There was a time, not very long ago, when Andrelton Simmons mesmerized us on a regular basis. You couldn’t go more than a week without some preposterous defensive play flooding into your Twitter timelines attached to phrases like “whoa,” “wut,” and “OMG.” Yet over the last year or so, that interest in Simmons’ plays has died down.

One reason might be MLB’s stringent social media policing that has deterred sharing GIFs and Vines of baseball-related content, but it’s not like those rules have shut down our collective love fest with Giancarlo Stanton home runs or Noah Syndergaard fastballs. Perhaps there is something about good defense that requires a visual aid in a way that other things don’t, but there’s probably more to it than that.

To understand this troubling decrease in Simmons-related online joy, we first have to ask ourselves if Simmons is still the elite defender he was at the peak of his internet glory. If he is, we must then wrestle with the reasons why he no longer seems to impress us to the same degree.

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I cannot venture to say that Alex Rodriguez is a complicated individual any more than any other person, but I can fairly easily say that Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is full of complications. He’s an all-time great who has twice signed two of the most expensive contracts in baseball history, been suspended for PED use, and is currently being shoved out of the organization he has played for the past 13 seasons despite putting up colossal numbers and leading the team to a World Series championship during the 2009 season. This post is not meant to analyze Rodriguez’s career, celebrate his accomplishments or discuss his flaws. The question here is should Alex Rodriguez retire, and like most Rodriguez-related issues, it is complicated.
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Exit velocity! We love it! Sorry for shouting. But we do! We love to sort the leaderboards, and we love to write articles using the information gleaned from those leaderboards. This is one right here! Beat writers love to tweet the exit velocity when a player they cover dongs a dinger, and even the folks who don’t always love the application of exit velocity in the public sphere agree that its tracking can only mean positive things for the future of our understanding of the game. Exit velocity: it’s for the people. Can you believe just a few years ago we didn’t have this stuff?

We have it now, and for as little as we have grasped about the subject, it’s intuitive that the higher the average exit velocity, the better. Hard-hit balls can go for home runs, and home runs are the best. In first place on this year’s average exit velocity leaderboard is Nelson Cruz. Good hitter. In second place is Giancarlo Stanton. Good hitter. Third place? Mark Trumbo. I’m on a word count, so I’ll stop here. You get the point. Good hitters having good seasons are hitting the ball hard, and that should surprise no one.

There’s a flip side to that leaderboard. Some bad hitters are having bad seasons and hitting the ball not-hard. The guy with the lowest average exit velocity and more than 200 balls in play is Billy Hamilton, who’s averaged just 83.3 miles per hour on his batted balls. Hamilton’s having a fine season, overall — he’s projected to finish the year right around +3.0 WAR thanks again to his elite defense and baserunning — but we’re now nearly 1,500 plate appearances into Hamilton’s career, and it’s beginning to look like the bat might wind up being more Alcides Escobar than the league-average production we all dreamed on when Hamilton broke into the league.

But that’s not going to stop me from writing about Hamilton. Because even though we might like to see what happens were he to hit the ball harder, there’s a lesson to be learned from when he hits it softly. Kudos to you if you already see where this is going.

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Dear reader, please allow this internet article to serve as the official announcement of the fourth annual FanGraphs Boston Meetup on Saber Seminar Eve. As the title makes clear, this year that day is Friday, August 12th. We’ll kick off around 7 pm, and the televisions will display the baseball match between the Boston Red Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks. We’ll talk about it, and baseball, and beer, and maybe how ridiculous it is that the other TVs in the bar are showing preseason football because who watches those?
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Earlier this week, the Cardinals called up a promising young arm in Alex Reyes, who’s already enjoyed some success out of St. Louis’ bullpen. Another promising young arm is set to debut for the Cardinals tomorrow, as 22-year-old Luke Weaver will get the start against Cubs. What should we expect from him?

One thing we know for certain is that Weaver was undeniably excellent in the minors this year. In 13 starts this year — most of them at Double-A — he pitched to a sparkling 1.30 ERA and 2.11 FIP. He struck out an impressive 28% of opposing batters, while walking fewer than 4%, which is equally impressive. It wasn’t the first time he tasted success either, as he pitched well last season in High-A, albeit with a more underwhelming 21% strikeout rate.
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When I click over to the leaderboards, I see that, right now, Jose Altuve is the major-league leader in wOBA. Which means that, by that measure, Altuve has been baseball’s best hitter, which is absolutely nuts. Not that we didn’t know Altuve was good, but he’s having a Mike Troutian season. Altuve is simultaneously breaking down pitchers and breaking down barriers, and it’s just so much more fun to have him leading the stat than some ordinary muscle-bound giant. It makes us second-guess what’s possible. Lots of things are possible.

Like this. When I click over to the leaderboards, and then significantly drop the minimum number of plate appearances, I see that, right now, the major-league leader in wOBA is Sandy Leon. Unlike Altuve, Leon’s offensive season isn’t “qualified.” So we can’t take it close to so seriously. But you might not understand how ridiculous this is, and you might not understand how critical it’s been for a Red Sox club trying to hang in the race.

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Ben Heller was called up to the big leagues for the first time yesterday. He arrived as a member of the Yankees, having been acquired by New York from Cleveland at the trade deadline as part of the Andrew Miller deal. As luck would have it, the 25-year-old right-hander’s first MLB venue was Fenway Park.

His debut will come elsewhere — the Bombers left Boston without him appearing in the game — and when it does, you can expect to see heat. Heller throws hard. Baseball America rated his fastball tops in the Indians system, and opposing hitters have certainly taken notice. In 45 relief innings this season, Heller has allowed 24 hits and fanned 52 in 45 innings at the Double-A and Triple-A levels.

Heller talked about his game, and the excitement of putting on a big-league uniform for the first time, shortly before taking the field at Fenway. Read the rest of this entry »

In the second half of the double-header between the Twins and Astros today, Chris Devenski will take the mound for the Astros. He owns an 80 mph changeup and a 92 mph fastball, give or take some ticks, and that differential is the fourth-biggest one among starting pitchers since 2014. That fact alone should make his changeup a great one when it comes to whiffs.

We’ve known for a while that movement and velocity differential are important to a changeup, but seeing as how the relatively ineffective John Lamb possesses the league’s second-best differential — and because the changeup works, in no small part, because of its relationship with the fastball — it seems fair to wonder, as someone in my chat did today, if a changeup which features too great a velocity differential might also suffer from ineffectiveness. In theory, an 80 mph changeup might look the nothing like a fastball. And if that’s the case, how could it fool the batter?

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You might not know very much about Travis Jankowski, but he’s just about tied with Bryce Harper in WAR, in half the plate appearances. The bat has been fine, but the defense has been exceptional, and the work on the basepaths has been daring. Just Wednesday, Jankowski pulled off a successful steal of home. As a rule, players don’t really try to steal home. Jankowski has now done it twice. His teammates in San Diego have done it another two times.

That’s four successful steals of home. Here they all are, in one clip:

The last team to record even three steals of home in one season was the 2008 Giants. The last team to reach four was the 1999 Padres, who actually got to five. Jankowski already has two such steals to his name. Wil Myers has also done it, and so did Melvin Upton Jr., before he was dealt. You can see that the Padres have been willing to take some chances.

But really, it’s more than that. It’s not easy to notice, because the Padres as a club this year haven’t been easy to notice. They’re bad, and their own team officials acknowledged after the Drew Pomeranz trade that a return to contention is probably many seasons away. Yet, okay — every team in spring training says one of the goals is to get more aggressive on the basepaths. Typically, nothing comes of it. The Padres have been remarkably aggressive, and they’ve been even more remarkably effective. The Padres have been the best baserunning team in baseball, and it’s not even all that close.

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Without rehashing the baseball-is-dying trope, it should be noted that the television ratings for this year’s All-Star Game took a pretty steep dive. Over the past half-decade, the ratings had held pretty steady, which is actually a positive trend relative to the general decline in television viewership as a whole — as well as the lack of interest in the other major sports’ All-Star contests. While the All-Star game still managed to draw nearly 9 million viewers, that figure also represent a 20% drop from last year’s contest — and seems to indicate that the exhibition lacks some of the draw that the event possessed when major-league broadcasts were few and far between. 

In the grand scheme of baseball viewership, however, the All-Star game appears to represent an anomaly rather than a building trend. Because even as fewer people tuned into the midsummer class than almost ever before, local television ratings, which are up again over last season, indicate that more and more viewers are watching baseball on a regular basis.

Two years ago, the Royals came out of nowhere to make the World Series. Last year, that momentum carried over to viewers as Kansas City led MLB teams in local ratings. After winning the World Series last year, Kansas City is still watching a ton of baseball. Ratings-wise the two teams from Missouri boast the top two spots in baseball, per Forbes.

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