Danny Duffy has had his ups and downs since being drafted by Kansas City in 2007. Many of the former have come in the past 12 months. The 27-year-old southpaw made three relief appearances for the Royals in last year’s World Series and has a ring to show for his efforts. This season, he has emerged as a dominant starter. Duffy is 11-2 with a 3.13 ERA, and his game log includes a 16-strikeout gem.

His resume includes rocky moments, as well. He’s undergone Tommy John surgery, shoulder woes, and more than a little inconsistency. The issues have been mental as well as physical. Duffy admits to having gotten inside his own head at times. He’s put too much pressure on himself, and an early-career soul-searching session even resulted in him walking away from the game for a few months.

Duffy talked about the road he’s traveled, and where he is today, when the Royals visited Fenway Park in late August.

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Duffy on why he’s been able to take a step forward: “That’s an interesting question. I’m just trying to keep it simple, man. It’s that battle I’ve tried to conquer for a while. When you don’t make the game so difficult… it’s hard enough already. I’m kind of just trying to use my stuff for what it is and not trying to be better than I am.

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There was some talk not long ago about Eric Hosmer and his impending 2018 free agency, with years in the range of 10, and dollars in the range of $200 million. Of course, this talk was being put out there by Hosmer’s camp, and of course Hosmer’s camp’s got nothing to lose by talking up their client. Hosmer’s going to hit free agency at a relatively young age, and just last year he was a 25-year-old former third overall pick coming off the best season of his career, in which he became more or less the face of a World Series-winning franchise. He’s been incredibly durable, he’s had his fair share of big moments and won his fair share of awards, and he’s the kind of guy that seems to be held in high regards by teammates and within baseball circles.

Hosmer’s got his virtues, and Hosmer’s agent, Scott Boras, is just doing his job, a job at which he excels. But it was clear at the time that Hosmer was never going to earn $200 million, or probably anywhere near $200 million, and it’s become clearer since. In the month and a half since the $200 million talk began, he’s slashed .215/.292/.349, good for a 66 wRC+, and while Hosmer’s bat (and his team) have been heating up lately, each likely seem too late to save their season. The Royals currently stand with playoff odds below 5%. Hosmer currently stands with a season batting line which barely rests above the league-average mark, and a Wins Above Replacement figure that has a negative sign in front of it.

Hosmer, clearly, is a talented ballplayer. You don’t go third overall in the draft without talent. You don’t break into the majors as an above-average hitter at 21 without talent. You don’t post a top-10 average exit velocity and hit homers like this without talent. So how do we get to September with a -0.2 WAR?

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The Kansas City Royals had won 13 of 15 games entering play on Tuesday only to lose their last two games in one-run, extra-inning fashion to the Yankees. They are now three games back in the Wild Card race and trailing five other teams in competition for two spots. Two weeks ago our playoff odds gave them a less than 1% chance of making the playoffs — and, two days ago, those odds were 9.4% — but after last night’s loss, they’ve fallen back down to 4.7%. Have the Royals really pulled themselves back into contention or has their late-season surge been for naught? They’ve proven projection systems wrong many times before and it’s possible the Royals are preparing for a magical run in September, but it’s undeniable that their path to the playoffs is not an easy one.

What strikes me most about the Royals’ recent run of success is that it’s come largely on the strength of what has been considered the team’s biggest weakness: starting pitching. Over the past 30 days, only the Cubs and Red Sox have posted a lower starters’ ERA than the Royals’ 3.42. Add in the bullpens and the Royals have recorded a 2.77 team ERA in the past 30 days, a figure which narrowly trails the Cubs’ 2.75 team ERA and is head and shoulders above the third-best team ERA over that stretch – the Pirates’ 3.41 mark. Meanwhile, their offense has posted a team wRC+ of 84 during that same stretch which is 26th worst in the majors and just a smidge ahead of the flailing Phillies offense (85 wRC+).

Inasmuch as the Royals have climbed back into contention, they’ve done it on the strength of pitching, which means it’s time to take a look at one of the key pieces in this resurgence, their much-mocked free-agent acquisition and current ace: Ian Kennedy.

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Chris Young faced three batters in the sixth inning of last Friday’s game at Fenway Park. Pitching in relief of starter Ian Kennedy, the Royals right-hander came on with one out, a runner on second base, and Kansas City leading the hometown Red Sox 5-1. He allowed a run-scoring single to Dustin Pedroia, then retired Xander Bogaerts and David Ortiz to end the inning.

Two days later, Young talked about the at-bats, the role of luck, and how his pitching approach is influenced by a home run he gave up in 2005.

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Young on facing Pedroia: “A lot of variables go into it, but I’m big on looking at the reports. With Pedroia’s numbers off fastballs, and what he does against sliders, in the back of my mind I was thinking, ‘Alright, I probably need to get him out with a slider.’ The fastball he covers pretty well. If I do throw a fastball, it’s got to be in a specific location.

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We’d like to welcome Ryan Pollack to the staff as the newest contributor to FanGraphs. Ryan has written for Camden Chat and Camden Depot in the past, and yes, we hired him just so Orioles fans would stop yelling at us about our projections. Please give Ryan a warm welcome.

The Kansas City Royals have been a high-contact, low-strikeout team for several years. Very few people saw this approach when the team was bad. But during their 2014-15 run, many noticed the team hardly ever struck out.

This bat-to-ball philosophy made great headlines because it opposed the trend of rising strikeouts. That the Royals succeeded in winning games made the contrast even greater. We remember Salvador Perez’s single past a diving Josh Donaldson that won the 2014 AL Wild Card game. We remember Alcides Escobar’s first-inning, first-pitch inside-the-park home run in Game 1 of the 2015 World Series. And we remember Eric Hosmer scoring the tying run of Game 5 on a weak Perez grounder to David Wright.

Put the ball in play, they said, and good things will happen.

That’s advice the 2016 Royals could use. Despite returning several members of the 2014-15 teams, this year’s iteration doesn’t avoid strikeouts well.

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The Kansas City Royals, like any team would, have missed Wade Davis in his absence, but they haven’t really missed Wade Davis. Davis, of course, would make any bullpen better. But since Kansas City’s star closer last pitched nearly a month ago to the day, the Royals bullpen has performed as well as it has all season. Over the last 30 days, the unit’s run a league-best 1.95 ERA, good for a league-best 2.8 RA9-WAR, and the same group has run a league-best 3.15 FIP, good for a league-best 1.5 FIP-WAR. As the Royals have surged back into the fringe of the playoff discussion, the bullpen’s been a big reason why, and it’s done so without its centerpiece.

Part of it’s been de facto closer Kelvin Herrera. He’s recorded a 2.77 ERA and a 2.99 FIP in Davis’ absence, and gone 8-for-8 in save chances. Joakim Soria‘s played a big role, too. He’s seemingly corrected his early-season woes and posted a 2.03 ERA and 2.85 FIP in the last month. Peter Moylan’s pitched well, and Chris Young hasn’t given up a run since July 26. But neither Herrera nor Soria nor Moylan nor Young’s been the biggest part of Kansas City’s bullpen since Davis went down. No, the most important reliever in Kansas City since Davis hit the disabled list is the guy who only got called up because Davis hit the disabled list.

Matt Strahm, over the last month, has put up a 0.84 ERA and 0.43 FIP in the first 10.2 innings of his big-league career. The 24-year-old lefty, drafted in the 21st round of the 2012 draft, has struck out 19 of the 40 batters he’s faced and walked three. Six hits, no homers, one run.

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On July 31st, the Royals were basically dead in the water. On the day before the team had to make a final buy, sold, or hold decision, KC stood at 49-55, 12 games out of first place in the AL Central. They’d been outscored by 59 runs. And to top it off, Wade Davis had to go back on the DL with a flexor strain, signaling that he hadn’t been able to get past the arm problems that had already cost him part of the season. The Royals hadn’t been very good with him in 2016, and now were looking at likely spending the rest of the season without one of the main reasons they’ve been able to win the last few years.

And yet, despite four months of struggles and Davis’ absence, since the calendar flipped over to August, the Royals have been almost unbeatable. They’ve reeled off 16 wins in 21 games, including their last nine, and have breathed some life back into a season that looked to be dead and buried. The graph of their end-of-season expected record tells the story pretty well.

In a season of ups and downs, August has been the biggest up so far, and unsurprisingly, the Royals have been winning games with the same kind of crazy formula that allowed them to make a couple of postseason runs the last two years.

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I just wrote a little bit about Joc Pederson making gains in his ability to make contact. The first commenter underneath got me thinking about Javier Baez. In the Pederson post, I began by reflecting on George Springer, but Baez was a little like Springer to an even somehow more extreme degree. When Baez was a prospect, it’s possible no one else had his maximum bat speed. But at the same time, few shared his propensity for swinging and missing. Fold in an over-aggressive approach and every single at-bat was boom or bust.

Baez got extended playing time as a rookie in 2014. During the PITCHf/x era, there have been more than 3,000 player seasons with at least 200 plate appearances. Baez posted the lowest contact rate out of all of them, at 59%. He wasn’t too hard to diagnose. Barring something almost unbelievable, Baez would need to get better at contact in order to have a real big-league career.

Good news! Javier Baez is making it. He’s 23, he has a league-average wRC+, and this is how his contact has gone:

He still misses the ball, and he still swings at a whole lot of pitches out of the strike zone, but where Baez as a rookie struck out an impossible 42% of the time, now he’s down to 25%. Javier Baez is putting things together. He should factor firmly into the Cubs’ plans, if nothing else but as a valuable trade asset. The bat is meeting the ball more often, and that was always going to be the struggle.

Shifting gears, turn your attention to the Royals. Last offseason, the Royals re-signed Alex Gordon, getting something of a hometown discount in the process. I wrote about that, and here’s a quick excerpt!

[…]one, Gordon shouldn’t hit the wall all of a sudden[…]

Gordon this year has been worth 0.3 WAR. After back-to-back wRC+ marks of 122, this year he’s down at 77. Even more troubling, Gordon hasn’t been hitting the baseball. His approach and his results were always consistent. In a sense I guess they might still be considered consistent, but they are also much much worse. Gordon’s career contact:

There’s nothing subtle about that. And you could blame a wrist injury he sustained toward the end of May, but there’s something curious — Gordon, before that, batted 166 times, with bad offense and an elevated strikeout rate. Gordon, after that, has batted 171 times, with bad offense and an elevated strikeout rate. Alex Gordon was having problems making contact before getting hurt, so I don’t know what one’s supposed to make of that. Gordon has gone through ruts before, and he’s earned the benefit of the doubt. But this is worrisome, not just because Gordon is a franchise legend, but also because the Royals are a team that can’t afford to spend such big money on underachievers. Don’t sleep on Gordon as one of the big reasons why these Royals probably aren’t getting back to the playoffs.

Baseball is wonderful and baseball is horrible. There’s evidence for both of these everywhere, but Baez and Gordon are stuck in my mind. As recently as 2014, Gordon had the higher wRC+ by 69 points. He had the higher contact rate by 19 points. Now it’s 2016, and they’ve both cleared 300 trips to the plate. Baez has been the better hitter. And so much more improbably, Baez has made more frequent contact. I’ll be damned. This is a hell of a thing that we watch.

Perhaps lost a bit in the trade-deadline shuffle, Kansas City left-hander Danny Duffy pitched one of the very best games of the year this past Monday. On the road against Tampa Bay, he had a no-hitter going until the eighth inning. By the time that inning had ended, Duffy had recorded 16 strikeouts against just one hit and one walk. After a fairly mediocre 2015 season spent mostly in the rotation, Duffy looked to be the next in line to become a very good reliever on a Royals team that has had its fair share. For the first month of the season Duffy pitched quite well out of the pen, but since the middle of May, he’s been a part of the rotation. Jeff Sullivan chronicled Duffy’s rise in the middle of June, noting in particular the lefty’s ability to throw for strikes, and hitters’ general inability to hit those strikes.

The numbers Sullivan cited in his post six weeks ago have remained good since then. Danny Duffy is generally a strike-thrower, keeping the ball in the zone 53% of the time this season, a figure which ranks sixth out of 95 qualified pitchers. Nor is he necessarily pitching to contact, however: his 78% Z-Contact rate is third in baseball behind only knuckleballer Steven Wright and Max Scherzer. Hitters haven’t fared too much better outside of the zone: his 56.6% O-Contact rate is 13th among qualifiers. His overall contact percentage (72%) and swinging-strike percentage (14.3%) sit behind only the figures produced by Jose Fernandez, Clayton Kershaw, Michael Pineda, Max Scherzer, and Noah Syndergaard. His 62% first-strike rate is good, but closer to the middle of the pack.

In Duffy’s brilliant game against he Rays, his first-strike percentage was actually a tad lower than normal at 53.9%, and his zone percentage was just a bit under 50%. Where Duffy excelled was getting the Rays to chase the ball outside the strike zone. Of the pitches outside of the strike zone, Rays batters swung at 44% of them and made contact on just 20% of swings.

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As it has been the past few years, the 2016 non-waiver trade deadline brought about a flurry of activity that was hard to keep up with even if it was the only thing you were doing. Since most of us have other things that we have to or would like to occupy our time with, we figured we would save you some hassle and create an omnibus post with all of our trade deadline content so that you have it all in one place. For clarity’s sake, I’m going to limit this to articles about trades that actually took place.

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