Give this to the Brewers — as much as everyone still expects them to fade, they haven’t faded yet. They’ve played at least .500 baseball in April, May, and June, and they’ve held at least a share of first place in the National League Central for more than a month. Sure, the Cubs remain the favorites. Sure, the Cubs are the more talented ballclub. But the Brewers have effectively cut the season in half, which does wonders for both the odds and morale. The first-half Brewers have been a great story.

A team doesn’t overachieve without players doing the same, and we’ve dedicated posts to several of Milwaukee’s pleasant surprises. We spent the whole first month writing about Eric Thames, and we’ve also addressed Jimmy Nelson, Corey Knebel, and so on. There’s another player I’ve been intending to write about, too. The Brewers rank eighth in baseball in starting-rotation WAR, and Nelson’s the leader of the group. And yet he is only barely holding off Chase Anderson.

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Coming into the season, Michael Conforto saw opportunity with the Mets despite a crowded outfield. He seized his chance early in the year and was among the majors’ best players in April and May. Then the league made an adjustment, one with which he’s struggling to adjust back. You could call that regression. You could also just call it baseball — as the player himself did recently with a shrug — but that ebb and flow is important. He needs to figure out this latest puzzle to get back on track.

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Over at Baseball Savant, another Statcast leaderboard has been rolled out. This one relates to speed. They are calling it Sprint Speed, and the definition is as follows:

Sprint Speed is Statcast’s foot speed metric, defined as “feet per second in a player’s fastest one-second window.” The Major League average on a “max effort” play is 27 ft/sec, and the max effort range is roughly from 23 ft/sec (poor) to 30 ft/sec (elite). A player must have at least 10 max effort runs to qualify for this leaderboard.

While Sprint Speed has been used for a while, we didn’t have leaderboards until now. Mike Petriello over at MLB.com has a full article on the rollout which I would recommend. Among the highlights: Sprint Speed correlates well from year to year; it doesn’t require a large sample to become reflective of true talent (Petriello compares speed to fastball velocity); and it might be useful when attempting to identify injuries that could be slowing players down.

So, we know that the metric can tell us who is fast and who is not. That’s helpful. I wondered if it might also be able tell us anything about any other statistics.

Before trying to predict the future or look at past years, I thought it might be useful to compare speed to the stats we have and see how they compare. While the leaderboard over at Statcast features nearly 350 names (every player who’s produced 10 or more max-speed data points), those sample sizes might be a bit too small when looking at other statistics. As a result, I narrowed the sample for this study down to the 166 players who were qualified at the end of Monday’s games.

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Maybe the Astros are the best team in baseball, and maybe they’re not. There are lots of good teams, and the differences are all fairly slim. At least, we can say the Astros have the best record out of anyone in baseball, and they deserve to stand where they’re standing. They’re easily clear of the rest of their own division, and while they’ve experienced a handful of significant or semi-significant injuries, they’ve chugged right along. The Astros were supposed to be good. So far, the Astros have been great. Projections can miss in one of two directions.

One of the things we knew was that the Astros were going to hit. During the winter, they were lauded for their offensive depth, and the Astros have an easy MLB lead in wRC+. But now I have a fun fact for you. It’s even more telling than that one. The Astros, as a team, lead baseball in home runs. They also have baseball’s lowest team strikeout rate. In the 19 full seasons since baseball moved to a 30-team landscape, no offense has led in both categories. The Astros are trying to be the first, which is downright impressive.

Read that again. Home runs? Sure. Everyone hits home runs. Marwin Gonzalez hits home runs. The Astros might as well be leading. But, strikeouts? Yeah. It’s not that there was zero warning. Reality is just following what could’ve reasonably been expected.

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In this, The Year of Higher Launch Angles and Homer and Strikeout Spikes, most of the game’s marquee offensive players have joined the party. Mike Trout was Mike Trout when healthy, Bryce Harper is back, while Cody Bellinger, Aaron Judge, Miguel Sano, and others are leading the youth brigade. In the meantime, though, has anyone seen Manny Machado?

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About a month ago, the Angels lost Mike Trout to injury. He’s still a few weeks away from returning. Trout’s absence was supposed to be crippling, and indeed, it probably should’ve been crippling. But one of the best active fun facts around is that, since Trout was sidelined, the Angels have played better. Now, that isn’t something I suggest you over-interpret. It doesn’t mean anything much. It doesn’t mean Trout isn’t the most valuable player in the world. It’s just a random curiosity. And, good for the Angels! What they’ve pulled off has been deeply impressive.

At this point, the Angels are very much a wild-card contender. Trout’s coming back soon. So there’s reason to look up and down the roster in an attempt to identify areas for improvement. There are still various areas of concern, but one’s eyes are drawn to Albert Pujols. Pujols, right now, has a 2017 WAR of -1.0. That’s tied for the second-lowest mark in the game. Pujols, through that lens, has been a major problem, and few of his regular numbers are any good. However, the Angels themselves have pushed back. They’ve publicly disagreed with the idea that Pujols hasn’t been useful.

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Are you suffering from fatigue related to talk of the home-run surge, the prospect of a juiced ball, and the idea of an air-ball revolution? No? Excellent.

As you’re probably aware, home runs keep flying out of major-league stadiums — and, if anything, are doing so at an ever faster rate, as Jeff Sullivan documented earlier this month.

Rob Arthur, Mitchel Lichtman, and Ben Lindbergh have led the charge to examine the ball’s role in these matters, their most recent work appearing at The Ringer earlier this month. It’s a must-read piece. They make a compelling case that the ball is different — and playing differently. Though, as Dave noted last month, Dr. Alan Nathan suggests it’s not an “open-and-shut” case.

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The Effectively Wild podcast gets a good number of emails every day, and a recent one was sent along by Aidan Jackson-Evans. He was asking about a trend that he noticed, and wrote about several days ago. I’d like to point you to his post, at High Heat Stats. You should read it, because this thing is quickly just building off that. I wouldn’t have noticed this trend if not for the email, and he’s already done a lot of the work.

I’ll get to the heart of the matter. At FanGraphs, we have splits going back to 2002. That’s not very long, but it’s long enough for research purposes. In this plot, you simply see league wOBA by leadoff hitters, and overall league wOBA. Nothing complicated, at least if we’re all to the point where we no longer think of wOBA as being complicated.

Last year, leadoff hitters were better than average. The same was true the year before that, and the year before that. And so on. Nothing earth-shattering. This year, the numbers have been exactly equal. Here’s where things get cooler. In here, leadoff-hitter wOBAs, split by whether it’s the first plate appearance of the game, or a subsequent plate appearance.

Allow me to translate that! Between 2002 – 2015, leadoff hitters averaged a .323 wOBA in their first plate appearances. Over all the rest of their plate appearances, they averaged a .325 wOBA. Essentially the same. Nothing weird. But since the start of last season, leadoff hitters have averaged a .343 wOBA in their first plate appearances. Over all the rest of their plate appearances, they’ve averaged a .323 wOBA. Leadoff hitters, in other words, have started performing a lot better in the top and bottom of the first inning. This is what Jackson-Evans found.

So what’s going on? As with everything in baseball, the answer is presumably complex. Yet, using data from Baseball Savant, I bet I can simplify. Firstly, let’s look at the rate of pitches thrown within the Gameday strike zone. Here you see two rates: the league overall rate, and the rate for first plate appearances.

The first batter of the game sees more strikes. But this might not seem very dramatic. It’s not! This is dramatic. Here’s the same as above, but showing fastball rates instead:

Over the past decade, over all plate appearances, hitters have seen an average of about 57% fastballs. However, leadoff hitters in the first inning have seen an average of about 73% fastballs. The margin so far this season is 72% to 55%. It’s particularly extreme if you look at the first pitch of the first plate appearance, where pitchers routinely throw fastballs more than nine-tenths of the time. Pitchers have historically been aggressive to start off, trying to get into the flow of things. If the results are any indication, leadoff hitters have started to ambush more often. That is, instead of letting pitchers get away with free strikes, those leadoff hitters in the first inning are going up more prepared to take a swing or two. It’s as if the hitters are getting ready before the pitchers are.

It’s weird to see it happen so suddenly, but this is where we are after thousands upon thousands of plate appearances. It’ll be interesting to see if pitchers try to adjust by folding in more secondary stuff at the beginning. It’s the obvious apparent correction, but it might not make them feel very comfortable. Maybe they want or need to settle in with a few early fastballs. It’s something for all of us to try to monitor, I suppose. Kudos to Jackson-Evans for identifying this curiosity.

There’s a youth movement taking place in Oakland. The A’s jettisoned both Trevor Plouffe and Stephen Vogt in the last couple of weeks, replacing them with Matt Chapman and Bruce Maxwell. Another big splash came this weekend, when Oakland summoned prospect Franklin Barreto to play second base.

Barreto continued to hit for an encouraging amount of power as a minor leaguer this year, especially considering he played in a park that massively suppresses homers (by PCL standards). However, his strikeout rate spiked from 18% to 30% as he transitioned from Double-A and Triple-A and his stolen-base numbers plummeted. As a result, his KATOH forecast has taken a hit. I have him projected for 4.8 WAR over his first six seasons by stats-only KATOH and 5.4 WAR by KATOH+, which incorporates his prospect ranking. Those marks place him 90th and 55th, respectively, among prospects, down from 18th and 20th in the preseason.

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