A few weeks back, we matched up three of the most dominant pitching performances from April, utilizing granular ball-in-play data, to determine which of Vince Velasquez, Jaime Garcia or Jake Arrieta had the best day. Velasquez won that time around, and with Max Scherzer recently authoring a 20-strikeout, no-walk complete game shutout over the Tigers, we have a worthy contender for the single-game pitching championship belt.

There’s one rule for entry into this competition: you had to finish what you started. Only complete games apply. Then we simply look at every batted ball allowed, and first calculate each pitcher’s single-game Adjusted Contact Score based on exit speed and angle data. Then, we add back the Ks and BBs, and calculate each pitcher’s single-game “tru” ERA-. With these two performances, we don’t need to worry about adding back any BBs.

Velasquez vs. Scherzer – Exit Speed/Angle Data

			AVG ALL	AVG FLY	AVG LD	AVG GB	AVG VERT
Velasquez	vs. SD	14-Apr	88.1	89.1	87.2	87.4	20.8
Scherzer	vs. DET	11-May	86.6	93.1	93.5	56.8	19.1
MLB Avg.	Thru	18-May	89.4	90.0	93.5	87.4	11.0

Both of these pitchers followed similar paths in their dominant outings. Besides striking out 36 and walking none between them, both pitchers allowed very high average exit angles, and very few grounders. Only extreme fly-ball/pop-up pitchers sustain average exit angles near 20 over a full season, the Chris Youngs and Jered Weavers of this world.

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Recording 20 strikeouts is an amazing feat — and a rare one, too: this past Wednesday, Max Scherzer joined Roger Clemens, Kerry Wood, and Randy Johnson as the only players ever to accomplish it in nine innings. What they’ve done is exceptional and, naturally, separates them from other pitchers. And while similar, each performance occurred in the context of different variables which made it distinct: era, opponent, ballpark, etc. No one is required to decide which pitcher faced the most challenging set of circumstances among those five games (Clemens did it twice). Yet, I’ve elected to make an attempt, anyway.

When first trying to understand which game posed the most difficultly, we immediately turn to the opponent. Roger Clemens, for example, achieved both of his 20-strikeout games with the designated hitter in play. Striking out 20 players of major-league caliber — regardless of how low they are on that particular scale — is still incredibly difficult. It’s more difficult to record 20 strikeouts against good hitters. The Detroit Tigers lineup Scherzer faced, meanwhile, is a top-heavy one. But solid overall, even if it didn’t feature a DH.

The table below depicts the lineup the Tigers deployed against Scherzer as well as each respective hitter’s rest-of-season projected numbers for wRC+ and strikeout percentage. (Jordan Zimmermann‘s career numbers were used, and his strikeout percentage and wRC+ were combined proportionally with pinch-hitter Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s. Weighted average accounts for the top of the order getting more plate appearances than the bottom)

Tigers Lineup Against Max Scherzer

Player	wRC+
Ian Kinsler	101
J.D. Martinez	124
Miguel Cabrera	145
Victor Martinez	119
Justin Upton	118
James McCann	71
Anthony Gose	80
Jose Iglesias	84
Jordan Zimmermann	33
AVERAGE	97
Weighted AVG	100

*Zimmerman’s wRC+ averaged proportionally with pinch-hitter Jarrod Saltalamacchia.

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The man who threw two no-hitters in a single season just one-upped himself. Max Scherzer was overwhelming on Wednesday night, striking out 20 Detroit Tigers batters without a single walk. It may not have matched the overall brilliance of his 17-strikeout, no-walk, no-hitter against the Mets a little over seven months ago, but this one was every bit as memorable. Although strikeouts have been on the rise for a decade, so too have the limitations on starting pitchers’ workloads, and in an era where aces get shut down in time for the playoffs and others get removed while chasing history, Scherzer went where it was difficult to imagine a man could go again, becoming the fifth pitcher to strike out 20 batters in a nine-inning game.

Scherzer did so by descending upon the strike zone with a reckless abandon. He threw an almost unfathomable 96 strikes in 119 pitches, becoming the first pitcher in recorded history to throw as many strikes in fewer than 125 pitches. His 80.7% strike rate ranks fifth since the beginning of the expansion era in games where the starting pitcher threw at least 100 pitches.

You’re in one of two camps with regard to Scherzer’s performance. You’ve read about it, and you wish you’d seen it, or you saw it, and you want to see it again. I was in the former camp, before I joined the latter. Let’s relive the five most dominant sequences from Max Scherzer’s most dominant game.

No. 5

Miguel Cabrera, first inning, strikeout No. 2

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Last night, in the middle of his start against the Detroit Tigers, news leaked out that Stephen Strasburg had agreed to a seven year, $175 million extension with the Washington Nationals. As Jeff Sullivan noted last night, this is seen as surprising news, as Scott Boras clients usually end up testing free agency, and Strasburg was four months away from being not just the best free agent on the market this winter, but the only high-end pitching option available.

And it’s not like the Nationals broke the bank to keep Strasburg away from free agency. The 7 year, $175 million total essentially matches the contract figures that Justin Verlander and Felix Hernandez received in their long-term extensions three years ago, except Strasburg’s actual contract is valued significantly less than those two, because it also includes $70 million in interest-free deferrals. Once you account for the payment structure of Strasburg’s deal, the net present value is $135 million, which is the NPV a player would get if he signed a 7 year, $158 million contract without backloading or deferrals.

That total puts Strasburg south of not only Hernandez and Verlander (not even accounting for the inflation that has happened in MLB salaries since those deals were signed) but even less annually than Jon Lester, who got $155 million from the Cubs for six years. Lester was selling his age 31-36 seasons when he signed with Chicago, while Strasburg would have been selling his age 28-34 seasons had he entered the market this winter; combined with his superior stuff and the dearth of alternatives on the market, I would have guessed that Strasburg would have been able to do significantly better than this as a free agent.

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Stephen Strasburg made his worst start of the season last night. At home, against the Detroit Tigers, Strasburg struck out 11 over seven innings, allowing four earned runs on six hits, three walks, and two home runs. The Nationals won the game on a walk-off home run by Clint Robinson in the ninth inning, and Strasburg took the no decision. A game in which Strasburg completed seven innings and struck out double digits was his worst start of the year in terms of ERA, and his worst start of the year in terms of FIP. It was his best start of the year in terms of signing massive contract extensions bordering on $200 million.

That last night’s performance was Strasburg’s least impressive of the season is impressive in and of itself. He’s been baseball’s third-most valuable pitcher by FIP-WAR, eighth-most valuable pitcher by RA9-WAR, and fifth-most valuable pitcher by an even mix of the two. And while what he’s done this seasons is an elevated level of performance relative to previous seasons, Strasburg’s been on this run for a while now. You could make the case that this is the best we’ve ever seen him.

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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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