At 60-84, the Rockies are not merely way out of contention, but also mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. The team’s in full on rebuild mode these days, and simply put, there aren’t all that many exciting players on their roster. However, they’ve called up a couple of interesting hitters this September who could ultimately develop into useful contributors and help out the next competitive Rockies team: infielder Cristhian Adames and catcher Tom Murphy.

Cristhian Adames

Let’s start with 24-year-old Cristhian Adames, who’s a good bit closer to being ready for the big leagues than Murphy. Adames has hit a loud .391/.440/.435 in semi-regular playing time the last couple of weeks, and has played each of the past few days while filling in for the injured Jose Reyes. Over half of Adames’s balls in play have fallen for hits, which has certainly played no small role in his recent success. But even so, pushing .400 is a great way to make a positive impression.

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Over the last couple years, the battle for higher wages for minor league baseball players has been fought on several legal fronts. The highest profile challenge has come in the form of litigation claiming that the minor league pay scale — under which minor league players often earn as little as $3,000 to $7,500 per year — violates the nation’s minimum wage laws.

At the same time, however, a separate lawsuit filed last December attacked the problem from a different legal angle. In Miranda v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, four former minor league players asserted that Major League Baseball’s minor league pay practices violate the Sherman Antitrust Act. In particular, the players argued that MLB and its thirty teams have illegally conspired to fix minor league players’ salaries at below-market rates not only by agreeing to a uniform, league-wide salary scale for minor league players, but also by artificially reducing the size of the signing bonuses that entry-level players receive under MLB’s domestic and international signing bonus pool rules.

As I noted at the time the Miranda case was filed last year, the plaintiffs in the suit faced at least one major impediment in their attempt to challenge the minor league pay practices under the Sherman Act: baseball’s antitrust exemption. Indeed, soon after the case was filed, MLB filed a motion asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit in light of its antitrust immunity.

Given that precedent, it should come as little surprise that Judge Haywood Gilliam dismissed the Miranda suit on Monday, concluding that MLB was shielded from the plaintiffs’ claims by virtue of its antitrust exemption.

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While working on something Erasmo Ramirez said — that his slider was always in the zone anyway, so he should probably use it to steal strikes rather than for swinging strikes — it became obvious that breaking pitches are much less effective in the zone than out when it comes to swinging strikes. Curves, in particular, are much better outside the zone. You get about one third of the whiffs on a curve in the zone as you do outside of the zone.

Separately, I’m working on a piece for The Hardball Times Annual about command. In it, a few pitchers talk about the difficulty of commanding breaking pitches. “Nobody throws anything that’s truly straight,” is how Trevor Bauer put it.

While sorting the in and out of zone whiff rates, and thinking about command, it came to me that the two are related. Maybe that’s a duh, but a big part of quantifying command is the problem of breaking balls and changeups and their movement. A breaking ball in the zone may often be a hung breaking ball, which contributes to the lower whiff rates.

Let’s take a look at the pitchers that have the most disparate results on their non fastballs inside and outside the zone first, and then try to find a way to spot these pitchers by movement.

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Even if you’re not a Boston Red Sox fan, you’re probably familiar with the Xander Bogaerts story. Big-time top prospect. Shortstop who has power. Pretty good plate discipline. Did some nice things right after his debut. Got off to a strong start in his first full season. Then: the collapse. I don’t need to give you the numbers — just imagine really terrible numbers. You’re there! So went Bogaerts, prior to his 2015.

This, though, has been a year of far more consistency. And far more promise.

It’s also been a year of change. Of significant change. Of major super massive change. We talk about players making adjustments all the time, but seldom do players make adjustments as big as Bogaerts has. If you’ve been paying attention, this isn’t exactly anything new. Owen hit on some of this in June. A player like Bogaerts, on a team like the Red Sox, doesn’t make a big change without a bunch of people noticing. But it’s one thing to notice what’s happened. It’s another to understand how dramatic this is.

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In a very short while, the Rangers and the Astros will kick off a crucial four-game series, with the AL West up for grabs. There will be three more meetings between the teams after this series is complete, so any mistakes can be made up for, but this race is coming down to the wire. It’s currently the closest race of the divisions, and while the Rangers are already close at 1.5 games back, they were literally inches away from an even smaller deficit before the Astros rallied past the Angels on Sunday. The Astros know they can lose their position. The Rangers know it’s theirs for the taking.

In a lot of ways, this isn’t what people expected. Even just several weeks ago, by which point we’d come to believe in the Astros, the Rangers didn’t look like a threat. After the games on July 31, the Astros were up two games on the Angels, and seven games on the Rangers. The Rangers’ odds of winning the division were a hair below 2%. Now they’re a little above 22%, gaining about a game on the Astros a week. Since the beginning of August, the Rangers have gone 25-15, second-best in the AL. Since the same point, the Astros have gone 19-20, sandwiched between the Yankees and the Rays. What’s happened to cause the Astros to lose much of their advantage?

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The Nationals aren’t mathematically dead, and there are several reasons for why they’re so far behind the Mets, but if you want to say the Nationals’ season died one day, you could point to the game they lost to the Mets after leading 7-1. Here’s that win expectancy graph, and you can see that, for Washington, it topped out at 99.2%. That game was absolutely devastating. That game all but sealed the dueling narratives. It can also get worse.

Source: FanGraphs

Sunday, Astros, Angels. The lead was three, not six. It was a game between first and third place, not first and second. But the Angels’ win expectancy topped out at 99.7%. They had the Astros down to their last strike. The Angels find themselves now behind 4.5 games, not 2.5. And the rally itself was almost inconceivable, even independent of the context. This would’ve been a dramatic conclusion in a game between the Braves and an area college. Let’s watch the meat of the top of the ninth inning. Some of you already know everything that happened, but those who don’t really need to.

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At the end of May, David Ortiz was posting a .309 OBP with just six home runs. The idea of Big Papi joining the 500 home run club this season was a pipe dream. Around that time, we heard an idea that had circulated many times in seasons past: Ortiz was done, kaput, finished. He was too old, his bat was too slow, and this time — really — he’d fallen off the cliff. There were articles about what was wrong with him, and for good reason.

Then Ortiz fixed those problems. From June 1st until today, he has put up a .389 OBP with 28 homers, good for a wRC+ of 172 (meaning he’s been 72% better than the average offensive player in the league). He’s put up an uncannily similar batting line to the one he posted last year. Take a look:

2015 Ortiz is 2014 Ortiz in terms of performance (he’s pretty much 2013 Ortiz too, for that matter). The walk and strikeout rates are especially remarkable in their consistency. So how did he get here? We’ve heard about Big Papi having issues in the early stages of the season before; what did he fix this time around to be able to reach the 500 home run milestone during 2015?

First, let’s go over what was wrong. Matthew Kory explained the issues with Ortiz’ approach in an early-June article: Ortiz was hitting too many ground balls, and both his average grounder and fly ball was more weakly-hit than his career-norm. That’s an issue when you’re a slow power hitter who is shifted by defenses at one of the highest rates in the major leagues, because those weak grounders almost always turn into outs.

Ortiz also faced a disproportionate share of left-handed pitchers in the first two months of the season. His career splits for lefties vs. righties are pretty stark (he owns a career 110 wRC+ vs. lefties and a 159 career wRC+ vs. righties), so it’s understandable that he couldn’t find his usual level of production out of the gate. Hitting a lot of weak grounders and facing a ton of lefties when you’re a left-handed hitter is a recipe for a slump.

Then the end of May rolled around. Ortiz sat on the bench for two days, studying tape of himself and most likely hoping that a mental break might turn things around. It worked: the time off marked the turning point of his season. Quite simply, Ortiz started hitting more fly balls after his short break, and he started hitting everything harder.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been kicking around a few thoughts in my head, and so today, I’m going to try and turn them into a cohesive post. I can’t guarantee I’m going to succeed, given that I’m writing these sentences before I write the rest of them, but after pondering these in my head for a while, it’s probably time to put them down on virtual paper and get some feedback on the ideas presented.

The primary genesis of these thoughts are spurred by the fact that, with three weeks left in the season, the battle for the second AL Wild Card is being contested by the Twins and Rangers. Entering the year, our Playoff Odds gave the Twins a 4.6% chance of making the postseason (based on a 74-88 projected record), and the Rangers a 3.5% chance (with a 73-89 projected finish), and now it seems quite likely that one of the two is going to end up playing the Yankees in the Wild Card play-in game. The American League as a whole has been pretty weird this year, or if you take a different perspective, our preseason projections have performed poorly in forecasting AL team records this season.

Rangers fans — or a segment of their fanbase who use Twitter, anyway — have been particularly loud in their objections to our evaluation of their team, and understandably, 140 games of their team winning games at a .525 clip has reinforced their belief that our methodology of team evaluation is incorrect. Or that I personally have a bias against their team. Or some combination of the two.

From my perspective, though, the disconnect is mostly just a philosophical choice, and is the same choice that drives a lot of the disagreement around many of our less popular evaluations. Primarily, we evaluate players and teams by their inputs, not their outputs.

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Fans of Major League Baseball have long held an emotional investment in favorite players and teams, spending time and money on the sport and receiving widely varying emotional returns depending on results. If Fantex and Los Angeles Angels starter Andrew Heaney get their way, fans and investors will soon be able to invest in the future earnings of the Angels left-hander. Heaney and Fantex, a company that has previously struck similar deals with multiple NFL players, have agreed to a contract that will pay Heaney $3.34 million in exchange for “10 percent of all future earnings related to his brand, including player contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees,” according to Ken Rosenthal. A deal like this will attempt to provide pre-arbitration players like Heaney a form of insurance against future injury or a downgrade in performance without signing a team-friendly contract that keeps players from free agency. While this concept has been around for quite some time, in practice, these deals are still in their infancy and come with some drawbacks.

Almost two years ago, Fantex made news by announcing an agreement with star running back Arian Foster of the Houston Texans. The deal, similar to the one for Heaney, would have paid Foster $10 million in exchange for 20% of Foster’s future earnings. Before the parties could follow through on the deal, Foster was injured and the IPO never got off the ground. The deals with Fantex are subject to getting enough investors to pay for the initial guarantee to the players. For Heaney to get paid, enough investors must first meet the IPO amount, in this case $3.34 million.

In some ways, this model may look like a long-term version of daily fantasy games, where fans can put forth a relatively small sum of money in the hopes that a player will play well and provide a return on the money they have deposited. I spoke with Fantex co-founder and CEO Buck French about the potential comparisons and he was quick to refute them, stating that they do not consider themselves in the same market. “[Daily fantasy sports] is totally different. It’s not investing. Either you win or you lose… A single game outcome will determine whether you win or lose.” French cited a Wall Street Journal article stating that 1.3% of daily fantasy players win 91% of the profits in the first half of the MLB season. French said that, in Fantex, people “invest in future cash flow stream and collect dividends. They aren’t trying to beat out a whole bunch of people.”

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Now that the minor league regular seasons have come to a close, and we’ve reached the ides of September, most of the noteworthy roster-expansion call-ups are behind us. Nearly all of the players who were expected to have substantial impacts on the pennant races came up on the first of the month or shortly thereafter. However, a few more prospects were promoted over the weekend, as minor league clubs were eliminated from their respective playoffs. The most notable of the rookies called up over the weekend was probably Gary Sanchez, a catcher in the Yankees organization.

Sanchez has been on the prospect radar for a few years now, ever since the Yankees gave him a big bonus to sign out of the Dominican as a 16-year-old back in 2009. Sanchez hit an excellent .286/.350/.496 (134 wRC+) over his first three seasons in the minors, but followed it up with a less impressive .261/.329/.405 (107 wRC+) between High-A and Double-A in 2013 and 2014. The primary culprit for the change was a drop-off in power, which manifested itself in substantially lower isolated power figures. However, Sanchez’s pop made a comeback in 2015, during which he split time between the Double-A and Triple-A.

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