Buckle up, because this is going to be exhausting. Bryce Harper just batted 19 times during a four-game series between the Nationals and Cubs in Chicago. Harper batted a meager .250, and he slugged a meager .250, but he came away with an OBP of .789, thanks in large part to literally 13 walks. Joe Maddon acknowledged that the Cubs were pitching around him, but he didn’t really need to do so for us to get the message, given what was taking place. How did Harper get pitched? Here are all the final locations:

The expression of the day is “the Bonds treatment.” For one four-game series, Bryce Harper was getting pitched like the greatest hitter any of us have ever seen. What’s kind of funny is that Harper has recently been in a slump — he has five hits in 34 official at-bats over the past couple weeks. The Cubs didn’t care, seemingly preferring to go about their business with Ryan Zimmerman and one extra baserunner. At least, much of the time.

Just to what extent did Harper get pitched around? Below, you may behold all 19 plate appearances. For each, I’ll show the sequence, and I’ll assign a 1-to-10 grade indicating how little interest I think the Cubs had in attacking. The grade is entirely subjective and meaningless, but to give it the illusion of meaning, let’s say 1 is pure attack mode, and 10 is unabashed threat avoidance. Here come the Cubs, Bryce Harper, and the Pitching Terrified Index.

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One can be excused for having lost track of the many twists and turns in the long-running broadcast-rights-fee dispute between the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals. Over the past four years, the two teams have waged an extensive legal battle over how much the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN) ought to be paying the Nationals for the team’s local television rights, with both sides capable of pointing to various victories and defeats along the way.

For those interested in a longer recap of the many ins and outs of the dispute, we have previously covered all of the gory details here on a number of occasions over the last several years. In short, though, under the terms of the 2005 agreement in which Baltimore allowed the Nationals to move to Washington, D.C., the teams agreed that they would renegotiate the television rights fees that MASN — the vast majority of which is owned by the Orioles — would have to pay the Nationals every five years.

Unable to reach an accord on the Nationals’ rights fees for the 2012-2016 time period, the teams eventually took the dispute to an arbitration heard by Major League Baseball’s Revenue Sharing Definitions Committee (RSDC), which ultimately awarded the Nationals $60 million per year in broadcast rights fees from MASN. Dissatisfied with this outcome, MASN and Baltimore then took the matter to court, successfully persuading a New York state judge (Judge Lawrence Marks) to overturn the RSDC’s arbitration decision late last year. In particular, Judge Marks ruled that because the Nationals’ legal counsel in the dispute — the Proskauer Rose law firm — had previously represented several of the RSDC members’ teams, the firm’s participation in the arbitration created the appearance of potential bias by the RSDC in favor of Washington.

As I noted this past December, both sides then appealed Judge Marks’ ruling to the court of appeals. The Nationals argued that the trial court had erred by throwing out the arbitration award; MASN and the Orioles, conversely, have asserted that Judge Marks should have permanently disqualified the RSDC from rehearing the dispute. That appeal remains ongoing.

Washington, however, believing that MASN has been underpaying it for years, is not content to sit back and wait for the appellate process to run its course. Instead, the team is now asking Judge Marks to order the Orioles to re-arbitrate the matter before the RSDC, even while the appeal continues. MASN and the Orioles, meanwhile, have unsurprisingly opposed this request, countering last week by asking the trial court to postpone any future arbitration in the dispute pending the outcome of the appeal.

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Yesterday, Daniel Murphy went 4-5, hitting his fourth home run of the season in the process, and driving his batting line for 2016 up to .398/.449/.663. His 192 wRC+ ranks third best in the big leagues, and he’s behind only Manny Machado, Dexter Fowler, and Mike Trout on the WAR leaderboards. In the aftermath of yesterday’s hit barrage, I sent out the following tweet.

Daniel Murphy for 3/$38M now looking like the free agent steal of the winter.

— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) May 4, 2016

Many of the responses argued that Fowler is ahead in that race, which is certainly a reasonable argument given what he’s done for the Cubs thus far. A bunch of other responses were essentially along the “small sample size” lines, though. Like this one, for instance.

@DCameronFG Is there any reason to expect the 25 game sample to trump the 900 game sample that preceded it? We know who Daniel Murphy is.

— Rational Sports (@Rational_Sports) May 4, 2016

In general, the premise of this tweet is mostly correct. When you have a large sample of a player’s career performance, you shouldn’t overreact to a 25 game hot streak, and believe that the most recent performance cancels out the longer history the player has provided for evidence of what he’s capable of doing going forward. In Murphy’s case, though, we’re well past the point of this being a 25 game hot streak. For most of the last year, Daniel Murphy has been one of the best hitters in baseball.

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Bryce Harper was in a slump! You might not have noticed. Right around the middle of April, it seemed people decided Harper had somehow taken another step forward. And maybe he has, I don’t know, but if he has, he hasn’t done it since the middle of April. As a matter of fact — I’m writing this late Wednesday, and when I look at the leaderboards over the past seven days, Harper is tied for dead last in WAR. I don’t recommend you make a habit of looking at WAR over seven-day periods, but Harper is Harper, and last is last. There was a real and legitimate slump. Could be there still is.

Let me make it clear right now that I’m not concerned. Not about Harper, not at present. I thought he was great at the beginning of April, I thought he was great in the middle of April, and I think he’s great now at the beginning of May. Everyone is entitled to the occasional off-week. I just do think there’s something we could learn from examining how what’s happened has happened. Bryce Harper slumped! Why?

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Over the weekend, Ken Rosenthal reported that the possibility of Ryan Braun being traded “was becoming more realistic”, as Braun is off to a fantastic start to the 2016 season, and he’s starting to put some distance between himself and the BioGenesis scandal that cost him half the 2013 season and a good chunk of his reputation. Since the suspension, Braun hasn’t played up to his previously established levels of performance, and when combined with his contract and the baggage surrounding how he handled his failed test, he was mostly an immovable object.

But with Braun hitting .372/.443/.605 — yeah, that is heavily inflated by a .409 BABIP, but his early season strikeout rate is back in line with Peak Braun levels, and he can still hit the ball a long way — and only four guaranteed years left on his deal after this season, dealing Braun is starting to look like something that could happen. It’s almost a certainty that the Brewers will take on some of his remaining contract in any deal in order to get better talent in return, with the question of how much of the remaining ~$90 million they’ll keep on their books being settled depending on how well he keeps hitting and what other sluggers hit the market this summer.

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I feel like I just wrote this recently somewhere, but I guess I’ll write it again. In baseball, people don’t pay too much attention to strength of schedule. In part this is because numbers aren’t easy to come by. In probably larger part, this is because strengths tend to mostly even out. That’s true over full seasons, for sure, but there’s no reason it should be true over smaller samples. Like, here’s a stat for you. Pitchers Aledmys Diaz has faced so far have allowed a combined .877 OPS. Pitchers Brad Miller has faced so far have allowed a combined .653 OPS. Is it any wonder why Diaz is presently out-hitting Miller? That’s an enormous gap, and it isn’t going to remain so enormous.

Let’s turn our attention to the overall standings. By wins and losses, no one has been better than the Cubs. That’s no surprise. They’re even with the White Sox, which is a bigger surprise. Then you find the Nationals. Though they’ve lost a couple in a row, they’re still 14-6, and while we expected the Nationals to be pretty good, we didn’t expect them to be this good. Of course, we’re kind of still waiting for the Nationals to play a major-league opponent.

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A year ago, Kris Bryant’s failure to make the Cubs Opening Day roster made a good deal of news because (a) Bryant, 23, had dominated the minors and was clearly ready for the majors, and (b) by holding him down for a couple weeks, the Cubs prevented Bryant from recording a full year of service time in 2015, which also prevented him from recording the necessary six years of service time for free agency before the end of the 2021 season. Bryant was the number-one prospect in baseball at the time, but he was not the only player kept in the minor leagues at least in part due to service time considerations. Carlos Correa, Maikel Franco, Francisco Lindor, Carlos Rodon, Addison Russell, and Noah Syndergaard all spent time in the minors last year before succeeding in the big leagues. There has been little uproar this year regarding service time shenanigans. While there is no Bryant-like player, the potential for some service-time manipulation is still there.

To identify players who are ripe for manipulation it’s best to begin with the very best prospects. Of the players mentioned above, six of seven appeared among Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list last year; only Franco appeared outside the top 20, down at 38 overall. Taking a look at Baseball America’s top 20 prospects this season, we can get a good start in identifying players.

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About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.

Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:

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Previous editions: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Los Angeles (NL) / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York (AL) / New York (NL)  / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Washington Nationals. In this companion piece, I look at that same DC farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Nationals have the 16th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

*****

1. Trea Turner, SS (Profile)

KATOH Projection: 8.8 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 60 FV

Turner scuffled in his first taste of big-league action last year, but previously did a bang-up job in the minors. Speed is Turner’s calling card, but he also showed a decent amount of power when he popped eight homers in the minors. Turner’s high-ish strikeout rates are a bit concerning, but his overall offensive package is extremely promising for a shortstop.

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Since the 2012 season, the question of the best player in baseball has been pretty boring. Mike Trout busted onto the scene with a +10.3 WAR season as a 20 year old, and he’s since dominated the sport in a way that has rarely been seen in the game’s history. There were good players having great seasons in Trout’s shadow, but no one put up any real serious challenge to the idea that they were a better player than Trout. But now, that might be changing, as Bryce Harper is putting together a realistic run at the title of the best player in baseball.

Obviously, Harper’s 2015 season was outstanding, as he won the NL MVP by wrecking opposing pitchers on a daily basis. But because of how good he was last year, it can be easy to forget that Harper is still just 23 years old, and he appears to be getting even better.

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