We’ve all seen those swings so terrible that a batter can’t help but smile. Swings like this one from Brandon Phillips last year.

Phillips, of course, isn’t the only victim of this sort of thing. He’s been a league-average major-league hitter for a decade, which is a substantial accomplishment. But even accomplished hitters can look bad, can get it very wrong.

Were Phillips batting not for a last-place club but one contending for the postseason, we might gnash our teeth. Couldn’t he see that was a slider? What was he thinking? What was he looking at?

The answer to that last question, turns out, is way more complicated than it seems. Phillips clearly should have laid off a breaking ball that failed to reach the plate. He clearly has done that — otherwise, he wouldn’t have had a major-league career. So what happened? What did he see? Or not see? Ask hitters and experts that question, and the answers are vague, conflicting, and sometimes just strange.

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Near the end of the game between the Blue Jays and Rays yesterday, the camera panned to center field. Evan Longoria was at the plate, and the Jays broadcast team was talking about the third baseman’s power. “He’s got some power to right field, too, now, and I think that’s why you’ll see the outfielders, especially the center fielder and right fielder playing a couple steps back,” said Dan Shulman. “Look at how deep Kevin Pillar is in center field. That’s only a couple of steps, it seems like, for Pillar, from the warning track!” he continued. “We have not seen Kevin Pillar play that deep,” concurred Buck Martinez.

It was impressive. That little dot in center is Pillar. Looks like a wallflower at a middle-school dance.

He was 361 feet from the plate at that moment. It makes sense, given Longoria’s spray chart this year. You’ll notice that Pillar is shaded a little bit to right, which is where Longoria hits many of his deep outs.

Source: FanGraphs

But the Blue Jays were pushing the envelope a bit. Call it situational defense, maybe, because Pillar was playing more than 30 feet further back than the average center fielder against Longoria this year. Given that there were two outs in the eighth inning of a tie game and Brad Miller and Nick Franklin were scheduled to hit behind Evan Longoria, there’s a certain amount of making sure to stop the big hit doesn’t sink the team. In a league where it probably pays to play deep, this was playing just a bit deeper on a guy who hits them deep.

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This week, we’re running a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mookie Betts for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP / Manny Machado for AL MVP.

Josh Donaldson was the American League’s Most Valuable Player last season, edging out Mike Trout by receiving 23 of 30 first-place votes and earning 385 vote points, compared to Trout’s 304. Donaldson was the best player on a division-winning team and, by routinely delivering in key moments, led the league in Win Probability Added for his 93-win club.

Donaldson was great, and clutch, and a winner. And this year, he’s arguably gotten better. The wRC+ has gone up. He’s again been one of baseball’s most productive hitters in high-leverage situations. He remains one of the game’s top defensive third basemen. The reigning MVP has, in many ways, built on his award-winning season. But that’s not why he should win it again.

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Two years ago, I wrote that the Blue Jays may have hit it big when they took Rowdy Tellez in the 30th round of the 2013 draft. So far, that suggestion looks solid. The 21-year-old first-base prospect logged an .801 OPS in A-ball last season, and this year he’s slashing .296/.384/.516 with Double-A New Hampshire.

Power is his calling card. Tellez has 50 extra-base hits as a Fisher Cat, and 20 of them have left the yard. When he really gets into one, they cross property lines. In our 2014 interview, Tellez told me he once hit a ball “over the fence, then a back yard, then a house, then over a cul de sac, and then into the next house across the street.”

He sees himself as more than a slugger. His minor-league numbers back that up, as does a left-handed stroke modeled after a pair of All-Stars’.

Tellez talked about his game — and the draft-snub chip that remains on his shoulder — prior to a recent game in Portland, Maine.

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Tellez on what has changed since two years ago: “A lot is different. I’m two years older and hopefully a little wiser. Defensively, I’m leaps and bounds ahead of where I was then. I’m a much more competent fielder. Everybody is confident in throwing the ball over to me and pitchers don’t worry about ground balls hit to me. Defense is what I’ve worked on the most. I’ve worked on it day in, day out.

“I’ve lost weight. I’m 245 now. The most I’ve been is probably about 275. That was around the time I signed out of high school.

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Last night, Mike Trout went 3-for-6 with a double, a homer, two runs, and an RBI. The Angels won, 8-2, over the Blue Jays, but let’s get back to that home run. Here’s what Mike Trout’s body looked like just moments before making contact with a pitch that went over the left field fence:

We all know what a typical home run swing looks like, and it sure doesn’t look like that. We also know what a normal baseball player looks like, and it sure doesn’t look like Mike Trout.

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Aaron Sanchez was optioned to High-A Dunedin over the weekend, though of course that’s not indicative of his performance at work. Sanchez is a legitimate Cy Young contender this year, maybe even the frontrunner in the eyes of some, and while players typically get sent down to the minors because their organization doesn’t care much for what they’ve done on the field, Sanchez was optioned because the Blue Jays care too much. He just turned 24, and he’s a massive part of the organization’s future, and the move was simply made to skip one of his turns in the rotation in an effort to limit the workload of Toronto’s prized, young arm.

That workload requires monitoring, of course, because no one expected Sanchez to do what he’s done this year. You likely know the Aaron Sanchez story by now. You know he spent the majority of his first two seasons in the majors working out of relief, and now that he suddenly looks like an ace, that he’s already exceeded his previous season-high in innings by more than 20. And if you know about that, then you know about the sinker that leads Sanchez’s arsenal.

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On May 12, Max Pentecost played his first game in nearly two years. Drafted 11th overall in 2014 by the Blue Jays out of Kennesaw State, the right-handed-hitting catcher was just 25 games into his professional career when he was shelved with a shoulder problem. It took three surgeries to get him back on the field.

A lot of head-scratching was involved. Pentecost went under the knife for a second time last spring — the initial surgery having failed to alleviate the pain — and once again the results were insufficient. His throwing shoulder still ached, and no one could explain why.

The a-ha moment came when a member of Toronto’s medical staff attended a talk by Dr. Craig Morgan, an orthopedic surgeon who had operated on Curt Schilling’s shoulder. The symptoms Morgan described were markedly similar to what Pentecost had been experiencing. An MRI followed, and soon thereafter Pentecost was undergoing yet another surgical procedure, this one a subacromial decompression. Based on early results, it appears to have done the trick.

Hurdles remain. The 23-year-old former first-rounder is getting closer to full strength, but he’s yet to return behind the plate. The Blue Jays have limited him to DH duties, which means he has some catching up to do defensively. Offense hasn’t been a problem. In 267 plate appearances for the low-A Lansing Lugnuts. Pentecost has slashed a lusty .314/.375/.490 with seven home runs.

His next at-bats will come with Dunedin. Pentecost has already reported to Toronto’s High-A affiliate and will be activated once he’s fully recovered from a minor injury unrelated to his thrice-surgically-repaired shoulder.

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Pentecost on his third shoulder surgery: “A lot has gone into it and I still don’t really know what was in there. We don’t know for certain if that was the original injury or if it was something caused by having pretty much a newly structured shoulder. But something was wrong and we got it fixed. So far it’s helped a lot, and hopefully my shoulder continues to get better.

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It’s been a big season for Michael Saunders, and for his career. He’s long been dogged by injury questions, and a season ago he was limited to just nine games played. For 2016 he’s been able to stay on the field, and his bat has done the talking. He’s been part of a loaded Blue Jays lineup, but he’s still third on the team in wRC+, below Edwin Encarnacion but ahead of Jose Bautista. The Jays now have sole possession of first place in the AL East, and given some of what they’ve gone through, it makes sense that they might owe Saunders a great deal of gratitude, his recent slump aside. He’s mostly been stable, and he’s become rather strong.

Numbers are funny, though. There are different ways to spin them, even if you don’t want to spin them. It would be completely legitimate to say Saunders has been one of the best hitters on the team. You could also very legitimately say Saunders has been arguably the least-valuable hitter on the team. It’s true that he’s third in wRC+. It’s true that he’s last in WPA. In a few ways, then, Michael Saunders is having a season to remember.

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Let’s peer into the future for a moment. The time: roughly one year from now. I’m hosting my weekly Tuesday chat, and a reader wants to know: who is the most underrated player in baseball? It’s a common question. It’s a question without an answer, but an answer everyone wants to know. Ben Zobrist’s time with the belt has come and gone. It’s no longer Jose Quintana — not after winning last year’s Cy Young Award. Another one of my go-to answers for this question is Mike Trout, and I might still believe that, but I know it’s not what the reader’s looking for. No, they want the star-not-perceived-as-a-star. The guy flying under the radar as one of baseball’s best at his position without the national recognition. They want what Zobrist was in his heyday. What they want is Devon Travis.

But they’re not going to get Travis as the answer to that question a year from now, because what I’m here to do now, in the present, is exactly what they don’t want you to do in any movie that involves time travel, like that one with Ashton Kutcher or any one of the dozen Final Destination films. I’m here to do something in the present that changes the future. I’m here to prevent Devon Travis from becoming the most underrated player in baseball, because he deserves to be recognized as one of the best second baseman in baseball already.

Travis checks all the boxes of a player doomed to be underrated. The first key of being overlooked as a major leaguer is to be overlooked as a minor leaguer. Check. Travis lasted until the 13th round of the 2012 draft, selected as the 424th pick between Phildrick Llewellyn and Alan Sharkey largely because teams were wary of his 5-foot-9 stature. By 2014, he’d worked his way up to cracking Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list, but even then came in at just 84th, and shortly thereafter was traded from Detroit to Toronto for Anthony Gose, whose own stock was rapidly plummeting.

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Marcus Stroman ended June with a bloated 5.33 ERA that was mostly deserved, so he went back to the drawing board. He’s since had an ERA two runs lower, once again deserved, since he changed things in early July.

After a good start in early July, he made general reference to some adjustments after the game, and Shi Davidi went and asked pitching coach Pete Walker for some specifics. So we know some of what Stroman did to recover. He cleaned up the delivery, he moved his hands, he changed his release point, and he altered his pitching mix. It’s the kind of stuff pitchers do to bust a slump.

The most interesting thing might be where he learned these things, though. Who knows when he picked them up from the Red Sox lefty, but these adjustments have made Stroman a bit more like David Price these days. Even if Price is struggling a bit, you have to count that as a good thing compared to where Stroman was earlier this season.

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