I’m not gonna lie to you — there are a lot of things Christian Yelich hasn’t done once. Uncountable things. Infinite things. He hasn’t eclipsed 20 home runs in a season. He hasn’t hit a triple on the road. He hasn’t signed an eight-figure contract. He hasn’t grown to six and a half feet tall. He hasn’t attended Oberlin College, and he hasn’t been drafted by the Phillies. He hasn’t survived an accidental fall from the Golden Gate bridge, nor has he survived an intentional fall from the same. Depending on how you look at it, Christian Yelich hasn’t lived much of a life. But he is doing pretty well at his job at an unusually young age, and let’s talk about something specific he has yet to include in his numbers. You can think of this as an indicator of success, to go along with the other, more traditional indicators of success, like, batting average.

We’ll make use of batted-ball information! We’ve got that on FanGraphs stretching back to 2002. Since 2002, 790 batters have put at least 500 balls in play. Yelich is now among them, as of not long ago. Within the sample, no one’s hit more infield flies than Vernon Wells, at 376. He has a 41-pop lead on Albert Pujols. No one’s hit a greater rate of infield flies than Eric Byrnes, who’s just in front of Tony Batista. At the other extreme are known pop-up avoiders. You know about Joey Votto. Joe Mauer doesn’t hit pop-ups, either. For all his faults, Ryan Howard belongs in this same group, as does Derek Jeter. As for Yelich? He’s at 0. He doesn’t have an infield fly to his name. He is currently the only such batter in the given player pool.

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Edwin Escobar, who came from the Giants in the Jake Peavy deal, debuted with the Red Socks on Tuesday. One inning of work is not enough to know much other than perhaps velocity, but that point alone started a discussion. He sat just under 92 mph, and once you correct for his appearance coming out of the bullpen, you might say he had average velocity. I even said this, on twitter. And Mike Newman responded:

@enosarris I had Escobar 91-93… That's plus velo from the left side.

— Mike Newman (@MikeNewmanRS) August 28, 2014

I’ve heard this before. I’ve thought it maybe untrue, for whatever reason. So I decided to check out a few splits among starters this year.

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Prospects are babies. They’re eagerly anticipated, they’re evaluated by their ceilings, their arrivals are memorable and frequently painful, and these days they’re traded for goods less than ever. They continue to be interesting for a handful of months, but then they start to develop into more fully-formed people, and the magic of limitless possibility disintegrates. Sometimes they turn into remarkable things, more often they turn into unremarkable things, and regardless, it doesn’t take long before they’re taken for granted. Toward the beginning, everything is celebrated. Later on, mistakes aren’t so novel, they aren’t so easy to explain away.

Javier Baez still counts as a prospect, even though his big-league career is weeks underway. He’s among the most exciting prospects we’ve seen in baseball in some years, and though it’s a certainty that he’ll be less compelling a year or two from now, at the moment everything he’s involved in can be turned into a highlight. If he were a real baby, all his activity would be posted on Facebook. Some people might already be getting Baez fatigue, but I’m not one of them, and even if I were, I’d probably make an exception for a showdown between Baez and a similarly extreme sort of pitcher. A pitcher like, I don’t know, Aroldis Chapman. Who Baez faced for the first time on Wednesday night in the top of the ninth of a close game.

Earlier this season, people paid a lot of attention to an at-bat between Kenley Jansen and Miguel Cabrera. It was compelling, because both Jansen and Cabrera are extremely talented. Chapman vs. Baez is compelling because both players are extremely powerful. There’s no one who throws harder than Aroldis Chapman. There might be no one who swings harder than Javier Baez.Who wouldn’t want to watch them go head-to-head over and over? They haven’t yet gone head-to-head over and over, but they have gone head-to-head once. Let’s put that at-bat under the microscope.

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As we head down the season’s home stretch, the AL MVP race isn’t shaping up to be the neat, two-horse race it was in both 2012 and 2013. Miguel Cabrera hasn’t quite been Miguel Cabrera, and though he still could win the award, Mike Trout hasn’t exactly been Mike Trout. As occasionally happens when there is no slam dunk position player candidate, the leading contender might be a pitcher, in the person of Felix Hernandez. In such a circumstance, sleeper candidates lacking the typical statistical “oomph” often possessed by MVPs can often emerge from the position player ranks of contending clubs. The Mariners boast two worthy contenders in Robinson Cano and Kyle Seager, the A’s have Josh Donaldson, and the Royals boast Alex Gordon, just to name a few. The Indians are not too far off of the wild card pace, and are one hot week away from injecting the name of Michael Brantley into the discussion. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the point in the regular season where, moving forward, a lot of our posts will be focused on the playoff race and teams within the playoff race. This is simply a natural shift of attention that occurs as the season progresses. Everything throughout the regular season builds up to the playoff race and now we’re here, so everything that happens which directly affects the playoff race becomes all the more noteworthy.

That doesn’t mean much for the New York Mets. They’re playing without their best and most exciting player, are currently eight games below .500, just two games out of last place and all but mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, with a a 0.1% chance to make the wild card.

But that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. Looking beyond this season, the Mets have a lot to be excited about, thanks to some combination of Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Jon Niese, Rafael Montero and Dillon Gee making up one of most promising young pitching staffs in baseball. Looking towards the rest of this season, there is less to be excited about, as neither Harvey or Syndergaard will pitch in the majors this year. But deGrom is still enjoying an unexpected breakout year and Wheeler is living up to the hype of being really, really good.

And there’s something else about Zack Wheeler that will make the rest of his starts this season a little more interesting.
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Numbers are the easy part, so let’s start with some numbers. David Price got thrashed by the Yankees, ending with twice as many hits allowed as outs recorded. He was charged with eight runs, all of them scoring in the top of the third, which Price began, but which Price was removed from without getting an out. That third inning saw Price allow nine consecutive hits, the first time that’s happened to a pitcher since 1989. The all-time record for consecutive hits in an inning by a team is 11, and that was in Colorado. Never before had Price allowed nine hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed eight hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed seven hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed six hits in an inning. In Price’s previous game, he one-hit the Rays.

Price on Wednesday got one swinging strike. His previous season low was six. In his regular-season career before Wednesday, he’d allowed at least nine hits just 20 times. He’d allowed at least eight runs just four times. Price set a new career Game Score low, of 2. In Price’s own words: “That was probably the worst game I’ve ever had in my life.” It was an awful game, but really, it was an awful inning. And, technically, it was an awful fraction of an inning. David Price is one of the best known pitchers in the universe.

Maybe it’s enough to just say what’s happened. A nine-hit disaster happened, to an excellent pitcher. Maybe now we ought to just move on. But it seems like we should reflect at least a little deeper. It isn’t often a terrific pitcher gets lit up like this. It isn’t often a team manages to string a bunch of hits together, and nine is extreme. We should go past just the numbers. What in the hell was that top of the third? Can the video show us anything?

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There are a lot of reasons not to like Bartolo Colon. He’s 41 years old. He has a 50-game suspension for synthetic testosterone in the recent past, and he underwent controversial stem cell treatments before that. He pitched a grand total of 257.1 innings in a span of five years between the ages of 33 and 37. When he bats, he looks like this and this, and he still has $11 million coming to him for his age-42 season next year — along with the million-plus left on this year’s $9 million. If we’re thinking about the Moneyball scouts who (probably really didn’t) prioritize selling jeans over winning baseball games, Colon is the guy they were thinking about.

For all those reasons, and who knows how many others, Colon went unclaimed through the waiver process earlier this week. If the paragraph above was all you knew about the man, that would make a lot of sense. A fat, old, expensive pitcher who doesn’t throw hard or strike people out shouldn’t draw interest. Big deal, right?

Maybe it’s not. It’s probably not, because Colon is no ace. And yet it still raised a few eyebrows around the game, because Colon, for all his considerable flaws, is well into his fourth consecutive season of being a useful major league pitcher. And that’s after an earlier career portion that had eight seasons of being a useful — or better — major league pitcher. There’s a select few contenders Colon couldn’t help right now. There’s plenty more that could benefit, and there’s precious little pitching available. So why is he still a New York Met?

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So, this stuff doesn’t really need to be reviewed, because you’re baseball fans, and you’re baseball fans who read FanGraphs, but recently, of course, the Angels lost Garrett Richards for the year. Meanwhile, Anibal Sanchez experienced a setback in his injury rehab, and now it’s unclear whether he’ll be able to return in the regular season. Not coincidentally, trade rumors have popped up, as the Angels are fighting for the AL West, and the Tigers are fighting for the AL Central or a wild-card slot. Losing guys like Richards and Sanchez aren’t easy injuries to overcome.

A disadvantage for both teams is that the injuries have taken place after the non-waiver trade deadline, so moves now are limited and difficult. Really good players just aren’t available, so the guys who are are mediocre or expensive. But, you’ll notice the calendar’s almost turned to September. That presents an advantage. That greatly reduces the need to go out and get a new pitcher for the short-term.

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The Angels’ starting rotation has been worth 10.8 WAR. Tyler Skaggs is responsible for 15% of that, and he’s been hurt for a while, and he’s done for this season. Garrett Richards is responsible for another 41% of that, and as of last week he’s out for the season as well, and perhaps a part of next season. The Angels still have the intention of competing for the World Series, but it would appear their pitching hopes might be down to a declining Jered Weaver and a struggling C.J. Wilson. Those guys, and an unknown rookie who turns 28 in a month. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know much about Matt Shoemaker. For a long time there wasn’t a reason to, but it might be Shoemaker who’s now the best starter on the staff.

It’s easy to want to write the guy off. Almost all quality big-leaguers show up and establish themselves sooner than Shoemaker has. He went entirely undrafted out of Eastern Michigan, and he owns a Triple-A ERA of 5.38. Never before was Shoemaker considered much of a prospect, if any kind of prospect, and when people would talk about the Angels’ rotation depth, Shoemaker was among the reasons they’d be nervous. Prior to 2014, Shoemaker wasn’t a meaningful part of the Angels conversation. So: why should that be something we care about now?

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Madison Bumgarner was only a dinked double away from a perfect game last night. A few aspects of his standout game reveal trends in his personal approach — and those trends match up fairly well with league trends. Even the major difference between Tuesday night’s start and his season reveals something about the way the league adjusts and adjusts again.

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