Six weeks ago, August Fagerstrom wrote about how Matt Bush’s fastball approximates Aroldis Chapman’s in terms of velocity and spin rate. Not much has changed. The Texas Rangers reclamation project — Bush was in prison and hadn’t pitched for four years — is still throwing heat. This past weekend the 30-year-old right-hander sat 98-99 in a scoreless inning at Fenway Park.

Much has been made of the former first-overall pick’s fall from grace and the Rangers’ willingness to give him another chance. (The attention is warranted: Bush’s substance-abuse and legal issues are serious matters.) Far less attention has been paid to the arsenal and mindset he brings to the mound. With that in mind, I sat down with Bush to talk pitching on the Fourth of July.

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Bush on why he’s having success: “I think it’s my arm action. My fastball has a lot of life to it. I’m also doing a good job of locating; I’m hitting my spots down in the zone. A lot of times it looks like the ball is going to be down and out of the zone, but it has extra life to it, which keeps it there in the zone. Other than that, I have an understanding that it’s not easy to hit a pitch that’s thrown as hard as I throw. I’m going out there with confidence.

“My spin rate is 2,500-something. Someone had mentioned it to me, so I looked into it and was pretty surprised to find out that it’s one of the highest in the game. That’s an indicator of why my fastball is tough to square up. I’m not afraid to go right after hitters, because with that spin, the ball has life. It’s not straight. You also don’t have very much time to pull the trigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday afternoon, I wrote about the Mets’ offense, and about how it’s been remarkably unclutch. It’s not the only thing that’s been going wrong for them, but it’s been a big deal, and it’s one of the reasons why the Mets feel like they’ve lost a lot of their momentum. Consider this a companion piece, as everything came out of the same research. If things were to keep up, then by one measure, the Mets would have the least-clutch offense since at least 1974. Similarly, if things were to keep up, then by the same measure, the Rangers would have the most-clutch offense since at least 1974.

The Rangers own the best record in the American League. As the majors go, they’re hanging around with the Cubs, and the Rangers have also staked out a massive lead in the AL West. It would be a shocker if they didn’t win the division, and whenever you have a team playing this well, there’s a lot that goes into it. What’s interesting is it’s not like the Rangers have been particularly lucky with health — players have seemingly dropped left and right. But replacements have stepped in, and the Rangers are blowing away their estimated BaseRuns record. The biggest contributor has been offensive timing.

I know this verges on coming off like a bad word; no one wants to think of their team as being sort of fluke-y. That’s really not the point I want to drive home, anyway. The Rangers deserve credit for what they’ve done. What they’ve done has been almost unbelievable.

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When Cole Hamels arrived in the major leagues, he had a 90 mph fastball, decent command, and what would prove to be baseball’s best changeup. That’s a few bucks short of an ace, and so, in two of his first four seasons, he produced an ERA over four and maybe was looking for something.

Now, instead of having one elite pitch, the Rangers’ ace is the only starting pitcher in baseball to possess four pitches in the top ten by whiff rates (minimum 200 thrown). That’s a long way from a pitch and a half. The fixes were simple, though, and he ran me through them before a recent game with the Athletics.

The Fastball
Here’s a graph that doesn’t follow normal aging curves: Hamels’ fastball velocity. Note that he was 26 years old in 2010.

Instead of going down steadily, the curve has gone up. We could wonder why, but we don’t have to — Hamels can tell us himself. Turns out, Hamels had back problems when he came up — a herniated disc — and he finally was able to do something about it once he got a major-league contract. “I hired a chiropractor, and for the past few years, I have one that travels with me and works on me the day before the game and right after the game,” Hamels told me.

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Ian Desmond has, unequivocally, been a complete success for the Texas Rangers this year. He’s hitting, with a 128 wRC+, but he’s hit like that before. He’s running the bases well, but he’s run the bases well before. The third thing Desmond’s doing, though, is something he’d never done before. When he takes his position defensively, he goes to the grass instead of the dirt.

And by all indications, he’s doing a fine job of adjusting. Position switches are always interesting in theory. Sometimes, they’re less interesting in practice. One always wants to believe that an elite athlete, particularly one coming from shortstop like in Desmond’s case, has what it takes to make the transition, but we never know until we see it.

Of course, it’s too early to put too much stock into the defensive metrics, but for what it’s worth, Defensive Runs Saved considers Desmond a solid plus, Ultimate Zone Rating considers Desmond a solid plus, and Fielding Runs Above Average considers Desmond a plus. It’s nice to see uniformity among the metrics. Beyond the metrics, we’ve got quotes that suggest all parties are content. Desmond himself admitted playing shortstop was a challenge that never came easy to him, but that center field is already starting to feel more like home. Manager Jeff Banister said the transition “has been as smooth as we could expect.” And then there’s the fact that the Rangers so quickly felt comfortable letting Desmond play center field at all, that says something to the organization’s internal valuation of his ability as an outfielder.

At this point, there’s no reason to believe Desmond can’t at least stick in the outfield, and there’s even evidence to suggest he could be a plus center fielder, though perhaps that’s jumping the gun a bit. Regardless, Desmond’s got a new home, and of all the great things he’s done this season, playing the outfield is the only one we’ve never seen before, which immediately heightens the interest. Further heightening that interest is this one area of playing the outfield where Desmond’s truly shone, where he’s separated himself from the pack, that perhaps helps explain part of the reason why his transition has gone so smooth.

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Like any baseball stat, Wins Above Replacement provides the answer to a question. The question, in this case? Something like this: accounting for all the main ways (hitting, running, defense, etc.) in which a player can produce value for his team, how many wins has this particular player been worth?

There are, of course, criticisms of WAR. Some valid, others less so. One prominent criticism is how defensive value is handled in WAR. Some don’t understand how it’s calculated. Others understand but also question how well it represents a player’s defensive contributions. These criticisms shouldn’t be dismissed. As with all baseball statistics, though, it’s necessary to consider WAR in the context in which it’s presented — that is, to remember the question a metric is intended to answer and the method by which it attempts to answer that question.

On Monday, I completed one such reminder in a discussion of players whose WAR totals this year are probably low based on what we know about their defense. Today, I’ll make another attempt — this time, by examining players whose WAR totals are probably inflated by defensive numbers unlikely to be sustained over the course of a season.

In the comments of Monday’s post, one reader, Ernie Camacho, noted:

[T]here is a weird tension in this article between quantifying and estimating what has already happened, on the one hand, and evaluating player talent, on the other. I’m not sure we should be blending the two.

This is a good point. That tension most definitely exists, and it’s possible that some of that tension is what causes people to discount defensive metrics — and WAR as a whole. I agree that, in terms of calculating WAR, we should not be blending what has already happened with what we think will probably happen. Over time, in an ideal world, WAR captures both. In smaller samples, however, this is more difficult to do. In fact, there’s actually something that does capture the blending when we have smaller samples: projections. If we want to capture a player’s talent level at any given moment, projections do that very well.

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Every so often baseball repeats the same lesson about the irrelevance of momentum. Momentum is our own construct; we believe in it because we believe it can help us see into the future. We are and have always been terrible at seeing into the future. Last Wednesday, the Rangers lost to the Indians in extra innings. They had Thursday off. The Mariners didn’t have Thursday off — rather, they spent it orchestrating one of the very greatest comebacks in big-league history. The two teams were tied for first place, and now they are not, because the Rangers promptly swept the Mariners away, assuming sole possession of first place in the American League West, and in the American League.

Here’s one way to tell the tale:

For the first time, we now have the Rangers as the AL West favorites. And this is according to math that many people believe undersells the roster. The Astros’ lousy start opened the door, and though they’ve righted themselves, and though the Mariners sprinted out, now the Rangers are in charge. It’s a good position to be in, even if the draft is still in front of us.

Yet there’s something I can’t stop thinking about. See, it’s not just that the Rangers are back in first place. They finished in first place literally just last season. Where they are isn’t a complete and utter shock. What I find more astonishing is how they’ve gotten here. First place was the plan, but not like this.

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We are excited to have Corinne Landrey join the FanGraphs writing staff. She’ll be contributing here several times per week, and is going to be an excellent addition to the site. Below is her first post as a FanGraphs author.

If you know one thing about Cole Hamels beyond his profession or employer, it’s likely the fact that he throws a magnificent changeup. It’s the pitch upon which Hamels’ impressive career has been built from the moment he made his major-league debut as a 22-year-old kid. Like any successful pitcher, Hamels has had to adjust and improve over the years first by refining his curveball and later adding a cutter to his repertoire, but the changeup has been the omnipresent ace up his sleeve throughout his major-league career. Until now, that is.

For the first time in Hamels’ decade-long career, his changeup is no longer serving as his go-to secondary pitch. That honor now belongs to the cutter he began using in 2010 after watching his teammate Cliff Lee use the pitch with tremendous results down the stretch the previous season. Since then, the pitch has developed into Hamels’ preferred third pitch and now its usage has officially surpassed the changeup:

This year Hamels has gone to the cutter 202 times, or on 24% of his pitches, whereas the changeup has been used just 185 times, or 22 percent of the time. This usage shift, however, is not the result of a season-long trend. In fact, during the month of April, Hamels threw his changeup more than he threw any other pitch, fourseamer included. But after his start on April 20th, something changed.

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Baltimore’s Camden Yards opened to almost universal praise in 1992. The success of the park and its broad appeal spurred the development of new stadiums throughout baseball. Since the construction of Camden Yards, 21 of the league’s 30 franchises have received new stadiums, while eight others have undergone renovations (sorry, Tampa Bay). In Cleveland, they’ve seen both occur.

Averaging roughly one new stadium per year has been great for business, as attendance has gone up across the league and the old unsightly multipurpose stadiums have been retired. It would be reasonable to think, however, that such a boom in stadium construction would naturally result in an equally steep decline. There are, of course, only so many clubs for which to build new park. Reason isn’t always at play in such cases, however. Both the Braves’ relocation to a new home next year — and a recent announcement by the Rangers that they plan to build a new air-conditioned ballpark just 20-some years after debuting the old one — should solidify that notion for us. As long as they create profits for ownership, stadium building, renovations, and fights for public money will never end.

Baseball is a business, and franchise owners acts as corporate heads looking to extract money and increase profits wherever they can. Getting the public to fund a stadium is a very big part of that and most owners have been incredibly successful in this regard. Of all the news stadiums built in this era, only the San Francisco Giants privately funded their stadium, with the St. Louis Cardinals representing the only other club to account for a significant portion of their stadium’s expense. In most cases, we’ve seen public fights, with threats to relocate elsewhere — sometimes to another city and sometimes just to a neighboring suburb. We’ve seen this play out recently in the case of both the Braves and the Rangers — and, despite all of the new stadiums, we’re not done seeing it.

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The Rangers lost both Drew Stubbs and Shin-Soo Choo to injury over the weekend, leaving them relatively bare in the outfield. To fill the void, they’ve called up top prospect Joey Gallo, who’s perhaps one of the most exciting prospect in baseball due to his exceptional power. We’ve been here before. The Rangers called Gallo up last summer, too, but thanks to a .204/.301/.417 performance in the show, they wisely concluded he needed more seasoning in the minors. Most concerning of all was his 46% strikeout rate, which was literally over twice the league average.

Based on his recent performance, it seems Gallo’s gotten the seasoning he needed. Last year, Gallo hit .240/.342/.520 between Double-A and Triple-A, and struck out in a super-concerning 37% of his trips to the plate. This year, he’s slashed his strikeout rate to a merely mildly-concerning 23% in Triple-A. As a result, he’s hit a gaudy .265/.415/.639.

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After the scrum was gone, after he’d answered all the difficult questions about his punch heard around the baseball world, after he’d deflected and postponed and shrugged, after he slumped into his seat and sighed, Rougned Odor looked up and saw me coming. To his credit, he raised his eyebrows for the coming question, ready for another round.

He was relieved when I asked him about being sent down in 2015, and what he learned when he was down there. Relieved, even though I was asking him about one of the more difficult times of his baseball life. Well, difficult in a different way than the difficult time he’s experiencing right now.

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