The Braves have won plenty of games, and Ronald Acuna has hit plenty of homers. A common analytical writer trick is to open with an anecdote, to suck readers in before hitting them with statistics. I am a common analytical writer, but for this intro I want to focus on a Ronald Acuna single, leading off a game the Braves lost. And honestly, I don’t even care so much about the single itself. The Braves lost to the Cardinals on Monday. Acuna led off the bottom of the first with a ground-ball single off Miles Mikolas. The ball was hit well enough, but to understand what Acuna has already become, it’s most important to look at the process.

Acuna took a first-pitch strike. Happens sometimes. Especially leading off games. Mikolas throws an awful lot of strikes. Acuna was behind 0-and-1, but then he took a close fastball for a ball.

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With last night’s win, the Dodgers moved into first place by half a game over the Rockies. The clubs are equal in the loss column, and with just 11 games left in the regular season for Los Angeles, their playoff position appears precarious. A glance at our Playoff Odds page, however, might leave you with a different impression. According to the Playoff Odds, the Dodgers have a four-in-five chance of winning the NL West, with Colorado taking the division one in five times. Even in those cases where the Dodgers aren’t projected to take the division, they’re forecast to take a Wild Card spot in half the time. Despite teetering just on the edge of contention, the team has an 89% shot at making the postseason. Nor is that even the weird part: the Dodgers also feature a 17.8% probability of winning the World Series, the highest marks possessed by any team that’s not the Houston Astros.

We could glance at the Dodgers’ number, dismiss it as unreasonably high, and move on with our lives. Alternatively, as my colleague Alex Chamberlain has suggested, we could dig a bit deeper to see what’s going on. Let’s do the latter.

The logic implicit in the Playoff Odds isn’t all that difficult to figure out. The Dodgers are a very talented team with great players, so they would typically be expected to win more games than they lose — and also to win more games than the Rockies. Factor in a series against the Padres and a series against the Giants — while the Rockies play the Phillies and the Nationals — and the disparity between the clubs grows. The Dodgers are going to win a lot of simulated seasons under those circumstances.

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On July 20th, my colleague Craig Edwards wrote a piece for this site entitled “The Cubs Are on Pace for Their Worst Rotation Ever” in which he argued — in accordance with all observable objective reality at the time — that the Cubs were on pace for their worst rotation ever. It wasn’t an especially difficult case to make. At the time Craig published, the Cubs’ rotation — which still featured rather too much of Tyler Chatwood — had produced just 3.0 WAR as a group, which is the kind of figure that, as a measure of collective performance through nearly three months of a major-league season, is apt to make one physically recoil regardless of how you feel about pitcher WAR’s usefulness as a measure of overall performance. It was bad.

Since then, however, the Cubs’ rotation has been rather good, and that fact is the point of this article. Consider the following table, which presents the Cubs’ rotational performance up to and including the 20th of July, and also after that date (MLB ranks in parentheses):

You will agree, I hope, that the Cubs’ rotation has been better since Craig said they were bad, and will therefore turn your attention with me to why. Here is one reason: it has much less Tyler Chatwood in it. Here is another: it has much more Cole Hamels. These might sound like blithe (and, in Chatwood’s case, rather mean) things to say, and to some extent they are. But they are also true.

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Yasiel Puig can still provide a spark or two of electricity when needed. In fact, the 27-year-old right fielder put forth quite a jolt this past weekend, doing some of the best work of his career in two of the Dodgers’ biggest wins this season. On Friday night in St. Louis, he punctuated a taut pitchers’ duel between Walker Buehler and Jack Flaherty with a pair of solo homers that bookended the scoring in a 3-0 victory. On Saturday afternoon, he hit three more jacks, two of them of the three-run variety, in a 17-4 rout. The wins allowed the Dodgers to catch and overtake both the Cardinals in the NL Wild Card race and the Rockies in the NL West race, and while Sunday’s loss to St. Louis undid both, Puig and company beat the Rockies on Monday night to retake the division lead.

You like dingers? Of course you do. Here’s the supercut of Puig’s five, which came at the expense of Flaherty, Tyler Webb (no, not that guy), John Gant, Mike Mayers and Luke Weaver:

It remains to be seen how the Dodgers’ season ends up, but as Puig goes, the 2018 campaign has been a fairly calm one, largely devoid of the drama of years past. Fewer complaints about his overly aggressive baserunning or lack of interest in the cut-off man. No reports of tardiness. No teammates ripping him anonymously through the media. No benchings or trips to the minors. He did get suspended for two games last month for brawling with the Giants’ Nick Hundley — an episode which brought forth the usual performative pomposity from the pastime’s moral guardians — but that has been the exception this season, not the rule.

He’s still demonstrative, of course, showing off his tongue now and then, licking his bat, admiring his homers when he hits them, and even kissing hitting coach Turner Ward afterwards. The epic bat flips, and the controversies attached to them — to his, specifically, not to the inane culture war that surrounds bat flips in general — appear to be a thing of the past.

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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 — Jerry Blevins, Taylor Guerrieri, and Lance McCullers Jr. — on how they learned and/or developed their curveballs.

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Jerry Blevins, Mets

“The story starts as a kid. You start learning about curveballs, and the reason mine is big and slow is because I wanted to visualize it. A lot of those smaller breaking balls you don’t really see from the perspective of a pitcher. I wanted to see the big break. That’s why mine is how it is.

“Did anyone ever try to change that? All the time. Every step of the way, coming through the minor leagues. Even in high school and little league. They were always telling me, ‘Look, you need something tighter.’ I always fought against that, and I think it’s done me well.

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During their Friday night game in Milwaukee, the Pirates wouldn’t have expected Orlando Arcia to be such a nuisance. Out of every batter this season with at least 250 plate appearances, Arcia ranks third from the bottom in wRC+. Taking a deeper look at expected wOBA, based on Statcast-tracked batted balls, Arcia ranks dead last. Furthermore, and more importantly, Arcia wasn’t even in the starting lineup. The Brewers had Jonathan Schoop at shortstop. Arcia only entered during a top-of-the-fifth double-switch.

But by the time the evening was over, Arcia had finished 3-for-3 at the plate. The first time he came up, facing Chris Archer, he tried his damnedest to injure Archer and knock him out of the game.

And then, the second time he came up, facing Steven Brault, he drove in a couple of runners. It’s not uncommon for two runs to score on a double. It is uncommon for said double to come on a bunt.

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Clayton Kershaw is nearing the end of another very good season. For the third straight year, the left-hander will fail to record 30 starts or 180 innings, but his 3.05 FIP and 2.51 ERA, his 25% strikeout rate and 4% walk rate make him one of the 10-15 best starters in the game by rate — and still a top-25 pitcher after accounting for volume. That’s not quite the 2011-15, Cy Young-level Kershaw who averaged more than 7.0 WAR per season, but it’s still good enough that he’ll likely opt out of his deal with the Dodgers in favor of entering free agency.

As to why Kershaw is now only “really good” instead of “Death Star-level dominant,” the easy culprits are age and health. He’s 30 years old now and has spent time on the disabled list due to back problems in each of the last three seasons. Perhaps directly related to those issues has been the loss of velocity on the lefty’s fastball. The graph below shows average velocity by season and includes his slider for reference.

For a decade, Kershaw sat at roughly 94 mph with his fastball. Last year, he averaged 93. This season, that figure is closer to 91. In the meantime, Kershaw has slowly modified his slider to increase its velocity into the 87- to 88-mph range we see today. (If you want to read more about the evolution of that pitch, re-visit Jeff Sullivan’s post on the matter from back in 2014.) The point here is that the slider, while perhaps experiencing a bit of a dip relative to last year, has exhibited pretty much the same velocity this season as the past few, while the fastball has slowed down significantly. The slider has been a pretty consistently very good pitch since 2014, with whiff rates in the mid-20% range and swings on half of pitches outside the zone. The whiff rate is down to 15% and swings outside the zone are closer to 40%, but the pitch is dropping a bit lower and inducing grounders on 66% of batted balls. Due to a high infield-fly rate, only 9.3% of batted balls are flies that leave the infield. The result for Kershaw on the slider has been a 47 wRC+ consistent with his career numbers.

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Charlie Culberson isn’t enamored of the nickname he’s picked up this season. Complimentary as it may be, it’s a bit much for a humble utility player from Calhoun, Georgia — especially one who knows that the idea of “clutch” has largely been debunked. Which isn’t to say he’s been irrationally dubbed.

His overall numbers this year are solid, but they’re nothing to write home about. In 287 plate appearances, Culberson is slashing .280/.330/.494. It’s his flair for heroics that has led to the sobriquet “Charlie Clutch.”

“I had the couple of walk-off homers back in May and June, and people just kind of ran with that,” explained Culberson, who is in his first season with the Atlanta Braves. “It sounds good — it works well with the two Cs — but it’s not something I would give myself. I think you’re going to come off as a little conceited if you put ‘clutch’ next to your name. And if you think about it, it’s kind of a pressure thing. ‘Clutch’ is a pretty strong word, especially in sports.”

I pointed out to Culberson that the walk-off bombs aren’t the only impactful hits he’s had this season. In 71 plate appearances with runners in scoring position, he’s slashed a healthy .375/.437/.641. With two outs and runners in scoring position, those numbers — in a small sample size of 32 chances — are a stupendous .464/.559/.786.

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Over the last several weeks, we have seen and/or sourced opinions on a handful of pro prospects whom we felt should move up our pref list, some of them into the 50 FV tier. Rather than wait until this winter’s full-scale update of each team’s farm system to reflect updated opinions on these players, we’ve moved them now to more accurately reflect our present evaluations (we have thoughts on each of them below) and also because we consider several of them perfect touchstones for discussion this offseason.

We have also shuffled a handful of players on the top 100. Most of the players we’ve moved up haven’t experienced tool change per se but have outperformed similarly evaluated talents; those who’ve moved down thanks, meanwhile, did so largely due to injuries. This isn’t a comprehensive update, just what we consider to be a more accurate snapshot, grabbing the low-hanging fruit. There’s also a handful of players whom we debated moving but decided to leave alone for the moment because Eric will be seeing them a lot in the Arizona Fall League, allowing us to provide a more well informed judgment in the near future. In his AFL preview, Eric names most of these players.

A reminder: THE BOARD is here. We’ll also be updating our 2019 MLB Draft rankings in the coming days.

Moving Up into the 50+ FV Tier

Vidal Brujan, 2B, TBR – Brujan’s speed, bat control, size, and feel for the game are all comparable to the sort exhibited by Ozzie Albies, Nick Madrigal, Luis Urias, and other pint-sized dynamos who seem to be multiplying lately. We had an aggressive 45 FV on him preseason in anticipation of a solid full-season debut, but he blew even us away, stealing 55 bases with 63 walks and 68 strikeouts.

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Consider this your periodic reminder of how awesome Mike Trout is. Including Sunday’s games, the best player in baseball has recorded a 192 wRC+, a career-high that leads all qualified hitters. He’s in the top 10 in the major leagues in homers (T-9th), walk rate (1st), BABIP (6th), isolated power (1st), batting average (5th), on-base percentage (1st), slugging percentage (3rd), and WAR (T-1st). He just crossed the nine-win mark for the fifth time in his career. He only just turned 27.

Based on reports, it appears as though the Angels expect this kind of production to continue for a while longer. Consider:

It’s not difficult to see Anaheim’s logic here. Mike Trout may very well end up as the greatest player ever, and that’s the sort of player you want to keep around because, well, he’s better than everyone else.

Of course, when Heyman use the word “lifetime” what he really means is “until that point at which Trout retires.” The Angels, presumably, would like one of baseball’s best ever players to end his career having played only for their team. There’s probably some value in that. How much value is a question for a different time, but “some” is an adequate answer for the moment.

But what if we were to understand “lifetime” in a more literal sense. What if, hypothetically, the Angels wanted to sign Mike Trout to an actual lifetime contract? Could they legally employ Mike Trout until he shuffles off this mortal coil, likely having hit 20 homers in each year of his 80s?

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