Major League Baseball might be incredibly healthy in terms of attendance, television ratings, and finances, but the league has a perception problem that will not go away anytime soon. Baseball’s biggest challenge is, and always likely will be, creating new fans. This is not a challenge unique to baseball or sports in general. All sports continue efforts to draw in new fans just like Coke and Pepsi use marketing campaigns to lure in a new generation of soda drinkers. Rob Manfred has made one of his goals to increase childhood participation in baseball as he believes that children who play baseball turn into baseball fans as adults, continuing the generational chain that has allowed baseball to thrive for more than a century.

While getting more youths to participate in baseball is hardly the only initiative MLB will undertake to grow the sport, getting new fans to attend games is very important for baseball’s future. The Angels’ most recent public-relations mistake, discouraging fans from lower socioeconomic levels from attending because they do not spend as much as other fans once they get to games, is a shortsighted strategy that could hurt baseball in the long run.

In his story for the OC Register, Pedro Moura discussed the Angels’ declining attendance with Robert Alvarado, a Vice President with the team. Alvarado dismissed targeting fans looking to pay for lower-priced seats because they do not make as many purchases once they are inside the stadium. This somewhat callous disregard for “discount buyers,” as Alvarado calls them, might work for short-term revenue, but the team has seen one of the bigger drops in attendance in MLB and the plan is a questionable one long-term.

Since we looked at attendance last month, there have not been too many big changes at the top or bottom of attendance rankings. The Los Angeles Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, and New York Yankees are still the highest-drawing teams, and the Cleveland Indians, rebounding on the field and in attendance, passed the Tampa Bay Rays in seasonal attendance over the past month. The Angels do boast decent numbers compared to all teams. (All attendance numbers below from Baseball Reference.)

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During a season, it can be hard to take a step back. You get so involved in what certain teams are doing, it’s tricky to be able to see the big picture. Just think about some recent events, though. The Astros have maintained a several-game lead in the AL West. The Twins beat the Red Sox in Boston on Thursday, aided by a ninth-inning error on a bunt, and it fit with a couple team patterns. And the Mariners traded for Mark Trumbo because they’re trying to energize an offense and an overall ballclub that hasn’t met expectations. You have a sense of what’s going on in the American League. But unless you really think about it, the significance might not hit you. You might not realize how insane the AL has been.

I’m sorry for this, but I have to use the word “projections.” I know that can be a major turnoff, but then, I’m not really sure why — projections are just forecasts, based on historical statistics. We make our own mental projections all the time. We all look at a talented young player and figure he could improve. We all look at an aging slugger and figure he’ll decline. If we see a pitcher whose ERA doesn’t match his other numbers, we’ll assume some better luck. And so on. Projections shouldn’t be that controversial, individually, and a team projection is just a combination of individual forecasts. This is no form of attempted sorcery.

So anyway, team projections have existed in some form for quite a while. Right here, some while back, I compared 10 years of performance against 10 years of Opening Day team projections. Obviously, the relationship isn’t perfectly linear — there are things that just can’t be predicted — but overall, the projections have done pretty well. Generally speaking, projected good teams have played like good teams, and projected bad teams have played like bad teams. There have been many exceptions. Enough to keep the sport interesting.

In that post, I compared projected full-season performance to actual full-season performance. Now, as far as 2015 is concerned, we don’t have an actual full-season performance. We have actual two-month performance. But that’s precisely what I want to examine. We know how teams have actually done. At FanGraphs, we projected how the teams were expected to do, based on their Opening Day depth charts. How are the numbers comparing at the moment?

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For me, there’s been something about seeing the first fruits of the Houston Astros’ years-long rebuilding project that really gets the imagination going. This is a team that is unquestionably built for the vague future that is even more unquestionably winning a lot in the concrete now. Let’s forget, for the length of this article, that the 2015 major-league team — alternately composed of beefy sluggers and finesse worm-burner-inducers — is favored by our projections to win the American League West and is tied for the seventh-best odds to win this year’s World Series. Let’s focus, for now, on the Astros’ draft picks in next week’s draft.

And I don’t mean the specific prospects that the Astros may or may not pick, a subject that has already been discussed in impressive depth by Kiley McDaniel. I mean the team’s early draft slots: 2, 5, 37, 46. The Astros are rich, and they stand to get much richer.

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We’ve reached that nice round number of two months after Opening Day, and as such, we can now recall fondly some of the highlights of those first two frames of the season. What sort of highlights, you may ask? Usually, they’re seen as the most popular type: dingers, big flies, what-have-yous. Today, just as we did after the first two weeks of the season, and just as August did a few times last season, we’re going to look at the hardest-hit, longest, shortest, and most extreme home runs of the year so far.

All data comes from our friends at HitTrackerOnline and Baseball Savant. Following a canvass of commenters on the previous article, there are now a few more categories for us to look at, especially related to pitch location; may we all rejoice in the communal desire to see a gross number of home runs. Onto the results!

Hardest-Hit Home Run — Josh Donaldson, 4/23

In theory, there are a great number of possible answers to the question “what happens when you hang a belt-high change up to Josh Donaldson?”, but in practice, there is often only one. This particular change up was adjudged by our computer overlords to leave the hand of the pitcher at a speed of 84.6 mph, while leaving the bat moments later at a speed of 120.6 mph. Fortunately for the safety of the fans, Donaldson decided to choose the second deck of the facade at the Rogers Centre to bear the brunt of the ensuing impact.
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There’s a lot going on with the Cleveland Indians right now. They’re not playing to expectations, but the expectations remain. The team has the highest projected rest-of-season win percentage, and our playoff odds have them just a hair underneath the Kansas City Royals, who have played far better than Cleveland this year.

The Indians haven’t really played that poorly, though. On a component level, they’re doing a lot of things correctly. Their offense and baserunning are top notch, as is their starting rotation. For all the fits Cody Allen gave the team at the season’s start, their reliever FIP- is middle of the pack. Their defense has been a problem, though. By Def, they rank 28th; they are 26th by UZR/150 and 25th by DRS. As it is pondered how to fix the Indians’ defense, attention obviously turns to the farm system, where top prospect Francisco Lindor currently resides. As one with flashy leather tools on his tool belt, it would seem natural that Lindor would be summoned to help the cause — especially when the incumbent shortstop Jose Ramirez isn’t hitting all that well. Is that fair? Are the Indians being too conservative with Lindor?

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David Ortiz is hitting — that is, to the extent he has stood in the batters box with a bat and hit a pitched ball and run towards first base. He is hitting, that is, in that he is and has been a hitter in the technical sense of the term. He is not hitting in that he is not hitting. That is to say, he is not hitting in the David Ortiz sense, the sense where he crushes line drives and smacks majestic home runs. David Ortiz, it should be noted, is 39 years old. The implication is that David Ortiz is, like all of us, getting older — and also like all of us, but only relevant to him, his baseball skills are eroding. When a baseball player reaches Ortiz’s age, the end is coming fast; it’s just a question of when. Based on the way Ortiz’s first two months have gone, maybe that when is now.

It was only last season Ortiz hit .263/.355/.517. That’s a wRC+ of 135. Quite good! Ortiz spent this May hitting .214/.287/.337, however, and it’s not as thought he was much better in April either. His combined slash line this season is .224/.308/.379. With his age and skill set, that’s bound to engender talks of his retirement. Baseball death, often like real death I suppose, can arrive quickly. But Ortiz has had tough starts to seasons in the past and gone on to excellence. Some have postulated that, instead of age, the problem is mechanical issues with Ortiz’s swing that are the true culprit. It is possible Ortiz’s bad start is entirely age related and this is who he is now, i.e. someone whose time has gone. It’s also possible that his lousy production is entirely the fault of faulty swing mechanics. It’s also possible that it’s some combination of both.

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Two months ago, almost on the nose, the Padres concluded their offseason by picking up Craig Kimbrel. It was a pretty big move between the Padres and the Braves, but the players of real consequence were Kimbrel and Matt Wisler. Of what was left, there were either long-shots or money exchanges. Onto the Padres, the Braves dumped Melvin Upton. Onto the Braves, the Padres dumped Carlos Quentin and Cameron Maybin. This was about financials, more than talent. The teams wanted rid of those contracts.

In a way, Upton and Maybin sort of canceled out. Both were frustrating center fielders with ceilings higher than their recent performances. Upton needed to get away from Atlanta. Maybin needed to get away from San Diego. We’ll see what Upton is able to do, when he’s back and healthy. But Maybin was slotted in immediately as a regular. And while I intend this more as a fun fact than as a cheap shot, I’ll note that, at the moment, Maybin has a higher WAR than Wil Myers, and a higher WAR than Matt Kemp. He’s hitting better than he ever has before, and now, after rolling the dice, it looks like the Braves might have a real center fielder for a couple of years.

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Aroldis Chapman has struck out more than one-third of the hitters he’s faced this season, a phenomenal number for most pitchers. For Chapman, however, that number represents a major drop from his incredible 2014 season when he struck out more than half the batters he faced. When he gave up a game-tying three-run home run to Philadelphia Phillies rookie Maikel Franco last night, it represented the first home run he’d given up in more than a calendar year. Now is hardly the time to panic over one of the best relievers in the majors, but there are some concerns over his most recent performances. Chapman is still throwing the ball hard (although not quite as hard), and he got off to a great start in 2015. Over his last half-dozen appearances, however, he hasn’t been able to get the ball in the strike zone. Hitters have picked up on his lack of command and since taking a week-long break in the middle of May due to a Cincinnati losing streak, Chapman’s performance has suffered.

Relievers are constantly under a microscope due both to the limited number of appearances they make and the relative importance of those appearances, but it can be difficult to decipher problems over the course of the whole season due to limited innings, let alone a couple weeks. Chapman could be pitching just as he always has and gotten a few bad results. He could be going through a tiny rough patch in an otherwise great season. Something could be seriously wrong, and we are seeing glimpses of its beginnings. Knowing precisely what Chapman’s problem has been over the last few weeks is near impossible. We’re picking up bread crumbs in an enclosed room. We can glean information from those crumbs, but we do not yet know where those crumbs lead. It’s too early.

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Yesterday, the Mariners traded for Mark Trumbo. Of course they did. More than any other franchise in baseball, the Mariners have a history of seeing value in bat-only sluggers, often surrendering defensive value to try and build a line-up that can conquer Safeco Field. I’ve been predicting the Mariners would trade for Trumbo all year, and with the Diamondbacks finally admitting that they needed to clear up their roster logjam, this was one of the easiest deals to see coming.

Of course, the fact that the Mariners have been acquiring players exactly like Trumbo for years, and never really having much success in doing so — even though the the acquisition of Nelson Cruz has gone as well as could possibly be imagined so far, the team’s position players are still 22nd in wRC+ and 28th in runs scored — makes it easy to point out that Trumbo is more of what the Mariners already have, but not at all what they lack. The Mariners have a .298 on-base percentage as a team, and they just acquired a guy who has a .299 OBP this year (while playing in hitter-friendly Arizona) and a .298 OBP for his career. This factoid was pointed out by a litany of people on Twitter in the aftermath of the trade.

Would feel better about Mariners if they got AJ Pollock, not Trumbo. Their problem is being 14th in AL in OBP, not 9th in slugging

— Peter Gammons (@pgammo) June 4, 2015

The team with the second-worst OBP (.298) in the American League just acquired a hitter with a .298 career OBP/.299 OBP this season.

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) June 4, 2015

Hey, another low OBP guy! Problem solved! https://t.co/m8fNiJX4pV

— David Schoenfield (@dschoenfield) June 3, 2015

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Usually, around this time of year, there still isn’t really much of an active trade market. Not only are teams wrapping up the process of figuring out what they already have — front offices everywhere are dedicated to the draft. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Lloyd McClendon says he’s always being reminded by his analytics department that the team should be okay. And in Arizona, just the other day, Dave Stewart stood by Mark Trumbo, calling him one of the team’s biggest threats. Based on the circumstances, you wouldn’t expect trades, generally. And based on the words, you might’ve figured Trumbo would stay put, and the Mariners would stand pat.

That’s what you get for thinking things. Wednesday afternoon, the following trade was agreed to:

Mariners get:

• Mark Trumbo
• Vidal Nuno

Diamondbacks get:

• Welington Castillo
• Dominic Leone
• Gabriel Guerrero
• Jack Reinheimer

Interestingly, while Arizona is getting the prospects and selling the main piece, they’re currently closer to a playoff spot than Seattle. But that’s kind of Seattle’s whole reason, and Arizona doesn’t fancy itself a real contender just yet. From the Diamondbacks’ perspective, this relieves a roster crunch, with Jake Lamb coming back and forcing Yasmany Tomas somewhere else. And from the Mariners’ perspective, Mark Trumbo feels like one of the most obvious acquisitions in years. He fits the mold, partially based in truth, of being a dinger machine who doesn’t really do anything else. But as easy and fun as it is to snark, that doesn’t make this a bad trade. And as much thump as Trumbo has, that doesn’t make this a big trade. It’s not actually of great significance, nor is it wildly lopsided.

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