The last time Athletics infielder Jed Lowrie was playing this well, I had a good talk with him about his injury history. He said part of his good play was due to the fact that he was finally healthy for a good stretch after a string of freak injuries due to collisions. After a three forgettable seasons since, Lowrie is back to where he was back then. And though the story this time is similar — he had two offseason surgeries that are contributing to his good run right now — the differences tell us a lot about what it’s like to be a major leaguer.

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“Grips are meaningless,” Oakland A’s starting pitcher Sonny Gray once told me. Maybe that’s why we haven’t yet had a good talk, despite calling the same clubhouse home half the time. He didn’t quite mean “meaningless,” it occurred to me, when we finally discussed his repertoire. But there’s another reason he’s found it difficult to talk the way pitchers often talk to me: He’s changing things from pitch to pitch, according to what he sees. That includes grips, finger pressure and pitching mix. It’s hard to say he’s been doing something different when he’s always doing something different.

It’s difficult to figure out the righty. His breaking balls, for example: One classifying system says he’s currently throwing more sliders than ever. One says he’s in a three-year high for curveballs. A third says he’s right about where he’s always been, but that his recent good stretch may have coincided with an increased use of his slider.

Is he throwing more sliders now that he’s healthy? Gray shrugs. “Even before I got hurt, I was throwing sliders, and I was throwing them at 88, 89 mph,” he says. No system has him throwing a breaking ball that hard. “Whatever people call the pitch is what they are going to call it. It’s a hard curveball, I guess. The grip is a little bit different, but it does have a curveball action.”

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This year’s A’s have been something of a mystery to me. No matter how you break them down, they don’t ever look very good, but they’ve felt like a statistical underachiever. Let me explain. You know our BaseRuns standings? The A’s have an actual run differential of -59, which is one of the worst in the game. However, they have an estimated BaseRuns run differential of -2, which is perfectly ordinary. That means the A’s have a difference of 57 runs, where no other team has a difference greater than 35. And while the lineup is a part of it, the run prevention has been worse than the estimate by 0.79 runs per game. No other team has been worse by more than 0.36.

Something has caused the A’s to allow more runs than they arguably should have. Now, in reality, a variety of things have contributed. There’s seldom ever one explanation. Yet the major factor here is the one described in the headline, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched the A’s on a regular basis. We’re a third of the way into the season, and the Oakland defense has sucked.

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We’ve talked (a lot, maybe) about lifting the ball more here, and so far the discussion has revolved around hands, legs, and intent — the mechanics of the swing, more or less. There’s another way to lift the ball better, though, one that hasn’t been addressed here: swinging at better pitches. That’s what Kevin Pillar has focused on, and his story offers another look into the effort to hit the ball over the shift.

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About a year ago, I remember thinking that Billy Beane must be feeling pretty good about having Sonny Gray, perhaps one of baseball’s best trade chips. Stephen Strasburg had just signed a contract extension, leaving few, if any, pending free agents around the league and little else available on the trade market at the deadline. With a cost-controlled pitcher, the A’s could sell to any team without being limited to major markets. If Drew Pomeranz was capable of fetching a top prospect in Anderson Espinoza, Sonny Gray was going to merit a haul.

It didn’t quite work out that way. A combination of ineffectiveness and arm injuries, perhaps one causing the other, left Gray with a poor season. A year later, Gray is pitching well, and he might still be that valuable trade chip I considered him to be a year ago.

I have some recollection of Sonny Gray being a top-of-the-rotation starter, an ace-type player. Then I look at some of his stats, and I can’t help but feel slightly underwhelmed. There’s his 21% strikeout rate from 2013 to 2015, which ranks an okay 31st out of 89 pitchers with at least 400 innings. His 7.7% walk rate was 60th among those 89 pitchers — not that good at all, in other words. Then you look a little further and find the one thing that Gray did very well — namely, keep the ball on the ground. His ground-ball rate of 54% was seventh in the majors during that timeframe. It’s hard for opposing batters to collect extra-base hits when they can’t get off the ground. It’s impossible to hit it out of the park. Unsurprisingly, Gray’s 0.66 HR/9 was 12th best in baseball during that period. Opponent ISO was under .100, second only to Clayton Kershaw.

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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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Did you know that the A’s lead the American League in home runs? Here’s one of them:

Here’s another one of them:

Those are two mammoth home runs. More, those are two mammoth home runs hit by the same guy — one Chad Pinder. Pinder is a 25-year-old infielder who’s topped out as Baseball America’s No. 7 Oakland prospect. In Pinder’s best professional season to date, he went deep 15 times. He’s gone deep four times over his last six big-league starts.

Pinder clearly has pretty good power. Keep that in the back of your mind. There are nearly 1,700 players with at least 50 batted balls in each of the last two seasons, including both the minors and the majors. Here are the 10 players with the biggest drops in ground-ball rate:

Whole bunch of minor leaguers. One Alex Avila out in front, about whom Dave just wrote. Avila has dropped his grounder rate by a stunning 30 percentage points, and that’s insane, but it’s also insane that Pinder is in ninth, having dropped his own grounder rate by 21 points. Pinder’s year-to-year track record:

• 2013: 41% grounders
• 2014: 46%
• 2015: 48%
• 2016: 42%
• 2017: 21%

One of those stands out from the others, and although it’s still early, and although things can still shift, what’s remarkable is remarkable. Suddenly, Pinder looks like he’s become an extreme fly-ball hitter. There’s power there to back it up. You know how Yonder Alonso has dramatically changed his own batting profile? His grounder rate is down by 19 points. Pinder has slightly bested that.

And oh, hey, Statcast. Out of everyone in the majors with at least 30 batted balls this season, Pinder ranks second — second! — in average exit velocity. He ranks fifth in average air-ball exit velocity. He ranks seventh in rate of batted balls hit at least 95 miles per hour. Pinder has hit nine so-called “Barrels”, which ties him with, say, Carlos Correa and Anthony Rizzo, and Pinder hasn’t played very much. He’s basically insisting that he gets noticed.

So, consider him noticed. How far this goes, I can’t tell you. Dramatic early-season shifts don’t always reflect legitimate changes in true talent. Yet Pinder is off to a promising start, and just to the eye, his swing is quite pleasing. The A’s could have something here. The A’s could have something terrific.

Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.

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This is our page that shows team performance according to BaseRuns. It’s a useful page to visit from time to time, just to check in, and earlier today I used those numbers to write about the Orioles, who have been up to something crazy. But that’s not all! When doing research for one post, one can sometimes find a nugget for another post. BaseRuns doesn’t fully understand what the Orioles have been doing. In a similar but opposite way, it’s also confused by the A’s.

The A’s do not stand out in the way the Orioles do. The Orioles, again, are already six wins clear of their BaseRuns record. The A’s are short of theirs by just a win and a half. That’s not good, but it’s also not anything worth talking about. By actual wins against BaseRuns wins, the Marlins have had it worse. The Rays and Braves have also had it worse. That’s not where the A’s have been way off.

If you’re on that page, though, stay on it for a second. Look at the run-differential columns. There we go. There’s where the A’s don’t make great sense.

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Yesterday, Yonder Alonso hit a home run. Used to be, that would be notable because Yonder Alonso home runs didn’t happen very often. This year, that home run was notable because it was ninth of the year, matching his career high for home runs in a season. Alonso matched his career-best home run total on May 7th, in his 29th game of the 2017 season.

You can only do something like that if you haven’t hit many home runs previously, and there are few regular corner players who have hit fewer home runs and kept their jobs than Alonso. From 2012 through 2016, when Alonso racked up over 2,200 plate appearances, he managed to launch all of 34 home runs, one fewer than Andrelton Simmons hit during that same time period. James Loney hit seven more home runs than Alonso did during that stretch, and Loney was the probably the most Alonso-like first baseman in baseball; James Loney also just got released from his minor league contract over the weekend, if you’re curious about league-wide interest in low-power first baseman on the wrong side of 30.

But low-power first baseman apparently doesn’t describe Alonso anymore, as he’s currently tied (with Bryce Harper, among others) for ninth on the 2017 home run leaderboard. His .356 ISO ranks even better, putting him fifth overall, one spot ahead of Harper. Yeah, it’s early, but Alonso is showing every characteristic of a guy who revamped his approach and might have salvaged his career.

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