A couple months ago, Kiley McDaniel posted his list of the players with the most trade value in baseball. It’s not quite the same as a list of the best players in baseball, since the former also considers contract status and salary, but, if anything, the former is more important than the latter. The Indians came out looking good — Jose Ramirez placed first, and Francisco Lindor placed second. But today I’m more interested in looking further down. Jose Altuve placed 36th. Blake Snell placed 35th. Rhys Hoskins placed 34th, and Mitch Haniger placed 33rd. Eugenio Suarez placed 32nd. He was one slot behind Gary Sanchez, and two slots behind Shohei Ohtani. Sanchez and Ohtani have only seen their stocks drop.

Within the baseball industry, it’s widely understood how good and valuable Suarez has become. That’s one of the jobs of front-office people — develop a proper understanding of player value, around the whole league. If Suarez were made available in a trade, teams would fall all over themselves to get in front of the line. But what baseball understands isn’t the same as what the average observer understands, and it’s incredibly easy to overlook what Suarez has done. He’s not a flashy player, he was never a hyped prospect, and he’s played for a non-competitive team. As such, my sense is that Suarez is greatly underappreciated. But, before the year, the Reds signed him to a long-term contract extension, in response to a breakout 2017. Suarez has since followed a breakout season with a breakout season.

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The other day, I was reading something written by Tom Verducci over at Sports Illustrated. Verducci was ultimately making an argument about Jacob deGrom and his Cy Young candidacy, but on the way there, he talked about what’s apparently been dubbed the Mystery of Flushing. The mystery concerns why the Mets can’t hit at home. More specifically, it’s about why the Mets’ team BABIP consistently suffers at home. Citi Field has been modified multiple times, but it was modified most dramatically before the 2012 regular season. Since 2012, the Mets rank last in the majors in runs scored at home. They rank seventh in runs scored on the road. And, since 2012, the Mets rank last in the majors in BABIP at home. They rank third in BABIP on the road. There’s an existing BABIP gap of 30 points. This is spanning the better part of a decade. That’s big, and that’s weird. It’s worthy of some kind of investigation.

Verducci’s article, to be clear, was missing something. He analyzed the Mets’ hitters, but he didn’t analyze the Mets’ pitchers. Since 2012, they’ve allowed the eighth-fewest runs at home. They’re in 17th in runs allowed on the road. And, since 2012, they’re 12th in BABIP allowed at home. They’re 28th in BABIP allowed on the road. Run scoring in general is harder at Citi Field. Turning batted balls into hits in general is harder at Citi Field. Mets hitters are hurt, and Mets pitchers get to benefit. But a question remains: why? Why is Citi Field so strange?

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Does anybody have a phone number for Vida Blue or Dave Stewart? Maybe Tim Hudson? The A’s could use another starter for their playoff push, because on Tuesday, they got the definitive news on Sean Manaea, and it was quite bad. The 26-year-old lefty hasn’t pitched since August 24 due to what was initially diagnosed as shoulder impingement and then revised to tendinitis in his rotator cuff. Not only will he not return this season, as initially hoped, but he’ll undergo arthroscopic shoulder surgery next week, and is expected to be sidelined through 2019.

The timeline isn’t unlike that of a late-season Tommy John surgery candidate such as the White Sox’ Michael Kopech, but returns from shoulder surgery are far less predictable than those from ulnar collateral ligament repair. In Manaea’s case, the exact diagnosis is unclear, at least as far as the general public goes; the range of possibilities could include a bone spur in his shoulder, and/or a tear in his rotator cuff, labrum, or anterior capsule — or some combination of those injuries. Manager Bob Melvin told reporters, “The specifics we’ll talk about more after the surgery, so we’ll know exactly what was repaired.”

Ouch. Say, what’s Barry Zito doing these days?

Manaea is the 10th Oakland starter to land on the disabled list (a total of 13 stints, according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser) and the fifth to suffer a season-ending injury. The other four were Tommy John recipients: Jharel Cotton and A.J. Puk were cooked before the season even started, while Opening Day starter Kendall Graveman and April 1 (game four) starter Daniel Gossett combined for just 12 starts before going down. Indeed, the first cycle through the A’s rotation looks like the dwindling cast of a horror movie, with Manaea (who started the season’s second game) and Andrew Triggs (who started the fifth, and is now on a rehab assignment, recovering from a nerve irritation issue) currently sidelined. Daniel Mengden, who started the season’s third game, is the only one currently active; in late June and early July, he served a DL stint for a sprained right foot. Also out are lefty (and perennial DL denizen) Brett Anderson, who is nearing a return from ulnar nerve irritation, and righty Paul Blackburn, who’s without a timetable as he works his way back from lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow).

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A writer — even a below-average baseball writer — needn’t worry much about finding a pretense upon which to invoke space. To the extent that night exists, the prospect of that distant, empty hellscape is, basically by definition, never far from one’s experience of the world. Space, as a notion, is inescapable.

During one recent night, I stumbled upon a dumb thought regarding that inescapable notion. Or, to put it more accurately, what I stumbled upon was less a thought and more a fleeting vision — a vision, specifically, of a baseball game being played in space.

There are obviously a lot of logistical concerns that attend such a vision. How are the players able to breathe? By what means do they move from base to base? Who washes the uniforms? Blessed with little in the way of intellectual curiosity and even less in the way of intellectual aptitude, I was fortunately untroubled by most such questions, allowing them to drift away unanswered. For the most part, I survived this reverie without having endured improvement of any kind.

One concern did emerge, however, that I was ultimately unable to escape. As to why it stayed with me, I’m unable to say, although I suspect it’s because, as one of this site’s editors, I’m compelled to work frequently with the sort of tools that might help one to answer it. What I wanted to know, specifically, was this: who, among baseball’s current hitters, would be the home-run leader in space?

Already you might see what’s at work here — namely, that physical strength isn’t of much use in space. Assuming a park environment with zero gravity — and that’s the assumption I’ve made for the sake of answering this question — the need for a batter to hit the ball with any great force disappears. Exit velocity is what allows earthbound hitters to briefly counteract the influence of gravity. In the starry abyss, however, there’s no need to counteract anything. A batted ball in motion will stay in motion — theoretically, to the end of the universe. Any exit velocity above zero is sufficient.

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Detroit’s contention window didn’t just close in 2017, it dramatically shut on the team’s fingers, the paramedics arrived and kicked them in the groin, and then everything caught on fire. I have zero problems regarding the 2006-14 team as a dynasty even if they failed to to win a championship. At their best, they were as dangerous a team as the Tigers of the mid-1980s.

The Setup

The Tigers squeezed out an 86-75 season in 2016, but they were also clearly a team on the downswing, with most of the key contributors approaching free agency, well into their 30s, and sometimes both things. With a 56-48 record at the trade deadline and sitting just 4.5 games back in the AL Central, the Tigers did precisely nothing, likely a result both of a farm system weakened by previous trades and a lack of understanding between the front office and ownership about what lay ahead for the team.

In this case, rather than a stubborn inability to agree, the discord (such as it was) was a product of owner Mike Ilitch’s interest in winning a championship before his passing, a fact which his age (he was 87 at the time) dictated must occur sooner than later.

This après moi, le déluge was, of course absolutely justified — even if it wasn’t necessarily great for someone who’d remain a fan of the Tigers into the 2018 and -19 seasons. After all, this is a sports team. The only consequences for unwise spending in the present are (a) fewer wins in the future and (b) slightly fewer millions of dollars for the billionaire’s heirs.

Ilitch passed away before the 2017 season, but there were no big offseason additions — unless you’re the world’s biggest Brendan Ryan or Alex Avila fan. The team managed to lurk around .500 into early June, 29-29 representing their final .500 record, but the club struggled after that, going 18-28 in the period from then to the trade deadline, and I don’t think any analyst (and I doubt anyone internally) really thought Detroit was going anywhere.

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If there’s an upside to the Blue Jays’ decision to avoid promoting Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for service-time reasons — which is to say if even the dumbest of clouds has a silver lining — it is in the arrival of Rowdy Tellez. The burly 23-year-old, who has endured not only the fall of his star as a prospect but also the recent death of his mother from brain cancer, recently began his major-league stay with a bang while taking advantage of playing time that might not have been available with Guerrero’s arrival. But really, what the hell more do you need to know before you embrace a player who acquired the nickname of Rowdy while still in the womb?

Tellez (pronounced Tuh-LEZ) spent the entire 2018 minor-league season at Triple-A Buffalo, an assignment he repeated after bombing in 2017 (more on which below). His modest final line (.270/.340/.425 with 13 homers) doesn’t exactly suggest an impact bat at first base or designated hitter, though he did improve over the course of the season, hitting .248/.329/.382 with six homers in 280 PA before the All-Star break and .306/.360/.497 with seven homers in 164 PA after it. What’s more, that improvement occurred against the unimaginably sad backdrop of his mom’s decline and, ultimately, her death on August 19 at the too-young age of 53.

Just over two weeks after Lori Tellez passed away, on September 5, her son was wearing a Blue Jays uniform, pinch-hitting for Jonathan Davis in the eighth inning, roping an RBI double into the right-center gap on the first pitch from the Rays’ Jake Faria, and, after receiving a rousing ovation from the Rogers Centre crowd, pointing to the sky in tribute to his mother:

Did it just get dusty in here, or is that my contact lenses going off? Pardon me for a moment… The next night, Tellez collected three hits, all doubles, off Shane Bieber (two) and Cody Allen (one). The night after that, he hit a pair of doubles off Carlos Carrasco, and then on Saturday, his first big-league homer, off Adam Plutko:

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There is a moment during Ryan Pressly’s delivery at which it appears — from certain camera angles and for the briefest of flickering moments — as if he might fall down. He begins his motion by raising himself quickly and powerfully onto his back leg, back slightly hunched and ball only just beginning to separate from glove. As his front leg begins to drop, Pressly moves his center of gravity — and full weight — onto that strong back leg, pitching arm pointing very nearly towards first base and glove out in front on his left hand like a talisman, as if to ward off the batter.

This is the point, in freeze frame, at which it appears ever-so-slightly possible that he might lose his balance and tumble, ass-backwards, off the mound. But then, a split second before the point of no return, the hips fire from their hyper-rotated position, the arm whips toward the batter at 45 degrees, and in the matter of an instant it is Pressly’s chosen victim, rather than the pitcher himself, who begins to look rather foolish.

That strikeout of Jonathan Lucroy, which came in the seventh inning of the Astros’ August 17th encounter with the surging A’s, was Pressly’s 10th for Houston since arriving via trade on July 27th. He has since added eleven more Ks against just one walk, which brings his totals in 16.2 innings pitched in the orange and navy to 23 strikeouts and just one walk. No other reliever has anything approaching that K/BB ratio over that period since Pressly arrived in Houston. Heck, Pressly himself has never really had such a dominant stretch of success. In the 47.2 innings he threw for the Twins before being traded, he struck out 69 and walked 19 — perfectly nice numbers, but nothing close to what he’s done in Texas.

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Perhaps the biggest surprise for the White Sox in 2018 was just how long they clung to their mathematical chances of reaching the postseason, surviving weeks longer than either the Royals or Orioles. But as goes the way of all flesh, the Pale Hose became pale dust — along with five other teams in the last week, meaning Dan is going to be busy over the next five days.

The Setup

Unlike with the Orioles, who still had at least a plausible argument coming into the season about playoff volatility, and the Royals, who pretended to have one, nobody was ever under the illusion that the White Sox would play October baseball.

Which is perfectly fine, of course, given that the team only threw in the towel late in 2016. Unfortunately, that was well after acquiring James Shields from the Padres (though this trade has turned out way worse than could be expected on average).

Chicago wasn’t among those clubs, like the Braves and Phillies, poised to return from the depths of their rebuild and compete for a place in the postseason. They’re still very early in that period of sorting out which of their prospects and low-risk pickups will help them in that capacity.

The White Sox entered the 2018 campaign clearly intent on avoiding expensive moves — costly in terms of dollars or prospects — that were unlikely to help make the team better in the future. Giving Miguel Gonzalez a one-year, $4.75 million deal isn’t crazy for a team that’s just trying to cover 162 starts a year. The team believed Welington Castillo was enough of a bargain at two years and $15 million that, even if the team failed to compete in the second year of the deal, they could always flip him for something useful.

Outside of a clever little trade of Jake Peter, a low-ceiling now-or-never utility-type for trade bait in Luis Avilan and Joakim Soria, it was a quiet offseason.

The Projection

ZiPS projected the White Sox to go 68-94, tying with the Tigers and a game behind the Royals. Who says I’m not optimistic about the Royals?

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On Tuesday, the Brewers beat the Cubs 11-1. It was the 71st game this season decided by 10 or more runs, and the 183rd decided by eight or more, and it got me thinking about failure. Baseball has an awful lot of failure. So much, in fact, that it feels sort of trite to mention it. It’s mostly failure of the small, survivable variety. We learn a lot from those sorts of tumbles. It makes our moms worry, but life’s lessons generally come after we’ve strung a bunch of snafus together. The how and why of a pitcher getting lit up, or a defensive alignment not working, enhances our understanding of the game, even if just to say, “Well, don’t do that again.”

But baseball also does big failure, extreme failure. Baseball does blowouts. Some of them come early, while others develop late. Sometimes they’re the result of a series of foul-ups; other times it’s one big inning. But in their extremity, we learn something about the everyday. So I took a look at blowouts, adopting pitchers as our guides through this land of suck, to see what we might discover. I present a not-brief, incomplete study.

The Reliever Whose Boss Only Cares About Him a Little

One of the crueler things about blowouts, and baseball more generally I suppose, is that no matter the score, someone has to pitch. The game doesn’t believe in mercy; the game believes in wearing one. We’re used to feeling the cruelty of a starter who has to stay in down seven runs to save the bullpen. It’s natural to feel sympathy for someone having a bad day. But cruelty isn’t the exclusive province of losers; there’s a smaller meanness reserved for victors, too.

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German Marquez is on quite the run. In the second half of the season, Marquez’s 2.3 WAR ranks third in all of baseball among pitchers behind only those marks recorded by Jacob deGrom and Patrick Corbin. His 2.29 FIP and 2.79 ERA since the All-Star break are both fantastic. He’s struck out nearly one-third of the batters he’s faced with five times as many strikeouts as walks. He’s doing all of this while pitching his home games in Colorado, and he’s just 23 years old. That’s quite the dramatic turnaround for a pitcher who put up a 4.73 FIP and a 5.53 ERA in his first 16 starts of the 2018 season. Like many young pitchers with a boatload of talent, Marquez has spent his first few years in the big leagues experimenting with different pitches and usage patterns. He seems to have found one that works.

A year ago, Marquez was primarily a fastball-curveball pitcher. He would mix in a change every now and again, and he did experiment with a slider, but it wasn’t used often and it stayed up in the zone. With a mid-90s fastball and good curve, Marquez produced a 21% strikeout rate, 7% walk rate, and an ERA and FIP in the mid-fours. In Coors Field, those still represented above-average numbers. For Marquez to progress, however, he was going to need to develop a third pitch. When Eric Longenhagen discussed Marquez ahead of the 2017 season, he anticipated the introduction of that third pitch.

Marquez also has a plus curveball in the 76-81 mph range that has a slurvy shape to it but bites hard and has solid depth. A back-foot curveball is the best weapon Marquez has against left-handed pitching right now, as his changeup is still below average. But Marquez is just 21 and his delivery is loose and fluid so there’s likely more coming from the changeup. Marquez’s command elicits similarly bullish projection because of the delivery and athleticism and he’s already throwing plenty of strikes. He’s a relatively low-risk mid-rotation arm, an above-average major-league starter.

Longenhagen mentioned the change as a potential addition, and Marquez did work to make that change more of a weapon heading into this season. That plan hasn’t exactly worked out. Marquez is throwing the changeup under 10% of the time this season. Even against lefties, he’s turned to it on just 11% of all occasions. What’s improved most for Marquez is the slider, and it is fooling hitters. Here’s Nick Hundley swinging at a slider despite holding a 2-1 advantage in the count:

The pitch works well in and out of the zone. When he throws the slider outside the zone, Marquez induces swings around 40% of the time, and batters swing and miss on two-thirds of those attempts. When the pitch is in the zone and batters swing, they make contact roughly 80% of the time, but on 44% of sliders in the zone, the hitter doesn’t bother to swing, like Evan Longoria in this 0-2 count.

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