A few days ago, in the FanGraphs chat room, there was a little discussion about whether Statcast more favored run production or run prevention. I’m of the mind that having so much information works to the advantage of the pitchers and defenders, myself. I wrote about that a couple Hardball Times Annuals ago. But it’s by no means a settled matter. Someone during our conversation pointed out that, while Statcast is new to us, teams have had access to HITf/x for years, so they probably already had their ideas. Yet, perhaps Statcast makes everything easier. Perhaps more teams are just on board now than before. I don’t know. Many angles are interesting!

There’s something about Statcast that I think might be underappreciated. And it would be true about HITf/x, too, but Statcast is the thing that we get to see, so let’s roll with it. As a demonstration, I’m going to use Jose Abreu, of the White Sox. Abreu hasn’t been terrible, but he hasn’t quite been himself, not yet. Why is that? Could be any number of things, but it could have to do with how he’s been pitched. This is where Statcast can serve a purpose.

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The historic start of the club residing on Chicago’s north side has obscured some pretty amazing things going on at US Cellular Field, as the White Sox have raced out to the best record in the American League. Hopes weren’t all that high entering the season, with the club’s only spring-training noise emanating from the aftershocks of Drake LaRoche-Gate.

A month-plus in, however, the poor-fielding and weak-hitting Chisox of 2015 are a distant memory. A fine starting staff, led by perennial Cy Young candidate Chris Sale and his wingmen Jose Quintana, Carlos Rodon and Mat Latos, are thrilled to find that most of the batted balls they allow are finding leather this time around.

About those batted balls: much is being made of the fact that Chris Sale is posting the best, small-sample traditional numbers of his career while pitching to much more contact than in the recent past. Today, let’s dig inside the numbers a little bit to see whether Sale is, in fact, new and improved.

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Bryce Harper may have slumped recently, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had a fantastic start to the season. He’s two homers shy of the league lead, and both the league leaders above him play half their games in Colorado. He simultaneously owns one of baseball’s best walk rates and one of baseball’s best isolated-slugging percentages. Bryce Harper is the man. Numbers weren’t necessary to make this point. All in all, Harper’s offensive performance to date has been worth nine runs above average.

Adam Eaton‘s been better. Not with the bat — Eaton’s just putting up his typical 117 wRC+ again. No, Eaton’s been better than Harper’s bat with his glove. Using Ultimate Zone Rating, our default defensive metric here on the site, Eaton’s glove has been worth a league-leading 9.6 runs above average. Use Defensive Runs Saved, where Eaton is running laps around the league with 12 runs saved, and it gets even better — Eaton’s defensive performance becomes equivalent to Mike Trout’s season at the plate.

So this funny thing is going on with Adam Eaton in right field — a position he’s playing on an everyday schedule for the first time, having moved over from center field to accommodate Austin Jackson — and, especially considering Eaton’s outfield defense has been something of an enigma in the past, this development is something that’s begging to be explored.

Adam Eaton’s made 10 noteworthy plays this season, which, combined with all the other routine ones, have already been worth 12 Defensive Runs Saved. That’s more than Josh Donaldson had all of last year. Eaton’s number might not (probably won’t?) stay that high all year, but it’s that high right now. Let’s watch Adam Eaton save 12 runs.
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Chris Sale is the best pitcher in the American League, and one of the true aces in baseball. He’s made the All-Star team four straight years, and has finished in the top six in Cy Young voting in each of those seasons as well. He may be overshadowed in Chicago by what Jake Arrieta is doing right now, but Chris Sale is still recognized as one of the game’s best pitchers.

Chris Sale has a teammate, though, who you probably wouldn’t recognize unless he walked up to you and said “Hi, I’m Jose Quintana, and I’m really good at my job.” And he should consider doing just that, because Jose Quintana is indeed really freaking good at his job.

WAR, Past Calendar Year

Name	IP	BB%	K%	GB%	HR/FB	LOB%	BABIP	ERA-	FIP-	xFIP-	WAR	RA9-WAR
Clayton Kershaw	247.1	4%	34%	50%	9%	80%	0.262	50	49	54	9.8	9.8
Jake Arrieta	240.1	6%	27%	57%	8%	83%	0.230	37	61	68	7.5	11.3
Chris Sale	230.0	5%	32%	42%	12%	76%	0.293	71	65	67	7.0	6.1
David Price	217.0	5%	27%	41%	9%	76%	0.306	74	68	74	6.2	5.9
Dallas Keuchel	232.0	6%	24%	60%	14%	75%	0.301	80	73	69	5.9	5.8
Jose Quintana	216.0	5%	22%	47%	7%	79%	0.317	68	69	83	5.9	6.7
Zack Greinke	227.2	5%	23%	47%	8%	82%	0.252	57	75	84	5.7	8.7
Max Scherzer	231.0	5%	30%	36%	12%	80%	0.272	79	79	76	5.6	5.8
Jacob deGrom	179.0	5%	28%	47%	8%	78%	0.267	61	63	72	5.5	5.5
Corey Kluber	217.0	5%	28%	42%	11%	72%	0.281	86	72	75	5.5	4.6

Over the past 365 days, Quintana is tied with Dallas Keuchel for the fifth best WAR among pitchers in baseball. If you prefer the runs-allowed version of WAR, he’s fourth. No matter how you evaluate a pitcher, Jose Quintana has been amazing for the past year, and yet, he’s still somehow rarely discussed as one of the game’s elite.

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I was talking with my father about Miguel Cabrera recently, and about how he’s undeniably one of the best hitters either of us have ever seen. One of the things we found so fascinating is that Miggy has seemingly never had to adjust. He’s got this approach, and that approach has been damn near unbeatable going on 14 years now. He’s been waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more for pitchers to exploit him, but there is no exploiting Miguel Cabrera, so he just keeps doing what he’s always been doing. Over the last decade, Cabrera’s swing rate’s always been between 46% and 51%. The contact rate’s always between 79% and 83%. The pull rate, always between 35% and 41%. Ground-ball rate, never wavering from the 39% to 42% range. There’s sure to have been little tweaks here and there, but for the most part, Miguel Cabrera’s been adjustment-free more than a decade, and he’s one of the greatest hitters of all time.

Of course, Miguel Cabrera is the exception. Seriously, the exception. Mike Trout‘s had to adjust. Bryce Harper’s had to adjust. Hell, even Clayton Kershaw spends some of his off time looking for another piece. Everyone in baseball is adjusting, constantly, which benefits their own employment status as well as mine.

You know Chris Sale as one of baseball’s very best pitchers. Over the last two-plus years, he’s got baseball’s second-best strikeout-walk differential, third-best FIP, fourth-best ERA, and fifth-best xFIP. He’s no Kershaw, but it’s very simple to make the argument that he’s the next-best guy. But Sale’s not content with the next-best guy. Just like Trout and Harper weren’t content with where they were, Sale wants Kershaw status. I’d guess that Sale, personally, has no doubts he can get there.

And so Sale’s made an adjustment. It’s always tough to tell, especially this early in the season, whether the changes we’re seeing in a player’s process are intentional or moreso a product of their environment. It becomes a lot easier to cipher out when the player comes out and lets us know it’s the former. Chris Sale, the American League’s greatest strikeout artist, made a conscious decision to become a more contact-oriented pitcher, and he’s doing it.

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Over the weekend, Ken Rosenthal reported that the possibility of Ryan Braun being traded “was becoming more realistic”, as Braun is off to a fantastic start to the 2016 season, and he’s starting to put some distance between himself and the BioGenesis scandal that cost him half the 2013 season and a good chunk of his reputation. Since the suspension, Braun hasn’t played up to his previously established levels of performance, and when combined with his contract and the baggage surrounding how he handled his failed test, he was mostly an immovable object.

But with Braun hitting .372/.443/.605 — yeah, that is heavily inflated by a .409 BABIP, but his early season strikeout rate is back in line with Peak Braun levels, and he can still hit the ball a long way — and only four guaranteed years left on his deal after this season, dealing Braun is starting to look like something that could happen. It’s almost a certainty that the Brewers will take on some of his remaining contract in any deal in order to get better talent in return, with the question of how much of the remaining ~$90 million they’ll keep on their books being settled depending on how well he keeps hitting and what other sluggers hit the market this summer.

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A.J. Pierzynski has played baseball for a very long time. He’s one of the few players to predate not only the PITCHf/x era (2007-present), but also the Baseball Info Solutions era (2002-present). He’s one of just six active players who played in the 1990s — the others are Carlos Beltran, Adrian Beltre, Bartolo Colon, David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez. They are all well celebrated and beloved players. Pierzynski does not fit in that group.

If you’re familiar with Pierzynski, you likely know that his opponents generally have not been all that fond of him. A Google search for “A.J. Pierzynski hate” turns up plenty of results. Rather than focus on that, I thought it would be fun to find some nice to things to say about Pierzynski.

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The White Sox beat the Blue Jays last night by a score of 10-1 (box). Comprehensive victory. Chris Sale won his fifth game, going a ho-hum 8 innings versus a lefty-destroying lineup in a hitter’s park. Southside hitters compiled 15 hits. They won on Monday in the first game of the series and five of the six games before that, too, and today they go for the sweep at the Rogers Centre — at which park the Blue Jays haven’t been swept since 2013. No one is saying that two games and the prospect of an early (and difficult) road sweep make a season, but the White Sox are one of two teams in baseball with 15 wins, and that merits some investigation. It would merit investigation no matter what team it was, but it especially merits investigation given where the White Sox were projected to finish this season.

At the beginning of the season, our projected American League Central standings looked like this:

There’s a lot of parity in the AL this season — not necessarily top-tier parity, but a solid, middle-of-the-road type where each of the division races could go down to the wire. The AL Central fits that mold, with the preseason projections telling us the Indians were clear favorites — though if the 2014-2015 Royals were any indication, we could expect the race to possibly be tighter. The Central was potentially seen as one of the more volatile divisions, with the possibility we could have a four-way race for the division. There was even the idea before the season started that even the Twins — with a little luck and a few breakouts — could be in the mix, but that seems less possible (to put it nicely) given their woeful start. Where do the playoff odds stack up for the Central now? Let’s take a look:

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Maybe it was the fact that she spent her formative years in Germany, while I spent most of mine in Jamaica and America’s South, but my mother and I have always disagreed about a fundamental thing when it comes to the weather. For her, she wants the sun. It doesn’t matter if it’s bitter cold and dry; if the sun’s out, she’s fine. I’d rather it was warm. Don’t care if there’s a drizzle or humidity or whatever.

It turns out, when we were disagreeing about these things, we were really talking about pitching. Mostly because life is pitching and pitching is life.

But also because the temperature, and the temperature alone, does not tell the story of pitching in the cold. It’ll make sense, just stick with it.

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On Sunday, with two outs in the bottom of the seventh, Boston reliever Noe Ramirez fielded a comebacker off the bat of Toronto center fielder Kevin Pillar. He flipped it to Hanley Ramirez for the putout. It wasn’t a particularly momentous occasion, but it got me thinking — was this the first ever Ramirez to Ramirez putout in major-league history? I probably would have let it go right there (I’m pretty lazy, after all) but Jim Reedy pointed out that there have only been 29 Ramirezes in major-league history, and that didn’t seem like to daunting of a number. So I dove in.

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