Last night, Johnny Cueto dominated the Dodgers, punching out 12 batters in just six shutout innings. This wasn’t anything new, though; Cueto has been destroying opposing hitters all season long. Hitters are batting just .158/.218/.261 against him this year, good for a pitiful .217 wOBA, and he’s the easy early frontrunner for the NL Cy Young Award.

Cueto has been very good before, but this year, he’s taking things to another level. His 28% strikeout rate is nine percentage points higher than his career average, and seven percentage points better than his career-best, posted last year. Last night was his fourth start of the season in which he punched out 10 or more batters; he’d only done that three times in his entire career prior to 2014. Cueto has always been a strike-thrower with a roughly average strikeout rate who succeeded by limiting hits on balls in play, never walking anyone, and completely shutting down the running game with the game’s best pickoff move.

Cueto is still doing all those things, only now, he’s also posting the fourth highest K% of any starting pitcher in baseball; the only guys ahead of him are Strasburg, Darvish, and Tanaka. Combine an elite strikeout rate with everything else Cueto does well, and you have something close to perfection.

But this isn’t the amazing part. The amazing part is how he’s doing it.

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Two decades ago, Tim Hudson was finishing up his first season at Chattahoochee Valley Community College. He was a short righty with a sinker, a slurve and small hands. More than 3,000 innings later, that sinker’s still going — but the rest of Hudson’s arsenal’s evolved. And maybe the story of that change can tell us a little bit about sinkerballers, in general.

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Earlier this week, we took a look at the thought process of a club that opened the season with thoughts of contention might go through when deciding whether to shift gears and sell off assets. Today, let’s take a look some of the organizational processes that lead up to the final product – a significant deal that helps set such a club up for the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

Mike Trout has been baseball’s best and most dominant player since 2012, so a little earlier this year, when he encountered something of a slump, it was a newsworthy event. Trout seemed almost perfect in all things, so it raised more than a few eyebrows when he started striking out fairly often. Before Trout, there was no Trout, but between 2009 – 2011, no one accumulated more WAR than Evan Longoria. He was perhaps baseball’s best young player, and it’s not like he fell off a cliff after that; Trout was just better. But Longoria was an awesome young superstar, and he, too, seemed impervious to trouble. It would’ve been hard to imagine Longoria going through hard times.

Yet here we are now, and Longoria’s hit some hard times. Fortunately or unfortunately for him, it’s been partially masked by the whole Rays team dropping out of the race, and it’s not like Longoria’s been bad, but something’s been missing, something of great importance. He’s still just 28, so it’s probably too soon to talk about a decline, but to this point Longoria’s been without his greatest strength. And it’s a mystery as to why that is.

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Right or wrong, coming into the season we made an assumption around here: the Tigers were the favorites in the AL Central. More than that, the Tigers were the hands-down favorites in the AL Central, and they looked to have a pretty clear path to the postseason. At the start of the year, they were given a 61% chance to win the division, and as of this writing they’re alone in first place, five losses better than the second-place Royals. They’re on pace to finish with seven more wins than the next-best team, so in that regard, what was expected is coming true. Though the gaps aren’t yet large, we’re barely a third of the way through the schedule.

But, of course, the Tigers have been floundering, which hasn’t gone unnoticed. And you can notice something interesting on our Playoff Odds pages. On one page, we have projected standings using blending ZiPS and Steamer inputs. On another page, we have projected standings using season-to-date stats as inputs. There comes a certain time at which it might become preferable to use the most current data, and as far as the Tigers are concerned, the two different pages will tell you two different things.

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Whenever a player or team perform exceptionally well, a common question we get in our chats is, “is this the real player/team?” Usually, the answer is no — a hot streak is a hot streak, a fluke level of performance above the norm. Every so often, though, the outlook’s a little fuzzier, especially when it comes to individual players who might be having a breakout. Yet in the case of the Nationals’ rotation, we can declare unequivocally that no, this is not the real them. The Nationals’ starting rotation is good. Over 51.2 innings, between June 3 and June 10, Nationals starters didn’t walk a single batter.

And they struck out 51 batters. According to Adam Kilgore, that hadn’t happened in at least a century. We can say with certainty that the Nationals’ starters aren’t this good because, over that span, they posted a 1.66 FIP, putting them somewhere between Craig Kimbrel and peak Pedro Martinez. They achieved a strikeout-to-walk ratio of #UNDEFINED, and a K% – BB% of their K%. The Nationals’ rotation, without question, overachieved, but everyone who’s ever thrown a perfect game has overachieved, and those perfect games have drawn an awful lot of words. So the Nationals deserve some words of their own, before this streak is forgotten.

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I’m going to begin this column with an unremarkable looking fact.

When a Major League hitter has swung at the first pitch of an at-bat in 2014, the average OPS in that at-bat — not just OPS on first pitch swings, but the OPS for all at-bats in which there was a first pitch swing — is .710. The average OPS for an at-bat in which the batter does not swing is .708. For all intents and purposes, that is a statistical tie, and suggests that there has been no obvious advantage to pursuing either approach this year.

Here’s why that unremarkable looking fact actually is remarkable; if this lasts, it would mark the first season ever recorded — as far back as Baseball-Reference’s data for that split goes anyway, which for this specific number is 1988 — where the OPS on at-bats with a first pitch swing was higher than the OPS on at-bats with a first pitch take. For most of the last 25 years, it hasn’t even been close.

From 1988 to 2011, the advantage of the first-pitch take was consistent and constant. Sure, there were years where the advantage wasn’t enormous — in 2001, the gap in OPS was only seven points, and it was just nine points in 2004 — but the blue line and red line never really came that close to intersecting until 2012. That year, the gap fell to just two points, which still stands as the lowest recorded advantage for the first-pitch take over a full season in the last 25 years. Last year, the advantage jumped back up to six points, but that was still lower than any season prior to 2012. And now this year, the gap has not only disappeared, but it’s reversed course for the first time.

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If you were to conduct a casual survey among baseball fans about the greatest pitching season of all time, there’s no doubt that there’s a few years that would pop up regularly among the responses. Bob Gibson‘s 1968, certainly. Dwight Gooden‘s 1985 would probably appear, or Roger Clemens‘ 1986, or Steve Carlton’s 1972. Randy Johnson has a few years you could point to. So does Sandy Koufax. So does Greg Maddux. There’s not really a wrong answer there, because it’s not a question that can be answered. Run environment and park effects have to be measured, and we can do that to some extent, but we can’t really account for the fact that some people prefer the quiet mastery of Maddux to the flame-throwing mastery of Johnson, or the fact that whether you were 15 in 1968 or still decades away from being born will absolutely color your memories of particular eras.

For me, the answer is a tie. It’s either Pedro Martinez‘ 1999 or Pedro Martinez‘ 2000, and it’s not hard to explain why. They were legitimately great seasons no matter how you looked at them, and they occurred right in the face of some of the highest offensive environments we’ve ever seen. It’s why Martinez’ ERA+ in 2000 was 291 while Gibson’s 1968 was 258, despite Gibson’s raw ERA of 1.12 being considerably lower than Martinez’ 1.74. And for me, I lived in Boston at the time. I was in college. I lived within walking distance of Fenway Park. I can’t say I specifically remember any starts of Martinez’ I saw in person in those two years, but I’m sure I saw at least a few.

Martinez, in those two years, did something no other qualified pitcher since 1900 has ever done before or since. He struck out more than 11 per nine, and he paired that with a walk rate below 2.00. That’s a bit biased towards recent pitchers, since the game as a whole simply didn’t strike out decades ago like they do now, but that doesn’t really change how fantastically impressive it was.

Now, realize this: This isn’t a post about Pedro Martinez. It’s a post about Stephen Strasburg, who, through his first 14 starts of the season, is on pace to do exactly that… not that anyone seems to be noticing. If it’s possible to be both a superstar and feel like a disappointment, considering how hyped Strasburg was as the No. 1 pick in the 2009 draft, he’s managed to accomplish it.

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You may have seen mention of it. Considering it happened during a game between two of the worst teams in baseball, you’ll be forgiven if you hadn’t.

The Houston Astros visited the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday. The Astros came out strong, getting two runs in each of the first two innings. They wouldn’t score any more. The Diamondbacks would, however. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Houston was leading 4-3. Lefty Tony Sipp was coming off a fairly effective seventh inning and was brought out again to face Arizona’s three best hitters. Well, sort of. Here’s how the eighth inning played out: Read the rest of this entry »