Doug Fister has only made more and more sense. He was most surprising in the early days, the successful days, the days when Fister was a command-first No. 2. He was never considered much of a prospect, because prospect evaluators love them some velocity, but Fister made it work through his pinpoint location. He was, in a sense, in the same mold as Dallas Keuchel and Kyle Hendricks. And then, gradually, Fister got worse, as his repertoire eroded. He lost what speed he had, and he lost his results, having exceeded his own narrow margin of error. Fister joined the Astros in 2016 as a roll of the dice. He wasn’t very good, and then he was a free agent. He didn’t get a job until the desperate Angels signed him in May. He was dropped a month later. Fister became what he was going to become, having gotten to the end of the line.

Yet one last opportunity beckoned, one with the Red Sox. Dave Dombrowski had seen Fister’s best self, and he needed a pitcher. Over Fister’s first month, he allowed nearly a run per inning. A shift to the bullpen ended on July 31 anyway, and Fister has taken off. He’s thrown seven games, and he’s looked like…classic Doug Fister. I mean that. Seemingly out of nowhere, Doug Fister has turned back the clock.

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As the only league among the four major North American sports to operate without some form of a salary cap, Major League Baseball has always been in somewhat of a unique position. Without the traditional ceilings on team salary, the sport has always left itself open to financial disparity and all the articles and opinions that go along with it.

For 20 years, baseball has tried to curb big spenders through the use of luxury taxes. Six teams paid a total of $70 million in taxes this past year, and baseball decided to continue hammering away on high-payroll teams in the new CBA approved last December. While the financial penalties maybe caused teams to think twice before spending on the free-agent market, the luxury tax never directly affected a team’s ability to access one key pipeline of talent: the Rule 4 (or, June amateur) draft.

This all changed last December. As noted by Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper, exceeding the luxury-tax threshold will result in draft-related penalties beginning in 2018. The full list of sanctions is described on page 110 of the 2017-2021 Basic Agreement, but for those who don’t have that kind of time, they can be summarized in two points:

• If a team’s actual payroll exceeds $237 million in the 2018 season (increasing to $250 million in 2021), their highest draft pick will be moved back 10 places.
• If the offending team’s highest draft pick falls in the first six picks of the draft, their second-highest draft pick will be moved back 10 places instead.

For the first time, Major League Baseball has tried to affect a team’s ability to acquire amateur talent after spending large amounts of money. If a team wants to devote an outsized quantity of money (compared to the rest of the league) to acquiring established players, they have to risk the potential of their future by seeing a major source of young talent dry up slightly. However, if you look closely at the new penalties, you see less of a leash on high-payroll teams and more of an inadequate deterrent that will fail to provide any checks at all.

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Baseball is getting chippy.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that the Red Sox were being investigated by Major League Baseball for violating the league’s rule against using electronics in the dugout. Specifically, the Yankees filed a complaint alleging the Red Sox used an Apple Watch to receive information from their replay staff, who had used the video reviews to decode the Yankees signs. According to the report, the Red Sox did not deny the allegation, instead going with the playground favorite “they do it too” defense, filing a counter complaint stating the Yankees using a YES Network camera to steal signs.

Then yesterday, Athletics third baseman Matt Chapman got ejected after arguing with Angels catcher Juan Graterol over, you guessed it, sign stealing.

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I don’t know what brings you joy. Baseball, probably, or else you’re hopelessly lost on the internet. Chances are, you’re a fan of a team, so you root every day for that team’s success. Me, I’m less a fan of a team, and more a fan of players and subjects. One of the things that’s been bringing me joy is observing Mike Trout climb up the WAR leaderboard. It’s amusing because, obviously, Trout missed about six weeks due to injury, and it’s hard, obviously, to accumulate WAR when you miss a quarter of a season. Trout is amazing.

There’s a slightly lesser version of that same exact story. The best pitcher in baseball, by WAR, is Chris Sale. That’s not very surprising, recent stumbles aside. Yet, the second-best pitcher in baseball, by WAR? That would be Corey Kluber, who missed a whole month due to a back problem. Even though a month is a long time, in baseball terms, Kluber has put that unfortunate episode behind him, even threatening to create something of a Cy Young race. Kluber, generally, has been pitching like Corey Kluber. Just, an even better version. The Kluber of today might have baseball’s best pitch.

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Full disclosure: as you might be aware, I authored a book on the Pirates — Big Data Baseball — which was published in 2015. As a result, it’s possible that I write this piece with some bias.

Still, I wouldn’t have entered into that book project if I thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were run by fools, engaged in uninteresting practices, and set for a catastrophic 2014 season. To work on the project, I had to believe the Pirates were a team likely to enjoy more success.

I pitched the book following the 2013 campaign, after the Pirates’ first winning season since 1992. I felt it was a compelling narrative: the Pirates ended the longest consecutive streak of losing seasons in North American pro sports history by residing on the cutting edge of analytics and innovating new practices (like having a quant embedded in the clubhouse) while also remaining attentive to the human element. It was a story of creativity, collaboration, and peak Andrew McCutchen.

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At some point, there was going to be a correction. Pitchers have been taught forever to work off their fastballs. If not for the fastballs, after all, to what would the other pitches be compared? The fastball has always been the primary pitch, and yet it was something of an unexamined position. How many fastballs are too many fastballs? How few fastballs are too few fastballs? Do you actually need to throw fastballs the majority of the time?

This is the age of information, so this is the age of experimentation. Just the other day, Trevor Bauer was critical of Avisail Garcia’s expectation of a fastball. Tom Verducci wrote up a whole feature earlier in the year about the Yankees’ fastball avoidance. One thing we know is that the fastball rate is going down.

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Daulton Varsho is a Cheesehead at heart. He hails from Chili, Wisconsin, attended high school in nearby Marshfield, and played collegiately at UW-Milwaukee. Summer ball also found him close to home. The 21-year-old catcher strapped on his gear for the Eau Claire Express, in the wood-bat Northwoods League.

He’s currently hanging his hat in the Pacific Northwest. Selected in the second round of this year’s draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Varsho is beginning his career with the short-season Hillsboro (Oregon) Hops. The environs have been to his liking. With the Northwest League playoffs set to begin, Varsho’s left-handed stroke has produced a .311/.368/.534 slash line.

His rooting interests have largely been geographic, but there is a notable — and perfectly plausible — exception. Varsho is a Packers fan, and he went to Badgers games growing up, but he didn’t root for the Brewers. His baseball allegiances were with the Philadelphia Phillies, with whom his father — former big-league outfielder Gary Varsho — was the bench coach during his childhood.

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Even just a couple months ago, Justin Verlander was a name. He was a name with a contract and diminished results, and his desirability on the market was low. Teams were interested in him, for sure — teams would always be interested in someone with Verlander’s background. Yet his performance wasn’t matching up with his cost, and so it didn’t seem like a trade would be likely. The Tigers didn’t want to give their legend away, yet contenders didn’t want to pay for someone whose best days were long gone.

Ultimately, Verlander did get traded. The Tigers, admittedly, paid him down, but the Astros picked up the bulk of the money, and they even gave up three legitimate prospects. The Astros paid for Verlander as if Verlander were an ace again. And for the past several weeks, Verlander has resembled an ace. He made his debut for Houston on Tuesday, and he allowed one run over six innings. Verlander’s gotten back to looking like one of the best in the world. So, what changed? What convinced the Astros to pay what they did? Outside of their own pitching issues, I mean. Verlander, it won’t surprise you, has made a couple tweaks.

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Manny Machado turned 25 on July 6. If he checked his stat line after that day’s game, he probably wouldn’t have liked what he saw. A little over halfway through the season, Machado had come to bat 350 times and hit 16 homers, which is pretty good. He was also slashing .215/.283/.418, though, equivalent to just an 80 wRC+.

That didn’t seem right. After all, the young infielder entered the season with a 119 career wRC+ — and had actually produced an even better 130 mark between 2015 and -16. At Machado’s age, hitters tend to improve, not collapse.

Machado’s performance gave the impression that something might be wrong, that something might need to be fixed. Whether that impression was correct at the time, it’s moot now: over the past two months, all he’s done is hit.

Here are a few relevant hitting stats for Machado from earlier this season compared to 2015 and 2016, when he was one of the better hitters in baseball.

While Machado began the season striking out a bit more often than in recent seasons, his walk rate was fine. And while his power took a dip, it still compared favorably to the league average. There’s nothing here that would reduce Machado from one of the top-20 hitters in baseball to one of the 30 worst.

Here, though, are some other relevant stats from those same time periods.

The batting results from that period through July 6 line are poor — but almost entirely a product of a lower batting average on balls in play. Now, that lower BABIP could reveal some decline in Machado’s game. An injury or change in approach. And if the drop in BABIP were paired with other observable differences, it might warrant further consideration.

And there were some differences. For example, while most of Machado’s batted-ball profile — including pull percentage, infield flies, ground-ball rate — remained largely unchanged, he was swinging outside of the zone a little more and making a little less contact. His swinging-strike rate had increased from 8.3% in 2015 and 2016 to 11.5% in the early going this year. The combination of some extra strikeouts and reduced power certainly affected Machado’s production. Again, though, their effect was pretty minor compared to the massive drop in BABIP drop.

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With September call-up season upon us, the Phillies have summoned top prospect J.P. Crawford from the minor leagues. He made his debut last night, starting at third base and notching his first career hit. Prior to his call up, Crawford hit .243/.351/.405 in Triple-A this year, including a powerful .284/.385/.517 since July 8th.

Crawford is an extremely talented player who can provide value in more ways than one. His minor-league batting lines don’t necessarily jump off the page, but in the context of his age and defensive value, they’re rather impressive. That’s why he’s been appearing near the tops of prospect lists — including KATOH’s — for years. Baseball America ranked him among the top-14 prospects each of the last three seasons, while Baseball Prospectus ranked him No. 4 each of the last two. Eric Longenhagen ranked him No. 9 in the preseason and No. 34 in his summer list.

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