Clayton Kershaw got hurt yesterday. I guess it’s possible he might’ve gotten hurt the day before or something, but Clayton Kershaw was removed from a start yesterday. His back is the problem, again, and while the symptoms now seem different from what they were a year ago, the initial word is that Kershaw will miss four to six weeks. Even after he returns, there will now be more questions, more uncertainty. And before Kershaw went down, there were already reports linking the Dodgers to Yu Darvish. It would stand to reason that the Dodgers might now have an even higher degree of interest. That’s seemingly good news for the Rangers.

Stop! Reconsider. I should say right here I don’t want to act like a Darvish trade is a foregone conclusion. The Rangers are coming off a sweep of the Rays, and they’re only 2.5 games back of a wild-card spot. You know who could use a guy like Yu Darvish? A team like the Rangers. They might decide to hold. If things stay as they are, they’ll *probably* decide to hold. This could all be much ado about nothing.

And there’s more. The Dodgers have the best record in baseball. They’ve won 33 of their last 39 games, and over that time span, they’ve been 8.5 games better than the next-best baseball team. Kershaw’s played a role in that, obviously. Losing him makes the Dodgers worse, just as adding Darvish would make the Dodgers better. Yet I just don’t see the same need others do. I don’t, say, view a Darvish trade as being crucial. I’m sure it makes me boring, but I don’t see enough of a benefit. The cost is sure to be high.

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If I know you, you’ve been around long enough to have seen a number of these. There isn’t much in the way of variation. Over a large enough timescale, the worst called ball will come on a pitch thrown in the vicinity of the middle of the strike zone. There’s no alternative. Those are the clearest, most obvious strikes, so when they’re not strikes, they’re lousy called balls. They all look more or less alike in that regard. So exploration is just about filling in the details. When did this particular bad call happen? Who was the umpire who made the actual call? Which pitcher threw the pitch? Which catcher caught — or didn’t catch — the pitch? What was the situation at the time? Did the call end up mattering much?

I’ve written the same post a whole bunch of times. I’ve done the same research, to end up with the same kind of play. Just about always, the call happens because the catcher sets up somewhere, and then the pitcher badly misses. I usually make some reference to how it’s evidence that framing does matter. Catchers struggle to catch pitches headed for surprising locations. You can “earn” a ball, even when you throw a pitch down the pipe.

This is another play that wasn’t very clean. We’re going back to June 18, in the first inning of a game between the Rangers and the Mariners. Danny Valencia got ahead in the count 1-and-0 against Yu Darvish, because Darvish and catcher Robinson Chirinos failed to properly execute. But this time, there’s a twist. This isn’t the same post as always.

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At a table in the center of the visiting clubhouse last week, in the depths of Cleveland’s Progressive Field, Jonathan Lucroy was seated holding his catcher’s glove in his left hand and a flat-head screwdriver in his right. He used the tool to loosen and tighten different laces in the glove. He spent perhaps 20 minutes on glove maintenance that day — a day on which, incidentally, he wouldn’t appear in the starting lineup.

There’s been some focus on Lucroy’s glove recently. Lucroy’s glove, his receiving skills, were once the game’s best. What’s happened to Lucroy’s framing in recent years, however, is something of a mystery.

There have been some stunning declines in baseball over the last few seasons. There was Andrew McCutchen’s age-29 drop-off, unprecedented in its depth for a star-level player, and his cold start to the current season. There’s Jake Arrieta’s decline from Cy Young winner in 2015 to middling starting pitcher since the second half of last season.

Perhaps less apparent, less publicized as these — but still as significant — is what has happened to Lucroy’s framing numbers.

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If you were to pick a face, a player, to represent where baseball is trending, Joey Gallo might be the one.

This post isn’t intended to serve as an endorsement of Gallo as an elite player, but rather to suggest that he embodies its trends as well as anyone. The game continues to include more home runs, more strikeouts, more walks, and fewer balls in play — to the angst of some (many?). Gallo is one of the Three True Outcome kings in the sport, a point detailed by one of FanGraphs’ community writers earlier this year.

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We’re still 100 games away from the end of the season, but we’re getting closer to that time when teams have to decide whether they’re in or out of contention for the playoffs. Some clubs might have to make the tough choice of moving themselves out of contention despite having a reasonable playoff shot. In the American League, nearly every team is still in the race. That might change over the course of the next month, of course, but the field certainly looks like it will still be crowded come July.

There are five playoff spots up for grabs in the AL, and while a lot can and will happen the rest of the way, there are four teams to which our playoff odds give roughly an 80% or better chance of making the playoffs: the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. The Astros look well on their way to potentially 100 wins, while the Indians, Red Sox and Yankees appear to be moving toward close to 90 wins, a figure that generally amounts to a spot in the postseason. Those four teams total 359% of the 500% total odds available. After that, seven teams have something close to a 10%.

After the first four teams, no club has a better than a 50% chance at the playoffs. The team at the top, Toronto, is currently in last place in its division. Here are the playoff odds since the beginning of the season for the rest of the teams in the American League — with the exception, that is, of the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, who have been near zero all season long.

Does that look like an incomprehensible mess? Well, welcome to the AL Wild Card race. If it helps at all, the list of teams at the bottom of the chart is in order in terms of their current playoff odds. There are seven teams with close to a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, with a couple more in Kansas City and Oakland that possess an outside chance of getting back into the mix. If you picked the top team currently by the odds, Toronto, taking the field is probably a better bet.

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At the end of March, the Rangers and Rougned Odor agreed to a six-year commitment, worth just shy of $50 million. Since then, Odor has gone from being a guy coming off a .502 slugging percentage to being a guy actively slugging .359. When you look for reasons why the Rangers are standing a little bit under .500, you should give plenty of consideration to the fact that, for two and a half months or so, Odor has played around the replacement level. His wRC+ is quite literally just about half what it was a season ago.

So, what’s ailing Odor at the plate? Here is a decent and very simple clue:

As a rookie, Odor was good for 19 pop-ups and nine home runs. As a sophomore, he finished with 26 pop-ups and 16 home runs. In what left the impression of being a breakout junior season, Odor wound up with 16 pop-ups and 33 home runs. But now Odor’s a senior, I guess, and his current line includes 19 pop-ups and nine home runs. Fully a quarter of Odor’s fly balls have qualified as pop-ups. That rate is extreme — too extreme — and it’s evident right away that Odor is back to just not squaring up the ball often enough.

In the plot, you see Odor’s rates of infield flies per fly ball, and home runs per fly ball. Here are the former rates, subtracted from the latter rates:

• 2014: -8.8%
• 2015: -7.3%
• 2016: +8.8%
• 2017: -13.2%

That’s just HR/FB% – IFFB%. To further contextualize things, here are Odor’s year-to-year MLB percentile rankings in the same stat:

• 2014: 8th percentile
• 2015: 7th
• 2016: 76th
• 2017: 1st

Odor, by this measure, was very bad, then very bad, then pretty good!, and now very bad. It’s not that he isn’t a half-decent power hitter, but he pops up too often for someone who hits so many balls in the air. Last season made it seem as if Odor had managed to conquer one of his biggest drawbacks, but now it’s back with a vengeance, and Odor is having difficulty keeping his head above water.

This doesn’t actually explain whatever the problem might be. It’s just another indicator that a problem has existed. And it’s also important to point out that, when Odor popped up a bunch in 2015, he still managed to hit all right. But Odor changed his approach over time to become more fly-ball friendly, and the pop-up issue has been worse than ever. Odor is trying to get under the ball, but in a sense he’s been too successful. The mis-hits have dragged down his batting line, to a woeful depth.

Odor will adjust, and the stats will improve. I can’t see him finishing all that close to a wRC+ of 54. But, given how aggressively he swings, he’s given the impression of being awfully volatile. Volatile players go through some miserable slumps. Rangers fans have seen the worst of Rougned Odor again, and this needs to get turned around within a week or three if the team wants to mount a serious charge for the wild card.

Not very long ago, Sam Dyson was a revelation. He was acquired quietly, but deliberately, and he played a major role in turning around what had been an unstable 2015 Rangers bullpen. Down the stretch in 2015, and then again throughout the year in 2016, Dyson pitched like one of the more valuable relievers around, providing the Rangers the luxury of riding his sinker to one- and two-run victorious margins. When one would try to explain the Rangers’ success, you’d have to talk about the relievers, and you couldn’t talk about all of them without talking about one of them in particular.

Not very long ago, Sam Dyson was designated for assignment. The Rangers ran out of patience, and although Dyson’s going to get another opportunity, it won’t be with Texas. The team won’t be getting much back. By WPA, already, Dyson has been worth what he was a season ago, only this time with a minus sign in front of it. At -3.45, Dyson owns the lowest WPA in the game. He’s been worse even than Francisco Rodriguez. WPA usually is not a very good analytical tool. It doesn’t always reflect the true totality of a player’s worth. Yet it’s sure had Dyson figured out.

The weird thing is how little has changed. I know that Dyson’s going to be moved any minute now, but the industry doesn’t know all that much more than we do. When it comes to trying to see Sam Dyson’s future, it’s simply a whole lot of guesswork.

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Joey Gallo not only slugs like a slugger, he looks like a slugger. Listed at 6-foot-5 and 235 pounds, he’s a large man by any measure. But don’t let that fool you. He’s no plodder. The 23-year-old Texas Rangers infielder-outfielder is far more athletic than many people realize.

It’s no secret that Gallo can propel baseballs long distances — fully half of his 16 home runs this year have traveled at least 430 feet — and it’s equally well known that he whiffs at an alarming rate. No shortage of words have been written about those facets of his game. Far fewer have been written about his ability to handle the hot corner and, if the need arises, positions higher on the defensive spectrum.

Gallo weighed in on his defensive versatility, including his background as a shortstop and as a flame-throwing pitcher, when the Rangers visited Fenway Park last week.

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Gallo on being drafted as a third baseman: “When I signed, I knew I was good enough to play third base. But I didn’t know how good I was. When I started out, I was playing with Latin guys who were much more advanced in the infield and kind of did things a little bit differently. So, when I signed, I was kind of thrown into that process. I was the only American infielder on our team, and I was a little bit behind. I was also a big guy, so I had to work pretty hard to stay at third. But again, I always knew I was good enough play there.

“I don’t think people realized I could play the position, that I could field the position, and do it at a pretty high level. When I was drafted, they said ‘first baseman,’ even though the Texas Rangers drafted me as a third baseman. MLB Network had me as, ‘Joey Gallo, first baseman, drafted…’ My parents were all pissed. It was weird. Everyone did reports on me as a first baseman, not thinking I could play third base.”

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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These days, we’re blessed with a number of amazing young shortstops. Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, and Corey Seager, for example, are already among baseball’s top players. Manny Machado is a shortstop who just accidentally plays third base. All of them are younger than 25.

Second base isn’t as notable for its youth. Last year, however, second basemen recorded one of the top collective offensive lines at the position in the history of the game. Good job, second basemen.

So both positions are experiencing a bit of a renaissance at the moment. This led me to wonder which teams might be benefiting most from that renaissance. It’s rare that teams can keep a second baseman and shortstop together long enough to form a lasting and effective double-play combo. Right now, MLB has some pretty great ones. But which is the greatest — particularly, on the defensive side of thing? Let’s explore.

First, we want to know who has played together for awhile. Since the start of the 2015 season, 21 players have played at least 200 games as a shortstop, and 23 have done the same at second base. Cross-referencing them and weeding out the players who have played for multiple teams, we get the following list:

That’s a pretty good list. There are some tough omissions here. The most notable is the Angels, as Andrelton Simmons hasn’t been with them long enough to meet our bar here. Given Johnny Giavotella’s defensive contributions, however, we can guess that the combo here would be quite one-sided. Also excluded are teams with new double-play combos, like the Dodgers and Mariners. Not only are the Logan Forsythe-Corey Seager and Robinson Cano–Jean Segura combos new this season, but thanks to injuries they haven’t even played together much this season. Cano-Segura has only happened 22 times this season, and Forsythe-Seager only 10 times.

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