Sunday night, Rafael Devers went yard against Aroldis Chapman, even though Chapman’s fastball was recorded at nearly 103 miles per hour. It’s the fastest pitch hit out in the pitch-tracking era, which has spanned nearly a decade, and that linked article was almost obligatory. Had to write something up. Devers tagged Chapman, even though it seemed like Chapman had his best stuff.

To a certain extent, you can’t blame Chapman for what happened. He threw a lefty-on-lefty fastball, with two strikes, kind of up and in at over 100 miles per hour. That pitch should basically never go for a homer. I’m still not sure how it happened. But, ignore the homer for a moment. Pretend it was a double, or a single. Or even an out! Whatever you like. Devers made contact. Solid contact, at that. The contact is what’s strange, and there are signs of a problematic trend, here.

Let’s examine Chapman’s career, shall we? I’ve prepared three rolling-average plots, each using samples of 30 games. This first one shows the development of Chapman’s average fastball.

You could argue there’s a recent down tick, but Chapman is still regularly reaching triple digits. His fastball is fast. Still a Chapman fastball. Like we all saw with the at-bat against Devers, Chapman can still run it up there about as hard as he ever has. So, based on the velocity, Chapman seems okay. Shifting to pitch location, we can see a trend from the past year and a half or so.

Chapman has been aggressive with pitching in the zone. He’s thrown two-thirds of his pitches for strikes, and this year in particular, he’s regularly gotten ahead with the first pitches of plate appearances. And, of course, with such an unhittable fastball, why mess around? Chapman had a terrific 2016, in which he came right after his opponents. This year, he’s done much of the same. But-

That plot shows contact rate. Chapman’s present contact rate is far higher than it’s been since earlier in 2013. All of a sudden — it’s not so much that Chapman is hittable, but he’s a great deal more hittable than he’s been. Look at this table of the biggest contact-rate declines from last year, with a minimum of 30 innings:

Chapman has a contact rate of 75.2%. The league-average reliever has a contact rate of 75.4%. No pitcher’s contact rate has dropped by more, and although Chapman is still mostly okay, and although this could be a blip, he was on the disabled list for a month, with a rotator-cuff problem. His contact rate has only risen since he came back. The velocity is there, and maybe that’s the most important thing, but you do have to wonder. Chapman’s been one of the most dominant relievers anyone’s ever seen. Real cracks appear to be forming.

Related to this, consider Chapman’s year-to-year ranks among all relievers in Win Probability Added:

• 2011: 24th
• 2012: 8th
• 2013: 44th
• 2014: 15th
• 2015: 16th
• 2016: 7th
• 2017: 337th

I don’t know what the issue is. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all if it were linked to the injury. In that case, it would be nice to have an explanation. But even then, explanation isn’t resolution. Aroldis Chapman is allowing roughly league-average contact. He’s in the first year of the largest contract a reliever has ever signed.

I don’t think many people expected the NL Central to be very close, but here we are, with four teams within four games of the divisional lead. Although the Cubs, as expected, have risen to sit in first, their closest rivals now are the Cardinals, but one single game behind. For those Cardinals, it’s been a pretty ordinary season, and it’s been a pretty weird one.

The best player on the Cardinals, by Wins Above Replacement, leads the team by a margin of one full win. The best player on the Cardinals didn’t crack the opening-day roster. As a consequence of that, the best player on the Cardinals gave serious thought to calling it quits. The best player on the Cardinals is a 29-year-old who came into the year with a half-season’s worth of major-league experience. The best player on the Cardinals has himself an extended injury history, and the best player on the Cardinals has also had to manage a degenerative eye condition, called keratoconus. The best player on the Cardinals probably isn’t supposed to be the best player on the Cardinals.

And still, at least statistically, the best player on the Cardinals has been Tommy Pham. It’s been fun for me to watch Mike Trout glide up the WAR leaderboard since his return to the bigs. As I write this, he’s tied with Paul Goldschmidt for third place, as hitters go. Pham is no Trout — he’s down there in 22nd, among position players. But that’s 22nd out of a sample a lot bigger than 22 players. That’s 22nd even though Pham hasn’t been up all year. That’s 22nd, which puts Pham above guys like Michael Conforto, Travis Shaw, and Andrew McCutchen.

Watch Tommy Pham hit a dinger. I don’t know what purpose this clip serves, but, who doesn’t want to watch a dinger? It’s a visual break from the wall of text.

Pham’s personal story is far too deep, complex, and interesting for a short blog post. I’d recommend reading this feature, or this one, or this one. Pham’s dealt with adversity from nearly the start of his life, and that’s for reasons even beyond his compromised vision. But just from a baseball perspective: Can you imagine trying to hit with compromised vision? This is an excerpt from the first of those links.

Pham said he is legally blind in his left eye due to keratoconus.

At present, Pham is able to play and perform through careful management of special contact lenses. I’ve already mentioned that Pham looks excellent according to WAR. He’s gotten there by being an all-around contributor. This is the kind of thing I’ve called attention to before when talking about Anthony Rendon. I looked at a spreadsheet of this year’s players with at least 250 plate appearances. I narrowed the pool down to only those players who’ve been at least average by K-BB%, ISO, BABIP, baserunning, and defense. The group includes only nine players. Rendon, yeah. Pham, too. Pham’s been solid across the board. He’s even cleaned up his biggest on-field weakness.

This right here is probably the highlight of this entry. We’ve got some plate-discipline data stretching back more than a decade and a half. I looked at every single player over that span to bat at least 100 times in consecutive seasons. Here are the 10 biggest year-to-year improvements in contact rate:

That’s a hard thing to pull off by accident. As a result, Pham has trimmed his strikeout rate by an unbelievable 15 percentage points, and although Pham now just looks pretty similar to what he was as a part-time player in 2015, he’s doing it now over greater playing time. And so Pham is now a player with a career WAR/600 of 4.5.

The St. Louis outfield remains crowded. Pham remains an objectively risky player, or at least a player with a higher degree of volatility. I don’t know to what extent the Cardinals actually trust him, but that trust has to be a lot stronger than it was a few months ago, and, if it weren’t for Pham, the Cardinals wouldn’t be where they are today in the standings. The best player on the Cardinals is a miracle. I don’t think I’m even exaggerating.

The most improbable home run I’ve ever watched in real time was hit last November. You know the one — it was the one hit by Rajai Davis, against Aroldis Chapman, with Davis choked halfway up the barrel. I’m sure that, mathematically, there have been home runs of a lesser likelihood, but that Davis blast just felt impossible. It didn’t feel real until the ball cleared the fence. I still can’t believe it happened, and the Indians still lost the game a couple innings later. I don’t care. I recall the Davis home run more clearly than anything else.

In truth, in my book, any home run against Chapman counts as improbable. I don’t know how he ever gets touched. And yet, Davis, at least, was batting right-handed. He had the platoon advantage. And the pitch he lined out to left field clocked in at a hair over 97 miles per hour. Fast, but not *outrageously* so. There are plenty of pitchers out there who can throw 97. Sometimes they give up dingers. The Davis home run, realistically, never should’ve happened, but I can bring myself to get it. I can understand the mechanism.

When Davis took his hopeful swing, Rafael Devers was, I don’t know, somewhere. Probably, he was watching. But no matter what he was doing, he was doing it having recently turned 20 years old. He was a good baseball prospect, but he was one who hadn’t yet encountered Double-A competition. I’m not sure how close Devers felt like he was. Yet Sunday night, you could say that Devers arrived.

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Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the National League East. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Atlanta Braves (Preseason List)

1. Ronald Acuna, CF
2. Ozzie Albies. 2B
3. Kyle Wright, RHP
4. Luiz Gohara, LHP
5. Kolby Allard, LHP
6. Kevin Maitan, SS
7. Ian Anderson, RHP
8. Mike Soroka, RHP
9. Joey Wentz, LHP
10. Cristian Pache, CF

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Aaron Judge’s monster first half made him an obvious MVP candidate, even as he’s slowed down in the second half of the year. Jose Altuve leads qualified hitters in wRC+, as a second baseman who also happens to steal a bunch of bases, so he’s an obvious MVP candidate. Mike Trout is within +1 WAR of both of them despite spending two months on the disabled list, and on a per-game impact, is again obviously making the biggest impact of anyone on the planet, so he’s a less-obvious MVP candidate, but he should be in the mix by season’s end.

But if the voting were held today, there would be a pretty clear choice for the American League’s Most Valuable Player, and it would be Chris Sale.

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Giancarlo Stanton had become overshadowed, both literally and figuratively.

Until just recently, Stanton had been a Statcast God, often lapping the field in categories involving 100 mph-plus batted balls and average exit velocities.

But then Aaron Judge broke out, and Stanton, who was once the strongest and most physically imposing player in the game, was dropped down to the second chair. There is no larger perception drop than from first to second.

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Half a dozen years after Pittsburgh drafted him out of a Dallas, Texas high school, Josh Bell’s power game has finally emerged. After going deep just 47 times in his first five professional seasons, the switch-hitting first baseman has 20 home runs for the Pirates in 448 plate appearances. Augmenting those numbers are 21 doubles, four triples, and a .257/.333/.486 slash line.

When I talked to the then-21-year-old old Bell in August 2013, he told me that his “power is going to come, just from maturity; I can’t really change my swing.” Two years later, at the Double-A All-Star game, he told me he had made an adjustment to where he felt he could “power through the ball while still making consistent contact.”

On Wednesday, I asked him what’s changed since our 2015 conversation.

“In Double-A, I was (batting) average first with a low number of strikeouts,” answered Bell. “Last year. I started focusing on driving the ball more — more doubles and homers. That’s carried over into this year. I’ve kind of morphed from what I was then to what I am now.”

The launch-angle approach espoused by an increasing number of hitters wasn’t the impetus. Read the rest of this entry »

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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