The first of two Wild Card games is scheduled for tonight. In addition to must-win baseball, this time of year is also typically marked by the appearance of a Dave Cameron piece on the merits of “bullpen-ing” a game — that is, the practice of using nothing but relievers in a single contest, of attempting to exploit matchups in order to maximize the chances of winning.

While the logic of “bullpen-ing” is sound in theory, it also fails to account for the comfort of pitchers who’ve potentially become attached to their roles. To get a better idea of how they might adapt to such an approach and how it might be handled in practice, I asked some actual players about it. Turns out, there’s a particular type of reliever who’s best suited to take the ball in the first few innings of a win-or-go-home game. And a particular type of pitcher who should follow him.

The first thing revealed by my inquiries is that relievers love the idea. “I’m down for whatever,” said Giants reliever Hunter Strickland with a smile. Nationals closer Sean Doolittle just laughed for a while. “Would I get paid like a starting pitcher?” he finally asked after the laughter had subsided.

Relievers would be fine with it because they’re accustomed to answering the call whenever. “We’re used to throwing in whatever inning, [if] not usually the first,” said Strickland. Added Miami’s Brad Ziegler: “I don’t think it would be very different for me, as much as it would be for the starter coming into the game [in the later innings]. His whole routine would have to change.”

And a starter probably would have to throw a couple innings in such a game — in order to reach a full complement of nine and still leave some arms for extras, that is. So the question is probably which kind of starter would adapt effectively to an otherwise unusual arrangement.

The answer? Probably a young one. Older starters are more married to their routines. “It’s very hard for me personally,” said Brandon McCarthy regarding the idea of starting a game in any other inning but the first. “My routine as a starter is fixed to the minute and a lot of guys are like that. It’s certainly not something impossible to deal with but could make a team nervous.”

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Travis Shaw had arguably the biggest hit of Milwaukee’s season yesterday. With his team on the verge of a crushing 10-inning loss, Shaw stroked a two-run, walk-off home run that helped keep the Brewers in the playoff hunt. A defeat wouldn’t have buried the surprise contenders, but it would have pushed them closer to the brink. They badly needed the win, and the Red Sox castoff provided it.

Even without Saturday’s heroics, Shaw has been a godsend for David Stearns and Co. Acquired over the offseason (along with a pair of promising prospects) for Tyler Thornburg, he’s contributed 31 long balls and an .877 OPS while solidifying the middle of the Milwaukee lineup. Last year in Boston, those numbers were 16 and .726.

The 27-year-old third baseman attributes his breakout to two factors: He’s playing every day, and he’s not stressing about things he can’t control.

“My mindset is a lot different,” Shaw told me earlier this week. “After what I went through last year, I needed to take a step back. There were some things I didn’t agree with, and there were some things I took the wrong way. I didn’t handle them very well

“I tried to play GM. I started reading into stuff — wondering why they’re doing this, why we’re doing that — and it ate at me. I worried about things I shouldn’t have worried about. In the second half, when I got to play, I felt like I had to get two or three hits to stay in the lineup. That didn’t bode well for my mental state, and it obviously didn’t work results-wise.” Read the rest of this entry »

Now that we’re close to the end of the season, you’re going to see a lot of talk about the bests in certain categories. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best pitcher. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best rookie. There’s a major award that goes to each league’s best player (sort of). And there are further awards that are supposed to go to the best hitters. It’s seldom easy to identify a given season’s best whatever, but at least you can limit yourself to one year of data. That makes things simple, relatively speaking.

It’s half as simple, or twice as complicated, if you double the number of years. But that’s something you have to do if you want to measure improvement. And this is something I’d like to spend a few minutes on — who, among major league baseball players, is the most improved hitter? There’s no great reason to focus on this, I guess, but there’s no great reason to focus on anything. Major improvement is good. Makes for a compelling story. Why not find the most improved hitter? All we need to do is agree on a method.

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We’ve written about a possible sea change in baseball over the last few years here, using phrases like “point of contact” and “attack angle” to better articulate the emergence of a Fly-Ball Revolution, itself another relatively new expression. Add those phrases to all the ones we’ve been compelled to learn for the benefit of Statcast alone — terms like “launch angle,” “exit velocity,” “spin rate,” etc. — and it’s obvious that our baseball dictionaries are getting an update on the fly.

Simply because we’re using a new lexicon, however, doesn’t mean we’re using it correctly — or, at the very least, that some of our assumptions couldn’t benefit from an update, as well.

With that in mind, I decided to examine some of the most notable and commonly used terms in this new language of hitting. With the help of the players themselves, perhaps we can better see what lies beneath each of them and attempt to reach something closer to a common understanding.

Fly-Ball Revolution

“I wish you wouldn’t call it the ‘fly-ball revolution,'” Daniel Murphy told me earlier in the year. “Coaches then think we’re talking about hitting the ball straight into the air. Call it the ‘high-line-drive revolution.'”

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The details have come together for Pitch Talks San Francisco this September 18th at The Independent, and it’s shaping up to be a fantastic event. Come see us at 8pm (doors at 7:30) and enjoy live commentary and interaction in a great venue.

We’ve got Giants General Manager Bobby Evans coming for a question and answer session with the crowd, directed by Giants Outsiders host Therese Viñal. That panel has been a highlight in the past and should deliver on its promise again. His take on a team at the crossroads should be very interesting.

The Giants panel is going to be simple, in an effort to let three stars shine. Viñal will return and grab a gab with Hank Schulman and Grant Brisbee, two strong voices in Giants coverage that have their own unique spin on things.

Finally, we’ve added a new sort of panel to the event this year in an effort to place baseball coverage and fandom in the larger context of popular sport in America. The Future of Sport panel will bring together Danny Leroux, an NBA salary cap expert that writes at The Athletic, John Middlekauff, a former NFL scout that does local radio and also pushes the pen at The Athletic, and also Jen Mac Ramos, who was most recently an Assistant General Manager for the independent league Sonoma Stompers.

I’ll make the trio into a quartet, and we’ll talk about the future of all sports, as predicted by media, cultural, and even medical trends. This panel should be a great way to help the Bay Area transition into a fall that won’t feature postseason baseball for once.

The season is winding down, and a turn to the future — whether it’s the Giants or all sports — should be just the ticket.

Speaking of tickets, get yours here. The event is 21+, and FanGraphs readers are welcome to come early for a meetup at 7:30pm. Tickets from the earlier, postponed Pitch Talks will be honored.

See you there!

A month ago, I wrote about Matt Chapman, the A’s developing star third baseman. The emergence of Chapman as a decent bat/great glove combination has dramatically changed the team’s infield, and despite only being in the big leagues for a few months, he’s pretty clearly the team’s best player right now.

But while Chapman’s emergence is the most positive development in Oakland this year, the team has added another Matt to the infield in the last month, and Matt Olson is now doing his best to make himself part of Oakland’s infield future as well.

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This post is about Gio Gonzalez. It says so right in the title. But to get there, we first have to talk to Dennis Eckersley, because he said something the other day that’s pertinent to what the lefty in Washington is doing right now.

Eckersley, in Oakland because the team named a gate after him, was relaxing before a game. We were talking about changes in the sport, and I asked him why his strikeout rate peaked in 1992, at a point when he was 38 years old and had been a reliever for five years. Was it a new pitch? Grip? Approach?

Nope.

“Everyone started chasing, just like now,” the legendary reliever said that day. “You punch out 200 guys now, it’s not a big deal. Everyone is striking out a guy an inning. You tell me why. First of all, they’re throwing harder. I get that. But no one puts down their hack. These 2-2 swings… they’re, like, crazy.”

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Sometimes it takes a while to really hear an idea. Justin Turner told me something two and a half years ago that only recently clicked. All it took for this idiot to finally understand was an illustration of a bat path, a couple of graphs, and like 10 others players articulating a similar thought. Maybe you got it the first time. The rest of you, though, might benefit (as I did) from hearing it again: go get the ball. It’s that simple, but it’s also not that simple.

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There’s a difference between watching the game at home and watching at the park, that much is obvious. Personally, I’m more analytical at home, where I have the tools to identify pitch type and location with some precision, for example. At the field, I can only tell velocity and maybe spot the curveballs, so I get an adult soda, a good companion, and I talk and wait.

What am I waiting for? “People go to the game to see us put the ball in play, throw the ball away, and fall down,” Giants starter Jeff Samardzija told me the other day. “They want to see people doing things,” said Indians slugger Jay Bruce. I couldn’t disagree. The problem, if this is true, is that baseball is trending in the opposite direction. There are fewer balls in play now than at any other point in the history of the sport. There’s less of people doing things, to use Bruce’s words.

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Below are the updated summer top-10 prospect lists for the orgs in the American League West. I have notes beneath the top 10s explaining why some of these prospects have moved up or down. For detailed scouting information on individual players, check out the player’s profile page which may include tool grades and/or links to Daily Prospect Notes posts in which they’ve appeared this season. For detailed info on players drafted or signed this year, check out our sortable boards.

Houston Astros (Preseason List)

1. Kyle Tucker, OF
2. Forrest Whitley, RHP
3. Franklin Perez, RHP
4. Yordan Alvarez, 1B
5. Derek Fisher, OF
6. J.B. Bukauskas, RHP
7. Gilberto Celestino
8. Daz Cameron
9. Cionel Perez, LHP
10. Colin Moran, 3B

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