It’s kind of hard to pick apart Brett Lawrie’s game right now. Yes, the strikeout rate is up some and the walk rate down even further, but he already has a career-high in home runs, his isolated slugging is up and he is once again posting roughly a league-average weighted runs created plus (98), more than enough to make him a valuable player thanks to his quality defense at both second and third.

With that said, Lawrie really could stand to get out of his own way a little bit.

This isn’t one of those pieces suggesting a high-energy player tone down the intensity or anything like that, because that’s part of what makers Lawrie the Stone Cold Steve Austin-if-Red Bull-were-beer of baseball. But Lawrie is on the disabled list after fracturing a finger on his right hand, the second time this month he was caught on the hands with a pitch.
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Life is good for Robinson Cano. He likes his new city, and his new city likes him back. He’s secured the contract of a man’s wildest dreams, and he’s a leading vote-getter for the 2014 All-Star Game. He owns one of the top batting averages in all of baseball, and while Cano’s new team isn’t leading its division, it is in the race for the first time in years, with more total wins than Cano’s old team. There isn’t a lot of disappointment to be found anywhere. Ten-year contracts tend to lead to disappointment, but generally not in Year One, and this many months in, Cano is all smiles.

And Cano has been one of the better players in baseball. He has been the Mariners’ best position player, among a unit that needed a player like him. There’s just that one part of his statistical profile. Time and time again, people have been told that Cano is a line-drive hitter, not a power hitter. Well, it’s almost July, and Cano has four home runs. A year ago, he hit 27. Right now he has as many homers as Billy Hamilton, and we’re no longer dealing with insignificant sample sizes. Cano has never been considered a true power hitter, but he’s never been further from being a true power hitter as he is today.

Naturally, one gets to wondering. It’s not like Cano’s skills have eroded. His overall approach is the same, and he’s still drilling liners. You just wonder about the balls flying over the fence. Leaving New York doesn’t explain everything — a year ago, Cano actually hit five more dingers on the road. Seattle has long played lefty-friendly. There has to be more behind the power drought.

The easiest place to start is with Cano’s balls in play. Last year, 44 percent of them were grounders. He spent the prime of his career hovering in the mid-40s. This year, he’s up to 55 percent, and while it looked like Cano was coming out of it with a more air-friendly May, he’s gone back to hitting grounders in June. A change this sudden, to this degree, is notable, and obviously you can’t hit the ball out on a grounder or most liners. You turn your attention to Cano’s swing.

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Close your eyes for a second and try to visualize the best defensive first basemen in baseball. The guy with the most range, diving to snag grounders, falling over dugout walls to snare popups and chasing guys down to make tags.

What did you see?

OK, the title of this post may have tipped you off a bit, but if not for that, you probably would have visualized someone like Adrian Gonzalez. Maybe it would be more along the lines of Joey Votto, Paul Goldschmidt or Anthony Rizzo. If you didn’t put a specific name to the face, it would probably be a younger guy, pretty athletic, maybe 6-2/220, with more speed than the average first basemen who could swipe a few bags over the course of a season.

Probably wouldn’t have visualized this behemoth:

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One of my favorite tools here at FanGraphs is our Custom Leaderboard section, as it allows anyone to create a page to keep track of the performance of any player or group of players, whether it’s just guys on your fantasy team, upcoming free agents, or some random collection of players that you happen to care about. It’s a super helpful resource, and I have a handful of saved reports that I reference all the time.

And for the next six weeks or so, I’ll be adding another one to the list, because now that we’re just a few days away from the start of July, MLB’s trade season is upon us, and I wanted an easy way to keep track of who might be available at each position. So, I made a 2014 Trade Chip custom leaderboard. That links goes directly to the list of position players, but you can just click pitching up at the top to see the available arms as well. And the positional tabs up top will let you view players at various spots around the field.

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Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law on Friday that gives local governments access to $13 million annually in funding for the construction or renovation of a professional sports facility. To be eligible, the sports facility must be owned and operated by a local government or owned by a private entity that’s located on land owned by a local government.

Under the general terms of the new law, the Tampa Bay Rays would be eligible as a beneficiary of the new funding stream, as Tropicana Field is owned by the City of St. Petersburg. Same for the Miami Marlins, which play in a ballpark built largely with Miami-Dade County bonds. Then there are the nine teams that play in spring training facilities in Florida (Phillies, Blue Jays, Astros, Rigers, Rays, Pirates, Orioles, Mets and Twins) and the 14 minor league teams in Florida that play in a ballpark owned by — or on land owned by — the local government.

But an amendment to the bill added as it made its way through the Florida legislature carves out facilities used by MLB and MiLB franchises unless and until MLB changes its rules to permit Cuban ballplayers to sign as free agents if they defect from Cuba directly to the United States. Under current rules, MLB requires players to defect and establish residency in a non-U.S. country before coming to the United States to sign as a free agent.

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“A chance — that’s the biggest thing, an extended chance,” that’s all Jesse Chavez wanted. For a pitcher who was never once on any team’s top 20 prospect list, a pitcher who has taken seven years and five organizations to pick up his first 300 innings, a pitcher who was an unknown until this year — an extended chance was a lifeline. The 30-year-old has finally gotten that now with Oakland, and he’s grateful. But the A’s might also have given him some freedom that has allowed him to shine. His pitches, and their grips, can help tell the story.

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You know the Sean Doolittle backstory by now, most certainly. The short version for those just joining us is that Doolittle was a first-round pick in the 2007 draft as a first baseman, made it all the way to Triple-A in 2009, then missed more than two years with knee and wrist injuries before converting to the mound full-time in 2012. He made it to the big leagues that year, was a successful setup man in 2013, and now he’s spent the last month as the closer for the best team in baseball.

Oh, and he’s also doing something you’ve never seen before. There’s that, too. Doolittle has struck out 50. He’s walked one. One. Vidal Nuno also has 50 strikeouts; he’s walked 22. We do a lot of complicated math here, but sometimes it’s easy. That’s a 50/1 K/BB. It is, unsurprisingly, the best seasonal K/BB of the more than 27,000 pitcher seasons of at least 30 innings we have in the database. (If you prefer K%-BB%, it’s only the fourth-best ever, but only second-best in 2014 alone. You go, Dellin Betances.) That it’s all but certainly unsustainable over a full season isn’t the point; the point is that this is a real thing that’s happened, and we need to understand why.

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Last week, I wrote that the best suitors for David Price were primarily lower revenue clubs who might not be able to afford his 2015 arbitration raise, leading to the possibility that Price could be traded both this summer and again this winter. Then, on Sunday, the Cardinals made that column obsolete. On the same day, they placed both Michael Wacha and Jaime Garcia on the disabled list, with Wacha’s injury having a pretty open-ended timeline and raising the question of whether or not St. Louis can count on him returning this year.

Suddenly, the team with the most buying power of any team in baseball now has a glaring and immediate need for an impact starting pitcher. And David Price ending up in St. Louis almost feels inevitable.

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What follows represents an attempt by the author to utilize the projections available at the site to identify the five starting pitchers whose per-inning WAR projections have most improved since the beginning of the season.

For every pitcher, what I’ve done is first to calculate his preseason (PRE) WAR projection prorated to 150 innings, averaging together Steamer and ZiPS forecasts where both are available. What I’ve done next is to calculate the prorated WAR for every pitcher’s rest-of-season (ROS) WAR projection (again, using both Steamer and ZiPS when available). I’ve then found the difference in prorated WAR between the preseason and rest-of-season projection.

When I attempted a similar exercise two months ago, I used updated end-of-season projections instead of prorated rest-of-season ones. The advantage of the latter (and why I used it on last month’s edition of this post, as well) is that it provides the closest available thing to an estimate of any given player’s current true-talent level — which, reason dictates, is what one requires to best identify those players who have most improved.

Only those pitchers have been considered who (a) are currently on a major-league roster and (b) have recorded at least 20 innings at the major-league level and (c) are expected to work predominantly as a starter for the duration of the season. Note that Projection denotes a composite Steamer and ZiPS projection. PRE denotes the player’s preseason projection; ROS, the rest-of-season projection. Inning estimates for both PRE and ROS projections are taken from relevant pitcher’s depth-chart innings projection. Data is current as of Tuesday.

5. Tom Koehler, RHP, Miami (Profile)
Projection (PRE): 154 IP, 6.4 K/9, 4.1 BB/9, 1.0 HR/9, 4.56 FIP, -0.1 WAR
Projection (ROS): 81 IP, 6.7 K/9, 4.1 BB/9, 1.0 HR/9, 4.53 FIP, 0.1 WAR

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For all of the natural ebbs and flows of individual player performance from year to year, the game’s ruling class – the elite among the elite, the upper crust – is a fairly closed society that remains fairly static from year to year. Any given year might have its Yasiel Puig joining that group, or its Albert Pujols conceding his seat, but the core membership is fairly predictable. What might happen in any given season, however, is one of these elite players taking a temporary step up in class, reaching an even more rarified air than ever before. Let’s continue to take a deeper look at the 2014 performance of some of the game’s elite, and determine whether they in fact have taken things to the next level. Today, Tim Hudson.

Your first thought might be, Tim Hudson – elite? A brief perusal of his career numbers might be in order. Does 212-114, 3.41, career ERA+ of 124 grab you? His 2013 season (8-7, 3.97) might not look so hot on the surface, but his FIP was over a half-run lower, and his cumulative record in his three previous seasons with the Braves was 49-26. Wins and losses are obviously far from the only or preferred way to evaluate a starting pitcher, but Hudson sure has had a knack for winning – and not losing – throughout his career. 16 years in the big leagues, 11 times as an ERA qualifier, and he has reached double digits in losses exactly three times, and has a career high loss total of 12. He’s played on a lot of good teams, true, but he has played a large role in making those teams good.

Hudson was a 6th round draft pick out of Auburn in 1997, and was just as well known for his bat as his arm as an amateur. John Poloni, who was unfairly negatively singled out in the “Moneyball” book, believed in him as a pitcher and pushed hard for his selection. Depending on how things play out following Hudson’s career, Poloni just might be responsible for signing a Hall of Famer for a relative pittance.

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