catcher, mostly for Montreal. In Arizona, under the guidance of  instructors Craig Wallenbrock and Robert Van Scoyoc, he developed an approach to hitting and communication that focuses on finding the intersection between a hitter’s natural strengths and a pitcher’s natural weaknesses, then communicating an approach based on the center of that Venn diagram that’s simple enough for hitters to take to the plate without needing a cue-card.

“Pitchers have ranges, philosophy-wise, in which they throw their pitches,” Murphy says. “And our hitting team has put that into a simple system, which says, for example, that if a guy has low-ride [meaning a pitcher’s pitches do not deviate substantially up or down from their apparent path upon release] then he’s a ‘zero-ride’ and if he’s high, you’ll go up to three. Nice and easy. And then from there you can visualize the center of the strike zone, and know that a fastball right down the middle that’s a three-ride would play up at the top of the zone even if visually it starts out right in the middle. And if a guy has a lot of sink, anything that starts down in the zone is not going to be a strike, regardless of whether my eyes are telling me it’s a strike out of his hand. You have to find ways to prepare in advance for the tricks your eyes are going to play on you.”

Put that way, the system sounds almost too simple — bucketing continuous data into three or four tranches is not, after all, rocket science. But in the psychological world of hitting, simplicity is a virtue in its own right, and finding ways to communicate complicated data simply and actionably is where teams are currently looking to find any edge they can. In the Mariners’ case, the particular challenge they’re working to tackle this year is finding ways to get their players attacking each night’s particular starting pitcher while not getting too far out of their own comfort zone. That’s a tall order for hitters who have often been raised spend their days thinking of ways to keep their approaches consistent, not tailor them to each night’s starter. But Laker things he’s found an approach that works: translating the message into a specific external cue or physical action.

“For example,” says Murphy, “if we’re facing a big sinker-ball guy, then maybe a good external cue for most guys is to try to hit a popup or a ball way up in the air, so we get underneath that ball path and our swing plane plays better to that guy. Whereas against a guy with a lot of rise on his fastball, like a Verlander, we’re going to try to hit a lot of line drives or almost ground balls to manipulate ourselves without thinking too mechanically to get the desired bat path to that ball. That’s what we do well as players, is move physically, and Laker has been great about taking the statistics and giving us a plan to take into the game that’s more externally focused; that’s still us, but tailored to the pitcher.”

“I think what we’re looking for is guys that have swings that can cover more than one spot,” Laker told me. “I think our guys are good enough that if we adjust the slices they’re swinging in just a little bit on a monthly basis, that they’re good enough to hit in different zones and not just get pigeonholed into one specific spot where they are kind of at the mercy of the pitcher, just hoping that he’s going to make a mistake in the one spot that they’re looking at.”

Perhaps to Laker’s surprise, that approach has found resonance even with Seattle’s veterans, like Jay Bruce. “I think you have to try and walk the line a little bit,” he told me. “Because at the end of the day, they have to throw the ball over the plate. They’re going to miss, and they’re going to make mistakes. And on the one hand if you go chasing what they do you get yourself in trouble, but also I think being cognizant of their approach and their plan and what makes them have success against you is important, too. Finding that balance has been good this year.”

For a relatively young team, hearing that message from all angles — coaches, analytics staff, and veterans — is critical. “That’s when those meetings become really powerful,” says Laker, “When our younger guys can listen to Jay or Edwin, guys who’ve faced other starters a number of times, and hear them say, ‘Here’s what he’s done to me, here’s what his pitch looks like to me, here’s how it moves, here’s what he’s trying to do.’ I think that carries a lot of weight. I think the more we can get hitters involved in what we’re trying to do, and have a collaboration in an open forum, that’s good.”

The Mariners probably aren’t going to have the best offense in baseball all year long. They might not even have the best offense in baseball all April long. But if you’re chalking up their early-season numbers to mere good luck, or running into a stretch of pitching that’s performing below its level, I’m not sure you’re correct. Pitching has under-performed against Seattle for much of this young season (the just-concluded Astros series perhaps excepted) because the Mariners have been highly intentional about finding ways to make it so, and about communicating with their players in such a way that tailoring an approach to each night’s pitcher doesn’t feel like telling hitters to do things they’re not used to. So far in 2019, it may just be working.