If one were to assemble a list of the major-league pitchers whose strengths are most well suited to surviving in Colorado, Kyle Freeland would appear among that collection of names — in particular, because he possesses both a good sinker and strong command. The sinker is important for inducing ground balls, which cause much less damage than balls in the air at Coors, due both to the altitude at which the park rests and the spacious outfield it contains. Command is important not only because mistake pitches are punished more swiftly at Coors, but also because walks tend to amplify the consequences of those mistakes.

Kyle Freeland had a modestly successful rookie season a year ago, getting a lot of ground balls and putting together a 4.57 FIP, perfectly average when factoring in his ballpark. He struggled a little to start the season, but over his last four starts, he’s defied the Coors Field stereotype by abandoning his sinking fastball and pitching up in the zone. So far, it is working.

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Sometimes, when players are first promoted, their teams try to ease them in. After all, there’s already plenty of pressure, and you don’t want to give someone the shakes. Might as well give a guy the opportunity to get comfortable. Other times, whether by design or necessity, there’s no such special treatment. A few weeks ago, Eric Lauer became the 27th starting pitcher to make his big-league debut in Coors Field. You might remember Lauer for half-smiling after allowing a grand slam. Lauer was charged with seven runs in three frames, which is not good, but the history of these debuts is predictably not good — starters have allowed 6.9 runs per nine innings. Coors Field is a beast. Nothing in the minors can prepare you for major-league bats in Colorado.

Sunday afternoon, 21-year-old Freddy Peralta became the 28th starting pitcher to make his big-league debut in Coors Field. It wasn’t really supposed to happen that way, but Chase Anderson fell ill, and Peralta was scheduled to pitch in Colorado Springs. He was actually going to pitch in front of his family for the first time in his career. The sudden change of plans abruptly sent everyone to Denver. One would assume that expectations were modest. And yet, in the bottom of the sixth, this is how Peralta left the mound:

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The Mariners own the longest postseason drought among major North American professional sports teams, and their chances of breaking that streak, which began in 2002, only got longer on Sunday. Robinson Cano was hit on the right hand by a pitch from the Tigers’ Blaine Hardy and suffered a broken metacarpal. While the full prognosis won’t be known until he sees a hand specialist on Tuesday in Philadelphia, the team will be lucky if he’s back before the All-Star break.

“They didn’t say anything about how long I might be out, but it is broken bad, so there might be surgery,” Cano told reporters after Sunday’s game.

Though they had merely been alternating wins and losses over the course of their past 11 games, the Mariners entered Sunday with a 22-16 record, matching their best start since 2004, and just 1.5 games behind the Angels in the race for the second AL Wild Card spot; with Seattle’s loss to Detroit and Anaheim’s win over Minnesota, the gap is now 2.5 games. Their Playoff Odds were at 13.9% entering Sunday. Without Cano for the foreseeable future, however, they’re down to TK.

The 35-year-old Cano has been the Mariners’ top position player thus far in terms of WAR (1.4) and second best in terms of wRC+ (128, on a .287/.385/.441 line) behind hot-starting Mitch Haniger. He’s been a remarkably durable player, averaging 159 games per year from 2007 to -17, visiting the disabled list only for hamstring strains in 2006 and 2017; he still played 150 game last year. That day-in, day-out durability has helped him rack up 2,417 career hits and 305 homers. Yes, he’ll be a Hall of Famer some day. He’s already seventh in JAWS among second basemen.)

Cano’s loss is a shame, first and foremost, for what it means to his team, but secondarily because he’s in the midst of a couple is-this-for-real trends about which we won’t get satisfactory answers for months. Inquiring minds want to know now!

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More or less, the public perception of a ballplayer’s value correlates pretty strongly with the reality of that player’s value. Mike Trout, for example, is almost universally regarded as the best player in the game. The numbers bear that out. José Altuve and Kris Bryant have both won MVP awards in recent years. Their records suggest that such accolades are warranted.

That said, an examination of the FanGraphs leaderboard for WAR since 2016 — which you can examine for yourself by means of this convenient link — reveals a case where perception and reality seem to diverge. Here are the top players from same:

You may be a more observant baseball fan than I am — or you may be from Cleveland (some people are!) — but I’m not sure that one out of every 10 reasonably aware fans would be able to say, without checking, that José Ramírez has recorded the fifth-most WAR of any hitter in the game over the last two-plus seasons. I’m not sure they would say he’s been more valuable than Josh Donaldson, Corey Seager, and Joey Votto over that span. But he has been.

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Mike Clevinger is a pretty great pitcher. He throws 94 mph. He’s cut his walk rate in half since last year. He’s been the best starter so far this season in one of the league’s best rotations.

Mike Clevinger also has pretty great shoes. They’re designed by by artist Jonathan Hrusovsky. Look at these things.

Ben Zobrist is a pretty great player himself. In his age-37 season, he’s recorded a batting line about 15% better than league average. He still plays multiple positions well. He’s the eighth-best player by WAR over the last decade.

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The Cleveland Indians were looking into the future when they selected Will Benson 14th overall in the 2016 draft. The powerfully-built Atlanta, Georgia product was a week shy of his 18th birthday, and his left-handed stroke — lethal against prep competition — was going to require polish if he hoped to reach his sky-high ceiling. Two years later, that process is well underway.

“You really wouldn’t,” Benson responded when I asked if now-versus-then film footage would show the same setup and swing. “In high school, you’d see a very athletic kid just competing and somehow getting it done. What you’d see now is more efficient movement — that’s a big thing I’ve worked on — and I’m maintaining better posture throughout my swing. Mechanically, making sure I’m getting behind the baseball is huge for me.”

Hitting the ball long distances isn’t a problem for the young outfielder. His power potential is a primary reason he went in the first round, and 545 plate appearances into his professional career — keep in mind he’s still a teenager — Benson has gone yard 23 times. The youngest position player on the roster of the Lake County Captains, he currently co-leads the low-A Midwest League with seven round trippers.

While Benson’s swing is conducive to clearing fences, his mindset is that of a well-rounded hitter. While he’s embraced launch-angle concepts, his focus is on simply squaring up the baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

The commissioner’s office has been concerned with the game’s pace of play for some time now — and for good reason, as the game has never been as slow as it was last season. Nor is time of game simply the issue. Perhaps more relevant in the smart phone, attention-deficit era, the game was never slower in terms of time elapsed between pitches.

This author believes patrons do not have an issue with the total time of game so much as that time elapsing between pitches and the increasing lack of action.

While the threat of unilateral pitch-clock implementation was not realized this offseason, other pace-of-play initiatives were, including the limitation of mound visits.

As I wrote back in February, some of the measures in place don’t really address pace. Cutting commercial time between innings, for instance, addresses total time of game — which is down five minutes to a flat three hours per contest — but pace of the action is probably more important.

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Cal Quantrill’s potential is considerable. Drafted eighth overall by the Padres in 2016 despite having undergone Tommy John surgery while at Stanford — he missed all of his junior year and much of his sophomore season — the 23-year-old right-hander possesses a combination of plus stuff and pitchability. Baseball America and MLB.com rank him as the fourth-best prospect in the San Diego system, while our own list — expect that soon — will have him a bit lower.

Quantrill, who is lauded as having one of the best changeups in the minors, has made seven starts for Double-A San Antonio this season and has a 3.52 ERA, a 3.29 FIP, and is striking out 8.2 batters per nine innings. He discussed his multi-pitch mix, and his take-no-prisoners approach, during spring training.

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Cal Quantrill: “I’m a fastball pitcher. Am I a power pitcher? I guess that would depend on how you want to define it. To me, a power pitcher is someone who attacks hitters, regardless of how fast their fastball is. They don’t fool around — they don’t play around with the edges of the strike zone — they go right after them. Getting ahead in the count is something I take great pride in. I try to make hitters get themselves out, and I want that to happen quickly so that I can go deep into games.

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The other day, Jay Jaffe wrote an article titled, “Does Any Team Want to Win the AL Central?” At that writing, the Indians were in first place, with a record of 17-18. The Indians subsequently won, which helped appearances somewhat, but still, the AL Central is a division with five teams, and right now not one of them is playing over .500. Four of them are playing under it. Every other division in baseball has more total wins than losses. The AL Central is there to pick up the slack. Or do whatever the opposite of picking up the slack is.

I can say this doesn’t come as the biggest surprise. The AL Central was projected to be lousy, with quite possibly the three worst teams in the American League. Now, the Indians, in the early going, have been a disappointment, but they’ll probably get it together. They’re supposed to be the juggernaut. The Twins are in there as a fringe contender, a team boosted by the realities of the unbalanced schedule. Anyway, one point: We assumed it would be bad. Another point: It’s looking really bad. There could be some kind of divisional history in the making.

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Between Sean Manaea, James Paxton, and the Dodgers’ collective effort, we’ve already seen more no-hitters in the first month-plus of this season than we saw in all of 2016 and 2017. Not only are we seeing more no-hitters, we are seeing a lot more games with pitchers taking no-hitters into the later innings. Ben Lindbergh discussed the phenomenon over at The Ringer.

This season, we’ve seen 28 no-hitters through five, 20 through six, and nine through seven, all record totals through this point in the year. As a percentage of games, no-hitters through five and six haven’t happened this frequently since 1968, and no-hitters through seven haven’t come this fast and furious since 1967. If it seems like you’ve heard about a new near no-hitter on a daily basis this season, you aren’t imagining things. Thus far, at least one team has been held hitless through five innings in 5.3 percent of games. At that rate, a no-hitter through five is more likely than not on any day with at least 20 teams in action.

With three no-hitters in tow, that means that so far, there’s been an 11% chance of seeing a no-hitter if the pitcher gets through five innings, a 15% shot if the pitcher gets through six, and a one-in-three chance through seven innings. These odds are considerably higher than historical norms for navigating a game without a hit. Near the end of Lindbergh’s piece, he mentions the notification process for MLB apps and the AP — that is, when MLB alerts followers to a no-hitter in progress.

Of course, one is under no obligation to abide by MLB’s preferences when it comes to following along. If that’s true, though, at what point in a contest should one start treating a no-hitter as a possibility? When’s the best time to tune in?

This is, ultimately, a subjective decision, of course. That said, there’s no harm to being as informed as possible about making that decision. First, let’s examine when pitchers lose no-hitters. Even with the increase in numbers this season, the removal of a starter who has a no-hitter in progress is still relatively rare, per Jay Jaffe’s article on the subject. We can take all starts and look at when starting pitchers lost their no-hitters over the last five-plus seasons.

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