A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard arguments today on the existence and scope of Major League Baseball’s exemption from federal antitrust law. The arguments arose in the city of San Jose’s federal antitrust lawsuit against MLB over the league’s failure to allow the Oakland Athletics to build a new ballpark in, and move to, San Jose.

San Jose sued MLB last summer claiming that the league’s rules creating exclusive operating territories for teams — and requiring a three-fourths vote of owners for an existing team to move into another team’s territory — violate federal antitrust law. Upon MLB’s motion, the federal district court in San Jose dismissed the city’s claims on the grounds that MLB enjoys an exemption to federal antitrust law dating to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1922 decision in the Federal Baseball Club case. That decision was based on a view that baseball was a game, and not a business, and thus not subject to antirust law.

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Prepare yourself for an unpopular opinion – there is a difference between a well-pitched game and a low-scoring game contested by two bad offenses. Not every quality start is a gem, thanks to the current state of offense in Major League Baseball.

On the same night the defending World Series champions eked out seven total bases in a 19 inning game, the Baltimore Orioles slugged six home runs. The following afternoon, they hit another three bombs. After a fallow period of one day, the O’s got back on the bats, hitting three MORE home runs Monday night, fueling yet another win for the first place team in the American League East.

Over the past seven days, the Orioles hit SEVENTEEN home runs. That is more than the rest of the AL East combined in that stretch, more than 11 teams can claim in the second half. It is this power surge that keeps them afloat and in front. It is this suddenly rich mine of home run power that helps them overcome/offset an otherwise underwhelming squad from top to bottom.

While we all stare at their lineup and wonder how they manage to remain first in a deeply-flawed division, the O’s look like a club that zigged while the rest of baseball zagged. Always a team built to score runs, they simply struggled to get all their pistons firing in sequence – until now.

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What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five major-league hitters whose WAR projections have most improved on a rate basis since the beginning of the season.

For every batter, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) WAR projection per every 550 plate appearances (or 415 for catchers), averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate every hitter’s rest-of-season (ROS) WAR projection (again, prorated to 550 PA and using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in WAR per 550 PA between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

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Last year was a tough one for Phil Hughes. Worse than that. “Last year was a disaster for me,” Hughes admitted to me before a August game with the A’s in Oakland.

But this year has been much better. He’s top fifteen in strikeouts minus walks, a pretty solid (if simple) way to measure starting pitcher quality. A big part of the change has been mindset, according to the pitcher, but that mindset has benefitted from a few key changes.

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A week ago, I wrote an InstaGraphs post noting that the current favorites for MVP in both leagues were playing in the Los Angeles market. The point of the post was to highlight Clayton Kershaw’s candidacy, but in running through the other candidates for AL MVP, I wrote this:

Robinson Cano only has eight home runs and will probably split any votes he might get with Felix Hernandez, who would be a serious threat to Trout if the BBWAA gave pitchers the same credit as hitters in the voting. They don’t, though, so Felix probably finishes outside of the top five.

Since that post was published, Robinson Cano has hit .381/.536/.810, good for a 253 wRC+, including a couple more home runs. And Felix Hernandez has thrown 15 innings, allowed just seven hits, given up two runs, walked one, and struck out 16. In retrospect, I undersold the MVP case for both of Seattle’s stars, and particularly, the growing case for Felix as the top candidate.

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How do you measure a truly great starting pitching season? Having an ERA that starts with a “1” generally qualifies, but there’s some obvious issues with that. First, that’s happened 82 times in the last 100 seasons, making it notable but perhaps not unthinkable. Second, obviously, are the flaws inherent to ERA, most importantly that it’s not adjusted for ballpark or league. Pedro Martinez (2000), Sandy Koufax (1964) and Carl Mays (1917) all had an ERA of 1.74. Clearly, none of them were facing the same kind of offenses.

You could, if you wanted, go by WAR. Steve Carlton‘s 1972 and Martinez’ 1999 make sense atop the list, but convincing people that Bert Blyleven‘s 1973 was the third-best season ever or that Bob Gibson’s legendary 1968 was merely his third-best season seem like tougher sells. Besides, since that’s a counting stat rather than a rate stat, it means no modern-day pitcher will ever be able to come close, because it seems pretty safe to say that we aren’t seeing a starting pitcher top 320 innings again, as both Carlton and Blyleven did.

FIP? That’s better, though still imperfect. Martinez, again, and 1984 Dwight Gooden top the leaderboards there, followed by a pair of guys essentially playing a different sport, Walter Johnson and Pete Alexander in 1915. (In 1915-16, Johnson pitched 706.1 innings; he allowed one home run. It was, as were 24 of the 97 total dingers he allowed, an inside-the-park job.) FIP also assumes some league-average inputs, and if we want “best-ever” perhaps we don’t want to assume any kind of average; like WAR, you’d also have a tough time winning a bar argument with something that you need to explain formulas for.

Enough setup, then. To the point, now. Clearly, there’s many different ways to do this, and no obvious, unassailable answer. You could make an argument for probably a dozen different years as the “best” starting pitching season of all time. What I’m doing, today, is to break it down into the most important things a pitcher can do that are more or less entirely within his control:

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On the one hand, I don’t know how much this matters anymore. Each team has just over 40 games remaining, which is basically a quarter of the season, and over a quarter of a season, things go crazy. The numbers get enormous error bars as you expect a ton of variation around calculated averages. On the other hand, these are the highest-leverage games yet, for almost every team still in the race. Little things now look like big things, as the stretch run essentially puts a magnifying glass over otherwise ordinary baseball. So that’s my justification for this latest and last look at rest-of-season-schedule strength.

I looked at this almost exactly a month ago. Since then, things have changed. Players have gotten hurt, players have gotten traded and games on the schedules have been played. Now there’s less of the year left, so this feels like a more significant factor. And with so little year left, schedules can look even less balanced than they are over the full summer. This isn’t to start a conversation about fairness; this is just what is. You’re going to see a big table.

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The article begins with an anecdote, like so many articles usually do. Let’s watch something that ultimately didn’t matter, from Sunday’s marathon contest between the Tigers and the Blue Jays. The game was tied 5-5 forever, but specifically, for our purposes, the game was tied 5-5 in the top of the 16th, when Ian Kinsler hit a one-out infield single. The next batter was Miguel Cabrera, and Cabrera drove the first pitch for a single to bring the Tigers that much closer to snapping the deadlock. It was a well-hit single, a line-drive single, to the left side of the outfield, but where Kinsler easily could’ve played it safe and stopped at second, he went and got himself to third, and he did so without a close play.

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Sam Fuld is not your typical outfielder, maybe. There’s an active brain at work out there. Often it wonders what the numbers say about this beautiful game.

Fuld’s history sounds like the backstory for a baseball analyst. He carried around a book of baseball stats when he was five. He went to Phillips Exeter, one of the best prep schools in the country. He has a degree in economics from Stanford. He read Moneyball and was inspired to complete an internship at STATS Inc.

Sam Fuld once said “The beauty of numbers is that our minds don’t necessarily capture the whole picture accurately. Our emotions remember certain things for whatever reason, and there are certain things you don’t remember…. that’s the beauty of numbers. It’s fact. There’s no way around it.”

So, before a game against his old team — the also openly nerdy Tampa Bay Rays — I thought I’d ask him what he was thinking about out there when the games got long.

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We are pleased to announce that Kiley McDaniel will be joining FanGraphs as our lead analyst and writer for all prospect coverage. The full announcement can be found over at InstaGraphs.

Thanks to David Appelman, Dave Cameron and the rest of the FanGraphs team for this opportunity.  I’m excited to tackle this challenge and feel like all my past experience working for MLB organizations and writing for various other outlets has led up to this, with each job giving me a specific tool or experience that will be key for what I want to accomplish here.

My Approach

It works out that baseball prospect writing jobs tend to fill certain roles that scouts fill in a real scouting department.  When I wrote for ESPN, I functioned as an area scout or maybe a regional cross-checker (covering mostly amateur players in a couple of states).  When I wrote for Scout, I functioned as a national cross-checker (covering mostly amateur players with a national focus).  In this new gig for FanGraphs, I will be filling something like the role of a pro scouting director.

I explain this to give you an idea of my aim and posture.  A pro scouting director focuses mostly on giving his GM recommendations for acquisitions of professional players, but many of them also will pitch in on the draft and international markets as their backgrounds and specialties dictate.  I have experience as a writer and club employee in all three markets, so I’ll be covering all three areas.

As is the focus of this site, I’ll be primarily focusing on minor/major league players, evaluating and ranking those players and finding the best way to communicate their ability and trade value.  In this metaphor, that makes the reader the GM.

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