I hope you will, in the service of a brief investigation into human worry, allow me to engage in some baseless speculation.

We tend to think of player decline as a gradual business. Guys get good, peak, turn 30, and then start to be less good. They lose a step on the basepaths, a tick on their fastball. The idea of making new friends wears them out. Their doctors tell them they just have to live with some uncomfortable stuff now. Any given player’s career might buck those trends, of course. Some fail to develop entirely, nary a peak to be found. Pitchers hurt their elbows and retire young; a designated hitter or two keeps trundling along past age-40. But most players have time to get used to the idea of being at home more.

Except, what if they didn’t? What if for a hitter, it weren’t an issue of injury, or being hit by a car, but the gift deciding, quite suddenly, to leave you? Poof! Gone! We know that isn’t how this stuff generally works. Players age or get hurt or someone better comes along; yips are a throwing dysfunction. But I have often wondered how much of a player’s reaction to any given strikeout is a concern that they will never get a hit again. That this is the first in a series of whiffs and groundouts and balls caught at the track that concludes with them no longer being baseball players. They could hit, and now, quite simply, they can’t.

To wit, Sandy Leon hasn’t had a hit since August 23. In 13 games and 30 plate appearances, he has walked just once and been hit by a pitch twice. He has a -73 wRC+ over that stretch. I watched the at-bats. It wasn’t screaming liners and vindictive BABIP. He has just been quite bad at baseball. He looks resigned. And I wonder how worried he is. I mean, of course he is worried, and probably a lot. He hasn’t played since Saturday. The Red Sox are in a great dream and he is trapped in a small nightmare. But I wonder when he has felt the most worried about this, this idea that he can’t hit anymore, this secret concern, and how worried he was.

You might think the low point was this past Saturday, when he struck out looking against the Mets’ Daniel Zamora, and his own broadcast spent much of the at-bat talking about the Cy Young chances of a pitcher who wasn’t pitching that day, or in the American League.

This was his last at-bat before being benched. He is probably 13 percent worried here. It has been a while. He’s in a bad way.

Or perhaps in the moment after he held out his hand so as to assert, yeah, Lucas Giolito had hit him with a pitch, such an obvious plea for and acceptance of charity. Here, 4%. Yes, he’s worried, but also, that hurt. He’s thinking mostly about how much it hurt. And feeling indignant that he was doubted. But also feeling that it hurt. Ouch.

Or perhaps on September 4, when he twice came to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs and twice failed to capitalize. Maybe 10%? That’s a lot of suck in a three hour span, but also, his team won. He was probably high-fived by his teammates at the end of it, though likely in a perfunctory way.

But I think the real answer is September 7, at home against Gerrit Cole. In the bottom of the fifth inning, Sandy struck out swinging, but reached base when the pitch skittered away from Martin Maldonado. This is 18% at least, and probably as high as 25.

He wants to be on first, needs it badly, but not like this. All that erased his failure was someone else’s worse stumble. Maybe there isn’t work as we understand it in a hit-by-pitch, but there is some sacrifice. There’s a dignity in it. Sandy was wounded in a trivial service. But a ball that gets away, a bit of luck that necessitates such a hard run down the line, telegraphing so strongly all his pent-up desperation, his concern he won’t speak of?

After it is clear that Leon is safe, first base coach Tom Goodwin puts out his hand for a fist bump, and there is just the smallest pause from Sandy, a pause in which I assume he looked his worry square on, wondered if he would ever reach base by a hit again, and considered not accepting Goodwin’s gesture. Fist bumps are for ballplayers, and what if suddenly he isn’t one of those anymore, only he doesn’t quite know it yet? Most of him probably moved on to running the bases. But I bet 18-25% didn’t.

…

The other day, my DVD player stopped working in the middle of a movie. I got it a year ago. Sandy Leon will almost certainly hit again. He might tonight! He’s a professional baseball player. He’ll get at least a few more chances. But I bet he is worried, at least 4% of him and maybe as much as 25. Sometimes things just crap out and take your copy of Tombstone with them.

John Gibbons is in his second go-round as the manager of the Toronto Blue Jays. The 56-year-old former catcher skippered the A.L. East team from 2004 to -08, and he’s been back at the helm since the beginning of the 2013 season. There have been a pair of postseason berths along the way — in 2015 and 2016 — and he heads into the waning days of the current campaign with a managerial record, exclusively with Toronto, of 789 wins and 782 losses.

It’s no secret that this will be his last year on the job. While nothing has been made official, the Blue Jays are expected to replace Gibbons once the season concludes. He won’t be fading into the sunset, though — at least not right away. Gibbons hopes to stay in the game, in one capacity or another, for the foreseeable future. As for his pair of tenures in Toronto, and the roads he traveled to get there… it’s safe to say that he’s enjoyed the ride.

———

John Gibbons: “In 1990, I was in Triple-A with the Phillies and kind of at the end of my rope as a player. Being a catcher with a little big-league experience, you can always find a job, but I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted. My original organization, the New York Mets, called. They wanted to know if I was interested in being their roving catching instructor. I debated whether I wanted to keep playing a little longer or get into coaching. I decided to go into coaching.

“After I roved for a couple of years, the Mets gave me a managing opportunity in Kingsport, Tennessee, in the Appalachian League. That was actually the first league I’d played in, back in the day. Things just kind of took off from there.

“I ended up with the Toronto Blue Jays when J.P. Ricciardi was hired as the general manager. I was originally in the bullpen, but then they made a couple of changes and I was the first-base coach. A few years later they made more changes, and I was the manager. So it’s been a long, crazy career. It wasn’t a very good one as a player, and from there it’s been what it’s been.

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This article has been updated since initial publication to reflect developments in the diagnosis of Trevor Story’s right elbow.

Surrendering first place to the Dodgers, as the Rockies did on Monday night in Los Angeles, was bad enough. The departure of Trevor Story in the middle of his fourth-inning plate appearance may prove more damaging to the team’s postseason hopes. Via Twitter, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported on Tuesday afternoon that the All-Star shortstop is “facing potential UCL damage in [his] right elbow,” though the exact diagnosis was unknown at the time. In the wake of an MRI, the Rockies now believe that Story is dealing with inflammation in the elbow but no structural damage to the ligament. Had there been significant UCL damage, the 25-year-old shortstop would likely have been headed for Tommy John surgery, ruling him out of the remainder of the regular season and postseason (if the Rockies make it), and into the first half of next season. The Rockies are optimistic that he will miss “only a few days,” though his absence could potentially be a significant blow to the team’s playoff hopes.

Story reportedly felt a twinge in his elbow after making an outstanding play in the first inning on Monday night. He dove to his left to stop a Justin Turner grounder, then he completed a spin and made a strong throw to first base for the out. His discomfort worsened when he whiffed on a 2-1 Hyun-Jin Ryu changeup in his next plate appearance.

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The Braves have won plenty of games, and Ronald Acuna has hit plenty of homers. A common analytical writer trick is to open with an anecdote, to suck readers in before hitting them with statistics. I am a common analytical writer, but for this intro I want to focus on a Ronald Acuna single, leading off a game the Braves lost. And honestly, I don’t even care so much about the single itself. The Braves lost to the Cardinals on Monday. Acuna led off the bottom of the first with a ground-ball single off Miles Mikolas. The ball was hit well enough, but to understand what Acuna has already become, it’s most important to look at the process.

Acuna took a first-pitch strike. Happens sometimes. Especially leading off games. Mikolas throws an awful lot of strikes. Acuna was behind 0-and-1, but then he took a close fastball for a ball.

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With last night’s win, the Dodgers moved into first place by half a game over the Rockies. The clubs are equal in the loss column, and with just 11 games left in the regular season for Los Angeles, their playoff position appears precarious. A glance at our Playoff Odds page, however, might leave you with a different impression. According to the Playoff Odds, the Dodgers have a four-in-five chance of winning the NL West, with Colorado taking the division one in five times. Even in those cases where the Dodgers aren’t projected to take the division, they’re forecast to take a Wild Card spot in half the time. Despite teetering just on the edge of contention, the team has an 89% shot at making the postseason. Nor is that even the weird part: the Dodgers also feature a 17.8% probability of winning the World Series, the highest marks possessed by any team that’s not the Houston Astros.

We could glance at the Dodgers’ number, dismiss it as unreasonably high, and move on with our lives. Alternatively, as my colleague Alex Chamberlain has suggested, we could dig a bit deeper to see what’s going on. Let’s do the latter.

The logic implicit in the Playoff Odds isn’t all that difficult to figure out. The Dodgers are a very talented team with great players, so they would typically be expected to win more games than they lose — and also to win more games than the Rockies. Factor in a series against the Padres and a series against the Giants — while the Rockies play the Phillies and the Nationals — and the disparity between the clubs grows. The Dodgers are going to win a lot of simulated seasons under those circumstances.

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On July 20th, my colleague Craig Edwards wrote a piece for this site entitled “The Cubs Are on Pace for Their Worst Rotation Ever” in which he argued — in accordance with all observable objective reality at the time — that the Cubs were on pace for their worst rotation ever. It wasn’t an especially difficult case to make. At the time Craig published, the Cubs’ rotation — which still featured rather too much of Tyler Chatwood — had produced just 3.0 WAR as a group, which is the kind of figure that, as a measure of collective performance through nearly three months of a major-league season, is apt to make one physically recoil regardless of how you feel about pitcher WAR’s usefulness as a measure of overall performance. It was bad.

Since then, however, the Cubs’ rotation has been rather good, and that fact is the point of this article. Consider the following table, which presents the Cubs’ rotational performance up to and including the 20th of July, and also after that date (MLB ranks in parentheses):

You will agree, I hope, that the Cubs’ rotation has been better since Craig said they were bad, and will therefore turn your attention with me to why. Here is one reason: it has much less Tyler Chatwood in it. Here is another: it has much more Cole Hamels. These might sound like blithe (and, in Chatwood’s case, rather mean) things to say, and to some extent they are. But they are also true.

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Yasiel Puig can still provide a spark or two of electricity when needed. In fact, the 27-year-old right fielder put forth quite a jolt this past weekend, doing some of the best work of his career in two of the Dodgers’ biggest wins this season. On Friday night in St. Louis, he punctuated a taut pitchers’ duel between Walker Buehler and Jack Flaherty with a pair of solo homers that bookended the scoring in a 3-0 victory. On Saturday afternoon, he hit three more jacks, two of them of the three-run variety, in a 17-4 rout. The wins allowed the Dodgers to catch and overtake both the Cardinals in the NL Wild Card race and the Rockies in the NL West race, and while Sunday’s loss to St. Louis undid both, Puig and company beat the Rockies on Monday night to retake the division lead.

You like dingers? Of course you do. Here’s the supercut of Puig’s five, which came at the expense of Flaherty, Tyler Webb (no, not that guy), John Gant, Mike Mayers and Luke Weaver:

It remains to be seen how the Dodgers’ season ends up, but as Puig goes, the 2018 campaign has been a fairly calm one, largely devoid of the drama of years past. Fewer complaints about his overly aggressive baserunning or lack of interest in the cut-off man. No reports of tardiness. No teammates ripping him anonymously through the media. No benchings or trips to the minors. He did get suspended for two games last month for brawling with the Giants’ Nick Hundley — an episode which brought forth the usual performative pomposity from the pastime’s moral guardians — but that has been the exception this season, not the rule.

He’s still demonstrative, of course, showing off his tongue now and then, licking his bat, admiring his homers when he hits them, and even kissing hitting coach Turner Ward afterwards. The epic bat flips, and the controversies attached to them — to his, specifically, not to the inane culture war that surrounds bat flips in general — appear to be a thing of the past.

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jerry Blevins, Taylor Guerrieri, and Lance McCullers Jr. — on how they learned and/or developed their curveballs.

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Jerry Blevins, Mets

“The story starts as a kid. You start learning about curveballs, and the reason mine is big and slow is because I wanted to visualize it. A lot of those smaller breaking balls you don’t really see from the perspective of a pitcher. I wanted to see the big break. That’s why mine is how it is.

“Did anyone ever try to change that? All the time. Every step of the way, coming through the minor leagues. Even in high school and little league. They were always telling me, ‘Look, you need something tighter.’ I always fought against that, and I think it’s done me well.

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With the Texas Rangers, we get to the first team that’s actually rebuilding rather than Rebuilding™. While the prospect of contending at the same time didn’t exactly come to fruition — Texas is the sixth team in this series, after all — the Rangers are making a legitimate go at threading the needle between competing in the present and preparing for the future.

The Setup

Because they’re both based in Texas, it’s natural to think of the Rangers’ attempts to become relevant again in the context of the Astros’ own efforts. The two cases might not be precisely analogous, however: while Houston absolutely needed to take their own house down to the studs, Texas may be able to escape without going to such extremes. The Rangers had much higher payrolls baked into the cake in 2017 than Houston ever did, with little real hope of shedding most of those high-end costs. Texas has also never let the farm system sink to the levels of voiditude of those late Ed Wade Astros teams or recent rebuilders like the Orioles or Marlins.

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Hi everyone! Welcome to the second live chat of the FanGraphs Book Club! We’ll get started at 9 pm ET, and Jonah will join us at 9:30. That’ll give us all 30 minutes to talk about the book amongst ourselves, and line up some really great questions for him. So, I would say, don’t put questions in for Jonah now, let’s save those until he logs on to the chat.

I hope you all are as excited as I am to talk baseball books! As a reminder, if you want to join our Facebook Group you can do so here.

Chat transcript:

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