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This season, Anthony Rizzo has obliterated 30 baseballs into the seats for home runs. As of last night, in perfect symmetry, 30 baseballs have exacted revenge for their wounded brothers by hitting Anthony Rizzo. This is a rare accomplishment. Is this an accomplishment? This is a rare accomplishment.

Until now, only one player had ever before reached that particular 30/30 threshold — Don Baylor, in 1986. That year, he knocked 31 dingers, and was hit 35 times. Over his career, he hit hundreds of homers. And he was hit by hundreds of pitches. He’s fitting company. If you want to make Rizzo more special, he’s also exceeded 30 doubles, which Baylor didn’t, so now by those terms Rizzo is the first-ever 30/30/30 player. Anyhow, going back to the original 30/30 terms, if you loosen the restrictions, there have only ever been six 25/25 player seasons. In 2004, Craig Wilson slugged 29 homers, and was slugged by 30 pitches. He came painfully close to belonging in the Baylor/Rizzo tier. Maybe that year he was robbed of a home run. I don’t know, so I’ll pretend, to aid the narrative. Craig Wilson: almost historic. Too bad.

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Zack Greinke’s changeup may only seem different this year. By the stats, it drops a bit more and it’s harder, sure. But if you ask the pitcher, the pitch itself hasn’t changed much. “I throw it more this year,” he said when I asked him what was different about it.

If the systems have the change dropping more this year — estimates run from about a half inch to an inch more drop this year over previous years — there might be something else going on. The systems might be grabbing bad changeups and classifying them as sinkers, while calling the bendier pitches changeups.

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Not very long ago, I read an article featuring some quotes from Kevin Cash, talking about how he wanted the Rays’ hitters to be more aggressive swinging at the first pitch. At least, I think I read such an article, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. It was probably from Ken Rosenthal, but now I feel a little bad in case I just gave credit to the wrong person. In any case, the article is lost on my internet, but the memory remains, and with it a little research idea. It’s time to look again at first-pitch swings.

With the season basically over, we’re free to examine league trends. You can examine league trends whenever you want, but now there’s no more time for new trends to pop up. Any trends present today are effectively locked in. Last week, I wrote a little bit about the return of offense, and especially home runs, in this season’s second half. If there was a crisis of run-scoring before, concerns have at least been reduced. The run-scoring trend is probably the most interesting one. It’s a big deal if there’s going to be offense again. But there’s another thing we’ve seen happen, even if we individually haven’t noticed. Hidden in the deeper numbers is evidence that hitters are more willing to go up there and swing right away.

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The way Jake Arrieta has thrown the ball this year — especially in the second half — has ended any discussion about who the Cubs #1 starter is. Arrieta has propelled himself into the discussion of true aces, and he’ll be the guy the Cubs put on the hill with their season on the line next Wednesday. With Jon Lester slotting in to the #2 spot, the Cubs top two starters should be able to hold their own against any other staff in baseball.

After that, though, things get a little more interesting. When asked who his third starter in the postseason might be, Joe Maddon stated simply “I don’t know.” Jason Hammel began the year as the team’s third starter, and his overall numbers are quite good for a middle-of-the-rotation guy, but those numbers are based on an excellent first half and a pretty lousy second half. Prior to the All-Star break, opposing hitters posted just a .261 wOBA against Hammel, but since the break, they’ve put up a .371 mark against him. The problems may be tied to a hamstring injury that landed him on the DL in July, and unless he really shows them something in the last week of the season, it’s not clear that the Cubs can trust that he’s healthy enough to be effective in high-leverage postseason innings.

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Sunday night, Jake Arrieta came within sniffing distance of doing the almost unthinkable. By which I mean, Arrieta made a serious bid to hit two home runs. He also, at the same time, flirted with a perfect game against the Pirates, but that part is very thinkable. I don’t know how many times this year Arrieta has grabbed attention for taking a no-hitter or a perfect game deep, but it numbers somewhere in the “a lot”s, with Arrieta more or less existing on the verge of history. It doesn’t take a no-hitter bid to put him in that position — the bid is practically a foregone conclusion.

Eventually, Arrieta gave up a hit and put multiple people on base, but none of those people happened to score, Arrieta spinning another seven shutout innings. Two batters of a total of 22 reached, and one of them only did so because Arrieta did him the privilege of hitting him with a pitch. The outing was timed well, what with the Pirates being a rival of the Cubs. The outing was timed well, what with Arrieta in the running for the Cy Young award. And the outing furthered Arrieta’s case for maybe having the best season half that ever there was. However arbitrary season halves are, we’ve been splitting seasons at the All-Star break forever, and what Arrieta has done since the break legitimately defies belief.

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Other teams are clinching divisions, and Nationals players are fighting one another. Not that players on good teams haven’t fought, and not that the Nationals’ incident was in some way unique, but this isn’t how it was supposed to go. A few days ago, the Nationals were mathematically eliminated from winning the division, and in reality it feels like it’s been even longer. They haven’t been within three games of the Mets since August 11. They’re currently behind by 9.5, and only the AL Central has a bigger gap between first and second place — by a half-game. It’s not an exaggeration to say the Nationals are feeling pretty embarrassed.

This is all review to you, but it’s not like the Nationals were simply the favorites. They didn’t come in with slightly better odds than any of their rivals. After the Max Scherzer acquisition, Bryce Harper talked about rings, and the only issue there was Harper was expressing what the rest of us thought. It looked like the Nationals would win the East in a landslide. Our projections figured as much. The PECOTA projections figured as much. The Clay Davenport projections figured as much. The whole entire media figured as much. And it wasn’t just about looking forward. Between 2012 – 2014, the Nationals won more games than any other team in baseball. They had 280 wins, and their closest division rival had 269. Those were the Braves, who were rebuilding. The Nationals looked good, and they didn’t have a serious threat.

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Over the weekend, the Mets officially won the National League East, though thanks to the meltdown in Washington — which now includes Jonathan Papelbon publicly choking Bryce Harper, with his manager apparently doing an impression of an ostrich while it happened — the accomplishment has been somewhat overshadowed in the news cycle. And it’s pretty obvious that, with the Nats falling apart at seemingly every opportunity, the NL East was the easiest division in in the league to win; even after sweeping the Reds over the weekend, the Mets still have just the fourth best record in the NL.

But lost in the shuffle of the MVP getting assaulted on TV, along with the Cubs and Pirates getting us all tuned up for what might be the best Wild Card game we’ll ever see, the Mets were quietly setting up their playoff roster, and the results of that tune-up should scare the crap out of the other four playoff teams.

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There is no one single way to be good at baseball, which is part of why it’s so amazing. Just last week we peeked into the mind of a man with one of the lowest swing rates in baseball when we asked Joey Votto how he does it. And this week? Let’s ask Adrian Beltre.

“I’m probably the opposite,” Beltre laughed when he heard Votto’s name. “I’m thinking swing first and take second. I don’t have that discipline.”

It’s hard to argue with him, but he has been a top-ten all-time third baseman. “It’s probably not the way to do it,” he said with that trademarked smile, “but it has worked for me.”

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Astros shortstop Carlos Correa turned 21 years old just three days ago. That would have been a much more dramatic opening line if we weren’t living through the Mike Trout, Bryce Harper, and Manny Machado Era, but it’s a relatively dramatic opening nonetheless. Correa has looked like one of MLB’s premier players over his first 90 games and 390 plate appearances all while being younger than Bryce Harper. And Bryce Harper is very young.

It’s not much of a surprise that Carlos Correa is a great baseball player. In fact, Correa was supposed to be a great player. He was taken first overall by the Astros in 2012, and while some people saw it as a way to free up money for later picks, no one disputed him as a top-level draft target. Correa’s been an elite prospect his entire career, occupying the fifth spot on Kiley’s Top 200 entering the season, and the third spot on the Baseball Prospectus and ESPN (Insider) lists.

The particularly remarkable aspect of Correa’s 2015 season is not that he’s hitting 32% better than league average or that he’s gathered 3.1 WAR in under 400 plate appearances; the remarkable part is that he’s doing so in 2015. While Correa’s potential was widely acknowledged, no one really seemed to expect it to arrive so soon. Kiley filed a report on him in October of 2014, giving him present Hit and Game Power grades of 20 to go along with a “2017 ETA.”

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I have an NL Cy Young ballot this year, and with 10 days left in the regular season, I legitimately don’t know who I’m going to vote for. If I was the kind of voter who looked only at run prevention and credited that entirely to the pitcher on the mound, it might be a fairly easy decision in favor of Zack Greinke, given that he’s at +9.4 RA9-WAR, putting him in pretty historic company in terms of keeping runs off the board. If I went solely by the measures that we have a pretty good idea are primarily influenced by the pitcher and not his defenders behind him, it would be pretty easy to cast a vote for Clayton Kershaw, given that he’s leading the fielding in FIP-based WAR by a pretty good margin.

But as we’ve discussed many times here over the years, both of those extremes are clearly incorrect; giving a pitcher no credit or blame for all the non-HR contact he allows is definitely wrong, but so is assigning the entirety of the results of those balls in play to him and pretending that defense does not play a role in run prevention. In reality, a pitcher should get credit (or blame) for some of the impact of events that FIP does not capture, so FIP-based WAR is definitely an incomplete measure of a pitcher’s performance. How much credit or blame should be assigned isn’t entirely clear, and if you just throw your hands up in the air and split the credit down the middle — blending FIP-based and RA9-based WAR together — you’ll note that Jake Arrieta ends up in the top spot, though the differences between all three pitchers at that point are so small as to be insignificant.

As you probably know if you’re reading FanGraphs, I’m not going to simply cast my vote based on total run prevention, since I believe in attempting to isolate player performance when handing out individual awards, and simply using run prevention metrics and pretending like defense isn’t a thing strikes me as a particularly lazy shortcut. But I’m also not going to just use FIP, and not just because it ignores a bunch of plays that do matter; it also has (albeit to a smaller degree) issues with teammate interaction. As our ability to measure a catcher’s impact on balls and strikes has grown, it has become clear that no pitching event is really “fielding independent”, and a pitcher’s walks, strikeouts, and home run rates are indeed impacted by the performance of the guy he’s throwing the ball to.

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