Hello and welcome to a relatively easy post to generate on the other side of a week off. You might already be familiar with the idea, so if that’s the case, then once again, you’re invited to just skip ahead to the table and move on from there, after having interpreted it yourself. You are your own boss; you read however many words you choose.

This is the third post in what I guess is a four-post series. The first one came when the regular season was about one-quarter old. At the very beginning of July, I did this again, when the season was about one-half old. Now the season is about three-quarters old, so we can check in one more time. Which teams have benefited the most from favorable strike zones? Which teams have paid the greatest penalty, on the other hand? If you accept that all the information comes with some error bars, this is simple. Increasingly simple, as I run these numbers more and more.

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This past weekend, the Toronto Blue Jays swept the Los Angeles Angels in a three-game series, dominating the Halos by a combined score of 36-10. The series represented a few important points: not only did the three wins vault the Jays over the New York Yankees for sole possession of first place in the AL East, but it also featured a matchup of the current favorites in the AL MVP race, Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson. While Trout went 3-10 during the series (all three hits coming in the series finale), Donaldson showed why he is beginning to be viewed as a possible contender for the league’s MVP, going 8 for 13 with a home run, four doubles and nine RBI.

Up until this season — even up until a month ago, in fact — the idea of Donaldson being a serious front-runner in an MVP race would have been viewed as very optimistic. He’s been in the conversation as one of the best overall position players in baseball since his breakout in 2013 (his 21.2 Wins Above Replacement since the start of the 2013 season is second only to Trout’s 25.2), but a strict comparison with Trout in the past probably would have been seen as a reach. That has little to do with Donaldson: Trout is the best player in baseball, and a normal year for Trout would be the best year of basically anyone else’s career.

Then this past offseason’s trade from Oakland to Toronto occurred, and Donaldson showed that the move to the Rogers Centre was most likely going to pay serious dividends for his statistics. Early on in this season, it became evident he might be tailoring his swing to pull more fly balls when he was playing at home, resulting in an astounding power increase that has showed no signs of slowing down in the ensuing months. His home/road splits are more pronounced than they ever have been, showing the influence of his home park’s friendliness to hitters — and his ability to exploit it:

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When you think pitching and greatness it’s unlikely you think of Mike Fiers. Well Friday, Mike Fiers threw a no-hitter against the Los Angeles Dodgers, so in your face. Of course, I’m kidding. No-hitters are fluky events by nature, and though the game’s greats have thrown them, so have many of the game’s not-so-greats. For example, the list of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters includes Joe Cowley, Mike Warren, and Jim Colborn, and excludes Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez*, Curt Schilling, Greg Maddux, and Robin Roberts. But still, pitching nine innings of baseball without giving up a single hit is a feat worthy of recognition and by golly we sure are recognizing it.

*Martinez threw nine perfect innings on June 3, 1995, but allowed a lead-off double in the 10th inning.

But there is controversy! You may have heard that Fiers has been accused of cheating while throwing his no-no. Who has made these accusations? The world’s morality police, also known as the internet, of course! So what “evidence” is there that Fiers cheated?

https://twitter.com/CaseyySheehann/status/634919577567100928

Oh. Whoops.

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For his career, Nathan Eovaldi has a below-average strikeout rate. He’s been a little bit worse than league average by ERA, and a little bit better than league average by FIP, but even average is a strange outcome for a guy with a top-ten fastball by velocity.

Take a look at how much of an outlier Eovaldi is in graphical form. That’s him highlighted, against all starters that have thrown at least 1000 fastballs since 2007.

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10 days ago, I was informed that I will be voting for the National League Cy Young Award this year. This will be my first time voting on the pitcher awards — last year, I was tasked with voting for Manager of the Year and MVP — and so I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to work through what kind of factors I’m going to want to consider in putting my ballot together. And as I work through the process, I’ve come to realize that there’s one potentially significant factor that I’m not sure whether to consider or not; a pitcher’s performance while batting.

My initial reaction to the idea of using a pitcher’s batting line as a variable was to reject the notion, considering that it’s an award designed to honor the best pitcher of the season, and a pitcher’s job is to prevent runs. What a pitcher does at the plate can be rewarded when they vote on the Silver Slugger Award. I think that’s generally the commonly accepted approach, and when I broached this topic with a few people at Saber Seminar this weekend, most of them — even Brian Bannister, the former MLB pitcher who posted a career .276/.300/.414 batting line — suggested that a pitcher’s hitting performance shouldn’t be a factor in the Cy Young voting.

But I guess I’m still not convinced. I certainly haven’t made up my mind to definitely include a pitcher’s batting performance as a factor in my vote, but I don’t know that I can accept the idea that we should only be evaluating a pitcher’s contribution to run prevention, when National League pitchers are also required to hit as a function of their jobs. It’s a smaller part of their job, certainly, but it is something they have to do, much like big lumbering sluggers who are selected for their ability to hit the ball a long way still have to run the bases, even though that is definitely not the skill they are being paid for.

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As the Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates race toward the playoffs with payrolls in the bottom 20% of Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers falter with top-five payrolls, we are reminded that money cannot buy success in all cases. The Dodgers, with their $300-plus million payroll and a luxury tax bill that will add on another $40 to $50 million, have not guaranteed themselves a berth in the playoffs. We have seen billion-dollar television deals grant enormous benefits to large-market clubs and teams like the New York Yankees and the Red Sox have long wielded their financial might to buy wins. Financial parity does not exist in baseball, but even without it, single-season payroll has played a lesser role in team success over the past few years compared to a decade ago. However, payroll does become a factor when it comes to sustained success.

Over the last three seasons, here is the amount every team has spent per win, using the Opening Day payroll for each of the three seasons and about one-quarter of the season to go this year.

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During the height of the furor over the National Football League’s mishandling of the Ray Rice case last fall, both Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association agreed to work together to formulate a new domestic violence policy for the league. On Friday, the two sides announced that they had finally reached an agreement on a new comprehensive policy covering not only incidents of domestic violence, but cases of sexual assault and child abuse as well:

MLB and the MLBPA have announced an agreement on a Joint Domestic Violence, Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Policy. pic.twitter.com/C1eTGljC6r

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) August 21, 2015

In addition to establishing new player treatment and education protocols, the policy gives the Commissioner’s Office the authority to investigate any allegation of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse involving a major-league player. Commissioner Manfred has also been given the power to place a player under investigation on paid Administrative Leave for up to seven days, a placement that the player can immediately appeal to panel of arbitrators.

Following the completion of MLB’s investigation, the new policy gives the commissioner the power to impose whatever punishment “he believes is appropriate in light of the severity of the conduct.” In other words, the agreement does not establish any minimum or maximum penalties for domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse cases. In fact, the policy explicitly states that a player does not even need to be criminally convicted of a crime in order to be punished by the commissioner. Once again, however, the player will have the right to appeal his punishment to a panel of arbitrators.

So how does MLB’s new policy compare with the league’s prior treatment of domestic violence? And what types of penalties might players realistically face if the commissioner determines they have violated the new agreement?

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Jason Bere had an interesting observation about Joe Borowski, who saved 45 games for the Indians in 2007. According to Bere – currently Cleveland’s bullpen coach – Borowski threw a lot of backup sliders. Contrary to what you might think, that was a good thing.

“A lot of times when he got a guy to swing and miss, it was with the one that just kind of stayed,” Bere told me. “They would react to what they were seeing out of the hand, the spin, but while it had the tightness of a true slider, it didn’t break like one.

“Hitters will tell you that something that backs up on them is hard to hit. A hanger, they’ll crush. But something that backs up – that last second it’s not going where they thought it was going to go – they”ll have trouble with it. You can see it from the swings they take.”

Intrigued by what Bere told me, I set out in search of further opinions on the effective, yet almost always unintentional, backup slider.

Alan Nathan, the man behind The Physics of Baseball, shared a scientific perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the ever-increasing dominance of pitching this season, Chris Archer has been a singular figure among the leaderboard of best pitchers during 2015: he’s not only a newcomer to the best handful of starters that populate baseball, but he’s also gotten to where he currently is in a rather unique way. In late April, I noticed that Archer was now throwing his slider almost 40% of the time and getting incredible results from it; in May, Carson noted that Archer was in a select group that blended an elite ground-ball rate with an elite strikeout rate; and, in early June, Dave wrote that Archer’s slider was now being thrown much harder, at upwards of 90 mph, making it an almost totally unfair pitch.

Archer has truly found himself as an ace this season, and last night, he turned in the best performance of his young career.

Unsurprisingly, the Rays’ right-hander pitched his complete game, one hit, one walk, 11 strikeout, 98-pitch performance in the method he has come to rely on this season: an overpowering fastball coupled almost exclusively with an unfair slider. Archer threw a Maddux, and he did so in historic fashion, compiling a Bill James game score of 95 along the way. The only other pitchers to throw a complete game with under 100 pitches and a game score of at least 95? I’ll let our friend Kazuto answer that:

Maddux with a 95+ game score: Koufax no-no vs Philly Cone perfect Bunning perfect Humber perfect (LOL) Rogers perfect Archer tonight

— Kazuto Yamazaki (@Kazuto_Yamazaki) August 21, 2015

That’s a lot of perfect games and one no-hitter on that very short list, which tells us just how good Archer was last night. He was this close, in fact, to a no-no:

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Two weeks ago, the Detroit Tigers essentially fired long-time General Manager Dave Dombrowski. Despite four consecutive division titles — a streak that will end this year, of course — and a lot of success over the last decade, Dombrowski was unable to bring a championship back to Motown, and with their window closing and the team struggling, ownership decided to make a change. Now, it will be up to new GM Al Avila to improve a roster that is starting to show signs of age and decline.

The first step in retooling is to determine what you have. The 2011-2015 Tigers were known for great offenses, great starting pitching, and terrible bullpens and defenses that let down their star hitters and pitchers at the worst times. During their best years, they scored runs like few others, and their starting pitching was as good as it gets, but aging and departed stars have taken their toll, so the 2016 Tigers will be missing some key components that formed that foundation. Max Scherzer is now in DC participating in the the tire fire that is the Nationals season, David Price is busy attempting to free Blue Jays fans from two decades plus of a playoff-less existence, and Yoenis Cespedes now spends his time demonstrating to Mets fans that when you hit a ball with a bat sometimes it can go far.

Scherzer is signed long term in Washington and Cespedes and Price are going to command hundreds of millions of dollars on the free agent market, making a return to Detroit questionable at best. To offset some of the decline in pitching, the Tigers improved their defense this season mostly by adding a healthy Jose Iglesias. This is no longer a team that betrays it’s pitching staff with poor fielding; these days, they’re just giving up runs because their arms aren’t that good anymore.

As for finances, the Tigers have $111.8 million committed to seven players next season, only five of whom will be on the club (they owe the Rangers $6 million of Prince Fielder’s contract and Joe Nathan will get a $1 million buy-out on his $10 million option). What’s more, the Tigers are going to have to pay J.D. Martinez a big raise in arbitration, and role players like Jose Iglesias will also require above-the-minimum salaries as first-time arbitration qualifiers. Just keeping those players will cost another roughly $15-$20 million, so they could be on the hook for about $130 million to just 10 players. This means spending $25-30 million on a top tier free agent is going to be very difficult unless they are about to dramatically expand their payroll.

So the Tigers need to improve their bullpen, strengthen their rotation, and adding a bat who can also field some wouldn’t be a bad idea either. The question is, can they afford to acquire those assets on the free agent market, or do they need to be more circumspect and move assets around through trade?

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