Remember when Johnny Cueto was viewed as a risk? I mean, he’s a pitcher, of course he’s a risk — all pitchers are risks. But even relative to other pitchers, Cueto was regarded this offseason as a rather large uncertainty. Between his underwhelming second half and ugly postseason with Kansas City, a right elbow that barked multiple times throughout the year, and his heavy workload in 2014 and 2015, expectations were tempered entering the 2016 season, and it seemed like folks were prepared for the possibility of a Cueto decline, or even collapse.

That preparation was for naught. Out of the gate, the Giants are getting peak Cueto. My preferred method of looking at pitcher WAR is using a 50/50 split of FIP-based WAR and RA9-WAR. It’s not perfect, but neither is looking at just one, and we know the ideal mix is somewhere in between. For now, I’m fine with simply splitting the difference. Do that, and this is your current 2016 top five:

1. Clayton Kershaw, 5.6 WAR
2. Johnny Cueto, 4.0
3. Noah Syndergaard, 3.7
4. Jake Arrieta, 3.5
5. Chris Sale, 3.4

Nobody’s Kershaw. But this year, Cueto’s arguably been the next-best thing. Or at the very least, the next-most valuable. Cueto threw another complete game last night, already his fourth of the season, and this one came against the Rockies. When Cueto’s taken the mound this year, the Giants are 16-2. I don’t think too many folks are still viewing Cueto as an uncertainty.

Environmentally, there couldn’t be much more going in Cueto’s favor, and that’s got to be acknowledged. He spent the first seven years of his career pitching in Cincinnati, a bandbox of a ballpark that works against pitching, and then he moved to the American League, where pitchers are replaced in the batting order by dudes whose only job is to hit. Now, he’s back to facing pitchers, and not only that, he’s facing pitchers in baseball’s most pitcher-friendly stadium. Adding to that, Cueto’s a guy who loves to work around the edges of the zone, and while recently he’s commonly pitched to the likes of Brayan Pena and Salvador Perez, the latter of whom routinely grades among baseball’s worst pitch framers, Cueto this year is enjoying the pleasure of pitching to Buster Posey, who’s currently grading as baseball’s best. He’s also enjoying the pleasure of pitching in front of an elite defense, though he’s long enjoyed that pleasure.

He’s gone from small parks and designated hitters and poor catchers to a favorable home stadium, more easy lineups, baseball’s best catcher, and an excellent defense. Of course, we’ve got adjusted stats to account for most of that, and Cueto’s still in the top-10 in those. If it were that easy to succeed in San Francisco, everybody would do it, and yet no one’s doing it like Cueto.

For one, it sure seems like he’s taking advantage of his new environment. By the metrics, this year’s Giants have had, by far, baseball’s best infield defense. Baseball Info Solutions credits San Francisco’s defense with 39 runs saved on the season; only one other team cracks 20. And along with that, Cueto’s increased his ground-ball rate by more than nine points — the second-largest increase of any qualified pitcher from last season. Cueto’s been a ground-baller in the past, but this is the second-highest rate of his career, and its coinciding with a change in location.

Last season, only Jordan Zimmermann threw a higher rate of pitches in the upper-half of the zone and beyond than Cueto. With all his offspeed pitches and lack of top-end velocity, you might not think of him this way, but Cueto’s recently been one of baseball’s most extreme high-ball pitchers. Not anymore. Going from last year to this year, Cueto’s had one of the five largest shifts toward the bottom of the zone:

Don’t get it twisted — Cueto still likes his high pitch. But there’s been an effort to more often work in the lower half of the zone in San Francisco. The lower half of the zone is where Posey works his receiving magic, and the lower half of the zone is where ground balls are generated, the ones that Brandon Crawford and the rest of the Giants defense routinely turn into outs.

And that relationship between Cueto and the infield defense? It manifests itself not only in quantity, but in quality as well. Among the 133 pitchers with at least 1,000 pitches thrown this season, Cueto’s average exit velocity of 86.8 miles per hour ranks fourth. His grounders have gone just 83.2 mph, also fourth. His two-seam fastball, with which he pounds the inner-half of the plate against right-handed batters, has generated an average exit velocity of 82.2 mph, baseball’s best. It gets swings that look like this:

Oh, yeah. Cueto can help himself out, too.

We’ve long thought of Cueto as something of a contact-manager, given his repeatedly low BABIPs and high strand rates, and now we’ve got the data to support that assumption.

There’s more going on here. Cueto’s going to his slider more often, and he’s truly solving right-handed batters for the first time in his career. He’s running a career-low walk rate and a career-high first-pitch strike rate, evidence that his command is sharper than it’s been in the past. And then he’s still doing all the things that have made him Cueto all along — the masterful mixing of all six pitches, the deception from his many deliveries.

It’s just all clicking right now. You can’t not give credit to Cueto’s surroundings, but you also can’t not give credit to Cueto for using his surroundings to his advantage. Cueto’s looked like an ace in the past, but that went away for a bit. Now, he looks like a better ace than ever before. The Giants are almost certainly going to make the postseason this year. This time, they won’t need Madison Bumgarner to throw 50 innings.

Tim Lincecum used to be freakishly good. He no longer is. Hampered by hip woes, the 32-year-old right-hander went from winning Cy Young awards and tossing no-hitters to the precipice of pitching oblivion. His velocity down and his ERA up, he succumbed to surgery last September.

He’s on the comeback trail, but not with the team he helped win three World Series. The former Giant signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in May and debuted with his new club in mid-June. His performances have been underwhelming. In four starts, the once-overpowering righty has allowed 29 hits in 18 innings. His fastball is averaging a pedestrian 89 mph.

The extent to which Lincecum can return to his old form remains to be seen. His surgically-repaired hip appears to be holding up, and his damaged psyche is healing as well. He’ll likely never be an elite power pitcher again — or a power pitcher at all — but he feels he can be a productive starter. Only time will tell.

Lincecum talked about his early development as a pitcher, and his career going forward, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

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Lincecum on pitching: “When you’re younger, you don’t have a plan. You either trust your stuff or you don’t, or you just throw it and hope. I always trusted my stuff. My fastball didn’t always play, but my curveball made my fastball better. That’s what I could execute. Some guys have an idea of how they can pitch — what pitches they should throw in what counts — but guys like me just end up throwing the ball and trusting it. There’s an aspect of that even at this level. You have a plan, but you’re basically throwing the baseball. It all depends on how well you can execute.

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Ever since Eric Byrnes used a computer to help umpire an independent-league baseball game last year, and then Brian Kenny took up the mantle of #RobotUmpsNow on the MLB Network, I’ve been fascinated with the idea that robot umpires will soon call strike zones in baseball. The more I talk to players about it, though, the more I doubt that it’s an eventuality. Because the players, well, the players are going to hate it.

I can’t speak for all players, obviously. I haven’t talked to all of them. But I’ve talked to plenty on both sides, even ones I can’t quote here, and the biggest endorsement I could get was a tepid version of “It’s going to happen.”

So instead of asking each player what they thought about robot umpires, I changed the question a bit. Instead, I asked pitchers, catchers, and hitters, “Who will hate robot umps the most?”

The short answer? Everyone. The long answer? Much more interesting.

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Like any baseball stat, Wins Above Replacement provides the answer to a question. The question, in this case? Something like this: accounting for all the main ways (hitting, running, defense, etc.) in which a player can produce value for his team, how many wins has this particular player been worth?

There are, of course, criticisms of WAR. Some valid, others less so. One prominent criticism is how defensive value is handled in WAR. Some don’t understand how it’s calculated. Others understand but also question how well it represents a player’s defensive contributions. These criticisms shouldn’t be dismissed. As with all baseball statistics, though, it’s necessary to consider WAR in the context in which it’s presented — that is, to remember the question a metric is intended to answer and the method by which it attempts to answer that question.

On Monday, I completed one such reminder in a discussion of players whose WAR totals this year are probably low based on what we know about their defense. Today, I’ll make another attempt — this time, by examining players whose WAR totals are probably inflated by defensive numbers unlikely to be sustained over the course of a season.

In the comments of Monday’s post, one reader, Ernie Camacho, noted:

[T]here is a weird tension in this article between quantifying and estimating what has already happened, on the one hand, and evaluating player talent, on the other. I’m not sure we should be blending the two.

This is a good point. That tension most definitely exists, and it’s possible that some of that tension is what causes people to discount defensive metrics — and WAR as a whole. I agree that, in terms of calculating WAR, we should not be blending what has already happened with what we think will probably happen. Over time, in an ideal world, WAR captures both. In smaller samples, however, this is more difficult to do. In fact, there’s actually something that does capture the blending when we have smaller samples: projections. If we want to capture a player’s talent level at any given moment, projections do that very well.

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Madison Bumgarner hit another home run. Sure, it was against Aaron Blair, and sure, this just keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward, but, Aaron Blair is a quality prospect in the major leagues, and this keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward. Bumgarner apparently figured out hitting in 2014. Maybe he got bored because he’d already mastered pitching. Since then, over just shy of 200 trips to the plate, Bumgarner has batted .234/.265/.451, good for a 101 wRC+. The next-best offensive pitcher has been Zack Greinke, with a wRC+ of 65. On the mound, Madison Bumgarner is Madison Bumgarner, and at the plate, Madison Bumgarner is Jonathan Schoop. The Giants’ advantage is that no other pitcher hits like a powerful second baseman.

This table is funny to me:

The name right after Bumgarner is Kyle Schwarber. When Bumgarner has hit a ball between the lines, he’s had basically the same rate of home runs as Kyle Schwarber. You know the image you have of Kyle Schwarber. Bumgarner has made that kind of contact.

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Cuban righty Yadier Alvarez was the $16 million crown jewel of the Dodgers’ 2015/2016 international free-agent class. It was the second-highest bonus ever given to an international amateur and reports on Alvarez prior to last July were so good that I ranked him #1 on my J2 board at the time. Alvarez ventured stateside this spring and has consistently pitched every fifth day, only missing one start to attend the birth of his child. Reports coming out of Camelback Ranch have been superlative. On Monday, I got to see it for myself along with a number of other interesting prospects.

Yadier Alvarez, RHP, Los Angeles Dodgers

Current Level: Extended Spring Training, Age: 20.2, Height/Weight: 6’3/180
Signed: IFA at age 19 on July 2, 2015 out of Cuba by LA for $16.0 million bonus

Alvarez was electric. After opening his start with a few fringe fastballs, he began to loosen up and was sitting 92-97 before long. He has been up to 100 this spring, which is especially notable given that there were rumors over the offseason that his velocity had been down. Mixed in along with the fastball was an 82-86 mph slider with late, two-plane bite. It flashed plus, but the line between that pitch and his 76-82 mph curveball was sometimes blurry. The curveball is a bit more vertically oriented than the slider and Alvarez decelerates his arm a bit to throw it, but it flashed average and it should solidify there once he becomes more comfortable with its release.

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Yesterday, we tackled the best final seasons for pitchers. Today, let’s tackle the position players, so we can get to the heart of the question of just how good David Ortiz needs to be to crack one of these lists. The rules and breakdowns are the same as before, so I would encourage you to read yesterday’s post to peep those. Once again, big ups to Jeff Zimmerman for data help.

30-39 WAR

Best Final Season, Position Players with 30-39 WAR

Player	Final Season	Age	WAR	Career WAR
Roy Cullenbine	1947	33	4.4	33.8
Chick Stahl	1906	33	3.7	33.1
Tony Cuccinello	1945	37	3.0	32.2
Gil McDougald	1960	32	2.8	39.7
Joe Adcock	1966	38	2.5	34.2
Elbie Fletcher	1949	33	2.4	30.7

The guys on this list are definitely not household names, but there are some interesting, if also tragic, stories here. Let’s deal with the tragic first. There are six players here because one of them, Chick Stahl, committed suicide during spring training of the 1907 season. He had been named the Americans’ (Red Sox) player/manager over the winter, and something drove him to take his own life. This was surely a big loss for the team, as they had been counting on him to help lead them. He was the fifth-best hitter in the game just a couple years earlier in 1904.

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A few years back, I wrote a four–part series about the worst final seasons for good players. It was inspired by Willie Mays, who very prominently had a bad final season, but was far from the worst season. Now, David Ortiz has inspired the flip side of the coin – the best final season. The Large Father is off to quite a hot start, and so some people have asked, how good does he have to be to produce the best final season of all-time? As you’ll see, the answer is he’ll have to do quite a lot.

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A a writer, you typically have an agenda when you approach a major-league hitter in the clubhouse. Literally. Even me! I try to keep it open-ended — and avoid the old “can you talk about how important player X is so that I can finish up my piece on him”-type questions — but I still have a (loose!) narrative sketched around some key stats when I step to a player. It’s called research.

Sometimes, the player has an agenda, too. Maybe that’s wording it too strongly. Sometimes, the player doesn’t want to answer your questions and has something else on his mind. That’s better.

That describes what happened when I talked to Josh Donaldson last night before a game against the Giants. He was obviously thinking about the night before, and when I brought up an old conversation about his two-strike approach, and the deception between Zack Greinke and Paul Konerko, he started talking about pitchers not following the rule book.

I let him run with it.

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In last night’s fifth inning, the Rockies threw punches and punches until the Giants were frontless. They scored 13 runs, which, as was noted at Purple Row, was a team record for runs scored in an inning. Oh, did I mention that this game was in San Francisco, and not in Denver? Because it was, which makes it all the more surprising. Let’s walk back through their blockbuster night, and use it to show what the Rockies are doing right this season.

First, let’s put this game into some context. Here are all the teams who have scored 15 or more runs in a game at AT&T Park, which as you probably know has been open since 2000.

15+ Runs Scored by Single Team, AT&T Park History

Date	Tm	Runs	Opp	Runs	Barry Bonds?
5/6/2016	COL	17	SFG	7	No
7/10/2015	SF	15	PHI	2	No
9/13/2014	LAD	17	SF	0	No
8/31/2014	SF	15	MIL	5	No
8/24/2010	SF	16	CIN	5	No
9/24/2008	COL	15	SF	6	No
7/23/2005	FLO	16	SF	4	No
9/3/2004	SF	18	ARI	7	Yes
4/9/2003	SF	15	SD	11	Yes
5/24/2000	SF	18	MON	0	Yes

SOURCE: Baseball-Reference Play Index

As you can see, this doesn’t happen very often — happens even less when Barry Bonds hasn’t been involved. For reference, over the same time span, a team has scored 15-plus runs at Fenway Park 37 times. Across the bay at whatever Oakland’s ballpark is called now, it’s happened 16 times. At Camden Yards, it’s happened 27 times. Runs are simply harder to come by in games affected by the marine layer.

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