The Philadelphia Phillies have given the sabermetric community a lot of ammunition over the last few years. The Ryan Howard contract! $52 million for Jonathan Papelbon! Delmon Young! Even off the field, the Phillies GM gives us comments like “I don’t care about walks, I care about production.” Picking on the Phillies recently has been pretty easy, and writers from this side of the baseball spectrum have been warning of the Phillies coming demise for several years.

Now that it’s here, the Phillies were even more roundly ridiculed for not acknowledging their place on baseball’s win curve, holding on to valuable trade chips at the deadline even as they get passed by the Marlins in run differential. Rather than turn Cliff Lee, Chase Utley, and Michael Young into younger, cheaper talent, the Phillies are soldiering on with an aging, expensive club that is nearly 20 games behind the Braves in the standings. And with last night’s news of an impending Chase Utley contract extension, they seem to be digging in their heels even more.

Chase Utley will be 35 next season. The last three years, he’s played 115, 103, and 83 games, and he’ll probably end up in the low 100s again this year, unless he gets hurt before the season ends and falls short of even that mark. The team with the 29th best run differential in the majors just signed up an injury prone second baseman for his age-35/36 seasons, but unlike most of the Phillies moves over the last few years, I actually like this move for Philadelphia, and commend Ruben Amaro for getting the deal done.

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Ben Revere has never hit a major-league home run, and that much you probably already knew. Or maybe you knew it before, and didn’t know *today*, with Revere at his highest plate-appearance total ever. He’s only 25, and he’s got a long career ahead of him, but he’s coming up on some records and more and more people are aware of that. The ESPN Home Run Tracker has no record of Ben Revere existing. If you were in an ESPN Home Run Tracker fantasy league, and you didn’t know anything else, and someone drafted Ben Revere, you’d think to yourself, “that isn’t a real player.” Revere isn’t the first player of his sort, but he’s of the greatest interest at the present day.

Because of what Revere’s doing, or not doing, I like to make periodic check-ins, the way I do with Joey Votto’s rate of infield flies. I just confirmed to myself that Revere hasn’t gone deep in 2013, over 330 trips to the plate. For his career, he’s six away from 1,400 plate appearances, and he’s got not a single dinger. He’s tried for a few inside-the-park home runs, but not only are those different — thus far they’ve been unsuccessful. So, I knew this morning Revere hadn’t homered in 2013. That made me wonder how close he’s come.

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Peter Gammons, as he so often does, teased an interesting tidbit yesterday morning, this one concerning Philliers closer Jonathan Papelbon. To wit:

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I don’t know if you can really understand until he’s yours. You might’ve forgotten, but Cliff Lee pitched for the Mariners once, and while I knew Lee was an ace starter beforehand, it wasn’t until I watched him every five days that I really “got” it. Lee was perfect. He wasn’t and isn’t the best starting pitcher in the world, but he’s close, and he does everything perfectly, just like you’d want him to. He’s always pitching in the strike zone, so he doesn’t get himself in trouble. He works quickly, which is refreshing, and his command is as good as anyone’s. Because of the zone work, Lee doesn’t issue walks, and because of the command and the quality of the stuff, Lee manages to rack up the strikeouts. Lee’s quick and always ahead in the count, and if you’ve had the chance to watch him and root for him, you know the way that I feel. When Lee isn’t pitching, you wish that he were.

Lee, then, is a superior form, a rare form, and he shouldn’t be the subject of many comparisons. Certainly, you wouldn’t expect to see his name linked to that of a right-handed young starter with basically two pitches. In terms of scouting reports, Cliff Lee and Shelby Miller don’t have a whole lot in common, aside from the fact that they throw baseballs at guys in equipment. But when you look at the processes, when you look at the results, Miller’s following in the right footsteps from a very young age.

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As we sneak up on July, we’re at a point where the buyers are starting to contact the sellers. As White Sox GM Rick Hahn said to MLB.com:

“Given the way we’ve played thus far, it’s not a real surprise we’ve had some phone calls — more of the vulture-type phone calls, the type that traditionally we’re more accustomed to making,” Hahn said. “But that’s part of the hole that we’ve dug for ourselves, that teams are going to look at us as potential sellers when the deadline comes, and they’re starting to lay a little bit of that ground work now.”

While the addition of a second wild card incentivizes bubble teams to hang onto their players a bit longer to see if they can make a second half run, there are eight organizations that shouldn’t have any false aspirations about how the rest of their 2013 season is going to go: The Astros, Marlins, Mets, Cubs, White Sox, Mariners, Twins, and Brewers. Minnesota has the best record of the group at 32-36, but they know they’re in full scale rebuild mode, and they shouldn’t diverge from the path-to-the-future that they began by trading away veterans for prospects over the winter. The other seven teams all have winning percentages below .440, and even if they had some pre-season optimism about their own club, they need to admit that it’s not happening this year.

Our rest of season forecasts have each team finishing with 75 wins or less, and given the 90+ wins it will likely take to secure a wild card spot, it’s time to face the music and start prioritizing 2014 wins. While the other 22 teams retain some chance of playoff glory, these are the eight franchises that should be putting their players on the market as we head into July. However, that list of sellers presents a problem for the teams looking to buy, especially teams who are hunting for a rotation upgrade: these eight clubs don’t really have good pitching to trade.

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Sunday afternoon, Domonic Brown did something he’s been doing a lot of lately. Brown faced Mike Fiers in the bottom of the first, with two on and two out. After a first-pitch curveball found the zone, Fiers missed three straight times, with a heater and a couple changeups. Brown scooted up in the box, and Fiers came inside with a cutter, or a slider, as if that detail’s important. Brown saw it, swung at it, and blasted it, way out to right field for a three-run dinger. It was Brown’s 14th home run in 32 starts. It was his 16th home run of the season. Brown is the National League leader in that category, after a spring in which people were concerned he might not find enough playing time.

Sunday afternoon, Domonic Brown did something he hadn’t done for a while. Brown faced Tom Gorzelanny in the bottom of the seventh, with one on and two out. After a first-pitch slider found the zone, Gorzelanny missed three straight times, with a slider and a couple heaters. The 3-and-1 pitch was a fastball that Brown went after and tipped for a strike. The next and final pitch was a slider that just missed, a little low and a little away. Brown watched it, and Brown walked — unintentionally — for the first time since April 30. Brown had just walked the day before, too, but that one was done on purpose.

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Let me preface all of this by saying that it’s always possible that a quick video replay could be missing necessary context and misrepresenting what actually happened. There is some uncertainty when viewing events from afar, especially in a narrow timespan. It is possible that what you’re about to see isn’t what it looks like.

But, uhh, it sure looks like Alex Sanabia was caught on video spitting all over the baseball after allowing a home run to Domonic Brown tonight. As pointed out by one of our commenters, you can see the video here, and pay attention at around the 13 second mark.

Or, if you’d rather, just watch this helpful GIF, care of Jeff Sullivan.

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In Sports Illustrated’s 2013 baseball preview, Tom Verducci wrote a great profile of the Tampa Bay Rays and their approach to optimizing the performance of their pitching staff.

One topic that was especially interesting to me was the apparent importance the Rays place on the 1-1 count. Verducci recounts how pitching coach Jim Hickey described the organization’s focus on getting opposing batters into 1-2 counts:

The Rays believe no pitch changes the course of that at bat more than the 1-and-1 delivery. “It’s almost a 200-point swing in on-base percentage with one ball and two strikes as opposed to two balls and one strike,” Hickey told the pitchers.

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Some weeks, there are major developments in the business of baseball — like a team signing a new local TV contract. Some weeks, there are little developments on the big developments. My posts tend to focus on the big developments, but that leaves you in the dark on the little developments, unless those little developments become big developments down the road.

Dollars & Sense keeps you up to date on the smaller stories that are important but may not justify a separate post. Today, we have news on attendance through the first quarter of the seasons and expanded in replay in 2014.

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