Blake Snell has turned into one of the very best pitchers in baseball, and in order to understand how and why, we can start by just looking at the most recent batter he faced. A couple days ago, in the bottom of the seventh, Snell struck out Rowdy Tellez. The first pitch was a slider for a ball, at 88 miles per hour. The second pitch was another slider for a ball, at 89. The third pitch was a slider for a foul, at 87. Then came a fastball for a ball, at 96. Then a curveball for a whiff, at 82. Then a curveball for a foul, at 81. Finally, a fastball for a called strike, at 98. Tellez was gone, and Snell was replaced by Chaz Roe, having thrown exactly 100 pitches.

It’s not that Snell is only just beginning to emerge. His turnaround began in the middle of last year, and he hasn’t looked back. It’s last season that now looks more like a breakout. This season, however, Snell is a contender for the AL Cy Young award, even despite a DL stint that threatened to derail his progress. And while Snell was strong in the first half, before his bout of shoulder fatigue, he’s come back nearly unhittable. Between halves, he’s chopped more than a run off his ERA. He’s chopped a run and a half off his FIP, and he’s done basically the same with his xFIP. He’s added ten points to his strikeout rate while trimming his walks. Blake Snell is like a dominant closer who throws for six innings.

In one way, it’s not hard to see where Snell has improved. Yet his most recent changes are far more subtle. And they might well be the last changes he has to make for a long time. All that’s left for Blake Snell is to stay healthy.

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There are a lot of reasons why the Oakland A’s are bound for the playoffs this year. Matt Chapman has produced an MVP-level season, and the club’s bullpen is amazing. Khris Davis, Jed Lowrie, Matt Olson, and Marcus Semien are all having good years, as well.

Unsurprisingly, playoff teams tend to be composed of good players. All of the individuals mentioned so far, however, were also members of a club that won just 75 games a year ago. Their strong play this season has undoubtedly helped the 2018 version of the A’s, but the club has also gotten an important contribution from newcomer Stephen Piscotty.

The right fielder joined Oakland in a winter trade from the St. Louis following a difficult year and a half for him both on the field and off. Despite playing well following his call-up in the middle of 2015 until the All-Star break in 2016, Piscotty’s performance suffered after that. Off the field, Piscotty contended with an infinitely worse blow when his mother, Gretchen, was diagnosed with ALS in May 2017.

Piscotty took some time off that season to be with his family. On the field, he dealt with multiple DL stints and a trip to the minors. It’s hard, if not impossible, to understand what Piscotty was going through. One gets a sense of it, though, from Susan Slusser’s profile of the outfielder published this past May:

“It’s relatively hard to watch, to see the progression take place… I feel so bad. I want to put a positive spin on it, but there are things that are out of our control and we’re just trying to make the best of a bad situation, and hopefully with what we’re doing, we can one day get to a point where other folks don’t have to go through it.”

The trade to the A’s wasn’t a panacea. Piscotty continued to slump at the beginning of the season. His mother died in early May and Piscotty hit an emotional home run in his first game back.

A few weeks later, though, Oakland was still hovering around .500. At that point, Piscotty had reached base just six times in his 35 plate appearances after the homer. There was little indication that, over the next four months, Piscotty would be one of the best hitters in all of baseball. As the table below demonstrates, though, that’s precisely what happened.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Ryan Borucki, and Jacob deGrom, and Yefry Ramirez — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Ryan Borucki, Blue Jays

“When I was 12, I hurt my arm. I had ‘Little League elbow’ from throwing too many curveballs at a young age. Because my elbow didn’t feel so good, my dad canned my curveball. He was like, ‘Alright. You’re just going to throw a fastball and a changeup.’

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On Sunday, the Rockies shut out the Diamondbacks 2-0, thus completing a three-game sweep in Arizona that put the home team out of its misery as far as the 2018 season is concerned. The Diamondbacks spent 125 days with at least a share of first place in the NL West this year, more than any other team, and when they weren’t in first they were at least in Wild Card contention. And then the calendar flipped to September, and they made like Wile E. Coyote:

From August 31 to September 23, the Diamondbacks lost 17 out of 22 games — that’s a half-game worse than the Orioles, who have already lost 111 games overall — producing a playoff odds graph that, as I suggested last week, looks more like the sharp spires of Utah’s Bryce Canyon than the signature expanses of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. (As a Utah native who has never hiked the latter, I may be biased here.)

Anyway, ouch. The collapse has to rate as one of the more gruesome in recent history, though it isn’t as though the team frittered away a seemingly insurmountable lead or was a powerhouse to begin with. The Diamondbacks’ largest lead in the NL West was six games, and that was as of May 1, when they had just beaten the Dodgers for the second straight night to open a four-game series and climbed to an NL-best 21-8. They have the NL’s fifth-worst record since then, despite outscoring the opposition:

That May 1 win was just one of eight the Diamondbacks notched that month en route to an 8-19 record. They rebounded to go 19-9 in June, but spent the next two months meandering around .500, going 13-13 in July and 14-12 in August. Even so, they were in either first or second place in the NL West for all but one day of that two-month span of mediocrity.

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Officially, the Braves have sewn up the NL East, after having completed a four-game weekend sweep of the Phillies. The division was already more or less decided, but an unlikely Phillies sweep could’ve at least brought it down to the wire. Instead, the Phillies will play out the string, while the Braves get themselves set for the playoffs. On the one hand, the Phillies can’t be too disappointed — they would’ve been arriving a year or so ahead of time. On the other hand, the Braves arrived a year or so ahead of time. And this is a plot of the 2018 Phillies’ playoff odds:

As recently as August 7, the Phillies were in first place and 15 games over .500. Since then, they’ve gone an NL-worst 14-28, while the Braves have gone 27-19. Very obviously, when a team collapses, several components have to be involved. One thing I’ll highlight, though: dating back to August 8, according to Baseball Savant, Phillies pitchers have ranked seventh in baseball in expected wOBA allowed, while Braves pitchers have ranked 16th. And yet, Phillies pitchers have ranked 26th in baseball in actual wOBA allowed, while Braves pitchers have ranked third. Call it noise if you want. I’m certain that’s a part of it. The other part is defense. The Phillies’ team defense has let them down, and as the headline suggests, they’re on the verge of establishing a new record.

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The summer, rich with relevant amateur baseball, has ended. With it ends an important stretch on the player-evaluation calendar, one that is being weighed more heavily with each passing draft. We consider this checkpoint to be a sensible time to revisit our draft prospect rankings and make a sweeping update to the amateur wing of THE BOARD. A link to the 2019 draft board is here, but it can also be accessed through our brand new prospect landing page, which encompasses all of our content (shout-out to Sean Dolinar!) here.

Below we’ve attempted to anticipate some questions readers might have and to answer them as well as possible.

Q. Why is the summer so important for draft evaluation?

A. The high concentration of talent in collegiate wood-bat leagues and in scout-run high-school showcase events (which are designed to be evaluation-friendly) more closely approximates the talent environment of pro baseball. It’s hard to know if a high-school hitter facing a lot of suburban varsity, upper-70s fastballs is actually any good, but watch a prep hitter face Division I breaking balls and 90-plus mph fastballs for eight weeks, and you’re going to learn a lot about him.

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Early this year, Dallas Mavericks owner and perpetually frustrated baseball-team-owner-of-the-future Mark Cuban, during a team dinner, said this:

“I’m probably not supposed to say this, but, like, I just had dinner with a bunch of our guys the other night, and here we are, you know, we weren’t competing for the playoffs. I was like, ‘Look, losing is our best option. [Commissioner] Adam [Silver] would hate hearing that, but I at least sat down and I explained it to them. And I explained what our plans were going to be this summer, that we’re not going to tank again. This was, like, a year-and-a-half tanking, and that was too brutal for me. But being transparent, I think that’s the key to being kind of a players owner and having stability.”

The National Basketball Association was, shall we say, peeved at Cuban, fining him $600,000. Why? Because of the implication that the Mavericks were intentionally losing games.

“Yes, it’s not what you want to hear as commissioner,” Silver told reporters at a news conference following a league meeting. “I will say that Mark has a long track record of being provocative, and… I think he acknowledged it was a poor choice of words.

“When we looked at what was actually happening on the floor, which is most important to me, there was no indication whatsoever that his players were intentionally losing games. And so we were satisfied with that, and again, and we moved on.”

Despite the resolution of that particular incident, tanking continues. In fact, the league’s fine of Cuban more or less confirmed that, while intentionally losing games is forbidden, intentionally losing seasons is acceptable — as long as no one talks about it. And while, for years, we talked about tanking as a uniquely NBA problem, that’s not the case anymore. In Major League Baseball, the tank is on.

That raises some interesting questions: under the MLB rules, is tanking legal? Is tanking legal under the law? And if it isn’t, what’s the redress? Believe it or not, these are not at all simple questions. And so we’ll start by asking a simpler question — namely, what is tanking, anyway? Royals Review gives this definition, which seems good for our purposes.

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In all likelihood, Tyler Clippard’s numbers are better than you realize. In 696 career appearances encompassing 752 innings, the 33-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander has a 3.17 ERA. Moreover, he’s allowed just 6.5 hits per nine innings, and his strikeout rate is a healthy 10.0. Add in durability — 72 outings annually since 2010 — and Clippard has quietly been one of baseball’s better relievers.

He also has 68 saves on his resume, and the fact that nearly half of them came in 2012 helps add to his under-the-radar status. It also helps explain the size of his bank account.

“My biggest jump in salary was the year I had 32 saves, and that was essentially the only reason,” explained Clippard, who was with the Washington Nationals at the time. “My overall body of work was pretty good, but numbers-wise it wasn’t one of my better seasons. I had a bad stretch where I had something like a 10.00 ERA, so I ended the year with a (3.72 ERA). But because I got all those saves, I received the big salary jump in salary arbitration.”

Circumstances proceeded to derail the righty’s earning power. The Nationals signed free-agent closer Rafael Soriano to a two-year, $22M contract, relegating Clippard to a set-up role. While Soriano was saving games, Clippard was being paid less than half that amount while logging a 2.29 ERA and allowing 84 hits in 141 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday night, Melisa Reidy-Russell, ex-wife of Cubs shortstop Addison Russell, for the first time went public with specifics about the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of her former husband. The blog post contains explicit descriptions of spousal abuse, infidelity, and domestic violence. As a result of the allegations, Russell was no longer with the team by Friday afternoon. He was later placed on administrative leave.

Major League Baseball has been investigating allegations that Russell was physically abusive to his now ex-wife since last year — allegations which Russell denied at the time. It should be noted that Melisa is not the person who made those allegations last year; in fact, at the time, she declined to speak further with MLB investigators. Nevertheless, this is the first detailed statement we have from either party regarding the matter. It’s worth noting that the parties’ divorce was finalized on August 30, 2018.

Longtime sports and law analyst Lester Munson was struck by the nature of Melissa’ account:

“I must say that her statement is among the more compelling and persuasive statements I have seen as I have reported on these events over the last 25 years…. Her language is so forceful. It has such detail that you really begin to think there’s no question that all of this happened.”

I won’t reproduce Melisa’s account here in full, but some of her allegations merit further discussion. Note that, among those I won’t be discussing, are Melissa’s charges of infidelity. While perhaps indicative of a troubled relationship, infidelity is also generally not illegal or abusive. Accordingly, I’ve omited any consideration of it from the following.

Instead, let’s focus on what abuse was specifically alleged and what the legal ramifications might be for Russell. We don’t know exactly where all of this took place, but we do know that Russell played for the Cubs, so it’s reasonable to assume that some or all of the episodes mentioned in Melissa’s account occurred in Illinois. The following quotes are excerpted from her blog post. Please note that some of what follows is unpleasant.

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This is the third installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

For those still on the Team Entropy bandwagon, the massive tiebreaker scenarios for which we’ve been hoping are starting to feel like the Great Pumpkin. Some of us still have our blankets and aren’t yet ready to go home, but others have moved on to the candy and costumes.

The penultimate weekend is one that features a lot of scoreboard watching, as there’s not much at stake when it comes to head-to-head action. With apologies to the Phillies (1.2% playoff odds) and Diamondbacks (0.5%), we’re down to six contenders for five spots in the NL. The D-backs, who have lost 14 of their last 19 games to produce an odds graph that more resembles Utah’s Bryce Canyon than Arizona’s Grand Canyon, will still have some say in the playoff picture, as they host the reeling Rockies — the team with the most at stake in both the division and Wild Card races — for a three-game set starting on Friday night. The Rockies (82-70) were just swept by the Dodgers and have lost five out of six to fall 2.5 games back in the division race, the furthest they’ve been since August 10; our odds put them at 4.3% in that context. They’re 1.5 games behind the Cardinals (84-69) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot, with odds of just 21.1% there. They’re hoping to get Trevor Story, who left Monday night’s game with an elbow injury that was initially feared to be UCL related, back sometime this weekend, which could provide an emotional lift, but as we’ve already estimated the 25-year-old shortstop to claim about 80% of the remaining playing time at the position, that isn’t going to move the needle, odds-wise.

As for the teams that the Rockies are pursuing, the Dodgers (85-68), who have their largest division lead of the season, host the Padres. The defending NL champions now have a 95.6% chance at capturing their sixth straight division title. The Cardinals (84-69), who host the Giants, have a 76.0% chance at claiming that a Wild Card spot (more on the Central race momentarily).

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