In April, Matthew Boyd gave up two homers. In May, five balls left the yard against the Tigers lefty. Last month, Boyd’s breakout season slowed as he gave up 10 homers. As we enter July, Boyd has a solid 3.57 FIP and a 3.72 ERA, and has been worth 2.6 WAR, which ranks 17th among pitchers this season. Those are good numbers to be sure, but as June began, Boyd’s ERA and FIP were both 2.85 and his 2.5 WAR ranked third for pitchers behind only Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Boyd’s strikeouts and walks have been slightly better than they were earlier in the season; his BABIP is slightly higher and his LOB% is a little bit lower. But that doesn’t explain his 5.90 ERA and 5.37 FIP. It’s the home runs that are hurting Boyd, and with the trade deadline a month away, trying to determine whether they are randomly bunching across a few starts or the beginning of a trend is an important exercise for teams looking to reinforce their rotations.

As for how Boyd broke out in the first place, the answer is a bit easier to find — the work has already been done for us. Sung-Min Kim detailed Boyd’s transformation earlier this season, showing how Boyd lowered his arm slot to gain spin on his fastball, and raised the location of the pitch. He also buried his slider more often, gained a consistency in his delivery, and basically eliminated the two-seamer. David Laurila also wrote on Boyd earlier this season, discussing his work with Driveline to create a better slider.

Boyd’s season can be carved up any number of ways depending on how you might want to use (and abuse) arbitrary endpoints. If we took away the first three spectacular Boyd starts of the season, where he struck out 29 and walked six, his FIP is 4.09, his ERA is 3.95, and he’s averaging nearly two homers every nine innings. If we look at just his first 10 starts, he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has five starts with 0 or 1 runs. He’s only got two starts where his strikeouts don’t at least equal his innings pitched. The only time he walked as many as three batters, he struck out 13 Yankees. If Boyd had evenly spaced out his 17 homers across his starts, we’d be discussing a moderate breakout. Instead, we have a massive breakout followed by concern. Read the rest of this entry »

Any new fans coming to major league baseball through this past weekend’s London Series between the Yankees and Red Sox got a rather distorted sense of the game’s scoring and temporal norms, particularly in the first inning of each contest. In Saturday’s series opener, each team sent 10 batters to the plate, scored six runs, and chased the other team’s starting pitcher (New York’s Masahiro Tanaka and Boston’s Rick Porcello). The 12-run, 58-minute inning was just the opening salvo of a slugfest that seemed to be imported straight from Coors Field, a 17-13 slog that took four hours and 42 minutes to play. Sunday’s game, won 12-8 by the Yankees, wasn’t quite as high scoring, but it did feature a four-run first inning by the Red Sox that clocked in around 26 minutes, not to mention a nine-run seventh inning by the Yankees in a game that lasted four hours and 24 minutes.

Though neither team in Saturday’s game came close to outdoing this year’s first-inning high score (10 runs by the Phillies on April 16 against the Mets), and the two teams fell short of the combined record of 16 runs most recently accomplished by the A’s (13) and Angels (3) on July 5, 1996, the rivals did make some history. According to STATS, this was the first time since June 23, 1989 (Blue Jays at A’s) and just the sixth time since 1912 that both teams scored at least six runs in the first inning. Via the Baseball-Reference Play Index, that game was one of just three since 1908 in which neither starter got out of the first inning after allowing at least six runs, with an August 4, 1948 game between the Red Sox and Browns, and an April 16, 1962 game between the Cardinals (not Bob Gibson’s best day) and Phillies being the others.

The Yankees’ big numbers in London helped them overtake the Twins for the major league lead in scoring (5.80 runs per game). While Saturday’s game was the second time in less than two weeks the team chased a former Cy Young winner in the first inning after clobbering him for six runs — they did so on June 19 against the Rays’ Blake Snell as well as Saturday against Porcello — they’re actually not the majors’ most prolific first-inning team. They entered Sunday ranked eighth in the majors with 0.62 first-inning runs per game, a per-nine rate of 5.56.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brendan McKay continued his fantastic season this past Saturday. Making his big-league debut with the Tampa Bay Rays, the 23-year-old left-hander retired 18 of the 20 Texas Rangers batters he faced. And his work on the farm had been every bit as dominating. In 66.2 innings between Double-A Montgomery and Triple-A Durham, McKay compiled a 1.22 ERA and allowed just 38 hits.

And then there’s the offensive side of the equation. As you know, McKay can swing the bat. Aspiring to be the major’s next Shohei Ohtani — sans the Tommy John surgery — the former Golden Spikes winner as a two-way player at the University of Louisville was 11 for his last 33, with three home runs, at the time of his call-up.

What is his approach on each side of the ball, and does he truly expect to be able to play both ways at baseball’s highest level? I addressed those questions with the 2017 first-round pick a few days before he arrived in The Show.

———

Laurila: Nuts and bolts first question: What is your approach on the mound?

McKay: “I’m a pitcher who likes to get ahead — just like every other pitcher — and force the action, rather than letting the hitter have any control over the at-bat. That’s basically it.”

Laurila: Are you looking to induce contact, or are you out there trying to miss bats? Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, Boston sports-TV anchor Bob Lobel used to say of former Red Sox players excelling for other teams, “Why can’t we get players like that?” Similar words are currently being uttered in Detroit, in regard to James McCann. In his first season with the Chicago White Sox, the 29-year-old catcher is slashing a robust .320/.378/.519, and he’s already gone deep nine times.

McCann wasn’t nearly that good with the stick in his four-plus years with the Tigers. When he signed with the ChiSox in December — a bargain-basement one-year deal for $2.5M, no less — he was a .240/.288/.366 career hitter. How did he suddenly morph into an offensive force?

“Honestly, the biggest thing for me this year is that I’m trying to be the best James McCann,” is how the Tigers castoff explained it prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “I’m staying within myself and not trying to do too much. I’m taking my base hits the other way — I’m taking my singles — and not trying to hit the impossible six-run homer.”

The breaking-out backstop trained with Rangers infielder Logan Forsythe over the offseason — both live just south of Nashville — and as McCann pointed out, each has played with some great hitters over the course of their careers. Not that attempting to emulate one’s more-talented peers is always the best idea. Read the rest of this entry »

Futures Game rosters were announced today. We’ve compiled them and added them to a tab on THE BOARD for your perusal. There you’ll have access to things like our scouting reports, tool grades, and video of the prospects.

You probably already know most of the names on the rosters because they’ve been discussed and/or prominently ranked at this website, but I want to touch on some interesting inclusions. First, I had to create a new BOARD record for, and source a fresh report on, Brewers RHP Devin Williams, who has been in pro ball since 2013 and is this year’s oldest participant. Injuries constantly sidetracked the first five years of Williams’ career and this season was his first above A-ball. I saw him as a starter in 2016 and 2018 sitting about 90-93 with a plus curveball. He was finally ‘penned this year and has been 91-97 and has touched 100 while showing plus breaking stuff. In my opinion he’s still too wild and has too lengthy an injury history to FV him the way we have other relievers with similar stuff (he was in the honorable mention section of the Brewers’ offseason list), but it’s a great story and an in-person look in Cleveland might change our minds. He’ll likely be a 40-man add this offseason.

Also of note is the Red Sox’s 2018 seventh round pick Jarren Duran, who was the biggest individual riser on our post-draft list update and is on the roster. As far as I know, he’s the lowest-drafted player to make a Futures Game in the following season. Boston’s system is not good and that’s part of why he’s their representative, but his rise has been quite incredible and his evaluation is arguably the game’s most important.

Of course, it’s important to note that these rosters are subject to change due to either injury or big league call-ups. Cubs RHP Adbert Alzolay and Rays LHP/1B Brendan McKay are both in the big leagues right now and would seem to be the most likely to be replaced, while Nationals SS Carter Kieboom, Cleveland OF Daniel Johnson and Rockies LHP Ben Bowden are, in my opinion, in the next tier of likelihood to be replaced. For logistical simplicity, replacements for Alzolay and McKay would be, and this is just an educated guess on my part, Midwest League arms from those teams. Rays prospects Shane Baz or Matthew Liberatore, both on Bowling Green’s roster, would be fine inclusions whose throwing schedules wouldn’t have to be adjusted much for this game, while Cubs LHP Brailyn Marquez, who is at South Bend, is a logical talent/proximity sub, but he’s have to be shorted a day’s rest (compared to what he’s used to, not based on typical big league rest) to throw that night.

News broke last night that Rays’ prospect Brendan McKay will make his debut on Saturday; Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times had the initial report. The reasons for Tampa calling up McKay, who was ranked 14th overall this spring by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel before moving up to 11th on THE BOARD in the post-draft update this month, are threefold. First, the Rays need a pitcher Saturday. As Topkin noted in his piece, Ryan Yarbrough pitched three innings in last night’s 18-inning win over the Twins, and he won’t be able to take the bulk of the innings tomorrow as originally planned. Second, the Rays are in what should be an incredibly close race for the playoffs and need every competitive advantage they can get. And third, tying into the second, McKay is a very talented pitcher who gives the Rays the best shot at winning.

Before getting to McKay’s talents, let’s first examine the competitive landscape in the American League. Much has been made of the parity in the National League, with nearly every teams having some shot at the playoffs halfway through the season. The top-heavy nature of the American League has made for a bunch of haves and have-nots, with only a handful of teams having a realistic shot at the playoffs. Looking at the playoff odds, the Rays are one of those teams:

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Belt isn’t having a particularly good year. For once, I don’t just mean that his counting numbers are unimpressive; he’s long been a player whose production has outstripped his reputation, as light-slugging first basemen tend to be, and playing in San Francisco’s extreme scoring environment hasn’t helped. From 2012 to 2018, he produced 3.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances, All-Star-level production, despite never really hitting for power or average.

This year, his defense has dragged him down near replacement level (note to the Giants: Belt really shouldn’t play the outfield), but his hitting isn’t up to his usual standards either (a 107 wRC+ that equals last year for his worst full-season rate). Even as Belt’s production wanes, though, he’s actually getting more fun to watch. Why? Well, you never know when he’s going to drop down a bunt, regardless of situation, and bunting for a hit is among the most fun plays in baseball.

When you picture the ideal player to shift against, Brandon Belt is almost a perfect match. He’s left-handed, pulls a ton of his groundballs, and isn’t fast enough that a second baseman in shallow right field might not have time to throw him out on a grounder. When shifting exploded in frequency from 2014 to 2016, Belt was the kind of player who gave teams a reason to do it. In 2015, 54% of the balls he put in play were against a shift, up from 14% in 2013. By 2016, that number climbed to 78%, and it’s bounced around 80% ever since.

At first, Belt had no clear counter. By the end of 2016, he’d bunted only five times in his major league career, going 2-4 with a sacrifice. Teams shifted on him with impunity, and Belt lashed grounders into the shift. His groundball rate decreased, but that’s not a way to punish shifting; it’s merely a way to ignore it. He tried bunting more in 2017, but it was only middlingly effective — he finished 3-6 on the year, and two of those singles were bang-bang plays; he easily could have been 1-6. “Bunt against the shift” is a great idea in theory, but Brandon Belt wasn’t doing it well enough in practice.

Bunting skill isn’t fixed, though, and Belt proved it. His bunts in 2018 were crisper, better-executed, and better-aimed. Take a look at this surgical strike against the Padres:

Freddy Galvis’s kick-stop drives the point home: there’s no reason to bother fielding that ball. For the season, Belt went 4-6 on bunts, and none of the singles even drew a throw. That .667 on-base percentage will do, even if he did embarrass himself in a Bay Area tilt:

Hey, they can’t all be perfect. That’s no different than a grounder into the shift, even if it probably feels worse.

Remember all the way back in the previous paragraph where I said they can’t all be perfect? Well, I lied. Brandon Belt is perfect on bunts this year, and he’s getting increasingly audacious. He’ll bunt in situations where a runner is valuable, sure. Leading off an inning against a decent reliever in a close game? That’s a great time to get a runner on first, and the shift is just asking for it. He doesn’t even hesitate:

That’s too obvious, though. Brandon Belt isn’t about bunting only in situations where a runner on first is most important. He’s in it for the love of the bunt. 1-1 count with two outs and a one-run lead? Sure, Belt will bunt on you:

Are runners on first valuable with two outs? Not at all! Still, Belt’s feeling it. Put away your run expectancy tables and feel the magic. Sometimes you just have to bunt.

How about against an Orioles righty in Camden Yards, a situation where Belt is probably as likely to hit a home run in a single plate appearance as he’ll ever be? Oh yeah, absolutely:

Keep your home runs; Belt will take his not-even-guaranteed base and be happy with it. The Giants hit three long balls in this game. Brandon Crawford, he of the .141 career ISO and 8.7% home run per fly ball rate, hit two home runs. Lefties batting against Oriole righties are in the best possible situation to succeed. Gabriel Ynoa has a 6.45 FIP and 6.75 ERA this year, for crying out loud! Belt doesn’t care, though. He’s bunting.

If you think those last two bunts are questionable, his latest one takes the cake. With the bases empty, a bunt single and a walk are exactly the same. Honestly, a bunt single and a walk are the same almost all the time, but especially with the bases empty. 3-0 count, pitch that might well be called a ball? Bunts away!

Bunts on 3-0 are rare, because they’re ridiculous. 3-0 counts often end in walks, without the hassle of having to connect on a bunt and reach base safely. When Matt Carpenter did it last year, I looked into it and found that he was only the third player to get a fair bunt down with a 3-0 count and the bases empty in the last 10 years. Well, that statistic is now outdated, because Brandon Belt is the fourth.

Think about what bunting on 3-0 entails. A 3-0 count is the best place a hitter could ever find himself. After 3-0 counts this year, major league hitters as a whole walk 60.6% of the time. They get on base 72.8% of the time. On the rare occasion where they don’t walk, they often hit home runs — 5% of non-walk at-bats that hit 3-0 end in a dinger. Literally every offensive stat is improved; batters have posted a .233 ISO (against .180 ISO overall), a .322 BABIP (.296 overall), and a .309 batting average. Brandon Belt doesn’t care. He just wants to bunt.

At this point, I think we can say that Brandon Belt is drunk with bunt power. In a twist, though, that isn’t really new. When Cody Bellinger bunted on 3-0 in 2017, Jeff Sullivan investigated and found a 3-0 bunt attempt from Belt that went foul in May 2017. Brandon Belt wasn’t even a good bunter in 2017! That bunt rolled foul, and it might be good that it did; the Dodgers weren’t particularly over-shifted. He just felt like bunting.

Hittable righties, favorable counts, spots where a runner on first isn’t all that valuable? That’s all irrelevant. Brandon Belt sees an opening, and he attacks. It’s not going to stop teams from shifting against him — he’s grounded into a shift 41 times this year, which means the shift is saving more in grounders than it gives back in bunt singles. Still, if you’re playing against Belt, maybe keep your third baseman close to home until the count gets to two strikes. Honestly, maybe leave him there with two strikes, too. Belt hasn’t attempted a bunt with two strikes yet in his career, but at the rate he’s turning bizarre situations into bunt singles, it’s only a matter of time.

The lingering suspense over whether the Yankees could break the major league record for consecutive games with a home run, which they had tied at 27 on Monday night, lasted until Tuesday night’s sixth pitch from Blue Jays starter Clayton Richard to Yankees leadoff hitter DJ LeMahieu. Boom!

In the brief interval that it took this scribe to tweet about that record — admittedly, while juggling a beer and a scorebook in section 422 of Yankee Stadium — Aaron Judge homered as well. In fact, solo home runs accounted for the Yankees’ entire output in their 4-3 victory, with Gleyber Torres and Edwin Encarnacion joining the party, too. The latter even broke out the parrot against his old team for just the second time since departing in the winter of 2016-17, that while a hawk literally watched his dinger from atop the right field foul pole.

Here’s the Yankees’ new perch after Wednesday, when Didi Gregorius’ second-inning home run off Toronto’s Trent Thornton further extended the streak (LeMahieu added another one in the Yankees’ come-from-behind win as well):

It doesn’t take the eyesight of a hawk to note that 11 of those 13 seasons are from the post-1992 expansion era, which has featured at least one home run per team per game — a level previously topped only in 1987 — in all but five seasons (1993, and every year from 2010-14 except for ’12). Four of those seasons, including three of the top seven, are from the 2016-19 period, which, as I noted on Monday in relation to Justin Verlander’s performance, is the first four-year stretch with at least 1.1 home runs per team per game. This year’s 1.36 per game is the all-time high, 0.1 ahead of the previous high set just two seasons ago, an increase of 8.7%. It’s 0.21 home runs per game (18.8%) higher than last year, and 0.5 homers per game (58.4% higher) than in 2014, the year of the post-1992 low:

If we factor in the ever-increasing strikeout rates, the rise is even sharper. This year’s rate of home runs per batted ball — that is, HR/(AB-SO+SF) — is 5.31%, 0.49 points (10.1%) higher than the previous high in 2017, 0.86 points (19.3%) higher than last year, and 2.08 points (64.2%) higher than 2014.

I’ll get back to that momentarily, but it’s worth noting that when the Yankees’ streak began in late May, only three of the seven players who contributed the most home runs to last year’s record-setting total of 267 were active, namely Aaron Hicks (who tied for second on the team with 27 homers), the sixth-ranked Torres (24), and seventh-ranked Gary Sanchez (18). Since then, the 1-2 punch of Giancarlo Stanton (38) and Judge (27) has returned from lengthy stints on the injured list, and Gregorius (27) has returned from off-season Tommy John surgery. Miguel Andujar (27) is out for the remainder of the season due to surgery to repair a torn labrum, but on June 16, the team traded for Encarnacion, who currently leads the league in homers (24, including three as a Yankee).

All of which is to say that it’s been a mix of A- and B-list players who have not only propelled this particular Yankee streak but have helped the team out-homer all but three other teams, namely the Twins (149), Mariners (145), and Brewers (138):

Such are the Yankees’ power reserves that the acquisition of Encarnacion led to Frazier, who has hit a robust .283/.330/.513 (117 wRC+), being optioned to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, and remaining on the farm even as Stanton went back to the IL with a sprained posterior cruciate ligament in his right knee, the result of a baserunning mishap early in Tuesday night’s game. He’ll miss the upcoming London series against the Red Sox, and will be out for longer than the 10-day minimum. With or without Stanton, who has played just nine games this season, it’s not hard to imagine a more complete Yankees lineup overtaking the Twins in the home run department. But even if they don’t, the rather patchwork lineup has kept them on pace to eclipse last year’s total, which is a hint that the homer situation is simply getting silly.

League-wide, no individual is on pace to challenge Barry Bonds‘ single-season home run record of 73; Christian Yelich, who leads the majors with 29 homers, would finish with 62 if he were to keep hitting them at the same pace over the Brewers’ final 82 games as he has over his first 73 (he’s missed seven games with assorted aches and pains). However, with only five teams past the halfway point in their schedules heading into Thursday (the Mariners have played 84 games, the other four of those teams 82), a total of 56 players had reached the 15 homer plateau, meaning that they were on pace for 30 homers. The league-wide record for such players is 47, set in 2000. Four of the top five totals hail from the 1996-2001 stretch, with the fifth coming in 2017, when 41 players reached it. Similarly, 18 players have reached 20 homers, and are on pace for at least 40. The record for players with 40-homer seasons is 17, set in 1996, and we haven’t seen more than nine players do it in any Statcast-era season; there were nine in 2015, but just three last year. Yelich, Pete Alonso (27 homers through the Mets’ 81 games) and Cody Bellinger (26 homers through the Dodgers’ 82 games, including one on Wednesday) are on pace for at least 50 homers. Only in 1998 and 2001 did more than two players reach that plateau, with four apiece in both of those years, including the single-season record breakers, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds.

Meanwhile, 14 of the majors’ 30 teams are on pace to set franchise records, with the top four surpassing last year’s Yankees:

All but three of the 30 teams are averaging at least one homer per game. Twenty-two teams are on pace for 200 homers, one fewer than in all of baseball prior to the 1994 players’ strike. Only in 2017, when 17 teams reached that plateau, have there even been as many as a dozen teams to do so. Eight teams are on pace for 250 homers, a level reached by just six teams ever prior to this year. The mind reels at these numbers.

While one can point to the general trend of batters making greater efforts to elevate the ball — whether to hit it over shifted infielders or not — it’s more accurate to call that an adaptation to the new reality. The scientific evidence again points to the ball itself as being the driving factor. Earlier this week at The Athletic, Dr. Meredith Wills published a follow-up to last year’s breakthrough article, which itself was a follow-up to MLB’s Home Run Committee report. That committee, led by Dr. Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois, had found that the recent home run spike was caused by a decrease in the ball’s aerodynamic drag, but found no physical difference in the balls that would explain the change.

Conducting her own measurements using digital calipers and disassembled baseballs, Wills concluded that post-2015 balls’ laces, which were an average of nine percent thicker than balls from the 2010-14 period, were producing less bulging at the seams, yielding a more spherically symmetric ball with less aerodynamic drag — thus allowing them to fly further.

For her latest study, Wills examined 39 balls from this season, which she found differed from the 2015-18 balls and even earlier ones. Most notably, she found “demonstrably lower” seams, only 54.6 percent ± 15.0 percent as high as those on balls from previous seasons. By measuring the coefficient of static friction, she also found that the leather on this year’s balls is relatively smoother, concluding, “the static friction for the 2019 balls is 27.6 percent lower, a statistically significant result demonstrating the leather covers are genuinely smoother.” She measured the bulging of the seams and found, “Not only were the 2019 balls virtually round, what bulging they did show was slightly negative, suggesting the seams might be slightly ‘nestled’ into the leather.” The significantly rounder balls, which have thinner laces than last year’s (more in line with 2000-14 samples) produce even less drag than before, and thus even more carry. Wills noted that both the seam and smoothness issues jibe with anecdotal reports from pitchers about difficulties in gripping this year’s balls, as voiced by players such as Sean Doolittle, Jon Lester, and Noah Syndergaard.

As for commissioner Rob Manfred’s recent suggestion that a better-centered pill (the core of the ball) is a factor in creating less drag, Wills was largely dismissive, writing, “[T]his is the most difficult result to produce without significant manufacturing changes, since existing techniques make it hard to keep the pill from being centered to begin with… Therefore, it seems unlikely that pill-centering would explain a sudden change in drag; at the very least, we would be remiss not to also examine other possible sources.”

All of Wills’ articles on the topic, which are behind a paywall, are worth reading, but it should suffice to say that there’s ample scientific evidence that the ball is carrying this. And how. Check out these numbers, which combine Statcast’s average distance measurements with those from our stat pages:

Fly balls are carrying an average of four feet further than last year, and eight feet further than in 2015. Add to that a general increase in fly ball rates and you have a recipe for significantly more homers. Perhaps too many homers. Combine that trend with the aforementioned strikeout trend and lower batting averages — though this year’s .251 is three points higher than last year, it’s in a virtual tie with 2014 for the second-lowest mark of the DH era, which began in 1973 — and the result is a greater percentage of runs being scored via homer than ever before. Here’s an historic look at what Joe Sheehan christened “the Guillen Number” a decade ago at Baseball Prospectus:

For a period of over two decades, from 1994-2014 — two decades that saw record home run rates, PED scandals, expansion, new ballparks galore — the rate of runs scored via homers was remarkably stable around 35%, never deviating more than two points in either direction. It hit 37.3% in 2015, and has climbed at a rate of about two points per year since, to heights previously unseen, and now, both statistically and aesthetically, the situation sticks out like a sore thumb. Ken Rosenthal called it “Bludgeon Ball” earlier this month, and I think the description fits. This is brute force baseball, and while it doesn’t lack for a certain amount of excitement, it’s very lacking in subtlety. When nearly half the league is on pace to set home run records, and the vast majority of teams are set to exceed totals that were once very rare, we’ve gone too far.

It’s time for MLB and Rawlings (which the league bought last year) to fix this. Wills noted that while Manfred has maintained that Rawlings hasn’t changed its manufacturing process or materials “in any meaningful way,” this may be an issue of semantics:

The Home Run Committee found that Rawlings regularly implements production improvements, including changes to the yarn (February 2014), the pill (March 2014, May 2015), the leather (June 2014, February 2017, August 2017) and the drying process (March 2016, February 2018). The Committee described these changes as “largely technical in nature and very unlikely to be in any way related to the (2017) home run increase.” That being the case, things like enhancing leather smoothness or drying baseballs more efficiently might not be considered “meaningful” to manufacturing.

While this may have been a reasonable attitude in the past, such enhancements now appear to have compounded, producing a more aerodynamic ball.

Wills recommended another committee report with the goal of using the information to tighten specifications, improve quality control and “determine further production improvements.” To these eyes — and I know I’m not alone — such improvement would include the restoration of some normalcy. When a player’s 40-homer season, or a team’s mountain of 200 homers, is no longer worthy of celebration, is as common as a garden weed, we’ve lost something. It’s worth searching for how to get that special something back.

In his rookie season, Pete Alonso has already hit 27 home runs, second in baseball behind Christian Yelich. He’s sporting a .281/.371/.634 slash line that’s created a 161 wRC+, which trails only Cody Bellinger, Mike Trout, and Yelich. Even after adjusting for defense, Alonso’s 3.3 WAR is seventh among all position players. With numbers like that, it might be difficult to believe that Alonso has already gone through a prolonged slump with just half the season finished. He has, though. Behold:

Hitting like a slightly below-average player for a month might not be classified as a slump for most, but Alonso has been one of the most productive hitters in the game, and the middle-third of his season thus far is a departure from the rest of his numbers. I could have massaged the numbers to make them slightly worse by going from April 30 to May 25, but the above sample fits neatly as the middle third of Alonso’s season so far. Earlier this season when Alonso was doing very well, Ben Clemens discussed the good and bad aspects of the first baseman’s game, though Ben’s focus was on the good as Alonso was annihilating baseballs at the time:

The two parts of this article are the Pete Alonso experience in a nutshell. The quality of contact isn’t the question — when Alonso hits something, it goes a long way. The question is always going to be whether he can make enough contact to tap into his tremendous raw power. The early returns are promising, but they’re also confusing. Alonso can hit — not that there were many questions about that before — but he’s been a pure manifestation of 80-grade power this year. He’s also struck out 30% of the time, which is, you know, not great.

What we saw from Alonso for much of May was the troublesome aspect of his profile. He was swinging and missing a lot, and not drawing walks. He was hitting home runs, but he produced such a low batting average that his hitting line was below average. We could chalk the BABIP up to bad luck, but his expected numbers from Statcast weren’t much better than what he actually produced. For a first baseman with potential fielding issues, that profile is nearly unplayable on a contending team. Alonso was experiencing his first adjustment from pitchers, and for about a month, he adjusted poorly.

Here are Alonso’s plate discipline numbers from the first few months of the season:

Pitchers threw to Alonso more carefully and he responded in the worst way possible: swinging more. His O-Swing% numbers were already below average at the start of the season, and for a month, he got worse. In visual form, here’s Alonso’s swing percentage heatmaps from those periods:

Maybe those maps don’t look completely different, but look at the sections up and in, and low and away. On the left map from April, Alonso isn’t swinging frequently at those pitches, while in May, he offered at the same pitches more often. That he made contact more often on pitches out of the zone might have prevented even more strikeouts, but it also caused weaker contact when Alonso put the ball in play. At the height of his slump, he told Mike Puma of the New York Post about his need to focus on pitch location.

“If I am swinging at junk then they are going to keep throwing it,” he said. “If I am doing my job and swinging at strikes and taking borderline pitches or sitting on good pitchers’ pitches and being locked in on my zone then it is kind of rewarding if I get a quality pitch to hit, whether it be a breaking ball that’s over the middle of the plate or changeup over the middle or fastball.

“For me it doesn’t matter what type of pitch it is, I need something middle, because even if I expand the zone on a fastball then I am still going to get myself out or not get myself in a good count to do damage or help the team.”

Alonso identified and understood his weakness. Making a demonstrable change against the best pitchers in the world can be difficult. Here’s his swing map over roughly the last month:

That area down and in is still the place to throw it if you want to try to get it by Alonso, but he’s pretty clearly swung less in an effort to avoid chasing bad pitches. That up and in area, and the low and away area look even better than they did the first month of the season. The lack of swings on the outside of the zone isn’t an indication it is a safe place to throw there, though, as Cole Hamels recently found out:

This is what Alonso’s plate discipline numbers have looked like over the past month compared to the first two we saw above:

I highlighted the O-Swing% and Zone% because those stats show the changes pitchers have made against Alonso and how Alonso has responded. Pitchers continue to hope Alonso chases, and are hopeful to avoid the strike zone. The Mets’ slugger initially responded with poor plate discipline but has since responded with fewer swings. As a result, Alonso has been better lately than he was in April when he took the league by storm:

Alonso has seen a massive decrease in his strikeout rate as pitchers have opted to avoid the strike zone. It’s possible his passivity could be exploited, but that’s a dangerous game given his ability to punish strikes. For good measure, here’s how his Statcast statistics during the same time periods measure up:

Since the end of May, only Mike Trout and Jorge Soler have been hitting the ball with more authority when contact is made. Factoring in walks and strikeouts, only Trout has exceeded Alonso by Statcast’s metrics over that span. Statcast’s numbers align with our own, as Mike Trout has a 227 wRC+ since May 29, with Alonso second to Trout with a 204 mark just besting Christian Yelich. He’s made some of my skepticism at his pace seem foolish, but at least I’m in good company along with a lot of the game’s best pitchers.

At first glance, any plan for the Rays to split their home games between the Tampa Bay area and Montreal — the exploration of which was reported last week by ESPN’s Jeff Passan — seems like a cockamamie idea. At second and third glances, too, not only because of the numerous legal and logistical hurdles involved, and the specifics of how those will be overcome so lacking, but because the underlying premise is so flawed.

That aspect was underscored on Tuesday, when Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman held a press conference in St. Petersburg to discuss the plan. Let’s cut to the chase:

Anyone who has followed the past quarter-century or so of Major League Baseball ought to be able to see the problem instantly. A franchise that has otherwise proven itself to be highly resourceful and competitive over the past 12 seasons has nonetheless been unable to convince area taxpayers and public officials to fund a new ballpark to replace Tropicana Field, where their lease expires following the 2027 season. Said franchise now hopes not only to build a new ballpark in that region, but also one in Montreal, a city the Expos and MLB abandoned in 2004 after a similar failure. You don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to do the math: convincing two cities to build ballparks for roughly half a season of usage per year is in no way going to be easier than convincing one city to build a ballpark for a full season of use, particularly given that in both cases the public will be expected to bear the lion’s share of the cost while the team profits.

Likewise, convincing two fan bases who have historically shown themselves to be particularly resistant to attending games to make a similar investment while confronting the reality of what amounts to a half-season road trip seems farfetched, to say the least. Let us consider the attendance histories of both cities:

The Expos spent their first eight seasons (1969-76) in Jarry Park before moving to Stade Olympique (1977-2004). Aside from 1970, their second season of existence, all of the seasons when they ranked among the NL’s upper half in attendance occurred during the 1977-83 span, when Stade Olympique was new. It helped that their lineup featured three future Hall of Famers (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines) for most of that period, but even so, they never ranked higher than third in the league in attendance, and made the postseason only in 1981.* From 1986 onward, only once did they rank higher than 10th (ninth out of 12 teams in 1987), and in their final seven seasons, they were dead last out of 16 teams, cracking one million fans just once.

*One aspect I neglected to note when I first published this was the fact that the team was robbed of a potential postseason berth — and with it, the long-term impact upon attendance and revenue — in 1994, when they had the majors’ best record (74-40) before the strike it. The powerhouse squad was dismantled before play resumed in 1995; attendance dropped by 26% that year, and for the remainder of the Expos’ tenure, only once did they even average half as many fans per game as in 1994.

In their final two seasons, they played a total of 43 games at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Despite the park seating just 18,000, they averaged more fans there (14,222 in 2003, 10,334 in ’04), than at Stade Olympique, which in its post-1992 configuration could seat 45,757 (12,081 in 2003, 8,876 in ’04). As Jonah Keri — a Montreal native who coincidentally wrote a book about the Rays — recently wrote of the two-city arrangement, which would seem to be relevant here: “[I]t was still a split-the-baby approach that ultimately left no one happy, and did nothing to help the health of the team in its original city.”

While much of the blame for the latter-day Expos’ attendance woes falls upon owner Jeffrey Loria (who bought the team in 1999) and MLB (which assumed control of the franchise in 2002 while allowing Loria to purchase the Marlins), the underlying reality is that the team could not secure public funding for a new ballpark. Ultimately, the franchise moved to Washington, D.C. following the 2004 season and became the Nationals.

The Rays are now in their 22nd season at Tropicana Field, where only twice have they ranked higher than 10th in the AL in attendance. They ranked seventh out of 14 teams in 1998, their inaugural season, and ninth out of 14 in 2010. They have ranked last or second-to-last in every season since, and, despite winning 90 games last year and being on pace to improve upon that record this year, are currently on their way to their fifth straight season of ranking last among the AL’s 15 teams. The ballpark’s location in downtown St. Petersburg is a major problem, as it’s far from the area’s corporate base and wealthiest suburbs, with significant traffic congestion problems and a lack of sufficient mass transit service. As Keri noted, “Fewer people live within a 30-minute drive of Tropicana Field than any other stadium.”

The Rays have spent more than a decade trying to get another ballpark built in the Tampa-St. Petersburg vicinity, but have been unable to get a plan off the ground. They can’t escape their lease, which has commonly been described as iron-clad. Earlier this week, colleague Sheryl Ring delved into their use agreement’s “exclusive dealings” clause, which forbids the team from even negotiating to play elsewhere. She also noted a similarly restrictive memorandum of understanding that allowed the team only to seek new stadium sites in the two Florida counties that encompass the Tampa-St. Pete area, Pinellas and Hillsborough.

You may recall that at the 2018 Winter Meetings, Sternberg made a show of announcing that a plan to build a glitzy, $900 million new ballpark in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City had fallen through, with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred blasting Hillsborogh County’s lack of specifics (read “public funding”). That came near the end of the three-year window granted by the aforementioned MOU, which expired on December 31, 2018.

If the Rays’ attempt to sell a dual-city plan weren’t already underwater enough, St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman handed ownership an anvil last week when he said, “I have no intention of bringing this idea to our city council to consider.” Without that, the Rays can’t get another MOU that would allow them to discuss any proposal with Montreal. In fact, there’s already an inquiry into whether Sternberg violated the lease agreement by discussing his plan with Montreal mogul Stephen Bronfman, son of former Expos owner Charles Bronfman and a prime mover in a group spearheading effort to return baseball to Montreal.

If the Rays were hoping to find high-level civic support elsewhere, Pinellas County Commissioner and 2021 St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Ken Welch said, “I am not open to funding a part-time stadium where our home team is shared with another city.” Meanwhile, former St. Petersburg mayor Bill Foster likened the two-city plan to the team wanting a wife and a mistress. Good times.

“I’m confident it’s an amazing idea,” said Sternberg on Tuesday while denying that this plan was part of “a staged exit,” or “a page out of a playbook to gain leverage.” His main selling point appears to be the fact that both new ballparks would be intimate, open-air venues with 30,000 or fewer seats, which would be less costly than building parks with retractable roofs, as in Arizona, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Toronto (the Trop is currently the only dome). According to Neil deMause, who has spent the past two decades chronicling MLB’s stadium shell game in his co-authored book Field of Schemes and a long-running blog of the same name, the “ballpark figure” for such a roof is an additional $200 million to $300 million, though “it depends what kind of roof, and how it affects the overall design.”

Secondarily, Sternberg claimed that such an arrangement will drive plenty of Canadian fans to the region, the kind of vaporous “economic impact” claim so common in stadium proposals. As FloridaPolitics.com’s Noah Pransky wrote:

In short, he suggested losing 41 home games a year — while also paying for a new Rays stadium — would pay for itself, as new Canadian tourists would come down to see their “home” team early in the season.

Back-of-the-napkin math on this suggests St. Pete would need tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of new Canadian tourists to make this work, which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that no Montreal fan is going to want to watch their team in Florida’s June humidity when they could wait three weeks and watch them up north in July.

You could also simply count all the empty seats at Blue Jays’ spring training games in Dunedin to know hundreds of thousands of fans aren’t coming down to watch their home team play baseball in Florida.

DeMause has his own debunking of Tuesday’s presser at Field of Schemes. His conclusion:

Whatever exactly Sternberg has in mind, this is clearly a long, long con, or if nothing else a way to kill time and build momentum for something while waiting out the remaining eight years of his lease. It’s transparently a classic non-threat threat — even Twitter noticed — but the question now becomes what the Rays owner plans to do with any leverage that he’s savvily created, especially considering he faces an opponent in St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman who isn’t afraid to sue to enforce the lease’s gag rule on stadium talks.

Of course, it’s always possible this non-threat threat is all Sternberg plans to do, in hopes that it will shake loose more stadium talks in Tampa Bay, given that he’s tried that move (albeit without the Montreal gambit) roughly a billion times before:

DeMause then linked to a tweet promoting this Pronsky article enumerating five separate occasions over the past decade in which Sternberg suggested the Rays’ future in the region was in doubt.

The one unplayed card Sternberg appears to have is that once the Trop is replaced, the team will receive 50% of the revenues that come from redeveloping the current site’s 86-acre footprint — but only if they remain in St. Petersburg. Any escape route from their current lease probably runs through that arrangement, with the Rays either forgoing some percentage of that revenue or paying the city a lump sum. Even if that happens, the obstacles to building two part-time ballparks remain, and it is difficult to imagine the Major League Baseball Players Association signing off on putting its constituents through the extra hassle. Even though players are well compensated relative to most Americans (and Canadians) — admittedly, less well compensated in the case of anyone in a Rays’ uniform — they and their families already lead lives that are bifurcated by the realities of the baseball season. Adding another temporary residence to that arrangement, particularly one in a foreign country, will be a tough sell.

Given all of the above, it hardly seems worth scratching the surface as far as the Montreal aspect of this plan, which surely has its own obstacles. While it would be wonderful to imagine major league baseball returning to the city, which would appear to be at or near the top of any short list of desirable expansion sites, it’s nearly impossible to believe that this is how it will happen. While Bronfman’s group has made progress towards a downtown ballpark, as Keri wrote, “It’s even harder to imagine the city, provincial, or federal governments kicking in a big chunk of the construction cost (which could easily approach or even exceed $1 billion Canadian) for partial seasons.”

Thus, the Rays’ plan makes for an interesting thought experiment, but that’s about it. Don’t hold your breath for this tale of two cities to end happily.