When Chris Heston threw a no-hitter, it was a good reminder that, on any given day, any given pitcher might shut down any given lineup, that baseball history isn’t limited to being made by those names you find on team shirjeys. When Max Scherzer threw a no-hitter over the weekend, it was a good reminder that, while any given pitcher can throw a no-hitter on any given day, the probability favors the best ones. Few pitchers in the game are better than Max Scherzer; few pitchers carry higher no-hitter odds than Max Scherzer. It’s not that this sort of thing was going to happen, but no one should’ve been surprised that it did.

The enduring conversation is about the elbow that potentially turned a perfect game into something a little less perfect, and that’s understandable, because it’s different. We never really see that happen, so it’s what we want to talk about. But if you take a step back, that one pitch does little to diminish Scherzer’s brilliance, and he still didn’t allow a single hit. And that’s going to be the focus here, as it was after Heston’s game. Many have argued that the no-hitter has lost some of its sheen over the years, with strikeouts up and offense down and with a greater understanding of DIPS theory. Yet a no-hitter is still a special and memorable performance, and we’re able to analyze them differently than ever before. In the course of throwing his no-hitter, Scherzer struck out 10 Pirates. What happened in the 17 other at-bats?

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Everyone makes mistakes. Some marry people they shouldn’t. Some cheat on their taxes. Some refuse to eat their dinner and find out later I won’t give them dessert and then throw a holy fit that prevents me from starting my article on how Francisco Cervelli is the Pittsburgh Pirates MVP until very late. But I will persevere. Welcome to an article about how Francisco Cervelli is the Pittsburgh Pirates MVP!

In fact, this brief reflection on mistakes is relevant, as the Yankees seem to have made one when they dealt Cervelli to Pittsburgh last November for reliever Justin Wilson. It’s not that Wilson is lousy so much as Cervelli has been fantastic. But let’s consider only mistakes for the moment. The Yankees gave Brian McCann $85 million over five seasons to be their starting catcher before the 2014 season because he was (a) available on the free-agent market and (b) one of the few major-league catchers who’s both a good hitter and good defender. McCann’s defensive reputation was as strong as his hitting, and in addition, he consistently scored high in catcher-framing statistics according both to Baseball Prospectus and StatCorner throughout his career. If anyone is worth $17 million for five seasons in his early and mid-30s that sounds like a good candidate.

But then last season happened. McCann had one of the worst offensive seasons of his career, recording a 92 wRC+, although his pitch-framing skills helped keep him a valuable player. In 2014, he stole 68 strikes and added 10.2 runs via his framing alone, according to Baseball Prospectus. StatCorner says the number is 11.4. Either way that’s a win and a bit more. This season he’s back to hitting again (119 wRC+) but his pitch-framing numbers have taken a nosedive. Perhaps it’s not surprising that McCann would step back a bit in pitch-framing skill as he enters his age-31 season.

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It’s possible Andrew McCutchen hasn’t been the hottest hitter in baseball, but at the very least, there haven’t been many much hotter. What makes the year notable, though, is that — as late as early May — McCutchen’s OPS was rattling around in the .500s. McCutchen didn’t go from good to red-hot. He went from bad to red-hot, and it’s worth examining the turnaround. Especially since I went to the trouble of examining his slump several weeks back. There was a time when people were legitimately worried about the Pirates’ best player. Now it’s all peaches.

It was on May 8 that I published an article titled “The Matter With Andrew McCutchen,” for JABO. Part of this article will now have to review that article, but understanding what was happening is critical for understanding what’s changed.

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I don’t believe in soul mates. I don’t think that there is one perfect match out there for everyone or that most of life is just a quest to find them. But just because there isn’t a perfect fit doesn’t mean there isn’t a best fit. You can’t win every hand of blackjack, but you can still play a strategy that’s better than any other strategy. This is a baseball website, so when we put this in the context of baseball players, we find the Pittsburgh Pirates and A.J. Burnett. While the Pirates and Burnett aren’t soul mates, they’re as pretty close to an optimal fit as you’ll find in the game today.

This isn’t a new discovery. There was plenty of attention paid to Burnett’s career rejuvenation in the Steel City as it occurred, and Dave was kind enough to remind us of that fact when he reviewed the Pirates one-year contract with the pitcher this last December. Dave’s thesis, unsurprisingly, was that this reunion made sense because of how well the player matches the team, but also that Burnett was another year older and would probably not be the pitcher they remembered from 2012 and 2013.

Dave was half right, at least so far. Burnett and the Pirates are helping each other in 2015, but instead of easing into retirement, Burnett is having arguably his best season as a professional. Certainly, it’s wise to factor in some regression to his 2014 numbers, but even if you do that, he’s right on track to finish 2015 at a very similar level as his previous two seasons with the Bucs.

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For the better part of the last decade, Gerrit Cole has intrigued with potential. Twice a first round selection — after being drafted out of high school in 2008, he spurned the Yankees and went to UCLA instead — and the first overall selection in the 2011 draft, Cole’s velocity and frame have had scouts dreaming about what he could eventually turn into. But while the stuff has always been top-shelf, the performance haven’t always lined up with expectations.

In his final season at UCLA, in fact, he wasn’t even his own team’s best pitcher, as Trevor Bauer ran circles around him from a performance standpoint. Their lines, side by side:

Cole looked like an ace, but Bauer was the guy who pitched like one, striking everybody out in a way that you’d expect Cole to do, given his velocity and breaking ball. But the Pirates bet on his stuff and their ability to develop him into more than what he had been, choosing Cole with the top pick while Bauer went to the Diamondbacks three selections later.

In the minors, it was a bit more of the same, as he was good-but-not-great, and certainly wasn’t blowing away minor league hitters like you might expect for a top overall selection who throws 100 miles per hour. And when he got to Triple-A, the strikeouts mostly disappeared, as he managed just 63 strikeouts in 90 innings at the highest rung of the minor league level. He was still throwing hard, and still had a good breaking ball, but for whatever reason, batters were still making plenty of contact against him, and he’s never profiled as an elite command guy, so missing bats was always going to be his path to star status.

Things got a bit better after the Pirates promoted him to the big leagues, as his strikeout rate jumped to 21% in 2013 and up to 24% last year, but given that the league average strikeout rate in the majors is now 20%, these are still not dominating performances. And while Cole’s FIP-inputs suggested he was pitching fairly well, he posted an ERA just a bit below league average, as he allowed a .310 BABIP despite pitching for a team that shifted very aggressively and held opponents to a .287 BABIP overall. Heading into 2015, Cole remained more potential than performance, and at some point, he was going to have to do something to justify the belief that he could become an ace.

That point is here, and through the first two months of 2015, Cole has now become what people have been projecting him to be. A comparison of his 2013-2014 and 2015 lines, to highlight the changes:

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With Thursday’s 11-5 drubbing of the Padres, the Pirates have won seven straight games. It’s a well-timed winning streak, on the heels of what were previously mounting concerns. And the Pirates are very much in the thick of it, if you can say there’s even a thick of anything when it still reads “May” on the calendar.

The Pirates are 25-22. Not bad. Also potentially a bit misleading. Based on their runs scored and allowed, their record should be better than that. Based on their expected runs scored and allowed, their record should be better than that. I know that’s a weird thing to think about, since runs are runs and wins are wins, but trust me that wins and losses aren’t the only indicators of team performance and ability. We can also say this: at FanGraphs, the rest of the way, we have the Pirates projected as a top-five team.

Which is all to say, hey! The Pirates are pretty good. Not only have they been pretty good, it looks like they ought to remain pretty good, especially now that Andrew McCutchen has rediscovered his swing. Now, these days, times are different. Suddenly, it’s not strange to think of the Pirates as being a good team. But there was some concern here because between 2014 and 2015, the Pirates lost Russell Martin to free agency. They didn’t want to; he just got too expensive. Martin was one of the team’s best players. To say nothing of other guys they also lost, including Edinson Volquez, Ike Davis and Travis Snider. Martin was certain to be difficult to replace, and the Pirates understood that from the start.

So how did the organization conduct itself over the winter, with a key piece leaving for $82 million in the other league? The Pirates are anything but a big-budget franchise, so they focused, as always, on efficiency. And while it’s been only two months — so no chapters are closed — it looks like the Pirates had themselves an excellent offseason. An offseason that cost them less than what the Blue Jays invested in a catcher.

Let’s run some of this down. I’ll highlight some individual acquisitions.

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Eight Major League Baseball teams won an initial victory on Wednesday in two federal lawsuits contesting MLB’s minor league pay practices under the minimum wage and overtime laws. At the same time, however, the judge denied the league a potentially more sweeping victory in the cases.

The two lawsuits were filed in California last year by former minor league players who allege that they received as little as $3,300 per year, without overtime, despite routinely being required to work 50 or more hours per week during the playing season (in addition to mandatory off-season training). MLB and its thirty teams responded to the suit by challenging the plaintiffs’ claims on a variety of grounds. Wednesday’s decision considered two of these defenses in particular.

First, 11 of the MLB franchises argued that they were not subject to the California court’s jurisdiction and therefore must be dismissed from the lawsuit. Second, all 30 MLB teams argued that the case should be transferred from California to a federal court in Florida, which they argued would be a more convenient location for the trial.  In its decision on Wednesday, the court granted MLB a partial victory, agreeing to dismiss eight of the MLB defendant franchises from the suit due to a lack of personal jurisdiction, but refusing to transfer the case to Florida. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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Andrew McCutchen has been bad. I think I’m allowed to say that. Used to be, it was just a bad start. It’s still a bad start, but we’re a week into May, so that “just” is disappearing by the second. Attention to this thing is warranted.

Now, at any given time, lots of baseball players are in the midst of being bad. What’s weird about McCutchen being bad, in particular, is that he’s usually not. He goes beyond just being an All-Star; he’s one of the five best players in the game today. The spotlight shines a little brighter, and so when things are going awry, people notice.

How much do I need to go over, here? I know McCutchen’s numbers are bad. You know McCutchen’s numbers are bad. I don’t need to review a ton of information proving as much. Here, let’s just look at one graph. As I write this, McCutchen has played 26 games in 2015. Below, his whole career, in rolling 26-game stretches of OPS. Pretty simple measure of hot streaks and cold spells:

Two things to take from that. One, McCutchen has had bad 26-game stretches before. They’ve just been tucked into the middle of seasons, rather than being right at the start, all conspicuous-like. Two, McCutchen has been quite bad this season. As far as the graph above is concerned, McCutchen has achieved a career minimum. It’s not proof that something’s wrong, but it’s enough to make you wonder.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

We have a Madison Bumgarner, right now. He just put a whole team on his shoulders and blew our minds last October, even. And with that Paul Bunyanesque workmanlike yet fiery demeanor, he seems a snowflake. Unique and alone. But maybe we have we seen pitchers like him before?

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