In October 2011, a Q&A titled Zach Britton, Oriole in Progress was published in these pages. Britton had just completed a rookie season in which he went 11-11, with a 4.61 ERA, in 28 starts. He’d thrown his signature pitch 53% of the time.

Fast forward to today. Britton is still in Baltimore, but much has changed. He became a reliever in 2014, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular. Since moving to the bullpen, the 28-year-old southpaw has appeared in 199 games and fashioned a 1.42 ERA. Relying more heavily on his power sinker — he now throws it over 90% of the time — he has the highest ground-ball rate in the game (80.8% this year). He also misses bats. Britton strikes out better than a batter per inning.

This season he’s been next to un-hittable. In 61.1 innings, Britton has allowed just 34 hits. He’s recorded a microscopic 0.59 ERA and has 45 saves in as many chances. As August Fagerstrom wrote last month — many have echoed his opinion since that time — Britton is very much in the mix for this year’s American League Cy Young award.

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Britton on his pitch mix and changing roles: “There were a lot more four-seamers back [in 2011]. As a starter, you throw more pitches and mix in different things. It was probably a negative for me that I wasn’t learning how to command the sinker as much as I am now. That was really the big focus when I went to the bullpen — the command of my sinker. The results have been really good once I got that focus.

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Hopefully there aren’t too many of you out there suffering from Zach Britton fatigue. Last month, our own Corinne Landrey wrote about his potential for an all-time great season, and then shortly thereafter the baseball-writing community collectively began taking turns crafting the individual arguments for his Cy Young — and even MVP — candidacy, before the pushback began. We had our Zach Britton week, and all was good and fun. In reality, however, the chances of him winning — or even making a serious run at — the Cy Young Award seems highly unlikely.

But the first inaugural Zach Britton Cy Young Discussion Week still provided the framework for a few days of thought-provoking arguments and gave us something interesting to ponder. Now, here’s something else to think about: what if, in Zach Britton’s already potentially all-time great season, he’s actually been unlucky?

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We’ve all seen those swings so terrible that a batter can’t help but smile. Swings like this one from Brandon Phillips last year.

Phillips, of course, isn’t the only victim of this sort of thing. He’s been a league-average major-league hitter for a decade, which is a substantial accomplishment. But even accomplished hitters can look bad, can get it very wrong.

Were Phillips batting not for a last-place club but one contending for the postseason, we might gnash our teeth. Couldn’t he see that was a slider? What was he thinking? What was he looking at?

The answer to that last question, turns out, is way more complicated than it seems. Phillips clearly should have laid off a breaking ball that failed to reach the plate. He clearly has done that — otherwise, he wouldn’t have had a major-league career. So what happened? What did he see? Or not see? Ask hitters and experts that question, and the answers are vague, conflicting, and sometimes just strange.

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The words “Ubaldo Jimenez” and “good start” haven’t appeared together often this year. In fact the word “start” itself hasn’t always applied. But with his team clinging to a Wild Card spot and still within reach of a division title, he picked a great time to throw four good starts in place of an injured Chris Tillman.

Jimenez’s first two years with the Baltimore Orioles are a study in contrasts. In 2014, he walked nearly 14% of his batters en route to a 4.48 xFIP. Although the Orioles won the AL East and took Jimenez to the ALDS, they left him off the ALCS roster. But in 2015, Jimenez harnessed his funky mechanics, got more ground balls, walked fewer batters, and had a much better 3.83 xFIP.

This year has more resembled 2014 than 2015. Although Jimenez is walking fewer batters than in 2014, he’s striking out fewer, too, leading to a lower strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%). After beginning the season in the rotation, here’s what happened:

• June 14 – Demoted to bullpen. At the time, his strikeout rate was just 17.3%, while his walk rate was 11.4%.
• June 17 – Pitched 2.1 innings in emergency relief of Mike Wright. Jimenez struck out four batters but walked two and gave up two long balls.
• June 22 – Returned to rotation.
• August 1 – Demoted to bullpen again. From June 22nd to August 1st, his strikeout rate improved to 22.25%, but his walk rate soared to an unplayable 15.7%.
• August 24 – Returned to the rotation as a result of Chris Tillman going on the DL. At the time the Orioles were 69-56, two games back in the AL East and two games ahead of Seattle for the second AL Wild Card spot.

His four starts in place of Tillman were good. Jimenez struck out only 15.9% of the batters he faced, but he cut his walk rate to a stingy 5.6%. He also threw the team’s first complete game since 2014.

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This week, we’re running a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mookie Betts for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP.

It’s fair to say that, at places like FanGraphs, we spend a lot of time trying to remove teammates from the equation, strip everything down to its basic parts and determine a player’s individual value without context. We ignore things like RBI and runs — metrics that are often based not on a player’s own talent level, but how good a player’s teammates are around him. While there are differing viewpoints on the BBWAA’s suggestion that “actual value” ought to be considered in MVP voting — and how that term should be defined — if we choose to look at the standings, at the playoff races, and the individual teams and players on those teams, Manny Machado has been the most important player in the American League and has provided more actual value to his team this season than any other player. That is his case for Most Valuable Player.

Machado currently has 34 home runs and .306/.358/.565 overall line, good for a 140 wRC+. The 24-year-old has played to his usual incredible standard on defense, and his 28 runs above average on offense — coupled with his 13 runs above average on defense — has led to a WAR above six on the season. While there are other players who provide more offensive or defensive value, literally no one in baseball provides that combination of the two: no single player currently stands within 15 runs on offense of Machado and five runs on defense. There is not a player who has provided double-digit defensive numbers with even half of the offensive runs above average as Machado. There are few concerns that Machado’s defensive numbers are the product of a small-sample mirage, either: he’s averaged about 18 runs above average per 150 games in his career. On offense, Machado is chasing history. The only players to play at least 25% of their games at shortstop and hit more than 40 home runs are Alex Rodriguez and Ernie Banks. Machado has a chance to join them. Read the rest of this entry »

Per at-bat, Manny Machado is better this year than he was last year. That’ll happen with a 24-year-old. Or at least that’s what people tell me, I don’t remember those halcyon days myself. What’s most interesting, of course, is how he’s done it. You can tell that he’s hitting for a bit more power by hitting more fly balls, and that he’s improved against breaking balls. That much is on the player pages. But was it the result of a mechanical adjustment, or an approach adjustment? Ask the player, and the answer is yes. And no!

“I haven’t really changed anything,” the Orioles infielder said recently of his swing. “You get a little smarter with the pitches they’re going to throw to you, what they are trying to do to you. Try to look more for a pitch you can drive.” When pushed on that particular subject, he admitted what most hitters would probably admit if they were being honest. “I’m sitting dead red. Looking for a fastball down the middle, more or less.”

“What’s my power, what’s my cookie?” he added with a smile. As for his answer, it does appear as though the fastball up has rewarded him with the best results. He’s been more aggressive on the fastball out over the plate and that’s resulted in more fly balls and power. Here’s his swing rate on fastballs last year (left) and this year (right).

Sitting on that high fastball has made the low pitches look less attractive — the same thing Adrian Beltre found when he started looking for the high fastball — and that has, in turn, dampened Machado’s ground-ball rate on fastballs.

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Few players can heat up the way Chris Davis can. Baltimore’s left-handed slugger has homered five times in his last six games, and over the last two weeks has ran a .432 ISO and 183 wRC+. It’s a sufficient number of stretches like this one over the course of a season that leave Davis winding up among the league’s best hitters, as he did in 2013 and 2015.

Few players can get lost the way Davis sometimes can too, though, and certainly few are getting paid more. Before Davis’ current two-week hot stretch began, the $161-million man was barely a league-average hitter, posting a 103 wRC+ over his first 451 plate appearances in the first year of the seven-year contract he signed in the offseason. Even when Davis has struggled to make contact, he’s walked enough to maintain a respectable on-base percentage, and he moves well enough for a slugger to accrue base-running value and avoid being a liability in the field. So, the season as a whole hasn’t been a disaster: he’s projected to finish the year with roughly 3.5 WAR. But the bat’s what earns Davis his money, and when Dan Duquette handed out the largest free-agent contract in franchise history this January, he certainly wasn’t hoping to see it look like this so soon.

And just before Duquette handed out that very contract, our own Jeff Sullivan, writing for FOX Sports, pointed out a troubling trend within Davis’ game, regarding that very bat. Sullivan noted that Davis was on a five-year run of increasing his pull rate, pulling air balls more each year, and pulling ground balls more each year. The culmination of that five-year increase was Davis, last year, ranking in the 99th percentile in pull rate. In other words, he’d become the most pull-happy hitter in baseball. The extra pulled grounders resulted in more shifts, and more outs. The extra pulled air balls presented a potentially worrisome indicator, too. To quote directly from that article:

People say that, as hitters age, they try to become more pull-happy, to squeeze out as much power as possible. That’s not the only explanation, but this could be Davis adopting and embracing an old-player skill. Which isn’t what you want to think about a player who’s been offered a seven-year contract.

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“Does Zach Britton have a shot at the Cy Young this year?”

It’s a question I didn’t take seriously at first. It’s only happened once in the last 20 years, and Eric Gagne’s 2003 season is perhaps the greatest season in the history of the modern closer. It comes complete with major league records — 55 consecutive single-season saves and 63 consecutive saves spanning multiple seasons — that helped justify the voter’s decision. There existed both the utter dominance and the storyline. But the Cy Young Award is now almost universally a starter’s award, and it’s been fair to wonder all this time whether Gagne could be the last reliever to win it, but it also might be time to start wondering whether this is the year it should happen again.

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It seems as though every year we ask the question “Is Player X having the greatest season by a relief pitcher in history?” Craig Kimbrel’s 2012 performance raised the question, as did Wade Davis’ performances both in 2014 and 2015. This year, the guy putting up a season which threatens the record books is Orioles closer Zach Britton.

On April 30th against the White Sox, Britton took the mound in the ninth inning of a tie game. He struck out the first two batters he faced and then twisted his ankle trying to field what ended up being a bunt single for Adam Eaton. Britton had to leave the game due to the injury and the Orioles brought in Vance Worley to replace him. Worley promptly walked a batter before giving up a single which scored Eaton and ultimately lost the game for the Orioles. That was the last earned run Zach Britton allowed. Go ahead and read the first three words of this paragraph again… that’s right, the last earned run Zach Britton allowed was on April 30th.

Three days before that outing against Chicago, Britton yielded a two-out run on an RBI single which was only made possible when the runner on first was able to advance to second via defensive indifference — which itself was only made possible by the Orioles’ three-run lead. To find an earned run that’s clearly attributable to Britton and not injury or strategic circumstances beyond his control, you have to go all the way back to April 11th, his fourth game of the season, when he allowed a home run to Mookie Betts to lead off the ninth.

And there, in two paragraphs, we have relived every single earned run Zach Britton has allowed during the 2016 season — all three of them. Last night, he made his 38th appearance since allowing his last earned run, which moved him into a tie with Brett Cecil and Craig Kimbrel for the longest streak in the Baseball-Reference Play Index era (since 1913). One more outing without allowing an earned run and the record will be all Britton’s.

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Imagine being Hyun Soo Kim. You’re signed by the Baltimore Orioles to a deal that’s on the small side by American standards, the kind of deal that comes without fanfare or breathless video crews. You’re optimistic about your chances of succeeding in the majors. You spend your spring training calmly adjusting to a new league and country — and then, suddenly, you’re in the middle of a maelstrom when you opt to refuse a minor-league assignment, a right you negotiated into your contract for a reason.

All that might be firmly in the rear-view mirror by now — “I consider spring training in the past” said the Orioles outfielder before a game against the Athletics — but that sort of backstory would make any of us a little uncomfortable. The good news is that the outfielder finally made all of those adjustments, on his own time, and is now getting comfortable in this new situation.

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