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Yesterday, Nick Stellini noted that there might be an AL East bidding war for third basemen this summer. The Red Sox’ current third basemen are a collection of misfits, while the Orioles could choose to shift Manny Machado back to shortstop to replace J.J. Hardy if they find there aren’t that many appealing options in the shortstop trade market. Both teams are playing well enough to expect to be buyers, and in some form, the left side of the infield looks like a place both teams could make real improvements.

But if I’m Dave Dombrowski, I’m probably not planning on trading for a third baseman this summer. I think there’s a pretty decent chance that the Red Sox’ stretch-run third baseman is already in the organization.

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A frequently asked question this spring in FanGraphs chats, and presumably around water coolers inside and outside the Beltway, concerned which Bryce Harper we would see in 2017.

Would we see the 2015, Ted Williams-like, Griffey Jr.-in-his-prime, Hall-of-Fame-trajectory version? Or would we see something closer to the perplexing, if still productive, 2016 version. (Harper must have been restricted by nagging injuries last season, right?)

So far it seems like the answer is more likely the former, but perhaps it is neither. Instead of settling for somewhere between those outcomes, perhaps what Harper has really set out to do is to exceed the extremely high bar he set in 2015.

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As a FanGraphs reader, you’re presumably familiar with the TTO acronym. Just in case you’re not, TTO stands for Three True Outcomes, and said three true outcomes are walks, strikeouts, and homers. They’re the outcomes least likely to lie to you; they’re the outcomes that tell you the most about the individuals involved. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that there are more strikeouts now than ever before. You also know that home-run rates have taken off. So this plot should fit with what you’d figure. Viewing over an entire century of baseball, you see league-wide TTO% taking flight.

This season, a third of all plate appearances have ended with either a walk, a strikeout, or a homer. As recently as 1992, it was more like a quarter of all plate appearances. It was a fifth of all plate appearances in 1946. The image there speaks for itself, so I suppose I don’t need to address it any longer. The trends are up, is the point. There’s no sign of this pattern changing course.

Recently, the Effectively Wild podcast received a listener email, asking how high is too high. That is, how high could TTO% go before the game just feels all weird and broken? I didn’t have a good answer. I’m unconvinced the average fan cares about this as much as analysts do. We’re the ones who need stuff to write about, while the average fan just wants to know if a given team is winning or losing. Here’s one thing I can say: The future might look like the Rays. Nobody else TTOs quite like the Rays do.

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I first became acquainted with Charlie Morton while covering the Pittsburgh Pirates as a newspaperman and while conducting research for my non-fiction work Big Data Baseball.

Morton was the first major-league player I encountered who exhibited a real interest in analytics. He developed an appreciation of numbers from his father, Chip, an accountant and former Penn State basketball player. As Morton struggled with inconsistency early in his major-league career — he posted a 6.15 ERA with the Braves as a rookie in 2008 — he turned to PITCHf/x information to better understand his stuff and performance beyond a traditional box score. He found PITCHf/x data and fielding-independent numbers kept him sane. He found advanced statistics and PITCHf/x provided a better baselines of performance to study. His father dove into the data, too, and they often had phone calls discussing the quality of his stuff, the velocity, and horizontal and vertical movement, etc.

Earlier in his career with the Pirates — and with the help of Jim Benedict and Ray Searage — Morton had dropped his arm slot and and adopted the two-seamer as his primary pitch. His new, and present, delivery reminded many of Roy Halladay. The Pirates had Morton watch video of Halladay. And at times, Morton’s stuff — his darting sinker and bending curveball — also resembled former Philadelphia and Toronto ace’s. In Pittsburgh, during the good times, he earned nicknames like “Electric Stuff” and “Ground Chuck.” He posted a 62.9% ground-ball rate in 2013 to go along with a 3.26 ERA and 3.60 FIP. He earned a three-year contract extension after the 2013 season.

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CLEVELAND – Miguel Sano knows what he wants.

In the visiting team quarters in Progressive Field, there’s a small kitchen — like something you might find in a World War II-era submarine — that offers players various pre- and post-game sustenance. On Sunday morning, Sano, apparently unsatisfied with the options, disappeared from the clubhouse and reappeared with rectangular aluminum carry-out pan containing mangú, a Dominican breakfast dish of mashed plantains topped with a type of thinly sliced sausage. He said he had procured it from a local restaurant. The 6-foot-4, 260-pound Sano is known as a popular teammate and this catering feat was a prime example. As he appeared with breakfast, several of his teammates, also of Dominican origin, huddled around a card table in the center of the clubhouse for a Sunday morning feast.

Sano is selective at the plate, too.

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I’ve always loved Bronson Arroyo’s leg kick. There’s some whimsy in it, is maybe why. At the very least, it represents a different mechanical approach than one finds elsewhere in the league.

Turns out, there are reasons against flinging the lead leg out into space like Arroyo does — and yet, his reasons for doing it make some sort of sense, as well. And in between the two, there’s even something about the future of baseball in that kick. It’s a kick that contains multitudes.

First, let’s revel in its glory — in this case, from the hitter’s view. Is it… majestic?

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CLEVELAND – Byron Buxton sat before his locker in the road clubhouse at Progressive Field before a game last week, intermittently scrolling through his smart phone and chatting with several nearby teammates. As I approached Buxton to request an interview, his clubhouse neighbor, Miguel Sano, morphed from a 6-foot-4, 260-pound third baseman to clubhouse bouncer. He was prohibiting me from addressing Buxton until I paid a fee, something of a toll. He was joking, I think, and I played along, asking if he would give me a receipt for business expenses. While Sano, who’s known for his loquaciousness and sense of humor, prompted some laughter in the corner of the Twins clubhouse, he was also perhaps trying to protect his teammates a bit from another prying journalist.

Buxton wore the label of “No. 1 Prospect in the Game” for multiple years, which has placed his offensive struggles at the major-league level under great scrutiny. But no one has placed more pressure on Buxton than himself. And that pressure was creating something that prevents success from occurring in the batter’s box: anxiety.

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This is Alex Stumpf’s fourth piece as part of his May residency at FanGraphs. Stumpf covers the Pirates and also Duquesne basketball for The Point of Pittsburgh. You can find him on Twitter, as well. Read the work of previous residents here.

Andrew McCutchen is struggling early in the season. If you’ve followed him for the last three years, you’re aware that this is nothing new.

In 2015, he hit .194 in April. In 2016, he slumped his way to a .719 OPS through the first four months of the season. After getting benched for a series in Atlanta, he posted an .852 OPS over the rest of the campaign, just north of the .844 career mark he’d possessed entering the year.

Last year’s strong finish created optimism for this season. So far, however, McCutchen is slashing just .212/.218/.401, with a career worst 84 wRC+.

The absence of both Jung-Ho Kang and Starling Marte — due to visa issues and a PED suspension, respectively — means that the Pirates require an excellent performance from McCutchen just to keep the offense afloat. So far, that hasn’t happened. In fact, the results have been even worse recently: entering play Sunday, McCutchen had recorded a .132/.207/.302 line in 58 plate appearances since April 29th.

As usual, though, the results only tell part of the story. The quality of contact is sloping downward, too. In 2015, McCutchens’ exit velocity averaged out to 90.7 mph. In 2016, it was 89.6 mph. Through May 13th of this year, it was 87.6. The rate of balls hit at 95 mph or above is down, from 44.8% in 2015 to 42.6% in 2016 to 39.3% in 2017. The same goes for barrels, too, dropping from 9.5% to 8.5% to 5.6%.

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Ian Happ made his MLB debut with the Cubs yesterday. He did so as a right fielder, which is one of four positions he’s played since Chicago drafted him ninth overall in 2015 out of the University of Cincinnati. But while versatility is handy, Happ’s bat is his calling card. The 22-year-old switch-hitter can mash.

Happ’s rapid ascent to the big leagues took him through Iowa, where he was slashing .298/.362/.615, with nine home runs, at the time of his call-up. And while he profiles more as a doubles machine than he does a home-run champion, his bombs aren’t anomalies. He has pop, and his approach is all about loft.

“I’m trying to hit balls in the air to center field,” explained Happ, who left the yard in his fourth big-league plate appearance. “If you get the ball in the air, you give yourself a chance to find some green and get on base. Ground balls are out. The instruction guys talk about trying to elevate, in order to produce. Your slugging percentage is in the air. You don’t slug on the ground.”

Happ doesn’t feel he’s markedly changed his approach, although he acknowledged that hitting the ball in the air wasn’t prioritized at the collegiate level. All in all, he’s pleased with how the Cubs organization has approached his development. Read the rest of this entry »

Ringer staff writer and FanGraphs podcaster Ben Lindbergh exhibited some excellent reporting earlier this week, obtaining MLB’s study on the properties of its baseballs. It was a valiant attempt to learn whether the ball itself is responsible for the game’s curious home-run surge. Last year, Lindbergh and Rob Arthur went as far as dissecting some balls to study, wondering if juiced balls were the “new steroids.”

This year, the home-run rate on fly balls is 12.8%. Last year, it was the same. Both marks are the highest on record and certainly grab our attention.

Lindbergh has been on the case of the juiced ball for a while. In light of that fact, it’s somewhat unsatisfying that the report he obtained doesn’t support the juiced-ball theory. While this conclusion naturally depends upon the assumption that MLB’s study was conducted in good faith, Dr. Alan Nathan — friend of FanGraphs and professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois — was asked by MLB to review the research as an independent source. Lindbergh spoked with Nathan.

“Quite frankly, I was disappointed at that result, because I was hoping I’d find something,” Nathan, who was compensated by MLB for the time he spent studying the BRC report, tells me by phone. However, he says, “I saw nothing in the data that was presented that suggests that the ball has been altered at all.”

Wrote Lindbergh in conclusion:

If the spread of dingers has less to do with COR or seam height than with a wave of Yonder Alonso–like breakouts by hitters who’ve tailored their swings to lift low pitches, then pitchers could exploit those uppercuts by raising their own sights … The historic performance we’ve seen since mid-2015 still supports at least a little skepticism about the true roots of baseball’s home run revolution; without witnessing the tests, we can’t consider these findings definitive. But the “juiced ball” hypothesis does seem much less likely than I thought it did two days ago. “It has every look of being suspicious,” Nathan says about the timing of baseball’s big-fly bailout. “But as I said, there’s nothing I could find that suggests anything amiss.”

Everyone interested in the home-run surge has a theory about its causes.

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