People customarily like to think of the All-Star break as separating the first half from the second half. The season right now is well past halfway over, with the Red Sox having played 97 games, and the Mets having played 91. Last year’s Reds finished 97-65, and no one would say they finished .500. But the terminology isn’t really important, and what the All-Star break really provides is an opportunity to look back on everything that’s happened, without much new stuff simultaneously happening. One of the things that’s happened is the season’s most clutch hit, objectively determined by Win Probability Added. Below, said hit is explored.

We know there exists a hit of maximum clutchness. It’s a home run, a grand slam, with the bases loaded and two outs while trailing by three in the bottom of the ninth, or beyond. If you want to get really detailed, it would be hit in an 0-and-2 count, and the best hit ever would be this hit in Game 7 of the World Series. We haven’t seen such a grand slam yet in 2013 — they’re rare! — but we have seen one somewhat comparable hit, one hit that has a good lead in the WPA leaderboards. It took place all the way back on May 11.

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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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Well friends, we are now approaching that time of year where a significant drop in a pitcher’s velocity passes the 50% threshold in terms of signaling that they will finish the year down at least one full mph.

The table above breaks out the percent of pitchers who experience at least a 1 mph drop in their four-seam fastball velocity in a month relative to that same month a year ago and who also went on to finish the season down a full 1 mph. It also shows the relative risk — meaning, the increased likelihood that a pitcher will experience a true velocity loss at season’s end when compared to those pitchers that didn’t lose 1 mph in that month.

For example, pitchers that lost velocity in May finished the season down a full 1 mph 47% of the time, compared to just 6% that didn’t lose 1 mph in May — an increased likelihood of 7.8.

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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With two outs in the top of the sixth inning in a tied game and runner on second, a manager elects to intentionally walk a right-handed batter with his right-handed starter in order to have that same starter face another right-handed batter. Two singles follow, putting the manager’s team down by two, leading the team to defeat. An intentional walk leading to bad things for the pitching team is hardly a novelty or surprise, but the characters involved make it a bit more interesting.

This happened yesterday. The manager was the Rays’ Joe Maddon, and the batter was the Royals’ Jeff Francoeur. Jeff Francoeur’s game (and lack thereof) has been dissected and discussed to the point of pointlessness. I have made plenty of contributions to the field, so there is no need to belabor that point. Joe Maddon has a pretty good reputation as a manager, but analyzing any manager’s abilities as a whole is difficult for a variety of reasons. This particular sequence struck me as odd, particularly given the Rays’ reputation for trying to gain every little advantage they can.

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Last year I reintroduced VOL, a custom metric that attempts to measure the relative volatility of a hitter’s day to day performance. It is far from a perfect metric, but at the moment it’s what we have.

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We are a little more than two months into the season, and that means it’s time to check on early season velocity trends. As I’ve mentioned before, declines in velocity are a less reliable signal in April and May than in June and July, but nevertheless large declines can still be a solid predictor that a pitcher’s velocity has in fact truly declined and will remain lower at season’s end. Almost 40% of pitchers that experience a decline in April — and almost 50% in May — will finish the season down at least 1 mph. And while the signal gets much stronger in July, 40% is still a pretty sizable number.

So let’s take a quick look at the major decliners from April and May.

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Despite being in fourth place at the moment, the Rays are obviously in the playoff mix, only four games back of the AL East leading Red Sox. Indeed, Tampa Bay has been in the mix pretty much every season since 2008. Their ability to prevent runs has been what has received the most attention the last few seasons, as they seemingly add an above-average starter from the minors every year, but their hitting has not been as bad as the perception. True, the only recognizable offensive star since the departure of Carl Crawford has been Evan Longoria, but the Rays have still managed to be in the top half of the American League in wRC+ since then.

This season, the Rays have a collective 107 wRC+, their best since 2009. Having Longoria healthy and hitting has been a big plus, of course, but as in past seasons, it is surprising performances from apparent stopgaps such as the previously-discussed James Loney — who currently leads the team with a 151 wRC+ — which have provided the needed boosts. Loney’s contribution thus far has been probably the most surprising, but almost equally as significant for the 2013 Rays has been the hitting of second-baseman-turned-left-fielder Kelly Johnson, who seems to be regaining the form he displayed in a previous out-of-nowhere career year for Arizona in 2010.

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You know all about xFIP, because you read FanGraphs, and it’s a distinctly FanGraphs-y statistic. You don’t quite know how you feel about it. Some pitchers demonstrate an ability to suppress runs more than one would expect. Some pitchers appear to be unusually homer-prone. Lots has been written about the handful of apparent exceptions, but xFIP isn’t trash, as some might suggest. Most generally, it does a good job of separating the good pitchers from the bad ones. Good pitchers get strikeouts, limit walks, and don’t allow homers. Most pitchers with weird-looking home-run rates will regress. One wants to argue with xFIP, but it isn’t easy, except on the margins. It contains a lot of truth.

This year, 56 American League starters have thrown at least 50 innings. Felix Hernandez leads with 90.2; we find Felix Doubront at 50, exactly. Here are the top four, by xFIP:

1. Anibal Sanchez
2. Felix Hernandez
3. Yu Darvish
4. Max Scherzer

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Matt Moore was a tippy-top pitching prospect, and like all tippy-top pitching prospects, he was supposed to become an ace. Based on his current sub-3 ERA and number of strikeouts, he’s arrived at a young age. Based on the rest of the picture, Moore remains at least partially unfinished, as he continues to struggle with command consistency. But that’s “unfinished,” relative to perceived ceiling. And players, of course, don’t always reach their ceilings. Most of them fall well short. Just how “finished” is Matt Moore?

Command has been a problem for Moore in the past. Here’s a thing from this past spring:

With Opening Day now a week away, Moore said he isn’t too concerned about his command issues.

“I’m pretty competitive,” he said. “It’s not so much that I can turn it on, but when the time comes around and I’m battling in those moments, when I have runners in scoring position, it’s better (when it’s the regular season).”

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