Originally, this was going to be a little post about Jonathan Schoop. I wasn’t super jazzed to write about Jonathan Schoop, and you weren’t super jazzed to read about Jonathan Schoop, but, in case you weren’t already aware, Schoop is swinging a lot less than he used to. One of the very most aggressive hitters around has dropped his swing rate by right around 10 percentage points, and that’s big. That’s a significant change, for a player who had been in need of more polish. It seems like a step forward. It’s interesting.

But, at least as this post goes, the hell with Schoop, because I need to point you toward Mike Moustakas. Has it been a while since you checked in on him? I guess that depends on whether you’re a Royals fan. But let me summarize where Moustakas has been real quick. You remember he used to be a top prospect. Then he was a disappointing major-leaguer. Then the big story became that his approach matured, and he learned to take balls to the opposite field. Moustakas stopped trying to pull everything, and, at last, he found success. The game was coming together for him, and he had a strong start to 2016. Then he got hurt. Badly hurt — hurt enough to miss the rest of the year. For everyone involved, it was a tremendous disappointment.

Moustakas is back on the field. He’s played almost every game, and he’s already set a new career high for home runs. That opposite-field focus is gone; Moustakas has been killing the ball to right. In that sense, he’s reverted, although now it’s working. But that’s not what I want to draw your attention to. Before having surgery, Moustakas was more patient than ever. On the other side of surgery, he’s been more aggressive than ever. He’s jumped from one end of the spectrum to the other, as you can see in the following plot:

More swings in the zone. More swings out of the zone! More swings in and out of the zone. Moustakas has been trying to hit everything he can, and his numbers are fine, if not massively improved. To try to put this in some context, I consulted the extent of our historical plate-discipline data, which goes back to 2002. I looked at every player with at least 100 plate appearances in consecutive seasons, which gave me a sample of 5,205 individual player season-pairs. Here is a plot of their swing rates. Moustakas is highlighted in yellow.

Compared to last year, Moustakas’ swing rate is up 15 percentage points, which is the largest increase in the sample. Looking at absolute values, it’s also just the largest change in the sample, up or down. This season isn’t over yet, so, there’s that, but for now, in the past decade and a half, we haven’t seen a player so suddenly change like this. Moustakas went under the knife as a more disciplined bat. He’s come away as a hacker, and he’s really gotten no better or worse. He’s the same, but different, and to this point in 2017, Moustakas has yet to take a single called third strike.

Usually people want more from something like this. They want the author to determine whether a change is good or bad. I can’t do that. All I know is there’s been a change. It’s worked about as well as the previous changes. Mike Moustakas has already had one weird big-league career.

We’re still 100 games away from the end of the season, but we’re getting closer to that time when teams have to decide whether they’re in or out of contention for the playoffs. Some clubs might have to make the tough choice of moving themselves out of contention despite having a reasonable playoff shot. In the American League, nearly every team is still in the race. That might change over the course of the next month, of course, but the field certainly looks like it will still be crowded come July.

There are five playoff spots up for grabs in the AL, and while a lot can and will happen the rest of the way, there are four teams to which our playoff odds give roughly an 80% or better chance of making the playoffs: the Houston Astros, Cleveland Indians, Boston Red Sox, and New York Yankees. The Astros look well on their way to potentially 100 wins, while the Indians, Red Sox and Yankees appear to be moving toward close to 90 wins, a figure that generally amounts to a spot in the postseason. Those four teams total 359% of the 500% total odds available. After that, seven teams have something close to a 10%.

After the first four teams, no club has a better than a 50% chance at the playoffs. The team at the top, Toronto, is currently in last place in its division. Here are the playoff odds since the beginning of the season for the rest of the teams in the American League — with the exception, that is, of the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, who have been near zero all season long.

Does that look like an incomprehensible mess? Well, welcome to the AL Wild Card race. If it helps at all, the list of teams at the bottom of the chart is in order in terms of their current playoff odds. There are seven teams with close to a 1-in-10 shot of making the playoffs, with a couple more in Kansas City and Oakland that possess an outside chance of getting back into the mix. If you picked the top team currently by the odds, Toronto, taking the field is probably a better bet.

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Currently 5.5 games out of first place in the AL Central, it’s still unclear whether the Royals will go for it one last time with a number of the same pieces from their championship season, or if they’ll perform a massive sell-off of multiple potential free agents. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Jason Vargas are among those who could be moved. Perhaps Kelvin Herrera, just another season from free agency, could be gone as well. Mike Moustakas might not get the notoriety of some of his teammates, but whether the Royals go all-in or sell, it’s Moustakas who should play the most important role.

Just a few seasons ago, Moustakas was a part of a disappointing group of formerly heralded prospects on the Royals’ major-league club. In 2014, as the Royals shocked just about everyone with their run to the World Series, Moustakas finished the season with a line of .212/.271/.361, good for just a 75 wRC+. Even with solid defense, the result was a barely replacement-level season. Moustakas had a problem: he was a fly-ball hitter in a spacious park. In the 2014 postseason, Moustakas hit four homers in his first six games, but was mostly quiet the rest of the way.

That power from the 2014 postseason didn’t really carry over to 2015, but once the summer hit — around the same time baseballs began flying out of the park at a much greater rate — Moustakas surged. Due to a knee injury, he recorded only 113 plate appearances the next season, but the power showed up in limited time — and it has continued in a big way this season. The graph below shows Moustakas’ 15-game rolling ISO, allowing us to see where Moustakas took off.

In the first half of 2015, Moustakas had become a ground-ball hitter, and the 35% fly-ball rate he recorded over that period would have been the lowest of his career if it had continued. He was pairing those grounders with a very low 11% strikeout rate, .315 BABIP, and very little power. The result was a 115 wRC+ over the first half, not too bad for a guy with a career 82 wRC+ in nearly 2,000 plate appearances. As for the change in approach, maybe it was because he was slotted at the No. 2 spot in the lineup and felt he had a role to play. He hadn’t ever been a guy to run up a decent BABIP on account of all the fly balls, so it’s unclear whether this strategy of grounders was going to work long term. We’ve never had to find out.

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This is now the third consecutive year in which I’ve written a post about the potential misuse of defensive metrics early in the season. We all want as large a sample size as possible to gather data and make sure what we are looking at is real. That is especially true with defensive statistics, which are reliable, but take longer than other stats to become so.

While the reminder is still a useful one, this year’s edition is a bit different. Past years have necessitated the publication of two posts on UZR outliers. This year, due to the lack of outliers at the moment, one post will be sufficient.

First, let’s begin with an excerpt from the UZR primer by Mitchel Lichtman:

Most of you are familiar with OPS, on base percentage plus slugging average. That is a very reliable metric even after one season of performance, or around 600 PA. In fact, the year-to-year correlation of OPS for full-time players, somewhat of a proxy for reliability, is almost .7. UZR, in contrast, depending on the position, has a year-to-year correlation of around .5. So a year of OPS data is roughly equivalent to a year and half to two years of UZR.

Last season, I identified 10 players whose defensive numbers one-third of the way into the season didn’t line up with their career numbers: six who were underperforming and four who were overperforming. The players in the table below were all at least six runs worse than their three-year averages from previous seasons. If they had kept that pace, they would have lost two WAR in one season just from defense alone. None of those six players kept that pace, and all improved their numbers over the course of the season.

The next table depicts the guys who appeared to be overperforming early on. If these players were to keep pace with their early-season exploits, the rest-of-season column would be double the one-third column. Brandon Crawford actually came fairly close to reaching that mark; nobody else did, however, as the other three put up worse numbers over the last two-thirds of the season than they had in its first third.

Just like with the underperfomers, all four of overperformers had recorded defensive marks six runs off their established levels. Replicating those figures over the rest of the season would have meant a two-win gain on defense alone. Again, no one accomplished that particular feat.

A funny thing happened when I ran the numbers for this season. There weren’t any outliers of a magnitude similar to last season or the season before. It’s possible you missed the announcement at the end of April, but there have been some changes made to UZR to help improve the metric.

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Salvador Perez has been aggressive from the start. He’s long been an aggressive hitter, and a talented bat-to-ball hitter, and pitchers have responded as you’d expect. This is Perez’s seventh year in the big leagues. In every successive year, he’s seen a lower rate of pitches in the zone. He’s also steadily seen fewer fastballs, this year owning the lowest fastball rate in the game. Perez doesn’t see strikes because he swings at balls, and for the same reason, he seldom draws a walk. In each of Perez’s last three seasons, he’s finished with an OBP under .300. For that matter, he’s finished with an OBP under .290.

Perez is no stranger to having a hot start, so, bear that in mind. But something so far this year is unusual. Again, he’s not seeing many strikes, and he’s not seeing many fastballs. Accordingly, he hasn’t drawn walks, because he’s still chasing as often as ever. Yet Perez is hitting for power, sitting on a 127 wRC+. There’s a long way to go before we know what Perez truly is, but he looks to be building on a process started last year. Salvador Perez is fully focused on finding left field.

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When you look up and see that the Athletics are in the midst of a two-game mid-week series against the Marlins in late May, you might suspect that the major-league baseball schedule is simply an exercise in randomness. At this point in the campaign, that’s actually sort of the case. The combination of interleague play and the random vagaries of an early-season schedule conspire to mean that your favorite team hasn’t had the same schedule as your least favorite team. Let’s try to put a number on that disparity.

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I didn’t realize the Royals have lost nine games in a row. When it’s come to disappointing baseball, most of my attention was focused on teams like the Blue Jays, Giants, Mets, and Mariners. Every team mentioned here has under-performed, but sure enough, the Royals stand at 7-16, with baseball’s worst record. The upside, I suppose, is that they were once 7-7, but that’s damning with faint praise, since losing nine straight can derail even a wonderful season. The Royals have had a horrible week and a half.

As you examine things, it’s not like the Royals have experienced some kind of team-wide collapse. The defensive metrics paint a confusing picture, and the rotation has been better than the bullpen, but the Royals’ run prevention has surprisingly been a tiny bit better than average. The Royals aren’t out there just constantly getting smoked. Nearly the entirety of the problem is captured by the headline just above. Hitting. Teams need to hit. The Royals haven’t hit. It’s not unreasonable to suggest they’ve actually hit worse than ever.

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To start, we might as well revisit the difference between command and control, or at least the accepted version of that difference: control is the ability to throw the ball into the strike zone, while command is the ability to throw the ball to a particular location. While we can easily measure the first by looking at strike-zone percentage, it’s also immediately apparent that the second skill is more interesting. A pitcher often wants to throw the ball outside of the zone, after all.

We’ve tried to put a number on command many different ways. I’m not sure we’ve succeeded, despite significant and interesting advances.

You could consider strikeout minus walk rate (K-BB%) an attempt, but it also captures way too much “stuff” to be a reliable command metric — a dominant pitch, thrown into the strike zone with no command, could still earn a lot of strikeouts and limit walks.

COMMANDf/x represented a valiant attempt towards solving this problem by tracking how far the catcher’s glove moved from the original target to the actual location at which it acquired the ball. But there were problems with that method of analysis. For one, the stat was never made public. Even if it were, however, catchers don’t all show the target the same way. Chris Iannetta, for example, told me once that his relaxation moment, between showing a target and then trying to frame the ball, was something he had to monitor to become a better framer. Watch him receive this low pitch: does it seem like we could reliably affix the word “target” to one of these moments, and then judge the pitch by how far the glove traveled after that moment?

How about all those times when the catcher is basically just indicating inside vs. outside, and it’s up to the pitcher to determine degree? What happens when the catcher pats the ground to tell him to throw it low, or exaggerates his high target? There are more than a few questions about an approach affixed to a piece of equipment, sometimes haphazardly used.

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Eric Hosmer is a free agent after this season. Maybe the most interesting free agent of the upcoming winter. If you are an unnamed scout who talked to Jon Heyman back in spring training, you think Hosmer should get far more than the 5 years/$73 million Brandon Belt got as an extension from the Giants, because anyone who thinks Belt is better than Hosmer should “get a grip”. The old $200 million rumor is so ridiculous we don’t even need to bother addressing it, but as Jeff wrote in February, it wouldn’t be that hard for a team to rationalize their way into a deal for more than $100 million if they believed a few things that aren’t entirely unbelievable.

But, as a counterpoint to Jeff’s perfectly reasonable post, I’d like to present a leaderboard that offers another perfectly reasonable position; the one that just acknowledges that Eric Hosmer isn’t very good.

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Terrance Gore can fly. The 25-year-old outfielder is as fast as anyone in the game, and he’s especially lethal on the base paths. Gore has 19 steals in 21 attempts as a Kansas City Royal, and he is 251 for 275 down on the farm. He takes his leads with a green light.

There is one thing holding him back: Gore has yet to invent a way to steal first base.

Hitless in seven big-league at-bats (his thefts have come as a pinch-runner), Gore has slashed .243/.342/.273 in 1,806 minor-league plate appearances. The OBP number in that slash line is acceptable, but given his SLG and his size — he’s listed at 5-foot,7, 165 — anything resembling Giancarlo Stanton-like respect is little more than a pipe dream. To earn ABs at the highest level, he’ll need to hit his way on.

He’s working on that, and — feel free to raise an eyebrow — launch angle plays a part in the process.

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