Yankees prospect Jorge Mateo has some serious wheels. In 96 games with Low-A Charleston, the Dominican-born shortstop stole an eye-popping 71 bases. He leads the South Atlantic League by more than 14 steals, despite the fact he was promoted to High-A a little over a week ago. Mateo’s posted gaudy stolen-base numbers in past years too. He swiped 11 bags in just 15 games in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League last year. The year before that, he lead the Dominican Summer League with 49. If you hadn’t guessed it by his stolen-base totals, his speed grades out as an 80 on the 20-80 scale.

Speed is clearly Mateo’s calling card, but he’s no slouch with the bat, either. The shortstop hit a respectable .268/.338/.378 in 96 games in the South Atlantic League, and has hit .464/.500/.714 in 30 plate appearances since his promotion to High-A, giving him a wRC+ of 116 on the year.

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For those casual baseball fans who might have found residence under a slab of basalt for the past two months, let’s get you up to speed: Carlos Gonzalez has been locked-in recently. Post All-Star break (that date chosen for simple convenience), CarGo is fourth in baseball in wRC+, tied for first in homers, and first in ISO. So, on Monday night, we shouldn’t have been too surprised when he did this:

Seeing the initial flight of the ball while watching this game, I thought this was a double in the gap that was going to short-hop the fence. The Rockies telecast said about the same thing. Instead, it was a frozen rope that didn’t come down, sailing into the first few rows of bleachers.

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Say what you will about the Mariners over the years, but at least they’ve thrown the American League’s last three no-hitters. And, say what you will about the significance of a no-hitter, but they’re undeniably exciting and cool, sometimes little oases of elation in a year that’s otherwise lost. You don’t need to overthink it. People like no-hitters. People like them because they’re neat. Hisashi Iwakuma just threw one, Wednesday afternoon in Seattle against the Orioles. The Orioles can hit pretty well!

It wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world, because Iwakuma has a history of being pretty good. It still qualified as a legitimate surprise, because Iwakuma had never before completed a major-league game, and this year he hasn’t entirely been himself. Much like Robinson Cano, it appears that Iwakuma has only righted himself too late to save the Mariners’ season. The best to hope for now is the occasional cool moment, and Iwakuma delivered as much as he could.

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There are three reasons to be interested in Chase Utley as a baseball player. One, there’s his whole history. Utley’s track record of being one of the best second basemen in baseball. If his career ended today, he’d be a borderline Hall-of-Famer. Two, he’s available. The Giants are reportedly in negotiations, with the Phillies looking to keep getting younger. If you want Utley, you can have him, provided you give a little something, and provided Utley is open to the chance. Three, this:

Good news on Utley: Per source, he not only is feeling better, but also has figured out a flaw in his swing that was caused by ankle injury.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 15, 2015

Utley’s numbers this year are very bad. He’s not one to typically offer excuses, but Utley injured his right ankle over the winter, and it never really got quite right. Lousy on-field performance followed, and then Utley went to the disabled list for a while. There’s no positive evaluation of what Utley’s been. The Giants are presumably thinking about what Utley might be now. They’d only be interested if they thought that Utley was better. His numbers since returning from the DL the other day are better. Small-sample numbers mean only so much, though. The numbers aren’t the encouraging thing. The swing is the encouraging thing.

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Absent a Carlos Gonzalez-like run of home runs by Mike Trout, Nelson Cruz or another slugger over the last fifty games of the season, major-league baseball looks likely to fall short of a 50-homer season for the fourth time in five years and seventh time in the last nine seasons. Only Chris Davis and Jose Bautista have notched 50-homer seasons since the end of the 2007 season after 23 such seasons between 1995 and the 2007 season. Despite the relative drought in 50 homer seasons, power is up this season over last with multiple players poised to hit more than 40 homers after only Nelson Cruz hit 40 last season.

A month ago, major-league baseball moved to the All-Star break with just over half the season finished. At the time, seven players had at least 25 home runs, giving the league an outside chance of producing a 50-homer season. That group was led by a player who has yet to crack 40 home runs in Giancarlo Stanton. Unfortunately, he had already been injured for several weeks and, despite his 27 home runs, he might fall short of 40 homers again this year. Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Bryce Harper were all one behind Stanton with 26 home runs, and J.D. Martinez and Todd Frazier entered the break with 25 home runs.

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We love the deep dive here, and often it’s mechanical — this player raised or lowered his hands, or altered the grip on his pitch, or changed his foot tap. Sometimes, though, the dive can start from a place as simple as a change in mindset and approach.

Like when you ask Michael Brantley what the key to his late-career power breakout was. He shakes off the suggestion that he changed his swing or bulked up. To him, it was simple. “Last year I was more aggressive,” Brantley said matter-of-factly when I asked him about it.

And of course, as simple as that sounds, it’s just a platform, a jump-off point.

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Last week, in this space, I wrote about Dave Dombrowski’s Achilles Heel in the wake of the Tigers letting go of their long-tenured General Manager. Yesterday, another long-term General Manager was relieved of his duties, as the Brewers have moved Doug Melvin “into an advisory role”, opening up their GM position for the first time since 2002.

Like Dombrowski’s start in Detroit, Melvin’s first few years in Milwaukee were pretty rough. The team lost 94 games in both 2003 and 2004, then hung around .500 for the next three years, so it was five years of laying the groundwork for a competitive team. But in 2008, things started to come together around a strong young core that included 24-year-old sluggers Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun and 25-year-old middle infielders J.J. Hardy and Rickie Weeks. To supplement the team’s homegrown core of All-Star hitters, Melvin made a big mid-season trade for CC Sabathia, whose dominant performance helped carry them to the team’s first postseason berth since 1982.

While Sabathia was just a half-season rental — and predictably signed for big money in New York that winter — the Brewers retained the young core that looked like it should form the foundation of a perennial contender. However, since the start of the 2009 season until Melvin’s resignation, the team went just 540-545 and only made the postseason in one out of those seven years. While Dombrowski is leaving Detroit on the back of a long run of success that may just now be coming to an end, Melvin’s track record is more of a long string of unfulfilled potential.

So why weren’t the Brewers able to turn one of the best young groups of home-grown hitters into a consistent winner? Unlike with Dombrowski, Melvin didn’t have one glaring flaw that came back to haunt him on an annual basis. Instead, the Brewers lack of success can be chalked up to three significant organizational failures over the last seven years.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

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Last week, I asked you a question that took me something like 900 words. Here, I’ll summarize in a sentence: As a baseball fan, would you prefer your team have a stretch of success without a championship, or a championship surrounded by a few years of disappointment? This is the post, with the poll at the end. As my stand-in teams, I used the recent Detroit Tigers and the recent Boston Red Sox. More than 3,500 of you responded. The results were interesting; no matter what, the results were always going to be interesting. Roughly 2,000 of you took the Red Sox. Roughly 1,500 of you took the Tigers. Things weren’t split right down the middle, but they were in the vicinity, with people showing a slight preference for the trophy.

I figured I’d write a short post outlining my thoughts. Because this is based on opinion and emotion, this is necessarily self-centered, and you can consider yourself invited to close this window if you don’t give a hoot what I think. I don’t know why you would. But I started it, so I might as well weigh in at some point. And a number of people asked where I stood in last Friday’s chat.

I’ve thought about it — I’ve thought about it for years — and I know where I am. Before I proceed, though, I want to embed two more polls. These are polls I wish I would’ve initially included. The polls are the same as before, but they’re selective: One is just for fans who’ve witnessed a championship. The other is for the others. I can’t make you vote honestly, but I don’t know what the point would be of trying to troll this. Vote if you’d like! My own thoughts are below.

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Pardon me; I don’t mean to interrupt your afternoon. If you’re here, though, you might well be a bit curious about Adam Eaton. Which is good, because I am, too! To get started, you know those player caps we have on most pages? The profiles and quick opinions, I mean, written by various FanGraphs authors. They’re written during the winter, providing brief player analysis, and here’s a link to Adam Eaton’s page. I’m going to pull a little excerpt. This isn’t intended to pick on Chris Cwik. Anyone would’ve written the following.

Since Eaton isn’t going to add any pop, his performance will likely be based on the guys behind him.

Made total sense at the time. Eaton is a little dude, with an extended track record of hitting groundballs. Last year, as an everyday player, Eaton was literally out-homered by Ben Revere. He went deep just the once, and so he was seemingly easy to project. Speed and contact. Decent number of walks. We all knew what Adam Eaton was, up until we didn’t. This season, Eaton’s already knocked nine dingers. Put another way, he’s tied with Adrian Beltre. Chase Headley and Jason Heyward, too. Adam Eaton wasn’t going to add any pop. Adam Eaton added a lot of pop.

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