Bryce Harper went and had himself a game Wednesday afternoon, and now, we can say these things, and not be lying: Harper is sitting on a career-high wRC+. He’s sitting on a career-high isolated power, and a career-high walk rate. Harper, by the way, is still 22 years old. It’s always mandatory to put that in somewhere. It’s a pretty big part of the picture.

It makes sense, then, to talk about what’s going on with Harper’s development. The world’s been waiting to see if he can ever try to catch up to Mike Trout. Ben Lindbergh has written about what seems to be a gain regarding Harper’s eye. Harper, also, has worked to calm down his swing a little bit, at the suggestion of his hitting coach and his manager. Back in April, Matt Williams said this:

Williams said the single to left was a particularly important example of what Harper needs to do to be successful and hit for a high average.

Williams liked to see Harper shooting balls the other way. Harper has long been personally obsessed with shooting balls the other way. Wednesday, the first of Harper’s three homers was slugged the other way. What you’d think is, maybe, Harper’s getting even better at using all fields. Truth be told, at least to this point, Harper’s gotten better at using just one of the fields.

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A fun question from last Friday’s chat:

Comment From Zob Lerblaw
How many games do the Mets have to get ahead of the Nationals and by what date to believe they may win the east? 15 games by June 1?

Since the question was asked, the Mets lost two of three over the weekend against the Yankees. So, if you’re a believer in momentum, the Mets have a little less than they used to. On the other hand, since the question was asked, the Nationals lost three of three against the Marlins. So while the Mets lost ground to Miami, they gained on Washington, which is the team they’d be most concerned about. At this writing, with the season almost 12% over, the Mets lead the Nationals by a full seven games.

The Mets are a worse baseball team than the Nationals are. I’m not 100% certain that’s true, but I’m definitely more than half certain that’s true. There is some point at which the season record becomes more meaningful than the projected numbers, but that point comes nowhere close to as early as April, and just last year the Nationals won almost 100 games. Any system that overreacts to the early start is a bad system; from this point forward, the Nationals should realistically be expected to be terrific.

Yet, the season still feels new. It feels like just yesterday that the Nationals seemed to have the biggest division edge in baseball. Already, that edge is almost all gone. The NL East is on the verge of becoming a coin flip.

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Look at this nonsense:

I should probably explain this nonsense: That’s Ryan Zimmerman. He’s swinging at a pitch from Jacob deGrom. As you can tell, that’s Zimmerman making contact with a pitch from Jacob deGrom. And that contact resulted in a dinger. It put the Nats up in the first inning. Washington wouldn’t score again. They’d win anyway.

It can be hard to write about baseball early in the season. So much of what gets written tries to use stuff observed in small samples in an attempt to figure out what’s going to happen the rest of the way. I do it myself. This isn’t that. This is just, whoa, weird dinger. Forget what Zimmerman’s future holds. Let’s talk about this home run, and Zimmerman’s present and past. Because, I mean:

This means something.

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We’ve moved our from the west — both NL and the AL — and covered both the NL and AL Wests the last two days. Today, we’ll do both eastern divisions, starting with the National League.

The Projected Standings

The easiest division in baseball to handicap. The favorites just have to avoid implosion to punch their ticket to the postseason, with only two teams even pretending to put up a fight, and neither one looking quite ready for the postseason yet. The fight for second place could be a Wild Card battle, but more likely, there is only one playoff team here, and it’s probably going to be the one we’d all expect.

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I came across a stat the other day that took me by surprise. Someone on Twitter was defending Starlin Castro, and made the point that he’s already amassed 1,000 hits before his 25th birthday. I thought to myself, “Surely, that can’t be true. Surely, Starlin Castro isn’t already one-third of the way to a milestone that all but guarantees one’s place in the Hall of Fame.” Turns out, it’s not entirely true, but this is:

Starlin Castro is only 24 and has 846 career hits. That’s the 18th-highest hit total in MLB history thru age 24, right behind Robby Alomar.

— August Fagerstrom (@AugustF_MLB) March 20, 2015

846 hits! Not bad, Starlin Castro. Especially considering it was around this time just a year ago when many were leaving Castro for dead after he put up one of the worst offensive seasons by a shortstop in recent history. In hindsight, that notion seems like quite the overreaction, given that Castro followed up the dreadful year with the best offensive season of his career and has re-cemented himself as the young, exciting Cubs shortstop of both the present and future.

But Castro’s case got me wondering: do we, as a community, take young talent for granted? Are we too quick to write off young players as one-hit wonders who burst onto the scene and then struggle — even if those struggles last for a full season or more? Seems to have been the case with Castro. Surely, I thought, there are others like him.

Naturally, my attention then turned to Bryce Harper.

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Every offseason, the somewhat distant future often comes to the forefront of conversations. Time and words are spent wondering what will happen in five, six or seven years. Space in our brains is used to speculate if these long term contracts will work out for their teams, or if Bobby Bonilla’s steady stream of income will outlast Max Scherzer’s (it will). Keeping an eye on the long term future is generally a very good idea, but games that count are less than two weeks away causing years six and seven to fade from consciousness. Before the offseason began, just three free agent pitchers had signed contracts over $100 million with new teams in the last decade. Two more names were added to that list this past winter, and now year one for Max Scherzer and Jon Lester is upon us.

The pitchers join teams at different stages of development. Scherzer comes to the Nationals as a potential piece in an immediate World Series contender. The rotation was strong before Scherzer’s arrival with Jordan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, Gio Gonzalez, and Doug Fister forming one of the league’s best rotations. The Chicago Cubs’ signing of Lester is more of a signal of things to come in Chicago. The Cubs are could-be contenders in 2015, but need a few breaks to jump into the ranks of the elite. Lester heads to Chicago expected to anchor a staff that will need his best to contend.

There are already a few concerns coming out of spring for Lester. He is missing a start due to a dead arm as those around him are ramping up their workloads to prepare for the beginning of the season. Sometimes the dead arm phase is nothing more than a normal phase pitchers go through to get ready for the season. Cole Hamels and Jordan Zimmerman have had dead arms in recent springs and gone on to excellent seasons. In addition to Lester this spring, Joe Saunders, Mike Fiers, Tim Stauffer, and basically the entire Boston Red Sox rotation have reported symptoms of a dead arm.
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Over the last 40 seasons, there have been 752 player seasons where a reliever pitched at least eighty innings out of the bullpen and averaged at least 1 1/3 innings pitched per appearances. Last year was the first and only season of the last 40 where not a single player met that criteria. Increased reliever specialization and larger bullpens have minimized the long reliever, and those who have been given the long reliever role tend to be the low man in the bullpen hierarchy. That was not always the case, and the decreased offensive environment could be a good opportunity to reintroduce the good long reliever to baseball.

In the not too distant past, long relievers were a regular fixture on teams. Relievers making regular appearances longer than two innings has always been a rarity, but some teams had relievers truly earning the the title of long relievers. From 1975-2014, just 110 relievers pitched at least 80 innings and averaged more than two innings per appearance, but those seasons have all but disappeared in the last two decades.

Strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 are omitted
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Ian Desmond is a success story. There isn’t another way to spin it. He spent his first two seasons as a big league regular playing below big league regular levels. He was fortunate to be young enough and on a team that wasn’t quite ready to compete, otherwise he might not have gotten another real opportunity. After two plus years at the major league level, he was sitting on 1,302 plate appearances and 2.5 WAR.

That’s a fine number for most of the world’s population, but with Nationals gearing up to become real contenders in 2012 Desmond was entering a sink or swim kind of season. He was 26, a good base runner, an average defensive player, and he only looked average at the plate if you compared him to other shortstops. Something had to change or the Nationals would have had to look elsewhere.

Obviously, something changed. Desmond’s defense got better and he started to hit for power. While he wasn’t known for Vottoian command of the strike zone, he held his own while also connecting for extra bases. His glove started to come along and over the last three years he’s at 14 WAR in 1,850 PA. A terrific success story and reason enough to pump the breaks after any down season early in a player’s career.

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Bryce Harper was in the news a couple weeks ago. It had nothing to do with his performance — in 2015, he hadn’t yet performed. It had nothing to do with his health — in 2015, he hadn’t yet gotten injured. It had everything to do with his words. Harper generates three kinds of stories, and this was another one about him not hiding his confidence. Harper spoke openly about how much he believes in his current cast of teammates, and while every player would claim to believe in his cast of teammates, Harper has a way of drawing extra attention, and he didn’t beat around any bushes. Harper went so far as to talk about the disadvantage of facing the Nationals’ starting staff in the playoffs.

Of course, while we like our players to be humble, it’s not like Harper was talking about anything we hadn’t already thought and said ourselves. The Nationals do seem like a juggernaut. The Nationals do seem like they should take the NL East running away. The Nationals do have a rotation that would be terrifying to face in October. Say what you will about Harper’s personality, but he just said what most people already believe. There’s no such thing as a playoff shoo-in this early in the year, but the Nationals are about as close as it gets.

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We’re in that awkward time between the true offseason, when most deals are made, and the spring, when all the Best Shape of His Life news stars flowing in. Let’s call it Projection Season, because we’re all stuck ogling prospect lists while perusing the projected numbers for the major league squads.

One of the most frustrating things about projection season can be the fact that most projection systems remain agnostic about change. Many of the adjustments the players talk about in season don’t take, or take for a while and then require further adjustment to remain relevant. So projections ignore most of it and assume the player will continue to be about the same as he’s always been until certain statistical thresholds are met and the change is believable from a numbers standpoint.

But projections do worse when it comes to projecting pitching than hitting, so there’s something that pitchers do that’s different than the many adjustments a hitter will make to his mechanics or approach over the course of a season. The submission here is that pitchers change their arsenals sometimes, and that a big change in arsenal radically changes who that player is.

Look at Greg Maddux pitching for Peoria in 1985. He’s not the Greg Maddux we know and love. Watch him throw fourseamers and curveballs. It was enough to get through the minor leagues, but, at that point, he’s barely throwing the two pitches that made him a Hall of Famer eventually.

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