Derek Shelton is a bit of an outlier in this series. Unlike the 11 subjects who preceded him, he isn’t currently a manager. Shelton is the bench coach in Minnesota, and outside of filling in for two games while Paul Molitor was in Cooperstown last month, he’s never been in that role at the highest level. His only full-time managerial experience is in A-ball, from 2000-2002 in the New York Yankees organization.

That may change. Shelton would like to manage in the big leagues some day, and he’s on a path to do. After serving as the hitting coach for the Cleveland Indians from 2005-2009, and the Tampa Bay Rays from 2010-2016, the 49-year-old former catcher spent last season as the quality control coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. A multi-faceted job, it segued well into the bench coach position that he now holds.

What type of manager will Shelton be if he’s able to take that next step? He did his best to answer that question when the Twins visited Fenway Park a few weeks ago.

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Derek Shelton: “First and foremost, the game is about the players. It’s about communication and how you interact with them. With the way the game has changed, particularly in terms of all the information that’s available, you have to make sure you’re communicating what you’re going to do, and how you’re going to do it. You want an open dialogue with not only your staff, but also with the players.

“I would hope that [having a good understanding of analytics] would be a plus. I worked in Cleveland, at the forefront of analytics, with Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti. Then I had the opportunity to work for the Rays, who are obviously not afraid to look outside the box on anything. And one thing the Rays do a very good job of — especially between their major league coaching staff and the front office — is having a very open dialogue. There’s kind of a no-ego relationship where you’re free to ask questions. Read the rest of this entry »

The outcome seems unthinkable, but the trendlines are undeniable and the conclusion unavoidable: Félix Hernández, for so long the ace of the Mariners, is doing more to hinder the team’s bid for a playoff spot — and thus end the longest drought in North American professional sports — than to help it. As the Mariners try to claw their way back into the second AL Wild Card spot, his place in the rotation is in jeopardy. The 32-year-old righty fondly known as “King Félix” may not be dead, but his exile from a job at which he’s excelled for so long may be imminent.

On Tuesday night against the Rangers in Arlington, a hellish place for a hurler even when the first-pitch temperature isn’t 98 degrees, Hernández was torched for a career-high 11 runs. Granted, just seven of those were earned, due to a pair of errors when hot smashes deflected off the normally reliable glove of Kyle Seager, but by the time those happened, the reality was already clear: the Hernández who had breezed through the first two innings on just 23 pitches, retiring all six hitters and making his pal Adrián Beltré look silly on an 0-2 curve, had left the building:

Alas, there was little joy in what transpired after that. After getting ahead of Robinson Chirinos 1-2 to start the third, Hernández’s command deserted him. He threw three straight balls for a leadoff walk, then surrendered hits to four of the next five batters, plating four runs (two on Rougned Odor’s double) before Beltré grounded into a double play. A one-out walk to Joey Gallo in the fourth, followed by Seager’s first error, set up the Rangers’ fifth run, via a Willie Calhoun sacrifice fly. A two-out, one-on error by Seager in the fifth was soon followed by a three-run homer off the bat of Jurickson Profar to run the score to 8-4.

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Without a doubt — and this is an objective fact — the best thing about baseball in 2018 has been Juan Soto. I mean, you could say it’s Mike Trout, because the answer to almost every baseball question is Mike Trout. But Juan Soto is probably the best teenager baseball has ever seen, and baseball’s been around a while. Juan Soto has posted a .415 wOBA and 161 wRC+, both marks fifth in baseball among players with 200 or more plate appearances. He’s outhit Aaron Judge (157 wRC+) and Freddie Freeman (143) and Paul Goldschmidt (141) and a whole bunch of other people he has no business outhitting. Juan Soto is third on the Nationals in WAR (2.7) and has played in 68 games. Trea Turner, who leads the team with 3.5 WAR, has played in 113 games. Juan Soto is so good. And he’s doing this, again, at 19 years old.

For no other reason than because Juan Soto is my favorite thing about 2018 Major League Baseball, here is Juan Soto hitting a ball to somewhere past Saturn — off fellow southpaw Chasen Shreve:

And an even more impressive dinger on a pitch that was probably off the plate inside:

Juan Soto doing Juan Soto things has brought him some degree of attention around the league, and Soto might be, at just 19, the best position player on a Nationals team that also employs Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon. And it’s likely because of his surprising ascent that, when he came up to bat against Atlanta earlier this week, Braves announcer Joe Simpson made a comment that raised a few eyebrows. You can hear the audio here, but here’s what he said as relayed by the New York Post:

“If he’s 19, he certainly has his man-growth,” Simpson said. “He is big and strong.”

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By just about any measure that counts, Alex Bregman has been one of the best players in baseball. In fairness, Alex Bregman was expected to be one of the best players in baseball, but not quite to this degree. I can explain, using our old standards — projections and WAR! Coming into the year, among both hitters and pitchers, Bregman was tied for the 45th-highest projected WAR. He was sixth in projected WAR among Astros, behind Carlos Correa, Jose Altuve, Justin Verlander, Dallas Keuchel, and George Springer.

Right now, Bregman and Verlander are tied atop the Astros’ WAR leaderboard. And Bregman is tied for 10th in all of baseball, around names like Matt Carpenter and Nolan Arenado. It’s not that no one ever saw Bregman coming — he was already a good everyday player, and the Astros did, after all, select him second overall in the 2015 draft. But Bregman has steadily continued to improve, to the point where he’s nearly maxing out his skills. Because of how loaded the Astros’ roster has been, it’s been more difficult for Bregman to stand out. It’s funny to refer to someone as having played in Altuve’s shadow, but Bregman’s completing his star turn, and he should be recognized as such.

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With the non-waiver trade deadline having passed — and, with it, all the sorts of analysis produced by sites like this one — it seems like a good moment to recognize what is sometimes missed in the rush to judge the merits of each trade for the two (or three or more) teams involved. Because, while it’s certainly logical to evaluate a trade based on the talents of the players changing hands, what’s sometimes overlooked is that “talent” isn’t static. Indeed, sometimes a club acquires a player not merely for what he has done but also for what, with some minor alterations, he could do.

For instance, after last summer’s trade deadline, the Dodgers got more out of Yu Darvish after pointing out to the pitcher some better ways in which to employ his arsenal. Gerrit Cole has made dramatic improvements with the Astros this season (as did Justin Verlander following his move to Houston). Corey Dickerson, meanwhile, has become a much more effective hitter in Pittsburgh.

From an L.A. Times story about what the Dodgers asked Darvish to do last August:

At the team hotel in Manhattan, Darvish met with general manager Farhan Zaidi, who advised him on how to attack that night’s hitters. Zaidi opened a laptop and revealed how Darvish could optimize his arsenal, altering the locations and pitch sequences he utilized during five seasons with Texas.

With major league players, teams aren’t just trading for recent history of performance and present skills of a player, they are digging in and seeing where they might be able to help a player improve. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Glasnow allowed a solo home run on Tuesday, but outside of that, he was nearly untouchable. Over four innings, he allowed two hits, with, importantly, zero walks, and, importantly, nine strikeouts. Now, I know what some of you will say, because I’ve already seen it on Twitter. “Who cares? It was the Orioles.” And indeed, the Orioles suck. But when Glasnow made his Rays debut against the Angels the week before, he was similarly effective. There was a solo homer, but also a bunch of strikes and whiffs over three solid innings. Glasnow is two (semi-)starts into his Rays career, and he’s made an outstanding first impression.

It should go without saying that we’ll need a lot more data. With Tampa Bay, Glasnow has taken the mound all of two times, and that’s only two times more than zero. The Rays need to see Glasnow pitch a lot more often, and that’s what’s going to happen from here on out. We can’t say whether Glasnow already is better. But he *looks* better, and this kind of topic is right in my wheelhouse, since Glasnow is a pitcher whose results haven’t yet matched up with his stuff. Let me quickly walk you through what I find encouraging.

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While the AL East race appears to have tilted decisively towards the Red Sox over the past five weeks, an even more dramatic turnaround has taken place in the AL wild card race over an even longer timeline, one involving the Mariners and A’s. This one has yet to be decided, which is good news, because it’s practically the last race standing in the Junior Circuit.

Through June 15, the Mariners were running neck-and-neck with the Astros despite a massive disparity in the two teams’ run differentials, a situation that — as I had illustrated a few days earlier — owed a whole lot to their records in one-run games (22-10 for Seattle, 6-12 for Houston). The A’s, though solidly competitive to that point, were something of an afterthought, far overshadowed by the Mike Trout/Shohei Ohtani show in Anaheim:

On June 16, despite placing Matt Chapman on the disabled list with a contusion on his right thumb, the A’s, who had lost to the Angels 8-4 the night before, kicked off a five-game winning streak, taking the two remaining games of the series that weekend, then two from the Padres at Petco Park and the first game of a four-game set against the White Sox in Chicago. Though they merely split a four-gamer on the South Side, they swept four from the Tigers in Detroit, sparking a six-game winning streak that also included two victories at home against the Indians. Remarkably, they’ve strung together two separate six-game winning streaks since then, as well, one against the Giants (a pair of walk-of wins) at home and the Rangers in Arlington from July 21 to 26 and then another from July 30 through August 5 at home against the Blue Jays and Tigers. Alas, that one ended on Tuesday night against the Dodgers.

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The A’s occupy one of the AL’s two wild-card slots, and the other day they picked up Mike Fiers. They’re about to use him out of the rotation. I tried — I promise — to come up with some kind of Mike Fiers article, but I couldn’t do it. I didn’t think it would be interesting. The A’s added a below-average starter, but, into the rotation he goes. That might be the real story here, how the A’s have gotten where they are despite a patchwork rotation that no one expected. The A’s have given Brett Anderson nine turns. They’ve given Edwin Jackson — literally Edwin Jackson — eight turns. Fiers probably will help, if only for the fact that he can reliably pitch. The group he’s joining appears paper-thin.

Which isn’t to suggest that I don’t think much of Sean Manaea. Manaea, at least, has been a familiar constant. But there’s a surprise in here, too, a guy without whom the A’s would be struggling. Contact rate measures bat-to-ball contact per swing attempt. The lower the contact rate, the better a pitcher is at generating whiffs. I looked at every starter this year with at least 50 innings. The guy with the lowest contact rate allowed is Chris Sale. In second is Patrick Corbin. In third is Max Scherzer. In fourth is Trevor Cahill. The A’s signed Cahill for $1.5 million in the middle of March, seemingly as a response to losing Jharel Cotton. Cahill’s started 13 times, and he’s ended up an absolute bargain.

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This contributor is not a supporter of baseball’s Wild Card game format.

While efforts to make a division title more meaningful are sensible and logical and while the addition of another team to the playoff field keeps more teams involved and fan bases invested during the regular season, the issue for me and many others is its one-game format. While a single play-in contest artificially creates drama and is a fun made-for-TV, web-streaming event, the notion that a team can compile a 100 wins over a season-long marathon only to fall in a single game borders on the absurd.

While the postseason is in many ways a different game from the regular season, one defined by small samples, the Wild Card raises legitimate questions about fairness (a point recently addressed by Craig Edwards) and the purpose of October baseball.

Had the Yankees lost in the AL Wild Card game last year, I suspect we would have heard much more said about revamping the system. Well, we might hear about it this next offseason. After being swept by the Red Sox over the weekend, the Yankees are almost assuredly headed to the Wild Card game again despite being projected to win 100 games. The Red Sox are on pace to win 108.

The Red Sox opened play Monday with a 91.4% chance of winning the divisions, with the Yankees at 8.6%. Entering the weekend? Those figures were at 76.6% and 23.4%, respectively. It was a devastating weekend for New York. While the Yankees could still conceivably win the division, it’s unlikely. The Yankees, the No. 3 team in baseball and the American League in run differential and 19 runs better than the No. 4 team (the Indians), are likely destined for a play-in game.

While not all fans of the sport will feel much sympathy for a club situated in baseball’s largest market, with the most flags currently flying forever, winning 100 games only to end up in a winner-take-all game doesn’t exactly seem to be in line with the most meritocratic of practices.

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The 2018 season is looking like another one in which the Giants’ even-year magic has deserted them. Amid a barrage of bad news about Brandon Belt, Johnny Cueto, and Pablo Sandoval — not to mention unsettling signs regarding Madison Bumgarner and Buster Posey — they were inactive at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline and now look ill-suited to leapfrog nearly half the league in order to get to October. After a crushing 3-1 loss to the Astros on Monday night via Marwin Gonzalez’s three-run homer off Will Smith with two out in the ninth inning, they’re 57-57, six games out of first place in the NL West and six back in the Wild Card hunt. Their playoff odds (2.8%) suggest they’re fated to play out the string.

Mind you, coming off a 64-98 season, the Giants never appeared to be a juggernaut. Offseason trades for Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen did fill a couple of obvious holes, albeit with players whose best years are probably behind them, but the team’s preseason odds (23.9%) still suggested more than a puncher’s chance at relevance. Yet the Giants haven’t been in first place in the NL West since March 31, and have spent just five days in second since I last checked in on them on June 7, two days after Bumgarner made his belated season debut. Then as now, they were a .500-ish team — 30-30 before Bum’s return, and 27-27 since — but as time has run off the clock, the hits have kept coming. Not the good kind, either.

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