Unable to escape the gravitational pull of .500, the Nationals finally waved the white flag on Tuesday. They let Matt Adams return to the Cardinals via a waiver claim. They traded Daniel Murphy to the Cubs for “an exciting Class-A prospect,” according to general manager Mike Rizzo. They put Bryce Harper through waivers as well — all three of these players actually hit the wire on Friday — but while he was reportedly claimed by the Dodgers, his waiver period expired without a deal transpiring, meaning that he’s staying put. Alas, the novelty of seeing the 25-year-old slugger in a new uniform, and the buzz such a transaction would create, will have to wait.

Despite his 30 home runs (tied for second in the NL) and 91 walks (first), Harper’s age-25 season has been something of a disappointment. He’s hitting .246/.380/.511 for a 133 wRC+, the last figure significantly below both last year’s 156 and his career-best 197, set in his NL MVP-winning 2015 season. His fall-off, however, isn’t the reason the Nationals’ 2018 is down the tubes. From injuries to several key players (Murphy, Sean Doolittle, Adam Eaton, Anthony Rendon, Stephen Strasburg, Ryan Zimmerman) to replacement-level-ish production from their catchers (-0.1 WAR) and bullpen (0.8 WAR), to questionable management by rookie skipper Dave Martinez, there are no shortage of reasons why the Nationals reached this stage and no shortage of fingers to point. It’s true that had Harper been more productive before July 31, perhaps by a couple of wins, Rizzo could have taken a more aggressive approach at the deadline, shoring up a weakness or two on a 54-51 team that was 3.5 games out of both a Wild Card spot and the NL East lead instead of shrugging his shoulders at a 52-53 squad. We’ll never know.

The Nationals are doomed, but Harper has been one of the hottest hitters in baseball in recent weeks, in stark contrast to the first few months of the season. Here’s a breakdown, using the All-Star break as the divider:

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The Orioles became the first team in Major League Baseball to be eliminated from all theoretical playoff contention in 2018, the first team to cross to the “other side,” where even Harry and Lloyd can’t say there’s a chance. As such, the Baltimore Orioles become our first team in our series of post-mortems for the 2018 season, in which we’ll talk about where each team was, is, and where they’re headed.

The Setup

After a 75-87 season in 2017, the Baltimore Orioles were in no mood for a rebuild. The season marked the team’s first losing campaign since 2011, a stretch that marked the most successful sustained non-losing run by the Baltimore Orioles since the early 1980s, a happier time featuring Eddie Murray, Jim Palmer, Ken Singleton, Cal Ripken a little later on, and until his first retirement, legendary manager/tomato grower/curse-word innovator/umpire fighter Earl Weaver.

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The St. Louis Cardinals brought 1B/“OF” Matt Adams back to his old stomping grounds, picking him up from the Washington Nationals after claiming him on revocable waivers.

Bryce Harper hasn’t been traded yet — and that would be a big one if it actually happens — but the departure of Daniel Murphy (about whom Craig Edwards will soon publish a post) and Adams is a likely indicator of how Washington feels about their rapidly deteriorating playoff odds. It’s a bit of speculation here, but from talking with people around baseball, I’m of the belief that ownership was less inclined to throw in the towel than team general manager Mike Rizzo.

Adams is a role player but a useful one for a team that’s starting to think about playoff bullpens. The 340-point OPS split between his career numbers against lefties (.595) and righties (.835) always made Adams a tough call as a full-time starting first baseman. Nevertheless, it gives him situational value. The Cardinals are 17th in baseball against right-handers by wRC+ versus sixth against lefties, and Greg Garcia is the only other left-handed bat available on the bench. Nor can the team dig in and grab someone from Triple-A: the only lefty Redbird hitters are Justin Williams, recently picked up in the Tommy Pham trade, and Max Schrock, who only has a .666 OPS and I think was the secondary bad guy in Batman Returns. Williams may have a future on the team, but if you just need a lefty bat off the bench, Adams is more valuable at this point.

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It’s probably fair to say that batting average, as a shorthand for the quality of a hitter, has lost a bit of luster over the past decade or two as the public has become acquainted with metrics that correlate more strongly with scoring runs and winning games. That said, for a player to hit safely in 40% of his at-bats at any professional level is still incredibly rare and worthy of consideration.

Even if he weren’t to hit .400 this year, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would still be worthy of consideration. As the son of a Hall of Famer, as a 19-year-old who has already reached Triple-A, there’s plenty that merits attention. But he’s also batting .389 in the middle of August, which means that Guerrero the Younger has a shot at a historic season.

Over at MLB.com, Jim Callis went through the list of minor leaguers who have hit .400 in a season. It’s not long. Back in 1999, Erubiel Durazo was a 25-year-old playing in Arizona’s system after a few years in the Mexican League. He hit .404 in 409 plate appearances between Double-A and Triple-A before his callup to the majors. He hit .329 for the Diamondbacks, putting his average at .381 for the full season. Back in 1961, Aaron Pointer hit .401, but almost all of that time was spent in Class-D, which was low in the stratosphere of minor-league affiliates — sitting below not only Triple-A, Double-A, and Single-A, but also Class-B and -C. Given the state of the minor leagues before the 1960s, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the last time a a player hit .400 facing a reasonably high level of competition was Ted Williams in 1941, when he hit .406 on the season.

Guerrero missed time earlier in the year with a knee injury and has come to bat just 351 times this season. If he plays out the minor-league season and starts 13 of 15 game,s averaging 4.3 plate appearances per game, he’s only going to end up with around 407 plate appearances, which isn’t quite a full season. Assuming 3.1 PA per game over 136 minor-league games, one arrives at 422 PA as the standard for the high minors. Even if the Blue Jays brought Guerrero to the big leagues — more on that later — and gave him 20 starts, he’d still end up at roughly 493 plate appearances, just short of the 502 needed to qualify for the MLB batting title.

To determine Guerrero’s chances at hitting .400 in the minor league season, we have to approximate Guerrero’s talent level against minor leaguers. He has a .389 total batting average between Double-A and Triple-A with a .339 average in only 71 Triple-A plate appearances. With 56 presumed plate appearances left in the minor-league season, we can expect him to take six walks, which would be consistent with his 10% walk rate this season.

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As baseball analysis has grown, the advanced metrics have begun to find their way into television broadcasts more regularly. Announcers will occasionally mention win probability in terms of game context. Pitcher FIP will be brought up alongside ERA. The slew of batter statistics — wOBA, wRC+, ISO, et al — will be used to shed further light on hitters. Even fielding metrics like UZR and DRS have slowly started creeping their way into viewers’ homes, at least from national television broadcasts.

The one quantifiable area of the game that seems to get a little less sabermetric coverage from broadcasters is baserunning. Stolen bases are of course referenced, and Statcast sprint speeds are a relatable number that does occasionally get mentioned. However, the concept of baserunning runs (BsR) has not made its way to television in the way that its fielding counterparts have.

While the introduction of Statcast sprint speeds to the public is a step forward in understanding how good a baserunner is, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Rather, it tells something more akin to the potential baserunning value that a player can bring. Activating that potential involves no small amount of baserunning instincts for basically anyone who lacks Billy Hamilton’s speed. Looking at one player in particular from 2018 clearly shows us why in explaining runner ability, broadcasts need to go beyond sprint speed.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the twenty-first installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Patrick Corbin, Zach Eflin, and Sonny Gray — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Patrick Corbin (D-backs) on His Slider

“My slider. When I was really young, I asked my father how to throw a breaking ball, and he showed me this grip. It’s something I’ve stuck with throughout the minor leagues and the big leagues. It’s been my best pitch, and it’s kind of neat that my father showed me the grip.

“I can’t remember exactly when it was, but probably around 10 years old, maybe the first couple of times I played catch with my father. He always used to say he loved throwing it at the left-handed batter’s hip and having him freeze, only to have the ball break over the plate. That’s something I’ve always remembered and taken with me.

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If you’re like me, you’ve been assuming the Dodgers would end up in first in the NL West for a while. Indeed, our playoff odds are still big fans, because it’s hard to overlook the track records of the various players around the Dodgers’ roster. If I had to make a prediction right now, I’d still settle on the Dodgers to be there at the end. Maybe that makes me smart. Maybe that makes me stubborn. Could be a little of both. I don’t like to be put on the spot.

But for however much talent the Dodgers possess, on August 16 we’re looking at the first-place Diamondbacks. The club’s been playing .500 baseball for a month and a half, yet still, they’re looming above the Dodgers and Rockies. When it comes to explaining why the Diamondbacks are where they are, credit has to go to good hitters like Paul Goldschmidt, David Peralta, and apparently Daniel Descalso. Credit also has to go to good pitchers like Patrick Corbin and Zack Greinke. And then there’s the helpful matter of so-called “cluster luck” — the Dodgers have a better run differential than the Diamondbacks do. No team reaches first place because of one reason alone.

Here, however, I’d like to shine some light on the Diamondbacks’ greatest strength. To this point I’d say it’s gone underappreciated, but I’ll show you the evidence in seven plots. The Diamondbacks have had an incredible defense.

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They set records for the highest win total and run differential of the post-1960 expansion era, and featured future Hall of Famers Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera in full flower among what would become known as the homegrown “Core Four,” as well as a memorably diverse lineup and bench sprinkled with some sage veterans. Despite a brief scare in the AL Championship Series, they steamrolled their way to the 24th championship in franchise history and the first of three straight. The 1998 Yankees — who went 114-48, outscored the opposition by 309 runs, and won 11 out of 13 postseason games, culminating in a sweep of the Padres in the World Series — were the best team upon which I’ve ever laid eyes, and they’ll probably remain the yardstick by which I measure all others, just as the 1927 Yankees were for my grandfather’s generation. If not for the time I spent watching and attending their games, it’s quite likely I’d never have taken the career detour that led to full-time writing about baseball.

As the Yankees celebrate the 20th anniversary of that team this Saturday in the Bronx, I’ll be there for personal reasons as much as professional ones.

I’ll spare you the long version of the personal journey, as I’ve previously documented my experience growing up as a third-generation Dodgers fan and then gradually taking to the Yankees after moving to New York City. The short version is that my arrival in NYC in February 1995, at the tender age of 25, more or less coincided with the Yankees’ return to prominence after having failed to crack the postseason since 1982. I had never before lived in a city that had its own major-league team (let alone two), and my passion for baseball was only beginning to awaken from its college-era dormancy. It was fueled primarily by reading the New York Times sports page and watching ESPN and network broadcasts.

I had rooted for the Mariners in their thrilling 1995 Division Series with the Yankees, but somewhere in the next year, between my first trip to the House That Ruth Built (August 18, 1996), David Cone‘s seven no-hit innings in his return from an arm aneurysm (September 2), and Jim Leyritz’s homer off Mark Wohlers in the epic Game Four of the World Series (October 23) — all of it blanketed by the preternatural placidity of manager Joe Torre, whose ability to withstand the bluster of owner George Steinbrenner and the noise of the New York media I found nothing short of miraculous — I found myself pulling for the Yankees.

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This is Nate Freiman’s second post as part of his August residency. Nate is a former MLB first baseman. He also played for Team Israel in the 2017 World Baseball Classic and spent time in the Atlantic and Mexican Leagues. He can be found on Twitter @natefreiman. His wife Amanda routinely beats him at golf. To read work by earlier residents, click here.

Being a tall hitter came with its drawbacks. Long arms, lots of moving parts. Eight-hour bus rides starting at 11pm. Getting pitched inside. (In fairness, I saw thousands of pitches and only suffered two broken hand bones.)

And yes, the low strikes. My entire career, anytime I’d get a low strike called there would be someone from the dugout yelling, “He’s six-eight!” Hopefully, by that time, it wasn’t news to the umpire. My hitting coach in A-ball told me to wear my pants Hunter Pence style. Above the knees. He figured the umpire would see the bottom of the zone better. I figured that would get me ejected.

So I can honestly say I sympathize with Aaron Judge. Travis Sawchik has done great work on Judge’s relationship with the bottom of the zone. It makes sense that a guy that big is a strike zone anomaly, but do other guys have the same problem? I used Statcast data to investigate.

The MLB pitch data features anywhere between 50 and 90 columns of information for every single pitch thrown. One of them is “sz_bot,” or strike-zone bottom. I used this number to adjust the strike zone for each hitter. The problem is, sz_bot varies. Of the hitters who have seen at least 500 pitches in 2018, the top of the zone measurement (sz_top) has an average range of 2.8 feet, while the bottom of the zone (sz_bot) varied an average of 3.4 feet.

Most of this is due to random outliers. One of the columns for David Freese, for example, suggests his strike zone on one pitch extended up 11 feet. To address this, I took the median strike-zone top and bottom for each hitter instead of the average.

Once determining the approximate strike-zone boundaries for each hitter, I isolated somewhat arbitrary window at the top and bottom of the zone. The window at the top of the zone is simply every pitch that is coded as being at least half the diameter of the baseball above sz_top. The bottom window is every pitch located between half a ball below sz_bot and one foot below sz_bot. The batters receiving strike calls on these pitches are, in theory, those who are the greatest victims of low strike calls.

Not surprisingly, Judge is way ahead. In fact, there’s a statistically significant difference between him and Peralta, who’s still ahead of everyone else in baseball. These guys also happen to have an average height of 75.4 inches, or a little over 6-foot-3.

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Historically, leadoff hitters don’t possess much power. Historically, they have served as table-setters, players who get on base so that more powerful hitters down the lineup can drive them in. Historically, all that’s true.

A look at this year’s home-run leaderboards, however, reveals Mookie Betts, Matt Carpenter, and Francisco Lindor all among the top 15. Betts is having a year that rivals Rickey Henderson’s 1990 campaign as the greatest leadoff season of all time, and Carpenter leads the National League in homers and WAR. Lindor, meanwhile, is just a lone dinger away from his second straight 30-homer season. That all bat leadoff for their respective clubs.

Because it receives the most plate appearances, the leadoff spot is, by definition, relevant to a club’s run-scoring efforts. Despite its importance, teams have generally failed to place one of their best hitters in that position. In 2002, leadoff hitters put up a 93 wRC+ overall, behind the marks posted by Nos. 3 through 6 in the lineup and virtually even with second and seventh. That’s just one year, but it’s representative of teams’ reluctance to place their best, or even second-best, hitters in the leadoff spot. The graph below shows a five-year rolling OPS+ for the leadoff spot, with data from Baseball-Reference.

For the most part, leadoff hitters have been roughly league-average hitters. They were a bit better than that in the late 1960s, when pitchers dominated everyone, and they had a great run in the late 80s and early 90s, too, when Hall of Famers Rickey Henderson and Paul Molitor were putting up great seasons at the top of the lineup. It’s possible teams spent the rest of 90s and early 2000s looking for Rickeys and Raineses and that, when they couldn’t find speedsters who got on base a ton and hit for extra bases, they merely settled on players who possessed the first of those traits. The result was suboptimal lineups that left runs on the table by giving too many plate appearances to players who weren’t among the best hitters on the team.

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