There’s a growing number of windmills sprouting around the country. One can see fields of them from plane windows at 30,000 feet. There’s even a giant one on the east side of Cleveland that’s visible, on a clear day, across Lake Erie from the shores of Bay Village, Ohio, a small municipality on the west side of the city, where this author now resides. The windmills are harnessing the power of the wind to create clean energy, which can be delivered anywhere, I presume, including the car-charging stations I’ve noticed pop up in places like the nearby Whole Foods parking lot. Despite very conspicuous advances and installations, we’re apparently decades away — perhaps not until the 2040s — from reaching Peak Oil, according to Reuters. Clean and renewable energy is taking some time to gain market share.

Some innovations take time to grab hold, others advance quickly. It can be difficult to project when a trend will reach its high-water mark. But we might have seen a prominent 21st trend and strategy reach that point in major-league baseball. In 2016, after a dramatic rise this decade, baseball might have reached Peak Shift.

This year, shifts declined for the first time since their rapid rise earlier in the decade. Ten years ago, shifts were being used against left-handed power hitters exclusively. There wasn’t a shift employed against a right-handed hitter, according to the Baseball Info Solutions database, until June 11, 2009, when the Phillies moved three infielders to the left side of second base against Gary Sheffield. At that point, in the late 2000s, the Rays and Brewers were at the vanguard of wholesale shifting. In 2012, league-wide shift usage doubled, though it was still modest in terms of raw numbers. Gradually more teams bought in — teams like the Pirates, who increased their shift usage by 400% from 2012 to 2013. In 2014, usage doubled again, as the 10,000-shift mark was breached for the first time. The practice has since proliferated across the sport.

From 2012 to -16, shift usage grew by at least 34.8% each season.

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Episode 782
“The Good Face” isn’t necessarily a concept that required further examination. That hasn’t stopped guest Kate Preusser of Lookout Landing from providing it, anyway.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 6 min play time.)

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The season’s complete, which means the numbers are official. This is convenient for a writer, because it means there shouldn’t be any issues anymore with comparing 2017 to another full season in the past. A full season is a full season. So how about a quick full-season review of the pitch-framing data? There’s something interesting going on. Something dramatic, something that shakes the foundation of the numbers themselves. I have the graphs to prove it.

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There’s no doubt that Mets shortstop Amed Rosario had a tough debut. He walked three times and struck out 49. Though he showed some power, he usually hit the ball softly and on the ground. Really the only thing that went well, looking back, is that he provided good defense at a position where the team could use an upgrade.

But. How much do we really know about a player after 170 plate appearances? Especially one who hasn’t turned 22 yet? How pessimistic should we be?

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If Shohei Ohtani isn’t able to play in the major leagues next season, that would quickly make Yu Darvish the clear No. 1 free agent available this winter — and perhaps the only clear top-of-rotation arm. And even if Ohtani is cleared to migrate across the Pacific to play professional baseball, Darvish is likely to walk away as the highest-paid player from this free-agent class.

Yes, Darvish’s awful World Series performance is still fresh in the collective consciousness, but that shouldn’t negate his late-season work with the Dodgers. After some data-informed tweaks (documented here by Eno and also by Andy McCullough of the L.A. Times), Darvish was excellent. With the Dodgers in the second half, the right-hander struck out 61 and walked 13 in 49 innings.

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Zack Cozart is going to be an interesting free agent. I mean, at the major-league level, they’re all interesting free agents, but Cozart’s case is particularly intriguing, given his late-blooming power. Cozart seems like one of those guys who was built to take full advantage of a slightly livelier baseball, and given that he’s also a capable shortstop, he’s a valuable asset as long as his power exists. Cozart might not strike it super rich in the coming months, but he’ll get a healthy guarantee from someone. Teams like shortstops who can hit.

Speaking of which, kind of: Zach Vincej. I admit that this is going out on a limb. Not only was Vincej claimed by the Mariners off waivers from the Reds; the Mariners then outrighted Vincej to Triple-A, meaning he’s not on the 40-man roster. Vincej has been freely available, and I wouldn’t say there’s been a feeding frenzy. You probably haven’t heard of him. I hadn’t heard of him. Vincej is not, and never has been, a top prospect. He’s a 26-year-old with nine major-league at-bats.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this. So I felt compelled to put this in writing. Vincej seems like a run-of-the-mill minor-league infielder. Yet he might be just the sort of player who’d most benefit from a promotion.

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When a baseball player dies, as Roy Halladay did yesterday, it can be difficult to know what to say. I never met Roy Halladay. I don’t have any personal anecdotes to share or any insight into who he was as a person. I don’t know his family. I only knew him through the television, when I watched him work. And you can’t really know a person that way.

The people that really did know Roy Halladay seemed enamored of him. In awe of him, not just as a player, but as a person. In the last 24 hours, the universal reaction within the baseball community has been that the game lost not just a guy who was great at pitching, but an ambassador for the sport. The stories that have emerged are both heartbreaking and inspiring. Stories like Jayson Werth’s:

“For a guy that was very serious, quiet and reserved, I can remember it like it was yesterday, the look on his face to see us waiting for him to celebrate together,” Werth said. “He loved the game but played for his teammates, for us to love him back like that you could tell it meant a lot. I’d never seen him so genuinely happy. I’ll never forget the expression on his face.”

I never got to see that Roy Halladay. Most of us probably don’t have that kind of connection with him, but yet, there is still the natural desire to mourn. For most of us, Roy Halladay wasn’t really part of our lives anymore, but it still feels like we lost something. So, today, while acknowledging that our loss cannot compare to the sort endured by those who knew him in a more personal way, I’d like to honor the Roy Halladay I did know.

This guy.

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Roy Halladay died in a plane crash on Tuesday, in the Gulf of Mexico, near to the Florida coast. He was the only victim, and he was 40 years old. Halladay loved to fly — following his retirement from baseball in 2013, it became one of his major pursuits.

We know Halladay for his career, and it was an incredible one. He ran a four-digit ERA in 2000, and three years later, he won the AL Cy Young. Seven years later, he won the NL Cy Young, and along the way he threw a perfect game and a playoff no-hitter while making an All-Star roster eight times. Out of a career nearly sidetracked before it really began, Halladay fashioned a Hall-of-Fame-worthy record. Few pitchers have ever worked with such efficient tenacity. As an opponent, Halladay seemed something other than human. He seemed something better. Humans aren’t programmed with such laser-like focus.

Halladay was the model of a professional athlete, and, from the sounds of things, he was the model of a person. He made no enemies, even out of his rivals. Those who knew him have always spoken highly. Some baseball players are said to be the most driven. Halladay actually was. Some baseball players are said to be the hardest workers. Halladay actually was. Some baseball players are said to be worth the price of admission. Halladay actually was. Halladay was everything you could possibly want, and that wasn’t a feeling shared just among fans.

I wanted to be Roy Halladay. I’m heartbroken, rest easy Doc.

— dan haren (@ithrow88) November 7, 2017

Roy Halladay was your favorite player’s favorite player. He left the game better than it was, and the same could be said of his community. Halladay was one of the special ones. You mourn the special ones. You mourn everybody, every mother and father and daughter and son, but, you mourn the special ones.

The Dodgers didn’t lose Game 7 specifically or the World Series generally due to a failure of their bullpen. That doesn’t mean the way Dave Roberts deployed his relievers won’t cost both the club and those pitchers down the line, though. There are indications that fatigue might be an issue. It’s not a product of how many total pitches the Dodgers pen threw. It’s about how those pitches were spaced out.

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Every year, around this time, I look forward to this post. I look forward to it because it checks the two boxes most important to me as a writer: the post is always popular, and I don’t have to try to come up with a new idea. It’s always the same idea, and it’s always the same basic research. What changes are the names and the dates and the numbers. It’s not that the research and prep are easy, but finding an idea is usually the challenge. That’s not a concern when you have a recurring series.

That being said, I get nervous. I always want to write about the worst called ball of the season, but, around the All-Star break, I tend to write about the worst called ball of the first half. Here’s this year’s. If that stands up as the worst called ball overall, then I’d have to decide if I want to write a second time about the same event. It’s preferable, to me, that the second half contain a ball that’s objectively even worse. The odds of that aren’t great; the second half is shorter than the first. They’re not actually halves at all.

Excitement and nervousness. My fingers are always crossed. This year, I got lucky again. The worst called ball of the first half was thrown on June 18. The worst called ball of the whole season was thrown on August 20. It was worse by a fraction of a fraction of one inch. The pitch-tracking technology isn’t truly that precise, to begin with. And this all depends on the upper and lower strike-zone boundaries, which are subjective, since they change for every hitter. I don’t have 100% confidence that the ball on August 20 was worse. But my confidence level is at least, I don’t know, 51%. That’s good enough to proceed.

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