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On September 1, Byron Buxton returned from a stint in Triple-A and proceeded to go 15 for 37 with five home runs over 10 games. Talking to him at the tail end of that stretch, I got a good feel for what was driving his success. The 22-year-old phenom was just playing baseball.

When expectations are sky-high, that’s easier said than done. Buxton was drafted second overall by the Minnesota Twins in 2012, and shortly thereafter he was ordained as the game’s No. 1 prospect. Media attention was heavy. Every success and failure was scrutinized. Being Byron Buxton was burdensome.

That’s slowly changing. Buxton told me that this is “probably the least attention,” he’s received since turning pro. He still feels pressure to perform, but at the same time, it’s easier for him to “not worry about what people are saying, or expecting.”

He admits to pressing early in the season. He also owns up to getting away from what comes natural. Read the rest of this entry »

With postseason awards ballots due in a few days, we’re getting a bunch of writers publishing their hypothetical votes today, including national writers like Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman. As has become an annual custom, one of the primary points of contention is whether to give the AL MVP to Mike Trout, far and away the best player in the game.

Rosenthal, who definitely ascribes value to playing on a contender, stumps for Trout anyway.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I prefer my MVP to come from a contender. A preference, though, is not an absolute. Trout has been the best by such a wide margin — his OPS is nearly 100 points higher than Betts’, thanks to his league-leading .441 on-base percentage — it would be foolish to deny him.

Heyman takes the more traditional path, arguing for Mookie Betts because he had better teammates, even though he puts Trout second, ahead of plenty of other good players on winning teams. In support of his belief that it’s close enough to give the edge to the guy was fortunate enough to get drafted by the well-run organization, Heyman puts for this argument.

Some say his age-23 season has been comparable to Joe DiMaggio’s. I’m not sure about that. But it’s good enough to take the AL MVP in a tight, tough, interesting year. He gets the nod over David Ortiz for playing defense (and an outstanding right field), and he gets it over Trout as he was almost as brilliant as Trout (9.5 WAR compared to Trout’s 10.2). That 0.7 extra WAR (based mostly on more walks) isn’t enough to disregard how Betts helped his team win baseball’s best division, and dominated games in the division, especially against the Orioles.

In the blurb on Trout finishing second, he repeats the claim that the difference is just some walks, saying “But his numbers are almost identical to those of Betts, except for the walks.”

Now, sure, that’s one way to look at it. If you just look at the traditional baseball card numbers, they are very similar.

But just for fun, let’s add another traditional baseball number to the column. It’s not going to be anything scary. It’s not a formula. It’s a counting stat, just like home runs and RBIs.

Heyman framed the difference as just some walks, and because walks are easy to dismiss — they’re not driving in runners, the guy didn’t really do anything to earn them, it’s just the pitcher being wild, etc… — it’s a good way to pretend that Betts and Trout have had similar offensive seasons. But instead of talking about walks, what if we just called them something else; non-outs. Because we know outs are bad, right? When a guy on the team we’re rooting for makes an out, we’re sad, because that means that our team’s offense has fewer chances to score the rest of the inning.

Mookie Betts has made 86 more outs than Mike Trout this year; in fact, Betts is sixth in the AL in outs made. Now, certainly, some of that is because he’s just hit a lot; his 718 plate appearances are second most in the AL, as the Red Sox offense has turned over the lineup frequently, allowing Mookie to come to the plate 49 more times than Trout, despite playing in the same number of games. But even Trout magically batted 49 more times than Betts this weekend, and made outs in every single one of those plate appearances, he’d still be almost 40 outs behind Betts on the season.

Betts has made three full games — plus a few leftover — worth of outs more than Trout has this season. That is an enormous difference, and can’t just be hand-waved away as “some walks”. And that’s why Trout is crushing Betts in any kind of calculation of offensive runs produced this year.

wRC is closer than the rest because, as a counting stat with a base of zero, it isn’t accounting for opportunities, so Betts’ extra trips to the plate help him rack up some more value. In the other three, where an average hitter is the baseline, Trout pulls away, as he produced more raw offensive value while using many fewer outs to get there.

OFF is the combination of park-adjusted batting and baserunning value, and here, Trout has a 26 run lead. Twenty-six runs is almost three wins. The idea that it’s a close race when you look at their batting lines is simply factually incorrect. The 86 out difference makes it entirely clear that Trout trounced Betts as a hitter this year. That’s nothing against Mookie, who I continue to love; Trout trounced everyone as a hitter this year.

So while I appreciate Heyman looking at WAR in determining his ballot, the reality is that the argument that it’s a close race depends entirely on the acceptance of an enormous gap in defensive value as measured by Defensive Runs Saved, which is the fielding component used in Baseball-Reference’s WAR, which Heyman is citing. DRS gives Betts credit for 32 runs saved — 10 runs more than the next best player, Adam Eaton — which is almost double his +17 UZR.

Betts is clearly a fantastic defensive player, and he deserves credit for his all around game, but the reality is that the argument that Betts and Trout have had similar 2016 seasons is an argument for accepting the validity of single-season DRS at face value. We’ve probably done more to advocate for the acceptance of stats like UZR and DRS as anyone, but even I wouldn’t look at Betts’ 2016 defensive numbers and argue that we should accept that he was the best defender in baseball this year, and far more valuable defensively than Trout, who still plays the more demanding defensive position.

And unlike single-season defensive metrics, which continue to have some noise influencing their results, we can very easily identify the offensive difference between Trout and Betts. It wasn’t just “some walks”; it was 86 outs made. And those 86 outs are why, with all due respect to Betts as a great player who had a great season, it isn’t really all that close this year.

Trout was the best player in baseball, by a lot. If you want to give the award to Betts because he plays on a winning team, we can’t stop you, but let’s not pretend that Betts and Trout had similar offensive seasons. When it comes to offensive production in 2016, it’s Trout, a huge gap, and then everyone else.

According to recent reports, the Marlins are on the verge of signing third baseman Martin Prado to a contract that would keep him from hitting the free agent market this winter; the extension will cost them roughly $40 million over three years, keeping Prado in Miami for his age 33-35 seasons.

According to even more recent reports, the Cubs are on the verge of signing President of Baseball Operations Theo Epstein to a contract that would keep him from hitting the free agent market this winter; the extension will cost them roughly $50 million over five years, keeping Epstein in Chicago for his age 43-47 seasons.

Between the two of them, the Epstein news is certainly more significant. The architect of the best team in baseball, Epstein is now the highest paid executive in the sport, and this represents about a 250% raise over the contract he got when he got to Chicago, which paid him $18 million over five years. The Prado deal is more of a run-of-the-mill contract extension for a nice player, but it barely rated as news in the baseball landscape. But given the differing lengths of the contracts, Prado is actually making more per season, and the two deals are roughly comparable in value.

In other words, MLB just told us that one of the best executives in the game is worth about the same as the decline years of a solid non-star, a guy who should be expected to be something like a league average player during the contract he just signed. I’m sure the Marlins and Cubs weren’t trying to create this kind of juxtaposition, but thanks to the timing of these two deals, we can say that the market is currently valuing coveted front office members in a similar way to an average player.

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Don’t ask Justin Verlander if his new harder slider is a cutter, apparently. “Verlander is steadfast on this — he’s not throwing a cutter. It’s a slider,” is how Chris McCosky characterized the ace’s opinion on the changing pitch.

The difference between a cutter and a slider is difficult to really nail down — and is most easily represented as existing on a spectrum. First, there’s the cut fastball, thrown with a slightly offset grip but still a fastball release. That pitch usually goes about a mile or two slower than the four-seam with only a couple inches of drop beyond the four-seam. Mariano Rivera threw that thing better than anyone, but Adam Ottavino modeled it for us.

Then there’s the baby slider, a cutter grip thrown with a little more supination before release, and those go 4-plus mph slower and have a few inches more drop. Those are the pitches you see from Madison Bumgarner, Cole Hamels, Jon Lester, James Shields, and Adam Wainwright. Most of those pitchers refer to that pitch as a cutter, but most of those pitches also drop more than the overall average for the cutter.

To make matters worse, there’s a brand of slider thrown by the Mets which might fit between the “baby slider” cutter and the slider-slider. We’ve dubbed that pitch the Warthen Slider. And it might be the answer to why Verlander is throwing a harder slider that looks like a cutter, but one to which he still refers as a slider. And it might be part of the answer to why tonight’s starter Daniel Norris has seen such an improvement in his walk rate.

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Yesterday, with the help of a much smarter friend, I dug a little bit into the home-run surge that we’ve all observed. There was room for some more examination, though, so this is to be considered a brief follow-up. Toward the end of that post, I engaged in some speculation. Based on evidence below, I believe I was wrong!

To re-cover some territory real quick, we do have this fact, established in the original post: Home runs are being bunched unusually tightly. The distribution of home-run rates around the game is closer to being even than ever before in at least the game’s modern version. That’s interesting! More and more hitters are getting into the dinger spirit, such that the landscape isn’t so dominated by a handful of elites. That now being given, let’s move on.

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“Different day, different arm,” is one of those things you’ll hear a pitcher say. You get up on the mound on a given day, and you try to figure out which pitches are working, what parts of your body are barking, where you can actually intentionally throw your pitches. It’s understandable, given the complicated mechanics required to throw the ball so hard, with so much movement — but it has implications for those who would attempt to place a number on their true-talent ability.

We know about this difficulty when it comes to pitching. Projections try to put a number on the true ability of a player, but pitching projections lag behind hitting projections. Even when a stat — like exit velocity — becomes meaningful in similar samples for hitters and pitchers, it behaves strangely for pitchers. It becomes meaningful quickly but isn’t quite predictive, either — maybe because pitchers add pitches, change the script, and become different more quickly than hitters. Maybe because their true talent shifts often.

Maybe true talent for hitters shifts more than we think, though. At least when it comes to their actual ability to express that true talent due to health reasons.

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On Sunday evening, the Los Angeles Dodgers hosted the Colorado Rockies in what was legendary announcer Vin Scully’s last home game at Dodger Stadium after 67 years of calling the team. The Dodgers won, in walk-off fashion, scoring in the ninth on a Corey Seager home run that tied the score at 3-3, and again in the 10th on a home run by Charlie Culberson that clinched the National League West Division and ensured Scully’s final call in Los Angeles would come on a high note.

But Seager and Culberson only had the opportunity for their theatrics because of a home run hit in the top of the ninth inning by a Rockies player. With the Rockies down to their final strike of the ninth inning and with rookie outfielder David Dahl in a 1-2 count with two outs, this happened:

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Monday night, a plurality of eyes were fixed on the fall’s first presidential debate, featuring at least one individual that any given viewer mistrusts. Like many political events, it was a transparent exercise in attempted persuasion, and one would be left questioning either participant’s sincerity. Around the same time in the evening, the Mets and the Marlins were playing out the most important baseball game of the year.

I don’t want to belabor the contrast, but it was a most striking juxtaposition. No matter your leaning, the debate wouldn’t have left you feeling clean. You’d be on edge, hairs raised, to some degree agitated. Watching the Mets and the Marlins, however, could only leave you feeling deeply, truly human. Tears were shed and tears were shared. Watching from home or from a seat in the park, the Marlins won, 7-3. Jose Fernandez got the win, Jose Fernandez knocked all of their hits, and Jose Fernandez scored all of their runs.

Following the events of Sunday morning, there was no question the Marlins had to cancel their game. It was too soon, too unthinkable to play. The emotional blow was crippling. You can’t play a game if you can’t rise to your feet.

Come Monday, there was no question the Marlins had to proceed with their game. The game itself would be of little consequence, the fouls and the flies and the takes-too-long pitching changes. But only a game could be at the heart of the ceremony that baseball so desperately needed.

Grief is seldom coherent, and in the aftermath of the accident, there have been some complicated feelings of something like guilt. As much as fans hurt, fans aren’t Fernandez’s family. Even Fernandez’s own teammates are something short of being his own family. And beyond that, while Jose Fernandez died, two other young men also are dead, two young men unfamiliar to the greater public. Their deaths are no less sad, no less unfortunate. Something felt vaguely inappropriate about grieving but one of three losses.

The baseball world needed Sunday to advance into Monday. It needed for a game to be played, because only the game could give us direction and relieve us of the burden of guilt. Fernandez’s loved ones will pay their respects. The loved ones of the two others will pay their respects. There were three lives, and they were all involved in many circles. The game – that was for Fernandez’s baseball circle. It functioned as a wake, for the baseball community. We’ve all had feelings we needed to let out, and Monday gently guided their release.

From the fan perspective, it feels objectively silly to be so broken up about the loss of a stranger. And in truth, the feelings aren’t entirely about Fernandez himself – we’ve witnessed the sudden loss of a 24-year-old invincible, and that reminds us of the fragility we try in earnest to forget. The teammates and the coaches – they, at least, knew Fernandez, many of them well. The reasons for their heart-hurt are easier to place, but nevertheless, how you feel is how you feel, even if you’re not entirely sure why. The entire baseball community aches. The only way to heal is through baseball.

Yesterday’s was an experience of hurting while watching others hurt. As Fernandez’s peers paid tribute, we paid ours through theirs. We listened to the mournful trumpet, and we listened to the anthem. We remained silent when the ballpark was silent, and we were brought into the two teams embracing. We were brought into the Marlins encircling the mound, inscribing Fernandez’s number and rubbing dirt on their pants. We were brought into even Giancarlo Stanton’s red-eyed pregame speech, and after it was all over, with the Marlins triumphant, we were brought into the team again standing around the mound, bowing their heads and leaving their hats.

In the video, you see one Marlin – Fernandez, No. 16 – saying to the others, “let’s leave our hats.” Only some of the elements from the whole evening were planned. That was a spur-of-the-moment idea, with Fernandez’s teammates searching for every last way to honor his memory. No single tribute ever heals a soul, but for an instant, every tribute feels like it could. The players and coaches seized any opportunity to acknowledge their grief. And so our own was acknowledged, from some distance away, though still very much raw.

The most important baseball game of the year featured the most important home run of the decade. Leading off the bottom of the first, Dee Gordon took a pitch while batting right-handed, mimicking Fernandez’s stance and apparently wearing his helmet. Gordon then returned to his familiar box and, two pitches later, he hit his first home run of the season. Gordon was in tears as he crossed home plate, and he sought out the Marlins’ every embrace.

You’re under no obligation to believe it was fate. You’re under no obligation to believe it was divine. What it was was cathartic, the unplanned and entirely unpredictable tribute that will forever stand as the symbol and memory of the evening. The devastating reality is we don’t yet know the total volume of this collective grief, but Gordon’s home run allowed us to release so much of an unknowable amount. There was sadness after, as there was sadness before, yet sandwiched was one single flicker of elation. It was, one could figure, the first.

Sunday’s accident brought far more than just the baseball community to its knees. We are not alone in being hurt, and it feels at least slightly intrusive to be affected so deeply at all. One could conceivably question whether we even have the right. But Jose Fernandez touched untold millions of people, and Monday night, there was a ceremony allowing for the baseball world in particular to grieve. The ceremony took place around a baseball game, a game that was scheduled to be started by Fernandez himself. He was, with great misfortune, unable to make the start, but in place of one singular Jose Fernandez, there were nine.

On August 1, within an hour of this season’s trade deadline coming to a close, the New York Mets and Cincinnati Reds finalized a trade which sent outfielder Jay Bruce to New York in exchange for prospects Dilson Herrera and Max Wotell. The Mets added Bruce certainly not for his glove, but for his bat, particularly for a little extra thump against right-handed pitching. At the time of the trade, Bruce was having the best season of his career. The 29-year-old right fielder had 25 home runs in just 402 plate appearances, good for a career-best .295 isolated slugging percentage, and a 124 wRC+. After an injury-plagued 2014 and a down 2015, Bruce was driving the ball in the air to the opposite field, had cut down on his strikeouts, and, at the plate, generally looked like the prime version of himself for the first time in several years.

And then, one week ago, on September 20, less than two months after parting ways with a legitimate major-league prospects to acquire Bruce’s bat, Bruce was pinch-hit for in the eighth inning of a close game against the Atlanta Braves by Eric Campbell, he of the career 81 wRC+ which presently rests at 55 this season. Bruce said after the game he had never been pinch-hit for. He certainly couldn’t have ever expected that the first would come for a player with Campbell’s track record.

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As you know by now, the world lost Jose Fernandez on Sunday. Here at FanGraphs, we wanted to offer those affiliated with us an opportunity to remember Fernandez in their own way. We have collected those remembrances, and would like to share them with you, as we all mourn Fernandez’s passing together.

August Fagerstrom
I cannot say that I truly knew Jose Fernandez. We spoke once, directly, and once as part of a post-game interview scrum. But I can say that our paths crossed, and that I was graced with his personal energy, which was impossible to miss if you spent more than 30 seconds in the same room as him, and for that, I am grateful.

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