You saw this post’s headline before you read this sentence. The headline’s a question, so you probably answered it. I’m guessing your answer is, “probably not, no.” Or maybe it’s, “well we have no way of possibly knowing.” Or maybe it’s both. And that’s perfectly fair — we don’t have any way of possibly knowing for sure, and there was a lot of baseball before 2013 Andrelton Simmons. But if you’re reading this post anyway, it means you’re curious. And curiosity requires an open mind. You’re willing to consider the possibility that Simmons is having the best defensive season ever, and that might say enough on its own.

The other day, Jose Iglesias did something amazing, and I wrote about it. I don’t think it’s the greatest defensive play by a shortstop I’ve ever seen, but a full write-up felt appropriate, given Iglesias’ reputation and given his importance to a contending Tigers team with the rest of the Tigers’ defensive infield. Eventually, it had to be noted that no matter how good we think Iglesias might be, there’s already an Andrelton Simmons. Iglesias, this year, has been a good shortstop for 318 innings. Simmons has been a good shortstop for more than a thousand. Iglesias is going to be hard-pressed to emerge as the best defensive shortstop in baseball, because Simmons pushes sensibility to the extremes, and with his 2013 in particular, we have to wonder: how does this stack up? Where does this season fit in all-time?

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Monday night in Washington, the Braves beat Stephen Strasburg and the Nationals by a 3-2 score. The beginning of the Nationals’ MLB.com game recap reads so casually you almost skip right over the astonishing part and miss the absurdity. Quote:

WASHINGTON — The Nationals entered Monday night with nine chances remaining to cut directly into the Braves’ 12 1/2-game lead in the National League East. They wasted the first of those chances in the opener of a three-game series, as Justin Upton’s go-ahead solo home run in the eighth inning lifted Atlanta to a 3-2 victory.

Braves in first, check. Nationals with chances left, check. Nationals with a blown chance, check. Twelve and a half games. Wait. Now thirteen and a half games. Because the Braves won. The number is inserted as if the gap isn’t completely ridiculous. The number is inserted as if Nationals fans ought to be holding out hope.

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Sometimes, to get a batting champion, you have to pay a steep price. Right now, Miguel Cabrera is blowing away the competition in the American League, to such an extent that it’s hardly a competition at all. The Tigers, of course, couldn’t be more thrilled that he’s on their side, but when they got him, they had to have some doubts. And sometimes, to get a batting champion, you can make a move that people hardly notice. The leader in the National League right now is Chris Johnson, batting .342. Johnson didn’t even begin the year as an everyday player.

Johnson went from the Diamondbacks to the Braves as part of a much larger deal. The key, everybody understood, was Atlanta’s acquisition of potential superstar Justin Upton. This was the conclusion of the Justin Upton sweepstakes. To this point, Upton has been worth 1.6 WAR. A big part of Arizona’s return was the solid and underrated Martin Prado. To this point, Prado has been worth 0.4 WAR. Johnson went to Atlanta and people didn’t notice. To this point, he has been worth 1.9 WAR. He was worth more than a third of that in July.

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It’s bullpen upgrade day. A few hours after the Tigers added Jose Veras, the Braves got the lefty reliever they’ve been hunting for, landing Scott Downs from the Angels, and they got him for what amounts to a hill of beans.

Working against Downs’ value was his age (37), his contract (remainder of $5M salary), and his splits (basically a LOOGY at this point). Adding a couple of million in payroll for a guy who is probably a situational reliever at this point in his career seems to have been enough to scare off most bidders, because the Braves only had to give up reliever Cory Rasmus to get him.

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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I know a lot of you loved this guy, so this thread is a place for you all to say goodbye…

Jeff Francoeur always seemed destined to be a Kansas City Royal. Even when he was a Georgia-born-and-raised Atlanta prospect, he was always destined to be a Royal. Sort of. It seems as if very early on Dayton Moore’s tenure as General Manager of the Royals, Joe Posnanski was predicting that Moore, who played a big part in Francoeur’s drafting and development when Moore worked for Atlanta, would find a way to acquire The Natural.

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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Last year I reintroduced VOL, a custom metric that attempts to measure the relative volatility of a hitter’s day to day performance. It is far from a perfect metric, but at the moment it’s what we have.

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We are a little more than two months into the season, and that means it’s time to check on early season velocity trends. As I’ve mentioned before, declines in velocity are a less reliable signal in April and May than in June and July, but nevertheless large declines can still be a solid predictor that a pitcher’s velocity has in fact truly declined and will remain lower at season’s end. Almost 40% of pitchers that experience a decline in April — and almost 50% in May — will finish the season down at least 1 mph. And while the signal gets much stronger in July, 40% is still a pretty sizable number.

So let’s take a quick look at the major decliners from April and May.

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The Astros have the worst team strikeout rate in the history of baseball. It’s not even particularly close, as these things go. The Astros have struck out in 26.8% of their plate appearances. The 2010 Diamondbacks struck out in 24.7% of their plate appearances. That’s a gap of more than two percentage points, in a rate that usually fluctuates between 15-25% or so. That’s terrible, and the only consolation is that the Astros were projected to be terrible so no one really cares.

Then right behind the 2010 Diamondbacks are this year’s Braves, at 24.5%. So, this year’s Braves have the third-worst team strikeout rate in the history of baseball. Between third and fourth there’s a gap of another 1.6 percentage points. The Braves, obviously, have the second-worst team strikeout rate this season. Just glancing at their current box score, they’ve struck out six times in four innings against Ian Kennedy on Wednesday. They’re going to strike out more before this game is through. Probably. I guess I can’t be certain.

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