It’s probably fair to say that batting average, as a shorthand for the quality of a hitter, has lost a bit of luster over the past decade or two as the public has become acquainted with metrics that correlate more strongly with scoring runs and winning games. That said, for a player to hit safely in 40% of his at-bats at any professional level is still incredibly rare and worthy of consideration.

Even if he weren’t to hit .400 this year, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would still be worthy of consideration. As the son of a Hall of Famer, as a 19-year-old who has already reached Triple-A, there’s plenty that merits attention. But he’s also batting .389 in the middle of August, which means that Guerrero the Younger has a shot at a historic season.

Over at MLB.com, Jim Callis went through the list of minor leaguers who have hit .400 in a season. It’s not long. Back in 1999, Erubiel Durazo was a 25-year-old playing in Arizona’s system after a few years in the Mexican League. He hit .404 in 409 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A before his callup to the majors. He hit .329 for the Diamondbacks, putting his average at .381 for the full season. Back in 1961, Aaron Pointer hit .401, but almost all of that time was spent in Class-D, which was low in the stratosphere of minor-league affiliates — sitting below not only Triple-A, Double-A, and Single-A, but also Class-B and -C. Given the state of the minor leagues before the 1960s, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the last time a a player hit .400 facing a reasonably high level of competition was Ted Williams in 1941, when he hit .406 on the season.

Guerrero missed time earlier in the year with a knee injury and has come to bat just 351 times this season. If he plays out the minor-league season and starts 13 of 15 game,s averaging 4.3 plate appearances per game, he’s only going to end up with around 407 plate appearances, which isn’t quite a full season. Assuming 3.1 PA per game over 136 minor-league games, one arrives at 422 PA as the standard for the high minors. Even if the Blue Jays brought Guerrero to the big leagues — more on that later — and gave him 20 starts, he’d still end up at roughly 493 plate appearances, just short of the 502 needed to qualify for the MLB batting title.

To determine Guerrero’s chances at hitting .400 in the minor league season, we have to approximate Guerrero’s talent level against minor leaguers. He has a .389 total batting average between Double-A and Triple-A with a .339 average in only 71 Triple-A plate appearances. With 56 presumed plate appearances left in the minor-league season, we can expect him to take six walks, which would be consistent with his 10% walk rate this season.

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Andrew Romine isn’t a pitcher, and yet, on Sunday, Andrew Romine pitched. So did — in another game — Chase d’Arnaud. Two days before that, Charlie Culberson took the mound, and so did — in another game — Andrew Romine. Scott Kingery and Roman Quinn pitched the day before that. Brandon Dixon pitched a few days before that.

I’m sure you’ve read by now more than enough summaries of how position players are making more and more appearances on the mound. It’s already happened 14 times in August alone, a month that isn’t even two-thirds complete. This is apparently just a part of the game now — rare, but no longer rare and so exciting. Some people still like it. Some people are troubled. Just in general, from the simplest perspective, it’s probably not good to have pitching done by non-pitchers.

I’m not here to make any suggestions. I’m not here to conduct any meaningful analysis. I just figured we’ve had enough position players pitching that we might as well take a quick look at some numbers. What’s actually taken place so far in 2018? Here are teams sorted in descending order of innings thrown by non-pitchers. You also see the total runs allowed by those position players.

The Diamondbacks and Brewers lead the way, at 6.1 innings. Viewed another way, I guess you could say the Diamondbacks and Brewers are in last place. Five teams haven’t yet had a position player pitch — the Pirates, Tigers, Yankees, Red Sox, and Rockies.

Now here are teams sorted in descending order of innings thrown by non-pitchers against them. You also see the total runs scored against those position players.

The Dodgers are in first, having batted for eight innings against non-pitchers. Over those eight innings, they’ve scored eight runs. Five teams have yet to face a position player pitching — the Pirates, Tigers, Giants, White Sox, and Mariners.

At last, here are team run differentials, considering only innings thrown by position players for and/or against:

In what we’ll simply refer to as “stupid baseball,” the Nationals are the winners, having outscored their opponents by six. The Dodgers have outscored their opponents by five. At the other end, the Phillies are running away with things. While they’ve scored three runs against position players, their own position players have combined to allow 14, yielding a run differential of -11. On the plus side, those runs are basically pointless, since almost every single position-player pitching appearance comes when the game has already been decided. The Phillies’ overall run differential might be 77 runs worse than the Braves’, but at least part of that can be ignored. When position players pitch, it’s hardly regular baseball.

Two teams remain who haven’t yet seen a position player pitch for or against. Those teams are the Pirates and Tigers. For those clubs, at least, the act might retain some of its novelty. There’s still another week and a half before rosters expand, and position players stop doing this. We’ll see if the two ballclubs hold out.

The Mariners lost two of three to the Dodgers over the weekend. It wouldn’t be fair to say the series was an accurate representation of the Mariners’ season, but it works as a convenient caricature. On Friday, the Mariners lost to the Dodgers by ten. On Sunday, the Mariners lost to the Dodgers by eleven. On Saturday, the Mariners beat the Dodgers, by one, in the tenth inning, on a walk-off balk. The Mariners avoided a sweep, and, indeed, the Mariners actually still have a better record than the Dodgers do. Over the three games, though, the Mariners were outscored by a margin of 27-7. Sunday was the Mariners’ worst loss of the year.

It’s hardly new information that the Mariners’ winning percentage and their run differential don’t exactly match up. This has been true for a matter of months, and it partly helps to explain why the AL West is as close as it is. But before we all just collectively get used to something, we should take a step back so we can reexamine precisely what’s been going on. Although the Mariners have slipped out of playoff position, they’re still within striking distance of both the A’s and the Astros. The Mariners are 3.5 back in the wild-card hunt, despite a run differential of -42. The Rays are 7.5 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of +10. The Angels are 8.5 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of +39. The Twins are 11 back of the Mariners, with a run differential of -22. Every year, there are run differential overperformers and underperformers. Yet this is far more extreme than is typical.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Mark Vientos, 3B, New York Mets
Level: Appy   Age: 18   Org Rank: 7   FV: 45+
Line: 3-for-3, 2B, BB

Notes
The Mets have made effectual changes to Mark Vientos’s swing since he signed. His stance has opened up and his hands set up in a way that has enabled him to lift the ball better than he did in high school, especially pitches on the inner half. His hands are more alive and powerful than they were a year ago, and Vientos has launched balls out the other way even when he doesn’t fully square them up. His size/build might eventually cause a tumble down the defensive spectrum (he’s been projected off of shortstop to, at least, third base since he was a high-school underclassman), which would mean power alone won’t be enough to enable him to profile. His early-career contact rates are positive, especially considering Vientos doesn’t turn 19 until December.

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There are a lot of things going right in Oakland these days. For one thing, there are early indications that a red-hot rental and home-ownership market might finally be cooling off, even if only slightly (and very tentatively), thereby bringing four walls and a roof somewhat closer to reach for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans in the Bay Area. For another, the unemployment rate continues to drop (although wage growth is persistently and irritatingly slow to rise). And for a third, the Oakland Athletics have been the best team in baseball (west of Jersey Street) for over a month.

For a team to go 22-8 over any stretch, as the A’s have just done since July 10th, when they were last 10 games back of the Astros, requires a lot of things to go right. It requires Tony Sipp to hang a slider to Matt Olson. It requires a sweep of Texas on the road. It requires, in short, a little bit of that fairy dust that seems to have been scattered around the HoHo Coliseum since the days when Scott Hatteberg and Jonah Hill wandered those green fields — and the A’s have had that and all these things. But it also requires a lights-out bullpen, which the A’s have manifestly also had in recent days, and it’s this feature of the club’s recent experience on which I’d like to focus for a moment, because it wasn’t clear at the beginning of the season that this level of bullpen success was something the A’s would achieve or even necessarily aspire to.

The 2017 edition of the Oakland bullpen mostly sucked. By FIP (4.44), it was the ninth-worst in the game, by ERA (4.57) the sixth-worst, and by WPA, which is as close a measure as you can get to answering the question “was this bullpen good when it counted?” it was rock-bottom — the very worst in the game. If all you knew about the 2018 edition of the A’s pen is that it would no longer include Ryan Madson (who recorded a 2.06 ERA last year), you might project that it would take a step backwards this year, even after accounting for the winter additions of xwOBA darlings Ryan Buchter, Chris Hatcher, and Yusmeiro Petit in a busy offseason for Billy Beane.

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Houston, you have a problem. Less than two weeks ago, I suggested that the battle between the A’s and Mariners for the second AL Wild Card spot was “practically the last race standing in the Junior Circuit.” At the time, the A’s — who had won 33 out of their last 44 games — were still 5.5 games behind the Astros, who themselves had rebounded from a five-game losing streak (July 25-30) to win six out of seven against the Mariners, Dodgers, and Giants. A change in the pecking order atop the AL West appeared unlikely; at the time, our playoff odds gave Oakland just a 1.0% chance of winning the division.

Since then, the Astros have lost seven out of nine to the Mariners, Rockies, and A’s, with Saturday’s 7-1 loss to Oakland knocking the two teams into a tie and marking the first time June 13 that the Astros didn’t have sole possession of first. Though they regained it with Sunday’s 9-4 win (Justin Verlander’s 200th, a topic I’ll address in an upcoming post), Houston now owns a 7-8 record in August, an 11-14 since the All-Star break, and 20-19 since July 1. Over all of those stretches, they’ve outscored their opponents (177-148 for the longest one), and they still own the AL’s second-best run differential (+200), but the defending world champions have nonetheless frittered away their advantage. They’re still the overwhelming favorites in the division, but even after Sunday’s loss, the A’s odds are up to 9.6%; in the season-to-date version, based upon this year’s stats instead of our depth-chart projections, they’re up to 25.6%.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the Astros are 10-15 against teams .500 or better since the start of July. They’ve fattened up by going a combined 8-1 against the White Sox, Tigers, and Giants, but lost three of five to the Rangers. Of their eight other series in that span, they’ve won just three (over the Angels, Dodgers and Mariners), lost three (two to the A’s, one to the Mariners), and split two (both against the Rockies). Overall, they’re just 37-36 against teams with records .500 or better, which is better than the A’s (31-39) but worse than the Mariners (38-35), and miles behind the Red Sox (37-22) and Yankees (36-24). Against those four teams, they’re a combined 19-20 this year; throw in the Indians (4-3) and they’ve played just .500 ball against the collection of teams they’ll have to beat in order to return to the World Series.

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Currently in possession of a 68-56 record and standing just a half-game out of first place in the NL West, the Colorado Rockies are in the midst of an objectively good season. Actually, the 2017 and -18 versions of the club have the best combined two-year winning percentage for any pair of Rockies teams in history, so one could make the argument that this is Colorado’s finest run ever. They’ve had two MVP candidates in the starting lineup both seasons and the starting pitching, long a team bugaboo, ranks ninth in the majors by WAR over that time period. Things in Colorado aren’t bad, per se.

But they could be better, it seems, without much effort. One real problem for the Rockies has been the team’s lack of offensive depth. It’s an issue they’ve shown little interest in addressing. And it’s costing them real wins.

With Nolan Arenado and Charlie Blackmon in 2017 and Arenado and Trevor Story in 2018, Colorado’s top-end offensive talent has been as dangerous as that of any team in baseball. Once you look past the top of the roster, though, things become a bit more frightening. Despite the team’s respectable raw numbers, the club’s offensive line reads like a gothic horror story after you factor in our old friend, Coors Field.

Even with the impressive performances by the brand names — most notably Nolan Arenado, who has been a legitimate MVP contender both seasons — the Rockies rank near the bottom of baseball in offense. At five of the eight main offensive positions — I’m not considering pitcher hitting or the DH for interleague road games — the Rockies have ranked 25th or worse in baseball by wRC+.

Now, DJ LeMahieu is a very ordinary offensive second baseman, outside of his .348/.416/.495 campaign in 2016, but he more than makes up for any bat-related shortfall with his defense. You can’t say that for the other positions ranking near the bottom of baseball.

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Last week, I wrote about fiduciary relationships in the context of Scott Boras and Jayson Werth, citing the seminal case of Detroit Lions v. Argovitz as a model to better understand an agent’s responsibilities to his client. (If you didn’t read that piece, you should, because it’s the prerequisite for everything which follows.)

Anyway, a number of commenters asked me to look at a slightly different configuration of the sports-agent fiduciary problem: what happens when an agent potentially has a conflict of interest which results from representing more than one player?

Before we answer, a few caveats. First, we are not analyzing actual situations here. This is not a guide on how to avoid disciplinary action by your state’s bar or your league’s player union. Second, this is a bird’s-eye view from about 50,000 feet, which is to say that we are oversimplifying things greatly. There is a lot more to it than what you see here, but submitting 20,000 words to my editor on conflicts of interest in fiduciary relationships (which is surprisingly possible) would likely draw his ire. Third, this is a broad overview based on American law. This is actually an international issue, which means that Canada and Australia, for example, have different rules. Finally, please don’t start a sports agency based on what you see here.

Now, moving on. There’s a couple of different ways to analyze the question posed above. On the surface, it may seem that having a multiple clients is not, in and of itself, a conflict of interest. And while that’s frequently the case, remember that a fiduciary owes a duty of loyalty to the beneficiary — to the exclusion of everyone else. As attorney Robert Kutcher explains,

Whenever one party places trust and confidence in a second person with that second person’s knowledge, it is possible that a fiduciary relationship is created. Such a relationship imposes on the fiduciary the duty to act in the best interest of the person who has placed his or her trust and confidence in the fiduciary. As a result, the fiduciary may not simply deal with that party at arm’s length, guided only by the morals of the marketplace.

It’s also possible to go to the other extreme. Since sports agents are fiduciaries, you could also argue that taking on more than one client is an inherent conflict of interest, because every minute dedicated to one player’s case is a minute not dedicated to another’s, to whom a fiduciary duty is owed. But that can’t be right either, because Scott Boras, for instance, has lots of clients. Most agents have multiple clients.

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Clay Buchholz has been rejuvenated in Arizona. Signed off the scrap heap in early May — the Royals had released him — the 34-year-old righty is 6-2 with a 2.47 ERA in 12 starts since joining the Diamondbacks. He twirled a complete-game gem on Thursday, holding the Padres to a lone run.

Health had been holding him back. Buchholz has battled numerous injury bugs over his career, particularly in recent seasons. Cast aside by the Red Sox after a tumultuous 2016 — a 4.78 ERA and a six-week banishment to the bullpen — he made just two appearances for the Phillies last year before landing on the disabled list and staying there for the duration. Frustration was clearly at the fore.

Truth be told, he’d rarely been his old self since a sparkling 2013 that saw him go 12-1 with a 1.74 ERA — and even that season was interrupted by injury. Given his travails, one couldn’t have blamed him had he thrown up his hands and walked away from the game.

That wasn’t in his DNA.

“No, this is what I do,” Buchholz told me earlier this summer. “I wasn’t ready to give it up. And while this offseason I told myself I wasn’t going to go through the whole minor league deal again, I swallowed my pride and did that for a little bit. It was for the best, because it helped me get to where I’m at now. It feels good to be able to go out there and throw without anything going on, mentally or physically.”

Buchholz made five starts in the minors before being called up, and he did so with a glass-is-half-full attitude. Read the rest of this entry »

As baseball analysis has grown, the advanced metrics have begun to find their way into television broadcasts more regularly. Announcers will occasionally mention win probability in terms of game context. Pitcher FIP will be brought up alongside ERA. The slew of batter statistics — wOBA, wRC+, ISO, et al — will be used to shed further light on hitters. Even fielding metrics like UZR and DRS have slowly started creeping their way into viewers’ homes, at least from national television broadcasts.

The one quantifiable area of the game that seems to get a little less sabermetric coverage from broadcasters is baserunning. Stolen bases are of course referenced, and Statcast sprint speeds are a relatable number that does occasionally get mentioned. However, the concept of baserunning runs (BsR) has not made its way to television in the way that its fielding counterparts have.

While the introduction of Statcast sprint speeds to the public is a step forward in understanding how good a baserunner is, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Rather, it tells something more akin to the potential baserunning value that a player can bring. Activating that potential involves no small amount of baserunning instincts for basically anyone who lacks Billy Hamilton’s speed. Looking at one player in particular from 2018 clearly shows us why in explaining runner ability, broadcasts need to go beyond sprint speed.

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