Ostensibly, Kyle Lohse and I talked about the evolution of his approach last week before a game against the Giants. He showed me some grips and talked about how his arsenal has changed since he was in Minnesota. But — as it happens when you start talking about baseball’s intricacies — our conversation ended up straying into the economics of baseball, the psychology of the pitcher/hitter matchup, and even performance-enhancing drugs.

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Maybe you’ve heard. Jonathan Lucroy is good at framing pitches. According to Jeff Sullivan’s most recent post on the subject, third-best in the league and the current first-best starting catcher. So he’s good at framing. But he doesn’t call it framing. And when he describes how and why he got good at it, it doesn’t sound like much of a mystery. It’s just the natural result of years of hard work.

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Well, the first shoe in the BioGenesis case has fallen. Faced with the possibility of having the issue continue to linger into 2014, Ryan Braun has agreed to a deal with MLB, and will be suspended for the rest of the 2013 season, which in the Brewers case, amounts to 65 games.

While Braun’s not going to enjoy being suspended, this is actually a pretty good resolution for the Brewers overall. Their 2013 season is obviously finished, and the marginal value of Braun’s contributions this year weren’t really going to matter to the organization. Without him in the line-up, they might even end up with a better draft pick than they would have otherwise in a year where the amateur talent is supposed to be pretty good.

More importantly, this should close the book on the BioGenesis case as far as Braun is concerned, which means that his 2014 status should no longer be in doubt. Braun basically is agreeing to serve a 65 game suspension in a season where those games are meaningless in order to avoid getting suspended in a year where any missed games might impact a pennant race.

For Braun’s own personal legacy and record, this is a blow, but for the Brewers, it’s hard to imagine a better outcome, given that MLB clearly wasn’t going to let this go. Yeah, it’s 65 games, but this is the equivalent of getting pinch hit for in a blow-out. The 2013 Brewers weren’t going anywhere with Ryan Braun, and so now, they put this behind them next spring and try to win with their best player able to spend the whole season on the active roster.

It will be interesting to see how many other players on non-contenders agree to similar deals, putting the appeals process aside and just agreeing to serve their suspensions in lost seasons. If I’m a non-contender and I’ve got a player linked to BioGenesis, I’m strongly urging them to do the same.

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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With the lack of high quality pitchers on the trade block, the Brewers have made it known that Yovani Gallardo could be available for the right offer. Since Gallardo is only 27-years-old and under team control through 2015, he has the potential to bring back a more significant piece to help the Brewers rebuild than the rent-a-veteran types that other clubs are shopping. However, there’s one small problem; Gallardo is doing his best to scare off any clubs who might have seen him as an answer to their rotation problems.

In his last two starts, Gallardo has allowed 13 runs while pitching only seven innings, and those clunkers came against the Cubs and Nationals, neither of whom are known for their ferocious offensive attacks. It’s not wise to decide that a player is not useful based on a couple of recent poor performances, but Gallardo has been trending the wrong way for a while now.

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Not a whole lot of people have been paying attention to the Marlins. Now, this is typically the case, but the Marlins have been off the radar for months. People suspected they’d be bad, then they came out and were bad, and that was it, that was confirmation of beliefs. So maybe you didn’t notice, but since May 31, the Marlins have posted the National League’s second-best record. It’s good to have a healthy Giancarlo Stanton. By overall record, the Marlins have managed to catch up to the Astros. And they’ve narrowed the gap between themselves and the Brewers to a slim three games.

Considering how those teams were viewed before the year, this is a bit of a surprise, and it’s mostly because the Brewers have been a disaster. In every case of significant over- and under-performance, there will be a variety of contributing factors, as no one player can make that much of a difference. Baseball is a game of little things adding up, and lots has added up to lead the Brewers to 32-48. But one problem in particular has been bigger than the others. One problem has really allowed the Brewers to sink to the depths.

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Defensive errors have been a part of baseball history forever, but we seldom ever talk about them now. We’ve come to better understand the importance of range, and so we look beyond errors for our defensive evaluations. A guy might make an extra error or two simply because he’s covering a lot more ground than a peer. There’s also the matter of errors being subjective, some being obvious calls and some being coin flips. As for hitters, errors are mistakes by the other team. When a hitter smacks a ball in play and the defense makes an error, we tend to think of the hitter as lucky, because that shouldn’t have happened. So hitters don’t get a lot of credit.

But errors do happen, and they’re factored into some wOBA formulas, and there’s a line of thinking that faster runners can force more defensive errors, giving them a mostly unseen advantage. There’s the idea, then, that there’s indirectly some skill involved, which might mean a few extra runs. I, personally, have seen Ichiro reach a bunch of times on misplays, which might’ve had to do with his speed. The more a defender has to hurry, the more prone he might be to screwing up, which could be a thing worth talking about. We’re about to focus on Norichika Aoki.

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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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The Milwaukee Brewers have two of the top ten players in WAR, and neither of them is named Ryan Braun. Carlos Gomez (+3.2 WAR, #1) and Jean Segura (+2.5 WAR, #9) have been revelations for the Brewers, while Braun has been his usual dominant self, putting up +1.9 WAR with his usual brand of excellence. Toss in a strong performance from the underrated Norichika Aoki and 78 terrific plate appearances from the occasionally healthy Aramis Ramirez, and the top end of the Brewers line-up has been as good as any in baseball. For context, here is the total combined line for Gomes, Segura, Braun, Aoki, and Ramirez:

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I know it’s not like me to use such a provocative, declarative headline. Truth be told, I’d be more comfortable with “Yuniesky Betancourt Hasn’t Changed a Bit, Probably”, just so I can cover all my bases. But here we are, and I think it needs to be said, on the heels of Betancourt slamming his eighth dinger of the still very young regular season. This is a time for sanity, in the midst of something very much insane.

The Blue Jays are 13-21, and John Buck has ten home runs. The Dodgers are 13-19, and Dexter Fowler has eight home runs. The Angels are 11-21, and Yuniesky Betancourt also has eight home runs. When something early in the season takes you by complete surprise, it’s worth re-evaluating your expectations, rather than sticking to your guns. But just because you re-evaluate doesn’t mean you have to change your position, and if Betancourt’s changed at 31 years old, it’s showing up in only one place.

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