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It’s been a good stretch for Nolan Arenado. In the past seven games, he’s hit eight home runs. Going back seven games is an arbitrary endpoint, so, in the five games preceding, Arenado hit either a double or a triple. After a May 23 doubleheader, Arenado was batting .257; since then, he’s batted .333, and far more importantly, he’s slugged .811. Now, the Rockies themselves haven’t necessarily felt it. They’ve played .500 baseball over the course of Arenado’s hot stretch, and it’s not a team that’s about to compete. But the Rockies are no strangers to playing ordinary baseball while getting extraordinary performances. This time we just get to look beyond Troy Tulowitzki.

I’m not all that interested in trying to analyze Arenado while he’s on fire. There’s only so much to be said about a short-term awesome performance, and in a case like this, I think it’s best to just take a step back and try to consider the bigger picture. Arenado is starting to get a little more attention. God knows he deserves it. He’s not a mediocre player in the middle of doing well; he’s a good player in the middle of being amazing. Have we seen a player like Nolan Arenado before? What kind of asset is he, to the Rockies? In the interest of honesty, I went into this with an idea already in mind. It was just a matter of collecting evidence. I don’t think the initial bias invalidates the conclusion.

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Alex Rodriguez has had an interesting few years. Ok, so that’s a big understatement. Besides the controversies, the 3,000 hits, and the various arguments with management and professional baseball catchers, we’re now witnessing something most people didn’t expect: a 39-year-old A-Rod putting together an incredible offensive year. As he heads toward the final two years of his contract in New York, two questions arise: has Rodriguez been worth the incredible amount of money he’s received over the span of his current contract? And has he been worth the money he’s getting this year?

First, it’s important to establish just how great and anomalous Rodriguez has been this season for, well, how old he is. It is pretty well known that most offensive categories should have taken a serious hit by the time a slugger approaches 40, but A-Rod has bucked that trend — in fact, he’s been close to his former greatness, at least offensively.

We can measure his success this year in a number of ways: by simple numbers (his current 152 wRC+ is in line with some of his better previous seasons — he posted the same wRC+ in his stellar 2008 campaign), average batted-ball velocity (he’s top five in the league), and fly ball/home run distance. The short story: A-Rod is hitting the ball really hard, really far, and he’s even being pitched to like he’s a slugger in his prime.

Now that we’ve established how great he’s been this season, let’s talk about the contract, and free agent deals. We often hear about teams backending contracts. They do so because inflation will devalue the later years of a deal, and they might be able to deal the player to a team who will eat some of the contract later on. It’s the free agent version of kicking the can down the road: sign the player now, get the production, and deal with the hard decisions later.

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Heading into this season, not unlike most seasons over the past few years, not much was expected out of the Baltimore Orioles from the statistics-based community at FanGraphs. Despite winning at least 85 games in each of the past three seasons with two playoff berths and the division title in 2014, just seven of the 38 FanGraphs writers surveyed before the season expected the Orioles to make the playoffs. The projections pegged the Orioles for 79 wins and gave them just a 16% chance of making the playoffs. The offense figured to be led by Adam Jones, Chris Davis, and emerging star Manny Machado providing great production at the plate and in the field, but the pitching had some question marks with no starter projected to record an ERA or FIP below four. While Jones, Davis, and Machado pacing the offense, there are still questions about the pitching staff, but Ubaldo Jimenez has returned from a terrible 2014 to provide stability for an Orioles team once again in first place in the American League East.

Jimenez was once one of the best pitchers in major-league baseball. From 2008 to 2010 with the Colorado Rockies, Jimenez accumulated 15.3 WAR, ninth in MLB just behind Felix Hernandez and right ahead of Jon Lester, Adam Wainwright, and Jered Weaver. Inconsistency plagued Jimenez over the next three seasons with the Cleveland Indians, but a great second half in 2013 — when he posted a 1.82 ERA, 2.17 FIP and 3.0 WAR — earned him a four-year deal with the Orioles worth $50 million.

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Phillies 6-foot-6 righty Franklyn Kilome works from a high 3/4 slot and has the size, arm speed, pitches, and mentality that you want in a starting pitcher. He has shown a huge jump not only in velocity, but also with the consistency of his secondary pitches. His long, lanky frame still oozes projection and the growth he’s shown with his stuff in less than a year has been exciting to watch.

Fastball 60/70

Last summer I had Kilome sitting mostly 89-92 while touching 93 mph on occasion, so seeing him routinely in the 93-95 range and touching 96-97 at times during extended spring training shows how quickly he is developing. The command is still not where it needs to be, but the growth he’s shown in one year is very positive. The fastball is heavy and has excellent sinking action, which is amplified with the good amount of downhill plane he gets by creating angles and letting his tall frame work for him.

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The Mariners have not gotten the production they were expecting from Robinson Cano so far. I know, bold statement. Surely the Mariners prepared themselves for paying Cano handsomely well into his decline years, giving him $240 million over ten years starting with his age-31 season. Still, nobody could have anticipated the steep drop in total offensive production he has endured the first year and a half of the deal. It would not be the first time an elite hitter fell off quickly on the elder side of 30, but is his decline simply due to mean, old Father Time? The overall numbers, as well as some of his results on a more granular level, certainly support that narrative.

If you have read this far, you know enough about Cano’s difficulties not to need his basic stat line spelled out for the hundredth time. Obviously he hasn’t hit as well, especially for power, as he did in New York. As you would expect, his ability to hit long fly balls has dwindled in the same manner:

This data comes courtesy of Baseball Heat Maps, and though it only covers the 2007 season onward, the change is obvious enough. His average distance on fly balls is noticeably shorter than both his career and his last few years in New York, which would make sense for a hitter losing the strength and athleticism of his younger self.

If he’s not hitting the ball as far because of age, you would expect his batted-ball rates to be suffering as well. Much ink has been written on how many more ground balls he has hit in the last year and a half; we’ll get to that. Here are his hard, medium and soft contact rates, found on FanGraphs’ player page for Cano:

His Mariners years fall below the most recent peak years he had in New York, but this year his hard-hit rate is back above his career average, as well as his 2011 season rate in which he put up tremendous numbers.

So we have a declining hitter who is hitting fly balls for a shorter distance, but is still hitting the ball hard enough on average to approximate his former performance levels. He’s also putting more balls in play on the ground, though nothing I have learned about aging leads to hitting the top of a baseball more often than the bottom of it. Christopher Rinaldi pointed out in the Community Blog a few weeks ago that Cano hasn’t gone to the opposite field as much this season, but if you include last season as well, there’s not as appreciable a change in pull versus opposite field rates from his Yankee career. Here is a look at the types of batted balls he’s hit to each for more clarity.

Remember that the hard/medium/soft delineations come from a BIS algorithm that does not include exit speed. I suspect that the decline in hard-hit rate may be due in part to the decreased number of fly balls and line drives, rather than simply a decreased ability to create force. Also, since his overall hard-hit rate isn’t that far off from his career numbers, this has the signs of a case of altered swing mechanics creating more ground balls, especially to the pull side. Canvassing video over the past few years for clues in his swing, this starts to make even more sense as the true culprit.The Yankees timeframe covers Cano’s last three seasons in the Big Apple for comparison. Everything you would associate with a negative change shows up here: fewer line drives and fly balls everywhere except for more liners to the opposite field, and despite an unchanged hard-hit rate to center, a lower figure to left and right fields. His batted balls are coming out on a lower trajectory, and to the sides of the field without as much force behind them.

Here is a swing from Cano’s 2012 season:

And here is one from June of last year:

Both of these swings are on similarly placed pitches, both fastballs up in the zone. The 2014 pitch is a few inches higher, but they are close enough to show some important differences.

The first is the way the hands take the bat to the ball. Notice how in the 2013 version, there is more of a loop to his hand path; the first move is down before they start moving forward. In the 2014 look, Cano’s hands start pushing directly toward contact. This makes his swing much more level, which is not as conducive to hitting high line drives and deep fly balls. You can really see how this works over three frames in the swings:

The other noticeable inconsistency is where the barrel travels in relation to the hands. It’s a little subtler, but in the 2013 swing you can see how the barrel drops slightly more under the hands as it comes into contact. In the second look, the barrel stays closer to the same level as the hands, coming around them more so than underneath them. When the barrel works around the ball on a flatter plane, you have a sure-fire recipe for more pull-side ground balls.

These aren’t just two cherry-picked swings either. Here’s another swing from this year on a low and outside pitch, followed by a low pitch in the Yankee era.

Former Cano digs the ball out and lifts it into the outfield, whereas latter Cano looks like he’s forcing his hands down all the way through the swing. Both balls end up in the air, but the Yankee swing obviously looks much more beneficial for a guy who should be looking to drive the ball out of the park on occasion.

From the pitcher’s view, this difference is still apparent. This time we will see a 2013 swing and a 2015 swing, cut off one frame after the left arm gets fully extended.

The finish of the swing is easier to compare from this angle, which is pretty clearly different despite similar pitch locations. Yankee Cano again shows more lift in his swing, resulting in a higher finish. Mariner Cano’s hands do come up through contact a bit more than the previous swings we looked at, but not nearly to the same degree as the Yankee version. The flatter finish in the 2015 swing is the product of the barrel coming around the hands, as well as the more downward plane his hands take toward the ball. Again, all signs point toward lower-trajectory hits, with the flatter barrel making an early swing more likely to yank the ball to the pull side. The bat staying more vertical used to allow Cano to lift the ball, as well as giving him a better chance of driving it toward the middle of the field.

What we cannot know is why this change has happened. I don’t know if this has been a conscious change or just falling into bad habits. The fact that this struggle has gone on for a year and a half with a fairly big change occurring simultaneously certainly raises a lot of questions. One interesting side note makes me even more intrigued to follow Cano’s season is Edgar Martinez’s recent hiring as hitting coach. I know absolutely nothing about Howard Johnson as a hitting coach, so this is not to say that he didn’t do a good job. But it’s hard not to be excited about a guy I have heard has an excellent perception of the swing, particularly regarding hand path, get a crack at helping Cano get back on track. He definitely has proof of concept:

Of course, it remains to be seen how well he can work with players as a coach. Doing a thing and understanding a thing do not automatically qualify you to teach a thing. Color me intrigued though. Maybe it’s just noise or coincidence, or maybe he’s already made an impression. The hiring was announced on June 20, and here are swings from each of June 21 and June 22:

There’s a little more of that old lift to his swing, and the barrel is a little more vertical. The second is a bit flatter with the bat, but it’s a product of the pitch location more than a swing issue; he doesn’t look like he hooks the ball nearly as much. To be clear, Cano has still shown a number of swings in the past week that look like everything he’s done in the past year and a half. On top of that, it’s extremely hard for even the best hitters to make mechanical changes in the middle of a season. For Cano’s sake, and for the Mariners offense’s sake, hopefully he (and Martinez?) can figure out a way to set himself back up for some better production at the plate.

To the main point of this piece, yes, Cano is getting to an age where a down month raises concerns and a down season sounds the panic alarm. Based on what I see, there’s still enough of a reason to believe he has the ability to be the mythical power and contact guy the Mariners need in their lineup. A mechanical issue can be fixed, and it’s just too hard to believe Cano’s strength and ability could have eroded so quickly. The problem is that fixing it is not always as easy as it sounds.

It was almost cute when it started — there were the Astros, playing really competitive baseball, a year or two ahead of schedule. They stormed out of the gate and people everywhere wrote about the possibility of the Astros making the playoffs without really believing it would happen. And to this point the Astros still haven’t clinched a berth in the playoffs, but with every passing day, they’ve been taken a little more seriously. They’ll be in first place at the halfway mark, leaving only another half left to go, and the prospect promotion is well underway. It’s not so cute these days. It’s like the Astros have skipped a step.

Look over what they’ve accomplished and you can understand why the Astros are a legitimate threat to make a playoff run. Hitting-wise, they’ve collectively been above-average. The rotation might not have a classic ace, but it’s been above-average as a group. The bullpen, too, has been above-average, and the team’s been good about running the bases, and on top of all that, the Astros have avoided ugly black holes. You’d be hard-pressed to find a problem spot, which is a feature of a winning club. But what might you call the Astros’ strength? Some might suggest hitting for power, which, yeah, they’re good at that. But they’re even better at dealing with groundballs.

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The Toronto Blue Jays are contenders. They are currently four games above .500, two games out of first place, and their positive run differential of 81 is first in the American League by nearly 30 runs. The FanGraphs playoff odds give the Jays a roughly one-in-two chance to qualify for the playoffs. The Jays offense has been the key, scoring close to five-and-a-half runs per game. The Blue Jays are 60 runs above average on offense, first in major-league baseball, and their 115 wRC+ for non-pitchers is second to only the Dodgers — and those two teams have a 25-run gap on the bases. Their Base Runs record is four games better than their actual record, indicating the team easily could have better results than their current record indicates. The problem for the Blue Jays has been the pitching staff, both in the rotation and in the bullpen. The easy answer is to trade for outside help, but deploying internal solutions in different roles could prove helpful as well.

Before moving to the pitching, a final note on the offense. The offense has carried the team thus far, but it is unlikely to continue to be as great over the course of the rest of the season. The graph below shows every team’s actual runs per game so far this season compared with their Base Runs, which should be a better representation of how a team’s offense has performed.

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Joey Votto is a passive hitter. Over the last five seasons, he’s swung at around 40% of the pitches that have been thrown in his general direction. During that same span, the average hitter swung at 45-46% of pitches he faced. Over 2,500 pitches, that’s a difference of about 125 swings, or something like 0.77 swings per game. Despite the fact that Votto is one of the most conservative swingers in the league, one fewer swing than an average hitter per game makes the difference appear small.

Commentators and fans have frequently criticized Votto’s approach. He’s paid more than $22 million per year and many people equate that kind of money with power hitters who collect RBI. The criticism of Votto is that if he were less concerned about his own statistics (read: walks) and was more willing to put the ball in play, his team would score more runs. Votto’s an on-base machine because he has an excellent eye and derives a good portion of his value from reaching via the walk. This isn’t new information and the criticism has been ongoing for at least a few seasons.

The advanced stat community has defended Votto because he’s an excellent offensive player and there isn’t a lot of evidence that his club would be better off if he were more aggressive — and Votto himself has voiced similar opinions. Votto argues that if he was more aggressive, his overall value to the team would decline even if his home run or RBI totals went up. Based on the evidence we’ve compiled over the last couple of decades, it seems like he’s right. The funny thing is, in 2015, Votto is actually walking less and his results have been terrific. Did Votto listen to the critics?

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At a time not very long ago — actually, just a single month and a few days ago — viscount of the internet Rob Neyer wrote at Just A Bit Outside about how the Houston Astros, then as now a first-place team, had been winning games with negligible contribution from any players drafted by General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Quoth Neyer:

The 2012 draft has, so far, produced two major leaguers: pitcher Lance McCullers and hitter Preston Tucker. McCullers and Tucker have combined for zero wins and one home run (granted, the homer was a big one Thursday). The 2013 and 2014 drafts haven’t produced any major leaguers.

The final sentence of Neyer’s paragraph remains, as of this writing, true. But, in a testament to how rapidly things are changing down in Houston, the first two sentences of Neyer’s paragraph have already become dramatically obsolete. Please recall that Neyer’s post is barely one month old.

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The Mets have an embarrassment of riches in their starting rotation. Jacob deGrom has seemingly become one of the best pitchers in baseball, and Matt Harvey has pitched very well in his first half-season since returning from injury. Behind them, Noah Syndergaard has shown flashes of dominance over his first eight starts in the majors, while Bartolo Colon and Jon Niese have pitched admirably at the back of the rotation. To accommodate all of these arms, the Mets outrighted Dillon Gee — a pitcher who appears to be a serviceable starting pitcher — to the minors last week.

Yet, despite of all of the talent in their rotation, the Mets are adding yet another intriguing arm to the mix. Word broke yesterday that New York is summoning lefty Steven Matz to the majors. He will make his big-league debut on Sunday against the Cincinnati Reds. The Mets will presumably employ a six-man rotation for the time being. Kiley McDaniel ranked Matz 65th on his preseason top-200 list.

Matz certainly did enough in the minors this year to warrant a call-up. In fact, if it weren’t for the current log jam at the big-league level, he likely would have gotten the nod a bit sooner. Matz pitched to a 2.19 ERA and 3.43 FIP in his 90 innings in Triple-A Las Vegas. He struck out an impressive 26% of opponent batters faced, while walking a reasonable 9%.

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