The defining characteristic of that period in baseball now known as the PED Era isn’t particularly hard to identify: it was power. Home-run totals increased across the game. The long-standing single-season home-run record was broken multiple times in a few years. And, of course, drug testing ultimately revealed that many players were using steroids and other PEDs specifically to aid their physical strength.

Attempting to find a similarly distinctive trend for the decade-plus since testing began isn’t as easy. For a while, the rise of the strikeout seemed to be a candidate. A combination of increased velocity, better relievers, and a bigger strike zone has caused strikeout rates to increase dramatically in recent seasons.

Over the last couple years, though, we’ve also seen another big rise in homers — a product, it seems, both of a fly-ball revolution and potentially juiced ball. We’ve also witnessed the aforementioned growth of the strike zone begin to stagnate, perhaps even to reverse.

The combination of the strikeouts with the homers over the last few years has led to its own sort of trend: an emergence of hitters who record a lot of strikeouts, walks, and homers — each of the three true outcomes, in other words — without actually hitting the ball in play all that often.

The players responsible for this development are the sort who swing and miss frequently while refusing to offer at pitches on which they’re unable to do damage. To get a sense of who I mean, here’s a list of the top-10 players this season by percentage of plays ending in one of the three true outcomes.

That’s a pretty representative collection of the sort of hitter I’m talking about. Not only are these guys refusing to hit balls in play, they’re being rewarded for it: all but two have recorded distinctly above-average batting lines.

And this group of 10 is representative of a larger trend across the league. Consider how TTO% has changed in the 20-plus years since the strike.

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Today, the Phillies will add Rhys Hoskins to their roster, bringing him to the Majors as a left fielder after failing to find a trade partner for first baseman Tommy Joseph. A few months ago, manager Pete Mackanin said the two couldn’t coexist on the same National League roster, but after trading Howie Kendrick and losing Aaron Altherr to the disabled list, the team decided it was better to give Hoskins an audition at a spot they needed help than simply bench Joseph to install Hoskins at first base.

I don’t know how the left field experiment is going to go. Based on the outfield performances of other “how bad can he be out there?” first baseman, I’m guessing this will last until Altherr returns, and then everyone will agree they don’t really want to see Hoskins running around the outfield anymore. But despite the possibility of some pretty bad outfield defense, Hoskins still belongs in the Majors, because he’s probably already the team’s best hitter.

From our depth charts, here are the projected rest of season wOBAs for the Phillies position players.

It’s not even all that close, with Hoskins 30 wOBA points ahead of the next best projected hitters. Of course, this projection is entirely based on his minor league performance, so there’s more expected variance around that mean, but it’s pretty obvious Steamer loves Rhys Hoskins. And for good reason; he walks, doesn’t strike out, and hits for power, which are basically the three things you want to do at the plate.

While he’s been a little older than you’d like prospects to be at each level along the minor league ladder, Hoskins’ results have been so overwhelming that Steamer thinks he’s ready to step in and hit big league pitching from day one. As Eric Longenhagen has noted, some scouts have questioned the swing and the power he’ll show in the Majors, but the concerns raised about him are the same ones that were raised about Paul Goldschmidt when he was mostly overlooked as a prospect. You don’t want to project anyone to get to Goldschmidt’s level, but there are some similarities in their scouting profile and minor league performances, so it’s probably best not to buy comments about Hoskins’ limited upside just yet.

If he can hit like Steamer thinks he can hit, he’s going to be the Phillies first baseman for a good long while. And the Phillies offense might be a lot better tonight than it was yesterday.

Earlier this week, we ran what was originally planned as the final installment of a three–part series chronicling Lars Anderson’s experiences playing baseball in Japan. Thanks to popular demand — and Anderson’s interest in sharing additional stories — this is Part 4, with more to come.

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Lars Anderson: “Birdman Bats’ fearless, peerless leader, Gary Malec made the long trek to visit me in Japan and temporarily join this bizarre circus. He flew into Osaka and took three trains in order to meet the team for our game in Kagawa. As the Fighting Dogs rolled up to the stadium on the team bus, I saw my good friend standing there wearing a Birdman t-shirt and board shirts with his trademark chicken legs sticking out. By his side was a box of bats and a suitcase. He was also sporting a huge, goofy grin. It was a cool moment.

“I met Gary through a mutual friend. We initially bonded over music, going so far as to start the band Daytime Nightlife with Gary’s little brother, Mark. Gary was hand-turning birch bats at the time, which I was obviously intrigued by. They were immaculate as well. As the years progressed and our friendship grew, we decided to use my experience and connections in baseball — and his passion of making baseball bats — to start a baseball bat company.

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In this, the year during which the all-time record for homers in an MLB season will be broken, there has been no shortage of dominant starting pitcher performances. From Clayton Kershaw to Max Scherzer in the NL to Chris Sale and Corey Kluber in the AL, true greatness has been on display. In this space not too long ago, I dug a little deeper into the exploits of Dodgers lefty Alex Wood. Today, let’s do the same in the AL and give Mariner lefty James Paxton his due.

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It was an eventful 24 hours for the Cleveland Indians outfield. On Tuesday, left fielder Michael Brantley sprained his ankle in a game against the Colorado Rockies, so Wednesday, the team put him on the disabled list and promptly traded for his replacement, Jay Bruce.

Because Bruce cleared waivers last week, the transaction was fairly straightforward. The Mets already knew they weren’t going to get much for him, as every team in baseball passed on taking on the remaining $4 million of his contract. So when Cleveland suddenly needed an outfielder, it represented a chance for the Mets to at least save some money while also freeing up playing time for Dominic Smith at first base. In exchange for assuming responsibility for the remainder of Bruce’s contract this year, Cleveland surrendered just RHP Ryder Ryan, a player so notable that this is the first time his name has ever been mentioned on the site.

Here’s what you need to know about Ryan: he was a 30th-round pick in the 2016 draft and is pitching in relief in A-ball as a 22-year-old. This trade isn’t exactly like the Indians claiming Bruce on waivers and the Mets just letting him go, but it’s basically that.

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About a month ago, the notion of adding Yu Darvish seemed to be something of a luxury for the Dodgers. After all, not only had the Dodgers emerged as the best team in baseball, they had entered the season with the most pitching depth in the game.

But then Clayton Kershaw was sent to the DL, a place where Rich Hill, Scott Kazmir and Hyun-Jin Ryu have resided at times this season — and where they have been placed often throughout their careers. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time when we talk about Mike Trout, we ask if anybody has ever done what he’s doing. Sometimes the answer is Mickey Mantle or Ty Cobb or Albert Pujols, but a lot of the time the answer is no and what Trout is doing is unprecedented. Today, we are asking two related questions:

1. Could Mike Trout deserve the American League Most Valuable Player Award despite missing 39 games earlier this season?
2. Does Mike Trout have a realistic chance to win MVP despite missing 39 games earlier this season?

While answering the second question might help prove the first through precedent, let’s restrict ourselves in the first part to the value Mike Trout provides. On Friday, I talked about Jose Altuve’s candidacy for MVP and showed this chart:

Things have already changed considerably. This is what the top of that chart looks like now.

So Trout is currently projected to be the AL position player WAR leader at the end of the season. If he keeps up his current pace and gets close to the the 200 more plate appearances he is projected for, he is going to get above 8 WAR. Trout is currently above a 200 wRC+, a number that hasn’t been reached since Barry Bonds and done by only nine players in non-strike seasons in history. He will actually have to exceed his projections in PAs to qualify for the batting title, as he is currently set to fall eight short. Read the rest of this entry »

Joey Votto hasn’t made a West Coast swing recently so we don’t have original words to annotate here, but he did say some interesting things to Zach Buchanan at The Cincinnati Enquirer this week, interesting particularly because he said that “This has been documented, so this is not anecdotal here,” and that sort of statement is like catnip around here. Let’s provide the documentation.

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Over the last few years, the A’s have had a high-end player problem, in that they haven’t had any. Jed Lowrie currently leads the team with +2.3 WAR; by comparison, the Astros have seven players who have already reached that mark, and that does not include their best pitcher, Dallas Keuchel, who spent two months on the DL. The team has developed some decent role players and decent enough everyday players, but they haven’t really had a franchise player since they traded Josh Donaldson to Toronto.

Without getting too far ahead of ourselves, I am starting to wonder if they’ve finally found a guy who at least has the potential to get to that level in the not too distant future. His name is Matt Chapman.

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CLEVELAND — When I asked Josh Donaldson about being a founding father of the fly-ball revolution recently in the visiting clubhouse at Progressive Field, he re-directed the credit. The creator of the air-ball, upper-cut philosophy was Ted Williams, he noted.

Donaldson knows his history.

Williams, of course, co-authored the book The Science of Hitting. He talked about impacting the lower half of the ball. It seems like that should be required reading for all professional hitters, but I wonder what is the actual percentage of pro hitters who have read the book?

What is interesting to this author is how Donaldson arrived at his philosophy. It wasn’t from watching grainy black-and-white video of Williams. In my conversation with the right-handed slugger, he did not reference having read Williams’ thoughts as being the impetus for his belief changes. No, Donaldson arrived and adopted the #GroundballsSuck concept through what he describes as his “first love”: golf. Read the rest of this entry »