“It’s his second start and he looks like he’s in midseason form!”

An exasperated Matt Underwood of SportsTime Ohio let out the preceding utterance after Brett Anderson dropped a 78 MPH curveball in for a strike on Cleveland’s Brent Lillibridge with a 1-1 count in the bottom of the third inning Monday. Even by that point it had become a familiar sight for Underwood and the hapless Indians. All told, Anderson used his off-speed trio — curveball, slider, changeup — 42 times, and 27 of them went for strikes.

Lillibridge struck out swinging on a 2-2 curveball biting down and in. He was one of five strikeout victims and one of 13 straight retired by Anderson to open the game. The positively svelte Anderson cruised through seven shutout innings, continuing to look the part of staff anchor just as the club needs him most.

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Let’s just go ahead and get this out of the way now: there’s no such thing as a good time to lose a starting pitcher like Bartolo Colon. Over 24 starts with the A’s, Colon posted a 3.43 ERA and peripherals that make him look only a little less good, and Colon has been a big part of Oakland’s attempted playoff push. Now he’s done, having been found out for cheating, and at this writing Oakland is five games out of the division and just a half-game out of the wild card. If the A’s were terrible, this would be too bad, but it wouldn’t be potentially devastating. The A’s aren’t terrible. The starting rotation has lost value right when the season leverage is getting its greatest.

But while there’s never a good time to lose a Bartolo Colon, there are worse times and there are better times. In one regard, this was a profoundly bad time for the A’s given their position in the playoff race, but on the other hand, Colon was suspended a day after Brett Anderson made his 2012 season debut. Anderson was excellent against the Twins Tuesday night, and Anderson figures to be a major stretch-run contributor right when it turns out the A’s could really use one of those.

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Consider for a moment that the top three teams in the American League wild card standings right now are the Rays, Orioles, and Athletics. Now consider in the following moment that the three teams right behind them are the Tigers, Angels, and Red Sox. This is not new information, for any of us, but it seems like the kind of thing we might not be appreciating for everything it’s worth. Regardless of how things turn out, this is the way things are toward the end of August. Baseball is amazing.

Now then, because it’s August, trades can still be made that affect regular-season and postseason rosters, and because the wild card race is so tight, teams are looking to make even slight improvements. On Monday night, as announced during their own game, the A’s made what they feel like is an improvement, acquiring Stephen Drew from the Diamondbacks in exchange for minor leaguer Sean Jamieson. Nothing against Sean Jamieson, but this is the last time he’ll be mentioned in this article. For the Diamondbacks, this was not about the talent return; it was about saving money. For the A’s, it was about getting a little better where getting a little better might make all the difference.

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The 2012 MLB season began with a very public bounty of international talent — Japanese stars, Cuban expats and even a Taiwanese surprise. With the season dipping into its final six weeks, we are beginning to see both the good and the bad of these international players who made the direct transition to MLB rookie.

SP Yu Darvish — The biggest star from Japan since Daisuke Matsuzaka has had a very Daisuke Matsuzaka season — much despite steady predictions of the opposite. Well, actually, he has an 86 FIP-minus and 94 xFIP-minus. That’s at least a better FIP than Daisuke’s rookie year, but an identical xFIP.

Dave Cameron has written extensively on Darvish lately, noting Darvish has a command problem, the league has realized Darvish has a command problem, and Darvish has a scary group of command problem comparables.

At the same time, though, Darvish has been adjusting his approach to a less-aggressive (compared to the NPB) league. He has been toying with his repertoire, and I would not be surprised if he entered the 2013 season with a streamlined pitch selection that sets up his elite slider (one of the best in the league) more effectively and simply.
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On Tuesday evening, 39-year-old Bartolo Colon handcuffed the Los Angeles Angels for seven innings, only surrendering a single unearned run in his final inning of work.

Although that unearned run ended his consecutive scoreless inning streak at 22.1 innings, he does currently maintain a streak of 22.2 innings without surrendering an earned run. The last earned run given up by the right-hander came on a solo home run by the Yankees’ Curtis Granderson on July 22 in Oakland. Since that home run … nothing.

Extended stints without allowing an earned run are not uncommon in Major League Baseball. After all, Ryan Dempster threw 33-consecutive innings without surrendering an earned or unearned run in July.

Instead, the intriguing aspect of Colon’s streak lies in his pitch selection and how he is finding success on the mound.

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Dave Cameron already covered the best and most obvious candidate in Cliff Lee here. Here are three more pitchers who could get moved as a post-waiver deal:

Brandon McCarthy

McCarthy could potentially pass through waivers due to the shoulder injury he suffered back on June 24. Although he’s already in the middle of a rehab assignment, he was crushed (six runs in 3.2 innings) in his first start. As such, he could potentially slip through waivers.

Although it would seem odd for the A’s to deal a pitcher of McCarthy’s caliber — 2.54 ERA, 3.39 FIP and coming off a similar season last year — they have much bigger needs than starting pitching right now. Oakland starting pitchers notched a 3.60 ERA and 3.26 FIP with McCarthy out.

Instead, the Athletics have major needs on the left side of the infield. Brandon Inge (.221/.278/.398, 82 wRC+) has somewhat stabilized the position, giving them at least some pop and a good glove. But shortstop remains a disaster, with Brandon Hicks’s .183/.246/.417 in 65 PA the best hitting performance the club has seen at the position this season. Cliff Pennington and Eric Sogard own wRC+ marks of 51 and 42 respectively.

McCarthy’s is eligible for free agency after the season. He is clearly good enough to help the A’s win in 2012, but if the A’s can fetch a reasonable shortstop for him, the upgrade could be bigger than the upgrade he presents over Bartolo Colon or A.J. Griffin or recent callup Dan Straily. The shortstop market was so rough prior to the waiver deadline, though, so there just might not be a match out there.

Josh Beckett

Beckett, due $31.5 million over the next two seasons and having his next start skipped to boot, should have no trouble clearing waivers. He’s having his usual even-year bad season (at least in terms of results), posting a 4.54 ERA. His strikeout rate is a career low 6.81 per nine innings and injuries have limited him to just 18 starts. Still, he has a FIP- of 82 and showed as recently as last season he can still put up elite results with his solid peripherals, notching a 68 ERA- to go with an 84 FIP-.

The Rangers were among the teams to show interest in Beckett prior to the trading deadline and could remain on the Rangers’ radar should he clear waivers, although the Ryan Dempster . However, despite classic media-driven issues such as those surrounding a round of golf in May, Beckett likely hasn’t done enough to force himself out — the Red Sox likely aren’t willing to take a discounted price just to get rid of him.

Randy Wolf

The Brewers would love to get rid of Randy Wolf not only because of the price tag — he has just over $3 million remaining on this year’s deal as well as a $1.5 million buyout of next year’s option — but also because the Brewers may want the opportunity to give their younger players some chances in the major leagues. The Brewers are trying to see what they have in players like Michael Fiers, Marco Estrada, Mark Rogers and also minor leaguers like Wily Peralta and Tyler Thornburg. Once Shaun Marcum returns from his injury, there will only be two spots for those youngsters (after Yovani Gallardo, Marcum and Wolf).

Wolf has been horrible this season, with a 5.45 ERA and 4.78 FIP. His 2.10 K/BB is actually slightly better than last season, when he notched a 98 ERA-, but the home run issues have returned, as Wolf is allowing 1.36 HR/9. The upside is minimal, but ZiPS projects a 4.29 ERA the rest of the way, which could be an improvement on a few fifth starters for contending teams. Jayson Stark said the Brewers would trade Randy Wolf “for nothing if you take the money,” so the risk for an acquiring team would be minimal. A team with a fly ball friendly park might be able to make it work for a tiny cost.

According to reports, this is how Billy Beane feels.

The casual fan will be excused for not knowing this, but Yoenis “La Potencia” Cespedes is having a phenomenal rookie year.

The Cuban import entered the league this past offseason with a fanfare rivaled only by that of Yu Darvish, who had the weight of his own nation’s media trained on him. But Cespedes — he of the plucky YouTube training video, he of the flight from totalitarian Cuba — has been just as worthy, if not more, of the media’s eye.

His rookie campaign started with a little old fashioned oh-em-gee — three home runs in the opening Tokyo series against the Mariners — but then the excitement petered out as an injury, a muscle sprain in his left hand, stalled his season.

But do not let that trick you. Not only is Yoenis Cespedes crushing the ball this season, he is hitting like one of the best rookies in the league — and if this were any year but Mike Trout’s, then he’d be in serious Rookie of the Year contention.
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The Brewers designed backup catcher George Kottaras for assignment last week, and he has now been traded to the As for longtime minor league reliever Fautino De Los Santos. Oakland manager Bob Melvin sounds totally pumped:

I really don’t know much about him… I’ve seen some of the numbers, and know he has a high on-base (percentage) for a guy that’s hitting 200-something.

Once the buzz has worn off, what are the As getting in Kottaras, and what role might he play?

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[With apologies to Mike Keneally]

[Author’s note added later for anyone who cares: the mentions of the differences between subjective and objective senses of time should not be taken as technical or precise in the way one would expect when reading, say, a historical explication of classic philosophies of time. This is just supposed to be an entertaining way of launching a discussion of how a few years can seem so distant with respect to certain things in baseball. For a technical and precise account of the different senses of time in Augustine, Husserl, or whomever, you should look elsewhere. Sorry.]

The existential experience of time passing is different than the intellectual acknowledgement of “how much time has passed.” I do not mean anything “deep” by that — I’m generally opposed to depth, or at least the appearance of depth. What I mean is simply that while, for example, every year is about 365.242199 days, on a subjective, personal level, it feels as if some slices of time go by faster than others. An hour spent staring at a clock feels longer than an hour playing video games. An hour watching Stephen Strasburg pitch flies by faster than an hour watching Jonathan Sanchez pitch. You get the idea.

That is all a prelude to saying that 2009 “feels” pretty recent to me. I am not sure why. Maybe because when I first started blogging (for the dearly-departed SB Nation site Driveline Mechanics) around that time. “Pretty recent” is itself a vague description — it is not “objectively” a correct or incorrect description. But it really has been a while since 2009. It was three birthdays ago. Looking at the changing perceptions of particualr baseball players is one way of measuring how much time has passed. Without giving a full recap of the year, here are a few things from 2009 that drove home the reality that, in fact, 2009 was a “million” years ago.

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I’ve written quite a bit this year on trends in pitcher aging, specifically velocity loss and gain. In the last iteration I focused on the odds of pitchers gaining velocity back after a season where their fastball dropped by at least 1 mph.

In that piece I listed a few pitchers to keep your eye on given that their velocity was down from 2011. In June, I wrote about CC Sabathia for ESPN and noted that the big lefty is likely beginning to “age”, as the odds are quite a bit higher that pitchers over the age of 30 do not gain their velocity back once they’ve lost it.

After thinking about it a while it occurred to me that there is of course the chance that these pitchers will gain their velocity back by the end of the year (as I noted in both pieces). We know that, generally speaking, pitchers gain velocity as the season goes on. Temperatures rise, and so too do fastball velocities. If this is the case I wondered at what point in the season we can say with greater certainty that a pitcher is throwing as hard as he is going to throw. Is there a particular month where a velocity decline is more likely to translate to or predict a full season velocity decline?
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